The Outer Dark

by Cynewulf

Rating: teen
Tags: Dark, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Horror, Twilight Sparkle, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 6164

Dead Twilight in Ponyville lies dreaming.

I have seen the mare who does not sleep.

Shall I tell you about her?

(Written originally for the Writeoff Association. The Prompt was "Forbidden Knowledge".)

Published 2016-05-05 20:40:02 UTC
Last updated 2016-05-05 20:40:02 UTC

The Mare Who Does Not Sleep

Before I answer your questions, Rainbow, let me say that it is good to see you. Even after all these years, I am delighted to see you again. We were friends once, after a fashion, weren’t we? I see you hesitate. It’s alright, it has been a long time, and I’m sure seeing me again was something of a shock. You’ve taken it in stride, however, and that is commendable.

And, yes, I’m getting there. Where have I been? And why do I seem so… strange?

Why, I have seen the mare who does not sleep.

Quiet, please. Don’t react so—you’ll worry the other patrons. In fact, here, let me pay in advance. For what? Why, for the drinks. You’ll be wanting a few. As for myself, I’ve found that since my little sojourn I care little for anything that would detract from my alertness.

Yes, I’ve really seen her. Twilight, the one whose name they dare not whisper in Canterlot's streets. I used to love this place, and now I cannot. I cannot enjoy the grace of such a city, not with how it has left her behind, and us with her.

The pickets surrounding the Valley of Shadow were the easiest part, ironically. Princess Celestia picked her finest guards, and yet still they too are only mortal. That place takes its toll on even the strongest wills. Have you ever watched acid do its work? I have. I once saw an artist work at etching, and marveled at what acid could do to an otherwise strong material.

But I am getting off track. The guards were easy to slip by. Judicious application of magic, combined with sleight of hoof and a generous helping of soul-wariness on the part of those forlorn protectors, and I was past their hopelessly inadequate wall.

It was strange, to walk the old paths again, and see the old things. Much of it is now unrecognizable, of course—even without the effect of Twilight’s folly, time and the elements have ruined much of my former home.

What was it like, in the ruins of Ponyville?

If you must know—and I suppose you must—it was in many ways identical to the day we left. The Sofa and Quills store has a sign hanging in its sad window announcing a sale that is long since over with. There are a few carts still in the center of town. The bakery is even intact, though its colors are long since faded. Everywhere in the valley there is a near-silence. Your breathing seems louder. Your hooves against the dirt path sound like muffled cannons in the distance.

Silence has a way of seeping into the skin, don’t you know? When a place is still enough, quiet enough, empty enough, the lack of movement becomes tangible. It clings to you. Your own steps frighten you. Your own blood pumping in the veins of your neck is enough to make you want to scream, because you swear that you hear every heartbeat.

I didn’t. Scream, that is—I did not say a word. Even in the valley of the shadow of death a lady at least tries to maintain her composure, and besides, I was as prepared for my journey as any could be.

I had, of course, learned how to shield the mind and spirit from certain aftereffects of the sort of magic that now saturates my beloved Ponyville. Had I walked the streets without my wards in place, I would not be here to tell you this tale. Wouldn’t that be a shame.

See this? Yes, isn’t it lovely? ‘Twas originally a birthday gift, but I have given it a much more noble purpose. Let me open the locket for you, and… there we are. Where once were pictures I have scrawled in tiniest detail the most intricate of formulations. I spent a week on each side, slaving away in the darkness when I knew none would disturb me or ask questions I could not answer.

But Ponyville, yes, I know you would hear about it than listen to me prattle on about my preparations. You remember the last moments of that burg—the chill in the air, the screaming. The… the lights.

The library is surprisingly well preserved, considering. The top looked as if it had been ripped asunder by some terrible clawed beast. I found the old telescope that used to sit so proudly atop the highest platform shattered on my way inside, and I kept one of the shards as I ventured into the epicenter of all our sorrows.

Books, mostly charred, littered the filthy floor. Here and there, one found markings on the floor clearly made by design, I presume by the mare herself with heat or strongest steel. Little… canals, to carry her intent. They spiraled all over the floor and along the walls, and for all of my diligent research I could not make heads or tails of them. They would suggest letters, and then word would fail to appear. They would almost seem to mimic some of the more advanced thaumaturgical phenomenology I have seen in dusty tomes… and then the lines would twist away and leave the work incomplete.

Everything about that library felt incomplete in a most maddening way. Our old friend herself was long gone, but her touch lingered still.

Gaining entrance to the basement was difficult, but I managed to dig through the debris sealing the entrance with brute force. Surprising, I know, but I am nothing if not determined. It took an hour, at least. Everything in Ponyville fights your magic now, as if it too were alive. Perhaps it is.

The basement of the library had been her sanctum. I had never entered it whilst I still lived in Ponyville, so I cannot say how much it had actually changed. The layout was predictably Spartan, books in their proper places in a forest of shelves which soon gave way to older records bound up in dusty scrolls. A small laboratory, perfect for alchemical work, far removed from the archives. I felt around the edges, cautious of a trap, but found only the ghost of an old spell to keep any conflagration from spreading. It was sad, seeing her spellwork again.

I stayed in the library for two nights.

You see, I had found her notes. They were, to be blunt, beyond me in most respects. Perhaps if I had spent a few more years in study as intense as she had undergone, I could have understood a quarter of the brilliance she applied to the page in such a slapdash fashion. I knew enough of the peculiar sort of lore in which she had dabbled to understand nothing more than that the scope of her work had been immense.

Of course, we all know what she was doing now.

I was able to piece together a narrative, however, and that was far more useful than mere notes. Others might care to know how it had all been done, but I only cared to know how ruin had come to Ponyville.

I did not visit my old home until the second day. I could hardly bear to look at it. I simply walked the abandoned halls. I touched nothing. The doom that came to our town had rendered it forever violated. The walls pulsed.

Funny that only now I mention that.

The walls, I mean. How they… how they pulsed. Reach out your hoof—yes, like so—touch the wall beside us. Not the glass, right. Now, what does it feel like? Solid, yes.

Not so in the valley of the shadow.

There, the buildings seem almost to move beneath you and around you. It was like stepping into the bowels of something that lived… if that word can apply to anything in the valley. Life is not so much what comes to mind as…

Forget it. Try to.

After two days, I found that I could bear the library no more. I had compiled the narrative of the mare who does not sleep--our once dearest friend--into a neat timeline, and had read as much of her work as I could bear to read. She was not there. The final answers were not there. Does that puzzle you? At first, I too was confused. Surely if anywhere in the valley had answers, ‘twould be the library where we saw…

There were so few bones there. None, actually. Did you know? How curious that is. How…

You know, perhaps I will have a brandy. Excuse me.

I am taking far too long to tell this story, I think.

You’ve been very patient. Thank you for that, old friend.

From the notes and research log, I concluded that my search would be completed not in Ponyville’s corpse but in the heart of the Everfree. Yes, I entered it alone. It, too, has changed.

We thought of it as fearsome before, and we were right to think so. Untested as we were, it would have swallowed us whole the moment we let down our guard. But it was not yet come into its own then. It was… imagine a foal. A foal can do many of the things a grown pony can do, but not as a grown pony might do them. We too, I think, were foals—all of us, then. When the sun shone in the valley. The forest has grown up.

It took me a solid day to reach the dark heart of that place. Cutting through the seemingly endless, snarling thicket was taxing on the body. The constant murmuring was taxing on the soul.

The forest whispers now.

Where do the voices come from? I have ideas. What do they say? Many things. Much of it is nonsense. The more your strain to listen to them, the less progress you make through the vines and thorns. But sometimes, I would catch fragments of what almost seemed like conversation…

Halfway through, I found the river where that dear old serpent once lived. In my excitement, I was careless. The thorns raked my flank and where they touched was so, so cold. I stumbled out onto open ground, trying to see what they had done to me. It was hard to breathe. Was it panic? Was I imagining the cold and the strangulation and the feeling of evil in the air? Perhaps. Probably, even. But I still felt it. It felt real.

I cauterized the wound. Yes, that look is appropriate. Overkill? Certainly.

The books were very clear that fire was the only true defense I could afford. And, to be honest with you, for a short time I think I lost my mind to fear.

Do you know what it is like to really, truly lose control of yourself? My panic was more frightening than the whispering trees or the dead streets had been. Your body refuses your commands. It revolts. Your legs give out beneath you. Cold sweat runs down into your eyes and your mouth sputters with things that want to be words but are not even close to being them. Your vision blurs with tears—or is it just another part of the panic? In the moment, you don’t know. You don’t really know anything in the moment of absolute terror. Your thoughts twist themselves into horrible shapes like a mare in the grips of glossolalia.

But I recovered. My composure is really my greatest gift, after all. Perhaps it would have been better had I not.

So I burnt myself rather badly. I dared not trust the water. Perhaps I would have been fine, but I was too frightened to even try. I lay there in the tall grass, hearing my heart hammering like a madmare in her cell for release. I felt like I, too, might snap. Ponyville, the notes, my home… it was a bit much, really. After all of those years of silent grieving, to see it all again.

No. I shouldn’t have brought any of you along. It was bad enough that I went myself.

My fears still felt justified. If she could make the Everfree even more terrifying than it had been before, what else could she have done?

What motivated her? That eluded me. Even with her notes in my saddlebags, I still was no closer to discovering that crucial detail.

What motivates a kind, sweet pony to delve into the darkest of lores? Was it simply the allure of forbidden fruit? I could understand that—resent it, of course—but I could understand it. Was it… was there some misguided notion of the common good? Or was she never the mare we thought she was, from the beginning? Were her smiles simply a cover for something awful, something that was always waiting for us?

Like myself, I know you have never looked at ponies the same way since Ponyville. Not after Her. You look at them and you wonder—who are you? Does this evil grow in you too? Have you found yourself shying away from their gazes, like I have for years now? Have you feared their touch, reminded of… of Her?

I’m sorry, perhaps I’m merely projecting.

But I kept returning to the problem of Her motivations as I looked at the Castle of the Two Sisters. Once, it had been opulent and imperial. When we first saw it, it was a ruin. It has since become a festering abomination.

How? Oh, believe me if you can, but it is obvious to the naked eye! The castle glows with a sickly green light. Dramatic, isn’t it? A bit… garish.

But it does. And the light flickers within, like when a foal walks in front of the fire and casts her shadow on the wall.

The bridge has been repaired. It was a nerve-wracking passage, but I made it and walked unchallenged by any sentinel. Perhaps the lack of response as I crossed into her domain should have warned me away, but I had come so far and seen so little.

The outer walls were much the same, but the inner courtyard has been utterly altered. Where vines and normal bush had overgrown the masonry, now there are stranger things growing. Thorned monstrosities that reminded me of the Venus fly trap an old professor of mine at community college was so proud of, with what I suspected were maws. I obviously didn’t close enough to check. It’s all wild growth, but it feels intentional, as if someone were planting those horrid things as a new wall, to replace the old stone battlements entirely one day. Certainly it took some effort to get through them into the inner sanctums of the old palace. The machete I had brought along, fearing exactly this, became useless after the first few swings. The plants secrete a sort of acidic sap that bit into the steel right before my eyes. Fire was a disaster—the smoke was pungent and I feared it might be toxic, and so I was forced at first to retreat.

Oh. I’d almost forgotten. They glowed, faintly. Like fireflies lived inside them. Yes, curious, isn’t it? I certainly thought so. I thought a lot of things, then.

It may come as some surprise to you, but I am better with magic then any of my friends ever suspected. Not all of us can be as grand as the mages of Canterlot. I was better with precision. Cutting, manipulating, the fine arts of the scalpel.

Suffice it to say that with difficulty I was able to pass safely through the thorned walls into the true inner sanctum.

The keep crawled with the unnatural plants, but I found the door was free of them and so I gained access easily.

She had finished here what she had begun in the library of Ponyville. The walls played host to her calculations and matrices, her spiraling eldritch scripts and her half-finished incantations. They were uneven—no, not uneven, downright maddening—and at first I tried to study them. I honestly tried, but I simply couldn’t after some time, don’t you understand? I understood less than half but I understood enough.

Have you… no, of course you haven’t. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound rude. If you’d ever seen a phenomenology of a pony by a true mage you would have been able to understand my discomfort. Those? They are works of art, and being an artist of a sort, I would know. But that is of the physical. What she did on the walls was on herself, and it merely started with the physical. But as I wandered deeper I found cross-sections of a soul laid bare. I stopped reading. There were others, brighter matrices, glowing with the same greenish fire, but I could not bear to look. Because what comes after such an examination? What had she done?

The deeper I ventured, the more the writing seemed to lose what little order it had shown. Her scrawling became more frantic, her spell work more advanced and less legible. Here she was working fast, too fast to keep up with, working up towards some last great release.

The thrones are gone now, and I know not where they are. But in their place there is a great doorway which is lined in old unicorn runes which I cannot read—but I’m sure she can. Even after everything, I want to know what they say. Maybe that’s why I kept going. The need to know.

I opened the door and found stairs that led down, down, down, into some other place.

At this point, I could have still turned back, I think. I should have. Just a few muscles pulling, a few signals different in this diseased mind of mine, and I could have left that ruin behind me and left that awful forest of darkness behind me and slipped back out through the frightened patrols and gone home. I would have had the papers examined by a mage I could trust, and perhaps have reached some closure about the whole business. Poor Twilight, like Ponyville, was gone, and that would have been it. And in the end, wouldn’t that have been enough? Surely it would have been. To die, calmly in my bed, without having delved into that darkest of places?

I want to believe that I could have done anything else. I need to believe it. But while I can tell the occasional fib when I find it prudent… I could not live such a lie. A true lady does not deal in such self-deception.

But what is important is that I climbed down those stairs, lighting my way with a simple cantrip spell. I walked and walked and walked, for what seemed like miles but couldn’t possibly have been. How deep under the earth was I when at last I saw and end to stairs? I cannot hazard a guess, and I’ll explain to you why—

It’s a lovely night, isn’t it? Despite my ramblings, Luna’s work is untarnished. The offer of a place to stay was generous of you, and I would love to take you up on it… but I don’t believe I can. I must say, I was surprised to find you here of all places at first, but it makes sense now. Canterlot is but a short ways away from Ponyville, isn’t it? So very close. As close as you can get without being in mortal peril. You didn’t want to let go of it. Or maybe, just maybe, you too found yourself trapped as I did. You were unable to let go. Days would go by as normal, and then one night you would dream of Ponyville again, and the things we saw there, and you would wake up shivering in the diseased hours between midnight and dawn, slick with sweat, begging the old gods of Dream Valley for mercy.

How did I know about the dreams? We all have them. All of the survivors. You know, I met the poor bookseller the other day. You remember him, on the corner? He is an absolute wreck. I entrusted the pages of the “diary” I had organized from her notes to that poor fellow, and he asked me if I had seen her in dreams. I tried to laugh it off, or suggest that perhaps he should try and read fewer dark things. But then I saw his eyes, and how they looked at everything, including myself.

Oh yes, we’ve all had the dreams. Every single one of us that fled like ants before the boot.

But for now, I should finish my tale.

Yes, I understand. It’s not exactly that you’re eager. I’m certainly not eager to relate it. It’s more that you have a need, isn’t it? As if you somehow know what’s coming next, but you have to hear it anyhow? Yes, I felt the same as I descended.

The end of the stair and the stair itself were strangely lit.

More runes. These I could read, for they were of more modern make. Some of it seemed like doggerel to me, bits of strange verse or half-remembered passages from odd books. I can only speculate on why she marked the walls in this way.

At the time, I remember thinking to myself that it was whim that compelled her. And the more I thought about it, the worse that idea became. I could almost see her, stopping her insane masterwork long enough to scrawl out some silly poem on the rock with her magic. Like how you or I might pause from some late night work to have some coffee, or a lonely writer might walk the block and smoke to clear his head. The juxtaposition of such a mundane, natural, even wholesome thing with the knowledge of what she had worked above and… below, was almost nauseating. It was simply normal. It was just another project.

The end of the stair, yes. I’m sorry, I was lost in thought.

I saw the light before I saw the final step. For a moment, somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I had the most absurd idea that it was the sun. That I’d somehow gotten lost and I would come out aboveground again.

Beneath the earth there was a vast vault. I could not see the top of it, and I could not see its end. A vault so high I thought there might be clouds above, though I saw none, and so long that I thought a world could fit beneath our hooves. And there was a city, and I saw it all laid out before me, for the stairs ended on a cliffside overlooking that… that damnable cathedral!

The city I will not describe to you because I cannot. In the center there was the cathedral, made of light and glass, translucent so as to suggest but never explain its contents, and light shone from it—clear! Clear light but it was not a wholesome light. The streets were winding, and I feared being in the light of the tall, crystalline tower and the shadows alike. I feared the green glow of the torches. I trembled in the alleyways for what felt like weeks, imagining I could hear heartbeats from the walls.

It’s all live, you see. The whole city is alive.

And the ponies are alive, I think. Are they? I don’t know. What does that word mean? If stones can pulse with life than what is life?

Yes, ponies. I saw them. I hid from them in the alleyways, dimming my light spell and praying to every being ponies have ever revered that they would not see me hiding from them. I dashed from hiding place to hiding place, unnerved by how they seemed to walk unencumbered.

You see, I wish I could tell you they were deformed or disfigured somehow. I so wish that I could relate some lesser horror to you then that they were, for all appearances, absolutely normal. They walked. They breathed.

They are building a city.

One finally saw me out in the open. I hesitated a second too long. It was… the teacher. She taught poor, poor Sweetie Belle. I remember her. Even after so many years I remember her. Ponyville’s final day ended a few minutes after school let out, don’t you remember? I imagine the foals bursting out of the little schoolhouse on the edge of town, laughing in the sun. I imagine her smiling a tired, content smile from her desk.

She looked at me with a mute, bored expression. Her eyes were awful. I do not know why, I cannot put it into words except to say that her gaze unnerved me. I was not the city. I held no interest for her.

And yet, when she made no effort to attack me, and I made no effort to do likewise… she followed me. Soon others joined, a dozen or so, following but not seeming to notice me at all.

I wish I could tell you they were monstrous because it would be easier to bear than to hear that they were marionettes. They were puppets. All extensions of a greater will.

I came to the great cathedral. The marionettes that wore the faces of our neighbors stayed outside, staring up at the crystalline tower. The doors were open.

Of course I walked inside. I had no choice either way, now. Where could I go to escape the maddening need to know but inward?

She was there. At first, I did not see her. There was the high dais and the stairs that led up to it. I saw no other doors. It was all glass—and translucent, suggesting the city beyond but not letting one see it, and so at last I was truly alone.

I walked up the stairs. I took them one by one.

Why was I there? Why did I go at all? I did not know until that moment, halfway into my ascent. Hadn’t I felt called to? Hadn’t I felt like all along, in my studying and in my spying, that I had been summoned? That I was, in some way, trying to get back to something?

I ascended.

She was… reading. She was reading, and I could not breathe. She had marked herself with those swirling designs, some thaumic matrix I did not understand. Horrible runes dug into her skin and fortified with sordid magic until they shone as if a sun had taken up lodging in her stomach.

She turned slowly. And… and… Please, please stop, I can’t bear to go any farther.

Celestia! Celestia help me. Her eyes glowed and they were unblinking, like twinned green suns.

She said, “Hello, Rarity.”

And I could not sob, I could not weep, I could not scream. Even when she rose to meet me more properly, and her form wavered like smoke, I could do nothing else.

I said, “Hello, Twilight.”

Author's Note

Title from

Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. --Matthew 22:13

Celestia foresaw many things, but to act was to undo all seeing. The Shadow of the Necromancer bears fruit.

There Are No More Chains On Me

Rarity was practically panting in the streets of Canterlot. Rainbow Dash had thought that she looked drained before, but now she seemed like somepony watching their own murder through a scrying glass. Her eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep. The strange hood she had been wearing had been cast aside, and Rainbow recoiled with shock to see the glowing runes carved into the sides of her head.

“I’m marked,” Rarity hissed, as if struggling to breath. “Rainbow, I saw her.”

“Rarity… oh, Celestia, what did she do to you?”

Rarity laughed. Her magic grabbed ahold of Rainbow’s simple weatherpony uniform and jerked her in closer. The pegasus squirmed, but she couldn’t break the iron grip. They were muzzle to muzzle.

“She rides my mind like a foal at a mayfair revel,” seethed the once-so composed unicorn. Rainbow saw her eyes watering. She smelt the stink rolling off Rarity in waves now, it was impossible to ignore. “I cannot sleep, I cannot do anything to relax or escape her. She rides me hard, from one survivor to the next.”

“What the hell—“

“My story is my last generosity,” choked Rarity. “So at least you’ll know. So you’ll have some idea before you walk in there.”

“Rarity, let go of me!”

“Don’t you feel watched?” Rarity continued. Her eyes bored holes in Rainbow’s own, and yet Rainbow knew that Rarity wasn’t looking at her. She wasn’t looking at anything. “Don’t you feel watched, all the time? Eyes on you? I do. I did, before, but now I know that it isn’t just simple anxiety or fear of the dark.”

Rainbow pushed with both forelegs against Rarity’s chest and they both went sprawling on the cobblestones.

Rainbow took deep breaths, trying to recover some semblance of herself, but Rarity was still babbling.

“Rainbow, do you remember? Do you remember what happened?”

“Of course I do, you idiot! Everyone… they…”

“No! You’re just like me.” Rarity was already back on her hooves, and Rainbow backed away. “You’re exactly like me. You saw it, didn’t you? They talked about necromantic magic in the papers, or blood magic, whoever was writing the story made up some new malady because there was no way to describe it! None of that fit! She saw something! We all did.”

“I just saw the explosion,” Dash growled. “And so did you.”

“The fabric of creation, she tore a hole into it, so we could see the outer dark, and then that too she tore away, until… until…” Rarity’s wide eyes gleamed in the torchlight of old Canterlot. Two mares, former friends, stared each other down.

Rarity sat on her haunches, and buried her head in her hooves.

“Rainbow, we’re the last.”

Dash’s ears flicked. She was seconds from bolting. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Don’t you understand? Didn’t you suspect something? We’re the last ones. She has all the others. Poor… I visited the book seller last night, you see. You were the last. She helped me find you. She pushed me forward, dug into me until I screamed. It’s only you and I that are left outside of the valley.”

“Someone would have noticed,” Rainbow said, but already her mind was working. When was the last time she had seen anypony from Ponyville? When was the last time she had seen another survivor? A week ago?

“Oh, they have. They’ve been watching you, just like they’ve been watching me. They’re terrified, and they should be. You and I? One moment we’re there and the next we aren’t. We slip right through their clever clutches. It’s not because we want to. I could have walked right past those guards. She was there. She was always there. She’s with you too.”

“Get away from me. You’re…” Rainbow spat. “You’re wrong. She’s dead. She died in the library. The mare that doesn’t sleep is a lie, Rarity.”

“I’ve seen her.”

“You saw wrong! You…” she wanted to say it again, but she could not.

“Do you remember? Do you remember what happened when she showed us all what the truth was? Do you remember that terrible secret?” Rarity edged in closer. Dash backed away. “Have you begun to remember? We all saw it… I know I did. My mind put up walls around the… the revelation, but they were breaking bit by bit. The weaker I became, the more I knew I had to go back. The more I felt the need to know. When I’m… when I’m done she’ll… What do you remember?”

“Flying,” Dash replied, her voice a hoarse rasp. “Flying, and then… light? Sound? I crashed. Somepony pulled me.”

“You flew towards the light,” Rarity said. “I remembered that part a few months ago, before I went in.”

She had. She remembered it. “I… but…”

“Rainbow,” Rarity began, “Twilight sent me to you. She sent me to the others. One by one, I’ve visited them and then she…”

“No.”

Rarity tore the robe off. Dash saw the new mark on her flank and recoiled.

“What is that? Sweet Celestia, what did you do?”

“She did this! This is her mark. It’s on you too. Yours just isn’t visible! She already has you. She wants me to say… to say…” Rarity choked. Rainbow hesitated, torn between fleeing the obviously troubled mare in front of her and trying to help, but Rarity ended her indecision by holding a hoof up.

Rarity shuddered. “She wants you to come back. She wants them all to come back. How much do you remember? Do you have a way to stay out of the shadows?”

“I already told you, I—“

Rarity moved forward before Rainbow could elude her. Rarity held her head in a vice between her hooves and stared at her eyes. She wilted, flinched as if slapped. She backed away.

“No, maybe… maybe if you just… if you didn’t go home. If you kept running… flying, I mean,” she began to babble to herself. “Chase the sun, go far away until you were beyond her and her city. You could keep to the light and…” Rarity began to sob. “I don’t want to be the last one!”

Rainbow fled towards home.

She slumped inside of her doorway.

Rarity hadn’t followed. She’d been crying in the street, and Rainbow had left her there to her madness. It was madness, she was sure of that. Rarity was delusional. Oh, Dash believed the first part of her story—the way she’d talked and acted, it wasn’t hard to believe she’d somehow gotten inside the quarantine surrounding Ponyville. Idiot! Of course she would. Always so nosy, always having to know… and now look at her, ranting about impossibilities. Like Twilight. Twilight was dead.

Yet, Rainbow’s heart rate was slow to return to its normal pace despite her certainty. The mind was convinced, but the body doubted.

Some of the things Rarity had said bothered her, that was true. The dreams… but that was easy to explain. It had been a traumatic day for all of the survivors, of course there had been dreams. The being watched was obvious. They’d all been cleared and officially declared clean of corruption by Celestia herself, but Rainbow would have been nervous about ponies who had been so close to whatever the hell Twilight had done if she and the guards positions had been reversed. Her memories were fine, weren’t they?

No, they weren’t. She tried to remember the explosion, but couldn’t.

She remembered… flying. She remembered a noise of some kind. Light.

The harder Dash tried to remember the more her heart hammered in her chest. The closer she got, the more her wings twitched to fly her anywhere but here. The less sure of Rarity’s madness she was, the less she noticed her apartment.

The air was cold, but it had been a cold winter for Canterlot. The light—the one electric light she kept on at all times—was out. The candles throughout had not yet been lit. Darkness wouldn’t do. She couldn’t stand it, couldn’t sleep in it. When she was in the dark she couldn’t help but think in lieu of see.

Rainbow Dash shuddered.

And then, before her in that total darkness, she saw them. She saw the unblinking eyes that glowed with a jade fire invade the sanctity of her living room. The fires were out. The light had failed. Rainbow tried to will herself into flight but her body would not obey. Only now could she feel the slightest touch of magic like a faint electric current over her wings, pinning them to the door.

The eyes came closer. She tried to say something, anything, so as not to die quiet. All that came was a pitiful, low groan of denial. Twilight had stolen her voice. She was doing something else, something Rainbow couldn’t see, but what did it matter? The air was thick with the electric thrum of magic.

And the eyes were so large now, so close, taking up more and more of her vision until they took up the entirety of it. There was nothing for Rainbow to see but the backlight of her eyes and the way the dark twinned abyss at the center of each waited to swallow her up.

Breathing on her face, on her ear, like a blizzard-wind. A voice, unchanged by time or calamity, in her ear.

“I’ve missed you, Rainbow.”

Author's Note

freedom succumbs to
the anxiety of possibility
a great darkness has come into the light
and the light has comprehended it not