It wasn’t what woke Rarity up that startled her, which was in and of itself strange. To be woken up in the middle of the night by a bang which audibly came from within your house would terrify most ponies. But for Rarity, it was the specific fact that she had been woken up in the first place which scared her. There wasn’t any reason for it to get this loud if all her safeguards were properly in place.
Therefore, all of her safeguards couldn’t have been properly in place.
Therefore, she had to go downstairs.
She threw off her covers and began to get dressed. There was something about haughtily putting on her dressing gown and slippers which comforted her. To outwardly act like this was some minor annoyance allowed her some much needed denial. But then, was the denial necessary? All she had to do was go downstairs and check. Then she could come back up and go to bed. She’d done it before and would do it again. It was easy. Rarity poked her head out of the door and peered down the hall.
It was easy.
She forced herself to leave the room. She shouldn’t have needed to, this was her house after all, but she did so all the same. With a thought, she flared her horn, casting a pale blue glow that illuminated most of the hallway. Not all of it, but most.
On her way down, Rarity stopped by Sweetie’s room. It wasn’t really Sweetie’s room, mind. It was the guest room, and she insisted on still referring to it as that. Sweetie Belle did not live at Carousel Boutique. She wanted to, and wasn't shy about making it known. Their parents also talked to Rarity often and at length about how much the filly would love to finally move in, and the truth was that Rarity would have loved her to as well...
But there was another knocking noise from downstairs, and so Sweetie had to continue living at their parents house. She only stayed when it was unavoidable, and there were rules. Most important of these was that when she went to bed, the filly would be locked in her room until morning. Sweetie had obviously not been very happy about this, but it was either that or she didn't stay at all. So, of course, she'd acquiesced.
Rarity gave the door handle a stiff turn, and was relieved to find it was still locked. There was no reason it wouldn’t be, as Rarity had locked it from the outside and then locked the key in her own dresser, but it was still good to check. She was fine in there anyway, there was an en-suite and a bed even more comfortable than Rarity's. She'd be fine.
Rarity finally reached the top of the stairs. Her hornlight didn’t penetrate nearly as well into the gloom as she would have hoped. Down there was a column of dark. It was syrupy, thick, far too tangible for something that should have been anything but. She had to go through it, but her legs wouldn’t move.
Rarity had never had many nightmares. It wasn’t an ailment she suffered, thankfully. But on one such rare occasion, back when she was around Sweetie’s age, she had woken in a panic, doused in a film of nervous sweat. She had wanted to go to her parent’s room for comfort. However when she’d left her room she’d been confronted with a pitch black hallway and the debilitating, infantile terror of the dark. The kind everyone had back then, and that everyone lied about not having now. It had paralysed her between fear in her own room, or fear on the way to salvation.
It was a memory that Rarity had been coming back to, more and more as of late. So she remained on the top of the stairs, feeling like a filly again, until she heard another knock. It wasn’t as loud as the one that had woken her up, but it was louder than the previous one.
She braved the first step, and then she braved the second. And all because she had to. The hornlight cast long, alien shadows as she took it step by step, cringing whenever the wood beneath her carpet creaked. Nothing could hear her of course…
Well, she didn’t think anything could. It had never been necessary or pertinent to find out. There was another knock, and Rarity realised she didn’t care whether anything could hear her. She marched down the stairs, faux-confidence driving her forward in the absence of any genuine courage. Her indignant glare was a nice mask for the fact that she just wanted to go upstairs to bed.
The journey from the bottom step to the doorway of her destination passed far too fast, and she found herself stood before a dull, unassuming door. It had been a blur of her body vetoing her fear, legs dragging an unwilling mind because all she needed to do was check, and then she could go back upstairs…
Unless there was something wrong. Then she didn’t know what she’d do.
Rarity unlocked the door and let her eyes adjust to the gloom. The initial assessment was good. There was nothing that looked out of the ordinary after a cursory glance around. ‘Storage space’, that was what she told visitors, because why would she tell them anything else? It wouldn’t do to tell them that old buildings have memories, knew things we'd all forgotten. They had secrets, and secrets needed keeping somewhere. That would be too intense, too much a splurging announcement of self-pity. So she said ‘storage space’, resolute in the knowledge that she was technically correct.
The centrepiece of the room was an enormous mirror. It was at least three times as high as Rarity, with ornate golden accents that would have made it the envy of any designer’s showroom. Rarity had only looked into it once, during the daytime. The rules allowed it to be looked into during the daytime. It was the nights which were...complicated.
There was something about it that was off. It was clearly old, but it wasn’t identifiably old. It was necessary for Rarity’s work for her to be able to have something aesthetically pinned to a time period and design school within seconds of a glance. But the mirror didn’t adhere to that, it’s golden accents were baffling, like nothing of this earth. The runes carved into it were of no language she’d ever seen.
This was all recalled from memory, however. At present, none of it's splendour could be seen. It was totally covered up by a thick, heavy blanket. She hoped that soon she'd forget what it looked like, and that the house would be the only one to remember.
Regardless of whether it was safe in the daytime, Rarity didn’t look into the mirror anymore.
She’d once been tempted to show Twilight, during the day, to see if she could identify it. But the idea of showing it to someone else felt obscene. The burden shared wouldn't have been halved. It would have been multiplied. Rarity wouldn't let that happen. What if Twilight didn’t know where it came from? What if no one did? What if she didn't listen to Rarity, and came by the study it in the night? What if she pulled the blanket down? No. It was better to leave it in her storage space, locked where it needn’t remind her of itself day in, day out.
She brightened her horn, giving herself a better look, and walked up to the mirror. She breathed a sigh of relief. Her blanket was still covering the entire thing. She couldn’t see a single square millimetre of it uncovered. It was fine. It almost felt like an anticlimax given the enormous build-up, but it was an anticlimax she was glad for. But as she turned away, she heard something faint from behind the blanket. She’d never been this close on an off night.
And though it had sickened her, Rarity had walked through that darkened hallway on that night, so long ago. Her tiny body had pulled her to her parent’s room when her mind had screamed at her to go back to bed. Because all she wanted to do was go back to bed now she’d confirmed it was all fine down here. But her body had other ideas. It needed to know what was at the end of that hallway. It had covered the mirror for years and if she could just listen, for a few seconds and not hear anything, then maybe there was nothing to hear at all.
Rarity leaned forward, putting her ear as close to the blanket as she could stand. She flinched for a moment when the velvet brushed her ear. But then she was recovering, and moving in closer still. Head cocked, neck stretched, ear straining for something other than her own heartbeat, Rarity listened.
When she’d walked through that hallway and got to her parents' room, years ago, it had all seemed okay for a second. Until her eyes had adjusted to the dark and she’d found her mother standing silently and her father nowhere to be seen. It was like the beginning of falling off the precipice, the moment you realise something is much more wrong that you’d ever dared think.
It was like that now as well, when she heard a sudden, steady knocking from behind the blanket.
And when she was a filly seeing her mother standing so unnaturally, half lit by whatever moonlight could filter through the curtains, she hadn’t realised she was still in a nightmare. Because if she’d just known that then, she might have known the worst was yet to come. When her mother abruptly started towards her, shrieking, it was like her world was burning. Then she woke for real. Screaming her heart out in sheets soaked in sweat and worse, a child unable to tell the mother that ran in why her presence seemed to make the fear worse.
It was a memory she was coming back to more and more, so often these days. Rarity remembered the lurching feel of being up on that precipice when the knocking from behind the blanket stopped. She got a couple of second’s silence, and then her world was burning all over again when something slammed into the glass.
Only when she fell back and grabbed out, body vetoing the wishes of her mind to just fall and leave the blanket in place, did Rarity realise why it had knocked so much tonight. It had tricked her. Because her hooves found purchase, and her body didn’t want to fall, and the only purchase around was a heavy blanket covering a mirror from a time no one remembered.
Rarity’s heart thundered, and for just a split second she thought she’d seen herself in the brief flash of mirror exposed as the blanket came down. But she closed her eyes instantly, and she knew she couldn’t have seen herself. She couldn’t have. Her mind exploded and her horn burned as she fumbled desperately to get the blanket back in place. To cover it and to end the nightmare in earnest.
It was good that her heart hammered so much, that the fury of her magic produced a crackling, static hum. It was good to have something to drown out the frenzy of knocking and pounding. The physical, violent orders to turn around and look. And for the briefest of seconds, as she bit her tongue until it bled and finally managed to get the blanket back in place, she thought she might have heard something call her name.
When the mirror was safely covered again, she finally opened her eyes. The storeroom was normal. It was over. She couldn’t see anything save for the deep black of a thick blanket, covering a mirror in her storeroom. The knocking had turned into a patient, baiting scrape on glass. It was still there, it would always be there.
But now she could go back to bed. Now she at least knew she was fully awake. Like when her mother had held her and managed to make Rarity less scared. Even though she was still scared that night. Even though she was still scared now.
Rarity gave the mirror one final check. She then hastily trotted out the storeroom and was careful to lock the door behind her. And after a short while, the scraping from behind the blanket drew to a fretful, unsatisfied stop.
