Twilight and Starlight watched as the foal fell into the river.
They watched as she grasped at the grass and ground of the riverbank—a ledge that was just a bit too tall for her. They watched as she sunk backwards into the rushing water, before being pulled under with a hushed cry, barely a single syllable out when the water overtook her.
They watched as she was tossed and turned under the whitewater, hoof tips coming up to breach the surface for the briefest of moments.
And they watched as she appeared at the river bank, and they watched as it all happened again.
No one should have even been out this deep in the Everfree; certainly not a filly of this age.
Yet here she was. Falling into the river. Dragged under. Thrashing for air.
Over and over.
As the river ran in reverse.
“What—” Starlight’s voice skipped. “What’s happening?”
Twilight watched as the foal fell into the river. Little hooves grasped at the bank, and the dirt rose back up into place from the surface of the river as the filly was pulled back under the backwards-running rapids. A blurry shadow beneath the surface, contorting desperately, dragged further and further upstream—
And then it repeated.
“I don’t know,” Twilight said, her tone hollow.
Starlight stepped closer to the bank of the river as the filly appeared again, clawing at the bank before falling back under. “It’s some sort of time loop.”
“Yes.” Twilight sounded like she was on a different planet.
Starlight glanced at Twilight before looking back at the repeating river. “Okay, well—can we interact with it?” Starlight didn’t wait for Twilight to answer. “I have to try.” She was up against the bank, horn aglow, ready to grasp the foal in her aura—
But every time she tried to focus her magic in on the flailing filly, she came upon nothing. In fact, it almost seemed as if her magic were being repelled in some fashion.
“It’s because it’s going in reverse,” Starlight muttered, gritting her teeth. “Dammit, obviously...” She turned her head up at the sound of hooves crunching through the undergrowth. “Twilight, don’t bother, the loop prevents magic from—”
Twilight ignored her, standing approximately twenty feet down the river from Starlight. Over here the loop reached one of its boundaries with the natural flow of time; where the waters met, a strange, impossibly thin line of conflicting currents met and terminated against each other.
The foal was being carried up the current towards the termination line. Twilight’s horn glowed; she pitted her hooves into the ground, bracing her legs, jaw set in concentration. The light around her horn intensified, and the entire portion of the river reversed shone with a bright magenta light.
With the sound of several cannons backfiring at once, Twilight toppled over. Starlight yelped, and scampered to her friend’s side. Shooting a hurried glance over her shoulder, she hoped against hope—
And felt it rush out of her when she saw the foal fall back into the river.
Twilight’s horn glowed for just a moment, although it was much more akin to a flicker if Starlight were being honest with herself. The Princess’s face paled, ears laying flat against her mane.
“No,” she whispered. “Oh, no.”
“Are you hurt?” Starlight cupped her hooves under Twilight’s head; her horn was smoking, and her eyes were glazed and unfocused.
Twilight couldn’t breathe; the instant she’d forced her magic through into the anomaly, what the filly felt subsumed her experience entirely. She’d been thrown back under the ocean—her senses screamed out as her body recalled the inescapable pressure, the agony of her lungs begging for breath, the final scraps of air, almost fully scrubbed of oxygen but not just quite, slipping past her lips and rising far, far away, her own treacherous weight slipping her deep into the endless abyss...
But someone had saved her.
“What is it? Twilight, are you—”
“I’m fine,” Twilight gasped, legitimately surprised when she didn’t heave up a gallon of seawater and found her mouth to be bone dry. Legs straining, she shakily got to her hooves. “But—the filly—my magic couldn’t—I couldn’t—”
“It’s okay, Twilight,” Starlight said, although her voice voice wobbled as she spoke. “It’s okay. We just need to think. What are we supposed to do here?”
Twilight said nothing, greedily sucking in several ragged breaths and hiccuping.
The foal fell into the river. Starlight repeated herself. “What are we supposed to do?”
“Starlight—I don’t know.”
Twilight’s breathing was getting faster. Her chest was tight. Endless miles of water, inescapable pressure, the last bit of air—
“I d-don’t always know.”
She inhaled; the air rattled in her throat, and the sharpness of it hurt her lungs. “But what I did know is that this was going to happen.”
Starlight stared at her. “Excuse me?”
“Do you remember the table?”
Starlight did remember the table.
She remembered walking into the room.
She remembered Twilight supine in her throne.
Her blank stare.
Eye level to the map.
Chin curled against her chest.
She remembered how the glow in the center of the Everfree Forest was not really a glow at all, but an ethereal projection of her and Twilight’s cutie marks slowly degrading into flickering, twinkling static before resetting.
“I remember.”
“Before I traveled time for the first time—I was aware this could happen. Time travel spells, even one as simple as the one I did—it’s fragile, and complex, and there’s always something that... doesn’t run through right. Anomalies will appear. But the universe is big; the odds of it happening on the planet, let alone in an inhabited part of Equestria...”
Twilight trailed off. The foal fell into the river again.
Starlight felt as if somepony has just yanked all of her organs out with a fishhook. “—so when I cast my own time spells—”
“You didn’t know,” Twilight said softly. “You couldn’t have.”
“But—my cutie mark was there too.”
Twilight nodded.
The two stood in silence; refusing to meet each other’s eyes, Twilight and Starlight turned to the water.
And watched as the foal fell in.
Over and over.
As the river ran in reverse.
