Darkness. Complete and utter darkness. Twilight was moving; she could tell. She felt the rush of air in her mane and over her flank, but she couldn’t control herself. She was going in one direction, traveling at a constant speed, and no matter how much she tried to wiggle her limbs or flap her wings in the vain hope of slowing herself down or changing course, it was no use. Though she eventually ended up turning herself backwards, she was still heading along the same path as before.
How did she get here? Was she falling? It didn’t feel like it. She’d had her fair share of falls in the past and it had never been quite like this. She had always been able to orient herself and fly safely away, or even teleport safely to the ground, but now she couldn’t even tell what direction the ground was in. The logical conclusion would be that she was heading toward the ground, of course, but something about her movement felt more like she was slicing through the air, like she had been flung from some powerful catapult and hadn’t yet reached the peak of her trajectory.
But even so...she could be wrong, and she didn’t exactly want to find out the hard way. She didn’t have to see the ground to teleport to another location entirely, like her castle. Closing her eyes - not that there was anything to see in the first place - she furrowed her brow and concentrated on teleporting back home. Her horn lit up with a faint aura, but nothing happened. She could still feel the air rushing by, no change in its pattern whatsoever.
Had her magic been drained? She’d never failed at this spell before, or at least not since she was a young filly just learning it for the first time. She prepared to try again, but was interrupted by a sudden pressure on her rear flank, or “plot” as some might call it. It only lasted for a moment, but it was enough to halt her momentum and send her hurtling in an entirely different direction to that which she had previously been heading.
Now oriented toward whatever new direction she was going, she looked back and saw nothing. She had clearly bounced off something, but what? If anything was there, it was just as dark as the rest of her surroundings. And how? Her horn still lit, she looked at her plot and frowned, reaching back to tap it with a hoof. Maybe she could stand to lose a few pounds, but she was about average for a unicorn. Probably below average for an alicorn, though there weren’t many others to compare herself to on that front and she wasn’t about to ask the princesses their weights.
Regardless, the point was that she shouldn’t have been that...bouncy. That was clearly a hard surface that she’d been pressed against. She should have smashed into it and that should have been it. She was certainly glad that it wasn’t, but she was more baffled now than ever.
She was lost in thought for several minutes, racking her brain as she tried to remember how she had gotten there in the first place. Suddenly she saw something in the distance, a dotted track of line after line of white light up ahead, extending in two directions as far as she could see. Another wall? Though she hadn’t felt any pain the last time she hit a wall...or whatever it was...she still braced herself as she got closer. What if those lines were the lights of buildings? Maybe she was falling after all, and there had been so much hail frozen in a cloud and ready to drop that it had felt like a wall as she hit it at the peak of her flight? It seemed unlikely, but so did this situation.
As the lights drew closer, Twilight began to panic. Desperately concentrating as hard as she could, she tried again and again to cast the teleportation spell, but to no avail. Tears welling in her eyes, she remembered her friends and all of the good times they had had together, all of the times they had saved Equestria together, all of the times they had helped her when she was in need. She would never see them again, would she? This was it. She closed her eyes.
Several minutes later, she opened them again. Looking back over her shoulder, she could see the track of lights receding in the distance. So she hadn’t been about to crash into the ground in the middle of a town. In retrospect, it was a bit far-fetched that a town would have all of its buildings in a straight line and none anywhere else, but her fear had tainted her thinking. Breathing a sigh of relief, she tried to clear her mind. She couldn’t keep panicking; she was Twilight Sparkle. Twilight Sparkle didn’t give up. She had to find a way out of this.
But how did she get here? And where was “here”? Why was it so hard to remember? Finally, something broke through whatever mental block had been stifling her memory.
“I’ll meet you at the bookstore!” Twilight called to Rainbow Dash, who nodded in acknowledgment. “I just need to get my copy of ‘Daring Do and the Griffon’s Goblet’ and I’ll be right over.” A.K. Yearling was doing a signing and Twilight wasn’t going to miss her chance to get an autograph. True, as a friend she could have probably asked Yearling to sign her book any time, but getting it done at an official signing felt more, well...official.
Turning away from Rainbow Dash, who was already well in the distance, Twilight concentrated on teleporting to her castle’s library.
Teleportation! That was the last thing she had done before she had ended up here. Or at least, the last thing she remembered doing. Had something gone wrong with the spell? Was that why she was here?
As far as she understood her magical theory, teleportation opened a temporary invisible wormhole with openings at both the beginning and endpoints, which automatically transported anything from the starting end to the finishing end almost instantaneously. Perhaps she had somehow become stuck inside the tunnel portion of the wormhole without emerging at the other end? The more she thought about it, the more plausible that seemed. It would even explain why she couldn’t teleport now - she couldn't make a wormhole inside another wormhole, could she?
But even so, in all of the magical literature she had studied, she had never heard of this happening. There was no firsthoof account of anypony having anything like this happen to them. There was an urban legend about a pony who disappeared forever after trying to teleport to a store to get some strawberries, but she had always assumed that if that story had any truth to it, the pony had merely lied about his destination and secretly gone off somewhere else. Now she wasn’t so sure.
In the distance, she saw another line of light, this one on its own with no other lines dotting a track to accompany it. And this one moved. As she watched, it seemed to align itself to the position that she was about to reach. Was the spell repairing itself? Was this the light of her library, a gateway opening up to take her in? Please let it be her library.
Stretching her hooves toward the light, she felt a pressure on them for a moment and then found herself traveling away from the light again. It wasn’t a gateway. It was a surface, and she had bounced off it.
Now what? She was heading back in a similar general direction to that which she had come from. If she was right and she was inside the wormhole, then she needed to turn around. She needed to find a way out through the end that she was now heading away from, but there was nothing she could do but hope there would be another invisible wall or another strange line of light to bounce her back in that direction again.
As she waited for a bounce to take her back, she tried to stay calm. Before long, she would be home. Right? She would go to that book signing and she would be extra careful not to mess the spell up again. She wasn’t sure what she could have done wrong, but there must have been something...
Or what if...there wasn’t? What if this was what happened every time anypony teleported and nopony ever remembered it? After all, she’d had a strangely difficult time remembering what she had been doing before she got here - a side effect of the spell? Wormholes could bend time, so what seemed almost instantaneous outside could be much longer within. It didn’t seem out of the question that there could be a similar mental block on ponies’ minds to suppress any memories of this situation when they emerged.
Twilight flexed her magic, using it to light up her horn and nothing else. Though she couldn’t teleport, it seemed as though it must be possible to do at least some magic here. Perhaps there was an opportunity for a small experiment. The lights must be platforms of a sort, so when she hit the next one, assuming there was one, she would try to use her magic to dim it and write her own message in the light. She wouldn’t have much time, but “Hi, Twilight!” would be simple enough. The most efficient way for the teleportation spell to work would be for it to use the same structure for the wormhole tunnel every time, and if it reused its previous endstate, then the message would still be there if this happened again.
And eventually, after a bounce off another invisible wall, another pass through the dotted track of lights - this time with her eyes open - and another period of waiting, she did see a new line of light up ahead, much like the one that had bounced her back in this direction. It was moving back and forth and seemed less sure of where she was going to be than the last one. Was the spell breaking down? What if the urban legend was true and that was what happened to that poor pony? Trapped in a wormhole forever…
She shook the thought off. Even if she didn’t hit the platform, she would probably just exit through the initial opening and be back in town as though the spell had failed. As she neared the line of light, which finally moved into place with not much time to spare, she cast a dimming spell. “Hi, Twilight!” she saw in the remaining glow, which was stronger than the rest. She bounced off the platform, and ended the spell without adding her own message.
Surprised, but only mildly so, Twilight now felt much calmer than she had been before. If this did happen every time, then of course some past version of herself would have already had the same idea. She still didn’t know how long this was going to last, but she felt confident that she would end up in her library eventually. The worst part now was just how boring this whole thing was...
After what felt like forever, she could finally see the far side’s platform again. It had already lined itself up to hit her back. Would a risk be worth it? She could try to move it away with her magic, but if she did, and then went beyond it, she didn’t know if there would be any way to turn around again. But surely she needed to go beyond it? Surely beyond it was the end of the wormhole? What would she have done in this situation before? After calculating the probabilities as best she could, she decided that it was much more likely than not that she would have moved the platform. Taking a deep breath, she cast the spell, moved it out of the way, and flew on past it.
“Okay, where did I put that book again?” Twilight said to herself. “Spike, have you seen my copy of ‘Daring Do and the Griffon’s Goblet’?” she called, hoping he would be close enough to hear. There was no response. She scanned the shelves, but it was nowhere to be seen. She turned to walk out of the room, but spied a book on a table. “Oh, of course! There it is,” she thought. She had already taken it down that morning in preparation for the signing.
“I’ll be at the bookstore with Rainbow Dash!” Twilight called again, still unsure whether Spike was listening but figuring it couldn’t hurt. “I’ll be back later!”
Then she teleported away.
The End
Author's Note
Also check out Blink! (It was a vague inspiration for bits of this.)
