Loop

by Aquaman

Rating: teen
Tags: Gore, Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Horror
Length: 13357

Doctor Sparks had heard stories about Canterlot General Hospital being haunted. In retrospect, he probably should’ve listened to them. Right now, all he wants is to escape the monsters pursuing him and get out before it's too late.

Doctor Sparks has never believed in ghosts, and the stories about Canterlot General Hospital being haunted by them didn't discourage him at all from taking on a position there as assistant chief of surgery. But when he awakens one night to a lifeless building filled with inexplicable and horrifying creatures, the doctor is forced to reconsider everything he thought he knew about the hospital, his beliefs, and his own mind. Because at Canterlot General, the past has a way of creeping up on you. Because at Canterlot General, sometimes the present and future do too. Because at Canterlot General, there are things that haunt you, things that hunt you, things you can never truly escape from.

Because at Canterlot General, everything loops.

[Originally written based on the /fic/ Writeoff prompt "Time And Time Again".]

Published 2014-05-17 17:30:05 UTC
Last updated 2014-05-17 17:30:05 UTC

One

A hypnic jerk, sometimes colloquially referred to as a night start, is an involuntary twitch that occurs just before going to sleep, often accompanied by a falling sensation and an elevated heart rate as if you’d just been shocked by something you weren’t expecting to see. Doctor Sparks had heard countless patients ask him about that ailment, and every time he gave them the same answer: it’s normal, it happens to everyone, just try to keep a regular sleep schedule and do relaxing things before bed. He told himself to do the same things whenever he felt one, and usually they worked. But every time he had experienced that phenomenon, it had been during hypnagogia, the last stage of consciousness before his brain shut off.

You weren’t supposed to feel it once you were already asleep.

Sparks awoke with a shout, his teeth gritted and his hooves clenched against the edges of the cot inside his office. For a minute or two, he just laid there without unwinding his coiled limbs, focused only on taking deep breaths and slowing his pulse down to a point where it didn’t feel like his heart was about to break through his ribs. Once he felt relatively calm again, he let his head fall back onto his pillow and pried his forelegs loose from the metal supports underneath his makeshift bed. As he stared up at the ceiling, his mind raced with questions. Where the hay had that come from? What kind of dream had he been having? Why were his muscles taking so long to unclench?

And why was the hallway outside so dark?

Sparks rolled out of bed and gingerly stood up, his legs sore from his earlier shift and still a bit stiff from what must’ve been a doozy of a night terror. Stars above, if only he could remember what it was! He’d been here at the hospital, he thought... something to do with a patient. A surgery, maybe?

Yeah, a surgery, and a tough one too: flying accident, severe spinal injuries, massive internal bleeding... familiar. Almost like déjà vu. Had he had that dream before? And then at the end, a throbbing hum, and a flash of light...

Sparks shook his head and forced himself to take another breath. There’d be time for interpreting his dreams later. Right now, he had more pressing matters to attend to. Like why, for example, the emergency backup generators seemed to still be about as useful as two three-hundred-pound paperweights. To be fair, he was sure the higher-ups had a lot of other things on their plates besides replacing the gennies. After all, he’d only been hounding them about the issue every single day since he’d transferred here two years ago.

Sparks swung his office door open and stepped into the hallway, mostly just to confirm what he’d been able to tell by looking under the door from his cot: against all manner of government regulations and public health codes, the power was out seemingly building-wide. He scowled and swung his door closed behind him, resolving to be much less civil in his next angry letter to the Board about proper maintenance and procedure. On the one hoof, it wasn’t terribly critical that they maintain power here every hour of the day. Unlike some newer hospitals, Canterlot General’s technomagical assets were mostly limited to overhead lighting and standard medical equipment.

But on the other hoof, what in Equestria was he supposed to do if something did happen at a time like this? Forget his nightmare a moment ago. They’d be living in a real one soon enough if a patient so much as caught cold with the whole building out of commission. Months of paperwork, a media scandal, probably a full-scale investigation and a mess of key personnel getting the ax... and the stars only knew what the Princesses would think. Thank the both of them that there at least weren't any patients in critical condition at the moment. With a bit of luck, he’d be able to corral some nurses and have this mess sorted out by morning.

Sparks took a moment to situate himself in the darkened corridor, then turned to the right and started walking. Every building looked different under the hood of near-complete darkness, and with its long hallways, outdated furnishings, and the musty smell that somehow pervaded even the new psych ward in the east wing, Canterlot General was the poster child for that effect. To be honest, it was nothing short of a certified dump. But it was a big dump and, as Sparks often reminded himself, an important one. And sooner or later, he’d be in a position to whip this place into proper shape.

Sparks rounded the corner at the end of the hallway, and a shudder crawled down his spine. Stars above, it was cold in here. Had the central heating gone down too? Sparks adjusted his course a bit and brushed his shoulder against the wall, and goosebumps rose on his skin as it rubbed against the peeling wallpaper. Ice-cold. This night just kept getting better and better.

He quickened his pace and kept going, and the fur on his back stood up again. There was another more personal reason he’d been so eager to solve the generator problem, and in fact it was a rather simple one: hospitals at night were just damn creepy. His hooves clacked against the tile with every step, and the noise receded far into the distance only to echo back a second or two later than he figured they should have, like the delayed response of some copycat at the other end of the hall. The silence, contradictory as the phrase was, felt deafening; there was no sound but that of his own breathing, of his heart pounding deep inside his ears like the thump of a hoof against a heavy wooden door. Hidden away in this wing were fifty-six patients and the rest of the night staff, but for all the world Sparks could’ve sworn that not a soul remained in the building besides him.

Sparks took another breath and rolled his shoulders. He’d come to a stop in front of one of the doors on the hall. A plaque on its front displayed its room number overtop a patient identification sheet too blurry to make out, and twenty feet down the hallway he could see the protruding corner of the nurse’s station. A part of him wanted to veer off course for a moment and push the door open, just to peek inside and make sure that there was a patient asleep in bed. Just to make sure there were other ponies in here still, perfectly content and blissfully unaware of the world outside their doors.

His hoof was half-raised to touch the knob, actually, when his neck prickled again and he tore his eyes away. As much as he was sure everything inside was completely normal, the hypnotizing, infuriating possibility that it wasn’t made the choice unbearable. The broken lights were messing with his head. He needed to get himself under control and keep moving. He needed to fix this.

He jogged the rest of the way down the hall and turned the corner ready to berate the night staff for not coming to get him sooner, but the words died in his throat as soon as they’d formed. The attendant’s station was empty—not just of anypony who certainly should’ve still been there, but of anything at all. The drawers on the dust-choked desks were ripped open and empty, and the big board showing the daily schedule was blank, its surface scratched and faded as if somebody had scraped it clean with the edge of their hoof. A single lit candle stood at the front counter, but other than that there was no movement. He shivered again. If anything, it was even colder now.

He made his way towards the candle, his eyes never straying from it despite the flickering shadows tugging at his attention. With no breeze to disturb it, the flame on the wick was still, and only a few thin strips of wax had dripped down into the pan beneath it. It hadn’t been lit for long. Somepony had to still be around. So where were they? And why weren’t they still here trying to figure out what was going on?

Another shout built up in his lungs, and as he took in a breath to fuel it, something caught in the corner of his eye. Movement in the window, whatever it was darting out of view just before he could turn to see it. He looked over anyway, and it reappeared: a tiny white speck, fluttering around on the wind. It was followed by another speck, then another, and soon the window was full of them. They bounced noiselessly off the glass. Piled up on the sill.

Snow.

It was snowing outside.

In August.

Sparks let out the air trapped in his chest, and it came away from his mouth in a shapeless white cloud. Something was wrong here, not just with the lights but with the whole building. There should’ve been somebody else here, should’ve been a functional generator, should’ve been some sign that he wasn’t the only pony left alive in the world, snowed into an empty hospital in the middle of summer. He stared back at the candle and watched the flame eat away at the wax, then shut his eyes and tried to reason out his next move.

Even if this wing was empty, there should still be somepony down in the lobby, or at least some other indication of what had happened. If not there, he could go outside, wade through the newborn drifts and check out a few other buildings down the street. There was an explanation for all this, and all he needed to do was keep his head on his shoulders and go hunt it down. He opened his eyes and turned in place, and the report of his hooves echoed back at him a second too late. The stairs. He needed to find the stairs. He needed to start moving and keep moving and keep calm and not panic and–

Beep.

Sparks twitched and whipped around, and the candle flame dipped and shuddered from the sudden motion. That sound. He knew that sound. Quick, sudden, like the sound of a glass cracking. Like the pulse in his ears.

Beep.

An EKG machine. There was an EKG machine somewhere in the ward, and if the machine was beeping that meant it was on, and if the machine was on then there must be power. And yet the lights stayed dark, and the hallway freezing cold.

Beep.

Down the right-side hallway. The noise was close. Once he walked over that way and peered around the corner, he could see the open door maybe forty yards away, the tiles in front of it lit up like the Solstice. Why just that room? What happened to all the other lights?

Beep.

Just one room. He had to check just that one room, then he could go downstairs. Sparks stared down the hallway at the door and the flickering light. He didn’t move.

Beep...

He had no choice. He had to go.

Beep... beep...

He had to go now.

Before he could think better of it, Sparks ducked out from behind the attendant’s station, starting off with a composed trot that soon evolved into a jog. His hoofsteps reverberated all around him, ever so slightly off pace with the motions of his legs.

Beep, beep, beep, beep...

The machine was getting louder, and behind it he could now hear something else: a constant rattling noise like somepony shaking a chainlink fence. He picked up his pace, and the echoes from his hooves got louder. Closer.

Beep beep beep beep beep beep...

He reached the door already breathless, his legs weak and his ears numb from the cold. The machine was reaching a crescendo. The rattling too. It was coming from inside the room.

He took a step forward and looked inside, and the air froze around him. Rusted tools and instruments were strewn everywhere, broken on the floor and embedded in the walls, and lit by a single flaring surgical lamp, a green-coated earth stallion lay convulsing on a spindly operating table, his chest peeled open and pinned back with black clamps coated with congealed blood. The straps crossing over him cut into his legs and neck as he thrashed around, and when a particularly violent spasm arched his back off the table and made his bindings screech in complaint, Sparks caught a glimpse of frothing, bone-white lips and half-lidded eyes rolled all the way back into his head.

There wasn’t time to think. There was barely even time to react. Sparks cried out and bolted inside the operating room, and the echo following his hoofsteps was almost immediate.

BE-BE-BE-BE-BE-BE-BE-BE...

“Code Yellow!” he screamed, his throat seared raw from the shout he couldn’t even be sure there was anyone around to hear. “Somebody get in here!”

Diving into a procedure without getting into scrubs or prepping in the washroom was a one-way ticket to a new career as a fry cook, but at the moment Sparks couldn’t have been paid to care less. The building was deserted, the power was on the fritz, and some despicable lunatic had left a patient alone on the operating table in the middle of a moondamned open-heart surgery. At this point, anypony still worried about regulations could go marry the freaking things for all he cared.

As best he could, Sparks got himself into position overtop the patient and tried to get a gauge on the situation, but the stallion was shaking with a strength he couldn’t begin to contain. He could guess well enough that the patient was in the middle of a full-blown cardiac arrest, but without full knowledge of his medical history he’d be shooting blind on a gut instinct. And that still didn’t take into account the gaping hole in his chest cluttered with distended intestines and broken ribs, the visibly battered heart beneath all of them frantically pumping blood out of it and into his exposed abdomen.

His lungs heaving, his hooves hanging helplessly in midair, Sparks stood paralyzed over the shuddering body. He thought of yelling for help again, but no one had come the first time. Why would this time be any different? He was alone. He was alone in an abandoned hospital, with nothing to work with and a dying stallion whose remaining life was surely being measured in seconds. He couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t help this patient.

He couldn’t save him.

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…

The stallion’s head lolled back, and the twitching organ inside his chest went horrifically still. Every hair on Sparks's body was on end, and every inch of skin beneath them was numb. Code Blue. Full arrest. No hope of defibrillation. No part of his body even intact enough for CPR. Nopony even left to share in the terror, to grasp onto and hide with and block out the screech of the EKG, scream over the terrible silence behind it.

He stepped back from the table, stumbling off the raised dias hard enough to smack into the wall behind him. Alone. The word sizzled in his mind like it had been branded there. Alone. One patient had died, more would surely follow, and here he was unable to move, struck dumb by the thought of being in a powerless hospital surrounded by countless clueless ponies whose countdowns to expiration had all started ticking down.

He barely registered the noise the first time it reached his ears. It was so faint, so obscured by the wailing machine beside him, he half-believed he’d imagined it. When it came again, though, he could no longer ignore it: metal clattering against metal, somewhere in the hallway that looked black as pitch from where he stood mutely staring out at it. Surprise compressed into fear, and from there combusted into anger. He wasn’t alone in here. Someone else was in the hospital. And Celestia help them, that someone was going to answer for this.

Sparks pushed away from the wall too hard and careened back onto the dias, bouncing off the edge of the table and jostling the limp, rubbery leg of the stallion still fastened onto it. He stared down at the corpse as the edges of his vision went red, then threw open a nearby cabinet and dug around inside it until he found a sheet to cover the body with. Once that was done, he shoved into the open door hard enough to send it careening back into the wall with a resounding crack. He stood waiting outside for one second, two seconds, five... and he heard it again. Creaking metal. Squeaking hinges.

A wheelchair, ditched in the hallway who knew long ago, rolling slowly into view from around another bend a few yards away. He could see a figure shambling away into the shadows behind it. They hadn’t noticed him yet. He was about to change that.

“Hey!”

The pony was close enough to be in earshot, but didn’t even miss a step as they continued their plodding journey down the hall. There was something odd about the way they were walking, like the hallway was tilted slightly and they were trying to compensate for it. As Sparks lurched into a jog again, it occurred to him that this might not even be another staff member, that it could very well be a patient trying to find someone to help them. Once he got closer, he saw the tattered gown hanging off their flanks and the loosened bandages trailing from their legs. He lowered his tone a bit and called to them again.

“Excuse me, I... I’m Doctor Sparks, I’m assistant chief of surgery. We’ve had a power outage and I need you to... hello? Hello, can you hear me?”

Still, the patient didn’t respond. It seemed to be a mare, as best he could tell, and with that clarity came a similar recognition of why her pace through the hallway was so odd. One of her hind legs was bowed out at a sickening angle, the bone clearly broken at the joint and not set with even a basic splint. The hoof dragged uselessly behind her, scuffing and bobbing against the floor as she clumped forward, and Sparks could hear her muttering to herself beneath the skittering noise.

A chill rose up on the back of his neck again. A normal pony would be lucky—or perhaps unlucky—to be conscious with an injury like that, let alone mobile. “Ma’am?” he said, no longer strong enough to let out much more than a whisper. “Ma’am, are you all ri–”

The mare’s breath hitched, and Sparks stopped dead in his tracks. She had frozen no more than ten yards ahead of him with her head low and her legs still as stone. It seemed for a moment she had even stopped breathing. Then without warning, she twitched again, and her broken leg scuffed at the floor. There was something wrong with her neck. Her head shouldn’t have bobbed that much. He should’ve been able to see it above her torso.

She turned around.

Sparks's mouth went dry, and his throat sealed over and stopped up with a silent scream. The mare’s head stayed suspended over her chest for a moment, then tipped over and sagged sideways in front of her shoulder, swinging back and forth at an almost perfect right angle at the end of a neck that had been snapped cleanly in two. Her mouth hung open under widened, veinless eyes, and from deep within her throat, her hoarse, wheezing voice resurfaced.

“Daaaaaah...”

Sparks tried to breathe, but his body wouldn’t obey. He stood staring at her, gasping for air that wouldn’t come, fighting against legs that would not, could not move.

“Daaaaahccck...”

Her moan was pitiful... plaintive. She was pleading with him. Begging him for help. Begging him to help her.

“Daaaahccktooooor...”

Sparks's jaw snapped shut, and his mind flashed blank. The mare lurched forward at twice the speed she’d traveled before, and he tore his eyes away and threw himself into a dead sprint back down the hallway.

His breaths came in searing bursts, each one bigger than the last and yet seeming to pull less and less air into his lungs. The clicking, ear-splitting sound of hoofbeats came at him from all directions, punctuated by an implacable ragged growl that seemed to be getting louder with every step. He had no way of knowing how close the mare who should have been dead—who must have been dead—who couldn’t possibly not be dead—was behind him, and he didn’t bother looking back. He didn’t care to know. He couldn’t bear to know.

Instead he just ran, slipping and streaking across the icy tiles until he reached the operating room again, until he crashed against the frame and slammed the door shut behind him with enough force to shake the whole room. Bits of metal and glass flew away from his hooves as they kept moving without any force to guide them, carrying him past the sheet-covered operating table and leaving him in a sprawling, shuddering heap in the far corner of the room. He scrambled a bit farther under the table, sending more debris skittering away from his uncoordinated legs, and kept unblinking watch on the door, counting off each second that went by without a sign that the mare had seen him come in here.

One.

Who was that?

Two.

What had happened to her?

Three.

What had happened to him?

Four.

What the hell was going on in here?

Five.

Sparks leaned his head against one of the support struts bolting the table to the floor. The cold steel gave him something physical to hold onto, something to anchor him down and clear out his mind. He let his eyes fall shut long enough to fill his lungs and empty them, and the piercing knot in his chest loosened ever so slightly.

Ten.

Something had gone horribly wrong. Not just in the hospital, but maybe in the whole city. The hospital staff was gone, vanished or imprisoned or something unimaginably worse, and in their stead they’d left... well, they’d left him. For whatever reason, he was still here, trapped in a ransacked OR beneath a stiffening, mutilated corpse and running from some unholy creature he had no way of escaping from.

Fifteen.

Unless he’d actually been quick enough. Unless she really hadn’t seen him come in here. Unless, provided he stayed out of sight long enough and waited for her to wander off, he could sneak out of the wing and make it out to the city proper to find out what was really going on. He took another breath, and his pulse finally began to slow. He was safe in here. He could wait her out in here. He could just–

Twenty.

The impact against the door was titanic, the frame groaning and the hinges shrieking in pain as they desperately tried to keep from breaking apart. Sparks's head banged against the table, and he cried out in equal parts pain and terror as stars floated in his eyes and sawdust sprinkled down from the door in front of him. Had she heard him yell? Did it even matter at this point?

The door shook again, and the deafening crack of splintering wood was even louder this time. With limbs carved out of stone, Sparks pulled himself up onto his hooves and faced the door, backing away without any thought or intention until his rump was pressed into the cabinet in the back. There were no windows in the room, nowhere else big enough for him to hide. He could attack her... and do what? Break her neck again? Tear off the head of a monster that clearly didn’t need it to pursue him?

A third collision rattled through the room and vibrated in his bones, and a jagged fissure split open down the center of the door. On the next hit, she’d break through. He’d have to run again. Sparks gritted his teeth and steeled his legs. He braced a hoof against the cabinet to give him leverage, and lowered himself into a runner’s crouch. And he waited.

But the final blow never came.

He waited ten seconds, twenty, a full minute, and the door held firm. With every moment that passed, his head grew lighter, and a buzzing keen grew louder in his ears. He swiveled his head around and let his eyes dart across the room as much as he dared, and eventually he realized the noise’s source. The EKG machine was still on, still moaning in alarm at the flat green line blazing a constant, redundant trail across its tiny monitor.

He slapped his hoof against the control panel on the wall, and when he finally managed to cut the machine off the silence nearly knocked him off his hooves. He’d be so concerned with the mare in the hallway that he hadn’t even registered the sound in the background, and now that it was gone it felt like a hole had been cut in his head and been left to eat outwards through the rest of his body. Once again, only his own breathing cut through the suffocating hush, along with a low, barely audible throbbing noise that seemed to be coming from deep beneath his hooves.

He’d thought before of leaving the operating room, of slinking away once it was safe outside and searching for somepony sane enough to explain to him what he was dealing with. He harbored no such heroic ideas now. Right now, all he could think of doing was standing here with his eyes closed, leaning against the wall and just breathing in and breathing out. Listening to the gentle pulse of the noise down below him. Feeling it reverberate up through his hooves and tingle in his stomach.

Was it getting louder?

Sparks opened his eyes and took a breath... and this time it echoed. Just like in the hallway, the noise from his body repeated a moment later. A moment too late. The pulsing was in the walls now, an immense heartbeat amplified by the very building that seemed to contain it. It was getting faster too.

His lips parted and he took another breath. The echo came two seconds late. With every pulse, the overhead light flashed a little brighter, painting the walls a cleaner shade for a split second at a time. Sparks turned his head and scanned the room, but there was nopony else inside with him but the stallion on the table, still covered with the sheet in the same place Sparks had left him.

One more breath. The echo came almost right on top of it.

It wasn’t the light overhead that was making the walls brighter. The walls themselves were glowing, pulsing with some unknown energy that grew in strength every time it surged through the building. In between flashes, Sparks watched the sheet on the table. The fleeting, quickening pulses made it look like it was moving, like the stallion beneath it was still thrashing around without the influence of a functioning heart.

The noise pressed down on him from all sides. The flashes were almost blinding now, and in the last second before he was forced to squeeze his eyes shut, Sparks turned his gaze towards the stallion’s covered head.

He held his breath. The echo came anyway.

The pulsing stopped and the light exploded with a colossal boom. And in perfect sync with the reflected sound, he saw the portion of the sheet covering the corpse’s mouth flutter.

Three

Sparks tried to scream, but a strong hoof hooked around his neck before he could utter a sound. He batted at the leg of whoever it was attached to, grunting and moaning for help as best he could, before another hoof clocked him on the head and what little vision he’d regained faded away again and filled with glowing spots.

“Shut up!” a voice hissed in his ear, ragged and unsteady as if its owner couldn’t decide whether to keep pulling him down the hallway or break his neck right then and there. By now, Sparks didn’t care what his captor wanted to do to him so long as he got away before he found out, so he kept struggling until he saw the casings of a wooden doorframe pass by on either side of him. The stallion that had dragged him there threw him inside with a vicious growl and swung the door closed once it entered behind him. They were in a storage room of some kind, filled with empty metal shelves and lit by nothing but the soft glow of what looked like moonlight sneaking in through the window.

“Shut up shut up shut up!” came the voice again. The stallion thrust his hoof into Sparks’s and leaned in so their faces were inches apart. Sparks's vision was filled with a pair of twitching, foggy blue eyes for a few seconds, then the stallion pulled away and scuttled over to the door, peering out into the hallway and muttering something unintelligible.

“W... w-wh...” Sparks cleared his throat and found his voice, and his tone solidified into something angry enough to draw the other pony’s attention. “Who are you?”

The stallion made a noise and jerked his hoof in a violent motion, but Sparks was having none of it. “No, I’m not gonna shut up until you tell me who you are and what the... what is this pla–”

“No, nononono, you’re ruining it, you’re ruining it!”

The stallion came at him again, and Sparks had backpedaled all the way up against the wall before he stopped. With their noses nearly touching and the light from the window catching half the stallion’s face, Sparks could see a bit more of him now. His mane was gritty and clung to his scalp like wet paper, and he was dressed in what looked like hospital scrubs stained with long-dried blood.

“Don’t you know?” the stallion whispered. He stared Sparks down for another second or two, but then he cocked his head to the side and wiggled his brow, white teeth flashing inside his mad grin. “When the stars come out, there’s ghosts about.”

He bobbed his head up and down and bounded back over to the door again, and Sparks swallowed back the lump in his throat. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said.

“Oh, but you do, Doctor Sparks,” the stallion immediately replied. “You most certainly, indubitably do.”

Sparks sucked in a breath through his nose and squared his jaw. After everything he’d just been through, the last thing he needed was some nutcase in a surgical gown making things worse. “What in the hell are you talking abo–”

“Ah-ah! Ssssssh, ssh-ssh-ssh-ssh! You hear that?”

Sparks returned the stallion’s giddy look with what he hoped was one of fiery disapproval. “Hear what?”

Shaking his head vigorously and groaning, the stallion hooked his foreleg around Sparks's neck and yanked him forward, shoving his forehead against the tiny gap between the door and its frame. “He’s coming, he’s coming,” he whispered. “Listen listen listen.”

“I don’t hear anything, get off m...”

Sparks trailed off, and for a moment he could’ve sworn the other stallion had poured a bucket of ice water over his back. He could hear something in the distance... grinding. Jagged metal, scraping against the floor. Shuffling. Muffled breathing. Moaning.

“Stars out, Doctor Sparks,” the stallion whispered, bouncing up and down in place. “Look look look.”

Sparks licked his lips and raised his eyes towards the corridor junction a few yards away, and his flesh crawled like it was ready to jump right off him. A lone earth stallion trudged into view from the right-side hallway, so malnourished that he was barely more than skin stretched tight over wobbling, creaking bones. His gown was tattered and torn, and filthy bandages wrapped around his entire upper body, covering every inch of skin and fur. Limp wires and tubes trailed behind him, connecting his leathery hide to a battered, rust-coated gurney that was missing three wheels and dripping with some dark, unidentifiable substance. The bare spokes carved deep furrows into the floor, and the tubes pulled on the stallion’s skin as he obliviously dragged it behind him.

“What is that?” Sparks whispered, his breath leaving his lungs unconsciously and happening to form into the words he was screaming inside his head. “What is that?”

The stallion behind him scoffed. “Oh, don’t give me that,” he said as he pressed Sparks's head harder against the door, leaving him with no choice but to keep watching as the thing outside finished crossing the hallway and shuffled out of sight again. The stallion released him and Sparks went limp, his nose pressed into the ground and his eyes staring blankly at wherever they happened to fall on the floor outside. Had he not felt the breeze as the air next to his head was displaced, he probably wouldn’t even have noticed that the stallion had yanked the door back open.

Sparks lifted his head and watched as the stallion trotted over to the hallway junction and peered around the corner, his head jerking back and forth so quickly that Sparks doubted he could see anything clearly. When the stallion apparently decided he’d seen enough anyway, he turned back towards Sparks and his Cheshire Cat grin returned.

“Spooky scary skeletons...”

He waved Sparks towards him just before he disappeared around the corner, his cheery tone carrying all the way back to the storage room as he continued his song.

“Send shivers down your spine...”

His heart buzzing with curiosity again, Sparks got to his hooves and followed the stallion’s humming, eventually catching up to him again outside a square archway patterned with tiny blue tiles. From somewhere within, he could hear the sound of running water splashing against porcelain, as well as something else he couldn’t bring himself to guess at.

“Hmm-hmm, hmm-hmm skeletons are silly all the same,” the stallion went on under his breath. “They’ll smile and scrabble slowly by, and...”

His gaze drifted up towards the ceiling, and he kicked his hoof against the ground. “Always forget that part,” he muttered. Without another word, he straightened up and trotted through the archway, his posture indicating that he expected Sparks to follow. Without much better of an idea about what to do, Sparks went ahead and complied.

The archway led into a locker room, pitch-dark but for a candle the stallion had seemingly produced out of thin air. The sound of the water was louder in here, and Sparks spent a few moments trying to place it before realizing the stallion had stopped just outside another archway from which the noise seemed to be emanating. Holding his candle aloft with his horn—enough to illuminate a sign nearby that read “Showers”—the stallion craned his neck out and looked inside. When he turned his head to the left, his motion hitched, and his gasp bore the tone of somepony who’d just remembered that their birthday was tomorrow.

“Be very, very quiet,” he said back to Sparks, his eyes wide and his hoof raised in warning over his lips. “This one doesn’t like crowds.”

Before Sparks could even form a question in his mind, the stallion hopped over the threshold into the shower room and trotted onward. His candle bobbed over his head, throwing twisted shadows over the tiled walls and, every so often, glistening off the back of somepony sitting under the running shower over to his left.

Driven forward by nothing more than a naïve hope that the stallion was leading him to safety, Sparks stepped gingerly inside the shower room and, inch by heart-stopping inch, crept over to where the stallion had stopped in the middle of the room. The other pony, as far as he could tell from the glances he occasionally threw in their direction, was a mare this time, and a pegasus. Her long, dark mane was plastered down her back, covering up the small square of muscle where her limp wings connected to her spine.

The mare never turned around, even when Sparks slipped and bounced off the wall as he found his footing again, but she was moving slightly. Her right hoof was pressed flat against the wall and slowly sliding down towards the floor, producing a constant, squealing drone as her wet sole rubbed against the sweating tiles. By the time Sparks reached the stallion, the mare’s hoof had clacked against the ground, and without a sound she slowly raised it again and placed it as high as she could reach onto the wall, beginning the process all over again.

“Shame. Shame,” the stallion said with a shake of his head, not tempering his voice at all despite the eerie presence of the third pony. She didn’t seem to react to him, though, so perhaps he knew better than Sparks did.

“Tragic case, really,” he went on. “Manic-depressive, rotten home life, no job, no hope. Tried everything. Didn’t work.”

The stallion turned to Sparks and nudged him in the shoulder. “And now she’s here,” he said, his tone now inexplicably upbeat. “With us. With you.”

Sparks half-listened to the stallion’s raving, but most of his attention was focused on the mare in front of him. Just like the colt before, she seemed so eerily familiar... in fact, every creature, or ghost, or whatever they were, had felt like this somehow. Had he had this nightmare before? Was this all just one big recurring fantasy he couldn’t remember in the midst of the dream?

“It’s not a dream, by the way.”

Gooseflesh rose up on Sparks's neck, and the nonchalant shrug the stallion gave him once he turned around only made things worse.

“You were wondering if this was all a big, crazy dream,” he said plainly. “It’s not. It’s real. You’re...” The stallion paused and seemed to consider something. “Well, I guess you’re... here, and then you’re there, and then... you’re kind of everywhere, actually.”

An attempt at a reply withered in Sparks's throat, and a deep, rumbling pulse cut off any chance at making another go at it. “And pretty soon, you’ll be everywhere again,” the stallion said. Sparks stared at him, and the tempo of the pulses increased.

“Wh… who is she?” Sparks shouted as the walls began to glow.

“Suicide’s never the answer, Doctor Sparks,” the stallion said with a grin. “Until one day, technically, it is. And speaking of which...”

Sparks's eyes went wide, and he turned away from the stallion back towards the mare. Her hoof had reached the floor again, and her face was pointed straight at him. As their eyes met and the walls shuddered and flashed around him, her eyes lit up, and her lips split apart into a wide smile. In the same motion, a yawning red incision under her jaw opened as well.

The room went white, and Sparks’s vision was blasted away. When he came to a moment later, the mare’s twin smiles still hung in the air in front of him, flash-burned onto his retinas like a brand into a hunk of wood.

Four

When the room was dark again, the mare under the shower was gone and the tiles where she had sat were dry as bone. Sparks would’ve expected the stallion who had led him in here to have vanished as well, but somehow he was still there, patiently waiting for Sparks to notice him before he took hold of his candle again and trotted out of the shower room. Once he’d followed his guide past a row of toilets and through another tiled archway, Sparks found himself back out in the hallway again, trailing a few feet behind the stallion as he whistled his way down the corridor. A few dozen yards later, he hung a sharp left through an open door and entered a patient’s room that seemed to be, like every other one on the hall, deserted.

“Well, that was weird,” the stallion said once Sparks had followed him in. As he spoke, he kicked the door shut with his foreleg, which he left hanging out in midair as he turned his expressionless gaze towards the wide-eyed pony next to him.

“What... what is going on here?” Sparks managed to spit out after a few initial attempts at speaking Equestrian failed him. “Th-those flashes, those... those things I keep running into, what...”

“You ever gone jogging, Doctor Sparks?”

Sparks kept talking over the first few words of the stallion’s question, and fell silent just in time for the stallion to scoff and take over again. “No, you’ve gone jogging, Doctor Sparks, of course you’ve gone jogging, Doctor Sparks, how would you not remember that you’ve gone jogging once in your life? It’s weird, though, isn’t it? All those ponies exercising, sweating, running-running-running-running and for what? No matter how fast they run, it’s still the same damn track!”

“I-I don’t...” Sparks began to say, but the stallion just cut him off again.

“It’s a loop, Doctor Sparks, it’s all a loop just a loop everyone loops everything’s loops,” he said, pacing in an aimless circle around Sparks. “Loops-loops-loops. Then, now, always, forever.”

Sparks raised his hoof to interject, but once again it took him a moment before he could cobble his thoughts together into words. “You’re saying this... this is a loop? This hospital is a loop?”

Strands of the stallion's mane stood up off his scalp as he whipped his head back and forth. “No no no, not this hospital, not this place, this... thing, this everything.”

Now he was shaking Sparks himself, grabbing his shoulders and twitching in front of them. “It’s a loop,” he whispered once he’d suddenly gone deathly still. “You are, I are, life death space time, time-time-time-time it’s all a loop.”

Finally, a single detail in the stallion’s ravings clicked in Sparks’s mind. A loop in time... he’d heard of those before. Something like this had happened at Canterlot General a long time ago. Patchy details sprang into his mind: horrible magical accident, disappearances, mayhem. A pony trapped inside a cursed building, flashing uncontrollably through time and space to wherever the volatile spell inhabiting it took him. He was that pony now. He was the one stuck looping through the past, present, and future of this awful place.

But ghosts?

He'd heard stories about Canterlot General, about how it was supposed to be haunted. In retrospect, he probably should’ve listened.

“We’re in a time loop?” he asked the stallion, who had since let go of him and wandered over to the window again. Caught up in his own mutterings again, he didn’t seem to notice Sparks had spoken.

“We stop and we go and we’re here and we’re there, but we’re still going around, aren’t we?” he murmured. “You’re still in the loop, we... we still are the loop. And all those things out there, all those ghosts you don’t believe in...”

The stallion chuckled, and flashed Sparks a cheeky grin. “They’re coming along with us.”

Now it was Sparks stubbornly shaking his head. Even now, he still couldn’t buy into everything the stallion claimed. “No, you keep calling them ghosts. They’re not ghosts,” he said. “They’re... I can see them. I’ve felt them, they... they have physical substance. They’re not ghosts. So what are they?”

Once again, the stallion ignored him, this time choosing to rock back and forth on his hooves and stare up at the ceiling. “Twelve-twenty, nine-seven-eight AL,” he said. “You were eight years old. You remember.”

“I don’t know what you’re talk–”

The stallion screwed up his eyes, and the side table next to the bed exploded as his magical aura smashed it against the wall. “You remember!” he screamed, sawdust showering down on him as his chest heaved and his hooves twitched beneath him. He stood there seething for a few terrifying moments, during which Sparks was sure he’d be the next thing that got broken in half, but eventually he calmed himself down and dropped his tone back into a murmur.

“You never forgot,” he said softly. “And that’s why you’re here. That’s why we’re here.”

“Why am I here?” Sparks shouted, adrenaline knocking his voice up a couple octaves. “Why am I the one stuck in this moondamn loop? Why me?”

The stallion looked at Sparks and tilted his head, and in that moment Sparks was overcome with a depth of terror even the monsters that had chased him before hadn’t reached. The stallion was shocked, gobsmacked, completely and utterly blown away by Sparks’ response... and so gut-wrenchingly familiar all the same. December 20th of the year 978. He knew that date. What had happened then? Why couldn’t he remember now?

“Why you?” the stallion asked, in a voice so frail and pitiful Sparks wondered whether he was about to cry. “Why not you? Why couldn’t it be you, why wasn’t it you, why shouldn’t it have been you, why isn’t it you?”

Sparks took a step backwards. He couldn’t remember what had happened on that date. He couldn’t remember if the stallion had locked the door.

“Why a shy young mare with a sickness that wouldn’t heal?” the stallion said, his voice rising and growing more agitated with each word. “Why a starving factory worker with a beard he forgot to shave, why a headstrong pegasus who hit a bad crosswind, why a father of four with a preexisting condition? Why an entire orphanage the week before Hearth's Warming, dead because the alarm never went off, alive because they went to the bathroom and smelled the smoke?”

The stallion was rounding on him now, slowly stomping forward as Sparks helplessly tugged at the knob on the dead-bolted door. The ceiling was glowing again. The floor was pulsing again. “Why you, why them, why us, why we? Why didn’t you do something, why couldn’t you do something, why can’t you do anything, why didn’t you help them why didn’t you fix them why don’t you remember them...”

The stallion was nose-to-nose with him. He raised his hoof. Sparks shut his eyes, and the walls flashed.

“Why couldn’t you save them, Doctor?!”

Five

Sparks didn’t move for several seconds, expecting at any moment the blow that would end this all for good. When he finally opened his eyes, he had to cover them up with his foreleg almost immediately. Bright, blinding light was streaming down from the fixture overhead, and outside he could hear birds chirping and the bustle of the city as the sun rose over Canterlot. He lowered his hoof to see the sight for himself, and once he did he couldn’t help but laugh. The nightmare was over. He was back in the real world.

Still chuckling to himself, he pushed open the door behind him—unlocked now—and strolled out into the hallway, relishing in the warm glow of the technomagical lights overhead. Stars above, what a psychotic dream! And to think it had made him wander all the way over here into... where in Equestria was he? The walls were painted with smiling flowers and brightly colored balloons, but the pediatrics ward was in the rear of the hospital, not the front side closest to the street. And what’s more, where was everypony else? No matter what ward this was, there should’ve been at least a few ponies milling around in the hallways or visiting with one of the patients.

Sparks stopped walking for a moment just so he could take the time needed to grit his teeth and scold himself. It was natural to be a little edgy after waking up from a strange dream, but this was real life now, and he needed to get back to Surgery before he had to explain to somepony how he’d managed to sleepwalk all the way over to Pediatrics in the middle of the morning. Now wasn’t the time to think about the dream. Now wasn’t the time to let his mind drift back to that stallion, to his screaming, to the last words he’d said before the walls had flashed and he’d woken up here...

…

… why couldn’t he save them? What was that supposed to mean? He’d conducted successful operations with almost every one of his patients. Of course, every surgeon occasionally had a case that just couldn’t be helped, but his were certainly few and far between. In fact, over all of his time as a surgeon, in his own memory of failed operations he could only remember...

Sparks stopped again, and his pulse quickened a bit. He could only remember... why couldn’t he remember them? He tried again, and a hollowing sense of vertigo forced him to give up even quicker than the first time. He knew they’d happened, he was absolutely sure of it, but the details just wouldn’t... stars above, he was messed up right now. Maybe he needed to take the rest of the day off. What time was it right now, anyway?

He trotted ahead a few yards and approached a bulletin board coated with faded flyers to check the time on the clock hanging above it. When he looked up and examined it, though, his stomach started to drop again. The clock was ticking, but the hands stayed perfectly still, stuck at precisely 11:35. He shut his eyes, shook his head, did everything short of blast the clock off the wall with his horn and demand that it work right, but nothing changed. 11:35. A perfectly functional clock, stuck at one single time, hanging over a bulletin board full of get-well cards and crayon drawings and little notices about proper hallway maintenance...

… and a day-by-day calendar, its top half adorned with a picture of a little grey kitten, displaying the date in huge black type.

December 20th, 978 AL.

Sparks stumbled back towards the wall, but his legs gave out before he reached it. This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. He was hallucinating, or he was still dreaming, or... it couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be real.

Hoofbeats. Someone was coming. He could hear them walking up to him, reaching him, passing him by, but he never saw them. He got back to his hooves and looked around, but the hall was empty, and the hoofbeats had stopped. Whoever it was had stopped. He took a step forward, froze in place, waited for a response. No one. Nothing.

He was about to turn around again when a droplet of liquid hit him on the nose. He jumped back and dabbed at the spot, and his hoof came away red. Another droplet flashed by his ear and splashed onto the floor. Red. Stained on his hoof. Wouldn’t come off no matter how hard he rubbed.

He looked up.

Wet, glistening hoofprints stretched across the ceiling, curving around from a nearby hallway and traveling right over his head to stop a few feet ahead of him. Red. They were all red. Every print on the ceiling was red.

He heard a noise like a grunt, and the ceiling dimpled overtop the last set of prints. There was a second of silence, and then a loud, thumping impact against the floor twenty feet in front of him, where four new hoofprints splattered into existence without anypony visible to make them. A fifth circle blossomed in front of the four already there, then a sixth, then a seventh and eighth. The hoofbeats he’d heard before broke into a gallop, and the calendar fell to the floor as Sparks jerked away from it and sprinted for the end of the hallway.

There was an exit there, a closed pair of double doors. He could make it there in time. He could hide there. He could stay in there until the loop reset, until he found the other stallion, until he woke up from this dream and was back in his office and he could just think for a second about what the stallion had said. He covered the distance to the door in a few seconds, and slammed into it without bothering to reach for the knob. The door gave, splintered, blew open in front of him as he bashed straight through it.

And the next thing he knew, he was tumbling head over hooves into the wall, tangled up in the legs of a squealing mare and blind in the glare of fluorescent lights.

• • •

“... hear me? Sir, can you hear m... Cheerio, get me a suture kit and call security!”

Sparks opened his eyes and lurched upwards, holding back a swing at the pony hovering above him at the last second. Although their forehooves kept him pinned to the ground and his muscles still ached with the urge to fight them off and run, he had no choice but to stare up at them and force himself to stay put. Even in his state, he could see that the pony’s eyes were green, not blue, and that she was a yellow pegasus mare in clean blue scrubs, not a dark-haired unicorn with much heavier hooves than hers.

“Sir? Sir, if you can hear me, just stay calm. I don’t want to hurt you, I just need you to stay here so we can make sure you’re okay...”

“Di... didn’t...” he struggled to say. His throat was bone-dry, and his wind hadn’t returned from his violent entrance into the hallway. The other pony had squealed. There were other ponies here. Why were there other ponies? Nothing had changed. There had never been… he hadn’t...

“Sir, it’s okay. We’re here, we’ve got you. Whatever happened to you, we can make sure it doesn’t happen aga–”

“Didn’t loop,” he finally managed to say. Before the orderly on top of him could protest, he pushed her away and turned around as he jumped to his hooves. The door he’d busted through hung on one contorted hinge nearby, and behind it lay an ordinary broom closet, its inner contents undisturbed despite the chaos just a few feet outside. “Didn’t loop, he’s still here, he’s still...”

“Sir, just...”

“He’s still coming!”

The orderly swore under her breath and whispered something to a stallion nearby, who nodded and motioned for the ponies gathered in the hallway to clear a path. “Come on,” she told him, taking him by the foreleg and tugging him towards the part in the crowd. “Let’s get you squared away. We’ll go someplace safe, I promise he can’t get you in there.”

Sparks shook his head, unable to resist following her yet unable to explain why he couldn’t bear the thought of it. His mind was moving too fast for his mouth to keep up, jumping back and forth between thoughts and memories and the all-consuming terror that ate away at all of them with every step he took away from that door, every step deeper into whatever fresh hell this was. He’d changed places again, jumped to a different spot in the building, but the walls hadn’t flashed and the floor hadn’t throbbed. So he hadn’t really looped, just... moved. To where? To when? Was it over now? Would it ever be?

Lost inside his mind, Sparks let the orderly lead him into a nearby room and set him on top of the bed. “I’m gonna lock the door when I leave,” she said, squeezing one of his forehooves in both of hers, “and we’re gonna bring in some ponies to check on you and figure out what happened. Nothing’s gonna get in here.”

She turned to leave and Sparks leapt from the bed, grabbing her shoulder and spinning her around. “When is this?” he asked. “What is today, what day is it today?”

The orderly tried to look him in the eyes, and could only manage it for a second. “It’s December 21st,” she said. “Look, I promise I’ll be right back, but we’ve had a hell of a day already. There was a fire in the Lower Quarter last night, a whole orphanage just… we don’t know what’s going on, but we’re gonna find out. I promise.”

She promised.

She didn’t know.

She was turning to leave again.

Through the tiles in the floor, he felt the building begin to pulse.

“Don’t leave,” he begged her. “Don’t leave, it’s happening again.”

The orderly’s eyes widened. She tried to tug her way out of his grip. “Sir, please, I need to go–”

“No no no, please, I’m begging you. It’s happening again, it’s going to happen now.”

She pulled out of his grip, and in desperation he grabbed at her with his magic. His aura caught onto her tail and held fast. The walls were glowing. How could she not see the walls were glowing?

“I don’t know what I did,” he cried. “I don’t know what’s happening to me or why it’s happening or what’s going to happen before I get out, but I can’t do it anymore! I can’t go back in, I have to get out! I have to get out of the loop!”

“Let go of me!” the orderly screamed, but it was too late. The walls flared, the floor and ceiling shook, and when the light exploded all around him it took the orderly with it. He was still holding onto her tail when it happened. He could see her face as it withered in the time it took him to blink, as her flesh rotted away and her eyes imploded and her bones disintegrated into dust. As she was simply wiped away by an instantaneous glitch in time that lasted a second for him and an eternity for anything he dragged along with him.

He let go of her tail, and the single tuft of cherry-red hair he’d held onto dissolved into the air. When the light faded, the hallway outside was quiet, and the air of the room he occupied hung heavy with dust. He had looped. He was alone.

And a brown-coated, blue-eyed stallion was standing in the doorway.

Six

“Hmm. I remember when I tried that,” the stallion said, watching with noted interest as Sparks reached out for the empty space in front of him with tears beading in his eyes. “Never did learn her name. Guess that’s one more to add to the party here.”

“It’s you...” Sparks whispered. He looked up at the stallion and channeled every ounce of his fury and pain and shame and fear into the glare he leveled at him. “It’s you! This is your fault! You’re the one who dragged me into this, and I want out! You hear me?”

The stallion snickered, and the edges of Sparks’s vision went red. “But of course it’s me, Doctor Sparks,” he said. “And it’s you... they’re all yours.”

Sparks jumped to his feet, and before he could close the distance between them the stallion leapt forward and did it for him. “What do you think this is?” he hissed, so close Sparks could feel flecks of spittle splattering against his cheek. “Dream? Nightmare? Bad luck? Destiny? Ghosts, spirits, real, not real, tell me Doctor Sparks do you think it really even matters?”

Sparks stared him down, willing himself not to lash out, ordering himself to keep listening on the off-chance that the stallion might finally tell him what was going on. “Emotions are a powerful thing, Doctor Sparks,” the stallion said. “They define you. They show who you really are. Anger drives you, sadness frightens you, happiness inspires you, and guilt...”

The stallion’s nose touched against Sparks, and the contact burned like fire. Sparks jerked back, and the stallion grinned. “Guilt haunts you,” he said. “And now, finally, with just a little itty-bitty nudge from this place, it’s broken you. Broken us. Broken we.”

With a mad yell, Sparks shoved the stallion through the door and pursued him as he went flying back into the hallway. He groped around with his magic and came up with an empty syringe from a lopsided cart nearby, which he held in front of the stallion’s neck and pressed up against his jugular.

“Let me out,” he said, his voice low and rasping and barely even his anymore. “Let me out or I swear on the stars I will kill you.”

The stallion’s eyebrows shot up, but instead of laughing, instead of begging for his life, the look that flashed through his eyes almost looked sad. “But Doctor Sparks, don’t you see?” he said. “There’s only one way out of the loop. There always has been.”

The stallion glanced down at the syringe, then locked eyes with Sparks and leaned forward. The needle of the syringe pricked into his neck, and as the stopper slid out and blood began to fill the chamber inside, the corner of his mouth twitched.

“And there always will.”

Sparks screamed, lunged forward, and shoved the needle straight through to the stallion’s spine. The stallion’s head lolled forward and the needed snapped off inside his artery, so Sparks resorted to his hooves, punching and bucking at whatever was in reach until the stallion’s crazed giggle died away and his smile was as hollow as the look in his eyes. When it was done, Sparks stood over him, face contorted, scrubs dripping with blood, squeezing his eyes shut and spitting and cursing and doing everything he could to ignore the fact that the hallway was still empty and the lights were still off and he was still alone here and he hadn’t escaped.

He looked up, and his eyes fogged up and seared with pain. When they cleared again he found himself surrounded by mangled bodies, by gaping holes and sagging limbs and blood congealed black in the dim corridor light. The monsters—ghosts—Guilt haunts you, he’d said—were back. Every single one of them stood behind him, and instead of approaching they just stared at him with sightless eyes, opened voiceless mouths and reached out with hooves covered in bandages and bruises and skin that time had blistered black. He looked back at them, his heart clammy, his skin prickling with every pulse. He couldn’t escape them now. He couldn’t ignore them now. He couldn’t forget them now.

He could remember now.

His head ached with every detail, every step of the procedures, every name and face and file and exact time of death noted by the assistant who wouldn’t look up and couldn’t speak to him because he couldn’t speak to them because they had trusted him and he had made them promises and his heart sank lower every time, because he remembered paperwork conferences proper procedures next-of-kin anger hate betrayal misery tears dripping onto his scrubs because they he was their only option because the blood was still on his sleeves and body bags wouldn’t let the liquid soak through because that was procedure that was surgery that was life and death and space and time and he couldn’t see it anymore and he couldn’t hear it anymore, because he couldn’t bear the awful truth of it one more second because he remembers he could remember he was remembering right now.

Sparks’ eyes slid left, and he saw the stallion with the bad heart first.

Oak Knoll. 37. CPA, casual golfer, family man. Coronary bypass surgery. Undiagnosed anesthetic allergy. His wife left a bouquet of flowers to wilt in the waiting room.

Next to him the pegasus, leg bowed, head tilted over too far.

Cloudburst. 23. Canterlot weather team. Took a joyride after work. Flew too low. She was fast. Trees weren’t. 7% chance of survival. Called off by coltfriend. Found a feather in my scrubs before bed.

The wretch tangled up in gauze, hidden from the world.

Steel Screw. 31. Celestial Chemicals. Equipment malfunction in an East Quarter facility. Third-degree burns on his face and neck. Closed casket funeral. He’d been saving up for his mother’s birthday present.

The mare from the shower, blood shining on her chest like a gem-studded necklace.

Magnolia. 25. Black mane, violet eyes. Wished me good morning when I stopped by for rounds. She kept the knife from breakfast. She never told anyone about the foal.

Four puddles on the ground, quivering, red.

Morning Light. 19. Top student at Canterlot Academy. Tried to combine invisibility and antigravity spells. Both went wrong. Run over in the street. Couldn’t operate on him until the spells wore off. Stayed behind to watch as the red circle on the sheets grew.

And in the middle, the colt. The one in the fire. The one with skin melted onto bones that snowed ash onto the grimy floor. The one with the messy fringe, the gap-toothed grin, the look in his eyes that greater ponies had conquered the world with. The one he had tried so hard, fought so long, worked so willingly fruitlessly endlessly to forget.

Blueberry.

Today, so long ago, always, forever. Orphans. Two little kids. Rivals. Best friends. It was cold. December 20th. A candle tipped over, and I was the only one awake. I ran to get the grown-ups. Woke up everybody in the wing. They told me later he went quick. He didn’t. None of them did.

Every doctor has a reason for why they became one. For most, it’s because of the ponies whose lives they could save. For Sparks, it was for the ones he couldn’t. Should have. Didn’t.

And now he remembered them. He saw all of their lives flash inside his own, saw them loop from life to death and back again. He was like them now. Alive and dead, caught up in the loop, trapped inside one of his own creation, because no matter how fast you ran in here or out there it was always the same damn track. No matter how many other procedures he did right, he could never escape the ones he hadn’t. They’d haunted him before. They would haunt him here.

Sparks looked down at the corpse beneath him, and one last emotion floated through his mind: recognition. Now he knew where he’d seen the stallion before. Saw him now. Would see him again. And if Sparks would never escape it... then he wouldn’t either. When the stallion came in again, he would be ready. When the loop reset, he would make sure it kept going.

After all, he’d said it himself: everything was a loop. Always had been. Always would.

Two

When Sparks opened his eyes again, he had to stop and stare for a moment before he could be sure he was still standing in the same room. The operating table, the dead stallion, the scattered tools and broken cabinets... everything was gone, whisked away as if it had never been there at all. The furnishings that had now replaced it seemed almost quaint by comparison: a wooden-framed bed made up with spotless grey sheets, a rickety side table, a window with a dim ray of light sneaking in through the gap in the curtains. What had moments ago been a nightmarish operating theater was now just an ordinary room. Almost a familiar room, somehow.

Sparks straightened up from the crouch the blast had pushed him into, and with his heart pounding in his throat he faced the door. The wood was flawless, the hinges dull but clean and unbroken. He grasped the knob with his magic, and it swung open easily with only the tiniest of squeaks. Good sense told him to wait until he could piece together what could’ve caused all this, but overwhelming curiosity pushed him forward and forced him back outside. Without the immediate danger of the walking, breathing dead, he found himself much more willing to duck out from his hiding place and look for clues about the bizarre twist his night had taken.

The hallway was still dark, but not so much that he couldn’t easily find his way around. He craned his neck up to look for the broken overhead lights, but all he found was a smooth plaster ceiling. Instead of technomagical bulbs, the hallway was lined with old-fashioned oil lamps, all of them filled up with fuel and not a single one lit. He definitely wasn’t in the hospital anymore, and that meant he was definitely safe from that awful mare that had chased him back into the OR. The warmth of that thought did wonders for his nerves, but with it came a new and perhaps even more pressing question: if he wasn’t in Canterlot General, then where in Equestria was he? And what kind of building in the nation’s capital city would still depend on gas lamps without so much as a whiff of magical backup?

“Hey, Sparky!”

Instinct told him to jump at the sudden call, but a strange union of rationality and forgotten memory settled him down soon after. That shout wasn’t born from anger or bloodlust. It sounded innocent, even playful. Sparks looked down the hall and zeroed in on a tiny figure waving at him from the far end, but he couldn’t make out any details from this far away.

He squinted his eyes and took a few steps forward, and suddenly a blue-coated unicorn colt who couldn’t have been a day over eight crystallized into view. Sparks came to a stop, and the colt’s face split behind a gap-toothed grin, his eyebrows vanishing beneath his messy fringe.

“Yeah, you!” the colt shouted. “What, didya think I was talkin’ to the wall? C’mon, egghead!”

The colt waved again and pointed down the hallway next to him, and Sparks racked his brain for some sort of concrete memory to connect with him. He knew he recognized the kid from somewhere: that brash look, that excited tone, that cheeky grin he never went without. Who was he? And why was he so sure he’d chased after him like this before?

“C’mon!”

Without waiting for a reply, the colt darted out of sight into the other hallway. Sparks stared at the spot he’d left for a moment, then picked up his hooves and started running, his mind spinning and his chest prickling with some unidentifiable pain. He skidded around the first corner just in time to see the colt’s bushy tail disappear around the next one, so he kept going, always a step close enough to tell where the kid had gone and a step too far back to catch another good look at him.

“This way!”

Sparks ramped up his pace and pushed himself nearly into a sprint again, but no matter how fast he ran, the gap between him and the colt never got any smaller. Sweat began to bead at his temple and drip into his eyes, and the hairs in his mane itched with heat. It had been freezing inside the hospital a few minutes before, but in this place it was scorching, and with every new hallway the heat only got more intense. Instead of snowflakes, all he could see through each window he passed was an otherworldly red light that spilled across the creaking floorboards and dyed the overcast sky an angry shade of maroon.

He rounded what must’ve been the dozenth corner the colt had led him past, and without warning a wall of scalding air stopped him dead in his tracks. This wasn’t right. It wasn’t normal for a building to get this hot. As the colt bounded away again, Sparks slowed to a walk, about all he could manage through the oppressive heat he could see distorting the air in front of him. Ahead of him, the entire hallway was flooded with red light, all of it seeming to shine in from a floor-to-ceiling window set right in its center. He pushed his way over to it and looked outside, and for just a fraction of a second, he felt cold again. It took precisely that length of time for him to realize what he was seeing, and that same period doubled for him to realize it was real.

Outside the window, the city of Canterlot was on fire.

He couldn’t identify the source of the blaze, but at this stage knowing the cause would hardly help anyone. There wasn’t a house or building in sight that wasn’t swathed in writhing red flames, that wasn’t collapsing into cinders or crumbling away into ash before his very eyes. From this vantage point, he could even see portions of the building he was in, and he watched in mute horror as a bell tower across the street splintered at its base four stories below and toppled towards the burning wing over to his left.

The tower touched down with a blast of superhearted air and a stomach-churning crunch, its tremendous impact enough to cleave through two floors and nearly knock Sparks to the ground. By the time he straightened back up again, his heart had sank. That wing was where the little colt had run off to. He would’ve been there himself if he hadn’t stopped to look out this window.

With watery eyes and aching, smoke-filled lungs, Sparks staggered around the corner and yelled out for the colt whose name he’d never even asked for. In the distance he could see the inferno the tower’s demise had spawned, and in front of that a small figure staring into it, untouched by the flames but only a few short yards from where they were chewing at the demolished ceiling and crawling across the floorboards towards him.

“Kid!” Sparks said, coughing from the exertion and from the smoke clogging up his throat. “Kid, c’mon, we gotta get out of here!”

At the sound of Sparks's voice, the colt slowly turned around, but he made no motion to come back towards him. His eyes were rimmed red from the blaze, but no tears were dripping down his cheeks.

“You’re such a baby, Sparky,” he said. “What’re ya afraid of?”

Sparks opened his mouth to speak, but his throat seized up and he dissolved into a coughing fit again. The colt shook his head, and a smirk played across his lips.

“You know what Miss Heart always says. You can’t fail unless you don’t try.”

The colt’s smile vanished, and suddenly his eyes were black as coal. “Have you tried yet, Sparky? Have you really tried?”

“What... what are you...” Sparks tried to say. The colt shook his head, and his smile returned.

“Honest, Sparky, just do it,” he murmured. “I trust you, Sparky. Didn’t you trust me?”

The flames were inches behind the colt, practically licking at his heels. There was still time for Sparks to sprint forward and grab him, but he couldn’t move now even though his life probably depended on it. He’d finally remember where he knew the colt from, and the thing standing ten yards away couldn’t possibly be him.

“C’mon, Sparky...” the colt said. The flames were upon him, surrounding him, batting at his tail and dancing around his hooves...

“Come on and play.”

The wind roared in triumph, and the flames finally caught. The colt went up like a lit match, the fire enveloping him and swallowing him up in the time it took to blink, and Sparks collapsed as a thousand screaming voices tore into his ears. They were coming from everywhere, from every room he’d passed and every hallway he’d left unexplored: the sounds of colts, fillies, adult mares and stallions burning and suffering in incomprehensible agony. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, could barely breathe as the noise pounded him into the ground and ballooned inside his throbbing skull.

And behind it all, behind the sounds that came from everywhere and from nowhere and from deep inside the recesses of his mind, he heard something else. His mind recognized it from sometime long ago; his body trembled at it in this hellish building. He looked up at the colt down the hallway, saw his mane and tail dissolving into ash, felt his stomach turn over as the scent of blistering flesh stabbed into his nose. He watched. And he listened. And he finally figured out where the noise was coming from.

As the flesh melted off him and his figure was whittled down to blackened bone, the little colt stared at Sparks with sightless, empty eye sockets—and laughed.

He didn’t have enough strength left to run, so Sparks crawled down the hallway and away from the fire, scrambling on his hooves and knees without a clue where he was going and half-delirious from the smoke. The pulsing in his head was getting worse. Getting louder. The walls were on fire, and the walls were glowing, and his hoofsteps were echoing and he couldn’t move fast enough to get away from them.

He grabbed onto a doorknob and pulled himself upright, and the echoes seemed to be right behind him. He ran blindly, deafly, dumbly in any direction he could, and the pulsing around him shook the whole building. In the distance, an explosion rocked the building and sent him stumbling forward, and a fresh wave of heat told him that he had maybe a few seconds before he and that colt shared the same fate. He stopped in the middle of the hallway and turned around, and framed by a wall of unbroken flame advancing down the hallway, he saw a soot-caked stallion sprinting towards him.

He had only moments to pick out details: white eyes, brown coat, grey shirt splattered red and black. The walls flashed. The stallion tackled him hard enough to knock his breath away.

And as they both flew backwards tangled in each other’s legs, the glowing light obliterated the flames around them and sent them flying forward. Sparks's head cracked against the floor, and the world around him went dark.

One

It’d taken years to get it right. Months, maybe. Had it been days? Who had time for time when it no longer held any meaning?

But no matter. He’d found him. He’d gone through the loop countless times, followed it through and explored every corner and figured out where it began and ended and began again. And now he’d found him. The stallion was back, spawned into the loop for the first time. He’d caught him just at the end of the orphanage fire, just in time to save him from being burnt to a crisp. He could’ve let him die there, of course, but that would’ve be no good. He was more special than that. More important than that.

The stallion—ungrateful little whelp—kicked and screamed all the way into the storage closet, where they’d be safe for the time being in this loop. Even when he was inside, he still wouldn’t stop babbling, but Steel Screw’s ears weren’t the best anymore. It wasn’t a danger, wasn’t a problem.

“W... w-wh...” the stallion stammered. “Who are you?”

It was, however, incredibly annoying.

“No, I’m not gonna shut up until you tell me who you are and what the... what is this pla–”

“No, nononono, you’re ruining it, you’re ruining it!”

The stallion backpedaled as Sparks came at him, stopping just an inch or two in front of his nose. He could see him well in the moonlight now: brown coat, greasy hair, grungy hospital scrubs. Just like he remembered. Just like he knew it would be.

“Don’t you know?” he said, a giddy grin splitting across his face. “When the stars come out, there’s ghosts about.”

He bounded over to the door again, and bit his tongue in anticipation. Wait for it. Wait for it...

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” the stallion said.

Bingo.

“Oh, but you do, Doctor Sparks,” he immediately replied. “You most certainly, indubitably do.”