| ]V[ A ]] E | ][ ]\[ | ]-[ E A V E ]\[ |
Ponyville, exactly six and a half in the morning. The first rays of the Sun enter through the half-opened blinds of the window in Twilight's room. Twilight wakes up.
Three seconds later, the blanket stops falling and touches the bed once again. It was flung upwards as soon as the alicorn opened her eyes. This gave Twilight enough room to roll off the side of the bed facing the door, and teleport as she was doing so, finishing her roll as she reappeared on the other side. Now she's running down the corridor.
Hooves slightly curved, to get a better grip on the crystal floor. Fifteen and a half long steps to get to the stairs, the last one melting into a jump towards the hoofrail. The acceleration is enough to make sliding down faster than running.
A push of her wings against the wall as she reaches the floor below, just enough to realign her with the next corridor as she lands back to her hooves. Running again.
It takes twenty-seven steps to get to where she needs to be on this floor. Thirteen steps in, her horn begins to light up. Eighteen steps in, she fires. The blast hits the floor ahead of her as she takes the twenty-second step, and by the time she arrives the floor has just finished collapsing.
She falls, down and forward, her legs mid-step. The hind hoof she was bringing down to the ground moves two and a half centimetres to the right in the middle of its trajectory, and makes contact with the spine of a book lying on the shelf.
The blast of magic keeps travelling, downwards and slightly forwards. It hits the floor once again, exhausting all of its charge as it burns a new hole in it and turns the debris to dust.
As she falls through the library, Twilight moves forward of about the distance she covers in one step and three quarters. Her legs only go through half their walking cycle, save for her right hind leg, which moves to pass the book she grabbed to her wing. Her heads tilts seven degrees to the right as she passes through the hole, avoiding contact between her horn and the edge.
Twilight lands back on the ground, perfectly positioned, resuming her run as she does. The main door is straight ahead. She teleports past it as she reaches the second to last column lining the wall, pushing herself into a slight jump, and lands in front of the stairs leading up to the entrance, still running.
Ponyville passes by beside her, and she earns a couple of curious looks from the few ponies already awake, and from the one who hasn't slept in the first place.
One house. Two houses. Three houses. Three houses and a shop. At the fourth house, she pushes herself to the right, aiming for the corner of the fifth one. The intangibility spell is cast a moment before her horn touches the wall, and it lasts exactly enough for the fourteen steps it takes her to exit through the opposite corner. A single hair from her tail, slightly longer than the rest, remains stuck in the wall, and Twilight winces as it's ripped off.
The rooms she passed were a kitchen and a bedroom. The latter is empty, as the son returned late last night and fell asleep on the couch. In the sink, two dishes and a glass still half-full with sparkling water. Stuck under one of the bed's legs, a guitar pick that the son lost forty-seven days ago. On the upper floor the parents' bedroom, where both are sleeping. Crossing the house diagonally takes seven seconds less compared to going around it, not accounting for the time lost by slowing down when changing direction.
Twilight keeps running. There's a pebble on the ground in front of her, where her left hind hoof will land in six steps. It was kicked there yesterday's afternoon by a young colt as he walked back home from school. Twilight steps on the pebble. It hurts a little, given how hard she's running. She loses about one fifth of a second because of it.
In the castle, Starlight wakes up.
A pony pulling a cart full of vegetables is walking down the road perpendicular to the one Twilight is running on. Given his walking speed and his distance from the intersection, he will get there before Twilight, but still be there in the middle when she arrives.
Starlight, walking out of her room, notices the hole in the floor.
There's a potted plant lying on a balcony to Twilight's left, three steps ahead. Twilight's left wing extends with a quick jerk as she passes it, only far enough to barely touch it. A single leaf is ripped off by the motion, and as it floats downwards a gust of wind pushes it forward and ahead of Twilight.
The pony pulling the cart stops for a moment, distracted by a single leaf floating in front of him, just as he's about to cross the road. As he lifts his head to follow it, his eyes catch something moving in front of him, and he turns back to see a purple blur running down the street.
The edge of Ponyville is in sight for Twilight. Beyond it she can see the outer rim of the Everfree Forest. Three buildings before arriving there, she takes a sharp turn left, followed by a sharp turn right, effectively moving to the road to the left and parallel to the previous one.
An empty glass bottle sits at the side of a porch two buildings ahead and to her right. The mare living there gets milk delivered once a week, at around seven in the morning, and she leaves the previous bottle there the night before for the filly tasked with delivering the milk to pick back up and bring back to the farm.
Starlight hurriedly looks around the library for signs of what happened, and she notices a line of books titled to the side, up on a shelf where one of them was removed.
Two steps before arriving at the porch, Twilight moves her right wing in a sweeping vertical arc and throws the book up and forward and very slightly to the side. As her wing comes back down from the motion, it grabs on to the empty bottle and moves to hold it close to Twilight's side. Two steps later, Twilight extends her left wing and grabs the falling book.
The edge of the forest is close. Twilight has to make a choice. As she takes time to think, there's a very subtle decrease in her speed. Just a moment before reaching the edge though, her pace picks back up, having made up her mind.
She enters the forest, and heads slightly to the left. Her head ducks to avoid a low-hanging branch. Her pace switches to a differently cadenced one, as her hooves rhythmically skip up and down, landing in the empty patches of grass and avoiding contact with the vines on the ground. Her trip proceeds uneventfully for a minute.
As she nears a noticeably twisted tree, she takes a hard right turn, precisely seven steps before it. She continues on, her trajectory leaning to the left, and thirty-nine steps after her turn right she leaps, landing on the other side of a hole hidden behind a bush, large enough to fit a pony and deep enough to contain one five and a half times.
A bugbear walks up to the tree and inspects it, then leaves. It came from deeper in the forest, after a small scuffle with a pack of timberwolves. It'll fly up to the edge of Ponyville, then return into the forest, stopping near the same tree to check on it again.
Twilight's horn flashes purple, and the book slips from her grip, remaining suspended in mid-air by her spell. She leaves it behind, now curving her path more to the left. Her horn flashes again, and she teleports downwards by exactly seven times her height.
She reappears in the underground cave, still running. Her wing stretches out, holding the bottle with the tips of her feathers, as she gathers up the water from the mirror pool at her side while running along it. The wall of the cavern is ahead of her, and as the bottle is filled up to five sevenths of its capacity she prepares her magic one more time. She retracts her wing, but waits on activating her spell. Three steps, just enough to get away from the tree above her, then she disappears.
She reappears above ground, running in the opposite direction. The turn was of one hundred and seventy-five degrees, to accommodate for the slightly curved path taken inside the cave while coasting alongside the edge of the pool, and Twilight's body was also moved half a step to her now right, giving her a clearer path ahead.
The alicorn fires a spark of magic forward and to the left. The energy crackles behind a bush, no real power to it but a great deal of sound and light accompanying it. Originally a spell Trixie came up with, though she had to rework it after she found it was rather unpleasant to her spectators, driving them away rather than simply impressing them.
The overly flashy nature of the spell is not unwelcomed, however, as it startles a group of timberwolves roaming the forest. They would have otherwise crossed Twilight's path, trying to run after her, and had the Princess not been there they would have instead moved towards Ponyville. However, they simply turn back and walk away, as indicated by the rustling sound Twilight hears while running past the bush.
She reaches the book again, grabbing it into her wing only three quarters of a second after the spell expired and it began to fall towards the ground again. Now she heads further to her left, deeper into the forest, as her hooves still avoid all vines while maintaining a proper running pace. She carefully balances the bottle, making sure the contents do not spill, and occasionally ducks to avoid a branch or vine.
After twenty-four minutes and sixteen seconds of running, she reaches the staircase leading down to where the Tree of Harmony is located. She jumps from the edge, throwing the book and bottle towards the sky with calculated, uneven swipes of her wings, and glides down towards the entrance to the cave. She touches the ground again after two and a half seconds spent in the air, and grabs hold of the two things once more as they descend from the sky, the book having spun while in mid-air while the bottle remained perfectly vertical thanks to her technique.
She runs into the cave, and upon nearing the Tree her horn lights up, as she reaches out for the Elements and then takes hold of them and brings them to float around her, enveloped in her magical aura. She heads to the left and runs a circle around the tree before heading out, saving one second and three tenths over stopping to turn around. Her run to the staircase is uneventful, save for her rearranging the Elements's disposition around her to the most aerodynamic configuration possible, taking into account the contents of her wings.
Outside a house near the outskirts of Ponyville, a small filly carrying a cart stares at the empty porch, wondering if the mare who lives there forgot to put the bottle out or if she didn't finish all the milk. She tilts her head to the side, pursing her lips for three seconds, then shrugs and walks away.
Twilight runs up the stairs to get back to the forest, taking the steps two at a time. It's faster than flying given her limited skills, and teleportation has to be kept at minimum due to the high consumption of energy, especially now that she's carrying objects with her telekinesis and not just with her wings. She reaches the top and takes a hard turn left, resuming her peculiar running gait to dodge all holes and rocks and inconveniences and land on even ground with each step.
Starlight, Spike riding on her back with a drowsy expression on his face, dashes across the streets of Ponyville, asking anypony she meets if they happen to have seen Twilight. Distracted, her eyes darting around for signs of the alicorn, she bumps into a stallion pulling a cart full of vegetables, and the contents end up all over the street. Ponies quickly come in to help, and Starlight apologises, mortified.
In the forest, Twilight feels a sting of regret. She slows down a tiny bit, then speeds back up again, shaking her head subtly.
In the Crystal Empire, Sunburst wakes up. He walks out of his room, having donned his signature cape and glasses, and heads towards Flurry's room to check in on the young princess before going to get breakfast. The filly is soundly asleep, lying on her left side, and Sunburst smiles to himself as he closes the door and walks away.
Moondancer walks into the library in Canterlot. She makes her way towards the bookcase she's looking for, seventeen steps to get there, consulting a note held to her side by her magic, and once there she scans the shelves for five seconds before picking the book for herself. She walks, eight and a half steps, to the nearest table, smiling, and sits down. She opens the book and reads for nineteen minutes and thirteen seconds before taking a pause.
Twilight sees Zecora's hut in front of her. She closes her eyes, readies her horn, and fires. She keeps running, eyes still closed, picking up the still intact vial to her right three seconds after the smell of burnt wood hit her nostrils. It reminds her of her old library, though here it's tinged with the exotic smell of sizzling alchemical ingredients rather than charred paper. She reopens her eyes only fifty steps after picking up the potion, having meanwhile dodged a tree in her path by sidestepping to the left while running.
Zecora stares, wide eyed and speechless, at the flaming remains of her home. The fire is rapidly consuming what the blast didn't destroy, and as it reaches the reserves of her ingredients it takes on shades of purple, green and blue. After a moment of indecision and disbelief, the zebra dashes forward, intent on containing the fire and stop it from spreading to the forest, even at the cost of losing what little is left of her belongings. Colourful smoke rises from the ashes of her home, and in fifteen minutes pegasi who noticed it will be there to help. There won't be a hut left, but the fire will be successfully contained.
Twilight speeds up, now on a frequently beaten path. Her breath comes in sharp bursts, feeling like blades on her throat. She could give a fully detailed explanation of why she feels a strong localised pain below her ribcage, but it wouldn't change the fact that it hurts, nor would it help her. Instead, she thinks about snails. Thinking about snails works surprisingly well to distract her, better than thinking about cats or grasshoppers. Not as much as thinking about chameleons, but that would distract her too much and she'd trip and fall, losing half a minute without counting the loss of speed afterwards.
In Canterlot, inside the palace, outside of Luna's chambers, a guard passing by trips on a crease in the carpet and falls, the clacking of his armour awakening the sleeping alicorn. The maid in charge of cleaning the corridor didn't do her job this morning, as she was busy arguing with one of the cooks about yesterday's dinner. The guard quickly gets back to his hooves and walks away, as Luna closes her eyes to go back to sleep. It will take her two minutes and forty-eight seconds to fall asleep again.
Ponyville is in sight. Twilight runs, the wind blowing past her mane, the ground a blur below her. Her teeth are grinding against each other, her breath heavy, her horn pulsating to keep the Elements and the vial floating around her in their designing positions, wings clenched to hold the bottle and book, careful not to spill the former's contents. She hits a pebble with her hoof, and sends it flying forward. It doesn't land.
Twilight slows down and stops, catching her breath.
"Well well."
Twilight walks a few steps forward, a tired sigh escaping her lips as she distractedly nods her head from side to side.
"What game are we playing here, Twilight?" Discord asks, his head dropping down from above as he remains suspended in mid-air, as if laying on some invisible branch of an invisible tree.
Twilight stares at him. "That's none of your business, Discord."
"Oh really?" He disappears in a flash of light, reappearing behind her. "That's weird. You see, I thought making ponies act randomly was my thing, but it looks like you don't need my help with that."
Twilight clicks her tongue impatiently. "Well, where's the problem? I thought you liked chaos. What's there to worry about if I'm doing all this without a reason?" she asks.
"You are not doing this without a reason," Discord snaps, reappearing in front of her and pointing a talon to her muzzle. "You don't do things without a reason, Sparkle."
The alicorn looks back at him, almost smirking, yet wearing a sad-looking expression. "And what is the reason?"
Discord remains in silence for a few seconds, or what feels like a few seconds, as Twilight looks around at the birds hanging frozen in time, their wings still and unbeating yet their bodies unaffected by gravity. Finally, he grunts, throwing his head back. "Fine!" he shouts. Defeatedly, he lowers his head back towards her, and admits, "I don't know."
Twilight stares back, a strange expression on her face.
The draconequus returns to pointing at her, his expression more serious this time. "Listen, Twilight. I don't know what you're planning, but I know you're planning something."
"You'll find out, won't you? Just let me go, no reason to keep me here anymore."
Discord draws back. "I don't know what you're doing, but that doesn't mean I don't have my ideas." He floats around to Twilight's side. "It's late Twilight, it's too late. It already was, it always was, and it'll always be. It doesn't matter how far you go, it's never early enough. Take it from someone who tried."
Twilight turns, but he's nowhere to be seen. Instead, all she sees are the trees streaking by beside her, as she's running towards Ponyville. She hits a pebble, and it lands in front of her half a second after. Twenty-three seconds remain before she arrives in the town, given her current pace. On the outskirts of town she can see two foals playing tag. One is a unicorn, while the other a pegasus. The unicorn is forbidden from using her magic to teleport, as the pegasus thinks it's unfair that she can just pop up in front of him, and to compensate he doesn't fly. She's not fast enough to keep up with him though, so she'll end up teleporting anyway four minutes from now. They'll have a scuffle, and go their separate ways for a bit, but after forty-six minutes they'll both apologise, and go back to playing something else.
The alicorn runs past the first house. Her castle, her next destination, looms ahead of her. She takes a turn to the right though, moving to run on another street. It costs her twelve seconds, but prevents her from running into Starlight, who walks into the street she was just in nine seconds after Twilight took her right turn, still looking for her, a preoccupied expression on her face.
Rarity's boutique opens its doors to the day's first customer, a light-blue pegasus mare looking for a fancy dress to wear at a formal party in Manehattan a friend invited her to. The white unicorn cheerfully trots up to her, asking what she's interested in in a pleasant tone, and as she gets her reply she starts to study the other mare's body, thinking about what dress might best suit her needs. Ten minutes later, the pegasus will walk out of the shop, satisfied with her purchase, and that evening Rarity will make some sketches for a new dress inspired by the customer's colour scheme.
In another corner of Ponyville, a rather sugary one specifically, just as the pegasus first enters Carousel Boutique, Pinkie Pie happily bounces up and down around the counter and across the shelves, grabbing the ingredients she needs to prepare the next batch of sweets. A weird tingle has been nagging at the base of her head all day long, but she can't pinpoint that specific manifestation of her Pinkie Sense to any event she knows of, so she has decided to wait and see what it might be caused by. She stops a moment, bringing a hoof to her chin to ponder whether she should use white or black chocolate, then shrugs and decides to go with both.
Rainbow Dash's room is empty, as the pegasus woke up early to exercise. She's taking a nap now though, lazily draped over a floating cloud just outside of Ponyville. She's been there for seven minutes, after taking fifteen flight laps around town. She'll be there another two, and afterwards she plans to go back home and finish up the book she started last night, which will take her until lunch hour. Then she'll pay a visit to Applejack, though the earth pony won't do much with her besides conversation, being busy with her work on the farm.
Fluttershy finished feeding her animals precisely one minute and thirteen seconds ago, and now she's walking back towards her house. She stops at the mailbox, checking for any letters or packages. She finds none of the former, but she does find a small package, light-brown cardboard neatly folded together in a parallelepipedal shape as wide as her hoof and half as long as her foreleg, held together by a single line of translucent tape. There's nothing written on it save for her address, neatly visible in sharp black letters. She blushes, looking around to see if anypony else is there, then places it beneath her wing and trots to the door. She locks it behind her, and six seconds later she's unwrapping the package on the table, helping herself with a pair of round-ended scissors.
As Fluttershy opens the mailbox, Applejack cocks her head back and to the side by seventeen degrees, giving a tentative prod to the cartwheel in front of her. She mumbles around the wrench in her mouth, then dives forward again to tighten the bolts further. The wheel was damaged the day before, while Big Macintosh was pulling the cart up on a slope and a rock got stuck between the wheel and body. It didn't come off, but it would have in the future if not fixed. Applejack has been working on it for twelve minutes and thirty-six seconds. She pulls her head back again and gives a push to the cart, rolling it back and forth to make sure the wheel is working properly.
Twilight runs. Past houses and shops, past the confused expressions of ponies seeing her, past doors and streets and trees and flowerbeds and the occasional statue, past the daily lives of those around her, on towards her home, her castle, step by step. Twelve seconds away now. Nine. Seven, then six, then five. The door's not on the side she's running towards, but that's better for her plans, it'll save her half a second on her way up, the spell gives a better grip when it's on pure crystal. A new light flares on her horn, accompanying the already present glow born from levitating the Elements. One seconds before reaching the wall, the spell leaves her horn and a purple glow encompasses her hooves.
Twilight runs, up the wall to her castle, against the pull of gravity. Ponies stare up at the glowing purple shape climbing the crystal shape of the tree-like building towering over the rest of the city. Starlight, from her position just outside of town, turns back and sees her, and simply watches, only the faintest idea in her mind of what is happening. More and more ponies spot the alicorn, as she climbs higher, as she glows brighter. The light around her horn glows up to a searing white, larger than her head, then larger than her body, so bright she has to close her eyes and still the blinding glow pierces through her eyelids. It doesn't matter, she knows how many more steps she needs to take. Eight more, and she reaches the top.
Across Ponyville, windows shatter. Bottles break, glasses explode. Statues crumble, walls crack, grass is flattened. Every pony who wasn't already staring at the alicorn turns their head towards the centre of town, some poking out of windows and doors, some walking out entirely. And they all watch, as the great crystal spire of Princess Twilight's castle is reduced to a million glassy fragments, grey and drained of colour. As the light of the spell fades away, as the whistling sounds of the blast clears from their ears, they all watch. First the top, then all the structure, descending in what amounts to a few seconds yet feels like minutes. Millions, billions even, no bigger than marbles, all evenly broken, the way crystals break. And a moment later, the shiny grey mound of lifeless rocks is all that's left, the contents of the castle buried under it and in places poking out. And not a trace of Princess Twilight in sight.
Cadance enjoys her morning chocolate, walking down the hallway to her palace, while in Canterlot Celestia huffs, already tired by her routine, as she nods to the boring declarations and whining of a noble in front of her. Luna sleeps in her chamber, dreaming peacefully of the old library in the old castle, with its star-filled ceiling mirroring the sky beyond it and its long hallway she used to float through. Moondancer turns a page on the book she's reading, in time with Sunburst lulling Flurry to calmness as he stands by Shining's side. A guard in a hallway falls asleep, losing her bet with her friend, and the city's collection of hourglasses goes unguarded. No one's there to steal any though.
Twilight reappears in a narrow dark alley, moves three steps ahead and falls to the ground, bringing a hoof to her lips to help keep them shut and not vomit. It would lose her seventeen seconds, and twenty more to clean herself up. She lies on the ground for fifteen seconds, fighting through the nausea and malaise born from the hyper-precise double long distance teleportation spell. Her horn aches, her every heartbeat resonates in her temples like cannon fire, and beneath her it feels like the floor has suddenly decided to take on dancing. The book, bottle and Elements are neatly positioned on an otherwise empty shelf inside a broom closet in the upper floors of Canterlot's castle, while the vial rests safely beneath her wing.
She gets up, and stumbling slightly she takes the ten steps necessary to get out of the alley, then turns right and heads towards the tall tower at the centre of the Crystal Empire, just a minute of walking away. She doesn't run, her legs too tired and her head still spinning. Twenty-seven seconds after exiting the alley, she reaches a fountain in the middle of a square, and drops inside the water, much to the confusion of the ponies who see her. She remains completely hidden underwater for thirteen seconds, holding her breath as Shining Armor walks across the plaza, then just as he's rounding a corner she gets out, gasping for air, and resumes her stumbling walk towards the Crystal Heart.
Thirty-three seconds later, she steps under the tower and keeps moving forward. Ponies walk around her, some appearing concerned about her, some admiring the Heart. Some are tourists, but most of them are local residents. Twilight pulls up the vial from under her wing, uncorks it and brings it up to her lips, downing the contents in one swing between two breaths. She's just five steps away from the Heart now, and the potion begins to take effect, slowly starting to dull the pain. Her horn begins to glow, the light rapidly expanding.
"Twilight!" Cadence calls, quickly trotting up to the purple alicorn after having appeared beneath the tower herself in a flash of magic. "I thought I saw you from the balcony. What brings you here, dear?" she continues as she walks up to her, reading herself for her traditional greeting with the mare she used to foalsit.
Twilight ignores her, as her horn grows brighter, and a second purple glow appears around it as her magical aura envelops the Crystal Heart floating and spinning in front of her.
Cadence cocks her head to the right, exactly twenty-five degrees and a half. "Twilight?" she asks, a worried expression forming on her face.
Twilight doesn't reply, but she turns towards her for a moment, as the spell goes off.
The pink alicorn shields her eyes from the blinding light, and a moment later reopens them, as more and more ponies around her run up to the centre of town to see what happened. The crystal pavement has been left with cracks in it, extending along the streets and not confined to below the tower. Similar cracks ride up the walls of the palace itself, and down along the upper section of the Heart's platform. The rest of the platform has been shattered, the Heart is missing and so is Princess Twilight.
In a park in Canterlot, a butterfly floats around an empty bench beneath a tree, up on a hill looking over the gardens around. Colts and fillies play together, as their parents watch them and talk to each other. They all seem happy. The day will go by, and after a picnic there in the park for lunch and more playing in the afternoon they'll return to their homes, promising each other to be back there the next day. Fall will come, the older ones will stop coming there in the morning, and most afternoons will see the park empty, heavy rain pouring down on it. Then winter, and they'll be playing together in the snow.
The butterfly will be dead by then. The trees will be a little taller, the bench a little more worn out. Years will pass, new faces will populate the park as the now newborns grow up, while the ponies now playing there will have grown up and be caught up in the spirals of their daily lives, and won't come to chase each other between the trees anymore. Some of them will one day bring their foals to play there, like they did when they were young, and they'll look at them and smile, and talk with their friends about nothing in particular.
The butterfly lands on the bench. The painting is chipped, the wood showing some signs of wear. It was installed there back when Twilight was still a little filly, and she never remembered it any other way. The previous bench had to be changed when a lightning struck the tree and broke off a branch, which fell on it. Her mother had told her about how that bench had first been installed, after a season of particularly heavy rain and one too many skipped maintenance checks had led the screws to rust and corrode through the wood of the previous one.
Twilight didn't remember a time before the bench, though she had been alive for a bit before that. She had the faintest memory of the smell of fresh paint, likely coming from something her father worked on, some piece of furniture or maybe repainting a ceiling. It wasn't her first memory, or at least she couldn't say for certain, as it belonged in that nebulous section of her mind housing fragments of the memories of her earliest foalhood. But for some irrational, perhaps sentimental reason, she'd decided to believe it was the smell of the bench when it was first installed, and it was her first memory. Maybe because it gave her a date, maybe because it represented a change of sorts, something beside herself to testify her existence, something she could point to and compare herself to.
The butterfly takes off again. Down in the park, a colt slips, tripping on a root bulging slightly from the ground. He starts to cry, and immediately his parents run towards him to see what happened, while some of the foals around him defensively draw back and declare their innocence. The wound is nothing but a small scratch on his knee, but it still hurts, and it would be probably better to clean off the dirt with some water. His mother grabs him in her hooves and hugs him, whispering to him about how it's going to be alright. He calms down a little, still sobbing but not crying, and his parents carry him away for the moment. He'll be back in the afternoon, the scratch already forgotten.
Maybe the bench will be replaced with a metal one next time.
Twilight steps forward on the soft crimson carpet of the castle's corridor, her hoofsteps muffled and barely audible. Her horn sizzles, stray sparks flying off as smoke puffs up from the tip. Her breath is heavy, her brow and her body covered in cold sweat, her wings limp at her sides, and she feels none of it. All she feels is a slightly warm numbness, and the dryness in her mouth. She walks for three seconds, until she reaches another corridor, crossing the one she's on. There she stops, and an invisibility spell envelops her body, as she holds her breath. A guard passes in front of her, then takes a left turn four seconds later, and Twilight releases the spell and her breath.
She walks to her left. She has twelve seconds. This section of the corridor remains out of sight of every one of the guards for exactly twelve seconds every seven minutes. In four she reaches the door she's looking for. Two to open it, two more to grab the Elements, the book and the bottle and to close it. Three to get back to the other corridor, walking faster than before, and once there she starts to run.
One minute, six seconds and four tenths. The entire corridor's length, half of it the other way around on the floor above, and the eighteen steps of the staircase between the two. The library's doorsblast open, the guards outside already knocked out by two blasts of magic. Twenty seconds later, the lock on a book in the restricted section of the archives bursts into pieces, and one more book begins to float in Twilight's purple magical aura.
One last burst of teleportation magic. Celestia looks dumbfounded for a moment, her table flipped on the ground and her teapot shattered, her cup still in the air, halfway up to her mouth. She stares at Twilight, unsure of what is happening, as the purple alicorn leaps forward and pushes herself further by kicking the edge of the balcony. Then she sees what Twilight is carrying with her, and her teacup drops to the floor as she shouts something, a thin bolt of golden magic fired from her horn.
Half a tenth of a second too late. The translucent purple sphere of Twilight's magic has already closed around the young princess, four times as tall as her, as light once more pours from her tired horn. The books open, letters on their pages light up and rip from the paper. As the tomes are reduced to ash by the energy coursing through them, the arcane symbols glowing on their surfaces move towards each other, mingling and intertwining in the air, and their colours change as new sentences are formed.
The contents of the bottle float out of it, as the glass turns to dust and floats away. As Twilight's bubble keeps moving forward in the air, two separate streams of water split off and move in opposite directions, one towards the sky and one towards the ground. Once they are one third of the sphere's diameter away from the edge of it, they flatten into a thin horizontal layer, pressing against the borders of the magical bubble. Just as the sphere finds itself exactly above the fountain far below, the two layers stabilise, looking almost like a pair of lenses.
The runes and sigils floating around Twilight dispose themselves in a circle around her, and violently shake once. They now appear black, their colours propelled away in what feels like a short, intensely moving wave, and as it passes through the world around the alicorn it feels like it's stripping something away, like reality becomes unstable around her, its foundations exposed and vulnerable. The sky and the city are no longer visible outside the bubble, and all Twilight can see is a shaking buzz of multicoloured strokes.
The Elements and the Crystal Heart position themselves around her, lying flat on the symbols. Reality shakes one more time, and now they are part of the inscription, black, flat, two-dimensional marks floating in the air. The world around the bubble becomes more violent, buzzing faster, moving louder, lines and stripes of colour clashing and pushing against each other.
Twilight looks up, at the mirror of silver-tinged water floating above her returning an infinite series of copies of herself past it as light bounces back and forth between it and the one below her. She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, and lowers herself.
The world shakes one more time. Twilight feels herself pulled apart, flattened, her essence exposed, her body reduced to lines and colour as her mind struggles to remain in one piece, as she too becomes part of the markings floating in the void around her, nothing more than a lifeless black stain over nothingness. The bubble bursts, and the mirrors collapse over the circle of runes, and all disappears as everything is swallowed by the swirling maelstrom of colours and movement.
Twilight is whole again, herself again. She's falling. Now she's floating. Around her, the void warps into a spiralling shape, marked by signs, thin and short white lines over the translucent blue of the cylinder she's passing through. And as she falls through it, floating out of it, one more mark is added. She doesn't know how many there are. She hasn't counted. She has decided not to count them.
Twilight lands. On a flat plane of what feels like glass, endlessly empty in all directions, small clouds of mist floating around. In front of her a unicorn, looking ahead, who seems not to have noticed her yet. Twilight walks forward, small, hesitant, hopeful steps towards the unicorn.
Twilight turns around, and stares at Twilight, and stares past Twilight, not seeing her. She sighs. "I must have been late again," she says, a hint of sadness in her voice.
Twilight raises a trembling hoof. She tries to say something, but nothing comes out. The mist around her pools and swirls, and raises walls around her, and swallows her as the other walks away and fades.
Twilight falls, through empty blackness, screaming frustration.
Ponyville, exactly six and a half in the morning. The first rays of the Sun enter through the half-opened blinds of the window in Twilight's room. Twilight wakes up.
Author's Note
Today is a special day for me here on Fimfiction. Exactly one year ago (assuming I didn't forget to post this thing on time) I published my first (new) story. Not technically my first story on here, but the previous attempts were less than mediocre and were all removed for a reason (and will all be rewritten at some point, as seen with Memories (yes, even Mitternacht, when I find the time and with substantial changes over the original)). So, to celebrate the occasion, I decided it was the right time to finally talk a bit more directly with you people. Not yet the time to comment, I'm saving that for a very special occasion, and definitely not the time for me to write a blog, but this is something at least.
And so here we are, one year and fifty stories later. I like to imagine this story (I swear the length was a coincidence) as closing a circle of sorts with the first one, it started with Sunset running and it ends with Twilight running. Starlight and Trixie will get their turns eventually. And yes, the title is a JoJo's reference. I'd like to take a moment to look over the stories I've published here so far, as a whole at least. Some where very popular, others not so much. Some were well received, others less so. Some I'm very fond of, some not that much. And one is literally just a barely edited version of a pm I sent to another author. But aside from one instance of a terribly rushed piece (that, too, will get rewritten at some point) everything else has stayed up. Because they all did what I wanted them to do, and I don't want to erase a part of my journey here in this site. If I thought something was good enough to go up when I posted it, then I think it should stay up now.
My time here on Fimfiction has been enjoyable, I would say. While of the small amount people I've gone out of my way to interact with or know more about here most I've found uninteresting, and a selected few downright dislikeable, others have been rather pleasant, and one in particular I have found to be a wonderful person that I'm glad I got to meet. Their work inspired me to come back to writing on this site in the first place, and I was glad to see I like them as a person just as much as I liked them as an author. And I haven't met that many people here, really, so I certainly don't think I have seen enough to judge the community as a whole. I wouldn't even see a point in that, I always try to judge people individually. There is one user in particular I'm interested in talking to and might pm in the future, if for no other reason than to ask whether they intentionally placed that one story in their favourites or they simply forgot to switch to their alt. They're probably reading this, they're following me after all. And before I forget, mandatory shout-out to ~~the best writer on this site~~ Wintermist, whose stories you should read. Seriously, if you have time to read mine then it would be better spent there.
But with that said, hey, I'm still on this site! I had some hiccups here and there, and I can't promise it won't happen again, but I have no intention of leaving this site for good anytime soon. Not until I run out of songs to reference, at least. You'll know when I'm leaving, trust me, but the time for me to write Sacred Mind (yes that will be the title of my last story, spoilers) is still pretty far away from what I can tell. I like writing here, and I have no plans to stop, just maybe there will be times when I'm not available for a while. Speaking of that, more stories are coming, and more updates for my ongoing ones. I have planned or even half-written chapters ready for almost all of them (except Spaceships & Dice Rolls, inspiration has been kind of lacking there, I apologise). I have plans for future stories, a lot of which concerning that weird Equestria Girls AU of mine, but for other things as well. And I think it's fair if I give you a little teaser of what's to come. The order isn't necessarily what you see here, and some might go unwritten for a long time, but I'll get to all of them eventually.
That's all for now, I think. Thanks to my followers and to all the people who read my stories, I might not be here still if it wasn't for you. I was never one to talk much (outside of that one Discord server I'm active on, try to find it if you want), so I suppose this is the end of this for now. Until the next story then. Probably buryallthefalseravens, then Dying for an Angel and Letter Unsent together at the end of the month (also a special day for me), the Raridrunk "trilogy" possibly between the two or maybe before and after, I don't know. And that one story I'm hiding up there should come out late August, that will be an interesting one (and if you're confused about what I'm talking about here, this whole notes thing has links throughout it, you probably missed them). And maybe I'll finish up Sparkle Hate Me! in the meantime, which isn't pictured because damn do I have too many project going on, good thing most are short one shots at least. Good thing no one's asking questions about the teaser I hid in my user page too.
