Sombraverse Book I: A Grim and Darkening World

by Cadejo Jones

Rating: teen
Tags: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Spike, Other, Adventure, Science Fiction, Horror, Twilight Sparkle, Applejack, Original Character
Length: 19118

Trapped in the Sombra timeline by two shadowy figures, Twilight Sparkle and Spike try to adapt to their new world and find a way to get back home.

Twilight Sparkle and Spike found themselves in a desolate, war-torn Equestria at the hooves of Starlight Glimmer. They saw the toll King Sombra's armies have taken on the world.

Now they're trapped there by the claws of something much, much worse. After a strange mare steals the spell, Twilight and Spike find themselves at the mercy of an otherworldly foe. They've been told they won't be free to return to their own time until they complete a certain task for him.

Not only that, this world seems to be changing them as well. Twilight can't seem to get a handle on her anger, and Spike's body is undergoing changes he can't understand. As the wear of a world at war drives them apart, the only thing keeping them together is this world's Applejack. Cold, driven, and intuitive, she may be part of what Equestria needs to topple the Shadow King for good.

After all, there's more than one monster lurking in the shadows, and the only way for Spike and Twilight to set things right in their own timeline is to save the world in this one.

Book One of the Sombraverse saga.

Published 2016-04-25 04:20:01 UTC
Last updated 2016-04-25 04:20:01 UTC

The Board Laid Out

Author's Note

Welcome, dear readers!

Welcome to the Sombraverse! It's a continuing epic saga, which splits from the show at a crucial moment and drops our beloved heroes into a world different from their own.

While this is labeled book one, and is where the story truly begins, we recommend you start with the prequel to this tale:
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/303176/the-sombraverse-prelude
as this one picks up only seconds after that one ends.
a brief recap: We find Twilight Sparkle and Spike in an alternate Timeline where King Sombra terrorizes Equestria with the might of his Crystal Empire. The two of them have been trapped, as someone has made off with Starlight's spell. With this timeline's Applejack at their side, they find themselves in hot pursuit of a strange orange Pegasus, who appears to have the stolen spell...

The Board Laid Out

Time is a tricky little thing, isn’t it?

Everything we see, everything we know, how we understand our world—it all comes back to Time.

Ponies stumble through their lives, most of them never realizing that Time is more than the clock hanging on the wall. It’s more than something to set a schedule to. Have you ever thought about it? Maybe not—it’s not easy to grasp. Seems everypony is always running out of it. Time is more than a measurement. It’s history. The simple meaning of this is that without some sort of yardstick, it’s hard to keep it all in a straight line. After all, almost all living creatures perceive events as occurring one after another, not as a simultaneous happenstance. Without some concept of Time passing by, it’s impossible to put experiences and memories into something coherent.

One great pony philosopher proposed that Time only exists in the past. He argued that without any concept of the past one would never notice that time is passing, that whatever poor creature lacks some mechanism for memory would constantly stumble about, never aware of the change of things around it, nor anything that was permanent. A rather smart-alec student of this philosopher asked how we could know that things would happen at a certain point in the future. The student pre-empted his master’s first response: Yes, he understood we could never be sure that anything is ever going to happen, but that the teacher knew damn well what he meant. The philosopher replied that because we have observed the passage of Time we can think ahead. The philosopher suggested that when anypony thinks something is going to happen, they write a version of it in their head and estimate the Time it will take based on their past experience. The philosopher pointed out that this estimation is also in the past as a written story in the subject’s head, and therefore provokes certain emotions with each time the mind rereads this story. The student referred to this (rather crudely) as ‘circuitous bullshit.’ The philosopher, now hurt and very defensive, posed a question: how then can one see Time in the future? The only way to perceive Time is after it is already gone. We know it only through an absence. We know only how much Time has slipped through our fingers since we last went to check it. It is something we can only know by its loss. Why else would we say Time has passed? The student pondered this. He didn’t disagree with the last part at all, but insisted that it didn’t, in fact, justify all the flowery crap the philosopher had led up to it with.

The names of the philosopher and the student are irrelevant, because they are both completely wrong.

Time is like an infinite number of loops of tape, each running out every possible world. A being of unspeakable vastness and comprehension and scope sits in the dark empty spaces between the worlds and with her six eyes watches all of the endless worlds run their courses over and over again. She watches these simultaneously. Those who wander too far out into the void or those who somehow gain knowledge of her are conscripted by her, sent back into the endless tapes to fix them. There are forces that exist, that either came into being or have almost always been, that want all of reality to end, and those who serve this guardian of Time are the army fighting back a tide of un-existence that threatens to undo all possibility. Those who serve her also have a name. A few of them, even, have seen her open her seventh eye.

Ponies, like any other sentient being, spend a lot of time thinking about Time, and how they wish they had more of it. Plenty experience a moment when they lose their perception of Time, feel there is no time, and can only think about the present.

Twilight Sparkle, as she chased an orange Pegasus into a decaying version of the town she lived in, had one of those moments.

“Come back here! Who are you?” she shouted.

“Just drop the spell and this won’t get ugly,” yelled Applejack. The earth pony couldn’t run as fast as Twilight could fly, yet she was only a few steps behind the Alicorn the whole time.

The thief kept a good distance ahead of them. Neither mud nor wet pavement nor the driving rain seemed to cause her a moment’s trouble. She was impossibly fast, and deft of hoof.

On her hooves, Twilight heard at the back of her mind. She’s a Pegasus. Why isn’t she flying?

If you think about it, Twilight, a difference voice said in her head, definitely not her own, how exactly are you flying right now?

She never had time to answer either question. The pony with the spell leaned down as she was running. She leapt forward, leading heavy with her front shoulder—some part of this also pinged in Twilight’s mind as odd, ponies normally lead with their hooves or their head—and crashed through the window of one of the many abandoned buildings.

Applejack dug her hooves in and skidded to a halt on the wet pavement of the path. Twilight landed with a limp thud, barely able to stand. The abruptness of it knocked Spike from her back, and he hit his head on the pavement.

“Oh, no.” said Applejack.

It wasn’t any abandoned building that the mare leapt into. It was the Golden Oaks Library. The tree looked old and twisted and far thinner or taller than Twilight remembered it being, but nonetheless, it was still the library. Her library. Her home.

“Tirek never blew it up,” Twilight said. Tears started down her face.

“What do you mean?” asked Applejack.

“It’s still here, he never destroyed it.” Deep down, even with the effort her friends had gone to, part of her hated the castle. Part of her wanted the library back. Her whole life had changed there, gone from something stuffy and lonely to a kaleidoscope of friendships and memories. She still dreamed some nights of being there, sorting books, sweeping, not even doing anything of importance. Each time she woke up, she’d curse herself for taking it for granted, before the rest of her mind assured her that the castle could someday share as high a place in her heart, with time and the love of her friends. Now she was stuck in a world without those friends, without comfort, without any hope, and not only was her beloved sanctuary before her, but somewhere within it at this very moment was the way home.

Applejack saw what the new pony was about to do, and galloped ahead of her, catching Twilight in her hooves and restraining her. Twilight tried to squirm and pry her way out, but Applejack was too strong.

“What the in the hell has gotten into ya? Are you buckin’ crazy?”

“LET ME GO!”

“Not on your damned life.”

“LetmegoletmegoletmegoI’llhurty—”

Applejack pushed Twilight away from her. In one swift motion, she brought her foreleg up and back-hooved twilight across the muzzle. Twilight fell down on her rump and didn’t get back up. She sat stunned, still crying.

“Now what the hell are you thinkin’? You—”

“It’s my home—” Twilight wailed.

Applejack grabbed her and shook her. “—It’s not your home, you bucking fool! Not here it ain’t. You ain’t in your world, remember? Here? Now? That place is evil. On top of that, the bucker in there just stole a spell which you told me can travel through time, and you want us to trot right in there without any sort of plan? You got a death wish or somethin’?”

Applejack dropped her to the pavement again. Twilight didn’t respond. Her chest jerked painfully with each sob. The fleece lining in her collar was soaked from the rain, her hair too wet to shelter it any longer. It soaked into the shirt underneath and she started shivering. Applejack’s heart dropped into her stomach. She hugged the other mare, and spoke into her ear.

“I shouldn’t have done that. Sorry. I…I lost my temper. I really mean it. I’m sorry. But I’m tryin’ to help you, you understand?” Applejack felt the tears of the other pony running down her neck and shoulder, warmer water than the downpour now driving against them. She felt Twilight nod slowly. “Listen, I know what it’s like to be lost. I spent nearly a half a year livin’ in the wrong place before I realized what I really wanted was to go home. And there’s nothin’ more that I want for you than to get you back to yours. But this ain’t it. It may look like it, but it ain’t. Ever since Sunset Shimmer saved us from the Longest Night, there’s just been somethin’ wrong with that place. No one went in after that, but there were strange lights, things would be found around it that had gone missin’ years ago, and…well, ponies always said there was a ghost in there, and not a friendly one.”

The crying tapered off, but Twilight was still shivering. The skies got even darker, and lightning struck in the distance. Applejack could feel the other mare look up at the crooked tree behind them, and shudder. She let Twilight out of the hug, and Twilight wiped the tears and rain from her face.

“Besides, didn’t you say someone blew it up in your world?”

“…Yeah. Tirek did.”

Applejack gave her an odd look, but shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. We need to get out of this storm, and we need to get you that spell back. Much as I don’t like it, we do have to go in. I suggest we—where’s the little one?”

“Spike!”

The two ponies ran over to where he was getting up, wiping the mud and rain off of his face.

“Spike, are you alright?”

The dragon put a hand to his head. “Yeah, I’m—I think I hit my head, and—oh jeez.” He shut his eyes hard, then slowly opened them. He looked at the two of them, still dazed, and stopped when he saw the building behind them. “Okay, now I know I hit my head, because that looks like the library. That can’t be…no, wait. Time travel and stuff. Right. What a headache.” He winced. “Make that a double.”

Lightning struck a building on the far side of town. The three of them jumped.

“Alright, we need to get inside now. Twilight, you can use your horn to light up the place, right? It never got wired up when the rest of the town got on the grid. Keep your guard up, everypony.”

They ran to the door. Lightning struck one of the nearby buildings, blowing the chimney clean off of it. The rain came down sideways, driven like ice daggers by the wind. The roof of one of the rotting houses across the way caved in. Applejack turned her flank to the door.

“On three! One, TWO—”

When her hooves connected, the door didn’t swing. It blew off its hinges and clattered across the open hall of the library. She rushed in after the other two, but it was pitch black.

“Twilight, now would be a good time to—”

She looked over. The Alicorn’s horn was lit like a beacon.

The door slammed behind them. Applejack looked back at it, then at the space where it had just been on the floor. She moved a bit closer to Twilight.

Out of the black swept a cackling laughter. It sounded strange, like the echo came before the laugh instead of after it. The echo also tailed too long for the room they were in. Whatever Big Macintosh told her he saw when he broke in here on a bet, this was far worse.

The voice still had the reversed echo when it came again. “Hello, Twilight Sparkle. So good to finally meet you.”

“Who are you? What do you want?” Twilight forced her horn even brighter. The darkness receded enough to show they were still in the Library, but none of them could see the other side of the room.

“Who am I?” Still echoing, but the source sounded closer. A head floated out of the darkness. While none of them had gotten a good look at her face, none of them doubted it was thief who took the spell. Her coat was orange, and while her mane was a midnight blue there was a few streaks of lighter shades. It was no longer pinned up and lost some of its waviness in the rain, giving it a disheveled, moppish look. Her irises were blood red. Around her eye on one side was a splash of sharp black markings, twisting outward in a jagged fashion like a thicket of brambles. The other eye had similar markings, but looked blurry, and trails of black rolled off of her face and dripped into the darkness. Those did not disturb her as much as the grin. The smile on the pony’s face was a little too long, stretching back up towards the ears. There were a few too many teeth for a normal pony, and all of them were sharper than they should have been. The right side of her twitched, and there was a sound like a knife slashing fabric.

“No one.” She said from behind them. They looked just in time to see her twitch on the left side of her whole body. The slashing noise again.

“An intrusion.” She was far to their left. Twitch, rip.

“An interloper.” On the stairs to the right this time. Twitch, rip.

She stood before them, in the center of the library. The jumps happened faster than Twilight could register them. There wasn’t an afterimage, or any trick of perception—but it defied explanation. One moment the pony was before you, but other than the twitch and the slicing noise, they’d be somewhere else before the brain had time to perceive the change in location, much less process it. It was teleportation, but not in the way Twilight was capable of with magic. The best way she could think to describe was with film. It was as if someone had cut frames out of a shot in a motion picture, moving a thing or pony across the screen without showing how it happened. The metaphor fit nicely with the slicing sound.

Twilight understood now why the thief hadn’t been flying earlier. She looked to be a normal Pegasus (thin, and maybe a little taller than average) and her tail had the same sort of bushy, full waviness as her hair had before it was wet. Her cutie mark was a four question marks, arranged into a box.

Everything seemed in place until one arrived at her wings. Twilight recalled with a twinge of pain the time she’d found one of the medical textbooks in the Canterlot archives, and come across pictures of severe burn scars in it. The wings themselves were leathery and ragged, and some of the feathers on it seemed melted to both the bones and each other. Twilight thought for a second she could actually see where the bones of one of the wing joints had actually fused together. The wounds were by no means fresh. At a quick glance, the paper-bag brown texture and color of the skin blended pretty well with the color of the mare’s coat. Twilight felt a fleeting ounce of pity. The wings were not only unusable, but immobile and more than likely very painful.

The Pegasus started to speak again, but Twilight didn’t hear a word of it. Something caught her eye. The darkness had receded to where it should have been naturally, and something was watching out of the stairwell to the basement. Two small but brightly burning flames, the color of emeralds, were focused directly on her. The flames dimmed around the top, as if their unseen owner had furrowed its brow, then they disappeared down the steps.

Spike dragged her attention back to the thief as he shouted at her. “So you know her name. Big deal. I don’t care what you have to say, just give us back the spell! We need it to fix everything!”

The mare laughed again. The echoing effect was all but gone from her voice. She sliced into being in front of him, putting her muzzle in the dragon’s face. “Spikey Spikey Spikey, I can’t do that. You didn’t even say please.” She sliced back to the middle of the room.

“Just give it to us!”

“Sorry. There’s too much we have to accomplish first. All of us, even our dear—”

The pony looked confused. Twilight and spike followed the thief’s gaze, and only then realized Applejack was missing—

—She was on the stairs. She leapt with a war cry, one of her forelegs drawn back to the elbow. She brought it down with a bone-crushing punch right in the orange pony’s scarred wing. The Pegasus let out an ear-piercing shriek, but it no longer sounded any different than any other pony in a blinding amount of pain. She staggered a few steps, then turned to face her opponent, only to make solid contact with Applejack’s forehead. Part of the black streaks around the other mare’s eye remained on AJ’s face, and the pattern itself smudged further. Twilight didn’t interject with magic, partly because she was worried she might hit AJ, but also because the earth pony clearly had total run of the fight. The nameless pony looked dazed, but managed to dodge the next few blows Applejack threw at her. After another hit, the pony sliced through the air, but Applejack had been paying attention, and pinwheeled in the direction of the twitch the mare had before she moved. When the Pegasus lunged out of the air at her, she was ready. She dropped her hips and swung out her back leg, sweeping her foe off of their feet with their own momentum. The Pegasus twitched as she hit the floor, then reappeared crumpled on the steps to the balcony where Twilight’s bed once was. Twilight noticed the pony was bleeding a little from her nose and the corner of her eye, but neither spot had received a blow so far. Applejack swung herself around to upright again, then lunged for the steps. The other pony cut through the air twice again, then stopped, panting and wincing. The bleeding Twilight noticed before had increased, and Twilight guessed that it got worse with each ‘slice.’ The mare twitched one last time, and stood shaking on the balcony. She was bleeding from both nostrils now, and a rivulet of blood came out one of her ears.

“I’ve heard of you. Used to be there was a dark-haired stallion ‘round here. Name of Doc. He’d say ‘beware, beware, the Smiling Mare.’ Always wondered what he meant. Not anymore.”

“He was—always” —The Smiling Mare stopped panting to spit a mouthful of blood on the floor— “Bit of a—prick. Save his—friend’s life, and—probably his too—and that’s how he—whooh—girl, you hit like a triphammer…”

“Plenty more where that came from. Cough up their spell and I won’t have to show you.”

“Not—hah—Not happening.” But she staggered a bit. Spike got another moment of clarity like the others from earlier in the day for a brief second. The Smiling Mare didn’t disappear the same way this time. Instead of the twitch and the slicing noise, Spike became aware that the space behind the Pegasus on the balcony was folding backwards. It was like watching someone fold a blanket, but with the image of reality on it instead of some design. The mare stepped backwards into the fold, and as the edges lined up, it disappeared. To Twilight and Applejack, it only looked as if she walked backwards into thin air. Applejack galloped over to where she had been. There was nothing besides the spot of blood spat on the ground. Applejack felt something odd on her face, and wiped some of the black smudge off with a hoof. She held her hoof up close to her face and examined it. Twilight, worried that the substance might be some sort of trap or chemical, put a hoof up out and opened her mouth, but Applejack sniffed it, rolled her eyes and wiped it on a nearby curtain.

“It’s just stage makeup, no big deal.”

“What if it just looks like it, but it’s not? We should try—”

“No, it’s stage makeup, without a doubt.” She picked up the curtain, and tried to wipe the rest off of her face. “Believe me, hon, I know it better than anyone. Don’t ask.” She let the curtain fall limp again. “Just hope I didn’t get any of her blood on me. I like this shirt, and it’s a pain to get out—”

The seam started to open again. Spike felt himself shouting to Applejack in slow motion. Reality unwrinkled and the Smiling Mare had the minute hand of a giant clock in her hoof. Spike saw that it was actually a blade, sharpened down to an edge on both sides. Before his words finished leaving his mouth, the Smiling Mare had one hoof wrapped around Applejack to pin her and the other held the blade to AJ’s neck. Twilight never forgot the grin that the Pegasus had. It spread wider than should be possible, this time almost to her ears. Her teeth looked like a million stiletto knives, all sharp and glistening, all jammed into two jagged interlocking rows stretching a thousand miles.

“That’s enough from you. Nopony move.”

“Let her go!”

“I said nopony MOVE.” The grin dropped from her face, replaced by an ordinary tight-lipped scowl. She pulled Applejack closer, and placed the edge of the blade against Applejack’s skin. Applejack had been here many a time before, but this part she never got used to. That vague feeling of it scraping against her skin. The knowledge that something as natural as a sneeze would mean the end, and the seconds that passed like hours as at least one of the parties involved turned you from a living being to a barter chip.

“Don’t hurt her. What do you want from us?”

“Not to be interrupted. And no funny business with the magic, either. I didn’t feel the need to hurt any of you, and I’m a bit disappointed that you all didn’t feel the same.” In the Pegasus’s hooves, Applejack struggled in discomfort, but couldn’t move without the blade threatening to rip her open. She tried to mouth something to Twilight, but if any of it got across, the Alicorn showed no sign of it. “I hope this isn’t what it takes to get an audience from you on your own world line, Princess. Taking hostages isn’t my style. Yes, I know all about your little spat with Starlight Glimmer, and you know what? I don’t care. I’ve got a job to do.” The Smiling Mare turned her head and spat more blood. The flow had stopped from most of her face, but a steady stream still came out of one nostril. She raised her foreleg to wipe her snout. Applejack held her breath as the blade came closer to her chin, scrapping a tiny amount of fur off on the way up her neck. When the other pony brought her foreleg down again, the blade wasn’t touching her anymore. Time to move. “So here’s how this is going to work, Sparkler. You’re going to do what I tell you. Agree to it, and I’ll let Applejack go. I don’t want to make a widow out of Mrs. Lu—”

Before the Smiling Mare could finish her thought, Applejack jerked her head forward as far as she could, her throat pressing against the clockwork sword.

“I’ve had enough—”

She swung it back straight into the Smiling Mare’s snout. Twilight, even from the bottom of the steps, swore she heard teeth cracking.

“—of you psychotic bitches—”

As her captor dropped the sword, Applejack grabbed their hoof.

“—showin’ up out of nowhere—”

She dropped her shoulder, and at the same time, pulled hard on the other pony’s foreleg.

“—and knowin’ my name!”

She bucked her back legs with all her might. The other pony flipped into the air, sailing off the balcony and slamming into one of the bookshelves. They landed in a cloud of dust and falling literature. Applejack leapt down from the balcony. The Smiling Mare shook the books off, but couldn’t find her footing. She gave a frustrated roar as she lay there.

“YOU. You weren’t supposed to be here. You ruined everything!”

Applejack stood over her like a tower of stone. The crippled pony squealed as AJ pinned her face to the ground with a hoof.

“Don’t you ever, EVER dare to say my wife’s name again. You ain’t worthy enough.”

Twilight wanted to point out that the name hadn’t actually been said in full, but thought better of it. The Smiling Mare stared daggers at Applejack, but they met a concrete wall. She kept trying to pull the earth pony’s hoof off her face, but didn’t have the strength. Twilight and Spike stood next to Applejack. The mare snarled and whimpered, still struggling. Her teeth, when bared, were only a few too many, and only slightly sharp for a pony’s teeth, so that a quick glance might even make them for normal. Twilight put a hoof to Applejack’s shoulder, but the blond one brushed it off.

“No, she’s got a lot to answer for. Startin’ with, how did you know my wife’s name?”

“I’m an old friend of hers.”

“Bullshit.” Applejack put a bit more pressure on her hoof.

“Agh, not—not in this world line. In my own time. I can see things across world lines. Doesn’t change me when I cross them. Why—hnngh—they assigned me.”

Applejack looked at Twilight, who shrugged. AJ resumed the interrogation.

“How do I know you’re not workin’ for The Shadow King?”

“Just told you—hah—not from this time.” The pony on the floor nodded her head towards Twilight and Spike as much as she could, also motioning with her eyes. “In mine, my world, those two trounced him when he returned. My orders come from—whimper—something more powerful.”

She’s from our time. Have I seen her before? Maybe without the teeth and scars? All the little metaphorical gears in Twilight’s head started spinning the bigger ones, putting the intricate machine of her academic mind into motion. It churned out a list of possibilities, then sat idle, waiting for the input it needed to continue.

“I’ve got a few questions too,” Twilight said. “I thought you said you didn’t care about Starlight Glimmer. You came from my world, meaning you have to be able to either travel time yourself, or you followed me and Spike through. I think we both know which it is. If you’ve got a way to move through time, why do you need any spell, much less one only a high-level unicorn caster can even understand?”

Applejack grinned. “Don’t be shy now. Tell our friend here everythin’. Hold nothin’ back.”

The pinned pony prickled, but Applejack leaned ever so slightly forward, and with another whimper the gates opened up. “Ow, ow alright please—please—aah, okay I’ll talk—I can’t move back and forth in time. Only sideways. All of them, all the possibilities, they run next to each other. Train tracks—urgh—like train tracks. Once they split they never touch. Spell isn’t for me. He desires it. Some way to hold you—hnn—ransom here until the job is done. Plus wants to know how Starlight got around Grandmare paradox.”

Twilight’s mind jumped from first to third gear. In her head, little versions of her ran through the vast archives of her memory, pulling relevant files and dropping them into the firing network of neurons. It all clicked with the last two words from their prisoner’s mouth.

“Of course! That’s how she did it! I never would have thought of it!”

“Gramma what now?” Applejack raised an eyebrow.

“It’s a classic quandary of time travel study. Starswirl the Bearded even used it as the focus of the opening chapter for his book Anachronisms, Analogues, and Anomalies: A study of Chronomancy through the Ages. Think of it this way, Applejack. Let’s say you go back in time, and somehow stop your grandmother from ever giving birth to one of your parents. What happens then?”

Applejack scratched her head with the hoof not pinning down the defeated pony. “Well, if they ain’t born, I figure I ain’t born either. Makes sense…No, wait, then I can’t go back in time, can I? ‘Cause I don’t exist…Which would mea…oh.” she put her hoof down again. “I get it. Paradox.”

“Exactly. But from what we’ve just been told, we know that’s not the only way time travel works. I have a theory on how Starlight Glimmer cracked the puzzle that it seemed Starswirl couldn’t.”

After a couple of seconds of staring at each other, Applejack asked, “So, uh…you gonna tell us this theory of yours?”

“Well, not with her here.”

“…Oh. Right.”

“There’s more. Fill in what you can, and I may ask you to elaborate. Still, I can see you’re in a lot of pain, so you can just nod or shake your head for most of these,” Twilight said, and nodded to Applejack. Applejack took some of the pressure off of her hoof, so the pony on the ground could wiggle her head a little if need be.

Spike, who had wandered off and lit some of the other lanterns in the room, and closed the window shutters against the storm, came back to the group with a lantern in his hand and set it down. He’d done it without thinking, he realized, and simply fell into the routines and habits he kept when a version of this place had been his home. It wasn’t a conscious thing, no more than the pat on the head he received from Twilight once he set the light down in front of them was an action of her conscious mind. Especially not now. Spike couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t able to sense it, much less pick up on the visual cues. He knew when the great wheels of his academic guardian turned, the world around her was not part of it. Any reaction she gave other than to the task at hoof was autonomous, a command sent from that strange part of the brain which mimics the abilities of its neighboring clusters to have one breathe, blink, beat one’s heart, and uses this mimicry to carry out our longest habits and routines.

Spike realized as well that this was way, waaay above the way he usually thought, and also felt confused as to why his backpack straps felt tight when he’d loosened them not five minutes ago.

Twilight, as Spike so astutely observed, was not aware of any of this. The lantern just barely registered, but those automatic processes mentioned of late scooped the message out of the data chain, turned off the beacon spell in her horn, and went about giving Twilight the anxious need for pen and paper. Some of these signs, either slight physical ones too small to consciously understand, or perhaps telepathic through those channels that powerful minds and their faithful assistants seem to have, reached Spike. He didn’t keep his grip on the parchment or quill too firm. By the time the Alicorn’s magic brought them in front of her, ink filled the scroll with details of the conversation so far. When he began to pay attention to the conversation itself again, twilight had finally arrived at something other than the trivial.

“There’s two sets of hoofprints in the mud between the map and here. Fair to assume they are yours?”

The orange mare on the ground nodded.

“So you came back a second time, just so I would see you?”

Nod. The quill scratched and scratched without end, only breaking for brief moments whenever Twilight Sparkle looked at her for an answer.

“—and the other tracks. It came in between?”

Nod. “He. He’s a he.”

scritch, scritch. “The first time is when you actually grabbed the spell.”

Nod.

“Had to be. How, exactly?”

A raised eyebrow.

“I mean, how did you take the spell from us?”

A weak smile. “Pick-pocket. Slight-of-hand. Learned it from—” The mare on the ground shot a worried look up at Applejack, then looked back at twilight. Applejack pretended not to notice. “—from an old friend. The best.”

“Okay. You knew when we’d arrive here, but I’m guessing not exactly when?”

Shake of the head.

“You’re from our time. Where Spike and I came from.”

Nod.

“Ponyville? Cloudsdale? Canterlot?”

Shake of the head again. “H…Hollow Shades. Worked in Las Pegasus a while.”

Interesting. “But you know Ponyville well.”

Nod this time. A deep, rattling breath. “Living there. Was living. Before this assignment.”

“Not to spy on me? How did we never meet?”

A weak shrug. “Haven’t been here...there, I guess…very long. Maybe a few months.”

“You knew where the library used to be.”

Nod.

“You picked the library because you knew I’d charge in.”

Nod.

“Didn’t think I’d have a plan.”

Shake.

“You also didn’t expect Applejack to be with us.”

“You think?” said Spike.

“Hush, Spike! …Fine. Stupid question.” Train of thought interrupted, she glanced back over her notes. The quill stopped dead.

“He. You said it was a He.”

Nopony moved. Panic crept into the Smiling Mare’s face from every angle. Applejack cleared her throat. The trapped pony gave a slow nod.

“You saw it—him.”

Slow nod. A welling in the eyes.

“You know him.”

Nod. The makeup around her eyes ran with the tears.

“He did something there, too.”

Nod. A single whimper.

“Did he leave anything there?” Spike asked. “Like gum?”

Twilight turned to chastise him, but saw he was (Taller? Skinnier? The thoughts buried themselves in haste) serious, and to her surprise the mare nodded as if the question fit the pattern. The purple pony decided to press on.

“He knows about Spike and I.”

Nod. The storm still rampaging outside pushed against the old oak. The giant tree creaked and moaned and twisted, a speech it gave to many storms before and after. I will bend, but I will not break. The sounds threatened to drown out Twilight’s voice as she leaned in closer, notes cast aside. Thunder cracked, but the tree refused to be struck. A patch of ground outside blew apart as a bolt of lightning curled around the library but could not overcome some unseen barrier. The storm itself, being a phenomenon of weather and incapable of conscious thought, gave up, and found plenty of easier targets for its electric fury. Twilight let the lantern make her face a mask of shadows, as she approached the inevitable end.

“He knows about Starlight Glimmer. More than he’s told you.”

Nod.

“He knew the map was linked to the spell. Maybe not when we’d show up, but certainly where. All you had to do was wait.”

Nod. The whimpers were becoming sobs.

“He has some game he wants to play. Wants me in it, doesn’t he? He’s the reason you’re here. You’re afraid of him.”

Twilight was inches from the other mare’s face.

“He’s the one who wants to know how the spell works.”

Nod. Barely so. Twilight stood up, wings erect. She quenched the other lanterns with her horn, so the only light in the room was the lantern’s dim cast upon her face.

“When you were talking about something more powerful than Sombra, you meant him.”

The pony on the ground wailed. Twilight wrapped every lantern in reach with magic and lit them all at once. She whirled around and screamed.

“WHERE ARE YOU?”

The sound came before it happened, shaking everything. Outside, lightning found a ready target in the house closest to the library. The force of the strike surged through the waterlogged wood of the collapsing structure, and the whole building exploded. Broken glass, stone, and splintered wood peppered the outside of the old tree.

After that, nothing came. The tree continued creaking in the storm, but the room fell dead. The blast outside was nothing more than pure circumstance. Nothing. Nothing like the presence she’d felt before. Nothing of the pull she’d felt when she’d seen those two emerald suns glowing in the darkness. Twilight could feel her mane and tail blazing with fire. She didn’t care. She turned again and shouted at the curled-up mare on the floor.

“He’s not here. But he was. I saw him! Where did he go? WHERE?”

The pony on the floor kept crying.

“Who is he? What does he want with me? WHO IS HE?” Instead of thunder, the room shook with her voice.

“Twilight, stop. She ain’t gonna tell us, no matter how hard you push her. No need to break her if we won’t gain somethin’ from it.”

Applejack no longer had her hoof on the brittle thing on the floor, but that wasn’t what stopped Twilight. Spike was looking at her, too. Staring at her. Even with all the light in the room, she could see the reflections of the flames of her mane and tail in his eyes. He definitely was growing, no doubt about it, but at that moment, he seemed tiny. There was hurt there, and maybe a little bit of anger, but up and down the little dragon was forced rigid with something else. Something everypony in the room had felt in the past few hours one way or another.

Fear. Pure unbridled fear. He was absolutely terrified of her. She didn’t even realize she’d been floating until her hooves touched the floor again. She let her magic uncoil from the lamps, and some of them sputtered out. The brunt of it hit her shoulders, and she slumped under the weight. Long, long after, Twilight decided that was the point where the rift began. Not from the little annoyances, the stress, the arguments, the fight, or the split. The distance of what would feel like aeons began the moment her temper had exceeded her self-control.

“Forgive me.”

Now she felt tiny. The whole room looked like a court to her, with each book a pony in the gallery, looking down, waiting for the two judges before her to lay down their verdict. The sounds of the storm came back to her ears, letting the room sink to as close as silence as it could get during the onslaught. The thunder had moved on and the winds weren’t quite as strong, but the noise deafened her. No one spoke. Applejack looked at the mare on the floor, then to Twilight. Twilight shook her head.

“Well, then, I have one question left,” Applejack said. She turned to the pony on the floor. “What’s your name? Your real name?”

The pony looked up at her, but said nothing.

“Maybe I was unclear.” Applejack put her hoof on the mare’s face again, and leaned a bit of weight on it with each word. “I. Would. Appreciate. It. Ever. So. Much. If’n. You. Could. Tell. Us. Your. Name.”

The pony underhoof winced, but stared back at her. Twilight felt her stomach turn as Applejack lowered herself to eye level.

“Unless, of course, you want your tombstone to be blank—” Applejack shifted her weight forward. The mare cried out in pain, and pulled at the hoof pinning her jaw. Her back legs bucked, sending books flying across the room. She continued to squeal.

“I’ll be more than happy to oblige you.”

“P-Please, it hurts! I can’t—AAAH okay it hurts okay okay my name is please just stop I can’t the pain aah aa I can’t—”

“Applejack, stop!”

“Spit it out.”

“RIDLEY! My name is Ridley Box oh sweet Luna thank you ahh uh huh ah huhuhuh—”

Applejack put her hoof down on the ground. “Was that so h—”

Twilight smacked her hard across the jaw. Caught off guard, AJ staggered a bit, but threw up her foreleg and blocked the next blow before it landed.

“What the buck is wrong with you?”

Applejack said nothing. Twilight grabbed her collar and pulled her up to eye level.

“You tell me not to break her, calm me down, act all reasonable, then nearly break her jaw just to get her name? Where do you get off?”

“I wasn’t about to burn the place down looking for a ghost.”

“No, you’re just going to crucify a victim.”

“She held a buckin’ sword to my throat.”

“And you demonstrated on her a textbook case of ‘kicking somepony’s shit in.’ I think that breaks even.”

“She stole your spell.”

“She’s just a pawn.”

“She knows my wife’s name.”

Twilight jerked AJ closer, jamming their heads together. Her horn tangled up in the blonde mare’s hair.

“SO. BUCKING. WHAT? Did you miss the part where she’s working for some sort of bucking demon? The part where it knows my world as well as it knows yours? It somehow knew everything that was going to happen with Starlight, something that effectively happened a couple HOURS ago, and not only that, knew exactly where I’d end up. You’re losing the orchard for the trees. Is that a country metaphor that’ll make sense to you? You’re married to somepony, who is apparently SO important, the fabric of space-time is stuck with second chair? Forgive me if I’m a bit incredulous, will you?”

“Were you in the same place I was this whole time? You saw what she’s capable of, and you can’t tell me any part of that’s normal. Makeup, remember? Awful big production if it’s just to pickpocket some piece of paper. We ain’t gettin’ the whole picture. She said herself she was assigned because of her powers. This ain’t no deal with the devil. I ain’t about to let her walk out of here, not after everythin’ I just saw.”

“So are you going to kill her?”

“I ain’t lettin’ her leave.”

“But are you going to kill her?”

“Don’t think I have a choice.”

“YOU ALWAYS HAVE A CHOICE. ALWAYS. Just because it’s one you don’t like doesn’t mean it’s not an option. The Applejack I know—”

“—For buck’s sake! How many times is it gonna take to stick? I ain’t the Applejack you know, no matter how hard you believe.”

“Oh, you’re her in spades, but that’s not the point. The Applejack I know believes in doing the right thing, even when there’s no reward to it at all. I assumed you weren’t much different in that respect. Am I wrong?”

“No, but—”

Spike felt something hit his foot.

“Am I wrong, Miss Applejack of definitely not my world?”

Spike swallowed the paper. He felt it catch fire in the heat of his stomach, and the taste of smoke crept up the back of his throat.

“I said no, for pony’s sake—”

Spike inched around the collapsed mare on the floor, his back to the shelves. She wasn’t conscious, or at least he didn’t think she was.

Twilight pulled Applejack even closer, snout-to-snout, as close as possible. “The Sombra I remember fighting, remember studying and re-studying to help my brother and his wife guard the Crystal Empire, remember as the terrifying darkness that can lie in even a single pony’s heart, was one of the cruelest foes I’ve ever faced. I’m betting the Sombra of this world is even worse.”

Spike didn’t like touching them. He saw what Twilight had surmised earlier. The main joints of Ridley Box’s wings were fused solid, consigning them to nothing more than dead weight. One of the wing bones was cracked, with a bit of fresh blood trailing from it, but he couldn’t ignore the hoof-shaped indent the break partially outlined. The wings had to be at least somewhat devoid of feeling, he realized, because had Applejack’s blow landed on healthy bones and tissue, the mare would have been down for the count from the pain alone. The mare beneath him stirred and he jumped back to the wall. Her eyes were open. Still, her head lolled and she didn’t really react to anything around her.

“The hell does that have to do with lettin’ her live if’n she ain’t workin’ for him? The hell would it matter even if she did? She said herself she don’t take hostages.”

Spike picked up the lantern off the floor, so if there was another fight, it wouldn’t tip. He stood off to side of the fuming pair.

“All the more important then. You think ANY version of Sombra has ever given quarter? And if she’s as murderous as you think, it only goes further to prove my point.”

“Which is what?”

“You’re better than them. You have the capability of mercy. Sombra doesn’t. She probably does, but she’s in debt to something, and that makes her desperate. Reckless. You are neither of those things. Your fighting prowess is evident, now show me you’re more than just a barbarian. You’ve shown me compassion, now do the same for her. Sombra wouldn’t. She probably wouldn’t. Show me that you are better than them.” With that, Twilight shoved Applejack away. Her horn pulled some of Applejack’s hair out with it, setting one of the braids off-kilter. Applejack picked herself up and dusted off. She clenched her jaw, nostrils flaring, and stared at Twilight.

“MotherBUCKER!” She hauled off and bucked the nearest bookshelf, which splintered and collapsed, sending books flying and sliding across the floor. She pointed a hoof at Twilight. “You’re right. Buck you. Buck you, and buck her, but you’re right.” She kicked the pile of books on the floor, but her heart wasn’t in it, and a couple books flopped over.

Spike saw movement out of the corner of his eye.

“So what’s the plan, then? You do have a plan, right? Not just wingin’ it?”

“Yes, I do.”

Spike ran over and tugged Twilight’s wing. The Smiling Mare was trying to stand up. Her legs kept giving out from under her, but each time she was upright a little longer. Twilight ignored him.

“Well, I’d love to hear it.”

“I know. That’s the problem. Anything we say in here, she’s going to hear. If this library is identical to my own, and probably even if it isn’t, there’s a spell in one of these books for the isolation of speech.”

Spike tugged harder.

“So…earmuffs, like?”

Ridley Box was on her hooves now.

“Better. With earmuffs, either of us could figure out what the other was saying if we could read lips, right? The spell I’m thinking of cloaks lip movement as well. Now, I know spike’s not strong enough on his own to guard her, and I’m not even sure I am, so it’s not like we can just step out of the room in order for me to explain. The spell should be around here somewhere, and it wouldn’t be hard to find it while keeping an eye on her. Then I can explain what I ha—”

“TWILIGHT!” Spike shouted.

“What, Spike? I’m trying to exp—”

She cut herself short as she glanced back over her shoulder. The Pegasus stood, grinning a smile of a thousand switchblades. Her left side twitched. Slice. She stood in front of the stairs to the basement.

“I’m afraid not, Princess.” Blood began to trickle from her nostril again. “I’m not broken so easily” —her body betrayed her on this count, as her legs shook and she wouldn’t be upright much longer— “and I’m not going to let you take me hostage. If I may just say—”

Twilight didn’t give her a chance to. She lowered her horn and quickly fired a bolt of magic at the mare. Spike felt his senses sharpen up again, as the Pegasus created another bubble in front of her to reflect the shot. He could see the Pegasus grinning even more.

But Twilight hadn’t fired the shot directly at the other pony. As his eyes took in the light of the moving shot, he could see that its actual trajectory was wide left and down. When it reached the bubble in front of the Pegasus, the shot again hooked around the lower side, and drove straight into one of her deformed wings. Spike’s senses snapped back to normal as their opponent cried out in anger. She nearly toppled over, one hoof sliding out from under her. She couldn’t seem to figure out how to stand on it. She finally tucked it against herself.

“Well played. But this isn’t over. You haven’t seen the last of us!”

Spike felt the sharpening again, and behind the mare it looked like someone had sliced a tear in a movie screen. He realized this was reality, and beyond it lay somewhere that looked vaguely familiar. The gap started to close as soon as it was made, and Ridley Box turned. She half-dove, half- collapsed through the wound, and it healed up without a trace.

The heightened state was gone, but Spike found himself aware of another sensation that hadn’t been there before. Twilight’s wing lay across his shoulders, where it had drawn him in tight. Another reflexive move, but from a far deeper part of her mind than the ones before, he knew.

She let him go. “Yes! Exactly as planned!”

Spike swore he could hear Applejack’s teeth cracking under the pressure. She didn’t open her jaw when she spoke. “You were plannin’…to let…her go?”

Twilight beamed. “I knew I could count on you, Spike!” She scooped him up in a hug.

Confusion tried to find a way into Applejack’s expression, but found itself locked out by pure rage. “You talked me out of puttin’ her out to pasture just to let her off scot-free?”

Twilight kept grinning as she set Spike down a second time. “Yep!”

“If’n you could try to not be so damn chipper, when you explain to me what feather-brained plan involves lettin’ that devil loose to wreak havoc on who knows what else, that’d be much appreciated.”

“But Applejack, there is nowhere in the whole of Equestria or the world she can go where we can’t find her now at a moment’s notice.”

Confusion got the greenlight and in a single swoop knocked all the anger clean off Applejack’s snout. “Wait, what now?”

Twilight looked at Spike. “Do you want to explain, or shall I?”

They explained it like this: as Applejack had begun to interrogate Ridley Box for her name, Twilight had begun putting together a charm to use as a tracking device, centered on a little piece of polished stone found on a nearby shelf. When AJ’s questioning had taken a turn for the worse, she quickly scribbled down some instructions on a piece of parchment, wrapped them around the stone, and dropped them to the ground. While she fought with the alternate version of her friend, she kicked the stone over to Spike. The instructions were to place the stone somewhere on the Smiling Mare’s body, somewhere unlikely to be noticed, but also secure enough it wouldn’t shake loose and fall off. Twilight emphasized that nowhere in the instructions did it say it was necessary to destroy them, much less eat them, but Spike shrugged and pointed out it was a fair assumption that if they weren’t, his target might have seen them and the whole thing would be compromised. Twilight pointed out that he had pockets in his newly-gifted jacket, to which Spike responded that he’d forgotten he was even wearing it, much less that it had pockets. Twilight commented that it was still gross, and Spike granted that paper soaked in ink did taste pretty awful. Twilight wondered if the note went anywhere, but Spike assured her that wasn’t how it worked.

Applejack cleared her throat. Then cleared it again with vigor.

Right. Sorry. Either way, while Twilight and Applejack were discussing the morality of killing, Spike worked his way around to the pony on the ground and worked the stone in underneath the Pegasus’ dead wing. He was certain she wouldn’t notice it, as she didn’t make any notice of it after standing up or coming around, and doubted that the mare would be conscious for too much longer anyway.

The reason Twilight had to fire a spell at her came from the rate at which Applejack had turned up the heat at the end of the interrogation. Twilight had worried that if she didn’t intervene, AJ might finish the job before the charm was finished. She left it unresolved but primed so all it would need is a charge of raw magic to finish it. She knew from the moment Spike had tugged her wing that the mare was going to get away. It had been difficult to ignore him, but she knew if they gave their foe a chance to monologue on their way out, she’d have the window she need to charge the charm. The spell had definitely hit close enough to accomplish the goal, but it would be a few hours before it was 100% accurate, as the method she’d used to ‘prime’ the stone actually took longer to resolve than the usual method. Once enough time had passed, not only would all of them be able to sense when she was within a few miles, Twilight would be able to pinpoint her exact location anywhere in the world. Since the plan went off without a hitch, it was perfectly alright to let their assailant think she had the upper hand for now.

Applejack’s face was a mask of concentration the whole time. It didn’t change when she began to ask questions.

“Guess there’s a few points I’m still a mite bit lost on. How did you know she’d get back up?”

“Did you notice that every time she did that jumping-slicing thing, she bled a little bit more? Yet somehow she was able to come back, and hold a sword up to the throat of you, of all ponies. You headbutted her, then tossed her across the room and down a floor, into a bookcase that broke and dumped most of its books on top of her, and yet she was still able to speak! How many ponies would even be able to fight back after that first hit you landed on her? I’d still say you are the stronger pony, but she wasn’t an amateur, either. We needed some sort of failsafe, just in case she got the drop on us, or…well, did exactly what she did just now. I wasn’t betting on her getting up so quickly, mind you, but…you get what I mean.”

“I do. Next question. How’d you manage to hit her with the spell? Thought for sure you shot wide.”

“I did. That part was a complete guess. Do you remember right before we started chasing her?”

“Sure do. You missed.”

“I didn’t. It was dead on. I swear on the sun and the moon, I couldn’t have possibly been more accurate. Something deflected it right before it should have hit her.”

The corner of Applejack’s mouth crept up in appreciation. “So you compensated.”

“There was no way to be sure it’d deflect the same way, but it was my only chance. Guess I lucked out.”

Some thought pawed at the back of Spike’s mind.

“Are you sure she won’t get suspicious, and check her wing? Seems to me like a bit too risky to gamble on.”

Spike butted in. “If anything, it looked like Twilight was just trying to stop her. Sure, so she figured out how to hit her. Twilight’s smart, and the other pony knows that. She didn’t stop to check after you schooled her, and besides—you saw how she left, she barely made it through! Wherever that hole spits out, she’s probably passed out by this point anyway.”

Twilight and Applejack turned to him with blank stares.

“What hole?”

The thought that had pawed before now pounced on his brain like it was a ball of yarn. He assumed that the other two had seen everything he had every time his senses sharpened up, but their expressions made clear that he was wrong. Was it the stone he’d swallowed before? Had to be. Somehow it did something to him, and now he could see things that even a powerful pony like Twilight didn’t notice at all. To make it all worse, his gut told him to lie. To not make a scene of it. He shouldn’t tell them about the stone, or the fact he’d been able to perceive events at speeds only Rainbow Dash had comprehension of. If he told Twilight, she might make him try to cough up the stone or give up the enhancements to his perception, and every inch of his scaly little body rejected it. He felt himself open his mouth, felt it lie, heard it tell them that hell, it was just a figure of speech, she was totally bleeding at the end and couldn’t stand up straight. That’s what he’d meant. It felt weird, like a scale pulled out a little too soon. The two mares stared at him until Applejack shrugged and said fair enough, but Twilight stared at him a bit longer before turning to the other pony.

“Anything else, Applejack?”

“If you hadn’t been plannin’ to plant that charm under her wing, would you still have let her go?”

“Yes.”

Applejack frowned. “Any reason as to why?”

“Do you want the tactical one, or the real one?”

“Both.”

“The tactical reason is so that we know our enemy. She’s not the one behind all this. I think it’s fair to say we agree on that?” Applejack nodded and let her continue. “She was assigned—or, I suspect, coerced—into dealing with us. Whoever’s behind this is not stupid, and beyond that, I’m guessing a mastermind. This way we know who we’re dealing with. If she doesn’t make it back, we have no idea what he might send after us next. He’s not going to dispose of her, like some supervillain in a comic book. She knows about the difference between the worlds. She’s from ours. Too useful a resource to squander while she’s alive. If she never made it back, she’s either dead or compromised, so he’ll send in who-knows-what to finish what she started. The charm itself is so low-key, he’s not going to find it unless he’s actively looking for it. Far as he knows right now, there was a fight, but otherwise chalk the round up to him.”

Applejack nodded. “And the real reason?”

“I meant every damn word I said before. Every single one. We always have a choice. It’s what sets us apart from monsters like Sombra. I would have told her the same things I told you.”

“Not everypony can be redeemed, hon.”

“Not everypony is damned, either.”

“Never said they were.”

“I refuse to become so jaded.”

“Jaded? I’m trying to be realistic.”

The Alicorn shook her head at that. “Ponies always say that. Being realistic. They make it sound like everything is unchangeable. I don’t understand why. ‘Reality’ is what we make it.”

There was a ripping sound, then breaking glass. Spike swore. The two mares turned to look at him.

Nopony could deny at this point that Spike was getting taller. His spines had grown as well, and while they hadn’t torn through the leather jacket gifted to him, they had in combination with his growing frame stretched beyond the limits of his small backpack and ripped the straps clear off. Spike pulled the wrecked binoculars from the bag.

“Son of a bitch.”

“Spike! Language!”

“What? You swore at Applejack a ton, why can’t I swear?”

“That’s…ugh, that’s not the point.” She put a hoof to her head.

“That’s so unfair.”

“It’s not appropriate for somepony your age.”

“I’ve heard the Cutie Mark Crusaders say far worse at the clubhouse.”

Twilight made a mental note to have a word with the three of them when they got back to their own timeline. “That doesn’t make it okay for you to do it.” She looked to Applejack for support.

Applejack’s face was blank. She shrugged. “I got no opinion on it.”

It hit Twilight and Spike at about the same time, and they looked at each other. Both saw an uneasy face on the other. It didn’t need saying. Neither of them knew if Applebloom was alive or…not, in this version of the world, but one thing was clear.

The Cutie Mark Crusaders never got together in this world. Spike felt the source of energy in his stomach slow just a little. Twilight felt another small part of her heart go dark.

Applejack looked from one to the other. “What? Somethin’ I said?”

Twilight sighed. “It’s what you didn’t say that scares me.”

Applejack raised an eyebrow. “Not sure I follow there, hon.”

“It—” It hurts too much to explain “—nothing. Never mind. Spike, you’re right. I’m being a hypocrite. Still, try not to do it all the time, alright? It takes getting used to, and besides, it’s better to save it for when you need it, like—”

“Like when something special breaks?” he held up the binoculars. “These were a gift, Twilight. Pony Joe gave them to me, remember? It was right after you started the advanced astronomy course. We started stopping by his place because you needed the coffee to stay up, and we’d end up hanging out there half the night anyway. Remember?”

She did. She sat down on her flank, as the memories came back and warm recollection wrapped her like a quilt. “I do remember!” she laughed. “I don’t think I would have ever gotten away with it, if I weren’t such a star student, no pun intended.” She snorted. “Okay, maybe a little intended.”

“It was this coffee shop in the heart of Canterlot,” Spike explained to Applejack. “We ended up in there almost every night. He’d give us free donuts, and we ate most of them, but sometimes if there were some really stale ones or we weren’t hungry, we’d take what we could find around the place and build stuff. So one day, we were goofing around, and we decided we were going to be like Daring Do, just like from the books, and have an adventure right there in the coffee shop.”

“Spike and I were obviously veteran explorers at this point, master of everything from the door to the cash register, but that day we set out for our most daring escapade yet—the back room. No adventurer worth their salt would dare go forth without gear. I made myself a compass out of toothpicks, the bottom of a Styrofoam cup, and a pen. Spike took two Styrofoam cups, stuck them together next to each other, poked out the bottoms, and made a spiffy pair of binoculars. The finishing touch was two old donuts, one jammed on each cup like they were lenses. Joe was busy with a very mean customer—literally, I mean, the stallion didn’t have one nice thing to say—so we slipped back there while he wasn’t looking, expecting to find all sorts of secrets. I think it goes without saying we were disappointed that it was all just his desk, some boxes and a broom and the like. Still, we thought we made it back there undetected. Wrong, of course. Joe came in, and he looked very angry with us. He picked us both up—he’s a unicorn, don’t know if I mentioned that—and floated us both over the counter. He dropped us on a seat.”

Spike shook his head, smiling. “He looked so pissed—sorry, peeved—I nearly wet myself. He sighed, and said ‘I’m very disappointed in you two.’ He went back into the other room. Twilight was shaking, I remember. You told me later that you thought he was going to call Celestia herself. Thought you were in such deep trouble. We were still really young then. Anyways, Joe came back out carrying something, but we couldn’t see what it was. Then he put on this angry look, and said ‘What were you thinking?’ Twilight looked like she was gonna cry—”

“I’m pretty sure I did cry.”

“—but before we could say anything he said, ‘Adventurers like you should be using only the best equipment available. Never go anywhere without it. You need the best money can buy, like these.’ And he gives me these. He must have heard us when we were making the stuff out of the cups and donuts and all that. He insisted that we keep them, and I’ve had them ever since.”

Twilight picked up the broken pair with her magic. She ran a hoof over the worn metal of the frame. She looked up. “Not to worry, Spike. The lenses may be cracked, but that’s not hard to fix. When we get back to our world I’ll make sure we get lenses for them. The best money can buy. And maybe we should pay Joe a visit.” Twilight realized someone was crying. She looked over at Applejack. “What’s wrong, Applejack?”

“I’m sorry, it’s just…sniff…well, it’s a hell of a thing, you know? Seein’ you two so close. My little sister, she went with all the other colts and fillies to Canterlot. No reason not to, but I ain’t heard from her since, really. Big Macintosh is here and when my wife’s not away on…well, I love them both, but they’re all I’ve got now, y’know? Ever since Granny died, I guess…I guess I’ve been distant from Mac, just afraid. Afraid I’ll lose him like everypony else. My stars and moons, too. If I ever…if she…if my darlin’ died I…”

Twilight and Spike hugged her. Outside, the wind and rain pounded on. Applejack cried, and for a little while Twilight cried with her. After some time had passed Applejack finally broke the embrace, and wiped her nose.

“You two must be somethin’ special, you know that? Lookit me, cryin’ in front of perfect strangers like that.”

“You’re not strangers to us,” said Spike. “I know that sounds kinda weird, but…”

“No, I get it, hon. I do. Even then…well…I don’t know how to put it. Maybe it don’t need puttin’ into words.” She scratched the back of her head. “And, um…sorry ‘bout callin’ you a psycho bitch earlier. Heat of the moment sorta thing, you know. Meant nothing by it.”

“It’s fine,” Twilight said.

“It was bad-ass,” said spike.

Twilight looked at him, but shrugged it off this time. “…Yeah, It was, actually. So, what now?”

“You’re usually the one with the plan,” said Applejack.

“Well, Spike and I need a place to stay for now, and based on what I’ve seen in Ponyville today, I don’t think being alone is too safe. Would it be alright if we stayed at Sweet Apple Acres tonight?”

“Not happenin’.”

“What? Why?”

Applejack walked over to the nearest window, opened the shutter, looked back at Twilight, and gesture out the window. Lightning struck a nearby house, and the three of them jumped. Applejack slammed the shutter and latched it.

“Think we’re bunkin’ in for the night. Just hope Mac made it back to the farmhouse before the worst of it set in. I’ll just ring him up on the…shit.”

“Do what on the WHAT now?”

Applejack raised an eyebrow. “They don’t have telephones in your world?”

Twilight stared at her. “What’s a telephone?”

Applejack sighed. “I’ll take that as a no. See, a telephone is a device that uses electricity to send your voice a long ways away. Some genius pony in Canterlot figured it out, and next thing you know the whole of Equestria’s rigged with ‘em. Any town that didn’t jump on the bandwagon sure as hell got dragged on once the War started. Ever heard of Diamond Dogs?”

“We’ve had a couple run-ins.”

“Well, that genius, she apparently had some run-in with ‘em herself in her youth. Guess they owed her one or somethin’. Anyways, the first telephone lines ran overground, between these poles, right? Except that didn’t work. Real easy for somepony or something to knock them over. So that pony, she cuts a deal with the Dogs, or calls in a favor or whatever, and those Dogs spread out all over Equestria, layin’ small tunnels so that the lines could be UNDER the ground, deep enough that they don’t get touched. And now that’s all they do, run around down there, fixin’ things, improvin’ them, makin’ sure the Shadow King and his spies don’t find a way in. They still don’t like Equestria as a country, I guess, ‘cause they won’t fight with us at the front lines. That should bother me, but…hell, they work hard to keep us all connected, and the way they swear at Sombra would make a sewer pipe blush. They ain’t all that bad. Anyhow, long story short—”

“Too late,” said Spike.

“—this place didn’t get strung up when electricity started goin’ everywhere too, which is about when Ponyville got phone lines. Farm’s got one, but doesn’t do us any good now.”

Twilight beamed. “That’s fascinating!”

Spike rolled his eyes. “Yeah, of course.”

“Oh, hush. So who was this pony? She sounds like someone I’d like to meet.”

“You and me both, but that’s the thing. No one knows who she is. She gave the whole thing over to the government to run, then disappeared. Said we should remember her not by her name, but her contribution. Rumor has it not even the princesses know who she really is.”

Twilight desperately wanted to ask more. This world was far, far ahead of where her own time was in terms of technology, even if in other aspects it was horribly lacking. Electricity was apparently everywhere, and—

She covered her mouth with a hoof as she yawned. Well, maybe it could all wait until tomorrow. Spike was fighting to keep his eyelids open.

“I’ve still got a lot I want to ask you, Applejack, but I think we should hit the hay for the night.”

“Thinkin’ -yawn- the same, but there’s one last thing we should do.”

“Which is?”

“Check the other rooms. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t see her holdin’ the spell when she left. Plus—” she looked around the room “—this place gives me the creeps.”

An hour of searching turned up nothing. At least, nothing related to their assailant or the missing spell. The layout was almost exactly the same as Twilight remembered it, with a few exceptions. Most of them were minor—a window a hoof or two to the left, shelves slightly higher or lower, books with the same name, but different colored covers—but the strangest change was the new room on the first floor. There wasn’t anything odd about the room itself. It was guest bedroom, exactly as plain as one would expect. The weird part was its existence in the first place. Twilight couldn’t quite work it out. From the outside, the old oak had seemed if anything slimmer than its counterpart. The main hall and the kitchen were the exact same size as she remembered. Pacing around from the inside, she couldn’t work out how it fit.

The other odd change was despite Applejack’s claims that it had been abandoned for years, it was as if someone had left it only hours before. The kitchen was stocked with canned food, all of it far from the expiration date. There was a wardrobe upstairs, full of clothes (even more unsettling, clothes that seemed to be of her size and preference) and the bed was made up with fresh linens. All the candles and lanterns were full and untouched, save the ones that had already been used that night. It almost felt like everything had been arranged in preparation for her arrival.

Twilight did not like that feeling. Not one bit.

There was something else, too, something that her horn was trying to tell her, some pull from somewhere down the stairs to the basement. She couldn’t put her hoof on it. Every time she looked at the stairs themselves, the feeling faded away, and she couldn’t recall it until a couple of minutes later when it snuck back up her horn again. Eventually, she ignored it altogether. The three of them met again in the center of the main room.

“Well, it’s not here, I guess,” Twilight said. “She must have taken it with her somehow. Spike, you found somewhere to sleep? Good. And Applejack, how about y—”

Twilight’s voice caught in her throat. Applejack had pulled out the braids in her mane and tail. Maybe it was the light, but Twilight found herself taken for a moment in how good-looking her old friend was with her hair down. Something stirred somewhere in her, not tethered to anything, but not foreign either. Twilight wondered how many other mares she hadn’t noticed like this. Stallions, too. Had there be—

“Uh, Twilight?”

“What?”

“You okay?”

“Huh?”

“You’re starin’ at me, hon.”

“Am I?”

“You tell me. You were sayin’ somethin’?”

“Right…Sorry. Tired. Think I zoned out. I was about to say, um…there’s a bed upstairs the two of us could share, if that’s alright with you.”

“I think I’ll be alright in the guest room down here, thanks. I am married, remember.”

“Right. Didn’t mean anything by it. You’re not married in my world, so—I mean, it’s not weird there because we’re friends there. Also, that bedroom’s…new? Is that the way to put it? It…it isn’t there in my time.”

“Don’t worry about it. I know you ain’t used to it, but I wouldn’t feel right undressin’ before a stranger, and all.”

Something hit the back of Twilight’s mind like a thrown dagger, but it didn’t interrupt the thoughts she was having about the sudden new feeling in her gut.

“I…I get it. Well, I guess this is goodnight then! Goodnight, Applejack! Ha ha! Ha…”

The earth pony paused at the door to the guest room. “Goodnight, Twilight. Take care now.”

The door shut, and Twilight fell to the floor. She put her hooves over her face. “Ohmygoshwhyyyyyyy.” It came out as a sigh.

“What was that all about?” asked Spike.

“I wish I knew.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

“You sure? I know what it’s like to have feelings for somepo—”

Twilight grabbed him and slammed a hoof over his mouth. “SSSSH.”

Spike gave a muffled reply. Twilight loosened her grip a little, but kept his mouth covered.

“Not where she can hear us, alright?” She whispered. She flew
(which lodged another dagger-thought in her brain)
the two of them up to the second floor, and she set Spike down across from her.

“So, how long have you had the hots for Applejack?” Spike asked.

“Oh, I’d say a grand total of about the two awkward minutes it took to get us here.”

“You sure?”

She put a hoof to her face and shut her eyes. “Listen, it’s a little too grown-up to talk about with you, okay?”

“I’ve done plenty of growing up since I got here, believe me.”

“Not the kind I mean.”

“OH. That kind. Again, CMC beat you to the punch on that one. Sort of.”

Twilight put her hoof down. “Wait, really?”

“I said sort of! Nothing really bad, but…They talk about all sorts of stuff when they hang out. Sometimes they just forget I’m there if I’m reading a comic book or something. Believe me, some of it I wish I hadn’t heard. You could just be…I dunno, vague about it.”

Twilight was going to have quite a few words with Cheerilee when she got back to her own time. And Applejack. And Rarity’s parents.

“Alright, fine. You have feelings for Rarity, right? Like, real feelings?”

“I—” Twilight shot him a narrow look. “Yes, yes I do.”

“That’s the difference. I don’t have real feelings for her, not like that, but I’m attracted to her. Physically. That’s not something I’ve felt for a mare before. But, I don’t know, knowing she has a wife, it…it’s weird. It’s like I never even considered that, but now that I see it, I get it. I’m not making any sense, am I?”

She expected him to look disgusted, or alarmed, or confused, but instead he was already pulling the sheets back on his makeshift bed. He hadn’t grown any since they’d come upstairs.

“You probably are. I think I’m just too tired. Need to go to bed.”

“Spike?”

“Hmm?”

“What if…what if this place is changing us? I mean, it’s definitely changing you, but I think it’s getting to me, too. Ridley Box said something about being able to keep her memories, didn’t she? What if we forget we’re from our world? What if we just become part of this one? If we go to sleep, maybe we’ll lose it all, and—”

“c’mon, Twi. You’re panicking.” Spike didn’t bother to take the jacket off. He crawled into the covers, and pulled them over himself. “Besides, she said she goes sideways. We didn’t go sideways, we went back and forward again. Totally different. We can figure it out in the morning.”

She sighed. “You’re right. I need rest. Goodnight Spike.”

“Goodnmmphmphmhm.”

She started to undress. She still wasn’t quite used to the feeling of wearing clothing all the time. She loved the jacket though. It was warm, it had done an excellent job of keeping her dry, and beyond all that, she loved the way she looked in it, and how good it felt to wear. The only catch was her wings. She had removed both of her forelegs with ease, but she couldn’t quite figure out how to get her wings back out through the holes. How did she do it when sh—

No. Oh no.

She’s a Pegasus. Why isn’t she flying?

The thoughts that had lodged themselves in her subconscious like throwing knives came rushing to the surface.

If you think about flying, Twilight—

How did she miss this?

—how are you doing it?

She writhed her way out of the garment and flipped it over. She couldn’t remember how she’d put her wings through when she put it on, because she wasn’t able to. When Applejack gave her the coat, there hadn’t been holes for wings in it. In fact, Applejack told her to hide her wings. If that was the case, why hadn’t Applejack said anything when she took off before, or when Twilight rose into the air, fiery and wings spread, an avatar of wrath?

She trotted over next to Spike. Surely, he noticed, but didn’t realize it. She picked up her hoof to shake him, then thought better of it. No. He’s out cold. He’d have trouble remembering his name, much less a couple hours ago, if he woke up from this deep a sleep. It could wait until morning. She trotted back over to her bed.

The coat had changed again.

Now, the holes for the wings were different. They still cut close to the wing at the base, but little alterations made it so that it would be much simpler to put on.

In fact, they were the exact changes Twilight would have made herself, or at least requested of whoever she would have found to alter it.

“You said yourself, Twilight. Reality is what we make it.”

“Spike, was that—” she whipped around. He was still sound asleep. A little puddle of drool had formed around his mouth on the pillow. “—you?”

Silence. Had she willed the coat to fit her the way she wanted? Or was the world making her more comfortable, inviting her in? She thought back across everything that happened. No way to tell. Could be that both of those theories were wrong.

Something else, though. What was that weird tugging feeling on her horn? She checked Spike one last time, then followed it down the stairs.

It came to her as she stood in the main hall. She’d realized it before, but it had slipped away from her. Now, with nothing but the dull sounds of the storm outside to distract her, she caught the feeling before it could slip away again. Nopony searched the basement. Not Spike, Not Applejack, Not her. Each of them came close at some point, but got distracted, or passed it up in favor of some other unsearched spot. She trotted to the table where she’d left her notes from the day. She pulled out the notes on the tracking charm. No doubt about it. They were all supposed to know when the charm was active within a 3-mile radius, especially Twilight. She glanced back at the stairs. She couldn’t shake what she’d seen earlier, or what had seen her. She had no choice.

Twilight stood at the top of the stairs to the basement, and took a deep breath. Somehow, the charm activated only minutes after the Smiling Mare made her escape. Ridley Box never truly left the library. All this time, the charm pulled them towards the basement, but something stopped them from realizing it and instead sent them on little goose chases among the shelves. Now, as she stood alone, those urges to ignore it were there, but not overwhelming. She thought about waking the others. No, she decided. No time. There’s a chance stopping now will make it undetectable again. If all else failed, she could scream, and the others would be with her at a moment’s notice. It’s now or never.

Twilight took another deep breath of air and started down the steps to the basement.

The Pieces Placed

Memory, like time, is tricky.

Not in the same way, mind you—but still tricky. Everypony knows almost all of what they know from memory. There’s a part of the mind that’s instinct, of course, but even some of those are built from memories repeated long enough to establish a pattern. The problem with all of this is that memories aren’t fixed. A pony can lose memories, for example. Ones made under the influence of cider are often blurred or disconnected from the reality they happened in, perceived through an altered state. Yet even accounting for those things, the average pony thinks that memories are almost always accurate. The question is not if the memory itself is unreliable, but instead the mind is reliable in retrieving a memory. It’s not wrong, per se—even if a memory is established to be different than the reality of the event, it may be considered that the memory is instead a perfect recollection of its owner’s perception of the event.

This does not make it any less terrifying when an established memory turns out to be wrong. Not something trivial, like grabbing the wrong loaf of bread at the store, or being convinced there should still be half a cookie left in your hoof when you have in fact eaten it faster than the mind can process memory. It’s when a fundamental or very large memory turns out to be false. Have you ever felt it? It’s like the floor disintegrating from beneath your feet. Imagine walking out on a high branch, convinced that it is sturdy. Halfway out you hear it snapping. It is one thing to describe, but another to feel.

Stranger still it might be to remember someone who, as it turns out, doesn’t exist at all and never did.

Twilight didn’t have that particular problem, fortunately for her, but the nature of memory was very much on her mind. She stood at the first landing of the steps down into the floors beneath the library. Crossing the threshold of the steps themselves had broken the spell of disinterest in the basement. She remembered now what her subconscious had been trying to tell her for hours, how at the last second when any of the three of them tried to descend the steps found they had forgotten something somewhere else or were distracted by something petty. She couldn’t recall any of the reasons she herself decided not to investigate. She reasoned that this was because there were none, and that even if there had been, they wouldn’t have by any means justified such a glaring lapse by all three members of their little search party. She also remembered the steps to the basement being different, but that was no result of any external force. She never looked at when the library had been built in her own time, nor when if ever there had been additions or renovations. The stairs before her ended another set down from where she was. They led into an open hallway with doors instead of the one door that led to what she had used as lab space. In that regard, it was one of the few things she preferred about the castle. The size of it left more space that could be delegated to research, and as a result her lab was actually organized with coherence. The only differences between this world and her own should be after when Rainbow Dash’s first Sonic Rainboom happened, but given that she didn’t know the history of her own library in that regard, the difference was not impossible. It could very well be that the basement was modified before she ever arrived in Ponyville, or that for some reason it was changed in this time. The same might apply to the guest room as well.

That was only a temporary distraction from the bigger problems at hoof. Why was the house stocked to her liking, if, in fact, Applejack was right about it being unoccupied for years? Where had that voice come from earlier, if not Spike? Was it the same voice she’d heard in her head, trying to point out to her that her coat had changed back when they were chasing Ridley Box? Who was really pulling the strings behind Ridley? Why did she suddenly find one of her best friends incredibly attractive? What was going on with Spike, anyway? Was it this world changing them both, or the other way around, or maybe both possibilities at the same time? Was that a light on in one of the rooms at the end of the hall? When was the last time anypony had dusted around h—

She sneezed hard.

Oh no.

She extinguished what little light came from her horn, put a hoof over her muzzle, and pulled herself as much as she could against the wall. She tried to move as little as possible and hoped that the blouse she was still wearing didn’t stand out too much against the wall.

The door at the end of the hall opened. Ridley Box poked her head out. Her mane was wrapped up in a towel, and the makeup she had on earlier had smudged all over her face. Steam billowed out from the room. A shower. She’d been down here long enough and felt safe enough to take a shower.

“Boss, was that you?” The orange mare whispered.

Twilight felt her heart stop when she heard footsteps in the main hall of the library coming towards the steps. A large upright figure came to the top of the stairs, a stack of books under each arm. She hoped they were arms. Other than the silhouette of the thing, it was too dark to see. It turned around and put one of the piles on a table, before coming back and starting down the steps. Twilight didn’t move. Whatever it was didn’t have a light, but moved as if it saw everything. There was no way it didn’t see her standing there. She couldn’t be squarer in its line of sight. It stopped inches from her. She could feel heat rolling off of it in waves.

It spoke.

“Did you say something, Ridley?”

“Yeah. Did you sneeze just now?”

Twilight clamped the hoof tighter over her mouth. She didn’t breathe. She began to sweat. The thing before her took its time to answer.

“No.”

“I swear I heard one.”

“I didn’t.”

“You sure?”

“Dead certain.”

It had to know. It had to! It had to have been in the main hall while she and Spike discussed things upstairs, as it definitely had not been there before she had flown herself and Spike up to the bed, nor had it passed her on the steps. She braced herself as it started to move, ready to scream out if it grabbed her and…she refused to think about what might happen past that point.

Instead of exposing her, it continued down the steps, as if it hadn’t seen her.

“Maybe the blood loss is getting to you, Ridley.”

“Yes, this time is different from all the others and suddenly losing a pint makes me hallucinate. Lemme guess, next you’re going to tell me it could have been a mouse?”

“Maybe it was the dragon. Or one of the Ponies, in their sleep.”

“But you didn’t hear a sneeze.” Ridley walked across the hall and opened another door. She flicked a light on inside the room. She turned off the light and shut the door to the bathroom, then waited for the figure to arrive.

“No, I didn’t,” it said. Twilight inhaled a little, and the thing paused for a second. It heard her, she was sure of it. It kept walking. “Why would I say a mouse?”

“Of course, how silly of me. That would be beneath you.”

“It’d be an insult to your intelligence. I’m just concerned. You took quite a beating from the blonde one. You said you even passed out.”

Ridley stomped a hoof. “Only for a moment!”

“You weren’t prepared for it, and that’s on me. I don’t know why I thought Applejack wouldn’t be with them. It won’t happen again.”

“Well…apology accepted, I guess. I know I heard a sneeze, though. And it was too—girly? Is that the word I’m looking for? Feminine! It was too feminine to be Spike.”

Twilight lost track of the conversation as the Pegasus and the thing walked into the room at the end of the hall and shut the door. She collapsed to the floor, gasping for air. Her heart made up for lost time, and it felt like it was going to break her ribs. There was no doubt in her mind that she’d been seen. Whatever had come down from the library was the thing who sent Ridley here in the first place. It was strong, too, in the sort of way that villains like Discord or heroes like Celestia tended to be. It was an inner power radiated outward, something more than just physical strength or dizzying intellect. To make it worse, whatever this thing was, it had it in for her, and was willing to jeopardize the fate of Equestria to get what it wanted.

Her instincts told her to run. To let this thing clear out, or to get help, or to be anywhere that it wasn’t, and yet—

She gave her horn just enough glow to find her way down the remaining stairs, then turned it off. She worked her way on the tips of her hooves to the door, hugging the wall the entire time. The door hadn’t been shut all the way, and Twilight peered through the gap. The room was small and lined with shelves, save one wall at the end of the room. That wall had a small dresser and an old wooden desk pushed up against it. Several long tables filled the middle of the room, all as antique as the furniture at the wall. The shelves themselves were more like cases, with glass double-doors covering each section. The books on the shelves were of varying ages, but from the few titles Twilight could make out, it was clear this was the special collection room. The tables were bare and dusty, but at the end of one there were a few saddle bags and a large duffle bag. Ridley Box stood before the mirror atop the dresser, trying to remove what remained of the smudged makeup. She was talking to the thing. He, thought Twilight. Ridley kept calling him ‘He.’

He was six, maybe seven feet tall. Applejack had been right about it being a wolf on two feet, but it wasn’t quite a wolf. It reminded Twilight of the times she ventured beyond the mirror into the realm of humans, in that it was upright, and wore clothes, but there was something else, too. She recalled seeing an animated cartoon in that world with a roadrunner and an unfortunate coyote. Whatever he was, he reminded her of the latter. The clothes he wore—a ratty-looking zip-up hooded sweatshirt and a pair of faded jeans—were ripped in places. It wasn’t anything that suggested struggle or conflict, but instead accidents and general apathy in regard to maintenance. He had a wolf’s head, but the jaw was long and flat like an alligator’s mouth. His tail was long, but not very bushy—almost ragged in the same way as his clothes. He walked around on his bare back paws. His shoes lay at one end of one of the tables closer to Twilight. They were stuffed full of newspaper. They were the same kind that the other human universe’s Rainbow Dash wore, the kind with the white rubber on the toes, solid color, flat sole, and a circular logo around the ankle. One of them was covered in mud. The whole look gave him the appearance of something silly, much like the cartoon she was reminded of, a predator made unintimidating by the shambles of its appearance. Although the teeth she saw when he spoke and the claws on its decidedly human-hand-shaped front paws were sharp, she found it hard to believe he was as powerful as Ridley had let on. He had several books in his paw, and occasionally opened the glass doors of the shelves to look at a book. Sometimes he put them back. Sometimes he took them to the bags on the table. She listened to the two banter back and forth.

Ridley stopped scrubbing with the towel for a moment, and looked in the mirror at the beast. “Do you ever, like, not speak in references? Ever? Can you even hold a normal conversation?”

He ignored her and held up a book. “—I mean, look at it, Ridley! The hero of the wastes in front of the stable door, engraved on the cover. And…wow. The author signed it. In my world, no one knew anything about her, besides that she wrote the story. I mean, I was familiar with her work before this, which is a secret of its own, but even then I wasn’t any closer to figuring out who she was than anyone else. This has her signature in it! Her pen name, but…definitely this one. Or how about this one? It’s The Star In Yellow.” he placed an ornate book on the table. The cover must be fantastic, Twilight thought, because it seemed to shimmer and bend the light around it. “…and I’m not talking about the story about the Star In Yellow, I mean an actual copy of The Star In Yellow itself. No, don’t—” He leaned over and pulled it out of Ridley’s grasp. Ridley seemed surprised she was standing at the table instead of the dresser. Twilight realized that she had pushed the door a bit further open to get a better look at it. “—Don’t open that. And do not—do NOT—read it. We’re taking that one, but we’re burning it.” He shoved it deep in the duffle bag, along with a few other books, and zipped it up. In a quick motion, he hovered his hand along the zipper, and it disappeared, leaving only solid fabric with one seam. “What I want to know, really, is how the hell any of these ended up here. This place hasn’t been touched in years. How is it possible that things like that”—he gestured toward the duffle bag— “end up in a place like this?”

Ridley shrugged, but didn’t turn away from the mirror. “Ur Books, maybe?”

The wolf frowned. “Now who’s making obscure references?”

“Hey, you got that one, at least.”

“You’re being snide.”

“Me? Snide? Perish the thought, good sir! Facetious? Often. Obsequious? Now and again. Bellicose? Pugnacious?”

“Just because they’re ten dollar words doesn’t mean you get paid to use them.”

“I thought it would appeal to your literary mind, O master.”

“Do NOT call me that.”

“But this is all your master plan, isn’t it?”

“It’s my design, but I’m no master of it.”

“What happened to your godhood, then?”

“When did I once—ever—say I was a god? And I’m not counting that night we were all hammered and you bet me that…you know which time I’m talking about. Not the point.”

“You bend reality to your liking. You could save thousands of lives if you wanted to. Maybe even just one. You’ve certainly ended enough for a few lifetimes.”

“It’s out of my hands more often than not. You know that.”

“Do I?”

“You may work for me, Ridley, but you’ve seen what I serve. You’ve been conscripted same as I have. A Child of Orion.”

“You work for her?” Ridley dropped the towel and turned to face him. “She’s the one behind all of this?”

“You know that’s not how it works. Still, I’ve been working for her as long as I can remember, even if I didn’t know it at the time. Even before I left my own world, I was serving her. Gods aren’t real, Ridley. We’re all just monsters. There’s always something higher up the food chain.”

Ridley paled. The wolf walked down between the tables. He picked up the sneakers, banging the caked one against the table to knock off the mud. He sat on the table, pulling out the wet newspaper from the sneakers. Ridley stared at him for a long time. After a while, she sighed and began packing up her saddlebags.

“You know, boss, you never told me what you settled on. For the dragon, I mean.”

“U-235.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Pu-240 is too unstable.” He struggled to pull the sneaker on his hind paw. “Like—stupid thing—what if it just went off before he got to it? Could you imagine? I put too much effort into this to have it literally blown to hell at the last minute.”

“So where’d you get it?”

He put the other shoe on his foot, and stomped it the rest of the way home on the floor. “Somewhere else.”

“Another world?”

“Somewhere. Else. Don’t worry about it.” He tied one of them without looking. “Now, have you got everything? I want to get going. You do still have the spell, correct?”

Ridley pulled it from one of the saddle bags, waved it, and put it back. Damn! Twilight didn’t think she could distract either of them long enough to get it.

“Excellent, my dear.” He set in on the other shoe. “Ugh. I’m a hypocrite for ever mocking anyone about function over form. These may look old-school cool, but they are about as waterproof as a sieve. This one’s gonna smell. You told her what her task was, right?”

Ridley stopped packing up her bags. The wolf stopped tying his shoe. “Right, Ridley?” He looked at the Pegasus. She shuddered. He finished his shoe, and stood up. “It’s not fair to have her play the game if she doesn’t know the rules now, is it?” She looked at the ground. He walked toward her. “Because, of course, we both know that it’s dangerous to all of us the way you used those bubbles as shields, or folded yourself out to hide, or tore a wormhole to come down here, but that is probably forgivable, so long as you did what you were brought here to do…” His pace was slow to the point of cruelty.

Ridley backed away from the tables. “Listen, I had to bail, alright? I’m not used to not killing. All I’ve ever fought were monsters, things I didn’t have to let live. Otherwise Applejack wouldn’t have beaten me! I w-was barely able to stand, and she would’ve killed me if Twilight hadn’t stopped her! I had to back off and recoup! You understand, r-r-right? They’re still up there, we can…” She stopped when her flank bumped up against the desk.

The wolf continued his slow steady gait, looking at one of his hands and scraping the claws together. He didn’t seem so cartoonish anymore. “Ridley, please. I don’t really want to hear it. It wasn’t about the spell, at all, and you knew that. If I wanted it that badly, I would’ve taken it myself. What I want is for her to play the game with me. I want her to prove a challenge. All of this was a setup for that. The game can’t really start until she knows how she can win—”

He towered over the Pegasus. Twilight could hear her whimpering prayers to Princess Luna. She cried out and covered her face as he reached down. He stuck two claws between her broken wings and gently pulled out the charmed stone, holding it up to the light. Ridley looked up through tears at it, jaw agape.

“—and already she’s cheating. Didn’t you notice? Why would she fire magic at you if she was intending on letting you go? I suppose you don’t feel enough back there to notice it, but didn’t you think it was odd? Honestly, I’m more impressed it didn’t come loose in the shower. Oh, get up. I wasn’t going to hurt you. Do you really think me that petty?” He rolled the stone between his claws, and Twilight could see—even feel—the charm unraveling, the magic dissipating into the air. “Quite clever of her, too. This will be more exciting than I thought. Already it’s going places I didn’t expect.”

“Where is all this going, really? What’s the point, Boss?” Ridley asked, throwing the saddlebags over her back. “Boss. Boooosss. No. B-O-S-ughbossbossboss. Damn it! Why can’t I say your name? Are you doing that? Boss? Are you even listen—” As she turned around, the words died in her mouth.

The wolf was grinning. It wasn’t a warped smile like the one Ridley Box could give, but it was unsettling all the less. “I’ve traveled a thousand different worlds, Ridley, and there’s an infinite number more. You know what I’ve learned with all that sight-seeing?” He closed his hand around the stone and squeezed. “Love rots. Dreams die. Who the heroes and the villains are is all a matter where you stand and watch from. If you watch while walking around, it turns out there aren’t heroes or villains at all. It’s just like real life, and it’s boring as hell. I drifted. Somewhere out in the vastness of the endless multiverses it came to me. I’ve got this incredible power, right? Something akin to a sort of god, possessing the ability to spin worlds and characters and places into being. So why not take that power and make a world where there is good and evil? Pit them against each other. It came to me as I crossed the endless wheels of time spinning in place that I wanted a part in this story I was building. Not the hero, no. That’s not fair with all these resources at my disposal. I had to become the villain of the tale. Who, then, to play the part of the hero? I needed someone. Someone who has to be able to take me on. Someone worth rooting for. Someone who could challenge me.” He opened his hand, and held up the stone. It was black and glassy. “And I found her. Sometime just before I met you, I heard about her. She can’t take me now. She needs to be pushed to her limit, live up to the fullest of her potential. She’s more powerful than Celestia or Luna, but she doesn’t understand it. She has qualities that put her above and beyond. And I want to see if she’ll hit her apex, or shatter under the pressure. Part of me even wants to her beat me. See her win.”

He laughed, and held a hand up to his face. “HA! Listen to me! I’m monologing right now! That’s how excited I am! I’m giving some grand speech like some fucking cliché, and you know what? I don’t care. It’s too much fun. I’ve been waiting for this too long.” He took his hand down from his face. He turned, and whipped the stone along the length of the nearest table. It half-rolled, half-skidded across the wood. When it reached the end, it rocketed off, hit one of the bookshelves, ricocheted high, and then bounced to a stop at twilight’s hooves.

She looked up. The door was wide open now, and the wolf stared her in the eye.

“Ridley, I should apologize. I lied to you. I did hear the sneeze. Twilight Sparkle was hiding on the stairs and she’s been listening to us this whole time. I thought I was upset about you not doing your job, but you know what?”

The wolf clenched a hand into a fist, then splayed out his claws. The sound of a bonfire reached Twilight’s ears as the change rolled over the wolf’s body. He grew taller, more muscular. His fur turned to black smoke, whisping and whirling constantly away from his body. His eyes began to burn green. It was him she’d seen earlier, lurking in the darkness. Watching her. His jaw changed, and now Twilight could see the visage of the wolves she’d only read about in textbooks before, the kind long since passed from Equestria. This was more than that. Fangs and claws glistened in the smoke. The ratty sweater was gone. When it spoke again, its voice was low and full, but didn’t echo. It was not loud, nor was it soft, and it came to Twilight’s ears without any reverberation or dynamic effect.

“I like this version better.”

He began to walk down between the two tables. He let one set of claws drag loose behind him on the tabletop, enjoying the sound of them scraping the wood.

“It’s an honor, Princess, It really is. I’ve been searching for you for years. Spike too, but his part in this doesn’t come close to yours. You are my perfect little hero. Do you know how many times I’ve met you? Hundreds. Thousands, maybe. We’ve played match after match, game after game, and I always get the checkmate. World after world after world. But none of them were you. Not the real you. No, I tried and I could not breach your real world. It never worked. My greatest effort collapsed under its own weight and nearly took all realities with it.” Twilight could not break eye contact with the demonic thing before her, but she noticed out of the corner of her eye that Ridley flinched at the last sentence. He reached the end of the table and tapped his claws on the wood. “I thought for sure that all my effort was in vain, that I’d never get through to you. To the Princess I wanted. To the real Twilight Sparkle.”

He looked away from her, leaning back and spreading his arms. He laughed as he stared at the ceiling. The emerald suns of his eyes burned even brighter. “Ah, but as always, I was blessed with serendipity. A unicorn I’d taken for granted turned out to be my saving grace. When Starlight Glimmer redesigned dear old Starswirl’s spell, she didn’t just drag you through time, but opened up infinite worlds of possibility that were sealed to me before. All I had to do is find the one you’d be dragged to first, and I could set my trap. I couldn’t complete my grand epic in your world, but that isn’t a problem anymore.” He turned to face her. When he arrived in front of her, he bent to one knee, almost like a knight before a queen. The smell of woodsmoke rolled off of him with such intensity that Twilight’s eyes started to water.

“Only one version of you even came close to defeating me. I miss her, to be honest. She winked from existence when she had her hoof on my throat, and I couldn’t bring her back. Now? I’ve got the real thing. I won’t pass this up. So, here’s the rules of our little game. All you have to do to get the spell back and set everything right is be able to defeat me. You can’t handle me yet. Not even close. Taking you on now would be unfair of me. Cheating. What would be the point? All this effort would go to waste. I’m not going to give you the chance to fight me until I’m sure it’s a fair fight. To be honest, if you make it that far, I doubt I’ll win. What do you have to do to prove yourself? It’s simple.”

Ridley was standing to his left. She had the duffle bag over her back, and had another smile of a million switchblades. The wolf leaned forward. It was like standing in the middle of a blast furnace. Twilight started to choke on the fumes. Her eyes burned with pain. The wolf reached out and took her chin in one clawed hand. He tilted her head up to meet his eyes. His breath smelled of molten metal and forest fire.

“Save this world for me, Twilight Sparkle. Save this world, and you’ll be free.”

Twilight felt she was about to pass out. A rushing sound filled her ears. The smoke pouring off his body curled inward, and then the two of them were gone.

Twilight staggered over to the table, coughing and hacking. A game. This was all a game. Trapped with only Spike to rely on. She trusted the new Applejack, but she couldn’t say for sure when the cards were down that they’d really see eye to eye. She shook her head. The dizziness from the lack of air wasn’t going away. She coughed again. What was that thing? Did he have a name? Why was he so obsessed with her?

No answers came. She was out of her depth. There was going to be a lot of research. She stopped at the pile of books the devilish pair had left behind. They were all classics of Pony literature (it reminded her of the reading list for her early college classes, actually), but there wasn’t any particular pattern to the titles or themes. Next to them was a bag full of bits.

“I almost forgot,” the wolf said.

Twilight jerked around. He was standing at the desk, his back to her, and he’d regressed to his raggedy, cartoonish appearance. Ridley wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

“I hate to ruin that exit. I think I nailed it, don’t you? Not leaving without this, though.”

Twilight opened her mouth, but no sound came out. The wolf was holding a book in his hands. He didn’t look back at her.

“I’ll be borrowing some books, some of them, ah… permanently, as it were. The bag there on the table is for the current librarian, which—heh—I guess is you again. You can take the page out of the library, but not the library out of the page, huh? Either way, consider that late fees in advance. I won’t be back to check on you for a while, so… man, coming back really spoiled that exit, didn’t it? I’m not usually so adept at theatrics like that. I don’t make a good star of the show, unlike Ridley. Or you. I can’t wait to see what you do with this place. Reality is what you make it, although it makes us back a bit in the process.”

He held up the book over his shoulder so that Twilight could see the cover. “I almost feel bad taking this. It’s the crown jewel of this library. I’d say it’s beyond compare. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

The cover of the book was pink, light purple and blue patchwork. It read Of Ponies and Peril, by Twilight Sparkle. A crooked grin spread out across his jaw, and he looked at her out of the corner of his eye. Out of everything so far, the look on his muzzle disturbed her the most.

“After all, you wrote it.”

He wasn’t there anymore. There were no longer claw marks on the table, and the pile of books disappeared. All that remained was the bag of bits.

Spike found himself jerked from a heavy sleep as Twilight finally found her voice again.

Author's Note

Now the story really begins. This chapter's pretty dense, but that's the way it has to be for the story to move forward. with introductions out of the way, we can finally set in on the world. There's a lot of references buried in here. There's no prize for guessing them all, except maybe a bit of smug satisfaction. If you think you know who the villain is, keep your mouth shut! don't spoil it yet!

any further notes before the end of the story from this point on will be solely for clarification.