For I Have no Friends, and Must Scream

Chapters

Bound to the Earth
Stars
Interlude: Learned Dreams
Knowledge
~Is Power
Baby Steps
Interlude: A Dream of Lighter Days
Picking Up the Pieces
Horse Apples Hitting Fans
BeTrixed
Then what of our Nightmares?

Bound to the Earth

She knew fear. She knew pain.

And misery.

Trixie's breath caught in her throat at the sound of far-off voices behind her in the quaint town she had just ran from. Her hooves found new speed, as the showmare convinced herself that they were coming to arrest her for the spectacular lapses in judgement that had just occurred. Trixie blinked tears of terror from her eyes as she kept running towards the forest not far ahead. All she could think of was the thick safety of the treeline looming closely now.

The thick underbrush snapped at her flanks with her passage even as the canopy of the forest turned a dark summer night into an all-consuming miasma of darkness. The showmare's heartbeat thundered in her ears as the dense brush ahead scratched and whipped at her face. Trixie rubbed at the stinging welts that adorned her face, forced to halt as she gathered her strength to press through the entangling mess ahead. Behind her, the voices had faded away into the silence of the wild; oppressively blanking out all noise but the tiny crackles of the showmare's hooves crushing the leaves and twigs of the forest floor and the steadily racing sound of her own heart.

Trixie looked up with a gasp and shrank into herself as the old geography lessons she had learned long ago rose to the forefront of her mind. The Everfree Forest, the Nopony Land. Her whimpers seemed so small and pathetic in her ears against the terrible majesty that laid all around her. The showmare twisted about as her eyes sought out any sign of the path she took into the thrice cursed forest. With only the faintest glow from her horn for illumination under the nearly solid canopy, she couldn't tell where her path may have been.

Magnified by the feeble light, the shadows of the trees about her took on an increasingly sinister tone. A brush of prickly bush against her cutie mark morphed itself in her mind into the cruel claws of a manticore testing her fur before the fatal strike. A scream of terror ripped itself free of her throat as Trixie bolted into the brush unheeding of the whipping branches that cruelly clawed at her form.

"Somepony, Anypony! Trixie is lost! Please!"

Something hooked one of Trixie's forelegs, slimy and foul as she slipped against it and feel to the forest floor in a jumbled heap of flailing limbs and wriggling torso. The mud in the small clearing she found herself in soaked through her fur with contemptuous ease and chilled the showmare across her whole body as she scrabbled across the ground in a desperate flight from whatever had grabbed her leg. In a faint ray of moonlight, she could see it, a many legged horror undescribed by science or magic rising into the air thirsting for her blood. Tendrils reached across the muddy clearing, its lair beginning to churn as it stirred from its slumber. Insectile carapace glistened in the slight light as it began to weave through the air towards the fallen showmare hungrily.

With a cry of horror, Trixie blasted it with all of her magical might and scrambled back to her hooves in a desperate attempt to be somewhere, anywhere but there. Adrenaline and fear powered her strides as she fled the clearing, running ever deeper into the forest of nightmares where harmony once fell. Creatures of all shapes and sizes awoke as she ran deep into the forest, it's magic slowly driving her towards the lost castle at its heart as she fled. Her mane drifted into her eyes, stinging them with traces of mud and sweat as she swept her gaze about in terror.

Gnarled bark rose up from the darkness, the shooting pain of flesh impacting tree trunk blinding the mare as she crashed headlong into the moss-wreathed surface. Once more she rose unsteadily, but less fearfully. The comforting light of the full moon bathed the area around her, as she discovered herself on a nearly overgrown and ancient road, stretching as far as the eye could see in both directions.

"Anypony out there? Please, I~ I need your help!" Trixie panted, listening for the comfort of any voice about her, for the comfort of any sentient being. Far off crackles of moving creatures sent ice through her veins; a mad dash to the center of the road her instinctive response.

But nothing came. Whether the creatures were afraid to reveal themselves due to the open terrain, or if they were too far away to find her, or worse staying away in fear of a greater threat Trixie couldn't tell. She wasn't sure if she wanted to know as she picked a direction and began stumbling along the rough stone-lined path.

Trixie stumbled and wobbled down the dark forest path slowly. She had escaped immediate death at the tendrils of the thing in the mudpit, but she was still lost in the Everfree. A situation that at best could only be described as extremely detrimental towards her continuing health. The moon above seemed to shine down upon her, as if to declare her its own property.

Already, she had found one end of the failing road, where it ended in roiling rapids and a destroyed bridge. Now she was making her way back in an attempt to find her way back to Ponyville. Her muddy, dangling mane continually stung her eyes as she walked, remaining wet from dew and sweat. Hooves ached from the broken road as she trudged towards whatever destiny she was doomed to find. At least the monstrous noises in the depths of the forest had quieted away, leaving her walking in silence.

She couldn't help but feel a nagging sense of dread and the sense that if she couldn't escape the clutches of the Everfree by moonset, she's never leave at all. The moonlight was already fading as she picked up the pace of her trudge, whimpering quietly at the sense that something horrible was watching. True darkness was falling, shifting the forest back into the ghastly shadows that had fueled her panicked flight earlier.

"Anypony out there? Please, I need help! I'm lost!"

Her only answer was the disturbing rustling of brush all about her, a serpentine hissing that moved all about her. A predator, waiting for the moon's protection to fade.

Trixie needed no further warning, and broke into a gallop to put distance between her and the latest thing that wanted to have a taste of her blue hide. Her hooves rattled the loose rocks of the path as she ran the fastest she ever had in her life. She didn't look back for the longest time in the fading moonlight, keeping her eyes on the road ahead and her breath as under control as she could manage under the circumstances. She only looked back once, at the sound of a strange strangled cry that sounded like a mix of a rooster's crow and a lizard's hiss.

She caught a glimpse of it for just a moment, flittering across the gap in the trees. Beady red eyes that seemed to glare into her soul, a long lizard-like tail that stretched out several feet, and short stubby wings that buzzed madly in the moonlight. A strange stiffness nearly tripped her as she met the monstrous creature's eyes. Breaking eye contact was hard for her; the glare seeming to bore into her very soul as her legs grew heavy.

She still managed to break free of the mesmerizing glare, running on despite the newfound lethargy that coursed through her form. Her legs didn't want to bend all the way, her hooves making strange new noises with every hooffall. Blinking the stinging tears back from her eyes, she could see a curious hut built into a small clearing beneath overhanging trees. She pushed on despite the pain gathering in her leg muscles, fighting the cramps in her extremities as she ran up to its door.

"Please, let me in! Whoever you are, I need help, something is trying to kill me out here!" Trixie gasped out her plea as she pounded upon the door. But something caught her eye as a faint last gleaming of the moon broke through the trees, a change in her own hooves.

Trixie let out a ragged cry of sorrow and horror as she realized what was chasing her, and what she had already partly become. The stone texture that had replace much of her lower legs served as an intense wake-up call for her studies of Equestrian wildlife in school.

"PLEASE LET ME IN! There's a cockatrice out here! I don't want to die like this!" The showmare pounded with a renewed fury upon the Zebrican-engraved door as she tried to break in. Rustling movement wormed it's way through the bushes on the edges of her vision as the cockatrice closed in upon her.

Fury found her petrified hooves as she slammed upon the hut's doors, hearing the owner stirring slowly within. As hard as Trixie tried to break in, the vile light of protective wards glowed beneath her hooves as they struck supposedly vulnerable wood. Trixie backed away from the door to make a running tackle against it in her desperate fight to break it open and find shelter within.

And it appeared, the loathsome green scales shimmering in the light of the wards reacting to the cockatrice. The predator reared up, the transformitive light burning within it's eyes as it prepared to finish it's attack.

Trixie did the only thing her panic-stricken mind could think of, turning tail to it and running once more for Ponyville in a screaming gallop of terror. If she had been in the right state of mind, she might have noticed that the monster's gaze had been hidden behind a protective veil for her. Darkness surrounded her, instead, beneath the twisted and clawing branches of the Everfree as she ran for her life.

"OH CELESTIA, HELP MEEE~EEE! Keep away!" Trixie begged for her life as she ran, hearing the swift-winged pursuit that was steadily closing upon her. Far-off, a voice called to her from behind in answer to her cries. To Trixie's ears, the foreign tongue sounded all too much like the sound the reaper himself guiding her to Tartarus as she raced for her life.

Bushes continually flashed to either side of her as she ran, her mane and tail freely flowing beneath the darkening skies. Ragged sobs interspaced themselves between gasping breaths as she kept her pace, determined to not go quietly into Luna's night. Baleful hissing erupted directly before her, just seconds before a low heavy mass ran directly into her legs, tripping her and dropping her end over end roughly across the path.

"Keep away!" Trixie screamed in terror as she instinctively fired off a blast of the strongest lightning magic she could summon. Her stiffened hooves struggled to find footing beneath her as she bled from a dozen tiny scratches in her coat. A squawk of pain brought a grim smile to her face as she blindly blasted again, trying to kill it before she became a monument to her sins.

The hiss directly before her face broke her concentration, seconds before twin glowering red eyes, seemingly full of the fire of Tartarus itself as they glared into her soul. Trixie screamed once more as the cold of stone began creeping up her legs once more. Rearing back, she flailed her now entirely inanimate legs at the creature to kill it. And she found to her horror that her rear legs had frozen in place entirely, trapping her in that unstable position as the cockatrice escape her attempt at retribution.

Trixie had few options left as the creeping stone continued to slowly claim her, slowly transform her from Trixie the Great and Powerful into Trixie the Stone Failure. Lightning shot from her horn once more as she closed her eyes, trying to break contact. A terrible force scratched at her eyelids, a primitive telekinesis prying them open fraction by unwilling fraction.

Her tail was a frozen mess, claimed by the obliterating stone even as her cutie mark fell to its icy embrace. Trixie yelped in terror as her breath began to be stolen from her under the cockatrice's assault. "Momma! I don't want to die! Anypony please he~"

Trixie worked her mouth, realizing that no sound came from within. Beneath the perifying gaze of the cockatrice in the darkness of a now moonless night, she could see that her entire torso had been frozen solid, leaving her as good as dead. Tears dripped from her eyes as the creeping oblivion slowly inched up her neck.

Against the coming oblivion, Trixie spat in the face of the cockatrice in defiance. She was doomed, she knew it, but all the same she wordlessly cried for her long-lost mother as the coldness rippled up against her chin. Tears froze on contact with the stone portion of her body, forming strings of her sorrow.

With almost no movement left to her, not any subtle gesture of defiance against the creature that was killing her, Trixie wept as the cold froze the last of her mane into place, her vision growing dim as she channeled every last erg of energy left to her. Lightning crackled about her horn as she tried to kill the cockatrice one last time, the air humming with energy even as sound was blotted out to her as her ears turned solid and grey.

Before her, the gloating face of the cockatrice grew nearer as her muzzle froze into a grimace of sorrow and pain. The monster alighted upon the tip of her nose even as the charge in the air suddenly ceased. Trixie's eyes widened one last time as she realized she had waited too long; her horn now petrified and useless. She strove to close her eyes, to prevent her last look from being one of pleading uselessness, even as blackness creeped in, her consciousness swirling down into oblivion as the last of her became a granite monument to her fear.

'Anypony~ What did I do to deserve this? Please, Trixie doesn't want to go...'

Stars

Void was all that she knew, the inky blackness of oblivion having swallowed up all her senses. She floated there, not even the sound of her own breathing distracting her as she tried to do something, anything to lighten her situation. Trixie gathered every scrap and iota of her power that she felt she could grab to project her mind out, to do anything but lay there an eternity waiting to be eroded away.

'Hello, anypony! Please hear me... I- I saw a cockatrice. I- I can't move, please help.'

Flickers of light shone or a brief moment at the edges of whatever strange vision she was seeing, maddening her with how far away they were. She realized that she was most likely seeing the souls of the dead, seeing the beginnings of the afterlife for her. But there was no way in Tartarus she was just going to give up quietly. Trixie would swear that some great show of light highlighted her struggles to free herself, to do something. That she moved the heavens and Equis itself if it would give her just one moment to claw herself closer to safety and freedom.

But for all that she tried, the tiny pricks of light so far away winked out from her vision one by one; perhaps having moved from beyond her sight, or Trixie had been taken deeper into whatever hell she had been descending into.

'No... no. Trixie doesn't get to have somepony help her, apparently. No love, nopony to even say goodbye to her. All I want is somepony, ANYPONY!'

Her thoughts took on a more desperate swirl as she laid there, trapped and immobile in the dark. For how long she couldn't say. On one hoof it felt like mere seconds, and on another granite parody of a hoof it felt like she had been waiting for so long that the world itself had crumbled away. Whirlwind plans to prove she was 'merely' comatose and in a hospital, or that everything since she had found that wretched poster advertising that mockery of her mother had been a dream, or anything at all was happening crowded her mind as she fought off the crippling worries of her state.

She strained to hear something, anything as she shut down her manic thoughts. And immediately wished she hadn't, as a dread whispering filled what passed for a spirit's ears. A tongue nopony living understood grew in strength as a black void darker than death itself began to emerge before her. The virulent chanting grew ever stronger as it approached, a single set of words understandable to the trapped mare. Her name.

Trixie wanted to rear back, to fight it away as tendrils with an icy grip like a windingo's began to unfurl to clutch at her soul, drawing her into the morass. Some tiny, frightened part of her soul knew that the last bits of her would be erased, taken to an oblivion that would so utterly unmake her that not even the afterlife would await. A force built within her to oppose it as she struggled and raged against the darkness claiming her with a force unseen since the diarch of the moon fought with the nightmare of her own making.

And the darkness knew her Name.

It called to her, Trixie somehow understanding how it called her food, called her and demanded her unmaking so that it would live. She knew that it called her by her Name, that it had a lever with which to tip her soul into its maw.

Trixie screamed as she felt herself being drawn in, bits of her being pulled away as she tapped on every single force her mother ever taught her. Arcane and nameless energies arced from her soul into the abomination, lighting up geometries that shook her mind, and horrified her soul. Her fear gave her strength. Her strength gave her anger, and hate.

And with a cry of rage against the fate that was slowly devouring every trace of her, she struck against it with the fury of the sun and moon. 'Do you want Trixie Lulamoon? Do you? Frak off! My soul is my own!'

Void became white for a moment as she poured every last ounce of herself into the strike, an aurora-esque show of light shining between them as she taught it suffering. Tendrils were burned from her soul and her eyes glowed with the power of ages as for a moment, she touched the power of the sisters themselves. Force pushed the darkness back, drove it into whatever part of the void it had come from as Trixie taught it the full and terrible meaning of suffering so very well.

Clouds swirled ominously over a fixed point in the forest. 'Storm is 'acoming' most had said. After a day of fruitless searching and far too many close calls for comfort, the consensus amongst the searchers was that the Everfree had swallowed the troublesome showmare whole. Even if she was somehow alive, between the fading trail and the worsening weather only luck would allow them to find her in a day or so. So, most had given up. But not all.

A lone mare looked up from the remains of Trixie's trail, staring concernedly into the stormy skies. The center of circulation crackled with lightning not far away, as thunder rumbled against the trees with elemental fury. The purple mare cautiously crept forward under magical shields, conscious of the danger that the storm was to her. Wind had begun to whip about beneath the canopy of raging storms; tree-branches clipping off the persistent tracker's shimmering purple barriers. Zecorra's hut wasn't all that far away, she wondered and worried why the showmare had not gone there for help.

Ionization crackled all about the mare as she carefully crept into the clearing at the heart of the storm and gasped at the horror before her. A terrible statue stood within the eye of the storm with a cloak of green scales covering her face. Trixie, caught in the moment of her last and utmost horror, displayed for all the world to see. The purple mare that had been tracking her down backed away in fright and cast a spell to protect her from the stare of the cockatrice as she tried to figure out how to remove the frightening and dangerous creature from its victim.

Before she could, her ruler-straight mane rose into the air as static built all about her; and the ghostly trace of light rising from the stat- from Trixie's horn was the only definite warning before the strike. A bolt seemingly from the sisters themselves struck from the heavens and smashed into Trixie's petrified form. The purple mare braced herself for the shockwave, grunting and groaning as the power of the lightning strike battered against her shields. In the confusion, she could catch only the slightest glimpse of the cockatrice flying through the air with a great trail of smoke coming from it's form before the dread being vanished into the trees.

"Trixie!"

The clouds were breaking up as their controlling influence ceased, and the persistent mare ran up to the petrified form to look for any sign of hope for the showmare. Magic flowed into the still, cold body as the rescuer poured a fail-safe spell into Trixie to try and break the fell curse upon her. And she poured, and poured every last little bit that she had; fighting against the curse that sought to forever trap the mare before her.

A cold numbness began to creep into the rescuer's hooves as the curse lashed out and began to strike at her. The magical link between victim and would-be rescuer broke with the shock of the change as the rescuer stumbled back in terror from Trixie. With no further link between the two, stone faded back to flesh just as the purple glow faded from Trixie's form.

Panting, she rested against the former showmare's flank and wondered what she could possibly do. She couldn't perform many experiments upon the limits of Trixie's curse within the dark heart of the Everfree. She needed information, and a safe harbor for the poor mare. And, maybe eventually, she might even figure out where that Tartarus bedammed voice was coming from!

Wait... What voice?

'Please! Whoever you are! I- I can see you, PLEASE HELP ME!'

'Trixie?'

Trixie tried to swim, or fly or do something, anything to get closer to the brilliantly shining six pointed star before her. The mare behind it had a name that seemed strangely familiar to her as she grabbed ahold of the shining star in the black void, hugging it tightly to her chest.

'Gah! What was that?'

'Please, don't leave me. Everypony else leaves.' Trixie clutched to her savior with all her strength. She didn't know how she was doing it, as she couldn't see or move her limbs, but every one of her senses told her that she had a grip on the purple star. She dug in, immersing herself in the sole sensations she had received for what felt like an eternity, halfway burying herself in the warmth of it's presence.

The brilliant lavender light from the star pulsed, even twitched at that. 'I'm not going to leave you, Trixie. You'll die if I do.'

'I know. Everypony says that they'll always stay, but they never come back.' Trixie's mind pressed outwards against the darkness, trying to take strength from the mare that she clung to. The darkness swirled all about her, wicking strength from her mind. If it wasn't for the star of light she so helplessly clung to, Trixie was afraid that she might give in and rest, and who knew how that would turn out.

'I'm not going to leave you. I have a friend I'm taking your body to so it'll be safe. You'd probably like her if you could speak to her.' The star pulsed in Trixie's desperate grip once more, and it's glow filled the void with a purple light.

Trixie squirmed and itched as it tickled against her. Almost like how her mother's tickled her. 'Please tell me, err, tell Trixie you can change her back. Trixie doesn't want her companionship to be stars and voids forever.'

'What? No! I'll do everything in my power to get you changed back, Trixie. But the petrification spell you're under fought back against my failsafe spell, and nearly turned me to stone with you. So, it might take weeks, or months of research.' The star pulsed again, its warmth drawing Trixie deeper into its embrace. So warm, and loving, and sorry for what had happened.

Trixie wondered how a star could be sorry for something that happened. Thoughts danced in and out of her mind, fever dreams and questions about metaphysics and souls and- wait. 'Weeks to MONTHS? But... Trixie would go insane by then!'

'I'll think of something! Okay? But I need spells, information. Hang on, Trixie. Just, hang on.'

The showmare's spirit sighed, afraid of what was to come. She couldn't tell how long she waited in silence for whatever the star, or mare, or whatever she was was going to do for her. It felt like she was floating in a sea of purple, hugged from all sides in the void. Shining glimmers of something poked at her from all around, keeping her awake as a most curious sight unwound into view.

A rolling and unrolling ribbon of black, covered in a white glow. Little arrowheads dotted it's length and twirled all around it as it curled up into a tight spiral before the pair of them. And it sang, a strange, lonesome song that Trixie couldn't understand a second of. Incomprehensible, sung in an alien language and referencing concepts and events in a manner that the showmare couldn't hope to understand. The undulating spiral dizzied her, and made her wonder if a spirit could loose its lunch.

Beneath her, the star pulsed once more and spoke. 'Yes Zecora, this is Trixie. Or, what's left of her.'

All about Trixie, the purple glow vanished, taken back into the star. She shivered, fearful of the darkness that surrounded her and the strange new entity before her. 'Who- Who is that?'

"-Be waived; but no victim of the cockatrice has ever been saved." Zecora raised an eyebrow as Twilight twitched and shivered at the touch of something. "Perhaps I should make some soup? You look as those you have inhaled a noseful of goop."

"What? Oh... when I tried to cast a failsafe spell on Trixie, I somehow created a link between my mind and hers. She's badgering me and she can somehow partially see you and she's hearing you in zebrican." Twilight shook her head and tried to focus on the conversation before her. Trixie insistently spoke within her mind, trying to keep abreast of what was occurring in the outside world. The poor petrified showmare's form sat propped against Zecora's table as the zebra kept a wide berth from her for fear or some other reason.

"Please tell me this is a joke! Such a link must be quickly broke!" Zecora's impassioned words caught Twilight by surprise, and she edged away from the zebra as the shaman began picking ingredients from her shelves.

"What? I'm not leaving her alone in there! I don't care if nopony else has ever been saved before, I'm saving her." Twilight stomped her hoof in outrage, standing taller as she rose to the presented challenge. She seemed to gather bits of shadow around her like a cloak as she slowly and steadily marched towards Zecora, and her glare dared the zebra to defy her on the matter.

"Twilight, it is for the best. Trixie must be laid to her eternal rest." Zecora sweated as she found herself backed against the wall under Twilight's intense gaze. Few beings had ever projected such a stare at her, and Zecora wondered if she should have let Twilight exhaust herself against the unbreakable curse before bringing up the correct course of action.

Twilight shook her head, denying it vehemently. Her mane flicked in all directions behind her as her eyes twitched at the thought. A gleam appeared in them that Zecora wasn't entirely certain that she liked. Twilight spoke, her voice cold and unyielding as she set her mind on one thing. "I refuse to accept that. And if you could hear her, neither would you. I am going to find a way to save her, even if it kills me."

As Twilight stepped back, Zecora swallowed the fear that had developed as she remembered Twilight's recent accomplishments. She wondered if the voice now within Twilight's head had left her immune to reason, with the way she had been acting so irrationally. "Be careful with such a jest; for a such words the universe does not rest. Despite your victory against Nightmare Moon, do not let its glory make your reason swoon."

Twilight shook her head again at Zecora's implication, having long before made up her mind. She wasn't going to give up on Trixie, not so long as she could still try. She couldn't see the mare's spirit, but she could hear it, and she could hear the desperation Trixie was gripped with. "No, I refuse to believe that there is no way to save her. She can hear you. She still has some senses left to her! There has to be some way to let her live again, no matter what workarounds I have to make in order to do it! Please, will you let me cast a linking spell so you can talk with her? She needs more company than just me."

Zecora shook her head, the zebra shaman slowly pacing around the frozen statue in her home. She didn't know where she could put the showmare so that she would not look up into a visage of horror every time she went for a drink of water. It was enough that she hosted Trixie in her home, she had no wish to further mire herself in the danger Twilight was putting herself in by linking her mind with the doomed showmare. "Nay, I think my mind is fine none the less; up in my head it is already quite the mess. Still I shall swear that under my roof, no harm shall come to Trixie by any hoof."

Twilight surprised Zecora by hugging her with surprising swiftness, tears gleaming in her eyes as she did. "Thank you! Please, keep her safe, she doesn't deserve what's happened to her."

Zecora nodded, apprehensive of the mood swings she had just witnessed. She feared the link with Trixie's mind might be more than either mare realized as the purple mare of magic let go of her, a slight tint of blue disturbingly visible in the small stars about her cutie mark. "Despite the gathering dark I wish not to tell you so, but is it not time to go?"

Twilight whipped her head around, looking out the window at the sky that was swiftly turning to night. Twilight straightened up and bolted for the door, taking a second to look back and say something to Zecora. "Thank you, and keep her safe until I get back!"

Zecora nodded, waiting until Twilight had shut the door before she moved again. A mask from her wall found itself hooked over the frozen showmare's horn and face, as a blanket disguised the rest of her form so that the shaman could find rest in her own home. As Zecora turned to her cauldron to brew something for her sleep and to put Trixie out of her mind, a blue mist crept and squeezed through the cracks of her windows. It swirled about Trixie for a moment, tendrils of it lovingly caressing her form before the cloud sucked itself back out the windows in a second. Zecora turned at the slight breeze, frowning as she saw nothing at all there.

Interlude: Learned Dreams

Twilight woke at the tapping of a golden-shod hoof on her shoulder. Her beautiful, graceful, beloved teached stood concernedly above her, smiling with relief. Twilight pressed a hoof to her head, wondering why it hurt so much. "I think I goofed again, Princess."

Celestia nodded, picking up her faithful student in a bubble of magic. She chided Twilight with gentle, motherly words; knowing just what to say. "Twilight, I know that your special talent is magic. I know that you want to do any kind of magic you can get your hooves on. But, Trixie has several kinds of magic that she developed due to her parentage that you need far more control and power in order to copy. Give it some time, when you're older."

Twilight blinked, clearing the sleep from her eyes so that she could inspect her surroundings. She couldn't remember how she had gotten out to the old pavillion in the gardens, or why they had come there. Part of her wondered where her friend had come from as the ghost-blue filly stepped out from behind Celestia, giggling at some aspect of Twilight's appearance. Celestia quizzically looked between Trixie and Twilight a few times before she caught on; joining in after a few moments while trying to politely hide her amusement behind a hoof.

Suspended as she was, Twilight couldn't bend or twist to see what was so amusing to her mentor and trusted friend. Since when had she known Trixie long enough to be a trusted friend? A grumble erupted from Twilight as she wriggled and tried to 'doggie paddle' mid-air as fast as she could to break free.

Trixie and Celestia shared a sly look between them for a moment before they began to guffaw even louder at her antics. Trixie even fell to her side, clutching her barrel in mirthful pain from her laughter as she did.

Twilight growled even harder as she tried to use her magic to conjure something like a mirror or illusion in order to inspect herself; complaining loudly to her companions as she did. "Stop laughing! Is it a snake? Gettitoff!"

Trixie shook her head and rubbed a tear from her eye as she laid upon the marble floor of the pavilion. Calling upon the small fountain at the edge of the overhang, she drew up a sinisterly rippling tendril of water that sloshed and snaked across open air towards Twilight. Hovering before the lavender filly, it smoothed and flattened out into a flawless mirrored surface.
Twilight first frowned at the sight presented to her, before joining her mentor and elder friend in mirthful laughter at the comical bedmane she had inflicted upon herself. It was absolutely hysterical to see her mane swept up into a ruffled spikey mess of stiffened hair. Which... would mean it would be twice as hysterical if it happened to somepony else?

Magenta magic surged around Twilight's horn, growing stronger to punch through Celestia's magic. A faint puff of smoke surrounded the solar diarch's mane as the spell kicked in. Celestia blinked in confusion as she stared into the back of the water-mirror; beholding her new horrific mane-do. Her two young students and surrogate daughters snerked and snickered at their teacher's look. Giving them both long-suffering glances failed to silence them as they burst into raucous laughter at the absurdity of the sight. "Oh Ha-Ha. Very amusing. Perhaps I should render all of us so horrifically styled."

Trixie yelped as a bolt of energy struck her, causing her to join Celestia and Twilight in the ranks of the mess-headed. As Trixie frantically patted down her mane in a vain attempt to tame it, Celestia floated Twilight into their small seating arrangement and swept both of her charges into a nearly crushing hug to her sides. Twilight decided to give all of them a break and used her magic to relax the tension from their manes as she nuzzled in even tighter to Celestia.

"Alright, now that we're all awake and chuckled out, it's time for our lesson of the day." Celestia sobered up as she wiped the last of the tears from her eyes, floating identical textbooks to her students. Twilight eagerly snatched hers from the air, while Trixie more reluctantly took charge of her own as it was set down before her.

The elder student nudged her teacher, distastefully setting the book flat against the off-white tiling before her. "Do we have to use the book? Can't we just go to the practical for once and practice the spells?"

Celestia shook her head at the suggestion, replying in turn. "We're discussing petrification today, Trixie. It's causes, cures, and its effects. The 'practical' is not only dangerous to your body, but your mind as well. Most ponies don't know that the spirit can be petrified as well. I don't want to add you to the statue garden, Trixie." Celestia firmly rebuked her most eager student, though not angrily. Her motherly concern sounded more along the lines of worry for the sake of the foal of a showmare. Unheeding of the discussion, Twilight opened the front cover of her textbook, scowling at the strange sight within.

Trixie yelped suddenly, trying to struggle to her hooves as something began to happen. "My legs! They're- they're petrifying!"

Celestia nodded, her tone almost robotically toneless as her face twitched. Strange, as she watched Trixie struggling to save herself. "Yes, they are. You activated the final test early. Twilight, Trixie is under the influence of a cockatrice stare spell. Reverse it or preserve her before she is fully transformed. Page 182 may help you." Celestia's horn began to glow as she called upon some spell with her magic, sweeping it about in wide arcs for some unfathomable reason.

Twilight frantically began flipping through her book, discovering page after page blank no matter how hard she looked. Lacking any other option, Twilight cast every failsafe and counter-transformation spell she could think of to no avail. "Princess Celestia! The book is blank!"

Celestia nodded, even as she watched the transformation cover Trixie's blank flanks with deathly grey. "That is because you have not read it yet. Two minutes left, Twilight. Save or preserve Trixie by any means necessary."

"Yes, please! Trixie can't- ulp... move!" The ghostly blue mare struggled ever more fiercely as the malicious magic claimed more of her body under creeping tendrils of stone. Her ice blue magic joined Twilight's own reddish aura in trying to hold the cold away from her.

"One minute, thirty seconds."

Twilight shook her head frantically, throwing the book to one side. "I need more information!"

Thousands of books began to flood into the pavillion through the archways, each as blank as the first and black as the night skies. Celestia seemingly impassively watched on as Twilight waded through the deepening tide of parchment towards Trixie's nearly entirely frozen form. "One minute to save or preserve her, Twilight."

Trixie's neck was changing, even as the book flood buried her torso beneath the sea of pages. A lone tear leaked from her eyes as she feebly called for help with the last of her air. "Twilight- please... -elp me."

As Twilight waded through the sharp covers and sweeping waves of pages, what Celestia had said echoed in her mind. A spirit could be petrified and frozen just like a body! And this... this place had to be a dream! How else could she explain the inexplicable sudden transformation Trixie was undergoing, or the flood of books?

She looked over her shoulder at Celestia, who had dropped the pretext of her impassive clinical oversight to wear a look of utter terror and motherly fear upon her face. Twilight suddenly realized that she had slipped into adult form once more from her size and the shape of her body. She knew what she had to do now, no matter how mad it was to most ponies.

"Save her, Twilight!"

Twilight reached her... friend, embracing her and worriedly looking into Trixie's fearfully trembling eyes. The stone had crept over her head, and was advancing up her horn and into her gaze as Twilight formulated what had to be the single most insane spell she had ever thought up or had ever heard of. "Trixie, I need you to reach to me! Reach to me with your magic!"

Flickering and fading magic waivered from what little was left of Trixie's horn, reaching towards Twilight as a tide of books nearly dislodged the purple mare. Twilight clutched tighter, looking deep into Trixie's eyes for the points of magic she searched for. Her own magic caught Trixie's unguided tendril, tying itself around the faint blue aura into a nearly unbreakable knot as it surged back towards Trixie along the path.

Trixie's transformation halted abruptly as Twilight's magic squeezed between showmare and stone, seperating the two with a layer of Twilight's own soul and power as the bearer of magic searched for the center of Trixie. Trixie's eyes glinted, the shimmer of what Twilight had been looking for shining deep within. And as Twilight made the last connection, the world turned white.

And Twilight woke up.

Knowledge

Twilight jerked awake from her dream, rubbing the sleep frantically from her eyes as she did. 'Trixie!' Her mental shout reverberated along their link, and a soft moan of pain and mental stiffness returned from the other side. Twilight softly sighed in relief as she felt the confirmation that the worst had not come to pass. 'Trixie, can you remember what just happened?'

The bearer of magic fretted in the dark as she waited for her- for her friend's reply. She hoped that Trixie hadn't been trapped mentally as well. A little part of her worried that her dream-spell might have partially broken the link between them. Oh Celestia, what had she been thinking, going to sleep so irresponsibly like that?

'Ooooooogh. Trixie actually found your dream, oh, enjoyable. It felt strange to think of herself as Princess Celestia's personal student, but Trixie could grow to like the idea. The part where Trixie began petrifying in the dream? Not so much. Why, Trixie's thoughts even started-'

'-Slowing down. Your spirit was under attack by the curse! I'm, well, partially a lucid dreamer, Trixie. That was all my mind's way of warning me what was happening. I think. The part where I'm Princess Celestia's personal student is real, though.' Twilight laid back in her bed from where she had partially sat up in worry. As the adrenaline from her dream began to wear off, she reveled in the softness of her mattress and wondered if the soul on the other side of her link could feel and be comforted by it. Twilight pulled the covers up to her chin, closing her eyes to try and visualize Trixie within her mind.

Trixie's mental 'voice' imitated the sounds and sensations of a pony swallowing back fearful bile at the thoughts presented. 'Trixie was... no- please no.'

'You're fine, Trixie. For now, and I think for as long as I live. I put, well, I don't know how to describe it. A shell of me, I guess, wrapped tightly around you. A barrier to keep the curse from touching any more of you. And since it doesn't have a foothold on me, it can't touch you. I can also siphon off little bits of my magic to empower you as well.' Twilight pulsed her magic to demonstrate, feeling and testing the sensation for the expected drain. Oddly, it seemed to be rather negligible.

For a moment, if twilight hadn't known better she almost swore that she could feel Trixie hugging her and trying to bury her face into the side of her neck. Maybe it was because of how muggy and warm it was in her room. The still air inside was choking off the coolness of the night outside. Wait. She had left the window partially open, and the fans blowing.

Twilight groped for her nightstand, feeling for the lamp on it. In the darkness, she couldn't figure out why it felt like there was an enormous stack of books between her and the lamp. She was mostly certain that she didn't sleep-read anymore.

'Sleep... Read? And your friends called Trixie crazy and filled with issues.'

Twilight ignored Trixie irritably, lighting up her horn to illuminate the situation. Oh. That was why it was so hot in her room. 'I think I know where the imagery of the Books of Flooding came from'. Twilight froze in an attempt to forestall the inevitable as she sent her thoughts purposefully to Trixie; wincing in thought of what was to come.

Trixie's mental voice sniggered at the images she received; glad for something, anything to distract her from her current state. 'No, really? This is too good. If Trixie was not already forced to stiff you for the bill, she would be dragging you kicking and screaming to the therapist.'

Twilight nodded weakly to herself, warily watching the towers of books all around her. The slightest breeze made the stacks shift ominously, swaying too and fro ever more purposefully, reaching a point of no return. An old phrase came to mind as Twilight watched the first book slip from the top of the stacks, landing between her legs. Her voice rose panicked and hoping for help before the full collapse, shouting one word. "Bookalanche!"

Pain. Pain became her very best friend as her shout of terror filled the air. The last bit of disturbance pressed the mountains of literature beyond their points of no return, toppling tomes in all directions. Spines of hefty books left welts upon Twilight's form, and sharp pages cut little grooves into her fur. Twilight's breath was slammed out of her as she found herself buried alive in her second-favorite thing on the planet.

"Twilight! Twilight! Where did all these books come from?" Spike' voice muffledly filtered to her ears after some time. The massive mound of books had pinned Twilight to her bed, and she was afraid that her number one assistant would finish squishing her if he crept too high upon the pile.

"Spi-i-ike! Help! I'm buried!"

The weight upon Twilight's chest began to lessen, and the sound of abused books sliding over one another echoed woodenly through the pile. Twilight couldn't even read the page in front of her as she tried to push on her burdens with her magic. It was just too dark to read, and too painful to concentrate. Book by book, though, she felt the crushing weight lifting from her slowly.

'Don't die on Trixie, she needs you!' A hazy bubble of blue magic forced itself from her horn, spreading out across her to protect against the weight. Somehow, Trixie's magic had squeezed out from Twilight's horn to cushion against the weight.

'Trixie! I'm not dying, I'm squishing.'

'Same difference.'

'It is not. And how are you casting magic through me?' Twilight reached up with a hoof as she thought her mental inquiry across the link. She pushed at as many points as she could, feeling for a weak spot in her tomb (or was it Tome?) of books.

'Is too! Shall Trixie send up a signal flare so that your Spikey-Wik- Wait. Did you say that Trixie was casting... through you?' The blue glow winked out, and Twilight felt what it was like to be a pillow once more as the pile collapsed upon her.

"Twilight!" Spike tossed the book on Twilight's face away, granting her access to fresh air after her brush with being proofread out of existence. Concern was etched upon his face as he cleared away more books to expose her so that he could drag Twilight out of her paper disaster.

'Yes. Oooow. You did.' "Spike, would you have happened to have been my number one assistant and remembered to get the Index number of the book that hit me?" Twilight wormed free of the dusty pile of books. Too many books. She had considered the concept impossible. An ill-placed hoof slid out from under her, tripping her to send her sliding down the slope of books on her back.

"No, Twilight. It doesn't have a library number. Or any kind of identification, actually. Where'd you get it from, Twi?" Spike's eager young enthusiasm found itself quickly dampened as Twilight glared up the pile from where she laid in the prone up to where he had become king of the book throne. He spoke again, much less enthusiastic as he did. "Wow. Uh, Twilight, I've never seen a book like this. Its, I dunno. The pages are weird."

'Wierd?'

"Wierd? Lots of books are wierd, Spike." Twilight slowly rolled over to her aching hooves, wincing as her entire body hurt. Spike clambered over the book pile to her, showing the strange tome to her. A cover made of some kind of silvery metal bound together hundreds of shiney and oddly smooth pages. And the words of the book seemed almost burned directly into the material instead of written onto the pages or printed on them.

"Have you ever seen anything like it, Twi?" Spike frowned with worry as his guardian shook her head. Ideas flashed through his head as he tried to figure out what it could be. The Zebrican Book of the Dead? Nightmare Moon's cookbook? The... Neighcromicon?

Trixie pitched in hesitantly, having felt what Twilight had observed about the book. As Twilight took the book, she spoke up across the link, making herself known. 'Trixie might have. She once saw something that fit such a description. It was in a museum, one of Starswirl's earliest works.'

Twilight fumbled the book in shock.

Twilight looked over the titles of her new collection of books curiously; wondering who had brought them to her. Sure, one book she might have been able to attribute to her subconsciousness somehow locating that one all-night bookstore in Canterlot over the course of a night of sleep-walking. But that wouldn't explain Starswirl's book, or the 500 friends that came with it. Neither really, did a Wish spell explain any of her new-found collection. But if it had been she wouldn't be able to trust any of the knowledge before her; something she couldn't afford while Trixie's life was on the line.

But, the idea that Trixie might have a patron with a vested interest in keeping her alive seemed to fit the facts. The archaic note that fluttered out of the metal-clad centerpiece of the collection suggested that to be the case. Well, Twilight hoped it was a vested interest in keeping Trixie alive instead of feeding false information. The only way she even knew the note was about her current mare of study was the modern lettering which Trixie's name had been written with loving care compared to the rest of the note, in all seven instances where it had been written.

Either way, the books were enough for Twilight to start trying to figure out a cure, or at least a way to suppress or control the spell Trixie had been trapped within. Starting with the book that had been recommended to her in her strange dream. She had only recognized it by the cover and by how it had been the bottom book in the stack on her nightstand.

To say that page 182 was an eye-opening nightmare explaining the single nastiest spell she had ever seen couldn't even begin to describe it. She had absolutely no need to know that cockatrices ate souls, but a healthy dose of memory-erasure spells after everything was over would come in handy. Twilight could feel Trixie's mind shivering at her own mental commentary as she described what 'Practical Transmutation' had to say about the 'Glare of the Cockatrice'. She agreed with Trixie, as what she read had to be the single grimmest topic she had ever discovered.

'The Glare acts like a combination of spider bite, webbing, and porcupine needles in relationship to a body/soul. It is supposed to transform a victim in order to prevent escape before the spell injects itself into the soul after the body has been transmutated into a sort of 'feeding cocoon' Once injected into the structure of the soul, it latches onto the soul and prevents itself from being easily dispelled by draining... the life force from the soul and eventually shredding the soul in any attempt to remove it by any known school of dispelling.'

Spike tapped Twilight on her shoulder, startling her enough to cause her to throw her book with magic instinctively. "Whoa! Twilight, calm down!"

"Spike! You scared me half to death. How did you sneak up on me?" Twilight breathlessly apologized to him, her tail and nerves still twitchy from her dark reading. Her heart slowly eased it's racing in her chest as she retrieved her study material with a few strands of telekinetic force.

"Uh, I didn't Twilight. You were mumbling something about Cockatrices and your eyes were glazed over. I brought you some of that tea that Applejack brought for you from Granny Smith." Spike held up the steaming mug of tea he had brought for Twilight, who gratefully took it. "Say, why are you studying all these books, anyway?"

Twilight closed her eyes and looked away from Spike, trying to figure out what would be best for him to know. "It's for... a friend, I guess. I barely knew them, her, but she was caught by a Cockatrice yesterday. I just barely met her, and I can hear her. She's calling for help every second she can, and I-" Twilight broke off, unwilling to discuss the painful subject matter she had been discovering.

Spike stepped back, eyes widening with shock as he realized why Twilight was studying so hard. He saluted Twilight and straightened up into something resembling a military parade stance. "You can count on me, Twilight! Private Spike Sparkle, First Bookkeeping Battalion ready for Book Sorting action, m'am!"

Twilight could almost swear that she could see Trixie rolling her eyes in the corner of her vision. Twilight teared up slightly as she considered how lucked she was to have the single best #1 Assistant in the world; and that counted the fact that she was Princess Celestia's #1 Assistant. "Books on Stone Petrification on the right, all other forms of transmutation and soul magic on the left! Sort 'em by their title alphabetically, and leave the metal one for me. It's all mine."

Spike saluted Twilight once more, before getting to work in a flurry of activity. Twilight dragged over a pillow with her magic and curled up on it to give herself a more comfortable spot to resume her grisley reading. Finding her page once more in the book, she delved into the words and diagrams that described the sadistic spell of the cockatrices.

'Trixie wants to know if... if anypony has ever been saved before.'

Twilight winced, not yet knowing if anypony ever had been saved. From what she had so far read the answer seemed to be 'nopony'. Zecora's adamant belief that Trixie couldn't be saved had begun to make altogether too much sense. Then again, for all anypony knew Nightmare Moon didn't exist and Princess Luna couldn't have been saved. But it had to be possible, it just had to be. Every spell could be undone. Every spell had a structure, a weakness that could be exploited.

'Trixie would like to interrupt you and point out that it would take a mage who had a special talent of magic itself in order to find such a weak point and attack it. No matter how depressing that is.'

'Well, guess what? Its not so depressing. I dreamed about being Princess Celestia's personal student for a reason.'

'Trixie does not- wait. Oh.'

'My special talent IS magic. I've done the impossible twice before, why not make it three times?' Twilight had never felt as proud of being who she was before. This was the moment Princess Celestia had been inadvertently training her towards from the beginning. This was her chance to make a difference and create something that could help so many ponies.

Trixie seemed to splutter for a moment as she realized what she had been up against before. 'Wait. You are that.... you're that pony! The Bearer of Magic! And that means Trixie- oh Luna, what did I do!?'

'Nothing bad. My friends mean well, but sometimes they let their egos get the better of them. You didn't really hurt any of them, and if they're petty enough to use that as an excuse to hate you forever, then they're pretty horrible friends.' Twilight reassured Trixie through their link, giving the showmare some images of the interesting hijinks her friends had so far put themselves through.

Turning the page in her book, Twilight recoiled at the horrifying sight of a mangled pony, whom had been 'freed' body and soul from the curse. She had... died, if somepony could call it that, shortly after the procedure. Her, and the volunteer who had linked with her to defend against the curse. They just looked so hollow. Hollow and broken beyond what Twilight had considered possible.

'Oh. Okay, uh, I think we might want to focus on keeping you sane first. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.'

'Trixie agrees. Please stop thinking of that.'

"Zecora!"

Trixie wondered how she could hear. The dead silence that had been her companion for an eternity had allowed no mortal noise into her ears. Beyond the pinkish glow of the six-pointed star that had swallowed her up she could see nothing but void. Void, and shapes and colors passing occasionally in what she felt to be the distance of the deep darkness beyond. Shapes and colors... that oddly reminded her of Cutie Marks.

'Souls.'

'What was that, Trixie?'

'I can see souls. Trixie can see yours all around her. She can see others passing by, represented by their Cutie Marks.' Well, they had been passing by. For some reasons the apparitions had faded away, leaving her with only tiny stars of light in the distance.

'Trixie, I uh- Well, I suppose it makes sense seeing as you're riding around in my body as a free soul.'

The darkness all about them seemed to slowly deepen as they continued onwards to wherever it was Twilight was taking them. It swirled about them, like the clouds of a wild storm before the dropping of a tornado. The sparkles of light, the tiny animal souls she had been seeing were slowly swallowed up by the dark void as it closed in around them. Like it was hunting them.

Twilight seemed to notice her passenger's distress, her soul soothingly pulsing around Trixie. 'Its alright. We're almost to Zecora's hut. Once there I'll see what spells I can steal or modify from Starswirl's book so you can at least interact with everypony again.'

'That isn't Trixie's problem. Something is hunting us, can't you feel that?'

Discontinuity. A moment of sensory disruption amidst a brilliant white light. As if she was in a tunnel and not in a tunnel all at once. It was like two points of the universe had conjoined long enough to move somepony.

And then Trixie began to wonder if she had already gone insane as the glowing black ribbon of arrows slithered into view all around her again.

"I am not certain of what effect you intend to induce, this appears to be a book of most unusual use." Zecora frowned and lifted one of her drapes to look out into the forest. For a moment as she had looked at the mysterious metal-bound book she could have sworn something had rattled in the brush.

"Honestly? I have no idea. Starswirl was known for knowing things that we're only just now discovering and nopony has ever found his theories to be wrong. So it should be good for something." Twilight opened up Starswirl's tome, frowning at the incomprehensible text within. She gently prodded the strange angular letters on the page with a pulse of her magic, wondering if whatever enchantment Starswirl had used to make them was still active.

A pulse that was swallowed up greedily by the page, lighting up a letter. A tug that became a swirl of energy that sucked gently at her magic, pulling it in slowly and steadily. Another letter lit up nearby, then what appeared to be a whole word. After a few moments all the writing on the page lit up with a pinkish-white glow, pulsating with energy. "Uh, maybe we should stand back. All the way back, actually."

The two of them backed slowly away from Zecora's table as the pages of the book were all completely enveloped in the pulsing aura. Tiny tendrils of pink light snaked out from it, touching them in the head as the book began to flicker even faster. Little beads of light zipped in both directions along the tendrils, heading from the book to their foreheads and feeding back into the column of light that rose from the book. With each pulse, the column reached up and out until it stretched from floor to ceiling in a brilliant beam of light, pulsing ever faster and brighter as it grew. A slight wind kicked up as the sight grew too bright for Twilight and Zecora to look at, forcing them to shield their squinting eyes with a leg as they apprehensively tried to watch.

A final blast of light burst forth from the book, seemingly strong enough to be seen in Ponyville. The burst of wind with it disoriented them as the blinding light distorted their vision with it's glare and left them unable to see past the greenish afterimages. The pair's heads felt like somepony had opened them up and stuffed the full power of the Elements into them.
Twilight was the first to stumble back to the book, relying on her memorization of the interior measurements of Zecora's hut for guidance. She tapped out the exterior of the book with her hoof, wondering how it had closed itself as she did. Tears watered in her eyes as she blinked rapidly to try and clean the spots from her eyes.

A blue glow diffused itself through her vision; the strange tickling of Trixie's magic trickling through her form receding as her vision returned. 'A trick Trixie picked up for dealing with fireworks accidents. Happens more than she cares to admit.'

Twilight turned back to Zecora, who was grumbling under her breath in her native language. Twilight cast the spell Trixie had used on her, smiling as Zecora's confused head-shaking stopped. "Are you alright, Zecora?"

"Well, I do not think I am under a dread thrall; perhaps I should just be glad that I did not walk into a wall." Zecora unsteadily stumbled over next to Twilight, sitting down like a pony who had just rode Dash in the middle of one of the more enthusiastic airshows she put on. A frown of confusion creased her muzzle as she looked at the front page Twilight had opened the book to. "Why is it that I can look upon this page, only to find that it reads like some form of gauge?"

Twilight whipped her head back around to the book, pleasantly surprised to find that it had somehow transcribed its language into her head. Even though it was all still written in the strange angular symbols that she had found, she realized she could read and understand it now. A phonetic language, 26 letters and ten basic numbers... fascinating. She read each line, discovering that each was an individual test designed to introduce and explain the rules of the language in the form of a nonsensical poem. Well, except for the last line. "You now have a kazoo?"

Zecora blew a strange honking-buzzing note into Twilight's ear, startling the life out of the unicorn. The bookworm turned to her study companion as she steadied her heart-rate and noticed the instrument Zecora had acquired. The zebra twitched the kazoo the book had summoned, letting it bob between her lips as she struggled not to laugh at the way Twilight's fur and mane had slightly puffed out.

"Oh. Kazoo." Twilight shook her head ruefully, applying the same mental filters she often used on Pinkie towards the matter. One of her hooves idly rubbed at her forehead as she felt her companion cracking up enough for her and Zecora. "And Trixie finds us hilarious. Wonderful. She could have warned me about that spell, though."

'The last time Trixie encountered one of Starswirl's books it had been disenchanted by a fraudster disabling it. And there was not a paragon of unicorn power poking it with a metaphorical stick. Trixie believes, if she remembers right, that the books could read somepony's thoughts and could find the exact page they were thinking of. So, lets see if Trixie is right...'

Twilight yanked her hooves back as half the pages in the book flipped by, turning the displayed page to somewhere in the 500 range. With the way Zecora nearly pushed her out of the way to take a closer look at the small and densely packed words on the page Twilight inspected her closely. She wondered if the zebra was as adamant in her belief of the dim odds for Trixie's survival as she professed. Twilight joined her companion in reading the page, which was helpfully labeled as 'Start of Cockatrice Research'.

"I have heard of such a book; it changes to what you need whenever you do not look." Zecora lightly touched a hoof to the page, using its tip to mark where she was reading.

Twilight followed along with her, commenting to Trixie as she did. 'Oh, wow. Starswirl's wife was caught by a cockatrice. She... she had just given birth to his son. Starswirl killed it, but not before the spell had completely turned her to stone. Somehow, he managed to bond his soul to hers like we did to preserve her, but he wasn't able to reverse the changes. Oh. Oh no... A spell only works on a cockatrice curse once because the curse adapts to the spell to defend itself. He was able to get her moving with a 'come to life' spell, but it faded away after a few minutes.'

"Twilight, are you listening? I have been trying to tell you of how your horn has been bluely glistening." Zecora concernedly shook Twilight's shoulder as she stared at the blue-cored aura around the unicorn's horn.

"What? Oh, I was just talking to Trixie. Don't look at me like that, you know she needs somepony to at least try to save her. I think you would like her, Zecora. When she's humble the two of you have a lot in common." Trixie snorted in Twilight's mind at the idea, leading to a mental elbow to the ribs from her host. "When she's humble."

"Even if that may be; any form of relationship between us I cannot see. Despite all the stories she could tell; it is not within my mind that she does dwell." Zecora ruefully shook her head as she recognized that Twilight was willing to go to great lengths to protect the mare she had bonded with.

Twilight turned from Zecora back to the book; realizing that it had read her thoughts and shifted to a page that was exactly what she needed. She tapped the diagram on the page; a spell that Starswirl had developed for the victims of cockatrices and other immobile hard-luck cases. She gathered her magic, glad that she and Trixie had eye colors that were close enough to not raise questions after she was done. She would never have been able to explain how she had developed dichromatic eyes suddenly. Tendrils of magic spun from her horn into her senses, especially her sight and hearing. Her whole body twitched with imaginary inputs as her magic burned connections into her nervous system. Sparks arced from her into Trixie's stone prison, running down the stream of magic connecting their souls together. Across that link, she could hear Trixie gasping and grunting from the sensations as the magic played havoc with her mind, as it dove under the level of the curse and connected them on a deeper level.

And, borrowing some of Trixie's spells to weave into the matrix, Twilight completed the last part of the spell. Starswirl had never really gotten it right. A matrix of raw magic formed in midair, sparkling with light. Twilight held it together using every last bit of Trixie's talent in the subject that she could get her hooves on. Spells twitched as Twilight bound it to Trixie's control; the curse nearly defending itself against her for a moment as Twilight finished sculpting the new illusion spell and bridged a link to it for Trixie.

Zecora looked between the awkwardly posed pony turned statue leaned against her table, and the illusion that had just been completed beside it. Unnervedly, she turned to Twilight and tried to resist the urge to run out the door. "Twilight Sparkle, I believe your eyes the most; tell me that I do not see a ghost!"

"She sees a ghost?!" Trixie's hoof flew to her throat, marveling suddenly as she discovered that her senses worked again and that she seemed to have somehow discovered the ability to move again. She moved her head around, trying to spot what had panicked the zebra and struggled to figure out why her vision seemed to come from where Twilight was standing. And more importantly, she was nearly panicking herself as she tried to figure out how her body was still standing there next to her and why it was still petrified! Trixie dashed to the stone mass, finding to her horror that her hooves passed through its side in a hazy blue glow. "AAAAAHH! I'm a ghost!"

Twilight nearly fell to the floor laughing at Trixie's shock. "She's only an illusion."

Twilight sauntered over to Trixie with a bounce in her step. A cheeky hoof poked Trixie in the side, giving Zecora and Twilight something to laugh about as the showmare jumped into the air from the sensations of the hoof probing her eitheral form. At least they had made some kind of progress.

~Is Power

Hoof pokes in. Hoof pokes out. Hoof pokes in. Hoof pokes out. Hoof pokes in. Hoof pokes out.

"Trixie, if you don't stop poking your non-existent hoof into my eye, I'm going to stop helping you and revoke your interaction privileges for a week." Twilight Sparkle barely looked up from Starswirl's journal as she sniped at her head-guest. Notes had been scattered all around Zecora's hut, to the zebra's eternal frustration.

Trixie jerked her illusionary body back, quickly dashing to the other side of the room, lest she annoy Twilight further. "Trixie is sorry. Please don't banish Trixie back into-"

"I'm not going to cut off the senses you're borrowing from me, that's just cruel. " Twilight rubbed a hoof against her mane in frustration. What Starswirl had been working on, it... well, was beyond anything she had ever heard of. Multiple concepts that were still theoretical in modern studies were completely fleshed out in his work, and partially discarded as he had devised the most insane spell she had ever seen. "I never thought that the only reason I'm seeing Starswirl the Bearded's magnum opus would be because one of my friends got herself turned to stone."

"Trixie would hardly call herself your friend. Maybe your inferior, or acquaintance, but she doesn't deserv-"

Twilight's glare stopped Trixie's dismissive hoof-wave mid-swing. "I might not like all that much about you and your habits, and we might not be very good friends, but we're still friends. I respect you, and the work you put in to keep yourself going. And you have some of the best illusions I've ever seen under that hat of yours."

Trixie blinked in surprise, the unexpected compliment having blindsided her. "Umm, Trixie thanks you?"

"You're welcome. When I fix you, you wouldn't mind teaching me a few of your tricks? I've got a thing or two I can show you that might spice up your act." Twilight turned back to the book, taking a new glace at it with her refreshed mind. A part of her realized that it would take months before she could properly cast it, and she hoped Trixie could wait that long. Starswirl's journal entries had begun to become erratic after a few months in his own studies.

"Trixie supposes she could. She would rather not, they were Trixie's mother's, and their uniqueness is the one thing she has left of her." Trixie worked her illusionary body, it's features wriggling for a little while as she struggled to show her sadness with it.

Being a disembodied spirit looking through another's eyes while trying to maintain a consistent illusion of her presence at a distance from her borrowed perspective was irritating and almost painfully difficult. Still, it was better than being trapped in the void again, with nothing to see but ponies's souls. She didn't want to feel that crushing darkness clutching at her again.

"It's alright Trixie. I shouldn't have asked."

The hut's door opened, Zecora wreathed in rare plants of the Everfree as she struggled to gently push it shut. "Lovebirds I see? Or a special drink that should have been saved for me?"

Twilight and Trixie both spluttered at Zecora's inneudo, tripping over each other's words trying to refute it. The zebra shamaness laughed politely as she let them splutter, looking at the still incomplete spell notes scattered across her formerly neat home. "Be at ease as I only meant a joke. Such hostile embarrassment I did not mean to provoke."

Twilight phew'd in relief, turning back to the book as Trixie tried to follow the shamaness. "Trixie does not perform that form of trick. Just for future reference."

Zecora nodded, having only been teasing. Now that she had been talking to her for a while, Trixie seemed remarkably humble when not upon a stage. Certainly a far cry from the tales told by Pinkie Pie. Though perhaps the part where staying on your savior's good side being the only way to stay saved might have had something to do with it. Zecora set her bundle in the large alchemical alcove to one side and deeply breathed in relief from the weight that had been upon her.

The sound of Twilight grunting in frustration and dropping her head against the pile of notes before her caught Zecora's attention, drawing her back to her kitchen table. Trixie's illusionary avatar joined her as they looked over the massive spread in confusion. It was as if Twilight had run around and around mentally, trying to catch some hidden facet of the spell. But the latest notes were different. Six points repeated over and over again in the notes, scribbled around and circled whenever they appeared.

"So tell us; have you made sense of this fuss? Or have you hit a stump, and now find yourself on your rump?"

Twilight's mane sprang into madness at the inquiry, looking as if she had not combed it in decades. Her eyes had shrunk to manic points of obsessive focus, the stress of the spell slowly unraveling her nerves. "Hit a stump? Yes! A stump! A big stupid ugly STUMPED!" Twilight threw her hooves in the air, magic sparking from them as it almost seemed like her mane was smoking.

Trixie could feel the growing madness of failure driving the unicorn, consuming her. Which was just wonderful, since having a mad host was likely not going to end well for her. "Trixie wonders why exactly Twilight is taking this so personally? Did not even Starswirl have problems just coming up with the spell?"

The ghostly image of the showpony jumped back as Twilight rushed up to her, Twilight pointing at her rump with fury and indignation. "See this? I'm supposed to have a special talent in magic itself! I should know this instantly! Or at least I should general know how this stupid kludge works!"

Zecora reached beneath her table, her hoof emerging with a cup filled with a calming elixir. She understood why Twilight was becoming slightly unhinged. She dealt with a spell that defied her. The shamaness was ashamed to admit it, but more than one potion had similarly consumed her. "Perhaps you have grown too self-reflective. May I suggest a new perspective?"

Twilight closed her eyes in thought as she greedily snatched the cup from Zecora and slammed its contents down her throat in a single gulp. Her spluttering from the burn that it dragged down her esophagus took a moment; leaving her panting as her frayed nerves slowly relaxed, and as her muscles untensed themselves. As she opened them again, only a super-equine show of will kept her from facehoofing as Zecora rapidly pointed between herself and Trixie. Now she just felt stupid for forgetting that they could have been of help.

"Oh. I'm sorry. I forgot that I had friends who at least hear me out and help me get this off my chest." Twilight took deep breaths as her mane slowly relaxed and fell into a more natural disheveled state. The dim lighting in the kitchen served to assist her as she closed her eyes and used her old standby of thinking that Celestia was right behind her and encouraging her to stay undiscouraged. "Right. Well, I'm so worked up because of how complex this spell is. it has six originating nodes! Six! Simultaneously!"

Trixie's eyes grew wide as she realized how crazy that was. An originating node was the pony or object that cast a spell, the foundation on which a spell was based. Usually, if there was more than one node, they either cast the exact same spell, or staggered their initiation in order to prevent horrific interactions. Casting two spells as part of a single spell from two sources at once was rare and a dangerous feat. But six? The ponies would be lucky if they merely turned inside out and exploded. Twice maybe if they were extra lucky. More likely they would die screaming as their bodies slowly evaporated when their spells turned upon them.

"So six the spell does name... but are not your Elements of Harmony the same?" Zecora shivered as she walked through Trixie, reaching up to the recessed bookshelf on her hut's wall to pull out a reference guide to Equestrian artifacts.

Trixie and Twilight both jerkingly turned towards Zecora, mouths agape. It couldn't be, could it? Twilight's mouth worked like a gasping fish as she realized how blindingly obvious the solution had been. Trixie's hoof hesitantly jerked up and down as she tried to find a way to politely interject herself into the conversation again.

"I- I... why am I made of stupid?! Of course!" Twilight rapidly sorted her massive array of notes in the air until she found one of the sources of her frustration. Trixie tried to make sense of the terrifyingly complex diagrams and equations. "See! The originating nodes connected into a larger effect! Only one of the elements has to cast this specific spell, and the elements complete the rest of the spell!"

"This is a good thing for Trixie, yes?"

Twilight nodded rapidly, skipping through the field of notes to hug Zecora tight enough to squeeze the breath out of her. "Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU! Oh, Zecora, you're a lifesaver."

Trixie projected the sound of her throat clearing, hoping that Twilight would pay attention.

"Oh, right. Literally a life saver." Trixie rolled her illusionary eyes, pointing a hoof to the extending shadows in the room as the sun set upon the Everfree Forest. Twilight's gaze snapped to the window hidden in the mouth of one of Zecora's tribal masks, yelping slightly in worry as she noticed the sunset outside. "Oh gosh! Sorry for leaving the place a mess! I'll get it all cleaned up tomorrow, I really have to go!"

Zecora nodded bemusedly, wondering how Twilight hadn't learned to budget some time to clean up after a week of coming out to study Starswirl's text. The ghostly cold of Trixie's illusionary body passing through her illicited a hop to one side to make way for the illusionary mare being dragged away as her anchor ran off into the forest.

"Until we next meet! I would suggest getting ready, Twilight is getting fast on her feet."

"Remind Trixie about iiit!" Trixie's galloping illusion fought against the tug, sliding across the floor and straight through a wall as the disembodied mare was yanked across the forest to her host.

Zecora walked over, shutting the door that Twilight had left open yet again while humming a tune of her people under her breath. She wondered why Twilight always left her hut in a mess, no matter what the occasion for the visit. Parasprites, a ghost performer, enough notes to write a thesis paper on, pony-statues... Surely they didn't leave each other's homes in such messes. Now where did she leave that broom?

Darkness lurked all about them once more. Not a metaphysical one, but instead a literal one as the stars rose upon the Everfree Forest. Trixie shivered in the comforting pinkish glow of Twilight's soul, having banished her body of illusion, watching out in her spiritual vision for dangers to her host. The constellation of lights watched over them, each a life of it's own. The darkness that had lurked about them on their first journey together into the Everfree had not returned yet; something that worried Trixie.

'Trixie was wondering, she noticed that you feel relatively confident about the Elements of Harmony. Why? Trixie understands that they are her best chance, but they haven't been seen in a thousand years.'

'Uh, about four months in a few days actually. Maybe a day or two, depending on when Princess Celestia last checked their vault.'

'Um, Trixie is not entirely certain she understands what you mean.'

Twilight sighed, wondering how somepony had missed Princess Luna's return. The deep woodlands of the Everfree Forest were fading, the light scrub and grass of the fields around Ponyville coming to surround them as the stars glittered high above. She stopped, looking up into them and hoping that maybe, maybe Trixie would soon be safe. 'You do remember the big commotion regarding the return of Princess Luna, right?'

'No. Trixie doesn't remember a- wait. Is that why all of Trixie's performances were canceled for a week several months ago?'

'Yes. Princess Luna was Nightmare Moon, and she's Princess Celestia's little sister. I think.' Twilight stepped off, feeling Trixie anxious for them to get out of the open and into someplace where she could manifest and feel like something more than a passenger. 'About four months ago during the Summer Sun festival, the thousand year prison that Princess Celestia put her in failed, and she came to Ponyville after putting Princess Celestia in the sun. It got kind of crazy after that, but me and my friends defeated her and became the Bearers of the Elements of Harmony.'

'Oh.' Trixie looked out across the void of her senses, seeing the faintest lights of souls clustered around what she presumed to be Ponyville. The little rainbow from a thundercloud, the ever glittering diamonds, the tumbling trio of apples... wait. 'Oh no. Would three of your friends happen to be the hecklers that Trixie took care of?'

'Yes, but I don't see how that- Oh no.' Twilight's eyebrow twitched as she walked down the tree-lined road leading into town. Trixie had a right to be worried after all, would the Elements even work if the bearers weren't all in agreement? What would Rarity, or Rainbow Dash say? They had been so humiliated by Trixie when they had bothered her and called her out on her boasting.

Trixie curled in on herself, compressing into a point in the glow as she realized that she had personally insulted three mares with the ear of Princess Celestia. Hay, if she hadn't been turned to stone, in a few weeks she would have been ruined in the backlash. Her life was over...

'Trixie? Trixie! Calm down. My friends will forgive you. It might take some work, but they will. You're still okay, this is just going to be more complicated than I had thought. Okay?' Twilight trotted a little faster as she saw her home on the Ponyville skyline, knowing that in an hour or so she'd have the Elements on-hoof to save Trixie.

After all, as one of their bearers, Princess Celestia was bound to let her have them if she needed them!

Spike yelped high in the air as Twilight slammed the front door of the library open. The baby dragon struggled to keep the mighty ladder that he was on from tipping over and disrupting the painstaking work he had put into reshelving many of the books Twilight had been carelessly searching through in her project. Vertigo swallowed him, consuming each of his senses as he tangled in the air from his precarious perch ten paces off the ground; his legs kicking with protest from the unpleasant sensations.

Magenta magic snatched him from the ladder, safely conveying him to the wondrous stability of the ground on what felt like the softest bed imaginable. Heartbeats raced in his hearing from the close call he had suffered, a clawed paw clutched across his chest to calm his raging heartbeat from the Pinkie-time tempo it had been keeping. Opening his eyes once more from their scared clench nearly sent his heart back into overdrive as Twilight's eyes stared into his own from far closer than he ever wanted to see them.

"YEEAAA-AUGH!" Spike flopped from her grip to the floor, tail stiff and both paws clutching his chest from the shock.

Twilight picked him up by his tailtip, shaking him lightly to snap him out of it as she levitated over a fresh quill and a sheet of paper. "No time for theatrics, Spike! I have an urgent letter for Princess Celestia!" She shook him again once more, pressing the writing implements into his paws for him to grab.

"What is it? What's wrong? The Parasprites are back? A giant timberwolf has come to eat the town? No, wait! Don't tell me Trixie came back to seek her revenge for being humiliated by you!" Spike waved his arms at the last idea, yelping as Twilight dropped him softly onto the cushion in front of her writing desk.

'Ha-Ha, Trixie would never- well, yes she might have. If she got broke enough and could never find work again...'

"Ready for the letter, Spike?" Twilight looked to him for a moment, seeing his nod of readiness as she paced around the table in the center of the lobby.

"Dear Princess Celestia,

I am writing to you today on a matter of utmost importance. A friend of mine suffered a most terrible mishap, incapacitating her. As a part of my investigation into curing her, I discovered a full and intact copy of Starswirl the Bearded's journal, which included the exact spell I was looking for. But, it can only be cast by the Elements of Harmony due to it's complexity. I urgently request to have access to them for several days so that I can help my friend. The Elements are her only hope.

Signed, your Faithful Student,
Twilight Sparkle."

Spike scratched his head as he tried to spell out some of the words Twilight had used in his head. He already had most of the letter down, other than a few little teensy problems. "Uh, how do you spell in-ca-watsinating?"

"Trapping her, Spike."

"Got it!" Spike waddled over to the window, sending his precious missive onwards to Celestia in a gout of green fire. Puzzlement etched into his face as he thought of something he forgot to ask. The night lighting of Ponyville glittered out before him from the low balcony he stood on, each reminding him of somepony he had met in the small town since their unexpected move. Funny, he couldn't remember anypony going missing...

"Say Twilight?"

"Yes, Spike?" Twilight didn't look up as she slowly paced around the room, her head nodding and shaking every once in a while, as if holding a personal conversation in her head.

"Who went missing? I can't remember anypony getting lost." Spike walked to the center of the room, turning in place to keep Twilight in view as a frown creased the set of thick scales that somewhat served as his eyebrows.

"You- you've already met her. Kind of a brief meeting, and she'll probably want to talk to you later when we free her." Twilight looked over to the window, anxious to see if Celestia would respond right away. The faster, the better.

Spike fretted at the way Twilight hesitated. Like she thought he would disapprove of whoever Twilight was helping. But anypony who was one of Twilight's friends had to be a good pony, so he wasn't too worried about it. "So, Twilight?"

"Hmm?"

"What happened to her? I mean, it has to be pretty bad if you're breaking out the Elements of Harmony and all."

"Spike... she was cursed by a cockatrice." Twilight stopped pacing, and walked over to Spike to hug him with all of her might, shivering as she embraced him. He hugged her back, concernedly glancing across their shoulders to where she laid her head against his back.

"Uh, I thought you didn't believe in curses."

"I didn't, until I saw what a cockatrice does to somepony. It's horrible, turning it's victim to stone, and then sealing them with a spell that rips their soul apart if removed. Nopony has ever been saved, only... only given Celestia's Mercy or placed in a place of honor in the palace so they won't be so lonely. And- and the cockatrice is always hunting for it's victim, because it wants to eat their soul." Twilight struggled to keep an even tone as she spoke, choking up as she once again thought over the horrific consequences that awaited if she failed.

Spike recoiled from Twilight, tripping over himself in shock as her words sank in. The realization that every one of the statues in the castle could be a frozen and inwardly screaming pony sent shivers of ice down his spine, and put a twisting knot into his gut. No, wait... that wasn't fear, that was a- BUUUUUURRRRRRP!

Celestia's reply rudely erupted from Spike's maw in a firey burst of light, plopping to the ground between them like a Sword of Camelcleas. They both hesitantly reached for it, bumping their heads together in the confusion. Rubbing his scalp, Spike reached down again before Twilight could, preparing to break it open to read it to her. But something stopped him. This was Twilight's friend, her plight to recover from.

"Twilight, here. You read it. It wouldn't be right for me to read it." Spike stretched out his arm, holding the rolled up document for Twilight to take ahold of.

She nodded to him with ever so slightly tearful eyes, taking the missive from him and breaking it's seal.

"To my Dear and Faithful Student,
Twilight Sparkle:

I am sorry, but I cannot grant your request to use the Elements of Harmony, no matter how charitable the cause. There are older, and fouler things than Nightmare Moon that stalk our world, and I need them ready and where I can find them should the worst come to pass. I am terribly sorry about your friend, but I cannot risk the nation's safety for anypony. I am confident that you can find another way, Twilight. I believe in you."

Twilight swallowed back the horror and disbelief, feeling Trixie all but ready to wail in sorrow in the back of her mind. "Now what?"

Baby Steps

Spike put his head against the door to Twilight's bedroom, concernedly listening to the sniffling within. "Twilight, you okay in there?"

"No, not really, Spike."

The sniffling stopped as he sat by the door, replaced by the sounds of Twilight's abused bed creaking, squeaking, and groaning with her movements. The baby dragon twitched as he thought of how distressed his guardian must be. If Twilight was wallowing in self-pity on her bed like Rarity occasionally did, just how stressed was she?

Spike sat down against her door. He leaned back, letting the scales on his back soak in the cool of the door's wooden frame as he called in to Twilight once more. "What's wrong, Twi? Why was it so important that you get the Elements? Who's this friend of yours that needs help?"

The baby dragon fell over backwards as Twilight yanked the door open behind him. Magenta magic coated him as he laid in surprise on his back. It picked him up and floated him across the room to Twilight's bed as another tendril slammed the door shut and locked it behind him.

"Twilight, you're scaring me."

"I'm scaring me too, Spike." Twilight laid him down on her prone form, hugging him tightly to her chest with her forelegs as she lay in bed. "I'm so lost and worried, and I don't know if I can control what's happening."

Spike struggled with Twilight's hooves, shifting them down to hug around his lower chest so she wouldn't strangle him by accident. "Is that a serious 'I can't control myself anymore', or is it 'I lost the manual to the castle's mainframe' again?"

"Not a time for jokes, Spike. Even if it is kind of, well both really."

Spike twitched again. The last time Twilight couldn't control herself had been when she had triggered a security spell that had taken over her body and marched her into a closet for arrest in the library. He didn't even want to think about what it could be this time. More relevant, though, was the band of blue magic that had sprung up around his body, hugging him even tighter to Twilight. "Uh, Twilight? When did your magic turn blue?"

His guardian sniffled and nuzzled him with her chin silently. Spike shook and squirmed to get free so he could look Twilight in the eyes as she silently cried beneath him. "Twi, talk to me. C'mon, you know that the number one rule of being a number one assistant is talking! Say something, please Twilight?"

"It's not my magic, Spike. Remember that friend, who was petrified by a cockatrice? It's hers. She's the one I need the elements for. It's the only way that I know of to save her." Twilight hoarsely sniffled as she spoke. She concentrated and began casting, showing Spike how her horn glowed with her normal color of magic.

"Wait, how are they casting? How are they casting through you? And where are they?"

"She's in my head, Spike." Twilight lifted a hoof and poked her beloved assistant in the noggin to physically demonstrate to him.

"Okay, Twilight. Now i know you need help. You're hearing voices and casting magic that isn't your own. Wait, wait! Maybe whatever it was that possessed Princess Luna got into your head! I don't want to be tardy forever because of Nightmare Dusk!" Spike threw his paws up into the air, jumping off of Twilight to stare at her worriedly.

Twilight facehoofed in exasperation as another voice broke the tableau.

"She is referring to Trixie, actually."

Spike jumped back, running to the locked door in fright. "Ghost!" Tugging on the handle a few times, he gave up and dived under the frame of Twilight's bed in his panic.

"SPIKE! Knock it off!"

Trixie stopped Twilight from diving under the bed after him with a touch of her magic against the purple mare's shoulder. She shook her head as Twilight looked at her, silently disapproving Twilight chasing after Spike. "Twilight, he might as well be right about Trix-... about me. No elements, an untested spell that all the major researchers of magic would declare suicidal, no other way to- I- I'm-"

"Not doomed. Plan B is still the Elements, one way or another. Plan A is getting that spell to work without the Elements, no matter how hard it seems. It's what friends do, and you've got a friend in me." Twilight accepted Trixie's magic-based hug as best she could, wishing she could pat Trixie on the back and tell her it was all going to be alright."

Spike slid his head out from under the bed, looking up at the pair. "Wait. Trixie? She got turned to stone by a cockatrice and now she's a ghost inside your head? I think my head hurts too much to actually hurt."

"And I think I need to explain this from the top for Spike, Trixie..."

"So, that's everything that's happened so far, Spike." Twilight passed him a mug of hot chocolate with pearl sprinkles as the pair sat in the library's moonlit kitchen. Giving him the whole story like that was a lot for him to adsorb.

Spike nodded as he thought through everything, looking back up to look Twilight in the eyes. Ugh, eye. The other one was just a few shades off, the one that Trixie had borrowed to see. The ghost's magician watching on through HIS Twilight gave him the willies. Hay, it'd give everypony the willies if they knew. They looked so close, and yet so different.

"Okay, I can get hiding Trixie's condition from everypony in town. Dash is still pretty angry with her. But why hide it from Princess Celestia? She's always reasonable." Spike scooted over slightly, still unnerved knowing that Trixie was looking at him even if he couldn't see her.

Twilight sighed, unsure of how exactly to explain her objections to him. "Spike, do you ever remember Princess Celestia talking to one of the victims they've rescued over the years?"

The baby dragon nodded. "Yeah. Actually, she talks to all of them once each year. Asking something about whether or not they still want to pray for a false hope, or if they want to go for help in some other place. I think she called it the Summer Glens, or something. She said it was a one-way trip, though."

Twilight twitched once more, her hair frazzling a little further in distress. "Spike, that name is a euphemism."

Trixie spoke up first, interrupting Spike with her disembodied voice. "Small words, Twilight. He is just a foal."

"Oh, right. It means it's a fancy nickname or another way of saying or describing something. Princess Celestia was talking about freeing victims from being trapped by sending them onto the next life. The only reason Trixie can do what she can is because of the spell I found from Starswirl. I guess it's because she doesn't want to torture them unintentionally with false hopes and the twisted existence they face alone in the dark in this life." Twilight steadfastly avoided Spike's gaze, hoping that he wouldn't lose faith in Princess Celestia. She was almost like a second mother to him.

Spike's mug set down with a shaky clatter onto the tabletop as he finally spoke up. "How bad is it, Trixie?"

"Can't move, can't see, can't hear, can't feel. Just a big black void you're all alone in, knowing that something could shatter you or eat your soul or..."

"Oh." Spike slurped loudly at his drink again, humming to himself as he weighed Princess Celestia's options in his mind. "Twi, you said there's no way that you've found to save her other than the Elements, right?"

Twilight shook her head somberly. "I haven't found one yet. Starswirl needed most of his life to create the spell that he designed to fire through the Elements. But, the world is a big place, and those things are in other countries too. Maybe somepony else figured out how to do it and is keeping it a secret."

Spike nodded, starting to know where Princess Celestia was coming from. "Well, I can see why she'd do it. It'd be like being bored, except a thousand times worse and it'd never end! It'd drive me crazy in a week. And that's completely forgetting about the whole risk of getting eaten like the way I eat a gem."

Neither noticed the involuntary shudder in Twilight's body at that afterthought. Or the way that her fur tinged blue.

"Oh Spike. Why is it that sometimes it feels like you're the adult here instead of me?" Twilight took a slurp of her own mug's hot chocolate in despondency.

"Nah, it's probably 'cause of my brain. You know, dragon? I think differently than you do because of all the chemi-whatsits and the wiring up in there, you know? But really, why not just tell Celestia? Trixie doesn't want to go, so it's not like she's going to force things."

Twilight licked some of the chocolate mustache off of her upper lip as she sat silently in thought and reflection. "Spike... I don't know. She's told me not to study the victims in the castle in the past. From what I know, somepony close to her was hurt badly by trying to help a victim. She's afraid, I guess. And I'm worried she might try to take Trixie, trying to help and keep me safe from whatever it is she's worried about. And then... I won't be able to help her at all."

"I guess she is a friend, if you're willing to pick her over the Princess."

"SPIKE! I know she's harsh, and blustery, and more arrogant than Dash, and that she dresses lousy-"

"Hey! Trixie stage-dresses! It must be attention catching!"

Twilight grumbled, continuing on over Trixie's objections. "Or what she said. But, underneath all that I found somepony who's... not all that different. Spike, before I came here, was I really all that different? I rejected everypony; I always was using my knowledge to get them to leave me alone even if it hurt them. I was the personal student to the Princess, and I knew it."

Twilight tinkered with the condiments in the middle of her table half-heartedly, tilting them and setting them back upright to try and stop herself from thinking of Canterlot. She'd been a real jerk. At least she could feel Trixie mentally blushing at the faint praise and compliments. Twilight wondered what could have happened, if Trixie really had been the Princess's personal student beside her, like the two of them had been dreaming of.

"You know what, Spike? Even if she didn't deserve it, she needed a friend. She can still be so much better. I know she could be better, if I could help her learn like me."

Trixie stammered, mentally and audibly at Twilight's declaration. No, nuh-uh! Trixie manifested her visible form, trying to pose meekly for the pair to demonstrate her disbelief. She wished she could show her blushing embarrassment, but already some "Trixie... err, I'm just a simple showmare. It's all I was raised to be, all I can be. I couldn't be like you."

"You. Could. Be. More." Twilight poked her hoof at Trixie with each punctuated word, forgetting that Trixie couldn't feel it.
Spike grumbled, as he thought about what Twilight might possibly try in her efforts to free Trixie. "So Twi, why won't the Princess just hoof over the Elements?"

Oh, great. "Spike, she's kind of right. The Elements are more than just our personal tools. There's a lot more resting on them than most ponies realize. Remember when I talked to you about how some ponies are just plain mean?"

Spike nodded to her statement, and Trixie raised an eyebrow in curious inquiry as to where Twilight was leading them.

Twilight cleared her throat, and continued, getting up from the table and leading them into the main lounge of the library. "Well, some nations are like that as well." She sighed, remembering that Princess Celestia had asked her not to go into detail with other ponies unless she had to. "Do you remember the party we had after we freed Princess Luna?"

"Oh yeah, you kind of missed the best part of that party! You never told me where you went." Spike licked his lips, thinking of a gemstone Rarity had passed him.

Trixie moved her visual avatar closer to Twilight, hoping for answers. "Did Princess Celestia take you aside?"

"Yes, she did. She was explaining to me why she was taking the elements for safekeeping, and explaining to me why she was keeping our identities secret from everypony." Twilight walked over to the globe to pick it up and spin it around for them both to see.

"Spike, Trixie, there are horrible countries out there. Countries that Princess Celestia tricked into thinking that the Elements are a weapon. One that she could use by herself to protect Equestria from them." Twilight yanked wavery spectral images of a few countries off the globe and hung them in the air for Spike and Trixie to see.

"The Drakeslands... Trixie was told never to go there when she was younger."

Twilight nodded, knowing why. "The drakes are an immature form of dragon as far as anypony knows. They think that the world and everypony in it belongs to them. They're secretive, and just plain old mean to everypony else." Twilight shuddered, remembering something else. "There's a rumor going around that the Great Dragon Migration is all the dragons who were exiled from the country for being too nice to other species."

Trixie bleaghed in distaste, even as Spike stared up into the outline of the other country. "Yeah, nopony knows, since the Migration doesn't talk to anypony else. Though I never knew that the Glasslands mattered either. Aren't they all... made of glass?" Spike poked the outline of the other infamous nation, watching it ripple around his claw.

"Well, Trixie would have gone, but she's heard how it's rather painful to travel there. Other than the cities, they mean it literally when they call it the Glasslands."

"Well, whatever the reason, they hate Princess Celestia for something she did before she came to Equestria. Something that they think is evil enough to still hate her today. They're just kind of crazy, and willing to do anything to hurt her." Twilight banished the two images with her mind, slowly turning to walk towards the window looking towards Canterlot. Beautiful, unearthly Canterlot, hanging so high on the side of the mountain. "Either one of them would steal the Elements, or foalnap us, or worse. Well, if they knew where the Elements were, or who we are."

"That's stupid. What if another Nightmare Moon shows up?" Spike set his cup down on one of the tables in the main library room, upset that somepony in the world might be that self-centered and crazy.

"Nations rarely act smartly. Trixie has found in her few dealings with government that many politicians only desire power, no matter whom or what they have to step on. Nothing at all rational there, Spines." Trixie grumbled in memory of her worst encounters, times that had nearly seen her in jail for crossing a politician by accident.

"It's Spike." "Sorry."

"Well, if you two are done, it's because they either don't know enough about the Elements, or because they think they can take on whatever comes." Twilight wondered what the real motivations were, what hidden secrets those two nations hid that had left them so confident. Why couldn't they all get along?

"Well, hmm. Would going to Canterlot work? It's not like Princess Celestia can complain if the Elements never leave where they're being kept." Spike pointed out the obvious solution, hoping that Twilight would take it.

Twilight nodded slowly, working out in her mind where they might be kept even as she spoke. "You're right, it would work, Spike. But I'm afraid of what might happen if we set off the Elements in the city. And I don't want to betray the Princess like that, going around her back and putting her in such a tight spot. And what if she finds out about Trixie?"

"Trixie doesn't like the thought of being added to the statue garden. Such a plan should be a last resort."

Twilight nodded once more, closing her eyes in silent comptemplation. "I'll do it, if I can't find any other way."

Spike watched as Twilight tensed up, reaching out to her in hopes that he could soothe his mother figure. Trixie's magic beat him there, working into Twilight's fur and ruffling it in a mana-fueled hug.

"Please, no more than a year. Trixie doesn't want to stay in the dark that long."

Twilight deflated as she made up her mind, opening her eyes to look up at Canterlot once more. "No more than a year."

Author's Note

Part of a Story Universe with: Scootamom
and : Tales from the Scootaverse

Interlude: A Dream of Lighter Days

Mmm. So warm... The sun beat its loving embrace upon her window, heating her poor abused form to a comfortable, muscle-relaxing temperature. So many hours of spell practice and theory had made her whole body ache and feel as stiff as stone.

Wait.

Trixie bolted upright in her bed, looking around at her surroundings in a watchful guard. Everything seemed hauntingly familiar, but it all taunted her with how it was so subtly wrong. Her room looked like some campus dorm, and a particularly high-end one at that. Almost palatial. The showmare looked down at herself, seeing her former raw and gangly teenaged form once more.

Her room looked like a bookworm lived in it, with none of the touches she would have put in. None of the curtains that she liked which should be shimmering like the night skies, not a black carpet in sight, her bed was some soft and frumpy thing, and there wasn't a sign of a board holding any admirer's letters to her. Why, only a few pieces of her inheritance were visible. Not her hat, or her cape, nor her mother's keepsakes, not even a- there was her picture!

Trixie snatched up the framed image with the ferocity of a drowning mare, staring into one of the few pictures she had of her mother. Her dear, sweet, beloved mother, who busily was making bunny motions with both her hooves behind Trixie's head as they posed for the picture in the Manehatten Grand Theatre. It was a nearly perfect duplicate, save for the frame. Instead of the minimalist black frame, it was blue and studded with glittering stars. Trixie jerked her head back up from her musing, finding that her 'room' had twisted to fit her tastes while she had looked away.

"A dream. Has to be a dream, but Trixie hasn't been able to have once since-... why?"

The showmare's door slammed open in an adorable flurry of purple pony power. The interloper launched herself like a ballista at Trixie, tackling her in an instant and pinning her to the lusciously soft bed in an all-consuming glomp. A filly! Wait, not just any filly, but-

"Trixie-Trixie-TRIXIE-TRIXIE!" The pint-sized reproduction of Twilight chanted the showmare's name over and over, scaling up and down the musical scale as she did. And she hopped on Trixie's chest like a little purple locust would hop from plant to plant. Trixie knew it had to be a dream; nopony could be that inaccurate in depicting Twilight.

Finally, Trixie formed a barrier between her chest and the dream-Twilight so she could irritatedly question her. "Yes!?"

The dream rendition of Twilight stopped suddenly, her posture wilting as if she had been scolded by her mother. Though she still jittered with energy, Twilight more politely danced from hoof to hoof instead of hopping up and down on Trixie. Then she noticed what Trixie had been holding before she had so rudely interrupted. With a further flurry of motion, Twilight slid over the edge of Trixie's shield, glomping her around the neck with all of her pint-sized might as she realized what Trixie might be feeling. "I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to-"

"Interrupt my musing on my mother's life and death? It's fine." Best to amuse whoever was playing with her dream. Without a fleshy body for her to end it with, she was stuck until they were done.

"D-did it hurt her?"

"Other than dying? No, I think not. She seemed more frantic for my sake than her own." Trixie set the fake photo down so she could take the time to remember how... sad her mother had been. She had tried so hard to say something, or do something as she had dissolved into that damnable blue mist to be blown away. Trying to give her one last lesson?

"Well, I guess so. She did somehow teleport you through the campus shield spells somehow. I guess she really wanted you to attend." Twilight clung to Trixie, breathing softly into the powder blue fur of the showmare's neck. Even when Trixie sat up in confusion.

That wasn't how it had happened. Her mother had spent all of her energy trying to tell her something, trying to speak one last time. Why change what had happened to teleporting her into the castle? What purpose would that have served?

"It could have been worse for her and you, Trixie. If she hadn't, you would have never have made it through the door. You're just as promising as little Twilight here. Perhaps moreso, with your talents for other race's magics." The graceful and majestic form of Princess Celestia glided into the room, alighting on the balcony as she was injected into the dream.

Trixie grumbled, squeezing Twilight's bear-hug off of herself with an oddly reflexive motion of her hooves between them. Clearing her throat, she tried to adopt a more poised pose for the illusion of the Equestrian monarch. "Yes, well, Trixie is quite well aware of how that would go. She finds being able to relax and the betterment of her knowledge to be a more comfortable life than that of a traveling showmare."

Twilight scuttled back from Trixie at the thought, looking on in abject horror. "But-but! That's horrible! You'd only be able to carry a few books with you!"

"Yes, yes it would be." Trixie pursed her lips in memory of her lonely travels.

Twilight hid her face behind her warding hooves, trying to hide from the possibility. The horror... the horror. All that work, all that lack of studying. No! "Wait! Wait! I almost forgot! You promised to show me how to cloud walk!" Twilight immediately perked up almost as if she had been given a Triple Pony Joe Espresso and began hopping around Trixie in anticipation.

"Trixie... did?" "Yes! Yes-Yes-Yes-Yes!"

"Trixie doesn't remember that." The showmare tapped her hoof against her chin in thought, wondering if she should or not. "Well, Trixie has nothing better to do."

"Yeeaaaaah!" Twilight's horn sparked with an involuntary magic release in her excitement, loving the prospects of learning a cool new magic.

Celestia put a hoof on Twilight's shoulder, calming the filly and keeping her from bouncing the softness out of Trixie's bed in her jubilation. "Well that is rather generous of you, Trixie. I'm curious to see how well you manage at teaching others."

Yes. The circumstances were coming back under Trixie's control. Just a little more manipulation and she could take her dream back and do a little questioning of her own. The showmare took a mock bow to Celestia, blowing an errant lock of mane back over her ear with a puff of breath as she did. "The Great and Powerful Trixie shall happily teach the Stupendous and Sensational Sparkle. That is, of course, if she could run along to the courtyard ahead of Trixie. Trixie has something to get ready before the lesson."

Twilight nodded her head hard enough to rattle her eyes before she shakily ran out the door to happily squeal in delight all the way to the ground floor.

Trixie exploded into action the second she thought that the Twilight simulacrum was out of hearing, weaving her dream magic to forcefully rip control away from the interloper. Chains of thought and will erupted from the walls and floors, wrapping the fake Celestia round and round until she was wrapped from hooves to neck. "Now that we're... alone, who are you and what are you trying to do in Trixie's dreams?"

"Somepony who cares very deeply, but whom can only do a few frightfully small things for you." The fake Celestia didn't resist, she didn't fight or struggle. She just sat there, head held low, with... tears? Why? "Somepony who is trying so very hard to help you, to let you dream. That is the real Twilight down there, branched into your dream."

"Why? Why would you torment Trixie?"

"Not torment. We give you this peace to strengthen the bond between you and the elements. You deserve these moments of happiness. It is the least... the least we can do to grant reparations for the misery we have caused thee. Our mistake cost thee most dearly." The form of the fake Celestia waivered as Trixie tried to force reality upon her and see through her veil. The impostor was NOT going to claim her mother's death and get away with it.

"Trixie's mother died by the fault of her own hoof, none other's!" Trixie scowled in fury, her horn arcing with energy as she brandished it at the false Celestia's throat intending to banish her.

"No, Trixie. Thy mother yet lives. Thou shalt know the truth, and soon. But for now, please rest and accept this gift for what it-"

Trixie flopped to the ground as she reemerged from the teleportation matrix. Twilight gleefully danced in victory all about her in the tiled courtyard, full of a child's happiness over her success. The drattable other mare had somehow teleported her through the dream, and had likely cost her her only chance to wring the truth from the interloper's neck.

"Trixie, Trixie, TRIXIE-TRIXIE! I did it! I'm amazing!" Twilight yammered all around Trixie, moving fast enough to seem like she was teleporting as she hopped up time and time again. A little cloud sat to one side where the filly had pulled it from high above, shadowing a rather beautiful patch of flowers.

Well, if it really was Twilight, then Trixie figured she might as well enjoy being the mature and responsible one for once. Somepony had to. Putting on a neutral face for Twilight, she played up to the part she had been assigned in the dream. "So you did. But the Stupendous and Sensational Sparkle should remember not to teleport others without warning or permission. It is very rude to do."

Twilight's eager face drooped into a frown and sorrowful pout as Trixie delivered her admonishment. "I'm sorry."

"It's no matter. Just don't ever do it again." Trixie hopped up onto the ground-bound cloud, letting it sink to the level of the walkway from her weight. It wasn't really to regulation size, if she remembered the primers on pegasus magic her mother had gotten her. But as she laid down on it, it still felt as good as ever. "Now then, let's see how hard this shall be. When I say 'go', you jump on w-"

Twilight sprinted up for a running leap, sailing up and over the edge spread eagle with her first attempt as she glittered with the energy from the spell she had already cast. POOMPHT! Cloud met filly, then ate filly, then introduced wet filly to pavement in a bone-jarring belly flop against the marble tiles. Trixie tried not to twitch at the sound, hoping Twilight wasn't too badly hurt.

Dejectedly, Twilight achingly emerged from the base of the cloud, earning a belly-busting chuckle-fest from Trixie with her appearance. When the little filly turned all the way around, Trixie couldn't help herself any longer and nearly fell off of her cloud laughing at the sight of Twilight's new facial features. Wiping tears of mirth from her eyes as she clutched her aching sides, Trixie did her best to not sound condescending and mocking as she spoke. "At least one part of the spell went right!"

"What?" Twilight rubbed at herself, discovering flecks of cloud sticking to her fur. Then Trixie conjured a mirror of water for Twilight to inspect herself with. The massive white beard of clinging fluff hung down to around Twilight's hooves, turning her into Old Mare Twilight much to their amusement.

"Good on the 'make the cloud stick to you' part, but unfortunately for now Trixie must fail you in the subjects of altering cloud density and structure." Trixie began to pull tuffs of Twilight's cloud-beard free, throwing them into the air where they hung suspended mid-flight around them.

"Wait, I could have sworn I copied the spell you used to sit on that exactly!"

"Trixie is using actual pegasus magic."

"You big rotten cheater."

Picking Up the Pieces

Smells awoke her. The smells of... wow, that smelled like a Canterlotian Cheesy Chupaqueso Omelet. No, no... Spike wouldn't get up early enough to make some. Her mind or Trixie was playing tricks on her. Twilight twisted, turned and tossed in her temperamentally tumultuous traversal from dreaming to awareness. Then the most curious thing struck, or rather tickled her withers. A breeze balefully was tickling her bare belly with the moist touch of a foggy morning. And, she was strangely weightless.

Yawning, Twilight stretched as she slowly fired up her mind. It was too early to be up. She screwed her eyes shut tighter as she shifted around in her unnatural bed, half-heartedly pleased that her movement was unrestricted. But despite all the comfort of her slumber spot, something prickled in her half-aware mind. Blearily and without opening her eyes, she called down to her assistant. "Spike, did I bubble myself with magic while I was asleep again?"

Spike's amused snort echoed back to her from downstairs in the kitchen. The sound called Twilight's sense of hearing to the sizzle of frying cheese below as he spoke. "Not exactly, Twi. Are you going to have another lazy day today?"

"My wakeup checklist doesn't include opening my eyes this morning!" Twilight grabbed a hunk of the strange pillowy substance she was laying on and dragged it over her eyes to defeat any plans of the vile evil Sun Princess to wake her with light. "Spike... ugh- tell Princess Celestia to turn off the sun."

"Trixie... err, I can rewrite your morning schedule to include a wakeup by a petrified unicorn followed by opening your eyes for you." A tickling strand of magic unraveled itself from around Twilight's horn. It snaked down around her body, curling up around her like a great beast as it tingled its way towards her belly button. "Your dragon-"

"His name is Spike, and- and- yawwnn." Twilight's maw creaked widely open in a sleep beckoning yawn as she rubbed at her pelt with her hooves. The tickling sensation that felt like a thousand ants crawling upon her continued against her will. "-And don't you... ooh- dare touch my 'No Wakeup' checklist's perfection."

"Yes, sorry. Spike has told Trixie- err, I mean me of the 'Secret Sparkle Start Selector'. How cunning to- hey!" Trixie's disembodied voice raised in protest as Twilight instantly curled up on herself and planted all of her hooves over her belly button. Magic pried and pulled at the stubborn limbs, unable to budge them yet. "Now, now, Sparkle. You simply must wake up to witness your newest Stupendous and Spectacular feat."

A sensation like a tongue or a wet feather slowly squeezed and pressed through the hoof blockade and delved into Twilight's belly button, eliciting a scream of ticklishness as she thrashed in her tiny curled up ball. The extremely fluffy and weight-canceling surface trapped her in place and left her unable to escape her devilish torture. "Spi-i-i-iike! I'm going to slay you, you traitor!"

"Spike, it's not working. What do you do when pressing the start button doesn't work?" Trixie's voice seemed to whisper from everywhere at once as she continued to poke, press, and pry at Twilight's most ticklish spot.

"One, that whole 'voice from everywhere' thing? Really creepy. Two, Princess Celestia said to do something with raspberries if the basic stuff didn't work." Spike's voice called up from below once more. The gurgle of pouring liquid rippled into Twilight's ears and the smell of COFFEE! hit her nose with the force of a princess pounce. Darn her beloved mentor for developing such devilish and deceitful ways to wake her. Sleep still called out to her, stand fast Sparkle!

Trixie's menacing chuckle snickered directly into Twilight's ear. A steady stream of air pressed against the semi-sleeping unicorn's belly in anticipation as magic rolled Twilight onto her back. The purple unicorn whimpered in dread at the prospects of what was to come as Trixie slowly spoke to her. "My, my. How...cunningly common of Princess Celestia. Surely the-" The pinch of magically faked hooves pressed into Twilight's gut, sliding all over it until they firmly grasped the dreaded nub. "-Great and Powerful-" The wind passing over Twilight's belly focused tightly, squeezing her her hooves to her most vulnerable point. "-Trixie can do so much better." Air rushed into a simulated set of lungs with a deep whoosh, before it ripped straight down into the heart of the matter.

BBBBhhhhhppppbbbtt!

Twilight jerked the rest of the way awake with a scream of a mare tickled past her breaking point. She yelped out a litany of protests as she thrashed about instinctively in her bedding, tangling up amongst the not-sheets. "Please stop, I'm up Prin-... Trixie, I'd be turning you into a bunny right now if you weren't already stone!" Twilight struggled to free herself, yanking on all of her fluff-embedded hooves with all of her might.

"Trixie is hurt. I mean, a bunny is rather low after the lesson I taught you last night. I would have assumed you would turn me into a great tree, or manticore, or a sleeping dragon." Trixie's voice trickled into Twilight's ears as the fluff that the unicorn was buried up to her neck in began to shift.

Twilight frowned in confusion, stopping her movements. "What lesson? I was asleep last night after we talked with Spike."
The student of Celestia found the bonds on her hooves suddenly slacking, and pulled them tight to her chest and belly once more. The baleful breeze blew once more, rocking her resting place with its passage. Twilight held a hoof up to her eyes, marveling as she noticed what was still sticking to her form all over. "Clouds? How are clouds-"

"You don't remember the little experience my benefactor arranged for us? Canterlot Academy, you had just joined and I had a few years on you but somehow we were both students of the princess?" Trixie let her astral projection fade into existence, sitting beside Twilight's new nest cheekily.

Memory rushed back to Twilight, a blush filling her face as she remembered what she had done. "And I teleported you blindly across half the campus without your permission! Ooh, what was I thinking!?"

Trixie sighed, her point of view through Twilight's eyes making the shame effectively invisible for her as she stroked Twilight's back with her magic. "Dream magic can cause mental alterations to fit with the persona the dreamer takes on in their dream. As you had been a 10 year old, so did your mind revert to the same age. Elementary! Besides, Trixie... ugh, I have done far worse in the waking world."

"Like?"

"Like keeping you from your pancakes, Twi." Spike waddled in holding a massively overfilled breakfast tray in paw. He set it down before Twilight and rubbed his chin with his now freed paws thoughtfully. "I mean, yeah, she gets some coolness back with the way she was able to make a cloud from hot bubble bath steam-"

"Bubble bath? What bubble bath!?"

"-But she's keeping you from a hot delicious Canterlot Chupaqueso! You love those, and that's just plain evil!" Spike pointed a claw into the air to emphasize his point, stamping his foot to show how much he wanted Twilight to eat that meal. Twilight's stomach growled with the strength and ferocity of an Ursa Major at the thought.

Spike set a determined look against Twilight as he scooted it closer to the cloud. "Twilight, we both know how crazy and cranky you get when you don't eat right!"

"I do not get craan-keeeeeeeyyaaagh!" Twilight planted herself on the floor face-first as she instinctively tried to cancel the cloud walking spell while she stepped off of the fluffy mass. Her limp body flopped back to the floor, sprawling out as she nudged the tray with her nose. Her deft tongue licked out and dragged a hash-brown to its munchy doom a moment later as Twilight conceded defeat. "Okay, maybe just a little cranky."

Spike and Trixie laughed a bit at Twilight's misfortune before Spike helped her back to a sitting position before her meal. "So Twi, what's the plan for today?"

Twilight paused mid-chew on one of the chupaqueso. She pulled her face out of the cheesy goodness, swallowing slowly and noisily to speak. "What do you mean, Spike?"

Spike gestured vaguely in the direction of Trixie's illusion in an attempt to silently make his point. His oblivious caretaker shook her head, unable to make heads or tails of the motions to his great frustration. Spike pointed dramatically in the direction of the illusionary illusionist, raising Twilight's eyebrow curiously. "Ugh! What are you going to do about Trixie?"

The two mares’ ears wilted backwards in sudden worry simultaneously. Neither had come up with any further plans than 'study until a solution presents itself'. But what else was there to study? Other than Starswirl's journal, none of the books had actually gone deep into the cockatrice's curse. Instead they focused on the bare basics of the spell so that somepony could spot it, or the physiology and habits of the monstrous creature, or the best way to kill them. Everypony considered it such a waste of time to even bother studying the curse. And she couldn't blame them. So, they were at an impasse, and she couldn't do anything more to help Trixie.

Unless...

"Trixie, is it true? What the dream showed me, I mean." Twilight chewed slower, spreading out her bites of delicious cheesy goodness so she could talk between them, "Did your mother really- uh, vaporize, or whatever it was that happened to her?"
Trixie's projected voice hitched and cracked with sadness as she made her illusionary body nod. "Yes."

Spike looked wide-eyed to Trixie, and then turned introspective for a moment, remembering his own life experiences growing up. "No mom?" Trixie nodded sadly at his words. "No dad, or grandparents, or sisters? Not even a brother?" Trixie continued to nod slowly and quietly, letting her host eat in peace.

"You have no family?" Spike looked over the now thoroughly dejected showmare, unable to remotely imagine what her life must have been like at first. Most ponies in Canterlot just pretended he didn't exist. He had... well; he had a family, a support network despite that. Now he just felt like a little bit of mildew on a book at how he had judged Trixie by her first actions. "I... uh-... wow you came out good for an orphan!"

"SPIKE!"

"No, no. I- Trixie has no excuse for her actions before the Ursa. She was... taught to be better than she is by her mother. Trixie should have found better ways to deal with her hecklers. Should have been a better pony than she was." Trixie let her apparition fade away in shame. She had let the years beat her down, tear away her noble showmareship. Her mother would have spanked her silly for the way that she had so rudely handled her hecklers

Twilight closed her eyes trying to recall the details of their shared dream. Like the-

"Spike! I know what I need to do! We've got to go, have dinner ready for us, it'll take a while!" Twilight hopped to her hooves like a mare on fire, deftly hurdling over her mostly finished breakfast without spilling a bit of their remains. She dashed out the bedroom door, leaving a thoroughly confused Spike behind.

"And she didn't even tell me where she was going. Again."

'You know, Trixie would really like to know where we are going.'

Twilight weaved through the last of the crowds, rushing out of Ponyville towards her destination. Ponies all around had called out to them asking about Twilight's madcap rush towards the edge of town. Twilight paid no heed, as she was too busy plotting out her path ten strides in advance and going over the weather for the past three weeks. Trixie's things hadn't been sitting around all that long.

Well, if they hadn't been damaged or looted on their journey there. Lost personal effects were supposed to be held for a month, after all. At least before getting moved to be disposed of and recycled.

'What- Oh. You- you're going to-'

'They're the last bits of your mom that you have. I don't know what I would do if I lost all of my family.' Twilight crested the final hill on the outskirts of town, beholding the compact sprawl before her. Down in the dell, where the smells and sights couldn't plague the rest of town sat the Ponyville dump, Green Acres. The part time work crews were busily sorting through as much of the trash of the week to pick out recyclable material, and shoveling much of the rest to be either burned or turned to fertilizer.

The smell prickled Twilight's nose, and she found herself oddly jealous of her spectral passenger. 'They should be keeping whatever could be salvaged from your things in the lost and found of the office.' Twilight picked out the administrative building at the edge of the bustle, and began trotting down the hill towards it.

'Momma's photos...'

'I hope so, Trixie. She seemed, oh nevermind.' Twilight planted her hooves, skidding down the steep gravel path and slid to a halt before the front door of the offices. She danced from hoof to hoof from the stinging from her hooves grating against rock crumbs. The poor unicorn could feel a dozen scrapes stinging her hooves like little pinpricks of Rarity's needles along her lower legs.

'What? She seemed beautiful? Unearthly? More than a mare and in her own way as warm and loving as Princess Celestia? My memories might be tainted by my youth, but Trixie- grr- I will not deny that she was... something.'

Twilight shuddered at the thought, shaking her head violently to remove the images unwittingly planted by Trixie. She didn't need to know that, did not need to know that, SHOULD NOT HAVE HEARD THAT! She nearly shoved the generic beige office door off its hinges as she dove inside the brown brick building. Alas, there wasn't a water cooler that she could wash the images out of her head with; she was stuck with them for the rest of the day.

Twilight looked around the nearly deserted office, realizing that all the workers were outside actually handling trash. The room was remarkably... sterile. Antiseptic and clean and bland to the point of being memorably forgettable. It was probably built and decorated to government specifications, given that Twilight had seen many an office in Canterlot that looked eerily identical.

A counter seperated the public area from the office space, and Twilight trotted up to its faux-marble coated surface quietly. Trixie would have rolled her eyes if she had any, grabbing ahold of the service bell with her magic and ringing it until it metaphorically begged for mercy. Her host broke the spectral showpony's invisible grip on it and set it back down on the countertop gingerly. All the same, the floor began to quake as the sole remaining occupant of the building stepped forth from his private office.

"Can I help you, Miss?" The part-time manager of the Ponyville Landfill shook the floor as he squeezed through the doorway to his office gingerly, his gruff voice tingling every hair on Twilight's body. The massive pegasus stallion stood as tall as Big Macintosh, but had bulked himself out to terrifying and awe-inspiring proportions. Twilight shrank back from his freakishly overmuscled white form for a moment before she remembered her manners.

She cleared her throat, standing up straight once more to respond. "Yes, I'm Twilight Sparkle and I-"

"Wait, you're the new pony from Canterlot who is always dumping glass and toxic potion residue in the trash!" The beady reddish eyes of the stallion squinted in tight and seemingly bored a hole straight into Twilight's mind. His smile hadn't left his face, even if his whole body had tensed up.

"Um, yes?" Twilight timidly responded.

"Don't do that! RECYCLE! And properly dispose of hazardous materials! Yeeaah?" The massive stallion's voice rose by several decibels as he spoke. His poor work vest and tie creaked ominously as his whole body twitched with stress.
Twilight nodded in order to get him to stop. "Umm, Yeah?"

"YEEAAAAAH!" The massive stallion stopped after a second as he witnessed the way that Twilight cowered away from his outburst. Clearing his throat, he picked up a clipboard from the wall and straightened his vest and tie. "So what brings you to Green Acres?"

"I'm here to pick up somepony's things; they should be in the lost and found." Twilight hesitated for a moment as the white stallion and headed towards the office he had come from. The sparse furniture of the office let them easily pass through the wide aisles. Poor little desk-bound ferns and plants shuddered from their passage, and files of all descriptions jiggled apart onto desktops.

Surprisingly, somehow the stallion fit through his door with ease, fitting comfortably into his small office with plenty of room left for his desk and Twilight. He picked up a tiny set of bifocal glasses and set them upon his nose as he rustled through the loose papers on his desk. Each opening of the filing cabinet behind him made a massive set of barbells creak and groan ominously against the structure of the building. Finally, he looked up from his now organized folders and barked out his request. "Naaame!"

"Trixie. Possibly under 'Great and Powerful Trixie' or 'Trixie Lulamoon'. She's fearful for her life and is hiding out outside of town because she's too afraid to return." Twilight wasn't exactly lying. Though the truth did suffer some constructive rearranging for maximum results as she sweated in place where she sat. Hopefully he wouldn't ask any further.

The snow-white stallion skeptically raised an eyebrow, his gaze beating down on Twilight and made her feel like a foal again in the process. The stallion reached into the clutter of paper upon his desk and unerringly picked a single form out for Twilight to fill out. His voice grew more cultured and refined as he adjusted his glasses, speaking once more. "Most unusual. This release form needs to be signed by her before I hoof it over. Yeah?"

Twilight found herself infected by the stallion's enthusiasm. "Yeah!"

"YEAAAAAAAH! Now don't come back until it's done!" The massive manager pointed out the door sternly, convincing Twilight to follow his instructions with a flex of his muscles that instantly shredded his vest and tie. He groaned and rubbed his face with a forehoof, continuing to point out the door. "Sorry for the inconvenience, ma’am. Have a nice day."

'So, Trixie is thinking Paperwork first, then her things, then finding out where that stallion lives.'

'Trixie doesn't know whether or not to be frightened at how much you know about the history of forms, or fascinated by it. She shall settle for both.'

Twilight rolled her eyes mirthfully as she continued writing, happily sprawled out upon one of the benches in the Ponyville Park as she did. It was too good of a day to be filling out forms buried away in her library. No, the right spot to be was out where the shining sun could warm her mane and where the fresh breeze from Canterlot could soothe her nose.

A pity she only had such a small form. It was only a single page front and back. Actually, it was kind of adorable little thing. It even had a custom border with little ponies and a non-standard font. But there still wasn't very much in the way of meaty blanks for her to fill out.

'And now she's pining for a larger form. How disturbing.'

'Trixie, I have a dictionary. And I'm not afraid to read it from Aardvark to Zygotes.' Twilight added her signature in the necessary block with a flourish of her magic. A split second later she ducked her head, allowing the ball from the foals playing in the nearby meadow to pass where her head had been harmlessly. She set the quill down next to the blank for Trixie's signature and turned her attention to the park guests for a moment.

Amidst the last fall blooming of flowers, a half a dozen foals frolicked around their minder, who had found herself wrapped up quite extensively by their leashes from when they had run around and around her. The little children were popping in and out of the bushes around their small clearing, one even floating on a cloud hanging in the middle of the deep blue skies.
Twilight turned her attention back to her guest, mentally calling out to her. 'Do you think you can sign this, Trixie?'

'Trixie... err, ugh- I have performed far harder feats of remote manipulation in the past. Observe, and be amazed!' A blue glow surrounded the quill, wobbly picking it up into the air before Twilight's eyes. It hesitantly wobbled over to the start of the remaining space, shaking like a leaf in the wind. Bit by painstaking bit, Trixie's signature etched itself out onto the page, completing the form.

Twilight looked closely at the writing, marveling at a small detail of her passenger's abilities. 'Why is your signature better than mine? You're a spirit in my head!'

'Don't remind Trixie. But, autographs are such lovely things for practicing writing. Do please try to remember my previous life.'

Twilight yelped as an impact snapped her head to the left painfully. The loud bonk of hollow rubber hitting fur and flesh at more than 50 miles an hour ran in her ears and left her disoriented. The sound of stampeding hooves vaguely brushed her awareness as she shook it out, and she looked up to see a foal running up to her. "Twilight, Twilight! Miss Twilight!"

A dozen more rushed up behind the first, trailing flower petals and dust from the speed and force of their passage through the meadow. The perky little preschool foals bounced and hopped and danced all around her, cheering that they had found the most interesting pony in Ponyville. Twilight looked around bewilderedly at the children of all coats, shapes, and races. For the life of her she couldn't figure out what she had done to earn such an audience. "Can I help everypony?"

"My sis says you can do anything!" "Anything!" "Show us a magic trick!" "Make some sparklwey thwings!" "Please!" "Please?" "Please-please-please!"

'Um, let me, Sparkle.'

Twilight felt the slight heat on the tip of her horn as she recoiled from her enthusiastically bouncing audience. She could hear the whistle of a magical firework shooting up high into the skies at Trixie's command, where it burst with a crackle of sparks. Twilight squirmed in a little as all the foals cheered even louder and pressed in against her. Too many ponies all at once! It was worse than Pinkie's parties! She shouldn't be feeling like Fluttershy.

'Calm down, Sparkle! They love you; they're hoping you'll shoot off another sparkler to entertain them. They mean no harm; just put up low strength force fields to push them back!'

The little foals didn't mind as they were pressed back from Twilight by a hooflength or two, continuing on with their cheer and laughing and bouncing even as their minder arrived with a tired flapping flop of her wings. The haggard mare took one look at the sea of knee-knocking kids and cried out in irritation and exasperation. "Playing in the park does not mean bugging everypony who looks interesting! Get over here and leave Miss Sparkle alone!"

"But fireworks..." "Fireworks!"

Twilight swallowed back the slight twinge of fear so she could speak to her savior. "It's not that big of a deal, Ma’am. I had just gotten done with my work, actually. I love helping foals explore the realms of magic with a trick or two!" Twilight blinked with surprise at what had come out of her mouth. A trick or two? She had sounded disturbingly like Trixie for a moment there.

"Oh dearie, you are such a wonderful pony. This full bushel of trouble must have been an awful bother." The gentle pegasus snatched one of the foals into the air and retied her harness so that the little pony couldn't escape and run off again. Luckily, she could hold them away from herself so their kicking wouldn't catch her.

"No, no! My pleasure." Twilight took her savior's hoof and shook it gently in appreciation.

The mare pursed her lips as she looked between her foals and the mare that had unwittingly prevented their escape. She sighed and shook Twilight's hoof once more as she dismissed her musing altogether. "Almost makes me wish you could come over to the Ponyville Orphanage to entertain the dearies. They get so lonely at night, you know? I wanted to get that poor dear Trixie, but she got run out of town. I hear that the authorities are presuming her dead at this point."

"She's not. But, uh... she can't come back to Ponyville for at least a year."

"Oh, oh my. I assume she's in some kind of trouble, then. If Miss Rarity, Rainbow Dash, and those other ponies hadn't done so much for the town, I would be tempted to sic the authorities on them for harassment. They mean well, but they've gotten overprotective of us after the last few times." The pegasus mare hovered up over her charges, counting them with a hoof as she spoke with Twilight. She wistfully lowered herself so she could stroke out a cowlick on a particularly brash colt, who continued to hop a few inches from Twilight's face.

'Last few times? That might explain why Trixie has received such a tepid reception over the past year in small towns. Ugh, I mean I! I! Curse thee, stage persona!'

Twilight skeptically repeated what her new companion had said as she squirmed up against the back of the park bench tighter. "Last few times? What exactly do you mean?"

"Oh, last year it was those horrible Shim-Sham brothers. They set up a cider booth in town, and to get their supply they kept stealing from Sweet Apple Acres. The worst part is that they didn't take care of their cider and kept getting ponies horribly sick. Those two vile things nearly drove Sweet Apple Acres out of business from stealing so much. Bushy mustaches and beards, cream coats with apple green manes and tails." The pegasus foalkeeper growled unpleasantly at the memory, shaking herself from nose-tip to tail tip from some memory of food poisoning. As she did, all the foals’ bleagh-ed in memory of how bad the cider had gotten before the end.

"Well, that would explain why Applejack would be wary, but last few times? That happened more than once?" Twilight uncomfortably looked across the park towards town, wondering why Ponyville seemed to be less of a town and more of a free-range asylum.

"Well, Rainbow Dash faced off with an utter villain of a pegasus who went around calling himself 'Doctor Insano'. That brute created some sort of lightning generator, and was using Ponyville as a test run before unleashing himself on Canterlot. He had these wonderful little lamps powered by it, but they were set to turn on their owners when he flipped a switch. If Dash and Miss Sunbeam hadn't stopped him, I shudder to think what he might have done." The pegasus looked down, seeing her sittees bouncing up and down in even more of a frenzy than ever before as they impatiently waited to get a move on.

Twilight winced as she thought about the idea of ponies getting zapped by lightning in their own homes. But, if Applejack had faced mad cider makers, and Dash a mad weather engineer, what had Rarity faced? A mad fashion designer that kidnapped ponies and made them the stars of an eternal fashion show? "I hate to ask, but I'm assuming that from the way she reacted, Rarity had a bad encounter as well?"

"Yes, well she- everypony settle down!" The gentle pegasus barked out her order to her charges, smiling satisfiedly as they instantly dropped to a dull rumble from their shouting and hopping. "Well, she stopped a vile little traveling magician. He would put on shows and stick some kind of little magic golem on ponies when they weren't looking so he could rob them blind in the night."

"And Trixie had the bad luck to show up in town after all those bad apples. No wonder. That's not fair at all for her." Twilight shook her head, dismissing a snort from her mental roommate. Well, maybe she could, since she had an expert and all. "You know what, I'd gladly help out. Anytime you want a show, I'll do my best to put one on. It's not going to be a problem at all."

"Oh, how wonderful. These poor little things have been looking for a role model besides me for years! You'll be perfect. I run the Ponyville Orphanage, if you can make it down there." The foal-minder tugged on the leashes of her charges, spurring the foals into their boisterous riot of motion once more. The mass of foals cheered out their approval as they tried to thunder down the road, nearly yanking the wings off of their guardian's back in the process. "Easy, children! Don't get too excited yet, we have to clean the orphanage for Miss Sparkle! Slow down!"

Twilight gasped, as she remembered that she had forgotten the most important part of the 'Making a new Friend' checklist. "Wait, I never got your name!"

"It's Calming Waltz, dear-ieeeeeeee!" The rest of what she had to say was drowned out by the roar of the foals as they rushed forward.

'Trixie is going to need to train the stupendous and spectacular Sparkle, she can already tell. But first, her things!' Magic yanked on Twilight's ear, getting her up onto her hooves and pointed towards Green Acres. 'Giddieyup, magic pony!'

'Trixie, that dictionary has your name on it!'

"Everything seems to be in order, Miss Sparkle. We have just one more check to conduct before we can hoof Miss Lulamoon's effects to you." The part-time landfill manager glanced back up from the form to look at Twilight's nervously twitching frame. He adjusted his glasses as he pushed some of the knick-knacks and stacks of paper on his desk around to make room for something. "Is there some reason you are so nervous, Miss Sparkle?"

"Nervous? Where?" Twilight flinched back as the massively built stallion leaned in closer to her. Oh! Oh! Oh, no. He had just pulled out a magical scanner out of his desk and set it up. He was going to scan Trixie's signature and magic against the Canterlot Archives, and then she would go to jail for fraud and Princess Celestia would find out about Trixie and-

Trixie's mental voice thundered in her head as Trixie overrode her frantically spiraling train of thought and put it back on the tracks. 'You're nervous because you volunteered to do a show for the Ponyville Orphanage and you are woefully underprepared for the job. You are unprepared because it was a spur of the moment decision. Calm down, say it slowly, but with a hint of nervousness to show that you're making plans.'

Twilight sat up ramrod straight on the visitor cushion at Trixie's prompt. Calmly, but rather stiltedly, she repeated what Trixie had told her. "Oh, I'm sorry. You meant me. I just volunteered for a show in the Ponyville Orphanage. The foals swarmed me in the park, and I couldn't just ignore them after all. But, I don't have a checklist for putting on magic shows, and I haven't done any research on what small children like..." Twilight trailed off as the manager raised his eyebrow once more.

"Really." Not a question, but a doubting statement as he slid the form under the crystal of the scanner he had just set up. Both ponies watched and waited as tiny lines of light burst from the scanner and traced over every single fiber of the form, leaving nothing untouched until it was satisfied with its result.

For a moment, nothing happened as the lines of light slurped back up into the crystal. Then, it lit up white and zapped the glasses on the manager's face, displaying something on them in lettering too small for Twilight to read from her vantage point. The stallion cleared his throat, taking the form out and setting it to one side as he began to speak. "Almost everything appears to be in order. Everything, save for one small issue."

'He didn't entirely buy it. Stay calm, graciously say that you won't feel right if you disappoint the children, and that you hope it's just a glitch in the scanner.'

Twilight managed to sound a little more natural as she spoon-fed the stallion her next set of dictated words. "Oh no, I hope there isn't anything wrong with the scanner. I've heard that they don't always read quite right." Twilight rubbed the back of her neck in nervous reflex as she waited for the stallion to make a decision. Steadfastly, she turned her gaze from him to wander across the small hanging photographs and medals adorning the beige and untextured walls. "I mean, it just wouldn't be right if I was delayed here long enough to miss putting on a show for those poor foals."

The stallion rumbled quietly under his breath in thought as he set the form down. His tiny wings fluttered as he took his glasses off and looked at the form once more. "You're probably right, Miss Sparkle. It's just a slight magical contamination of Miss Lulamoon's hornwriting. Easily explained by your handling of the form."

He reached up into one of the nicely paneled upper cabinets behind his desk, withdrawing a key within his teeth. Twilight got a good look inside of it, seeing little weights sitting atop neatly stacked folders alongside gleaming scanning crystals and a box full of neglected trophies. "If you will follow me, we'll go pick up her things right now."

Twilight nodded a little too eagerly, earning a snort of intrigue from her guide. Her hoofsteps followed the impossibly hovering pegasus back out into the sterile main office, which remained as empty and seemingly abandoned as earlier that morning. He waived his hoof once more as she followed, gingerly flying towards a blue door in the back as he coaxed her along.

"By the way, where is everypony?"

The stallion grunted and flexed his heavily muscled body once more as they stopped outside the door. The tattered remains of his vest ripped a little farther and his bones creaked as he stretched out. "Office work is part-TIIIME! Most run shops in town." He barked out 'time' and 'shops' like he had just dead lifted a 2000 pound weight and threw it clean to Canterlot. After a moment, he relaxed and shook out the key ring until a blue-tagged key slid to the bottom and eliminated the need to hunt for it.

"Wait, that's where I know you from!"

'That's it, keep him occupied with small talk so he forgets your slipups earlier!'

The bulky stallion grunted once more as he stuck the key into the lock, fighting it with his hoof when it stubbornly didn't want to go in right. "YeeeAAAA-ahem. I run the gyyyyym! in town, yes." He turned his attention back to the door as the key jammed inside the lock with a tiny scrape of metal.

"Uh- Snow... uh- Snooooow- I know it... uh... Snow- drop?"

"SnowFLAAAKE! Special Snowflake's Generator Gym! The dynamic dynamo where we turn colts into MEEEEN!" Snowflake nearly wrenched the knob off of the door in his enthusiasm. Fueled by the burst of energy, the delicate key slid home with a click and swung open silently.

Twilight looked in and gasped with awe at the massive plethora of personal belongings piled perilously within. The room was huge, and half of its shelves were filled with bags and clothes and all manner of it-

'That chest! It's from my cart!'

Oh, and Trixie's belongings, which were being kept conveniently in the near corner of the room.

"I take it that the chest holds Trixie's things? Well, I hope it holds Trixie's things." Twilight crept forward into the room, vaguely feeling like she was stepping into a Daring Do novel. Old and musty paper smells mingled with those of clothes and other sundry scents.

"Everything that could be repaired and saved is within it, ma’am. A photo album, a hat and cape, a few... odd books, the chest, and I believe there are a few other small items. Oh, and a doll of Princess Luna, though it's an odd one. Funny thing is that it looks like it came from the Neighties, but that was twenty years ago." Snowflake opened the chest, showing off the recovered and repaired items within it. Atop the pile, sitting on the notorious hat of Trixie sat the aforementioned blue doll. A doll that was pretty clearly Princess Luna, but not as Twilight had ever seen her. She certainly didn't have a dark blue coat and a two-toned starry mane the last time she had checked.

'Lu-LU! Uh, ahem... Trixie means to say to ask him calmly as to how to finish signing for Trixie's things so we can take them home.'

Twilight picked up the doll with gentle care, inspecting its starry mane with interest. The fabric almost looked enchanted. Why she could- and she was slipping into research mode again. Bad Twilight. Bad! Focus on ad-hoc checklist. Next step was to talk to Snowflake again. "Is there anything else I need to do before I can take Trixie's things to her?"

Twilight turned her attention back to Snowflake just in time to see him shake his head in the negative. "No ma’am. But, if you see Miss Lulamoon, please inform her that Princess Luna requests an audience with her." The musclepony held the door open for Twilight as the purple unicorn threw the doll back in the chest and shut the travel box. He looked on in slight interest and impressed awe as she picked it up with ease in her aura and began carrying it towards the door.

Wait a second, Princess Luna requesting a what? "What, when!?"

'Trixie doesn't want to know. They know of her, and want to send Trixie on, she just knows it!'

"A week or two before Miss Lulamoom arrived in town. She wants to see Miss Lulamoon at her earliest convenience, and is willing to meet her on her own ground. They sent a flier and everything." Snowflake reached across the hall as Twilight came out, presenting the poster hanging there.

Twilight barely held back a gasp as she noticed how Princess Luna had changed from their first meeting. Inset into one of the bottom corners, the small portrait of the alicorn of the night was a near dead ringer for the doll held in the chest. Well, it was a dead ringer other than being slightly off-color subtly. Twilight shakily nodded to Snowflake, startled by the revelation slightly. "I'll... uh, do that. Yeah."

"YEAAAAAAH!"

"Spike, we're back! I need to drop Trixie's things off down in the basement, and then I'll be right back up! We've got a checklist to make!" Twilight slammed her front door shut behind the chest she had dragged back loudly, shaking the whole tree.

Spike leaned out of the kitchen, straightening a top had he had mysteriously picked up and hiding a false whip mustache behind himself. Coming home sounding like Pinkie, mysteriously slamming the doors, making a crazy new checklist? Uh-oh. "Checklist? Checklist for what, Twi?" The baby dragon looked back into the kitchen, making shushing motions with a claw.

"I agreed to do a magic show for the Ponyville Orphanage!" Twilight carefully shoved the floating chest across the room towards the basement door, slamming it open with her magic as she approached. She disturbingly cheerfully trotted through and down past the threshold into the basement beyond as Spike studiously kept the kitchen door shut.

Spike waited until Twilight had disappeared into the basement before opening the kitchen once more and frantically waving 'come hither' to the occupant within. From inside, a rhythmic thumping sound could be heard as the hidden occupant emerged. Spike hopped and danced anxiously in wait before running back inside to speed up the process.

"Spike, give me a moo-meeeEENT!" Spike reemerged from the kitchen carrying a hog-tied Rarity above him. The fashionata squirmed and shimmied in the air above Spike uncomfortably as he carted her away. "A little more practice than I desired, Spike. Could you please set me down?" Rarity squirmed her legs where they were tightly bound together in the air as she was taken away upside down.

Spike shook his head and quickly and quietly ran to the back door. "No time, Rarity! I'll explain later!"

"Spike, wait! Don't-" Rarity fumed as Spike set her down gently on the concrete back stoop before shutting the wooden door in her face so he could run towards the basement inside. "-leave me tied up. Oooh, Spike Sparkle, I am going to get him for this!" Resolutely, Rarity rolled, squirmed, and hopped back to her hooves and daintily began to hop her way back to her Carousel Boutique.

Horse Apples Hitting Fans

Spike set the thick and ominously bound book from Trixie's chest down upon the basement table, nervously glancing around at the candles arrayed in a spell matrix around it. They all were lit with sickly blue flames, sputtering darkly and casting odd shadows upon the room. The whole setup looked like some Tirekian ritual. "You know Twi, I think I left my... uh... my... I left my Rarity on the back porch; I'd better go get her!"

The little dragon ran for the stairs as fast as his stubby little legs could manage, hoping to escape whatever nightmarish ritual was about to occur. Unfortunately for him, he failed to remember that Twilight's reach was only limited by her line of sight. Any warning was too much warning. His spade-tip tail found itself caught in a magenta glow as Twilight floated him back to herself. She shook her assistant gently as she turned him around while hanging him suspended from his tailtip. "Forgot your Rarity? What exactly is that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing! I mean, I have just a few chores I need to do, I promised Rarity that I would be her pincushion again, and I really need to go!" Spike kept himself as calm as he could as he was slowly floated around to hang before Twilight where she stood in the center of the library's basement. The two of them had spent the past three days redecorating it into a practice stage with advice from Trixie.

His librarian caretaker and currently warden had temporarily dressed herself in a cape made of sheets and a turban made of pillowcases to 'get into the spirit of things'. Dozens of strange props had been set up for Twilight to practice various aspects of show magic to see what she was proficient in, including a rather prominent table with a certain hat sitting upon it. Spike was fairly certain Trixie was playing a prank on both of them. "Hey, Twilight, you don't need me, right?"

Twilight teleported to herself her checklist for the day, unrolling it with a thunderous clap of unrolling paper being cracked like a whip. She looked down it carefully, looking for any sign of Spike's supposed activities. "No, nope. Nothing left on here for you to do. Well, okay 'Test Subject for Magic Show Experiments' is on there but that's just sitting around waiting for me to do something for you or two you. It'll be your perfect day!" Twilight rolled the scroll back up with a practiced flick of her magic. The sound of rapidly flapping paper rippled through the air as it slurped itself back up. With a sparkle of pinkish magic, the scroll teleported itself to the desk drawer it had come from.

"Great." Spike's false smile dropped as soon as Twilight's back was turned. "Juuuuuust great."

""What was that, Spike?"

"Nothing!"

Twilight paused, and then shrugged. It wasn't worth arguing over. Spike was being a big worrywart, nothing bad ever happened when she was testing. Well, other than that time she had summoned that tentacle-chin thing by mistake. Princess Celestia had come in handy then. This was good for Trixie; teaching somepony else was one of the most relaxing pastimes on the planet!

"Now then, let's see. For my first trick, I shall perform the classic 'Rabbit from a hat!'" Twilight levitated Trixie's hat to a spot exactly beside the book of tricks that Trixie kept. Spike did his best to try and tune her out as she read through the preparation steps, only tuning back in close to the end. "And for the final step, chant something ominous and grand sounding. Okay... uh... Azaroth Noacim Zynthos?"

Trixie snickered as she spectrally watched, expecting some fun to occur.

And then a great many odd things happened all at once. As Twilight reached her hooves into the hat, the strangest tingling of magic ran down the back of Spike's head like the trickle of cold water. The second was the warbling fever pitch of Twilight's grunts of struggle as she buried her forelegs up to her forequarters into the seemingly endless depths of the hat. Then a horrible pressure built up around Spike's head as his vision went black for a moment. He could swear that he could hear Twilight directly above him mumbling something like "Come to Twilight, Angel!"

It was about then that his sight returned to him with unfortunate timing. After all, the sight of suddenly looking up past the brim of a hat you could never fit inside to stare between Twilight's forelegs into her suddenly terrified and horrified face would be enough to frighten anypony. So, Spike did the only thing that he could think of alongside Twilight. Screaming his lungs out trying to outscream her.

"Yes, Trixie has never had a magical accident quite like that one. I wonder why. It could be those words. Trixie always has... odd things happen with them."

Rarity shook herself out once more, still feeling stiff from the seating in the observatory hidden in the spire of her residence. The farmtown fashionata made a mental note to rearrange her seating floor pillows. And maybe once she had saved Twilight, she could get her to teleport a couch up. She was always accidentally throwing the red, white, pink, and purple pillows every which way whenever she rapidly shifted between the portholes of the disguised and hidden room to observe a particularly gossip-worthy event going on.

A pity that Pinkie made her swear a Pinkie Promise to never reveal anything she observed unless she felt that somepony would come to harm through inaction. It wasn't entirely her fault for the Utter Flutter Incident. Alright, she might have sparked it, but she worked just as hard as anypony else to stop it once she realized what had happened. She knew so much about everypony in town, maybe more than Pinkie herself. Why shouldn't she use that knowledge?

"I dunno, Rarebear. I'm pretty sure I know more, but I only use my powers for good instead of evil."

Right. Amazingly, despite her chattering mouth, Pinkie was somehow more restrained in the use of the knowledge she acquired. Wait... "Whaaa-AAH-AH-AaaAAH! Pinkie! What are you doing in my observatory!?"

Pinkie manically grinned at her target, giggling with a few snorts of breath mixed in amongst her breathless wriggling laughs. The party pony wiped some tears of mirth out of her eyes as she watched Rarity calm down. "I'm just here to remind you that great observation comes with great responsibilities! Remember! Good, not evil!"

The Great Devourer, the Pinking Horror, She Who Must Not be Summoned flopped down across the tiny loft from Rarity. A beat later, she stopped in her twitching movements, and pondered loudly while tapping her chin with a hoof. "Oh, and I had a flippy tail, which I think means that somepony I know has come to Ponyville, but has never been in Ponyville before, which means a 'Sorta-New-Pony Party'. But how could I know a Sorta-New Pony if they've never come to Ponyville before? I think my brain needs a hug."

Rarity squirmed back, 'ick'ing slightly at the thought. Pinkie paused for another moment before turning to Rarity. "Wait, what are you doing here?"

Rarity fixed Pinkie with a deadpan glare as she picked up a stemmed glass of Earl Grey from the doorside table. It was going to be a long few minutes until she could convince Pinkie to go hunt somewhere else. "This is, as you should rather quickly remember, my place of residence." Rarity harrumphed delicately and tossed her mane. The fashionata's horn glowed with her sky-blue aura as she sipped from her tea and rearranged the pillows into two properly color-coordinated symmetrical nests for Pinkie and herself.

Pinkie 'oooh'ed in thought for a moment. That did make sense. It was Fashion Party Central for all of Ponyville, and where Rarity made her money. She joined Rarity in looking out one of the portholes of the tiny little observatory for a moment before she began rethinking what she had just heard. "Heeey, wait a second. That's not what I asked. Why are you in your observatory again?"

"Why, I'm observing, Pinkie darling." Rarity sipped from her gold-trimmed glass once more with dainty distain as she looked out her window. After moving the glass to one side, she leaned in closer to the window, close enough for her breath to fog the cooling glass.

The rough feel of Pinkie's utterly neglected mane brushing against the side of the fashionata's head nearly made her jump away reflexively to preserve her coat. Pinkie mushed her face against the glass as she tried to see whatever Rarity was seeing. "Why are we observing Twilight's tree? It's not going to sprout root tentacles and carry her off screaming into the Everfree, is it? I don't think I could take any more crazy."

She looked at Rarity once more as something struck her. "Hey, wait a minute; this had better not be another Utter Flutter Incident. You said you were going to stop observing after you made Fluttershy cry for a month." Pinkie pressed her face against the glass once more, smushing her face flat against the glass.

Rarity's magic slowly pulled Pinkie from the window so she could clean it up. Rarity's scrub cloth attacked Pinkie with all the fury of a Nightmare Moon, sending the pink pony spluttering in protest as they both turned their attention from the window, and what was happening outside. With their attention distracted by their antics, neither noticed the front door of the library opening to allow a cape and turbaned pony form to rush out of it. Or the hat held in her telekinetic grip, or the fact that she had an odd lump under her blanket cape.

Rarity finally finished up her work, smiling in satisfaction at the sparkling condition of her window as she turned her attention back to the window and the view outside. "Pinkie, have I or have I not been absolutely mum on anything I have discovered here over the past two years? Other than that distressing... incident." Rarity kept herself together, trying not to allow the irritation Pinkie was inducing in her get the better of her patience. Even if she was strangling the pillow beneath her with her forelegs hard enough to squeeze it's stuffing out.

Pinkie looked at Rarity funnily, fixing her with the slightest hint of accusation. "Mostly." Yeah, sure Rarity. Pinkie was born yesterday so of course she'd believe you.

Rarity snorted into her drink from a sudden inhalation, sweating a few drops of pure nervousness as she recalled several infractions in her promise. Nopony had broken a Pinkie Promise. Well, not that anypony could remember anymore, maybe. She quickly chucked to try and diffuse the tension for a moment, before continuing in a babble of nervousness. "I may have been slightly... weak at points. But! I have been resolute in holding to the spirit of the promise! I fear our dear Twilight is in the very heart of danger at this very moment!"

Pinkie shimmied back in shock at the proclamation of doom. "Gaasp! My bestest Party Testee Pony in trouble? My bested friend in the world! What's happened?!" Pinkie lurched back into Rarity's personal space, hooking a foreleg around the freaking fashionata and pressing their faces against the tiny pane of glass in haste.

Rarity fought the scrunching of her face to speak once more. "That fiendish enchantress Trixie wants to finish the job she started with that dreadful Ursa and destroy all of Ponyville for her humiliating defeat at our hooves!" Rarity screamed her worry at nearly the top of her lungs and jumped out of Pinkie's grasp to leap to her hooves while pointing a hoof accusingly towards Twilight's library. To Tartarus with dignity and decorum and nerves, evil was ahoof! It had to be the truth, after all! Trixie thought herself so clever, hiding her sinister plans so deeply, but Rarity would be the one to expose-

"Rarity, have you been reading kooky spy or fantasy novels again? Why would Trixie get revenge on Ponyville? Everypony other than you and the girls loved her!" Pinkie peeled her face off of the window worriedly. Reaching down under a pillow, she pulled out a magnifying glass and used it to try and peer through one of Rarity's eyes and into her brain. "I mean, c'mon! Didn't we just learn a lesson about preemptively judging ponies?"

Rarity pulled back from Pinkie's inspection, brushing aside the pink pony's concerns in the process. "Pinkie! She came closer to breaking apart Ponyville than even that diabolical vile Dr. Insano! She must want to destroy Twilight for floating that Ursa out of town!" Rarity pointed a hoof towards another window and the Everfree Forest beyond it where Snips and Snails had been so clearly bewitched into luring the starbeast from.

"Rarity, that's crazy talk. It nearly ATE her. She boasted about defeating one, yeah, but c'mon! She was an entertainer! She's supposed to tell wildly inaccurate tales to make us 'ooh' and 'aaaah' at their coolness! The only ponies she was sore with was you, AJ, and Dashie!" Pinkie made motions indicating that she thought Rarity's words were made of crazy as she spoke. As her white-coated friend harrumphed at her rebuttal, Pinkie frowned in frustration.

"PInkie darling, I heard Twilight talk about how 'we' had come back with Trixie's things! I didn't see her since I was tied up in Twilight's kitchen, but I swear I heard two sets of hooves" Rarity poked her chest, and then Pinkie's to indicate the number of ponies she meant by 'we'. She turned her head back to the library in worry, afraid to take her eyes off of it for too long.

Pinkie rolled her eyes, wondering when she had become the only sane mare in Ponyville. Rarity needed a hoof put down before a Super Sparkle Scenario took place. Because then she'd have to finally enact a Pie family oath-break on Rarity. "Rarity, you do know that since Twilight is supposed to be the bearer of magic and the example-pony of friendship, the not-brain twisty-turny explanation is that she's actually taking Trixie in because of the whole 'Oh no, my home went SMUSH! by Ursa Minor' problem, and offering her a place to stay until everypony is calm again, right?" Pinkie slowly slid the magnifying glass back underneath the cushion she got it from, turning her head back to the window again.

Rarity sighed in relief that Pinkie was at least paying attention, even if not in the way she wanted. Then she squeaked in horror as Pinkie turned around and caught her face between two pink hooves and squeezed it tight. "Wait-WAIT! Why were you tied up in her kitchen?"

Rarity choked and spluttered before pulling away roughly after a few moments. That tea down the wrong tube along with the deformation of her face did a number on her breath. "Not... cough- important, Pinkie darling! But don't you think that if Twilight was innocently offering Trixie a place to stay we would have heard about it by now? They declared her dead after all. If Trixie was innocent, she would have corrected that little legal mistake."

Pinkie opened her mouth and raised a hoof spluttering in protest at Rarity. After several moments of sticking her felt thoughts back to the velcro of her mind, she finally shut her jaw in a huff. "Fine. I'll go prove you wrong. When I go proof that nothing suspicious is going on, you are going to Pinkie Promise to drop it and leave it alone. Got it, Rarity?"

"If you find nothing wrong, Pinkie. If."

"While this is a most interesting trick, perhaps you should settle for a less dangerous kick. While small subtle gestures are what you desire; for them your magic does not seem to be for hire." Zecora slowly pushed a forehoof into the hat, dislodging Spike with an expert motion and a yelp of pain on his part. The baby dragon's head reappeared with a pop between his shoulders a moment later as his zebra savior casually dropped the hat atop Twilight's head.

As Spike woozily wobbled to collapse besides Trixie's statue still awkwardly posed in Zecora's bookshelf alcove, the spectral mare snorted and harrumphed at the zebra's suggestion. Okay, so maybe less at the suggestion of the tribal shaman, and more at the ridiculous coat of paint that had been slapped upon her body, plainly visible even in the gloom of the hut. Bright orange and nearly neon yellow did not go with petrified unicorn. "Trixie does not do 'subtle'. That is slight of hoof and mind tricks, the domain of pegusi and earth pony performers. No, she is far more than that." The illusionary illusionist waived her hoof in dismissal of the zebra, considering her suggestion to be bunk.

Twilight wished she could dump some ice water on Trixie's head to calm her down. Something suitably ironic for the hothead and such. Wait... what? That made no sense whatsoever. Right, moving on from her faulty thought process before she got too carried away. Twilight stepped around Zecora's cauldron pit as she spoke, clearing her throat nervously. "Zecora, I wouldn't exactly call pulling a dragon out of the hat 'subtle'."

"Perhaps my metaphors need a class; trying to perform tricks with your magic is like putting too much juice in too small a glass." Zecora picked up the ladle for her cauldron, stirring a particularly nasty-smelling brew with exceedingly tender care.

Trixie grumbled as she used her magic to weakly polish all of the scales upon Spike's head that had been scuffed in their interaction with the... spacey-bridgy wormhole-teleportation effect of the failed rabbit pulling. For all that Spike squirmed under her telekinetic grip; he continued to let her calm herself with her polishing job until the tangled roots could be clearly seen in his scales. "Yes, the world does not need to keep reminding Trixie how unfair it is to her. Yes, Sparkle's cup runneth over."

Twilight's lip quivered for a moment as she tried to find something to say. Stiffening it as best she could, she continued edging around the fire pit of the expansive hut until she stood by Trixie's petrified form. Laying a hoof on the smooth and deathly cold shoulder, Twilight let a single tear squeeze out of the corner of her eye. "Trixie, if I could I would gladly give you any part of my life you wanted. Especially a good bit of my magic. Remember how I talked about bubbling myself the other day?"

"Yes?"

"That's a mental trigger that the staff of the Princess's school put into me to protect the other students." Twilight's breath hitched as she remembered far too many close calls with her magic, the jeering of ponies that only saw the seeming magic incompetence caused by her power and laughed at her. "I would have accidents whenever I had nightmares, or got scared, or couldn't focus. Accidents that could hurt ponies."

Twilight took a deep breath and looked into Zecora's mirror. She rarely, if ever just let her magic shine forth. She had only done it once within the last year; even the Ursa hadn't been enough to get her to let it loose. She opened her suddenly glowing eyes, letting Trixie look through them and upon the way the energy induced static in her coat and fizzled against the air. "My magic might be the strongest ever seen in a mortal. Or, at least Princess Celestia says I'm for certain the strongest this century outside of Cadance."

Twilight immediately choked off the flow of her magic when Spike approached her, whimpering at the feeling as it slammed against the physical confines of her body with itching and burning. Spike swallowed back his worry and dry throat, picking up where Twilight left off as he stroked her forequarters. "Yeah. She practices all the foal-grade tricks she does in order to improve her control. Like mustaches and bubbles that change a pony’s colors!"

As Spike stroked his nonexistent mustache, Zecora looked at Twilight in a new light, shuffling a book with a pair of wings and a horn upon its cover under her bed as she did. "If foal hood pranks are what you perform, perhaps they can be made to conform."

Twilight looked up as Trixie raised her illusionary body's head. They both blinked in slight shock at the obvious idea they had missed. Twilight quietly spoke first. "I have a book of all the tricks I've sort of gotten right."

"Trixie knows ways of combining cantrips."

Twilight dashed for the door as Trixie dispelled the illusion of her body. Spike hopped and waddled after them, desperate not to get left behind in the Everfree as he chased after them as fast as he could. Zecora stood in shock as she had remembered what she had meant to say all along over the course of their meeting. "Wait, you need to stop and hear! I have much to fear! Continue to mantle Trixie's life, and it is your soul that will be in for strife!"

Of course, there was no way that Twilight had heard her. This wouldn't end well, not a chance of it.

The library was silent, it's master not yet home. Nothing disturbed the eerie silence of the library as it maintained its vigil. Not even the marching of the shadows of Solid Pink as she rappelled through the upper windows. Granted, Solid Pink really knew how to move silently, so of course she wouldn't disturb the silence.

Mmm. She loved night vision crystal lenses. They made everything sherbet orange!

The shadow mare crept along the ceiling; strung from it by a rope she had fastened in the library days ago in case of friendship intervention emergencies. As she thought about it, though, it was pretty fun in general sneaking around and seeing how many ponies she could trick into thinking that she wasn't there. It made the eventual parties funnier when they tried to figure out how she had done it.

Pinkie looked down to the library lobby, seeing that she was in a perfect position. The catsuited stealth mare began descending to the floor, carefully avoiding every beam of light streaming through the windows as the sun slowly set. After all, who knew as to whether or not the light beams were secretly motion detector beams. And if she tripped them, who knew what hideous and fiendish traps Twilight had installed into her library. Like turning her into a cactus! Ooh-ooh! Or zapped to the moon! Or zapped into a cactus on the moon doing the pony polka Fooor-Ever!

Pinkie looked up from the diagram of her inner dialogue she had made and wondered when Rarity had infected her with a case of the Crazy. She stuffed the velcro-lined felt board back into her mane and raised herself silently to her hooves. It was time for Pinkie Pie, Super Spy.

The pink mare looked left and right, trying to remember where Rarity has said that Trixie's things had been taken to. The basement? Pinkie dove across the room in a single leap, back flipping midair to avoid a beam of light in the process. Pinkie slickly slid across the polished wooden floor to disappear into the space directly behind the table with the horse head bust on it.

Nothing moved for a moment, the silence returning to the library once more. Fluff crept around the edge of the table, the unmappable expanse of pink curls and snarls that made up Pinkie's tail emerging from behind the table carrying a dart gun. Granted, it was armed with foam darts, but they were filled with Pie clan hot sauce! Everypony handled that stuff like it was a deadly substance!

Pinkie slowly stretched her head around the other side of the table, looking for signs of attack. Nope, no Doombots, Magic Munchers, Brain Basters, or other such legions of automatic doom anywhere. What the jip? Twilight's lair was lacking in lair-like defense systems! Lame.

All the same, Pinkie all but slithered across the floor, sliding slippery in her formfitting rubber suit across the freshly refitted and repaired planks of the floor. She slipped into the shadows of darkest darkness, vanishing without a trace into their tight spaces. Then like an eel, Pinkie rose up from behind a convenient fern pot by the basement door. Her hoof reached up to her face and clicked her goggles to fully active, bathing her eyes in a harsh orange glow.

Pinkie rose up onto her hind legs like a minotaur, using the wall to balance herself as she tippy-hooved closer to the doorway. With silent precision, Pinkie's tail flipped up and wrapped itself around the doorknob like an unholy mass of pink tendrils out to suck somepony's sugar and happiness out. The tail twitched, edging the door open with the ever so slightest sound of creaking.

The 'super spy' crept, squeezed and smooshed her way through the impossibly small gap she had opened without touching the door or doorframe. On the other side, she stuck a hoof into her mouth and reinflated her body with a mighty puff of air. She itched as she rebounded like an expanding balloon. Then again, she always itched when she defied physics. Hmm. Pinkie turned her attention back to the basement, looking down into the darkness as she returned to all four hooves.

It was dark in the basement, almost too dark for Pinkie to see anything even with her goggles. She needed to find a light to turn on. Preferably before her heart rattled its way out of her chest or before she sweated her mane off at the thoughts of whatever could be lurking in the darkness. The basement's furnishings loomed creepily in the narrow field of view of her goggles, barely visible as ghostly outlines that hinted at sinister plots and secret monsters out to make Pinkie stew!

Pinkie shuddered as she forced the thoughts out of her head. Despite the fact that it looked like Twilight could get a degree in Spookology, there was no way that she would leave anything that could gobble a Pinkie up. Even if the steps creaked at every hoof-fall, and the slightest breeze periodically wicked at the sweat upon her ears, and the monsters were-

Pinkie took ahold of her head and shook herself until she felt like candy was falling out. The library was an old building, with all sorts of... quirkiness. And being spooky was no proof of evilness. She could still hear the disappointed lectures from Princess Celestia that she hard received after the solar alicorn had found out about the treatment of the foreign dignitary in the Everfree. Whimper...

Pinkie finally found the light switch, flipping it on to illuminate the room. And she gaped in horror at what she saw. The party mare ran out of the room fast enough to leave a pink afterimage streaking in her wake unbroken to the front door, then returned with equal speed carrying a screaming Rarity in an utterly disheveled state above her head. "Rarity, Rarity! It's true! What has she done to Spike!?"

Claw marks adorned several of the walls, as if Spike had frantically tried to scratch them down. A spell circle took up much of the floor, still fizzling with arcane energies as sickly candles at each of its nodes smoked as they continued to slowly smolder. Worse was the bleached white skull of an adolescent dragon that propped open a sinister spell book that was bound in purple. The two mares screamed in horror at the thought that Trixie had already skinned Spike. Who knew what dastardly deeds Trixie was doing to Twilight right at that very moment?

"Ooh... darling little Spike was turned into a... a... a book holder!" Rarity pressed a hoof to her head as she fought back against the faintness that threatened to take away her consciousness.

"We've got to save Twilight while we still can!" Pinkie looked around, continuing to spot signs of Trixie's influence over Twilight in the gloom of the basement.

But the creek of the library's front door opening jarred them back to their senses. Two sets of hoof-steps slowly crossed across the unmaintained sections of the floor as faint voices could be heard plotting amongst themselves upstairs. Pinkie dove for the lightswitch, flipping it off with a click with her nose. Rarity dove in behind her and dragged her under the staircase, throwing a tablecloth over their forms to disguise them.

Creaking groaned through the still air as whoever it was opened the basement door. Thudding hoof-steps rattled the pair's nerves with each doom-prophesizing hoof-fall. Rarity shushed Pinkie silently and made 'jump her' gestures as the steps began crossing the basement floor, closer and closer to the hidden mares.

"FOR TWILIGHT!"

BeTrixed

"Mmmrph!" "Mm-mm-MmMmMmMm-Mm!"

"Yes, you're tied up in my basement for hitting me upside the head with that cheap pot. No, I'm not ungagging you until you promise not to start screaming." Twilight filed the edge of her hoof as she sat upon a cushion brought over from the corner of the room; having set it out so she could watch over her friends as they struggled in a set of enchanted ropes that had wrapped them up up to their chins. It was probably overkill, but given that Pinkie was in the room it was probably safer that way.

Pinkie rolled her eyes, wriggling a foreleg free of her bonds. Then, as she began mumbling something through her gag and dodging the attempts of the animated rope to recapture her limb, she made a cross over her heart, flapped it in the air, then stuck it into her eye in a way that looked pretty painful. Twilight shuddered slightly, hoping Pinkie hadn't hurt her eye.
Wait, how had she escaped her ropes?

"Pinkie, what was that and how did you-" Twilight scooted back as the rest of the ropes fell from Pinkie's form.

"What, the Pinkie Promise?" Pinkie poked her hoof against her chest as she started once more. "Cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye! Nopony ever breaks a Pinkie Promise." Pinkie rushed over to Twilight, dragging her into the one-legged hug of conspiratorial doom. She leaned in close, whispering into Twilight's ear. "Eeeveeeeer."

Twilight jerked away, watching Pinkie in terror as the mare leaned back away, then zipped back towards the pile of ropes still wriggling on the floor. Pinkie bounded up to the top of the pile, glaring seriously at Twilight before she sank down out of sight into the knotted depths. After a moment, she rolled out of the pile once more lightly hogtied with the gag somehow replaced in her mouth.

Twilight edged around until Rarity was lying on her back between her and Pinkie, afraid to ask. "How did you- why did-? You know what? Forget it." Twilight pressed a hoof to the side of her head, massaging at her temples where a terrible headache was building. She had been getting a lot of them lately, now that she thought about it. "Rarity, do you promise, too?"

Rarity scraped her head against the ground as she craned it back to look Twilight in the eyes. Seeing the irritated look of utter exasperation on her fellow unicorn's face, she nodded as quickly as she could while mentally lamenting the horrible things the gesture was doing to her hairstyle. The gag was lifted, letting her take a full breath once more with a deep gasp. "Oh my word, that was dreadful, simply awful! The thread count was all wrong, silk would have been a better choice than whatever that was, and the pattern didn't match my coat style or colors! Oh, what was it made out of, steel wool? And let us not even begin with that utterly atrocious knot you tied! Ooooooooooh!"

"Maybe I should put yours back on..." Twilight began to slip the gag back on, earning a choked squeak from Rarity as the fashionata began to frantically shake her head.

"Eeew! No! No! NoNoNo! I'll stop now; please don't put it back on! Take it away, take it awaaay!" Rarity squirmed backwards from Twilight, squeaking in terror at the thought of wearing the wretched piece of cloth again.

The pitter-patter of a pair of paws waddling down the staircase caught everypony's attention, freezing them awkwardly in place. Spike looked over the strange group, blinking with a blank look on his face as he tried to figure out what was going on. "Rarity? You didn't tell me you were taking Damsel in Distress lessons from Twilight, too! But, if you're taking lessons from her... does that mean I'm a bad partner?"

Twilight worriedly glanced up to Spike, and then turned back to Rarity who blushed ever so slightly. Twilight's voice grew a little harsher as her imagination ran wild, inquiring coldly after a few moments. "Damsel in Distress Lessons? What exactly have you been doing to Spike, Rarity?"

The bound-up fashionata found it oddly frustrating that she couldn't distract herself by tapping her forehooves together nervously. After all, what happens between a mare and a dragon should stay private. Though, at the same time Twilight was slowly leaning in closer and closer with that big frown upon her face. Ooh, confound her weakness! "Spike and I were practicing my techniques for being a damsel in distress! While one must on occasion rescue oneself, it's always better and more romantic to be rescued by a knight in shining armor!" She didn't notice the subtle wince that crossed Twilight's face. "After all, how droll is it to break free of your own bonds and subject yourself to the hideous fashion torture of escaping when somepony else can so selflessly give their fabulousness up for you?"

Twilight jerked back and blinked, wondering when Ponyville had stopped- no, wait. Ponyville had never made any sense. Her first mistake was starting to believe that it had. The second was moving in instead of being a friend who came over to visit. Sigh. She turned to Pinkie, who shrugged while mumbling behind her gag. "You couldn't take that back off yourself?"

Pinkie rolled her eyes, shrugging her way out of her bonds effortlessly. "Fine. Sheesh, everypony is a grouch lately. Is there some kind of meaniepants field over town lately or something?"

Twilight rubbed at the base of her horn, feeling a headache unlike any before building up there. "No, Pinkie. The Stupendous and Spectacular Sparkle has-" Twilight stopped mid-sentence as she realized what she had been about to say. The slightest intake of a gasp from Rarity reached her ears, proving that she had indeed said that out loud. "Okay, I really am getting stressed out from everything if I slipped into stage speak that easily."

"Stage speak?" Rarity nervously twittered for a moment as she looked up at her anxious and aching purple counterpart. "Um, whatever exactly do you mean, darling?"

"Well, I-hey, wait a minute!"

'Thank you, Sparkle. Trixie... ugh, I was worried that I was going to have to point that out.'
'Quiet, you.'

Twilight stepped back up to Rarity, leaning down to look her in the eyes and horn to horn, growling under her breath. "Nice try, trying to distract me. You still haven't explained why the two of you were waiting in the dark to ambush me in MY basement."

Rarity spluttered, looking to Pinkie. The pink party mare shook her head violently and immediately became fascinated with her mane, pulling it down in front of her face so she could pull strands of rope from it. Rarity swallowed nervously, trying to come up with a proper story to explain herself with. "Well, I-uh... oh dear, this is rather frightful. Oh, Pinkie darling, I'm afraid you're better at explaining this than me. I don't even know where to begin."

Pinkie growled rather uncharacteristically before pulling forth a record from her mane. She slid a record player over from the side of the room and set it up, grumbling under her breath the whole way. At last, though, Pinkie cleared her throat as she reared up in time with the scratching of the start of the recording. "Razza-frazzing can't believe I've gotta repeat a blarging song."

"Oooooh, we think you've fallen to an evil enchantress;
Who goes and chants and prances!
And you've looked into her eyes and she's put you in trances!
And beware whatever you do,
Because Rarity thinks she's gonna gobble you up in a big tasty stew!"

Twilight stepped back again, yelping slightly as she rubbed her rump against Spike's hanging tail and the edge of the stairs. She had never seen Pinkie so... frustrated and unenthusiastic about a song and dance number before. Ohno. Evil Enchantress!? They had found out about Trixie! They were going to pull out holy water and dunk her in it until they washed Trixie's soul away into the abyss!

'Trixie has to ask before we go any further, but is Ponyville infectious? Or is it that everypony in this town is CRA-ZY!? That does include Trixie, by the way.’

Before Twilight could answer her mental roommate, Spike spoke up. "RARITY! How could you? I said I would explain the whole Trixie thing later, all you had to do was ask-" Spike blurted out his accusation without thinking, realizing only too late that he was confessing his guilt. His claws slapped across his mouth, shutting it instantly as he gulped back ever so slightly fearful bile.

The first strands of Twilight's mane to go twanged as they popped out of place, highlighting her extreme stress. "Spiiiiiiiiike...." Twilight's voice was disturbingly and sickeningly sweet as she turned around, hiding a frothing sea of screaming frustration roaring within her. Her eyebrows twitched above pin-prick focused eyes as she grabbed Spike's tail with her magic and sauntered up until she could run a hoof gingerly across the tips of his scale fringe. "Would you be my beeestest number one assistant in the world and explain to me just what you were about to explain to Rarity?"

"She used her little mane-tossing, eyebrow-flashy thing that I could never resist and came over while you were saving Trixie's things even though you told me not tooooo!" Spike wailed out apologetic explanation and covered his head. He shook there as he cowered, knowing his doom was neigh. "Please don't turn me into a cucumber or zap me to the mooo-ooo-ooon!"

Twilight tried to growl at him, but found that her heart just wasn't in it anymore. Spike's cowering and wails of apologies reminded her of just how beastly she must have looked in her frustration. And, more importantly, they reminded her that the real culprits were right behind her. "Oh, Spike.... I'm sorry I got so angry with you." She wrapped him up in a deep hug, patting his back as he sniffled.

The twin 'awww's of affection at the sight of sibling bonding reminded her of who she was supposed to be really angry at. She picked Spike up with her magic, patting him as he hiccupped and sniffled, turning on the once again cringing pair of mares against the wall. "No, I'm not mad at you, Spike. I'm mad at my 'friends' who decided that instead of asking me what was going on they had to break into my house and then tried to bash a cheap pot over my head to knock me out when they jumped to conclusions off of half the facts from a distressed baby dragon!"

Pinkie's mane slowly drifted back into place from where it had been windswept back by the force of Twilight's rant. The unicorn slowly panted, catching her breath as she glared first at Pinkie, then at Rarity who guiltily averted her gaze. Oh hay no; she wasn't going to get off that easily. Pinkie put her on the spot with her next words, knowing just what to say. "Yeah, Rarity. You were the one who didn't want to just ASK Twilight like I suggested!"

"ME!? It was not I who saw this basement and threw an utter fit, declaring that all our worst fears were true!"

"Only because YOU! worked me up with talk about how Trixie was eating Twilight's soul and how she had come to get revenge upon us all!"

"Why I should-"

Twilight's horn crackled with energy, her mane smoldering as miniature bolts of electricity arced out from her horn. She screamed an utter wail of exhausted patience as she picked up her friends and forcibly separated Pinkie from Rarity. The purple glow that had taken up residence in her eyes faded as she let her magic slip back from her and out into the world at large harmlessly once more.

Spike clambered down from her, hiding behind her frame as she glared at Pinkie and Rarity once more, taking control from her impulses and forcibly calming herself down. "It sounds like both of you are at fault! This was exactly the kind of reaction Trixie was trying to avoid!" She could hear a slight sniffle from her mental passenger as she all but screamed; and Twilight could feel tears of frustration quivering at the corners of her eyes.

Rarity plastered a forced smile onto her face as she came to terms with the idea that Trixie might not be in town for nefarious reasons. Oh, what HAD she done? She hoped she hadn't hurt Twilight's feelings too badly with her rash actions; but her hopes faltered as Twilight slowly slumped to the floor and planted her face in the smoothed out rock foundations.

Shame coursed through Rarity's veins, tweaking her consciousness with the need to repent and forgive. It plucked at her heartstrings until at last the rightful question freed itself from her lips. "May I be so bold, if I haven't overstayed my... er- welcome, but what exactly was Trixie doing with you, then?"

A slow sigh of utter defeat escaped Twilight as she languidly lifted her head from the floor to look Rarity in the eyes. "She was helping me put together a show for the Ponyville Orphanage. All this stuff-" Twilight raised her hoof, gesturing vaguely at the decorations, mystic and creepy props, and various personal effects. "-was meant to help. But between you guys interrupting me, and my problems with pulling a Spike instead of Angel Bunny out of a hat, I guess I'm going to... fail."

Rarity wiggled once more in her bonds as she bemoaned how she had selfishly jumped to conclusions. Again. "But that's so noble! Even with the way that she was- and the bear- and oh goodness, WHAT HAVE I DONE!? We chased somepony who could have been so good to the community with the right friends, and turned her away from friendship forever! I'm tainted, TAINTED by my Eeevil! Don't look at me, Twilight! Save yourself!"

"I dunno about evil." Spike piped in from behind Twilight, looking at Rarity through his guardian's legs. "I mean, all you did was harass her in the middle of her job as a performer even if she was a jerk, then according to her helped a bunch of ponies chase her into the Everfree forest with torches and pitchforks until she ran into a cocka- me and my big mouth." Spike reached into the crate behind Twilight, pulling out another strip of cloth that he tied off into a gag keeping his self-proclaimed big mouth shut.

Rarity paused as she was freed at last by Pinkie, processing what Spike had just said. "Spike? Darling, I was rather busy saving somepony else that dreadful night, I certainly never went into the Everfree-eE-e-EEEEII! Dust! DUST! Uncleaaan!" Rarity had topped over to the floor, rubbing the chalk dust and dirt across her side in the process.

Pinkie cleared her throat, stepping around her white-coated friend as Rarity began scrubbing the dirt from her fur with a zeal that only a Zebabwaeian Shaman could match in fervor. "Um, Spike... I hate to be cooompleeeeetely confused, but how could Trixie be helping Twi-Twi here throw a show for the Orphanage? I mean, doesn't running into a cockatrice put you into a rockier situation than my family's farm like... always? They have a go at you, throw you into the hospital and leave you stiff on the bill. Fooor-EV-ER!"

Twilight's eyes widened and she shook her head wildly. The normally straight-laced mane sprung out like a hedgehog, betraying her inner horror and panic as she tried to cut them off. "No, no, no! Trixie is JUST fine! She's hiding in the forest right NOW! At Zecora's place!"

Pinkie walked over to Twilight sadly, knowing Twilight must have been in denial. She leaned in close, tapping her chin as she inspected the crazed-looking mare, before she beeped Twilight on the nose and swept her up into a hug. "Fibber."

"I- what? No, I am not!"

'This is starting to get ridiculous, do these mares ever actually LISTEN?'

Twilight pulled back out of the hug, tripping over her own hooves as Rarity walked over. The white coat was clean once more, picked within an inch of its fuzzy life. Not that it mattered to Rarity as she swept up her dirty and dust-riddled companions into a hug. With a look of great pity, she let her head rest on Twilight's shoulder to offer comfort. "Oh, darling! It's okay. You're as terrible a liar as Applejack, why you even have her tells! I can tell how much her loss must have hurt you! Her spirit's watching on, helping you make the best memorial show possible for her!"

"Memorial show, WHAT?" Twilight tried to figure out where in the hay Rarity had gotten that from, and if it was the same place Pinkie got her props from.

"Why yes, it's as clear as day! You must have known her from before, a friend from school, or a rival, or... a lover! Your marefriend!" Rarity continued on, leaving reality lost and confused far behind. "Yes, of course, how could I not see it?"

A bolt of blue energy rushed up from Twilight's horn, exploding against the ceiling in a cascade of blue sparkles and an anguished scream of frustration. Pinkie and Rarity scrambled back from Twilight, falling on their rumps as they sparkles pulled back in on themselves. A moaning wind gripped the room as they formed a glittering whirlpool of crackling white energy in the center of the room. In its heart, amidst the crackling and buzzing a white glowing form rapidly took shape, and amidst a final burst of light, Trixie's translucent form was revealed at last. "Oh, what in CELESTIA'S SOLAR-FLARING SUNBUTT IS WRONG WITH YOU TWO!?"

Pinkie's mane deflated instantly as she raised a trembling hoof to point shakily at the translucent form. Rarity, meanwhile took the more dignified approach. She took a single deep breath, and then passed out cold. Pinkie kept on trying to get out a word out, only getting the first syllable out. "Gh-Gh-Gh-ghh-h-h-h-gh!"

"Yes. Trixie is a ghost." She saw Pinkie's eyes widen a little further as she began giggling in terror. The ghostly showmare sighed, then zoomed in close to Pinkie, almost in her face. "OOOOGA-BOOOGA-BOOOGA!"

Pinkie turned as white as Rarity, falling over with a bleat. Trixie snorted back the start of a maniacal laugh as the party pony's legs twitched in the air, enjoying the scare. Or she was, before Twilight interfered with her projection, canceling it out."Hey! What did Trixie do?"

It took most of the evening to calm Pinkie and Rarity down once more. It didn't exactly help that at one point Pinkie had explained to Trixie that she was constantly giggling to try and exorcise her from the building.

Thankfully, they were willing to listen to Trixie's story as soon as the ghostly mare had offered it. More than willing, as she went on. The tale of how her mother had evaporated into thin air, leaving her trapped in the Canterlot Orphanage system brought tears to the pair's eyes, and more than one hug attempt from Pinkie that left the party mare sprawled in the dust. Rarity found herself smiling in recognition from one artist to another as Trixie recounted how she had slowly become known in parts of Equestria as a great magician and had been about to move to the 'bigtimes'. Eventually, though, her tale turned to its dark and foreboding twist and her petrification at the fowl clutches of the cockatrice.

"W-we did that?" Pinkie had a look of utter horror on her face, as if she had taken all the candy from every foal and Ponyville and kicked everypony's dogs.

Rarity shook her head, not wanting to believe that anypony she knew would be so heartless as to actively chase somepony deeper into the Everfree. "No! It couldn't be! I would never do something like that, no matter how much i might despise them."

"Well, it might not necessarily be somepony we know, or even have happened at all." The mares all turned to Twilight, who was going through the file cabinets recently installed across from the stairs. "I know that Trixie thinks there was a mob chasing after her, but it's been scientifically documented that in stressful situations the mind can misinterpret information. It's part of what causes hallucinations." Twilight buried her head in the drawer of one of her farther cabinets, searching for the checklists and documentation regarding the Night of the Ursa. "Ah-HA! Here it is!"

Trixie turned her spectral apparition towards Twilight to signify her interest. "Trixie is fairly certain as to what she saw and heard. A line of ponies chasing her into the forest with torches and pitchforks."

Twilight rushed over to her map of the Ponyville area, laying out the files on the table beneath the wall-mounted map. "Well, Trixie, if you crossed through the Stickles Brushline like you say you did, then it's just not possible. The group's lighting was provided entirely by a group of unicorns with specializations in lighting spells, who had blue, white, and purple auras."

Twilight scanned down the list, inspecting every name in turn and cross-referencing it with what she knew of the town and the constellation of notes she had taken. Most of the party had not even seen Trixie's show, and were unaware of the connection between her and the Ursa. All save for one. "Rarity? Why didn't you tell me you were on the Stickles team?"

"I wasn't darling!"

Spike leaned in through the upstairs door, looking down at the group with concern. "Rarity? I heard your voice raised, you okay? Trixie's not doing that thing where she pokes her hoof in and out of your eye again, is she?"

Rarity turned slightly green as Spike spoke, and Trixie spluttered as she tried to defend herself. "No, Trixie- ugh, I'm not doing it!" The ghostly entertainer stamped her hooves silently as she protested. "Rarity is having a hard enough staying awake without fainting as is! Trix- Augh! I am not about to intentionally induce stress to the ponies who I owe my life to!"

Spike rolled his eyes, getting the message. "Alright, alright, you're an ethical entertainer, already heard that. Say, does everypony else want honeyed tea, or that chai stuff from Neighpon?"

"Surprise us, Spike." Twilight beamed a smile up to the grumbling dragonling, who grumpily shut the door once more. "So, Rarity, if you weren't with the Stickles team, where were you?"

"I was with the team following the old Fillydelphia road, Darling." Rarity confusedly trotted over, leaning deep into Twilight's bubble of personal space to look at the list. Certainly enough, there was her name, even though it couldn't possibly have been- well that wasn't right either! "Cloudkicker? No, that can't be right. She was with my party, and she nearly drowned in that dreadful swamp that swallowed up the road. Oooow, eww... I still feel that mud-ewewew!" Rarity shivered in discomfort, remembering the feel as she had waded in after the fallen pegasus.

"It's okay, Rarity! No uncleanliness that I see! Okay, you were a little dingy the next day, but you're all sparkling white again!" Pinkie gave Rarity a big smile to cheer up her spirits, before demonstrating the lack of dirt by pulling over one of Twilight's magnifying glasses and examining Rarity closely.

Meanwhile, Twilight tapped her chin in thought as she examined the map, mentally tracing the most obvious routes of travel and calculating transit times. One had to take into account Rarity breaks, stops for aching hooves and detours due to streams on the map and a cliff face, which came out to-"Rarity, the Sticky End Bog is only an hour away. Wow, weird name for a swamp. The Stickles team left near midnight, you could have made it back well before then."

Rarity dodged and weaved, trying to avoid letting Pinkie get a close look at the roots of her mane as she responded to Twilight. "Midnight? That's too late to be the ponies that Trixie claimed chased her. Stop that Pinkie! Besides, we were out there rescuing Cloudkicker and I until nearly daybreak. We never made it back." Rarity swiped the magnifying glass from Pinkie with her magic, sliding it under a pillow and sitting on it to prevent Pinkie from discovering her true mane color.

"And if they departed at midnight, that's too late to be the ponies who were chasing Trix- AUGH! Too late to be the ponies chasing me." The showmare distressedly whined, pawing her intangible hoof against the floor.

Pinkie nodded in turn. "Yeah, no way that Rare-bear made it out that fast, it's called Sticky End Bog for a reason. Nine times outta tine, you walk in and BLUP! Down you go to meet Momma Earth's tummy."

Trixie felt the oddest sense of absolute certainty that Pinkie was wrong. Almost as if she had insulted the laws of physics... why? "Trixie is fairly certain that is just folklore. Bogs aren't that powerful and deep. And besides, Trixie passed along the outskirts of one trying to avoid a big... crawling thing with tentacles in her running and screaming. Of course, Trixie may have just been Great and Powerful enough to walk on water."

Pinkie snorted and turned back to irritating Rarity, who rolled her eyes at Pinkie's giant comb waiving in her direction and the still city-sized ego of the performer. Twilight sighed happily, feeling the call of the lecture as she pulled out a piece of chalk and began writing on the floor. "While it is possible to run atop quicksand and deep mud by moving fast enough, it's pretty unlikely since you would have to be Dash fast to keep from falling into it as you motion liquefies the surface. So, no Trixie, you likely didn't actually enter into a bog."

Trixie tried to turn her head to the general direction of Twilight's friends, hoping her fears weren't true. "Tri- I have to ask, does she know enough for a lecture on every subject of study in the world?" She winced mentally as Pinkie shrugged noncommitally on the edge of Twilight's vision. "Trixie was afraid of that."

Twilight tapped her hoof against the floor three times loudly to break up the pair's sidebar. "If the class is finished talking..." She waited as Pinkie began a complicated set of motions that began with zipping her mouth shut before she continued, best to let Pinkie have her fun than to try and talk over her. "Anyway, as I was saying, not only did Trixie probably not pass by... 'Sticky End Bog', the mystical powers attributed to it can't possibly exist. Quicksand and mud are too thick for ponies to go 'blup!' It's not scientifically possible."

Twilight drew a further set of pictures on the floor, depicting several stuck ponies in a bog. "See? In water, we float at about withers deep normally. But bogs are where there is so much water in the ground that it makes the sand and earth spread apart until they turn to a liquid. But since it's still denser than water, you would float at belly deep, though your legs would be stuck."

Twilight took a little too much of an interest in showing that on the floor, before continuing with a set of guards with armor on. "Granted, it is possible if you are extremely weighed down, like a whole battalion of guards in heavy armor. But I never heard of losing a bunch of ponies like that to explain a local legend." Pinkie and Rarity were a little pale as she looked up, and possibly worried about their friend, judging from their expressions. "Alright, it is possible a bunch of ponies got stuck out there and died of exposure, or got tangled up in a bunch of roots that kept them from floating, but seriously, nine out of ten ponies who go out there can't possibly go 'blup'."

"But it happened just last year, Twilight! A travelling merchant coming from Fillydelphia tried taking the old road to save time. Dashie was in the area on weather patrol and saw her unhooking herself from her cart to find a way through, and marched right on in ignoring Dashie! Then the ground started bubbling and down she went, so fast that Dashie couldn't get ahold of her and nearly went in herself!" Pinkie made motions and sounds to accompany her story, with bubbling effects from a bubble pipe and miming out somepony sinking into the earth. After stopping, she seemed to almost deflate a little. her coat fading a little. "I just wish Dashie could have saved her, I didn't know her, but it's just not right that she- she..."

"Trixie still doesn't buy the idea of evil places. Err, I mean I'm having trouble buying the concept. It would require corrupting magic beyond anything anypony has to pull off."

Twilight shook her head, grumbling in disbelief. "No, no... seriously? You believe Dash on something only she witnessed? Especially a creepy tale about eeeeevil swamps?"

Rarity huffed, inspecting her hoof for any remaining traces of the ghastly mud as she spoke up. "Well, don't take just Dash's word for it. When Cloudkicker... well, nearly drowned, she had landed in there after spotting what she claimed she had spotted Trixie's head sticking up out of the bog. She swore that she could hear her calling for help, and she rushed in and found what she thought was a stable set of roots. But, they parted beneath her, dropping her into the muck a hundred yards in from the edge." Rarity began telling her tale, emphasizing the unearthly nature of the earth in the swamp as she did.

"Rarity, I- you know what? Just forget it." Twilight rubbed her head, feeling for the hot point of pain where it felt like it wanted to split. Better to just get it over with. Who knew, maybe her head would split due to magic and bud off a Trixie head, solving most of their problems! Ponyville was weird enough for it. 'Evil' swamps, stoned annoyances, friends who had a dim view of the concept of private property-UGH! "So, you were busy all night. But, if the lists are wrong, and the times are wrong, then who chased Trixie?”

Pinkie had procured a hat somehow while Twilight had been looking away, a tweed thing that smelled of old woods. Pinkie tapped her hoof against her chin in thought, mumbling something after a few seconds. "Hey, didn't Trixie run straight from town without stopping?" Everypony took a doubletake as Pinkie adjusted the scale felt diorama of the surroundings near Trixie's presumed path. Pinkie pulled a cornflower blue piece of yarn out from under her hat, carefully laying it down to match Trixie's path.

"Yes, Trixie did. She was pursued nearly all the way." Trixie's weak and flickering telekinetic field picked up a large pin, sticking it into the side of a felt hill to show when she had noticed she was being chased.

"And no naps?" Everypony looked at Pinkie again. "What? Naps are important, just ask Dashie!"

"No, Trixie did not take a nap at any point. Running screaming for her life tends to do that."

"Then it couldn't be ANYpony from Ponyville."

Twilight paused in the middle of reshuffling her files into the folder as she caught Pinkie's declaration. Bad enough that she was going to have to go through her records with a fine-tooth comb, but how did Pinkie know? "How are you so certain, Pinkie?"

Pinkie rolled her eyes while smiling goofily, as if she had been asked the dumbest question in the world. "Well, DUH. I'm Pinkie Pie, remember? When I say I know everypony in Ponyville, it's not a boast, it's a guarantee. When BIIIIIG stuff like a BIIIIIG Ursa come into town, I go and find out everything that happened during the event, just so I can prepare for anything that happened!" Pinkie wildly gestured with her hooves to emphasize the BIIIIIG-ness of things that happened that night, before sitting back down.

She cleared her throat, pulling a little card out of her mane. "So, let's see, everypony was either still asleep like Princess Luna at high noon, or rabble-rabble-rabbling in the town square, or still running around like the flower sisters going 'AAAAAUUUUUAAAGH!' over the fact that the city-sized bear nearly turned Ponyville into hoof jam!"

Rarity's eyes fluttered for a moment as she considered the absolutely dreadful metaphor Pinkie had offered, and then shuddered as she realized Pinkie was being literal. "Well, thankfully that awful bear did not in fact turn us into your utterly horrid metaphor after all. But, that begs the question, darlings, if I wasn't chasing her, and nopony else could have inspired her... hallucinations, then who did?" Rarity leaned into the semi-circle of ponies a little further, looking at each of them in turn with worry.

"Does it matter?" Trixie's apparition slowly slumped to the floor, her face disappearing into it as she all but gave up. "No matter what happened, Trixie is still as good as dead, and her body- my body is still in Zecora's hut gathering Zebrican graffiti."

Trixie's avatar was pulled up with Twilight's magic, its nose turned ever so slightly solid with effort through the purple mage's magic. Twilight nuzzled that tip, letting the sensation feed back to her occupant. "You're not as good as dead."

"Yes, Trixie is. She's nothing more than a shade in your mind now, an object of pity at best. And she's- I'm growing tired of fighting to stay aware, of fighting whatever it is her soul is becoming." Trixie let her spectral body fade out again, so that Twilight couldn't try and comfort her anymore. "I can't even teach you how to do magic tricks, I nearly got the town destroyed, and just looking for me nearly killed two mares."

"Trixie? Could you please come out? Look, we aren't mad at you- well, we were but we still want to help." Twilight mentally reached out for Trixie, feeling her presence deep within her, trying to draw in on itself.

"Darling, I've been such a dreadfully wretched mare, I must fix this! I MUST!" Rarity held her hoof up towards the skies as she declared her unbending will.

"BECAUSE YOU'RE BETTER THAN TRIXIE!" The showmare's voice blasted through the room alongside a pulse of blue magic from Twilight's horn. She continued on, quiet and sobbing as she did. "Even at your worst, it's because you cared, not because you just had a bad week. You're better than me; I don't deserve your help."

"Well, DUH! That's what friends do, though! We're loyal and honest and generous and kind and all giggly-wiggly with each other. And seriously, with a story like that? Of COURSE we're gonna be your friends! Why, I need to start planning the party right now! I've gotta get Applejack and Dashie, and Fluttershy too! Why, once I get the icky-sticky nastiness between you and Dashie worked out, you'll stick together like glue!" Pinkie jumped up to Twilight's head, all but yelling into an ear.

Rarity grabbed Pinkie by the tail, stopping her from escaping the room to go find the others. "Pinkie, dear... I don't think Twilight is ready to tell the others. Especially since you seem to have rendered her deaf in that ear."

"Friends... Trixie-I've never had friends. Aquaintances, allies, contacts... but not a friend." Trixie slowly faded back into view; with little tear streaks running down the sides of her cheeks.

Twilight wanted to pull a Pinkie and just hug Trixie until she started laughing. It had been getting worrying there for a few moments, scaring her into thinking that Trixie was going to try and rip her soul out of its magic protection. 'Not so bad, is it, Trixie? You get used to them. Or go insane. Oooh! I know, a friendship report!'

‘Hmmm.... nah. Trixie is loathsome at writing.’
'It'd be fun!' Twilight's eager voice said it all about her need to document everything. Even friendship.
'If by fun, Sparkle means 'Dorktacular', then yes. It will be fun.'
'Studying the hidden depths of friendship is not 'dorky'! It's analyzing the building blocks of the very force that saved us all in order to become a better pony!'
'Celestia on her throne, do you ever stop studying!?'
'Hey! Stop mocking studying!'

A white hoof grabbed Twilight's shoulder, shaking her roughly. "Twilight, are you alright? Speak to me! Good heavens, somepony find my fainting couch!" Rarity shook Twilight harder, afraid for her after she had become unresponsive. The yelp of surprise as Twilight refocused on the outside world caught her offguard, as did Twilight's momentary flailing before the pleasantly plump scholar toppled over atop her.

Twilight's impromptu unicorn-based cushion squeaked in discomfort beneath the weight, wriggling in place. "I said get my fainting couch, not use ME as one!"

"Sorry, sorry!" Twilight rolled off of Rarity, clambering back to her own four hooves. Wait... Rarity. Spike's... disturbing new black cape and top hat... Trixie on special effects, Pinkie on... yes! YES! YesyesyesyesYEES! Oh crud, everypony there had seen her momentary Happy Hooves Dance. "Uh, right, Rarity, you said you would do anything to make it up to me and Trixie?"

Rarity wondered if she should say yes, given the disturbing off-kilter look in Twilight's eye and the sickeningly sweet edge of madness in her voice. "Um, yes?"

"That'll be Just... Perfect." Twilight's eye twitched ever so slightly as she began to giggle quietly. "I know exactly what we can do with you, and don't worry, it'll be safe. Perfectly safe. Well, except for your coat and manestyle. But that's okay, you could use a change."

"Can I change my answer to no?"

Zecora hummed the songs of her people as she cleaned up her hut. The petrified look of horror on Trixie's face was assaulted by the Great Duster of Cleanliness, stolen from the temples of the gods in her homeland. Its feathers brutally swept away the grime that accumulated in all the corners and crevices of the sculpturized pony, leaving her more sparkling and spotless than the day she had arrived. Zecora smiled and stepped back, admiring the stripes she had painted on Trixie's form to make her match the decor. It wasn't as good as having another zebra with her, but oh well.

The fire in her hearth crackled lightly, slowly warming the blue pot above it with its carefully horded flames. Zecora hadn't left her warded safe zone for several days; her new neighbors were responsible for that. The zebra walked over to a window, nudging its latches open with the tip of her nose to see how they were coming along.

A startled squak rang out outside, along with a heavy thump signaling the fall of her latest trespasser from her roof. Zecora reached to one side, grabbing an old friend from its rack.

Virulent red eyes rose up from beyond the windowsill, quickly blotted out by two protective caps of white-hued magic as the hut's wards protected Zecora. The cockatrice screeched in frustration as its stare didn't work, lunging at her instead. Unfortunately, at least for it, despite having an excellent sense for ponies who were lost, distressed, and defenseless, Cockatrices didn't have senses for impending pain and involuntary flight.

Down swung Zecora's family staff, around went the cockatrice's eyes as thirty pounds of pain was introduced to its head at high velocities. Up reared Zecora, transferring her staff from her mouth to her forehooves. Out swept the staff once more, slamming into the cockatrice in its belly and launching it off into the darkness of the forest beyond the wards.

Zecora could feel her throat hurting, her adrenaline-rushing brain unable to figure out why until her ears got done consulting each other. She was still screaming her tribe's traditional war chant. A simple phrase, one that would roughly translate into common equish as, "Come 'ave another go if you think y'er 'ard enough!"

Nothing came. But she could feel them out there, watching for her. They had blockaded her in, and were lying in wait for Twilight. She had tried to warn the pair that this would happen, but Twilight hadn't wanted to hear any of it. If Twilight tried to reach the shaman's hut again without teleporting, she would be caught just like her passenger. The creatures wanted Trixie's body back. Badly. It called to them, an devoured soul trapped in their web. They could wait for its guardian to starve to death...

"Twilight Sparkle, Please hurry. Far worse things are coming, I worry."

Thunder crackled overhead, echoing the shamaness's foreboding worries. From the dim light of the overcast clouds, rain began to drip down into the trees, smelling odd to her nose. The skies lit up once more with the crackle of energy, but not as she had ever known it. The tendrils of electrified light high above twisted and contorted in their outbursts, transforming into brilliant multicolored bolts crackling across the skies. Some arced towards Ponyville, but many more wreathed the skies above the region of Canterlot, menacing in their unnaturalness.

Then what of our Nightmares?

"And if dreams can come true, then what of our nightmares?"

"Stupid Trixie, always Lost!
Must have sold her soul to Faust!
Now she's stuck~
Out of luck~
Hard as a rock~
But limp like a sock!
Never knows when to duck~
Maybe she needs a little fu-"

Trixie awoke screaming, her mane plastered against her head with sweat. Damn those schoolyard bullies, they were still giving her nightmares. At least she had woken up before the worst... of... it? She couldn't wake up; she was still in Twilight's head!

The head-hiking showmare yanked the covers of the bed she was dreaming about up to her chin, dreading whatever was coming. She had NEVER gotten a reprieve from the schoolyard scene, whatever it was it was going to be worse. Her nightmares never got better. What had triggered this one? She had put all those thoughts about hopelessness and uselessness out of her head before Twilight had gone to bed.

Unless it was Twilight's nightmare, but she didn't see Twilight's filly dream-form anywhere. Giggles erupted all around her at the mental mention of fillies. Formerly cute but vicious voices slowly deepened and turned demonic as her former classmates emerged from the swirling shadows outside the light above her bed. Their new chant drilling into her head was only making things worse as it worsened her mood further, feeding the negativeness back into her dream.

She had to fight it, to think of her greatest triumph and hold it until it could be all she could think about. Her moment of unmasking the impost-

Drip.

Drip. Drip.

Trixie opened her eyes once more as cold air whispered over her, screaming as she found her intentions twisted so horribly. This had been one of her greatest feats, stopping evil at such a young age. A changeling, the foul and loathsome little thing, had taken the form of her then three year dead mother to claim the love of her admirers and to take Trixie back to the hive to be used as... food. It... hadn't gone well. For the changeling, that is.

But she felt young and weak again, and the mysterious power reserves she could sometimes tap in the depths of her darkest anger were gone, sealed away behind a suffocating curtain of fear. She was back on that horrible stage, laying on the ground where she had nearly subcomed to the changeling's will. Slime was oddly dripping from the ceiling, something that hadn't happened during the fight. And it certainly hadn't glued her to the spot as it was in the nightmare. She whimpered and wriggled and tried to get up as the oversized changeling came ever closer, stalking her like-NO!

Mustn't think of it! It'll bleed into the dream!

"But it already has, little foal. Can't you feel it? Trapped, helpless?" The massive changeling began to saunter over; it's yellow and red eyes piercing her soul and driving any last lingering trace of courage from her heart. Wait- those eyes had been green before.

She tried to turn her head away, feeling as if it was in her head, rummaging through her thoughts and memories in the same way that Twilight helped to go through her chest. The slime dripping from the ceiling was a constant stream now, trapping her in a cold cocoon of fear as her head was glued into a cowering position. Trixie could only whimper as the creature sauntered up to her sinisterly.

"Well, of course I can read your thoughts! This was my realm, before pwecious wittle Luna stole it from me." The creature touched Trixie's nose, its presence repelling some of the slime away from the twitching blue tip. He seemed to be getting a perverse pleasure out of watching her be buried alive. "So, she thinks she taught you everything that there is to know about this realm? Thought she could master it?"

The creature wearing a changeling suit laughed heartily, a disturbingly male voice coming from the changeling... mare's body. "I'd say that's the best joke I've ever heard, but that's not true! No, that would be the adorable way you have been lying and deluding yourself to think that she ever loved you after the way she abandoned you."

Trixie tried to rebuke her-him, IT through the green rivulets of snot-like changeling goo that were running down her face. She had to, because he had to be wrong. Her mother cared, loved, and protected her, even if damn her she was foalish enough to play with magics beyond her control. "Not. Abandoned. K-mmmph.... Killed in magic accident." Her lips were starting to stick together, muffling anything she tried to say.

The... dream demon laughed uproariously, slapping its side as it stood up on its hind legs. "Killed!? Oh, that's even better! She WILLINGLY went, you foal!"

"N-n-mmmph!" Trixie couldn't even open her mouth anymore as her vision was slowly tainted green by the cocoon consuming her. She didn't want to go like this, a changeling meal!

"Aww, you really think she's innocent? She's one of the stars that freed Nightmare Moon! Your mother was as monstrous as... well, ME! She never loved you, nopony does!" The creature snaked down, bent around impossibly to stare her in the eyes. It was hideous, unbalanced, asymmetrical, and inequine in its monstrosity. "Of course, I'm a monster! Just like you're a TOOL, not a pony!"

H-how dare he vilely slander her mother like that? How DARE he imply that she tried to end the world, that she was a... a bitch who was so evil that she gave birth to Trixie just to use her in some vile scheme. The showmare could feel her breathing reflexively slow; her body adjusting and trying to dampen down the power she was calling on.

The same power that always seductively called her whenever she had a fit. It gave her extra power, but with each little bit of power she used, she became a little less controlled, less restrained, less like a mare and more like- well, she didn't want to think about it. She couldn't let her anger control her actions, or else that thing would win. Especially in a dream, where anything could happen to her.

"Oh, no response, little tool? Aww, why are you so... gummed up?" It laughed at its little joke, slapping Trixie on her cutie mark lewdly. "You know, not even your fans like you for being you. They're all in it to make themselves look better, to seem worldly and deep." The demon pulled out a bucket of... oh Celestia, it was a bucket filled with a pony who had been melted, just barely covering its bottom with their suffering.

"Hmm, not much to them. Oh well, he must have been from the shallow end." It threw the bucket back into whatever either it had come from, its occupant screaming for a moment before it vanished. Or, maybe that was the universe.

Brown fur sprouted from the demon as it finished transforming back into its 'native' form, twisted and grotesque in terrible glory before Trixie's helpless body. It smiled, seeing Trixie's fear, and more importantly, the sight of Trixie trying her best to deny its claims. "Oh yes, I mean every bit of it. When Celestia was just a sparkle in her creator's eyes, I was around. Just like I'll be around still when you're just a few specks of dust. If it doesn't make any sense for me to know it, of course I will!"

The creature snapped two of the digits of its paw together, and a flash of light came forth that blinded the showmare for a moment. When her vision cleared, she had been turned around to face the audience seating, which was nearly empty save for her mother, Nightmare Moon, and her... friends. She... she had friends, even a few she hadn't met yet.

He was going to play with them, and she couldn't go anything about it. He was going to do things to them, and she knew it. She couldn't tell if they were just constructs, or if they were the dreamers themselves watching and waiting for their own turn in the horror show.

Trixie could feel her breath speeding up, her heart racing as an icy fear swept through her veins. Her breath whistled through two tiny holes in her slimy prison as she struggled to keep from giving into despair, or anger. The world was shuddering with her, shaking beneath her and with her as the smell of ozone burned her nose. Trixie clamped down further, fighting the urges that were warping her view, sharpening it to an eagle-like precision.

"Oh, how cute! You really want to challenge me in my own realm!" The creature laughed at her as it reached out into the audience, pulling a screaming Twilight out from the stands. It held its paw holding her out, dangling her from the painful grip on her horn as it vaguely gestured to her whole form.

Trixie whimpered as it shook the unicorn out, making the purple mare scream in pain as her horn began to crack at its base. Trixie wanted to scream as it almost snapped its wrist with a final violent shake that cracked her friend like a whip, making Twilight explode like a bad smoke effect. Gone, save for her horn, which slowly burned away in the demon's grip like a purple sparkler before he threw it at Trixie. "Oh, well. She was such a fragile thing, prone to... exploding in a fit of insanity!" It laughed uproariously at its joke, slapping a knee as Trixie shook her prison trying to escape again.

It wiped a tear from its eye, looking up to her with a manic gleam in its insane orbs. "Oh, don't go! We still have a little more left to do! Look at the little 'dork's friends! I can't believe that you thought for a second that they're friends of yours!" The five familiar mares all began to scream before Trixie as they began to melt like wax. "See, look! They're... running away! Oh, that's good! They're only stuck to you because they're trying to get back to their ooooh-so-special 'friendship'."

Trixie whined, huffing so fast that it hurt. She tried squeezing her eyes shut, tried to shut out the screams of horror and the sights that no mare deserved to see. The way she was scrunched up on the stage beneath her cocoon was starting to make her back hurt. Hurt like it was starting to explode from her shoulders. Hay, the way she was sprawled was slowly pulling her cape tight against her neck, choking her as she tried to cry. Damn that thing! How dare he, how dare he!? She had friends, DAMN IT! For the first time, she had friends and he was ripping them to pieces in front of her, and was making her watch every moment of their ends! DAMN HIM, leave them-

A force peeled her eyelids open again, revealing it crouched down directly in front of her. "I'll leave them alone, or you'll what? Glue me to death? AHAHAHAHAHAHAH!"

It stood up once more, and began walking towards the front of the stage. "Why are you denying it? I've already told you, YOU HAVE NO FRIENDS! Why are you lying to yourself? All its doing is making you into an adorable little angry monster just like your mother!" It stretched out its arm, plucking away Trixie's shadow. Clutching the incorporeal thing in its paws, it scrunched it into a ball, then pulled it out and stretched it like taffy to form it into a reasonable facsimile of Nightmare Moon in miniature. "See! Nopony even ever loved you, not even your mother! You're just a stupid little PET to keep her mor-"

An inarticulate wail of rage and despair bellowed forth from Trixie as she broke her bonds as if they were jello. She rose up from where she had been imprisoned like a cannon-shot, pouncing through the air like a great cat to strike at her tormentor. She could feel the strangest sensations at her side as she all but flew through the air to smash into the demon. The thing went down beneath her magic-ensconced hooves as she trampled it viscously into the stage. Her rage burst from her to form an aura of baleful fire, roaring and screaming in unearthly tones before she slammed it into the demon like a whirlwind of madness, trying to burn it into ashes as she screamed in tones that only a few had ever heard and lived through before. "Shut up, Shut Up, SHUT! UP!"

It just kept laughing through her best efforts, even as the world and it began to grow smaller beneath her. "You know it's all true! She used you! She wanted you to be a vessel of Nightmare Moon, and I'd say she did a hell of a job! Look at yourself now!"

Trixie was thrown from the demon with the lightest flick of its wrist, sent flying to land sprawled out on the floor. She was aching all over with pain, something that should have been impossible in a dream. Blood dripped from a chipped tooth, acridly filling her mouth with a metallic taste. It was warping the dream world! And if it could warp the dream world, it could ki-

She screamed in horror and flailed her hoof as she saw what was happening to her. Her forehooves were covered in a spiderweb of blackness that pulsed and beat with unholy and demonic power. It had- yes, it had to have been the demon, twisting her and changing her into the vile creature she was becoming!

"Oh, I haven't done anything to you! This is the best laugh I've had in millennia! It's all you, not me! Ahahahahaaa!"

Trixie skittered back from its suddenly far too close face as she looked up. She turned, jumping to her hooves and running past it for her life. She was going to die, she was going to die here, she was going to DIE in a dream! She could feel his presence closing in behind her, her feelings of uselessness and weakness growing as her vision turned as grey as stone, everything washing out and going out of focus. Nothing was lining up right anymore as she ran, nearly tripping her time and time again as the pain in her back grew.

Her wings fluttered, outstretched to catch her balance as she stumbled upon a set of rollers in the seemingly endless backstage of the dream theater.
W- WINGS!?!

Shock rushed through her system like a pyroclastic flow; her already racing heart thundering fast enough that her chest ached and her breath wouldn't catch back up with her, leaving her faint. She... it must have put them there! She had to get them back off; she had to go back to being Trixie! They had to be part of what was twisting her mind and body in the dream, they had to come OFF! Her hooves tugged with desperate strength at the draconic membraned wings, trying to rip them out of their sockets as she stumbled to the ground amidst whimpers of pain.

"My, my! Oh it's almost better than I could have imagined!" The demon reappeared as they fell through a door into a featureless grey void. It reached out with a claw, running it up Trixie's jawline uncaring if he drew blood as the showmare contorted in pain and fear. "Think about it, a twisted and tormented soul trapped between oblivion and normality! A Nightmare in a Trixie Suit, just waiting for a chance to rip free of that lovely little shell of worthless self-doubt. Don't doubt it, you really are worthless! Why, you should be thanking me! If it wasn't for me convincing my pet to take an interest in you, you'd be penniless and starving in the streets waiting to die! Ponies would come from all over just to reject you for the vile little waste of life you are!"

"W-why?" Trixie groaned as the itching pain of the blackness swallowed up a little more of her limbs, leaving alien fur in its wake. She could just barely see it through the lenses of grey upon her eyes.

"Nothing personal, you understand. You're just the best little tool to hurt your mother, just like she hurt me. And I want her to keep on hurting, just as she left me. Doomed to scream throughout the eternity at the unfairness of it all, and all that. In fact, if it wasn't for my little... tiffidilica with your family, I'd be doing a nice normal prank on you. Turn you into a jello pony, that sort of thing!" The demon reached into its maw, pulling out a Trixie sized and shaped jello pony for its captive's 'enjoyment'. The construct almost seemed to look at her and scream before the demon shook it hard to break it apart into cubes of gelatin.

Trixie scrambled backwards, hoarsely begging for help as the demon advanced once more. It rubbed the goatee on the chin of its grotesque and disfigured head in thought as it spoke once more. "You know, it's actually entirely personal, now that I think about it. Just not with you. But, I've been waiting 1200 years for my revenge, and it wouldn't be nice to them to wait much longer. The three of them have been needing to get cut down to size for a while." The demon began trimming the legs off of two alicorn-shaped shrubberies, and one unicorn-shaped one. "Of course, one already bit the dust.” It threw the manual pruners over his shoulder; where they exploded somewhere off in the distance with the sound of a power saw and an agonized cat. It reached behind itself, pulling out a coffin made of cotton balls, with a skeletal unicorn stallion within clutching the interior padding with its teeth.

"Your uncle, actually; such a delightful piece of work. Then again, you throw one little cockatrice at his wife and even the great 'Starswirl the Jingling' falls into itty bitty pieces!" The demon smiled viscously as he shook the skeleton apart, sending all the bones that once made it up flying through the air; some even tangled themselves in Trixie's mane.

An animalistic growl escaped its throat as Trixie cowered in fear, shivering back still. His eyebrow rose as he contemplated her, before stalking forward. "Still haven't accepted your worthlessness? I've never had anypony hold out as well as you before. Let's see, how about the little fact that your mother MADE the Nightmare, and unleashed it upon Princess Luna?"

"She's.... she's n-not that-"

"What? Old? Don't be silly! Ponies never look like their real age! Why, if I did, I'd-" It turned itself into a bleached skeleton that smiled like a jackal in a flash of light. An absurd number of teeth crowded its jawline, many making no sense beside each other, and were positioned in ways that would leave the demon biting its own flesh. A second flash restored it to its proper fleshy monstrousness as it expectantly looked down at Trixie while tapping a leg against the ground.

No- even if her mom was secretly an immortal... her momma couldn't be that evil! She could be petty and mean to other ponies, and oddly bitter, but she went out of her way to not hurt other ponies! SHE WASN'T EVIL! She had been good at heart, caring for the plight of others, loyal and truthful to others, and so brave to the bitter end. Her mother was the Mighty and Magnificent Moonstone! She couldn't have been a two-bit villainess!

The tendrils of black slowly eating Trixie's coat suddenly halted in their progress, quivering. And then, reversing. Her hooves trembled as they found purchase beneath her once more, the showmare pushing herself back up as she defied her tormentor. She was worthless, but her mother was not, and it would pay for trying to turn her into a monster. "No."

"What the- that should have worked. Get back down!"

Trixie stood up taller as she felt a refreshing strength come to her, something pouring power and hope into her, as if somepony was standing right beside her. "No. My MOTHER was a good mare, demon of dreams. Nothing you can do or say will ever convince me otherwise, wyrm! Trixie has heard better insults from schoolyard fillies than you! You're circling the drain, and I'm going to flush you into a swirly all the way down to the sewers!" A righteousness had filled the showmare as she glared at the demon. The fire of her anger had returned for the sake of the memory of her mother as she stood, sharpened to a point threatening the demon's neck. If it wanted to hate her mother, then she could hate it enough to control that rage.

The demon shrugged and rolled its eyes. It waved a paw suggestively at Trixie; a gesture to bring it on. Trixie didn't disappoint, unleashing a full storm's worth of elemental fury. She leaped forward, wreathed in angry magic as dark crystals crackled into the air as she moved to stomp on its neck. And she found herself hanging in the air by her throat as the demon caught her with contemptuous ease and lifted her up.

"I don't know why you just won't give up, but you apparently don't know who I am! Perhaps I should introduce myself properly to you. For you see, I'm a stallion of wealth and tastes, who revels in every bit of chaos he makes!" The demon squeezed tighter; slowly choking Trixie into unconsciousness somehow as her breath was cut off altogether. The showmare's new wings and her forehooves waved weakly in the air, trying to bat away the demon's other forepaw as it slowly raised up and reached for her forehead.

Trixie silently screamed, shaking her head to keep the paw from touching her. She tried to kick him, bite at the claws wrapped around her neck, anything as all of her instincts screamed out the danger she was in. All the same, it was getting hard to move as the demon's eyes began to fill her vision, strangely swirling and turning into kaleidoscopes of color; its voice thundering in her ears. "Well, if you're not going to play along willingly, I can still make you- HEEEEURK!"

"Drop her, Wyrm." Trixie tried to focus on the voice, mentally grabbing for it like a life preserver as her awareness faded.

Something shook her like a rag-doll, ripping the demon's claws free from her neck. A moment of clarity fell upon her as she was dropped to whatever surface the void contained, letting her see a black-coated alicorn with her horn through the back of the demon's neck and into its chin. The pressure upon her neck explosively released; her lungs filling with air in the same moment as blood came rushing back into her ears to drown out all sound. Her vision waivered and swam as she lost focus, barely able to make out faint outlines and colors.

The dark alicorn parried and slashed at the demon with terrifying speed, taking a few hits in the process as she systematically forced it away from Trixie. The showmare blinked as her head grew heavy, missing a sudden burst of movement from the dark alicorn. Light burst in Trixie's vision, blinding her for a moment as the wind from an implosion of air sucked at her mane. And then, came stillness.

She cried in pain, physical and mental alike as she weakly beat at the surface beneath her with her hooves, unable to get up. She was about ready to just give up and lie there in pain until Twilight arrived, or woke up. If she could. A demon of the dreams... For all she knew, it had dragged Twilight down into a coma, dooming Trixie to be trapped forever in the featureless plain.

But she wasn't alone.

The unshod hoof slowly descended into her vision from above, the black coating that had hidden its identity slowly dissolving away to reveal midnight blue silken fur. It caressed Trixie, brushing back her mane with the touch like that of her mother had so tenderly done long ago. She jerked away from it, fearing contact after what had been happening to her. Through the tears of her pain, she could see how it twitched. Why had it twitched, almost as if it had been burned by touching her?

Trixie didn't have much time to ponder that as the hoof swept back in, to be joined by another that scooped down underneath Trixie to drag her up into a trembling hug. A voice whispered soothingly into her ear, drowned out by the rushing of blood and the ringing of fading oxygen deprivation there. A muzzle, long and elegant slowly pressed down into Trixie's scalp as something warm dripped down from it onto Trixie's ears. Everything was so hauntingly familiar; it had to be one last trap.

But the touches and voice were gentle and flowing like her lost mother's, even down to some of the movements as the unknown savior pulled her a little closer and began to stroke her back. Trixie cried at that, she wasn't too proud to admit it. She bawled into the shoulder offered to her as she tried to cope with the torment she had just been through. She hoped it was at least a memory of her mother, something she had filed away to save for a rainy day, for her eyes were leaking the fear and pain from her body.

And for a moment... For a moment, she looked up to stare into sorrowful and apologetic cerulean eyes, suspended in a sea of stars. And then, it was all gone.

"... care of her, Twilight Sparkle." There was that voice again. Ooh, where was she?

"I will, Princess Luna. Why did it attack her?"

"We know not for certain. From what we observed, he may have attacked her to attack you, or somepony else that would be affected by her loss." The voice sounded like it was directly above her, as if protecting her.

"She's an orphan. I mean, I don't want to sound callous, but who other than me would miss her?"

"Thou wouldst be wrong, Sparkle. She is not an orphan. Either way, the full purpose of Discord's meddling cannot yet be determined. It is bad enough that his seal is weak enough for him to be able to affect the realm of dreams. But, he may be after higher prizes than petty revenge." The voice... regal... Princess Luna? Why? Why did she care? Was she... no, she couldn't be the patron that had helped her so much.

"So, what now?"

"We will leave her in your care for the remainder of your dream. Comfort her and reassure her. We will attempt to insure that Celestia remains close to Ponyville in case Discord attempts anything further, and we shall attempt to protect the Elements of Harmony. He has made it a habit to snatch them away at the first sign of their use. As soon as we are done with that, they shall be returned to you for immediate use."

Trixie slowly opened her eyes, looking up at the neck and chin of an unadorned alicorn. She was probably Princess Luna, given the closeness of the voice and the mane of stars that billowed around her. That would explain their patron after all. Of course the alicorn of the night ruled dreams. The trembling showmare shut her eyes once more, tucking her face under a foreleg so that it would all go away.

"Trixie? Trixie!" And Twilight had noticed. Just... wonderful.

"We shall take our leave. Be wary, though. While we are dispatching a group of exterminators to handle the infestation, her physical form and soul are still vulnerable. Keep her safe. We command it of thee. And, be prepared for the aftermath." Luna's touch shocked Trixie, causing the showmare to pull in tighter on herself.

"Princess Luna, if the ponies you dispatch find Trixie's body, they'll take her back to Canterlot! And... what aft- oh. A whole bunch of 'out of town' ponies are going to show up, aren't they?"

"Aye. And if they find out who you are, we cannot guarantee the safety of any of you. Keep her secret, keep her safe, Sparkle." Princess Luna's voice began to move away, the comforting presence leaving Trixie and letting her mangled nerves begin to jangle with the leftovers of her shock and fear. The showmare reached out with her free hoof, reaching to keep the Princess from leaving.

Two hoofs grabbed her waving one, pulling it over to a warm chest. Twilight, from the feel of the tissue beneath the surface. As Trixie let herself get pulled into a hug, her host spoke once more. "Before you go, Princess, I have one question. Why does Trixie have wings now?"

"Why shouldn't she have them? Use your keen powers of observation, as you used them against us. The answer has stood before you all along. Fare thee well, Sparkle. We will return with aid in a week." A flash reflected through Trixie's tightly shut eyelids, leaving her darkness filled with light for a moment more before it crashed back in upon her.

A nuzzle pulled Trixie a little closer to lucidity. "Trixie, speak to me, please?"

"G'way. Trixie does not wish to speak."

The nuzzle came again, stronger and more tender. "Tough. Trixie, I know you now. You're hurting so badly. I'm here for you, whatever happened. Please let me in. I know you heard part of what Princess Luna said, but what did Discord do to you?" A hoof began to stroke Trixie's mane, trying to stroke out the nervous tremors running throughout Trixie's body.

Trixie tried to focus on the grass beneath her, or the soothing smells. Anything to not remember the hate for her, for her mother... the pain that she was wrung through. "Trixie doesn't remember."

"You're hurt!" The stroking stopped as Twilight pulled back from Trixie to examine the cuts on her neck. The claw marks stung as Twilight probed them with magic, the unicorn nearly getting a wing to the face for her trouble. "No, this doesn't seem scientifically possible! You said that injuries would regenerate faster than they could be generated!" Twilight pulled Trixie up against her hard once more, afraid herself as the dream realm suddenly seemed a much colder and darker place.

"I-if dreams can be interacted with, and come true; then what of our nightmares?"

"Well, I- oh. He used a nightmare to get in, and then kept on twisting it worse and worse until you couldn't get away?" Twilight blanched and whinnied slightly at the thought.

"So there is this something... else, in the dream world, able to turn dreams into nightmares and drive ponies mad." Twilight pondered for a moment, wondering what she could possibly teach Trixie to help out. "Well, I'm not going to let this 'Discord' come back. We're going to teach you to teleport."