Twilight could never tell how late it was outside when occupying the bowels of the library’s dark, dank basement.

The room itself was expansive, though filled with old furniture, broken bookshelves and stacks upon stacks of old tomes that nearly touched the low lying, wooden ceiling.

Despite its dirty and chaotic state, it could not have been a better personal study for Twilight Sparkle when she dabbled in her secret studies into the manipulation and control of her recently acquired Black Magic.

There were no windows for people to spy through and only one entrance from a creaky set of stairs that had seen better days, complete with a heavy old wooden door at the very top that thankfully, much like the stairs, made enough noise to alert Twilight Sparkle the very moment an intruder had entered her sanctuary uninvited. Furthermore, she had arranged the clutter to fully wall off a section of the basement completely from the sight of anypony that did manage to venture too far down the staircase before she could intercept them.

One such being Spike, whom Twilight occasionally caught sneaking a peek down the staircase whenever she had forgotten to lock the door. He was naturally curious as to what his big sister-figure was up to all alone in the basement these days.

Though Spike never really did overstep his position when she officially warned him to never venture down into the depths alone, Twilight hoped to keep it that way.Thus, she had installed a magical lock to seal the door when she was not occupying the space or the library itself, preventing the aforementioned curious dragon from causing any untoward mischief when she was not around.

Only she was allowed in, aside from Princess Celestia of course.

Heavy lidded eyes squinted at the infernal book that rested upon an old rickety coffee table that stood within the purposefully sectioned off portion of the basement, with a single lit candle in its holder seated upon the corner of the slightly slanted surface.

It was the only light source that allowed Twilight Sparkle enough illumination to read the unique scrawl written in the tome, which she had only recently discovered to be inked in blood and its binding to be tanned hide from a heavily discolored pony.

At first, Twilight felt sick that a pony was used to even create such a twisted book of spells… but then, a twisted curiosity soon overtook her revulsion as her thoughts turned towards the mysteries behind the more than likely unwilling donor of such materials.

Was it from a unicorn? Or was it just simply fashioned from any old pony, be it earth or pegasi?

Such a concept alone had almost spurred Twilight to dedicate some of her limited time to researching the issue, to fully analyse the book’s construction itself to perhaps unravel more of the mysteries that surrounded it?

Another time, she thought, even though it is very tempting. I have more important matters to attend to, after all...

Twilight’s horn ignited, aglow with a sinister coloration of purple and black as she turned her attention to a small notebook next to the tome, in which she had written a detailed observation of every known written character within the tome’s pages.

It was a complex cipher, arranged in a specific numeric order so that only the owner of the book could understand what was written. By correlating the existing letters with languages used near and further afield from Equestria, Twilight Sparkled had managed to create a decoding notebook to help her fully translate the multilingual mash-up the tome was expertly crafted in.

Whoever wrote it was of a higher intelligence than even she.

But who else in Equestria could possibly wield such magics?

No one. It's as if I was fated to meet with it... as if it... as if it chose me, somehow...

She was almost jealous of the original author, though. After all, he constructed this fine puzzle from scratch.

All it took now was for her to line by line decode the tome to fully understand it and to finally unlock the secrets the originator had so desperately tried to keep hidden away.

What other spells will the book hold? What untold, forbidden knowledge has it been hiding for all these centuries?

Twilight almost salivated at the prospect.

“This is probably my biggest personal project to date. It has taken me weeks to grasp the cipher, fully, with four days straight trying to make sense from just one spell,” Twilight whispered to herself, quietly determined to, by the end of the week, fully translate another which had piqued the mare’s curiosity when she had read the translated title out loud. “Life Drain… sounds pretty morbid. But it might be useful.”

Closing the notebook, Twilight Sparkle flipped through the pages of the tome, searching for the true resurrection incantation and not the spell she had attempted to use before that ended in disaster. “I suppose it will take me a further five months to completely translate everything from beginning to end, maybe if I pull all-nighters from time to time, but… for now?”

Twilight dropped her gaze to Smarty Pants whom she had carefully placed some time ago upon the ground at the center of several chalk-drawn circles a couple of hoofsteps away.Her face softened from its serious expression as she studied the stuffed animal's ragged appearance, stirring all kinds of warm and loving memories inside of her.

She quickly dismissed them with a shake of her head.

“I’m sorry, Smarty Pants, but I have to try this. I owe it to Celestia… I owe it to Nurse Redheart. I owe it to the families of the guards I... that I had killed... This time I will not fail; I will not make the same mistake twice; you’ll see. This will work. There will be no mistakes.” Her gaze darkened as her thoughts turned towards vengeance. “And when I am successful? I will find out just what I need to know and then nopony will be safe from my wrath. I will make them rue the day they even so much as thought about harming the ponies I love… especially Celestia.”

Twilight knew she would one day repent for her selfish actions when she had attempted to wield powers beyond her comprehension at the morgue, resulting in two more innocent deaths. After all, it was her fault that she had used the wrong spell upon Raven’s corpse in the first place.

It was a foolish mistake on her part. If she had only waited and patiently translated the text fully then maybe she would had realized her error before it was too late. The spell she had used on the traitor was not supposed to bring the dead back to life; it was supposed to raise the corpse as a mindless, flesh hungering ghoul and nothing more.

It did not breathe the life back into it like she had believed it would.

But this spell? This one was entirely different.

It took some preparation and some manipulation of a couple of guards over the course of a couple of weeks, but it appeared Twilight had managed to get away clean, without lifting a hoof or even alerting anypony of her involvement with a recent bout of grave robbing that had struck Canterlot.

Controlling the guards to do her dirty work while forcefully erasing their memories was the perfect plan, and it was executed beautifully right under everypony’s nose.

As far as anypony else was concerned, some very angry ponies dug up a traitor to deliver their own brand of justice upon her decomposing corpse.

They had chopped it up and maliciously set fire to it as if the purification of the flames would somehow cleanse her sins, a sickening act of desecration that Twilight Sparkle herself had programmed into the guards to specifically enact, once they had obtained the samples she needed, of course.

Not even cleansing your rotten filth in the baptism of fire will clear you of your sins, Raven. You deserve worse… I will give you, worse.

“As stated here within this text, I have correctly woven Raven’s hair in severals places into the vessel which I want her to possess, so that’s one thing off the checklist.” Twilight found herself smiling again as she looked to Smarty Pants.

There was nothing more harmless she could force Raven’s soul into. After all, it was just a mere stuffed toy. What could she possibly do in such a state?

Nothing. And that is precisely how I want her.

Weak.

Feeble.

All mine to control and do with as I please.

“Anyway! Right then; have I also prepared myself appropriately? Since it is written that the ritual can drain a vast amount of energy from those that use it and as much as I don’t want to feel drained, I don’t really want to use the alternative.”

That option involved using another pony to siphon the energy from. Apparently, using such a method often killed the subject for whatever reason Twilight Sparkle did not bother to fully translate.

Killing another pony just for her own personal gain was strictly out of the question, no matter how desperate she was for the spell to succeed.

“I have rested well, eaten well and conserved my magical energies throughout the day the best I could. My magical reservoir is far larger than that of any other pony since practicing Black Magic, so, I shouldn't be in any kind of real danger, other than maybe getting one really bad headache.”

Using her magic to lift the tome from the rickety table, Twilight Sparkle approached the chalk circle, her eyes gazing down at Smarty Pants with an excited smile.

“This is going to be unprecedented. I am going to bring back a pony from the dead with full consciousness.” Her smile darkened suddenly. “And when you are back amongst the world of the living, Raven? I am going to extract what I want to hear from you, very slowly. For all the trouble you have caused me and the deaths you wrought with your betrayal, I am going to make sure you sufficiently suffer for your crimes... and I am going to enjoy it, every last bit of it.”

Drawing a deep breath, Twilight closed her eyes as Smarty Pants was consumed by the same purple and black aura that encapsulated her horn and tome, levitating the stuffed animal within the center of the circle.

“Decemuir clamávero immortuis Tartarus, audite hoc votum, Cerebus. Suscita mihi quem ut cognoverunt Raven, in vitam aeternam, ut mihi est in æternum…”

Slipping open her glowing crimson eyes, Twilight Sparkle smiled as her body suddenly shivered, noting the sudden drop in temperature as she witnessed the shadows around her awaken and shift into horrific shapes that danced a macabre movement just inside of her peripherals.

It’s working. I can feel it!

“No longer does she need to sleep in peace within the realm of the damned for I, your Mistress in darkness; your curator of death commands you, usque ad animam, quae libera vas benedixique!”

Twilight’s red eyes widened excitedly as she noted the toy’s leg twitch, a green vile mist rising up from the ground to churn around the doll’s form, swirling in an all too familiar torrent as it penetrated through the buttons that were the doll’s expressionless eyes.

“Mihi vivere illam industriam, Cerebus! Ut quondam iterum!”

Suddenly and without warning, Twilight’s mind reeled as she felt a sudden chunk of her energy rip out of her as if someone had reached into her heart and clenched tightly around the beating muscle with icy fingers, causing the mare to stumble forward, breaking the circle and disrupting the incantation as she fell to her knees within the chalk outline, dropping the tome as a hoof shot out against her lips.

Twilight retched, heaving until a splatter of blood and something dark and inky ejected itself from her body, striking the ground with a sickeningly wet slap.

Struggling to breathe, Twilight lifted her panicked gaze to Smarty Pants as the doll fell to the floor, remaining stationary within the center of the broken magical ward as whatever Twilight had expelled from her system slithered its black mass and penetrated the doll before absorbing completely into it as if it had never existed.

After several long, painstaking moments in silence, Twilight spoke.

“M-move…” She whispered through gasps. “Please! Move!” She struck a forehoof on the ground beside Smarty Pants, her eyes eagerly waiting for the toy to show signs of life.

“No… no…” Regaining some breath, Twilight’s aching body sat back onto its haunches as she struggled to maintain her focus.

Everything just seemed to spin.

Lifting a foreleg up, she wiped her bloodied lips against her fur and felt herself whimper, staring face to face again with yet another failure.

Exhaling a mist of hot breath in the cold atmosphere, Twilight Sparkle slowly got to her hooves.

“I-It should have worked…”

Spinning on the spot, Twilight’s eyes drew wild with rage as she stood in a threatening posture. “WHY DIDN’T IT WORK!?”

Twilight swung her horn violently to the side, upturning the table with her magic before hurling it across the room, causing the piece of old furniture to smash against a disused, old bookshelf that immediately toppled over and broke apart against the force of the impact.

Huffing through her nostrils, Twilight picked up her most precious of fillyhood possessions and shook the doll violently in the air before her snarling face. “I did everything by the book! We got the hair samples—I gave my energy as it said! I felt it leave my body! I said the words correctly; I even translated some of it into Equestrian! What more does it want from me?!”

Then as if someone had flicked a switch, Twilight Sparkle felt all of her rage bleed away instantly the moment Smarty Pant’s arm tore from the socket, sending a small ball of white stuffing to drift aimlessly to the ground. Her eyes followed the descent as she held the doll and its dismembered arm within her magical grasp.

Despair overtook her features as she took a step back, placing a hoof against her head as her crimson eyes pulsed with veins of dark energy that sparked outwards from her pupils. “The Dark Magic… I-I let it get to me…”

It felt… good.

"No! No, it doesn’t feel good! I can’t let it make me think that; I can’t let it think I depend on it.

Dropping Smarty Pants, Twilight stumbled a few steps until she threw herself to lean against a wooden crate, turning away from the tome entirely, feeling mentally drained as opposed to physically. “I-I need to relax and focus myself… m-maybe I’ll take a walk. Get some air. W-we need to clear my head.”

I have to get out of this basement… out of this library… I have to get out of here.

Abandoning hope of achieving her goals for the day, Twilight summoned her magic to unconsciously lift the tome off of the ground and place it upon her back. She made her way across the basement, slowly trotting up the steps as her mind remained locked on this most recent of failures.

The ward was drawn perfectly. I had more than enough hair samples to weave in Smarty Pants for the ritual to succeed.

At the mere thought of her doll, her concern returned to Smarty Pants.

I’m so sorry, Smarty Pants…I’ll fix you later, I promise.

Shaking her head to rid herself of any such lamentations, Twilight Sparkle reached the top step of the darkened stairwell, lifting a trembling hoof to wipe away a tear that slipped down her muzzle.

“S-Silver…?” Came a tiny and frightened voice echoing from the darkness below.

Twilight’s ears instantly perked, her body freezing in place as her eyes grew wide.

W-what was that?

“Wh-why is it so dark in here?” The voice wept, seemingly drawing closer. “S-Silver?”

Slowly, Twilight turned to look over her shoulder, trembling as she stared with her mouth agape at the one armed Smarty Pants standing at the bottom of the stairs under its own power, looking up at her with its vacant, blue and purple buttoned eyes, its head turning side to side as if in search of something.

Or somepony.

“S-Silver Hammer? Is that you? Where am I?”

Author's Note

Because my lovely editor is swamped with so MUCH shit right now that I have thrown his way, I've decided to stupidly edit this myself so... I apologize.

Anyway, it's an update! That's something, right?