We never found Twilight

After the end of the conversation Shroud handed me a drink, I was reluctant at first, certain that it was drugged; it might have been some truth serum. I didn't really have a choice in the matter.

I drank it, my world faded to black again.

I woke up in front of my house, in arms with two other people; they were dressed in black, their faces covered.

I asked if Shroud was with us, they laughed and told me not to worry about it.

We searched the house, they couldn’t find her, neither could I.

They brought out weird devices, radars from the look of them. They couldn’t find anything.

If there was one thing I was glad of, it was the fact that there were no pictures of Twilight in her unicorn form.

They asked me where my sister was, I told them she was supposed to be here. When they asked me where she might be, I told them where she hung out at.

The local library a few theaters and restaurants we went out to on occasion, and a night club. They made a few calls, we waited a few minutes, and their phone rang.

No sign or trace.

She just disappeared.

They told me to call my parents, I did without hesitation.

“Tristan?” My father groaned as he answered the phone, it was dark outside and I had no idea of the time but it was probably early morning.

“Dad, Sis is gone.”

The reaction was of course not the greatest. The men told me not to mention anything about them, but I could tell from my father’s reaction that he heard them.

He didn't say anything about Twilight being a unicorn.

He said he would be over in the morning.

After what felt like ages they gave up and started packing up. Said how they would be keeping an eye out, suggested I call the cops about finding my sister, told me how to contact them when I found her.

“I will do just that, I want to make sure she is cleared innocent as soon as possible.” How far from the truth that statement was.

I didn’t call anyone until they left. Then I called Crystal, she worked third shift so she would be up at this time. Looking at the clock she would actually be getting off work.

She didn’t take the news well either.

Crystal came over, spent some time until my parents got there. I told them about how I came home and she was just gone.

How I waited for hours and got curious so I started looking around and I never found her.

I didn’t mention the shrouded people.

Crystal didn’t know but my parents could guess, they were smart people. They had feared about something like this for years.

We called the police, they searched the house for prints but there was no sign of intrusion or of a struggle. There wasn’t much they could do, but they promised me they would find her.

I knew they were lying.

She didn’t get taken, she left.

If anyone could leave without leaving a trace.

It was Twilight.

We were created in a lab, experiments for some unknown reason. We didn’t know how we came to be we just did.

One day some people came and killed our creators, in a last effort they released us, even though we were failed experiments.

But there were some benefits that they hadn’t considered.

We could change how we looked, probably a prototype to making us look exactly how they wanted.

We knew that the people invading were a danger, so we changed our form to our attackers, and when no one was looking we left.

I remember the smell of sulfer, the sounds of gunfire and the torment of our creators.

We didn't know who we were, what our purpose was, but we knew some things.

We knew hunger

And we knew survival

But most important, we knew that we were empty, and that all we wanted most was emotion.

We learned the rest of it ourselves. Like how we could extract emotion from people, it was on accident one day some random lady walked past one of us, recognized us as a lost love and was overjoyed with love.

Tasty delicious love.

It smelled like a warm sunny day out in a meadow.

Then we knew how to feast, and then we knew how to extract our food from hosts.

So after that we formed our own group, we would find a target, it worked best with people who lost ones that were close to them. We would study how the person was lost, make up a story, send one of us to that person and they would live with that host till they sucked them dry. Then that one would come back and the cycle would continue.

But no matter how much we tried we could never feel our own emotions. All we had were the tastes from our hosts, fragments of memories. We knew what it was supposed to feel like but we could never feel it.

We felt empty

Like shells of life

Probably smell like a graveyard

If we did have feeling we would probably be disgusted with ourselves.

But we didn’t really care

We didn’t have names either, so we went with the name our host at the time wanted us to be.

At the moment I was Chase Sparkle, the son of Tristan Sparkle, some old man who got married and had one son.
He smelled of secrets, and sadness, both of which smelt somewhat like wet books. As if it was raining inside a library.

A very weird smell to say the least.

I wasn’t his son of course, but it had been years since the old man had contact with either his wife or his son.

Maybe they left him, maybe they were dead.

We knew the son wasn’t in the country, so we didn’t care. We made up my background, and how I was supposed to do my job.

I smelt like peppermint.

And I went to his door; he greeted me with joy in his eyes.

Delicious joy, that smelt like candy

I told him about how I had been working for a company, and how the company crashed and I had nowhere else to go. So I moved back so I could live with him.

He was more than happy to accommodate me.

And so I was left in his care, and every day I sucked him dry of all the joy and love he gave me. He never mentioned the wife.
Not like I cared.

His house smelt like herbal tea.

Then the draining started to kill him, after five years of plentiful feasting, and some fond memories, Tristan was on his deathbed.

It was time to finish him off and move on, best to see the old man off before I go.

I walked to his room at the hospital he was staying at. One of the nurses took me to his room. She left me alone with him afterwards, and as she left I could taste the sadness in her eyes. How it smelt like rain around her.

It wouldn't be long now. The stench of death was overlapping the rain.

“Hey dad.” I said to him, he looked like a living corpse at the moment, the doctor’s said it was cancer. He woke up and looked at me without a care in the world. His son was here, so he was happy.

“Hey son!” He gleefully sat up to talk to me, and started coughing uncontrollably. A dash of flowers accompanied the death.

We talked for a little, nothing interesting, about how the nurses were taking good care of him. He asked if I was eating well, I told him not to worry about it.

I wasn’t exactly sure what to say, I hadn’t been part of a death bond before.

I decided to bring up some emotion, recently the well had been running dry, and I was feeling hungry. Plus the smell of death was getting to me.

“I miss mom, I wish she could be here with us.”

And then I realized my mistake. At that moment his eyes flashed with a color of green, usually it meant that we were enforcing our bond. Sometimes that was necessary to keep a bond going, sometimes people had fights. But that was one of the good things about dad, we never fought or anything like that.

He was a good father.

But when the eyes flashed like that, without our influence it meant one thing, one thing that was considered the worst thing to ever happen to one of us.

Our bond had been broken.

I decided to play it cool.

“Dad?” I couldn’t hide the fear in my voice.

“My son has been dead for twenty years.” Dad muttered as he looked away from me towards the window at the setting sun outside. I followed his gaze.

The setting sun was strangely beautiful. I figured it must have been the medication.

“What do you mean?” I asked after a minute of silence.

“He’s been dead for twenty years. He left me with his mother, never said a word after that, one day she called me, and said he was dead, that was it nothing more, no apologies or anything. She didn’t even let me say anything back.”

It wasn’t just the medication. I edged towards the door.

“I never knew what went wrong, I tried to be the perfect dad, I gave them a wonderful house, plenty of things to make them happy. But she didn’t want any of it; she wanted me to show how much I loved her in more ways than just gifts. She never really knew me, couldn’t really read me. So one day she left with a younger man. She took Chase with her. And the only time I ever heard of them after that was when she told me he was dead.”

I tried to reestablish the bond, maybe I could make this work.

“I’m not dead dad… I’m right here. I left mom and I came back to you.”

He didn’t turn his gaze from the window.

“I always tried to find out what I did wrong, I couldn’t live with myself after that, I started drinking, heavily but nothing answered my question, never stopped the pain. So one day…”

Realizing that my bond hadn’t been fixed I started heading for the door again, his voice stopped me.

“So one day I created a fantasy world, just so I could keep going. I imagined that everything wasn’t horrible, that it went the way it was supposed to be. It wasn’t hard; I looked online and found a guide to how to make Tulpas, imaginary friends in a sense, you could interact with because they were fragments of your consciousness. But I never could make my son; every time I tried it would just end in failure.”

I was at the door ready to make a run for it.

“And then you came along…”

I stopped, it was a stupid idea but for some reason

I stopped

“I thought I had finally done it, I recreated my son in my mind, and I was more than happy. I knew it was a lie that my son was dead, but I could pretend.”

I turned around and looked at him; He was staring at me, right through my disguise towards my true self.

“I had hints that you were real, that you were something that wasn’t just a figment of my imagination. My mind jumped to conclusions, at first I thought you were a succubus sent to drain my soul, but that wasn’t it. If that was the case you would have been my wife. So then I knew exactly what you were.”

He turned away to look back at the sun.

“A changeling.” He said with a quite raspy voice.

The name had sentimental value to me, I had never heard of the word before, but it felt right. We had pondered many times what we were. We as well had checked mythology and for a while we did go under the name of demons.

“But I didn’t care, I knew the risks, and the threats, but I didn’t care.”

I started walking back towards his bed; he didn’t turn to look at me again.

“I was just…”

I stood next to him, and for a change I said something back.

“What?”

“Happy.”

I was shocked, there dad was, knowing that I was killing him but he didn’t care, what was wrong with this guy?”

“Happy?” I asked in disbelief.

“Happy that someone, even unintentionally… was granting my last wish.”

He stopped talking after that, he didn’t look back at me, I… didn’t know what to say, there wasn’t really anything I could say.
But there was something I was starting to feel.

Was I getting sick? I wasn’t sure

“Is… Is it okay?” I said uncontrollably I started to shake.

“Is what okay?” he answered as dad turned to look at me, with a smile on his face, his eyes gleaming with joy.

I didn’t even care for some reason. For once in my life, it actually sickened me.

“Is it okay… if I still call you dad?”

What was I doing? Was I going crazy? I should have left by now, he would have died soon enough anyway, I should have gone back to the others. They would be waiting for me so I could move on to my next target.

What in the hell was I doing.

Why did my chest feel like it was about to explode.

Why for the first time in my life did I feel like I was about to cry.

Dad looked at me; he blinked his eyes, shed a single tear and nodded his head slowly.

“Yes son”

And then he died.

I saw the life fade from his eyes. His pulse went dead and he fell back into his bed, the nurses ran in. They pulled of defibulator units and tried to revive him.

He wasn’t coming back

He was gone

The man I had spent five years with

My dad…

Was dead.

And then something unexpected happened.

I saw a large amount of love appear in front of me, a humongous amount that never happened before.
It was a last desire, perhaps the most delicious emotion that a host could ever supply. It only happened on a death bond. When the host died while still linked to one of us, they were said to be the most delicious thing that ever happened. And the best part was, they could be stored, contained into a crystalline form and saved for later occasion.

I had been anticipating for this for the last few weeks, it would be my first ever taste. We got the first ones, after that we would give them to the group.

I couldn’t bring myself to eat it.

What was wrong with me, I must have been sick, there was no other excuse.
And how did I get the last desire to begin with? The bond was broken, it shouldn’t have happened.
None of the nurses saw me condense it into a heart and put it in my pocket. Nor did they see me leave the room.

I went home, not to the others.

I went to my Dad’s home.

My home.

Back when we were leaving the lab, one of us found some information about our creators and some of the fellow experiments.

Besides us there were the alphas, and one other project.

The home world

Equestria

Our creators made an alternate dimension using some strange material that bended the rules of time and the universe. That could make things change without reason. They made a world for the alphas, so that one day when the world was ready they could introduce it to the people, and they could go there if they wished.

We didn’t go to that dimension, we knew that there were multiples ways there, but there was no point for us to go there. We needed people to survive, and we had no idea if we could find food there. So we never left.

But we knew some of the alphas survived and that some of them went through. I knew of one.

Dad had a sister, he never told his son about him, or his wife. But in the last few weeks he talked to me about her. About how she was a mystical being, who looked sort of like a cartoon horse, but could do magic. How one day he was interrogated by a mysterious group who was hunting these beings and that thankfully they never found her, but she never came back.

He talked about how much he missed her.

How just once he wanted to see her again.

It didn’t take much to put the pieces together.

I walked through the door to my house, and I started searching for a gateway. I knew there was one in this city. We mapped them out a long time ago. I was startled when I found one in the guest bedroom. Dad told me once that it was actually
Twilight’s bedroom before she disappeared.

How ironic.

It was now that I noticed liquid on my cheeks.

I was crying, I wasn’t sure how, didn’t even know I could cry, none of us had before.

But I knew what I had to do

I would fulfill dad’s wish.

I got out a piece of paper, pulled out a pen and started writing.

I wrote of the five years I spent with dad, of our time together, of the things we did.

I wrote about who I really was, and how I wasn’t really his son.

But I was now.

I wrote of his last moments, and how I wanted to send his last desires to Twilight.

I attached it to the heart, it beated in my hands with warmth. I wasn’t hungry, for the first time in my life.

I didn’t want to eat the heart.

I found the gateway, and opened it with my horn.

The doorway shone with light.

It blinded me

I pushed the note and the heart through.

Then I closed the portal, walked out of the room, packed my things and left.

Before I closed the front door behind me as I walked out to the street I stopped and for a moment looked at the house behind me. I saw the green couch that father always loved to lie on. The television hooked up to the wall, and some cups on the table that were sometimes filled with tea in the morning.

“Goodbye father.” I whispered

Author's Note

And here is our Sad chapter, why? because the sad tag.

You may have noticed a different style of writing in this chapter. This is not because someone else is writing the story or anything but because it helps produce a feeling of depression. When your upset and depressed you don't explain much about your life, things just turn into a dull gray. That's what Tristan feels without Twilight.

Not immediately at first (he's more sad and worried the depressed) but eventually it does water down into this dull view. The story if you noticed is written in past tense which means that Tristan was writing this from the future. He is supposed to be writing this years after Twilight has left him, but before he moves on with his life. So he has a very dull gray outlook.

So then we cut foward to Chase Sparkle

I never was as fascinated with changelings like most bronies are for some reason but i had this scene stapled to my mind it just felt like it was nessicary

It's short, there's not enough detail about Chase and this chapter over all just feels short

But that's the thing with Changelings (they aren't supposed to be very detailed, since if they had their own personalities it would kind of blow their disguise.)

So in lack of detail of character i added detail of the setting, after all if there wasn't much to you why not pay attention to everything around you?

regardless i'm not proud but at the same time i am

Also we are getting near the end of our story!