Ringing Whicker

It was the beige's breathing! Twilight's nostrils twitched, then flared in fury. Of course it was that wretched, pretentious bag who was at fault. One had only to look at her to see that she thought cloud-gazing put her above everyone else.

Hiding her face in her book, Twilight rolled her eyes at the printed paragraphs. "Story of my life," she thought. "Strangers no smarter than me look down on me. Then, years later, I find out they've been holding me back the whole time."

She tried to breathe in slow, deliberate lungfuls, but the hacksaw tune of wheezing air in her ears made it hard.

"...And the worst thing is, there's nothing I can ever do about it!"

By now, she was staring at the offender, who had reached over and was caressing her purring pet behind the ears, all the while keeping her eyes fixed on some distant vaporous formation. The other passengers hadn't noticed yet.

Obviously, requesting that this stranger blow her nose was out of the question. Twilight could remember a time when she might have done just that, but she had since learned that to be so forthcoming could be hazardous.

At the same time, to continue her last-minute research with THAT sound, all the more deafening for its softness, was not feasible.

She had forgotten to bring ear-plugs.

The erudite equine kneaded the skin of her forehead, grown thin over the last few tiring weeks, with a purple hoof. Scrunching up her gooey eyes, she begrudgingly acknowledged that if she wanted to get any reading done, she would have to do it outside.

Since the train was too small for its own dining car or anything of the sort, that meant standing in the corridor for the next two hours.

Effervescent loathing boiled up in Twilight's ribcage at the thought. She hated the wheezing dreamer with nothing better to do with her life-time than to lose herself in sky-mist. She hated herself too, for having brought a portable portal detector, Volume V of the Guide to Old Ponish Toponyms, and a custom-made pocket cloud chamber from Cloudsdale but forgotten her ear-plugs.

"Twilight, stop," she chided herself. "Impotent rage, condemnation of others, self-loathing... You're starting to remind me of Case Study No. 33," the thought articulated itself further as she glanced at the golden words "Pony Psychosis" on the cover of the closed tome which floated before her in a levitation field.

She tried to hold all four of her hooves still for a moment, tried to pace her breathing, tried to drown out THAT sound by flooding her mind with silence.

She told herself that resignation was better than resentment, and was about to get up and walk out quietly when the train entered a tunnel.

In an instant, darkness had filled every crack and crevice. All around Twilight was a heavy quiet, though the beige mare's wheezing breath managed to slice through that, too. Twilight decided to wait it out, and make her exit as soon as she could see something again.

After a few blinks, she began to grow accustomed to the lack of light. Still, she saw nothing, which allowed her to pretend that she was all alone and thereby relax a little. Then she saw something.

It was roughly opposite her. It looked like two coins which someone had covered in phosphorus. She had no idea what it was.

That was unsettling.

Ponykind has had a fear of the dark Since time immemorial, since the first equines, tiny and hoofless, huddled together in terror of the stealthy foes that slunk through the shadows with teeth like gleaming scimitars.

Even a child of modernity such as Twilight could not escape the uncompromising programming chiseled into her genome numberless moons ago.

Reason came to her rescue. The cat! These were its eyes. She relaxed a little, without removing her attention from the creature.

Her heart rate settled down little by little, and she managed the spunk to be snarky with herself about it: "Twilight, my dear, at this rate you'll be aged and grey before your children finish school..."

With blood in her ears no longer deafening her, she began picking up little sounds all around. The stallion, as far as she could tell, was screwing on the lid of his ink bottle. The old mare was - somehow - still knitting, though she seemed to have slowed.

As for the wheezing nuisance opposite her - she was gone. She was gone, or seemed to be. The hideous breathing sound had stopped. Silence was now where she had been before.

In the moment when Twilight became aware of her acoustic disappearance, the two glowing coals opposite her rose into the air, rose higher than they should have, left Twilight looking up at them in an enchanted impression, at last making out even their black pupils, where the darkness had infiltrated the light; pausing briefly as a crash was heard and cold tunnel air coursed around Twilight's body, they leapt into the darkness and vanished.

Twilight jumped up and rushed over to the window, narrowly circumnavigating the young stallion, who had sprung up as well. They stared into the blackness rushing past outside as Twilight asked, intensely: "Did you see what happened?"

"The cat jumped out..." said he, wavering. The tunnel came to its end. Abruptly, sunlight flooded the wagon, blinding the two of them. Pressing her eyelids together, the Princess of Friendship noticed the absence of another sound. The knitting needles had stopped.

She jerked her head around, and the stallion did the same, though he likely hadn't taken note of the change. The old mare held her long ivory needles as one, pointing towards the window seat to her left. Their two heads swivelled round and they saw, with a sinking feeling, that the beige mare was gone.

"She must have left -" Twilight intoned with an uncertain gesture to the door.

" You think so?" asked the stallion. He looked as though he wanted to believe it, but didn't.

Now the crone spoke, her words difficult to distinguish from the wind which whipped past outside: "She didn't." She left it at that.

Twilight gulped, swallowing the ugly truth, but the frog in her throat remained. "Of course not," she acknowledged, "If she had, how could the window have been torn off its hinges like this?"

The stallion put on a serious face to say:"We should notify..." but Twilight was already at the door.

"I'm on it," she declared with a reassuring look back which made the stallion raise an eyebrow but had no effect on the wagon's other remaining occupant, who had gone back to knitting.

She tore open the door and stormed out.