Oneohtrix Point Never

by Regidar

Rating: teen
Tags: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Spike, Horror, Sweetie Belle, Twilight Sparkle
Length: 7570

Twilight Sparkle discovers a strange, new set of caverns under her castle.

After attempting to recover a significant amount of lost matter in a teleportation mishap, Twilight Sparkle begins to exhibit strange symptoms.

As this goes on, a strange droning emanates from the newly discovered caverns underneath her Crystal Castle.

The worst part is, nopony in the town seems to believe her.

Published 2015-07-01 06:50:02 UTC
Last updated 2020-10-25 09:23:04 UTC

Replica

“Now, I know it seems simple," Twilight Sparkle said with a smile, her posture straightening slightly, wings ruffling behind her. “But this is actually one of the more important spells to learn, Sweetie Belle. Teleporting objects, even the most infinitesimal of distances, is one of the first steps in being able to teleport yourself.”

Sweetie Belle looked to the left of Twilight, where a tangerine sat on a stool. Her eyes traveled over Twilight to the right, where another stool, bare of anything, stood. “I don’t think this is that simple, Twilight. Teleportation is crazy! I still don’t even know how you do it!”

Twilight chuckled, setting her hoof on the stool next to tangerine. “Well, I learned the teleportation spell when I was a little bit older than you, but I had the hang of teleporting objects for some time before that. You’ve got potential, Sweetie Belle, and if we exercise it now, you’ll be able to accomplish amazing things!”

Sweetie Belle looked at the tangerine, arching her eyebrow suspiciously at it.

Twilight looked at the little orange fruit, and then back to Sweetie Belle. “Teleportation is really simple when you think about it, Sweetie. If you just imagine space as one plane, with time as a line bisecting it perpendicularly, and then you have the space plane constantly moving UP the time line,” Twilight made a motion with her hoof to represent the elevation of the plane. “To represent the motion of time, of course, then you just imagine teleportation as moving an object vertically, across the space plane,” Twilight dragged her hoof sideways in a straight line to simulate the effect. “Without having it go up along the time plane, so it’s instantaneous! That’s a very simplistic rendition of it, seeing as I’ve edited out a lot of imaginary geometry, how leylines factor in, and I haven’t even accounted for other dimensions and timelines, but I think it gets the point across rather clearly, wouldn’t you say?”

Sweetie Belle stared up at Twilight blankly, her mouth slightly agape, her eyes glazed and unfocused.

Twilight’s brow creased. “R-Right. Anyway, let’s just get back to the work at hoof, shall we? Set your focus on the target object…”

Sweetie Belle blinked hard, and swiveled her head to face the fruit, furrowing her brow and sticking her tongue out slightly.

“Now, concentrate on the object, as if you were doing a levitation spell…”

Sweetie’s small horn sparked, a pale green glow surrounding the orange.

“Now, instead of trying to exert your own strength through magic to lift it like you do in levitation…” Twilight said, eyes flicking back and forth between Sweetie and the tangerine. “Try and imagine—conceptualize!—the target object in the place you want it to be. Don’t think about it moving, that’s not the goal! You really want it to be IN the place you want it to be. Thinking about moving it will only slow it down, it needs to be put there in an instant!”

Sweetie’s brow furrowed, her eyes narrowing as the aura around the tangerine richened in hue. A single bead of sweat formed on her forehead, and she crouched down, teeth grit and face gnarled in a grimace as she focused all of her energy on the tangerine.

Twilight grinned, her eyes sparkling as she felt the hairs of her coat along the right side of her body raise, their close proximity to the tangerine and the energy setting them straight up. “Yes! You’re doing it, Sweetie! And on your first try, too! It took me three times before I could do it! Keep going! You’re almost there!”

Sweetie Belle let out a high pitched whine as she clamped her eyes shut, her grimace almost comically dragging her mouth down past her chin. The thin outline of a vein on her forehead, just below her horn, was barely visible. It throbbed in time with the strobing of the light on her horn, which shot out a spark now and then.

“Alright, Sweetie…” Twilight said, eying the fluctuation of energy around Sweetie’s horn. “If you feel like you’re exerting yourself too much, don’t be afraid to pull back, I don’t want you to get hurt.”

Sweetie craned her neck down, her eyes opening for just a moment. As her eyelids fluttered, her eyes rolled back for just a moment. Her muzzle scrunched, twitched, and—

“AH-CHOO!” Sweetie shot up in the air, hopping backwards a few inches as her horn let out a burst of supercharged energy.

Twilight cringed, quickly encapsulating herself in a bubble of force. The tangerine disappeared in a flash of green energy… as did the stool… and a large chunk of the floor… but Twilight remained unscathed as the energy shield dissipated around her.

Sweetie Belle slumped to the floor, her horn sparking at random intervals, her back hoof twitching slightly. Looking up, her face damp with sweat, she gazed at the hole in the center of the room.

“Oops.”

Twilight gazed down into the hole, which lead down through the crystal floor, and then through almost a foot of dirt. Roots cut down the middle were visible in the perfect cross-section of the ground—even an unlucky worm had been caught in the crossfire and had been cut in two. Halfway down, the burrow of a small animal was exposed, and a confused mole poked its head out to confirm this.

Twilight’s focus was on, however, the section of the earth even further down. The dirt gave way to stone at a foot down, and the chunk began to close out in this rocky section. However, a hole about three feet across at the bottom of the removed chunk formed an aperture into a cavern. The light from the room shown through, illuminating a dim patch at the bottom of the cave, exposing a smooth surface.

“I-I’m sorry Twilight!” Sweetie Belle squeaked, hoping to her hooves and promptly falling over, her horn crackling with green sparks.

Twilight stepped back from the hole, her face fixed in a quizzical expression. “No, no, Sweetie, it’s alright… I’m just glad you’re okay! I just… I just never knew they were these caves under my castle.”

“Wh-What? There’s a cave?” Sweetie Belle tried to get to her hooves, but dizziness overcame the poor filly and she sunk to her side again.

Twilight nodded. “Yes, you exposed a previously undiscovered cavern structure! At least, I believe it’s previously undiscovered… I’ll have to check some geological surveys to confirm that…”

“But look at everything I’ve done!” Sweetie Belle said, weakly gesturing at the gaping hole in the floor.

Twilight chuckled softly. “Oh, Sweetie, you don’t have to worry about this. I kind of wanted to wait a bit longer to show you this spell, but since you’ve given me such a perfect opportunity to use it…”

“Huh?” Sweetie Belle looked up at Twilight, confusion splashed on her face just as heavily as the sweat from her magical ordeals.

“Look closely at where you teleported all of the matter away,” Twilight said. “In the space you left behind.”

Sweetie squinted at the gap in the floor. “It looks all fuzzy… like the air above a fire, where there isn’t any smoke!”

Twilight nodded. “Yes! Very good! That’s the disturbance of magical energy left behind by teleportation events. It happens briefly when I teleport as well, but since you teleported a significant amount of matter, the effect stays a bit longer.”

“S-So what does that mean?”

“It means,” Twilight said, her horn glowing slightly as she approached the edge of the gap once more. “That I can cast a spell that will allow me to retrieve the teleported material!”

“Is that safe?”

Twilight frowned slightly. “Well… I’ve never tried to retrieve so much before, that’s for certain… but I’m sure everything will be fine. It’s not exactly a dangerous activity. And if worse comes to worse, it’s not a fantastic amount of damage, and I’m sure repairs can be made easily enough.”

Twilight’s glow around her horn intensified. “I’d take a step back, though, Sweetie. I’ll try to control where the matter comes back as best I can, but this won’t exactly be easy.”

Sweetie Belle pushed herself to her hooves, taking a few shaky steps back until she was pressed up against the wall. “I’m really sorry about this, Twilight…”

“Relax, Sweetie,” Twilight said with a reassuring smile, “Everypony makes mistakes! It’s the only real way to learn. We’ll get you right back on track after this and then you’ll know what not to do, right?”

Sweetie let her lips upturn into a sheepish smile. “Y-Yeah… I guess you’re right.”

Twilight turned from Sweetie Belle to gaze over the hole once more, and shut her eyes. Her brow furrowed in concentration, and the vague distortion in the air around the pit began to glow lavender.

A moment of silence passed before Twilight’s expression changed to one of a confusion. “Hold on, something’s not right…”

“I-It’s not?” Sweetie’s eyes went wide.

“It’s strange,” Twilight said, her eyes still closed, but her forehead and brow were tightly knit in bafflement. “I feel almost as if there are little hooks around my stomach, yanking me forward, like the sensation directly before—“

There was a flash of purple light, and Twilight was gone.

She was faced with a thousand blinding streaks of light; she supposed they could be pinpoints, like stars, but she was going so fast they were like lines, parallel to her, all collapsing at the point of infinity. She soared towards it, and crashed through an impossible heat, reversing and sailing along the lines upside down.

She could feel every single line, every bit of energy, coursing through her veins, her nerves. They pulsated in her, setting her nerves on fire and boiling her blood away until it was only supercharged plasma. Everything lead to her horn, which sparked and shot a column of jagged, pure power from the top, joining the endless cycle to infinity and back, flipping upside down and returning to her.

Her fur was frying, but she loved it. Her wings were shaking, but she embraced it. Her horn…

She can to an abrupt, sudden halt. There was no energy here. Only the smell of burning feathers and smoldering fur. Her horn, her entire body ached now that she was no longer connected to the heart of the leyline. Her hooves shuffled against cold dirt, and she collapsed.

Everything was dark… everything was cold…

A faint, faint heat pulsed out to her from the darkness, and she crawled to it like it was the only thing left of the world. Her hoof scraped against cold dirt, slashing through lifeless, subterranean air—

And it pressed against stone. It cut into the underside of her hoof, slicing through the frog, but she endured the pain. This stone was the most welcome thing she ever touched, and she would not mind if it was the last and only thing she ever touched from here on out.

It radiated slow, painstaking heat… rationing it out to her as the only survivor of a frigid star, buried deep under the rock and soil of a dead planet.

And it spoke to her.

Rehp… le… ka…

“Replica,” she whispered back, flawlessly. Her hooves glided alone the jagged surface, blood dripping from inside her tender hoof, feeling the sharp splinters and serrated edges slowly melt away. It became smooth as ice, but kept the warmth that she craved, slowly pulsing out from inside it, in rhythm with her fragile, dry heart.

A light lit from a horn, but it was not hers. No energy ran from it any longer. It was the horn of a mare in front of her.

It was her, black and shiny, a perfect doppleganger made out of obsidian. She watched as the blood she had trailed along her volcanic glass chest beaded off of it, dripping down her mimic’s leg.

The Obsidian Twilight opened her mouth, and the earth’s grating sound filled her ears.

“—teleportation.” Twilight finished, and promptly slumped over. A huge cylinder of rock, the very tip of the bottom sporting two stalactites, smashed into the crystal floor two feet away from Sweetie Belle, who let out a shrill yelp. The stool fell to the floor, splintering against the cold crystal, and the tangerine rolled away, sliding down into the pit.

“Wow, Twilight! That was amazing! You got it pretty much instantly!” Sweetie carefully inched her way around the mass of rock, and straddled the line between it and the gaping hole in the floor. “That was—h-hey! Are you alright?”

Twilight lay on her side, her hoof bleeding profusely, a crimson pool gathering under her leg. “Replica…” she moaned. “Replica…”

Sweetie Belle leaned down, prodding her side gingerly. “Twilight? Are you alright? You’re starting to scare me…”

Twilight lay motionless. Sweetie bit her lip, her eyes wide and wet. “I-I’m gonna go get help, Twilight, you’ll be okay, just don’t m—“

Twilight sat straight up, and Sweetie Belle let out her second scream of horror in the past minute.

“I-I’m fine, Sweetie,” she mumbled drunkly, lifting her good hoof to her face and feeling her cheeks. “I just need some bandages for my hoof, that’s all. I stepped on a jagged piece of crystal while teleporting the matter back into the room.”

Sweetie Belle stared at Twilight as she felt up her face. Twilight stared dead ahead, her lips moving slightly every second, but if noise came out, Sweetie did not hear it.

“The bandages are in the kitchen near the stove, Spike keeps a first aid kit nearby just in case,” Twilight deadpanned.

Sweetie nodded, and scampered away towards the kitchen, the sounds of her hooves echoing throughout the mostly empty castle.

Twilight’s hoof slowly dragged its way up her face, feeling her cheeks. They were flushed, but otherwise fine. She dragged them around her eyes—and poked herself by accident, causing the large orb to water. Nothing unusual there. Her hoof traced along her brow, feeling the bone ridge underneath. It was intact. Up through her mane, which was all there, unsinged… and she traced her hoof along her horn, feeling the contours and lines along it.

She brought her hoof down, and sighed. “I’m really sorry about all this, Sweetie, it’s just that—“

Twilight looked down at her hoof, something translucent and thin stuck to it. At first, she tilted her head, examining it with mild fascination, before a creeping, twisting feeling in her gut, like she had just swallowed a gallon of poison, spread chills through her.

It was a layer of her horn.

R Plus 7

R Plus 7

Twilight closed her eyes, the streaks of energy she observed in the leyline burned into her retinas. When she opened them again, the thin shell was still there in her hoof, laying there almost innocently, like it was nothing more than an unassuming gossamer remnant of some large insect. The resemblance was certainly there—and if Twilight were just a bit more gullible, or just a bit less intelligent—she could have been able to convince herself it was nothing more than just that.

Yet, Twilight was Twilight, and that was undeniable a piece of her horn’s outer layer. She stared down at it, the overwhelming numb feeling that had filled her after her detachment from the leyline slowly giving way to the tortured agony in the pit of her stomach. It did not radiate out like the precious little heat from the stone deep beneath the earth—it snaked through her intestines, seeping into her blood and drawing lines as it tainted each vessel, horror and panic sinking deep fangs into every cell as it passed through her, until she was nothing but a web of glowing venom filled in with little bits of pony between the gaps.

The tiny tapping of hooves behind her was almost not enough to wrench Twilight’s gaze away from the terrifying sight in her own hoof. With great effort, she turned her head around, her heart beating detached from her body, hammering a frantic, primal tune against her ribcage and bouncing around inside the cavity of her chest, slamming against her other organs in a frantic effort to get them to respond to the sheer, almost abstract horror of the situation.

“I got your bandages, Twilight!” Sweetie Belle said, pride and apology mixed together in her voice like some sort of vile soup. Twilight looked down at the bandages, the roll hanging off of the filly’s raised, white hoof. It was almost pathetic, sitting there; the cut on her hoof was the least of her worries now! Her other hoof held the real issue! Her horn, couldn’t Sweetie Belle see her horn? Surely, at any moment, she would scream and leap back, babbling incoherently as she gazed up at Twilight’s head. The fear would strike deeper for her more than anypony else, of course, seeing as she too was a unicorn, and Twilight would not be surprised if she fell on her side again, returning to the sobbing wreck she was just minutes ago.

Sweetie Belle smiled hopefully up at Twilight, raising her hoof slightly and nodding down at the bandages.

Twilight blinked. “Th-Thank you, Sweetie.” She raised her bloody hoof, turning it over so that its underside faced Sweetie. “Could you wrap it for me? U-Use your magic, it’s always good practice…”

Sweetie Belle nodded, humming as her horn sparked. “I also got a little pad of gauze and some water so we can wash out the cut! Keep it from getting infected, and all.”

Twilight nodded, chewing her tongue slightly with her molars. She always knew Sweetie Belle was a bit… dull… but how could she be so oblivious to this? Twilight hadn’t looked at her own horn, but if a whole LAYER was missing, and an irregular one at that, surely she’d notice? Could she really be that obtuse and unobservant?

“Good thinking, Sweetie,” Twilight said, barely biting back contempt as her teeth dug deep into the soft muscle of her tongue. “Always nice to see you’re keeping yourself sharp in more than one area.”

Sweetie hummed, grunting softly as she levitated the cup of water, and gently tipped it over. The water washed over Twilight’s hoof, carrying the blood away with it. Crimson bands and spirals appeared in the deluge for just one moment before they were whisked away, dripping down Twilight’s foreleg and matting her fur. The gauze followed, patting down the area around the cut, the white slowly becoming more and more stained with red. Twilight winced, a sharp pain shooting down her leg with each pat of the Sweetie scrunched her muzzle slightly, the roll of bandages unwrapping and slowly floating over towards Twilight.

“Wait…” Sweetie said slowly, looking down at Twilight’s overturned hoof. “What’s that?”

“What’s what?” Twilight looked down at her hoof. A tiny little splinter of black stone rose about half a centimeter from the soft flesh, and the beads of blood around it betrayed it as the cause of her cut.

“Look, you’ve got something caught in the underside of your hoof, right where the cut is,” Sweetie said. Twilight scowled at her redundancy.

“Let me get it out for you.” Sweetie’s horn lit, and a small glow formed around the shard of obsidian.

The streaks of light shot across her vision, and she let loose a scream so high pitched that nopony heard it. She felt the vague, but necessary warm pulse sever from her—and she was alone and cold. Nothing was inside her, nothing was around her, she was only a cold husk floating in the middle of a magicless void—

And it was all because of a dim witted thief who wanted nothing more than to keep the heat for herself.

“No!” Twilight screamed, shouldering Sweetie Belle away from her. The filly fell on her rump, letting out a squeal, and the bandages fell to the floor with a lame thud. “You can’t have him! He’s mine, you little thief, he’s all mine!”

Sweetie looked up at Twilight in bewilderment, her eyes growing wet. “Wh-What? Twilight, what are you talking about?”

Twilight’s chest heaved as laborious, cutting breaths manipulated it. She stared down at her hoof, a single bead of sweat creeping down her cheek as she focused her gaze on that black sliver.

“I-I’m sorry, Sweetie, I just…” Twilight trailed off. Quickly, she bent down, and took the bandaged roll in her mouth. She lifted her good hoof, and moved her mouth down, and with a few quick twists, had her cut hoof properly dealt with. “There; no nopony can make the mistake of trying to take him away from me again.”

“Him?” Sweetie quivered on the floor, her eyes darting around uncertainly. “Who’s him? Is he hear right now?”

“No,” Twilight muttered more to herself than to Sweetie. “But he’ll be here soon…”

“He?" Sweetie said, just as bewildered as before. “Twilight, I don’t understand! Who—“

“The lesson is over," Twilight said curtly, turning flank on Sweetie. “Excuse me, Sweetie, I need to see somepony real quick.”

And Twilight was gone, leaving Sweetie Belle alone in her home with only a chunk of the floor missing and a blood stain to remember her by.

Twilight hobbled outside, and stretched her wings out. With a few quick beats of her feather webs, she was in flight.

As she soared over the air through Ponyville, a thousand thoughts ran through her head. Help was obviously something she needed to get… but what could be done? She doubted anypony could help her with her horn—she’d never read or heard of anypony ever having to deal with horn shedding like this! Even as unicorns age, the one part of their body that stayed strong was their horn! Of course, horn shattering, while rare, was not unheard of… but this was something else entirely. A full layer of horn shedding…

“Horns don’t work like this at all…” Twilight muttered to herself. “Unicorns aren’t like goats, or even minotaurs! Once they reach full maturity, the horn stops growing and the outer layer solidifies, becoming even stronger than bone! Albeit more sensitive, due to all the nerve endings and whatnot…” At this, Twilight reached a hoof to her horn, biting her bottom lip and stealing herself for the worst of nerve damage.

The instant her bandaged hoof touched her horn, she felt a tiny tug on the sliver of stone inside her skin. She gasped slightly, her eyes crossing as she tried to focus up on her hoof and horn, and then—

The sheer intensity of the heat almost bowled her over. She was laying on a flat, spiny slab of black rock, with a dull orange glow all around her. Her breathing was labored and heavy, full of bitter ash and sour smoke. The strong stench of sulfur slashed her senses, and she wheezed and heaved together in tandem,—or so she assumed, as she could hear nothing over the roar of some gigantic dragon that was pushing itself up from the ground in a spray of molten rock.

But no dragon came, even as the wall of sound continued. Geysers of glowing red and orange—the only source of light as the entire sky was blackened by ash—shot straight up, large chunks of ebony stone showering the earth around her. A particularly large one arced from the nearest spire of magma, twirling and spraying a fine mist of lava from it in circles through the air, heading right towards the middle of her vision, filling it with spiked black rock. She braced herself for the inevitable fatal impact—

And felt nothing as the rock passed through her, shattering the ground below. She looked down, observing the pile of obsidian shards. What had happened? Was she truly not there?

She tried to move, but she could not. Her viewpoint remained fixed. She turned her head to the side; her vision swiveled, and she was now looking in a completely different place: a large, grainy hill with a huge glowing crack in the side resided about thirty feet in front of her. It was surrounded by quick ochre rivers, and the whole formation was distorted by the sheer amount of heat coming from around and on it.

She supposed she was not really there…

The ground beneath her split open, and a huge torrent of lava exploding forth, encapsulating her. Heat coursed through her, and before she could so much as open her mouth, she was lifted into the air by the tide of superheated earth and gas. She was pushed through waves and layers of thick air, ash, and smoke, little molecules of solid matter tearing away at her senses but not her incorporeal form.

The heat left as suddenly as it had come, and she hung suspended there in space. Her eyes were flashing and throbbing in agony, and constant droning, ringing sensation reverberated inside her ears. As the unfathomable heat left her, it did so as if it were being leached out from her, drawn out as if it were a poison threatening to send her spiraling to death. She was surrounded by an inky blackness, cold and alone.

Except for one source of light…

With great effort, she turned her gaze, and saw a fiery ball of… something. Her mind, still overloaded with the sensations of heat, light, and ash, could not recognize just what she was looking at for a few moments.

And then—

With a small, strangled gasp, she realized she was looking at a great molten orb, the planet of Equestria, suspended in the void of space. It was cracked, mostly black but with clear oceans and rifts of bubbling lava, and huge amounts of ash and smoke escaped from its surface, fading into space behind it.

As her ears cleared, she heard a great sound, one that she had heard only once before, but knew so very well:

Re…pli…ka…

She trembled, the smallest scrap of warmth reaching her.

Arh… pl… uhs… sev… EN…

The surface of the world cracked open, and a blinding light escaped from it like a floodlight being turned on directly before her eyes. She felt an intense energy, a wave of power that could eradicate stars, and it washed towards her. Her mouth opened but she knew no scream would come out—

“AAAH!” Twilight screamed as her eyes opened, and swerved narrowly to avoid slamming into a house. An orange-maned mare squealed shrilly, slamming her blinds shut as a few purple feathers detached from Twilight’s wings and fluttered against the rafters.

Her horn throbbed painfully as she spiraled into the ground, and with a grunt she shouldered the dirt, digging a small trench in the ground with the sheer force of her collision. Rocks, small plants, and clods of dirt flew up around Twilight, and she lay there, panting heavily.

“My garden!” came the indignant voice of somepony, possibly within the house; Twilight couldn't care less about that, though, for she had just stumbled upon something much more important than the destruction of some inconsequential mare’s carrots.

Laying there in the cool dirt, a warm, vicious fluid pouring forth from her shoulder, Twilight could hear the heartbeat of the Earth. She could feel his dull heat, so far away, but she knew it was there. Every so often, a low, low sound, and the vaguest sensation of vibration pulsed into her.

“Take my blood,” she murmured. “And heal yourself.”

With great effort, Twilight pushed herself to her hooves, dirt and smashed carrots falling from her soiled coat. She focused her tired eyes, streaks of light occasionally returning to her line of vision. She hobbled away, down across the wreckage of the garden, and toppled over the low wooden fence that separated it from the road.

The door to the home creaked open, and a mare poked her head out. She watched as Twilight dredged herself out from the soil ruins, and tripped over her fence, hobbling towards the hospital, dripping dirt, mashed vegetation, and feathers all the way.

“What the hell?”

“You’ve definitely sprained your wing,” Nurse Redheart said, gingerly running her hooves along Twilight’s shoulder, pushing down towards aforementioned wings. “How fast did you say you hit the ground?”

“I was mostly likely only going about thirty five miles per hour in the air,” Twilight said dissuasively. “Could you please attend to more pressing matters at hoof?”

“Now, I wouldn’t just throw this away like it’s nothing, Princess,” Redheart said, nodding at her wing. “Thirty five miles per hour is a serious collision; you’re lucky to have gotten away with a simple sprain! Now, I haven’t worked on any alicorns before you, but rest assured I’ve seen my fair share of pegasi with damaged wings, and an impact like that can simple shatter a bone to bits.”

“If I were concerned about my bones, I would have called in a rheumatologist,” Twilight snapped. “I know you’re only a nurse, but if you could please take a look at my horn…”

Nurse Redheart glared at Twilight for a moment, and opened her mouth. She closed it just as quickly, took a deep breathe, and exhaled. “Fine. Turn this way, please.”

Twilight turned her head to face the Nurse. “Now then,” she said. “What’s troubling you?”

“The first layer of my horn came off,” Twilight said curtly, glowering at Redheart as if she had just spat in her face. Was she blind? Was every sun-forsaken pony in this town so blind that they couldn’t see this simple truth? “The Stratum Cornus.”

Redheart started, taken aback. “P-Princess, that’s a serious matter! I don’t think I’ve ever had a case of of the Stratum Cornus just… coming off, you said?”

Twilight nodded. “I’m glad you see how dire this is. Do you think any of the doctors here will be able to help?”

Nurse Redheart bit her lip. “Well, I do not doubt the medical prowess of our staff, but this is… something else, to say the least. Will you allow me to examine your horn for a moment, please?”

“Go on.”

Redheart stepped forward, and gently placed a hoof on Twilight’s head, steadying her. She peered over the purple horn, her eyes flicking back and forth in their sockets. “And how did it come off? Peeling? Splintering?”

“It peeled, yes," Twilight said, nervously tapping her hoof against the floor. “I haven’t used any magic since it happened. You know, for fear of making it worse.”

“I would say that was the safest rout of action,” Nurse Redheart said, closing on eye and focusing on the tip of Twilight’s horn. “Um… Princess?”

“Yes?”

Redheart removed her hoof from Twilight’s head, and stood down. “I-I am confused. Surely, I’ve never seen the shedding of the Stratum Cornus, but…”

“But what?” Twilight said, eye twitching slightly.

Redheart shook her head. “There’s nothing I can see wrong with it at all. Your horn is, for the most parts, completely unremarkable and totally healthy.”

Twilight sat there, dumbfounded as she looked the Nurse right in the eyes. “Excuse me?”

“Now, this is fantastic news, obviously,” Nurse Redheart said, smiling shakily. “The peeling of horn layers, especially for a pony of your magical, certainly would have not been a good sign. But you’re as healthy as can be—err, respective to your horn. Now, I do recommend seeing Doctor Stable about that sprained wing of yours…”

Twilight’s nostrils flared, and her lips metamorphosed her expression into a snarl. “I cannot believe such incompetence. I don’t know what manner of joke you’re trying to pull, but I can assure you, I don’t find it funny at all! This is something of a most serious nature, and I won’t have some sort of frazzled, over-glorified medical servant tell me it is anything less!”

“Princess, please, if you would just calm down—“

“Calm down?” Twilight shrieked, her wings shooting outward, and she winced in pain as a few feathers fell around her. “How am I supposed to calm down?”

“Do you still have the layer of your horn?” Redheart asked calmly.

Twilight snorted. “Of course not! Why would I want to keep that with me?”

“Do you know where it is?”

“Yes, it’s right—“ Twilight paused. She couldn’t presently remember what she had done with her horn layer. She had had it stuck to her hoof when she was in her castle with Sweetie Belle.

“W-Well, it was on my hoof when it came off, back in my castle, and—“

“Speaking of hooves,” Nurse Redheart said, pointing down towards Twilight’s bandaged appendage. “What happened there?”

“Nothing,” Twilight lied quickly. “I simple stepped on, er, a broken cup, that’s all!”

Nurse Redheart gently held Twilight’s hoof in her own, turning it over. “Now, just let me examine it for a moment; even if you treated it properly, there could be something stuck inside and we have to remover it. We don’t want an infection to—“

She will remove you from the heart.

“No!” Twilight shrieked, rolling backwards against the wall. “Stand down! This examination is over!”

“Princess—“

But Twilight was gone, bounding out of the examination room and towards the entrance of the hospital.

Zones Without Ponies

Click.

Twilight sighed, rubbing her temple with a sore hoof, tapping her other against the brass of her telescope.

“I should be looking down there,” she whispered to herself, and took off.

“Twilight’s been acting strange lately,” Spike said. He and Sweetie Belle were wandering around the outskirts of Ponyville, not too far from Fluttershy’s cottage. “She hasn’t left the place in days and spends most her time on the roof… branches… thing looking at the sky. I’ve caught her outside just sort of… pawing at the dirt? Like she’s trying to dig with her hooves, but she isn’t making any progress. Any time I try to ask her about it she—“

“—pretends nothing’s wrong? I’ve been thinking about that a lot,” Sweetie Belle said, frowning and turning her gaze to focus on anything but Spike. “I think something happened when I was there last.”

“You think?”

Sweetie made a face. “Yeah, well, I can’t be too sure honestly; she insists nothing is wrong, but…” Sweetie told him about the teleportation incident. Spike wore a frown that deepened the entire time.

“That’s definitely not good. What did she say again right after she came back?” Spike had stopped walking.

“‘Replica.’” Sweetie stopped as well. “She said ‘replica’. I don’t have even the slightest clue as to what that’s supposed to mean, though.”

Spike pursed his lips. “She mighta just been disoriented from the teleportation. Probably didn’t have any idea what she was saying. She didn’t bring it up again?”

Sweetie Belle shook her head. “Nope. Rushed to get me out of there as fast as possible once I bandaged her hoof up. She didn’t let on, but I think she maybe was pretty angry at me for what I did.” Sweetie felt a pang as if she’d just been bucked in the chest, and her posture slumped. “Ugh, and by the sound of it I’ve really gone and messed things up.”

There was the scrabble of talons over dirt, and a soft gasp of surprise escaped Sweetie as she felt Spike pull her into a tight hug.

“Hey,” Spike said, his tail slapping gently off the ground behind him. “Don’t say that, alright? It’s not your fault. I’m sure whatever’s happening with Twilight is just stress related. I love her, and you know I’m remiss to say anything bad about her, but… y’know…”

They were both quiet for a moment. After what seemed like perhaps a bit too long, with Spike’s arms still wrapped around her, Sweetie finally broke the silence.

“Do you want me to say it so you don’t have to?”

Spike gave her a relieved smile. “Would you?”

Sweetie Belle laughed, the sound delicate and musical. “Twilight is kinda like a powder keg of mental duress waiting for the littles spark of stress to set it off, isn’t she?” It took a moment, but Spike found himself laughing along as well.

“A powder keg of duress in a wildfire of stress.” Spike heaved a weary sigh, a final giggle catching the tail end of it in spite of himself. “Really, we shouldn’t be too hard on Twilight, she spreads herself so thin but it’s because of how much she cares.”

“Oh, no! Don’t get me wrong!” Sweetie quickly covered. “Twilight’s amazing! But she is… well, she’s overworking herself into insanity, it sounds like. And she wouldn’t let me look at the thing in her hoof.”

“What?” Spike tilted his head, his brow furrowed. “What do you mean, ‘she wouldn’t let me look at the thing in her hoof’? What ‘thing’?”

“Well, I didn’t get a great look at it, but it was probably a rock of some kind; that’s how she cut her hoof and all.” Sweetie shrugged. “Why? Do you think that’s important?”

Spike had a very uneasy and highly perturbed expression donned. “I dunno…” he said slowly. “But that’s definitely very strange behavior. Not like Twilight at all not to be meticulous about anything much less something medical like that.”

Sweetie felt a shiver run down her spine, which was strange because it was 83 degrees in the late-afternoon sun, and she had a dragon hanging off her.

“Oh, sorry,” Spike said, letting go of Sweetie. Her coughed, his cheeks flushing for a moment as he looked directly up at the slowly deepening blue of the sky.

Sweetie smiled. “Hey, nothing to apologize for, right?”

Spike returned her smile, and Sweetie felt the exact opposite sensation of the shiver that had just run through her.

Click.

“You’ll never find them out there, you know,” Twilight muttered to herself. She looked down from her telescope lens and down at the charts she’d been marking up; they were completely unintelligible now, covered with scrawls of ink—half completed thoughts, random tangents, in-identifiable symbols, and the occasional good-old-fashioned bout of profanity.

To Twilight, of course, it made total sense; she hadn’t spent the last week and a half staring at the sky day and night for nothing.

“Ah, but you’d doubt me, wouldn’t you?” she murmured, her horn glowing for a moment as she, in her eagerness to make a new documentation of the position of a Replica, had forgotten her wound.

Agonizing pain shot through her head, driving down into her skull through the core of her horn like an icepick. Twilight let out a pained gasp as her body seized partially; both her wings curled inward, her untreated sprain sending further discomfort through her. She could hardly care about that though.

“My horn,” Twilight whined softly. “No, not another layer…”

She brought her hoof to her horn, and in real time, she felt another layer coil and curl off it, as if it were the page of a burning book turned to ash.

Twilight held this section of her horn. How many times? How many times?

She carefully put it aside the others that had shed during her near two-weeks up here. This made the fourth layer. Each one resembled the last, with one exception: there was always more each time.

Now it didn’t matter, because their voices were singing in her ears. They told her she was loved, that they loved her, and her whole body was aglow with warmth.

All you’re even going to want to do is go back there.

Twilight tore the bandages from her hoof, holding it up to the light. The jet black shard imbedded in her frog glittered with a brilliant sheen, drinking the sunlight. It was greedy, and drank far after it was full. Twilight could feel it growing warmer and warmed with each passing moment, its surface aglow with a black light she knew she shouldn’t be able to see.

Yet there it was, surrounding the shard in an aurora of fractured color. Color that Twilight had never seen, couldn’t know, and absolutely loved.

“None of them believe you.” Twilight was talking to herself, about herself, but it sure did seem like the shard in her hoof were the subject in both cases. “They don’t know what it’s like. To be ripped apart. Torn away. None of them.”

She stared deeply into its wonderful, dazzling heat. She brought it close to her chest, pressed it against her ribcage until the smell of burt hair and frying flesh became too much to bear; when she took it away, she missed how it beat in synch with her heart.

It was whispering to her. Trying to speak again.

“What’s that?” she asked kindly, far kinder than she’d spoken to anypony recently.

Twilight Sparkle brought the shard to her ear, and it spoke to her.

“ZONES. WITHOUT. PONIES.” The voice was booming, deep, echoing around her skull. She knew she was the only one to hear it. She was proud of that. Nopony else deserved to hear them speak.

“Zones without ponies,” she whispered back.

“ZONES. WITHOUT. PONIES.”

Twilight looked back up at the night sky. The stars twinkled mockingly back. She shot them a manic grin.

“I understand,” she said, a tear forming in the corner of her eye. She brought her hoof to her mouth, and kissed the shard. The moisture of her saliva hissed as it turned to steam.

“Twilight?”

Twilight spun around; she’d clearly instructed Spike to leave her alone while she was doing this important research. What could the impudent whelp want now?

“Twilight?” Spike asked again. Why did he look so crestfallen? “Are you feeling alright?”

“Of course I’m feeling alright, Spike,” Twilight said, the dismissal crystal clear in her tone. She waved her hoof at him. She didn’t even bother to look in his direction. “Leave me be. I’ve got important astronomy to attend to.”

Spike made a weird little noise. “Twilight, really. This is starting to get concerning.”

“If you were concerned, you and the rest of my so-called ‘friends’ would have tried to help me out with my horn already!” Twilight gestured wildly to the gnarl of branches she’d been using as a shelf/desk.

Spike knew better than to point out the area was empty and that her horn looked fine. “You’ve got us all worried.”

“Really, it’s ME who should be worried about all of YOU,” Twilight spat with utter and pure unadulterated spite at Spike. “Having to put up with constant lies and conspiracies against me by you petty thieves and ungrateful heatstealers!”

Spike couldn’t have looked more bewildered even if he had tried. “Wh… what? Heatstealers? Twilight, what are you talking about?”

“Get out of my sight,” Twilight hissed at him, her entire muzzle contorted in a scowl that was quite unlike her to make. “Get out before I make you.” She could feel the raw bubbling energy building inside her, the heat emanating from the shard so intense that she was half-convinced a fireball was forming there right above it.

Spike sighed. “Alright, Twilight. I’ll leave you alone. But really, you’re starting to scare me. This isn’t like you at all.”

Twilight stared at Spike with a look not unlike that a cat gives a particularly plump rat right before tearing its head off. She then took a deep, measured breath and closed her eyes before exhaling slowly. “Spike, I’m fine. I’m just overworked right now, and you’re really making it a lot harder for me to get the things I need to do done.” She’d tried to speak as calmly and soothing as she could, but she’d said everything through grit teeth and with a very grating strain to her voice.

“I get the message,” Spike muttered, fighting every urge to roll his eyes. “Okay Twilight, if you say so; I’ll leave you alone now.”

“Good,” Twilight sneered. Spike obliged Twilight, and left immediately. Unbeknownst to her, he’d set off to the Carousel Boutique the second he’d left the palace, but even if Twilight had know that would have hardly been the first of her concerns.

“Try to take the heat from me,” she mumbled, grinding the shard gently against her face. “Try to take me from the heart.”

there they were again, those marvelous and beautiful voice singing and harmonizing in her mind, making her feel as though she were right and beautiful and trusted even though she'd already been all those things before and had known that they had shown her she was simply just a replica from the highest heavens brought down to the warmth of the earth

She pulled her hoof from her face. A small trail of blood connected the shard to her cheek.

Twilight flung herself half-off the branches that formed the rooftop of her palace. She grinned ear to ear, the evening wind whipping her mane this way and that as she dangled by her lower belly and hind hooves thirty feet from the ground. Her sprained wing twitched feebly.

She was staring directly at the front lawn of her palace, but to her she might as well have been gazing right through it; she could see the great black mass in the earth, twisting and writhing slowly over itself like no stone should do.

Twilight Sparkle was going to enter the zones without ponies.