The Twining

This was pointless. Shining Armor sighed heavily, tossing and turning in his bed. Go and get some rest, she’d told him, as if he could, as if he’d be able to sleep knowing Twilight was going to that room all alone. Knowing that no matter her assurances something was very, very wrong with this hotel. Knowing that those visions of his mother and Twilight irreversibly burned into his memory were far more than simply his imagination.

He shouldn’t have let her go. And so he lay in bed and tried not to think about it, tried to steal some sleep that he sorely needed, tried to pretend that Twilight would return and tell him the room was empty and boring and normal, and there was absolutely nothing to worry about. But as the hours relentlessly slipped past, Shining failed at every single one.

This was doing no good for anyone, he decided, throwing off the covers with dramatic finality. Least of all himself. He had to find Twilight, even if it was just so she could tell him he was being stupid and worrying too much, and that she wasn’t a little foal anymore and she could take care of herself, before giving him that little smile that always seemed so adorable. He hoped that’s what would happen, that Twilight had just decided to let him rest, and everything was going to be okay. Hoped, but didn’t believe.

And so it was that he found himself outside room 237 again, those brass numbers glinting in the light. The door was closed. Still, he swore he could feel something leaking out around the edges, in the same way he could have sworn he saw the darkness melting out of them before. A kind of dull, throbbing pressure, making his head swim, and his vision pulse. What was it about this room, he wondered? Why 237?

Perhaps some foul sin had been committed here, decades ago, one that had burned into the walls and corrupted the hotel entirely. Perhaps this was the centre: the dark, beating heart from which all the hotel’s secrets and madness leaked out. Or perhaps it was built over an ancient burial ground, or something. Impossible to know, although Shining was certain that – whatever the reason – this room was the source. The beginning. The feeling that coursed out of it permeated the whole hotel, but so faintly that it was only here that one could acknowledge it, contrast throwing the sensation into stark relief. It all came from here, this place, and the air was thick with a terrible weight.

And he’d let Twilight come here alone.

Shining would never forgive himself for that, but he was here now, and if Twilight was here too he was going to find her. No matter what it took. He reached out to touch the door handle, and for a moment he imagined there being some kind of electric spark just from touching it, that whatever energy boiled within would zap him. But the moment passed, and the handle was just a handle, and the door was just a door.

A door that was, he quickly discovered as he turned the handle and pushed, well and truly locked.

Shining sighed. Things were never that easy. Perhaps it had been locked for Twilight, too. Perhaps she’d never even gone inside, and he’d been worried over nothing after all. Perhaps he’d really just imagined the gap in the first place, and everything that happened outside afterwards.

But he knew he hadn’t. And now he had to be sure.

Shining raised a hoof, hesitating, and then took the plunge and rapped sharply against the wood. Somehow the silence the other side seemed to grow even quieter, the kind of silence where something was now listening intently. Every nerve in Shining’s body was screaming at him, every instinct warning him that this was dangerous, impossibly so, but Shining quelled them. If Twilight was here, nothing could stop him.

“Twilight?” he called, and he sounded far braver than he felt. “Are you in there?”

Silence.

And then, not silence. A sound creeping under the doorframe, a noise so faint it could almost be imagined. He pressed his ear up against the wood, and although it was still so quiet there was no denying its existence. A soft, rhythmic, metallic clicking. Over and over again. Click click click click. He recognised that sound. After all, he had heard it echoing through the corridors on so many of the days he’d spent aimlessly wandering as Twilight worked on her book.

The sound of a typewriter.

“Twilight, is that you?”

The clicking stopped. The silence afterwards only seemed so much more all-consuming in contrast, and that vibrating power was rolling off the door in waves again. Shining grit his teeth. She was in there, he was sure of it, and he was also sure that the room was taunting him. Toying with him.

To Tartarus with it. He took a couple of steps back, shifting his weight from hoof to hoof. This was going to hurt, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and if the former captain of the Royal Guard couldn’t barge down a single door, then what good was he?

A deep breath, and then Shining charged forwards, aiming his shoulder at the edge nearest the door latch. He closed his eyes, bracing for impact. None came. Instead he heard a loud click and a creak, and as he opened his eyes again he just about made out the shape of the now open doorway as he stumbled through it, thrown off balance by the lack of an expected crash. His hooves rapped against polished wood as he staggered to a stop, and that wasn’t right either.

This was not room 237.

Instead, Shining found himself in the grand hall that Twilight had spent her time writing in, the one she had shooed him out of on so many occasions to work tirelessly on her manuscript, only further fueling his smouldering resentment at her dragging him out here. He spun to find no doorway behind him, either, just the wide and opulent staircase that gently ascended to the second floor.

Windows stretching all the way to the high ceiling lined one wall – white with snow, as always. In better weather, Shining was sure this room would have had a wonderful view of the hotel’s gardens, but not anymore. If he squinted, he could just about make out the faint outline of the hotel’s sprawling hedge maze, and he shuddered a little. Mazes were bad enough at the best of times; the thought of charging frantically around in one through heavy snow and ice sent a chill down his spine.

The hall itself was mostly bare, and his hooves echoed loudly and resonated in the wide space as he approached the only furnishing of note: a desk that Twilight had borrowed from one of the nearby rooms. He’d wondered aloud about her choice of writing location at the time, suggesting she might be happier in a more cosy room, but Twilight insisted this place was perfect.

It gives the writing room to breathe, she’d told him, enigmatically. Privately, Shining thought that sounded stupid, but then what did he know about writing?

And resting atop it – strangely monolithic, a black slab of metal – was Twilight’s typewriter, beside a thick stack of papers. Shining eyed it warily as he approached, as though it would start clicking of its own volition, but it lay still in the silence. Its keys gleamed silver, a blank page held tightly in its jaws, all ready to devour the emptiness and replace it with printed word. Experimentally, Shining reached out and pressed one of the keys, and it clicked loudly in the quiet, ringing out through the empty hall. Perhaps that was why Twilight had chosen this spot. Hearing that echo with every letter, demarcating every sliver of progress.

It set Shining’s teeth on edge, even before he’d heard it through the thick wood of Room 237’s door.

With a snarl, maybe just to prove he wasn’t scared of an inanimate object, Shining slammed the lever back, and as the loud ringing noise bounced around every nook and cranny of the empty room, he froze. He’d thought the page was blank, but now he noticed the very tops of a row of words.

You’re not supposed to look, Shining. They’re personal, not ready for the public eye yet. She wouldn’t want you to look.

He resisted for all of two seconds before scrolling the page up and pulling it free. A single sentence stood out starkly against the pale parchment, above the errant letter he’d typed himself.

All work and no play makes Twilight a horny mare.

Shining had to read it twice more to make sure he wasn’t imagining it. The words remained stubbornly the same.

A joke. It had to be. A bad one, maybe, but a joke nonetheless. Or maybe she was bored, just putting words on the page to kick-start her creativity. Something like that, surely. Shining’s attention slowly slid over to the stack of papers beside the typewriter – all of Twilight’s progress so far – and his heart began to sink.

The top page had two sentences. Well, not two exactly. The same sentence twice.

All work and no play makes Twilight a horny mare.
All work and no play makes Twilight a horny mare.

Shining’s hoof was shaking as he reached out towards the stack. Please, he begged to himself. Anything else. Anything but more of this.

The page beneath had a lot more than two sentences. A wall of text, no punctuation or paragraphs, and every sentence exactly the same.

All work and no play makes Twilight a horny mare.

And as Shining leafed through the rest of the stack, hoping desperately that he’d uncover something else, he discovered it was all the same. Page after page, all covered in the same sentence, over and over and over again. The sprawl of words turned into neat paragraphs, still repeating the same mantra. All work. The words melting into one another, typos and smudges as Shining imagined Twilight frantically hammering at the typewriter’s keys, insanity practically dripping from the pages. No play. He couldn’t look away, couldn’t stop delving deeper, and now the words began to prance across the page, no longer content to sit in a conventional arrangement. Makes Twilight. They zigzagged and spiralled across the space, forming rudimentary shapes and patterns. Triangles, circles, endlessly cascading. Horny mare.

One set only had a single word on each page, but read in order they formed the same sentence. The next was all blurry, and it took Shining a moment to realise Twilight had taken the page after writing her message and typed over it exactly the same, perhaps more than once.

Page upon page upon page of madness. Finally, he reached the bottom of the stack. The same sentence stared up at him, right in the middle, as if daring him to think it would have been anything else.

All work and no play makes Twilight a horny mare.

“What do you think?”

The voice behind Shining made him jump harder than he ever had in his life, dropping the perverse parchment as he whipped around to find Twilight standing in the shadowy alcoves at the edge of the room.

“What the hay is this?” he demanded.

“It’s my manuscript,” Twilight said, slowly. “Don’t you like it? I thought you would. After all, it’s mostly about you.”

“This is what you’ve been writing? The whole time? All those days you spent here, just…”

“All work,” said Twilight, with a slightly lopsided smile. “And no play.”

An icy shiver ran down Shining’s spine as his sister stepped out of the shadows. Something was wrong. It was in her eyes – a kind of casual, calm confidence that put him in mind of a lion stalking its prey. He’d seen that look before, on the fake-Twilight outside room 237. The one standing beside his mother, the one that had tried to entice him and had definitely, absolutely not succeeded.

“Don’t you know it’s rude to read somepony’s first draft unless they offer?” Twilight asked, taking another step closer. There was a strange sway in her step, and her tail swished restlessly back and forth behind her. “Especially for something like your sister’s memoirs. There could be anything in there, things that you’re not supposed to see.”

Another step towards him, and Shining found himself taking an equal step back to match. “I’m sorry, Twily. I didn’t mean to. I was looking for you, and-”

“Oh, really?” Twilight smiled, and it was all teeth, glinting in the pale light like numbers on a door. “Well, you’ve found me.”

Another step forward, another mirrored step back. Shining’s thigh knocked painfully against the desk, and he winced in pain and surprise.

“What did you want me for?” Twilight asked, and her words were drenched with meaning that Shining didn’t want to guess at.

“I wanted to make sure you were okay,” he said. “I shouldn’t have let you go to that room alone, I should have come with you.”

Twilight paused for a moment, frowning. “I’m fine, Shiny. And the room was empty, there’s nothing to worry about. You were just imagining things.”

“I wasn’t,” he insisted. “This place is dangerous. Do you even know what you’ve written? That’s not normal.”

“I know exactly what I wrote,” said Twilight, moving closer still and forcing Shining to manoeuver around the desk and back up towards the stairs to keep that gap between them. “Every. Single. Word.”

All work and no play makes Twilight a horny mare.

“We have to get out of here,” he pleaded, although he was fairly certain his words were falling on deaf ears, that she was too far gone to hear him. “We’ll find a way, somehow. Take our chances in the snow.”

“Get out of here?” Twilight’s unnerving smile morphed into a snarl. “Get out? I made a promise, Shining. To Princess Celestia herself. Do you understand that? Do you even know what a promise is?”

“Of course I do, but-”

“I can’t let down the Princess. You were her personal guard, once, don’t you remember the oaths you took? You can’t let her down either.”

“She didn’t want this, Twilight, whatever this is.” Shining hoof knocked against the bottom stair, and he had no choice but to continue his retreat upwards, Twilight matching him every step of the way. “This isn’t you. Please, stop this.”

“Stop? Why, what do you think I’m going to do?”

Shining didn’t know what to say to that, had no answer. Twilight didn’t really give him a chance to think about it either.

“I thought you wanted to make sure I’m okay,” she said. “Don’t you want to? Come close and make sure every inch of me is okay, so much more than okay.”

“Stay back, Twilight,” he warned, although his voice held very little conviction as she kept getting closer, one step at a time. “I don’t know what’s happened to you, but-”

“I’m not going to hurt you, Shiny.”

“Listen to me, we have to-”

“You didn’t let me finish,” Twilight snapped. “I said, I’m not going to hurt you. My big brother, best friend forever, you know I’d never do something like that.” Her tone grew low and husky, and that lion’s gaze was back and more intense than ever. “I’m just going to fuck your brains out.”

A wave of fear and revulsion rippled through Shining’s body at Twilight’s declaration. This was another trick, another thing the hotel had thrown at him to make him suffer. This wasn’t Twilight, couldn’t be, couldn’t be the same little sister who had asked him to check the closet for monsters, who had cuddled him when she couldn’t sleep because of bad dreams, whom he’d always done everything to protect, to keep safe and happy. That couldn’t be the mare staring at him now, her eyes wide with madness and lust, her grin manic. It was just another illusion, another hallucination.

Except he knew it wasn’t. The manifestations before had a strange blankness to them, a hollowness, a not-quite-thereness. And while something in Twilight had clearly broken, snapped under strain, Shining knew this was her. He’d always know.

“Please,” he begged, his voice cracking. “Whatever this is, we can fix it. We can work it out. Don’t do this”

Twilight’s grin faltered for a moment, and for the briefest of instant Shining wondered if he had gotten through, if his words had unearthed the real Twilight, somehow. That hope didn’t last long. “Come on, Shiny,” she said, her voice suddenly low and monotonous. “We both know what you want to do. All you have to do is say yes, and I’m yours.”

“Stop it, Twilight..”

Twilight snarled in frustration and impatience. “Just say it.”

Shining had run out of stairs. He staggered as his hoof plunged through the air where he’d expected a step to be, almost tripping to the ground, and in that moment of vulnerability Twilight lunged at him with a primal shriek.

Everything stopped. A series of flashes, moments, all he had time to process. Twilight leaping, her face full of sadistic glee and lust, wings outstretched. A surge of magic in Shining’s horn, welling up out of pure instinct. Twilight’s excitement morphing into shock and fear as she tried to summon her own magic to stop him, but too late, too slow. A flash of colour, blinding, bright light erupting from Shining’s horn, and Twilight barely had time to wince before it enveloped her and blasted her backwards, tumbling away. Falling out of the air, crashing down the stairs with awful, sickening thuds as she rolled and bounced. And then, as she skidded to a stop at the foot, silence. Dreadful, terrible silence that seemed to hang so thickly in the air.

“Twilight?” Shining asked, and he hated the quiver in his voice.

Twilight didn’t answer.

“Are you okay?”

Twilight didn’t answer.

The walk back down the stairs to his sister’s motionless form was one of the longest in Shining’s life. The longest held breath, every part of him tensing in anticipation, half of him dreading that Twilight was about to jump to her hooves and take him by surprise, the other half even more terrified that she would remain utterly still instead. He reached the foot and slowly approached, ready for the slightest movement, but none came.

“Twilight?”

Twilight didn’t answer.

This close he could at least see her breathing, but she made no movement or acknowledgement of his presence. He reached out, carefully, and prodded her with a hoof. No response. She was out cold.

Shining finally let out the breath he’d been holding in, a burst of relief and dismay all wrapped up in one as he sank down to sit on the stairs and wonder what in the hay he was supposed to do now.