The Mare That Time Forgot

-THE MARE THAT TIME FORGOT-

Elapsed Time: 0 Hours, 0 Minutes, 0 Seconds.

The sun had stopped rising a while ago.

The birds were not singing.

The wind was not rustling through the grass, causing the morning dew to fall.

Not a soul was breathing, or even moving, for that matter.

Except for one...

Twilight was groggy. She wanted to stay in bed longer, but she knew she still had a busy day, just like any other. She slowly opened her eyes toward her closed blinds, and carefully moved out of bed, failing to notice that her blanket was hanging off the side, suspended in air.

She opened the blinds, barely glancing outside, not noticing the impossible spectacle in front of her house.  She looked at the clock, which was still displaying early morning with its hands. She grabbed it off her nightstand, put it up to her ear, and listened quietly.

Silence was her answer.

She then made a mental note to make a physical note to purchase a new clock, as the one she had had for several months had finally broken. She tossed it behind her, onto the bed, and proceeded to make her way towards the stairs. She gave a quick look at the completely still Spike, and softly chuckled to herself. Spike loved his sleep almost more than his gems. She slowly paced herself as she lowered herself down to the ground floor, casually glancing around her bookshelves, making her way toward the foyer.

What she didn't notice, however, was the clock. As if by some act of rebellion, it simply stayed exactly in the air at the last moment Twilight touched it, floating several feet above, and in front of, its intended target.

As she walked through her humble home, she thought about the day's events, and what was coming forward as she approached the day's beginning. She wondered if she and her friends would perform an amazing act of friendship, or if new villain would rear its ugly head, forcing Twilight and her friends to preform an amazing act of friendship. She treasured every moment she had with her friends, almost as if each one was its last...

That's when Twilight noticed it. The atmosphere, or rather, the lack thereof. Nopony could be heard outside, no snores from Spike, nothing. Everything was quiet. Too quiet. Not as if nothing was making noise, but as if nothing could make noise. It was as if every object in the universe had been silenced, for good.

Twilight brushed the ideas out of her head almost as fast as they came in. It was silly, and downright childish. There was an obvious answer, she was just looking too deep into things. She just needed a bit of fresh air, that was all. She proceeded to walk at a quicker rate towards the front door, accidentally knocking a small table just a bit, which tipped over.

Twilight mentally scolded herself for freaking out, then turned to pick up the table from the floor. It would prove to be unnecessary.

The table, which stayed at the precise angle at which Twilight hit it, simply stayed there, balancing on a single leg, performing such an amazing disregard for common physics, that Twilight stared in shock for several seconds before examining further.

"What in Celestia's name...?" she stated, before poking the chair one more time, which moved exactly how far the sudden impulse displaced it, then began to remain still, frozen as it was moments earlier.

Twilight had no idea what to make of it, the table simply stood there, as if gravity no longer applied. She took another glance, and a sudden realization hit her.

What if it's more than just the table? she thought as she darted up the stairs, and came within inches of banging her head on the floating clock, still exactly where she had last touched it. She ignored it, and looked toward Spike.

"Spike? Wake up! Something weird is going on! Are you okay?! Spike! SPIKE!" she screamed. She ran her hoof along his arm and neck, struggling to find a pulse,  and found exactly what everything else had been giving her.

Silence.

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Elapsed Time: 0 Hours, 27 Minutes, 32 Seconds.

The panic had set in almost immediately. Twilight's heart pumped liters of adrenaline into her brain as she tried to piece together everything around her. She had been absolutely still for almost half an hour, her mind attempting to find answers where there were none. Nothing made sense. Twilight was shaking, and staring at her assistant wasn't helping. Spike was as still as the entire room, and not a single sign of life was present in his body. It was plain to see, he was...

No.

It couldn't be true. Twilight thought to herself. There was something else. The same something that kept the table and the clock from falling. This, "force" had negated gravity, inertia, and had practically deleted Classical Mechanics from the world around her. She seemed to be unaffected, but that did little to aid her situation. Science had departed, and taken reason with it, but apparently Twilight had been left behind. In the back of her mind, amid all the shock, a little voice warned her that she needed to move. She had to find out what was going on. However, Twilight could barely bring out a whimper before falling on the floor, approaching a catatonic state. Her mind wrestled with the simple idea that Spike could be gone, and she wouldn't even know what caused it.

Suddenly, something clicked in her head, a little ray of hope shined through, and a simple question was asked. A question that, if given the right answer, could bring Twilight back from the brink of insanity.

Slowly but surely, Twilight picked herself off the floor, and made her way down the stairs, albeit much more carefully this time. All the while, repeating the question in her head. Despite how obvious the answer was, Twilight still needed confirmation. One way or another, she was going to fix this.

It took her twice as long to cross her living room as she had previously, but no time at all to open the door. She practically pulled it off its hinges trying to. As soon as she stepped outside, Twilight breathed a sigh of relief, and started laughing jovially, despite the situation in front of her.

It seemed that at some point, Derpy was preforming an early mail run, and had accidentally crossed paths with another pegasus. Twilight couldn't quite remember the name, but was delighted to see her stuck in the air, mid-fall, screaming in half-anger, half-terror. To Twilight, this meant that whatever was happening inside was causing this in front of her. She logically deduced that, due to the similar loss of kinetic forces, the situation in front of her and the once inside had been caused by the same force.

If that was true, than that meant Spike couldn't be dead, since Derpy and the other pegasus were very much alive, if not simply frozen. Twilight laughed almost maniacally, now realizing that something much bigger had happened. Something, like...

A Spell.

Twilight stopped all at once. Somepony had to have done this, there was no other clear explanation. Somepony with an axe to grind with Twilight had to have done this, and if so, there had to be a way to undo the spell. Twilight then realized the challenge in front of her. She could still move objects, so she had access to her books, lab, and the entire town. She had to remedy this, at any cost. Twilight ran back inside to start working, and silently swore to herself that "For Spike, I will fix this."

Spike would prove to be the least of her many concerns, however.

<><><><><>

Elapsed Time: 7 Hours, 18 Minutes, 23 Seconds.

Twilight spent hours calculating energy values, matching magic parameters, and conducting experiment after experiment to reveal more and more information until it all collapsed like a house of cards. Over time, Twilight would prove to be no match for this, sadly.

It had been a good run, but the answers finally ran out. Despite all the work she had put it, the logic faded to a close, and she was left with a puzzle that was missing so many pieces, she couldn't even figure out what the big picture was even supposed to be.

It had started so brilliantly, too. First, she cross referenced Derpy's work schedule and planned route, and found that she froze in front of Twilight's house between 7:12 AM and 7:43 AM. Using this, she concluded this had to be the result of a planned spell, as the numbers weren't even with any major time change, and happened on an awkward scale. It was in the middle of autumn, and the equinox was 2 weeks away, meaning that any natural cause for a sudden lapse in temporal movement was out of the question.

Then, she then commenced a few preliminary spells to test the area for any static magic fields, and found that nothing of the sort was present. This meant that the "spell" had to only be affecting her in some way, not anyone else.

Twilight even went so far as to dig up some old Temporal Analysis books, using them to conclude the nature of the spell. Given the properties of physics after the affliction, it seemed that the closest result was an "Exo-Layer Exclusion Spell." According to the book, Twilight had been sent forward into a higher spacial-temporal plane, where the progression of time moves differently, and the results of forces and momentum became non-existent; to put it simply.

This was where the problems began. The book gave little to nothing on reversing it from the affected end, and only gave a basic description. If this really was what Twilight had been affected with, then she had no clue on how to go about reversing it. On top of that, her list of possible suspects had shrunk exponentially. The amount of power it would take to send an object as big as her into a higher plane? Absolutely astronomical. In her estimates, she couldn't put the number below 40 Gigajoules. The only ponies with that amount of power readily available were Luna and Celestia, and she knew it couldn't be them.

So that left only a few options. Either the Alicorn Amulet had resurfaced, or something akin to its dynamics did. Other than that, Twilight couldn't imagine what would give somepony enough power to do something like this.

She sat down after another run through of her calculations, and hung her head. It didn't make any sense. Even if it wasn't a so-called exclusion spell, she was back to square one, and had nothing to work with, but an unending amount of time with which to work.

<><><><><>

Elapsed Time: 16 Hours, 43 Minutes, 54 Seconds.

The strain of solitude had begun to weigh heavily on Twilight's mind, and was not lessening by any means. The idea of having too much time started to break Twilight, but she wasn't giving up yet. However, Twilight had exhausted every resource she could conceivably use. She tried seeing if her conclusion of the spell type was wrong by checking outside Ponyville's city limits, but was met with much the same as everything else, stillness.

It was then that Twilight had noticed something even worse than the stillness; the cold. It was almost unbearably cold. How she had not realized the temperature change before now was unthinkable, but it was there now. Twilight wasn't even going to bother figuring out why the world dropped 20 degrees, she had enough problems as it was.

Twilight went back into town and took a scenic route to clear her head, but it was clear that wasn't going to help. Every few blocks she had to stop, shivering, and look at somepony frozen in place. It was almost sickening to imagine one would force this kind of torment on somepony else.

She stepped back into her house with a sigh, and decided she would take a break. She walked up the stairs and laid on her bed, looking at her assistant as she drifted off. Her head could use a rest, and nopony was going anywhere anytime soon...

Especially Spike.... Twilight thought.

<><><><><>

Elapsed Time: 23 Hours, 19 Minutes, 37 Seconds.

Twilight once again woke up to the sounds of nothing. Although she knew already, it still came as a heavy hit to her heart, as she got up, and resumed her research .She refused to give up, and refused to lose sight of her objective. Time had shortly become a meaningless variable, and Twilight fell into a trance-like state as she tried to once again fit the pieces together.

Unfortunately for her, this puzzle didn't have a solution.

<><><><><>

Elapsed Time: 53 Hours, 11 Minutes, 19 Seconds.

It took a day and a little more for Twilight to come to the same conclusion, but she eventually came around to the idea.

Her mind finally snapped when she went out on another walk around town to calm herself down. She visited Sugarcube Corner, Sweet Apple Acres, Town Hall, among other places. All throughout this trip, Twilight kept dancing around the answer that was staring her in the face. The utter disparity of the situation had failed to set in. Ignorance seemed to be bliss for Twilight, until she attempted the return trip.

Twilight would've been able to make it home too, she was so close. If it hadn't have been for the last thought that rang through her head, she may have been able to recede back into her wall of Science and Silence. She was just inches from the door when...

I will never see my friends again.

It was such a simple thought too, a simple recognition of a random possibility. She had spent so long trying to fix it, that exercising the outcome of an irreversible spell shouldn't have done much except fuel her determination more. However, the full day of seeing nothing but failure in her math, added to that the full view of everyone frozen, created a snowball that her mind could no longer handle. It was the straw that broke the camel's back.

The thought sent waves of terror through her mind, and for a few seconds, Twilight let the fear consume her. That proved to be all that was needed, and she fell to the ground once more, unable to move.

I will be stuck here, forever, and no pony will even know what happened to me...

Twilight began to silently weep, as the absolute futile nature of the problem slammed into her thought process like a train. She couldn't hold it together. She stayed there, on the ground, mere moments away from giving up. The cusp of her sanity was quickly fading, and nothing could be done to prevent the inevitable result.

I have no help, no hope, and I am alone... forever... she thought as she receded into mental darkness.

<><><><><>

Elapsed Time: 57 Hours, 24 Minutes, 56 Seconds.

Twilight had been reduced to a husk... a mere shell of a mare with nothing left to think about except the pain, the pain of solitude. And as you may know, those without the proper vision of "options" tend to...

...well, best not to mention that now.

In the meantime, Twilight's mind was still reeling, still stuck in that infinite loop of sorrow and fear. She eventually trampled around town, screaming at the frozen ponies, begging some to speak, shouting:

"PLEASE! SOMEPONY SPEAK! SAY SOMETHING!"

"I NEED HELP! CAN ANYONE HERE ME?!!!"

"SPEAK NOW! STOP SITTING THERE AND JUST MOVE AN INCH!!"

"SOMEPONY JUST SPEAK TO ME!"

The flood gates had opened, and rationality was quickly slipping away. Twilight began to approach a state far too familiar to one with knowledge of the phrase, "Lesson Zero."

This information aside, Twilight's psyche shattered into an uncountable number of pieces, and she began smacking ponies, demanding responses from somewhere she wasn't going to get any. It was hopeless, but Twilight was way past that word now. The math meant nothing to her. As far as she was concerned, the spell was irreversible, and she just wanted to put an end to the biting silence. A silence that seemed to scream back at her, endlessly.

<><><><><>

Elapsed Time: 62 Hours, 24 Minutes, 56 Seconds.

Twilight had spent too much time wandering around town, and eventually ran out of energy, anger morphing back to depression, and hatred moving back to fear. She collapsed in the middle of the street, and began to cry once again.

It's not fair... I had so much to live for, my friends and I defeated Nightmare Mood, and Discord! she thought. For a quick moment, her mind briefly stopped and considered the idea that this was Discord's doing. Twilight then she realized she was grasping at straws, as Discord was put in stone and couldn't possibly escape. This idea only worsened the situation, as it emphasized to Twilight how hopeless the situation was, and continued to weep, the cold silence only growing in size.

She sat there, flooding the street with her tears as her mind struggled to find a way to end this, this pain, and eventually, she ended up--

It is at this time, that I would advise any of those of you out there with a sensitive heart to please refrain from reading any further, for your own safety. Please, if you have a set of emotions that react heavily with dark elements, please direct yourself elsewhere. Otherwise, please continue.

--at a terrible solution, that seemed to be the only one. Twilight immediately locked onto the idea, and proceeded to gather herself, and slowly walk toward the outskirts of Ponyville. The entire time, the tiny bit of reason battled to save her from this fate, but there was nothing left. Her dire conditions had driven her to this... and there was no way to stop it. Twilight had made the ultimate decision, ultimate in the sense that it would be the final choice she would ever make.

She was going to end it all, to make the pain go away.

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Elapsed Time: 64 Hours, 37 Minutes, 4 Seconds.

It didn't take her long to ascend the cliff, but it took her even less time to descend. She had recognized that gravity still affected her, in the exact same way, but this information was of course used for an unfair purpose.

As she climbed, her mind battled with the last of her rational thought, and by the time she reached the top, she did not hesitate. She jumped, and the entire world let her go.

It took her 12 seconds, a mere fraction of the time she was stuck here, and the fall killed her instantly.

Details spared, there was not a thought that came out of Twilight's head afterward, and the entire world became silent once more, never to hear the sound of her voice again. The universe made no indication it recognized the event, and not an object stirred.

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Elapsed Time: 72 Hours, 0 Minutes, 0 Seconds.

The saddest part of the whole affair? She was so close...

As it turns out, the universe was simply biding its time, and in an instant, everything was back to moving again. Derpy finished crashing into the unnamed mare, Rarity awoke from her slumber, the town resumed once again, like a clock finally repaired from its ailments.

This clock however, was missing one very important cog in its inner workings, and it didn't take long for anyone to find out.

The first strange event was that several ponies suddenly reeled backward slightly, claiming they had been attacked by some strange force, but none of the unicorns had felt any magical disturbances. Echos of someone seemed to flow throughout the town for mere milliseconds, but no one could place any calculated answer on the occurrence.

The investigation into those shortcomings were quickly snuffed out when incredibly shocking news came to light. A traveler coming to Ponyville by the name of Cranky had come across some poor mare who had flung herself from a nearby cliff. It was, of course, a short time before her identify was discovered.

As soon as the ID was confirmed, the theories began to fly. Some claimed somepony had murdered her, but no drugs were found in her system, nor were there signs of a struggle. Others claimed it was an accident, but no previous documented cases showed any signs of anypony else falling off the cliff in question, which made that possibility immensely slim. All signs pointed to a suicide.

This quickly became a shattering event for the rest of the town, as one of Ponyville's greatest heroes, and friends, had so quickly been taken away from them, without another word, or any explanation.

The news of course hit Spike the hardest, who spent a week without eating anything, and simply sat near Twilight's bed, wondering if he could have, nay, should have done something. Should he have asked Twilight if anything was wrong? Should he have spent more time noticing Twilight's demeanor? Would this even have mattered? The short answer was no, but nopony could possibly know why.

Spike then moved in with Rarity, who was eager to offer residence to the broken dragon. Surprisingly, this did little to ease his pain, as his life was changed forever, with no hope of recovering.

The friendship that Twilight had started between the Elements of Harmony quickly began to fade, as depression turned to fear, fear turned to anger, and anger turned to hatred. They blamed each other for not watching out for Twilight, and without the pony in question to fix this friendship problem, they were shattered, and went their separate ways. It seems that she was a focal point, one that quickly removed balance with her untimely demise.

The rest of the town quickly fell prey to lapses in judgement, error's in reasoning, and broken friendships. Without Twilight to play her role in their lives, the town faced an uncertain future.

When news of her protege's death reached Celestia, the guilt in her heart returned akin to that of Luna's banishment. She spent weeks recovering form the information, spending days in her room. With help from Luna and her staff, she was eventually able to return to her duties as princess, but no longer searched for an apprentice, for fear of replication of the levels of stress that might have caused Twilight's death.

<><><><><>

It was a sad time, but the saddest part was that nopony would have any answers they were searching for. Nopony would know anything more about this catastrophic chain of events. The few days she spent crossing the line into insanity, would be lost from any history book. Her death would be ruled as a suicide, and nothing more. But there was more, and none of it would come to light.

And in the end, all it would have taken to save her was more time...

THE END