The Legionnaire

by MrNumbers

Rating: teen
Tags: Twilight Sparkle, Gore, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Death, Thriller, Horror
Length: 6318

Monster hunting comes easier when you can learn from your fatal mistakes.

Twilight's bloody corpse hangs in a shard of broken window. Twilight stalks the train in search of the monster that killed her. Two of the Twilights that are too many, facets of a Twilight that is too much.

“So you remember what dying’s like?” Dash asked with the careless curiosity of a child.

“It was like if falling asleep really hurt. Except some of me stayed dreaming.” 

Published 2022-10-07 01:40:02 UTC
Last updated 2022-10-07 01:40:02 UTC

We Can't Exist As This Many

Twilight’s eviscerated corpse hung in the door of the first class cabin, blood dripping from the shards of fogged glass in the window smaller than the body had been at its original size. Forced through like it was, the body had been made smaller, the window frame larger. The incompressible liquid matter of the internals painted the door thick on both sides.

“Alright, enough of that!” Twilight’s voice echoed from the next cabin over. “It’s time you came out and stopped scaring all these nice ponies.”

That one was a golden horn, as close to her original self as the Master could still make it, but a bit more able to handle the sheer volume of magic and information. Golden horns were meant to be more permanent, but how many ‘permanents’ had Twilight gone through? She could be killed just as easily as the scout had. She shared all its memories, had, felt everything that Twilight had felt as she was slaughtered. Only the Master was immortal, they were merely replaceable.

The Master zipped through the Dreaming with all the awareness of a telegraph from the inside of a telegraph cable. But the Master moved as fast as thought, and she thought very fast indeed.

Pinkie swatted the fireball away with the back of the banjo, like it was a tennis ball. The steel strings made a satisfying twang as they shifted with the heat, but it’d be such a pain to tune it after this. That is, if the banjo held together. Or they did, for that matter.

“Is it just me,” Pinkie wrung the sweat out of her mane, pricking steam where it hit the stone at her hooves, “or did monsters used to be easier?”

“Not just you,” Twilight grimaced. Her mane was singed, and she’d already lost half her tail. The smell of burned hair was horrendous. “I thought a lava lizard sounded cute. I thought it might be easy, after the bunyip and the chupacabra. But it spits.”

The lizard hocked another napalm loogie at them. Twilight bounced it with a forcefield, back into the charnel pit that had been a Hooveston tavern. Small, efficient uses of magic, but after almost an hour of this, it was clear she was at the end of her rope. Pinkie didn’t like how Twilight was swaying on her hooves, but she refused to tag out. They didn’t know how long it would be until Rainbow was back with the storm clouds, or how much more damage this thing could do while they waited.

“It’s still standing over the basement.” Twilight pointed out. “You keep this thing busy for a moment. I’m going to see if I can’t pull the floor out under it, bury it for a while to buy some time. Maybe there’s still enough cider in the barrels to slow it down, if we’re really lucky.”

Pinkie whammed another hocked napalm ball, but this twang was out of tune again. She got lucky with the last one. “You’re going to pull it down on you? Twilight that sounds super, duper, duper too dangerous.”

“And this isn’t? Pinkie, how much longer do you think that thing’s going to last?”

“It’s lasted this long, hasn’t it?!” Pinkie swung like a tennis serve, trying to gonk the thing with its own loogie. The banjo snapped in half, the base swinging from the half-melted strings. “Oop. Okay, but I still think-” Twilight was already gone.

What was left of the cobblestone flooring wobbled under the huge lizard, and its eyes went wide. For the first time in half an hour, the flaming fronds along its tail flickered uncertainly. Another snap, like breaking firewood over your knee, and the whole floor fell in on it. The lizard scrambled to pull itself out, but more and more debris just fell in. Wooden supports caught fire whenever the lizard tried to drag itself up, shattering any holds. The rest was like quicksand.

At the end, after Pinkie was done choking on dust and ash, there was still a bright orange glow at the bottom of the rubble. Smoke still filtered through the cracks. The lizard was still alive, but all was still. It had worked.

Twilight didn’t come back. Pinkie called out for her, but nobody answered.

Monster hunting came easier when you could learn from fatal mistakes.

She remembered seeing the monster at the last moment, before it had killed her. A huge shifting shape and made of liquid night, it had squeezed through the cracks in the passenger window behind her until there was enough to rip at her from behind. It struck as a panther with praying mantis claws. Voidstuff roiling and boiling, dripping like slavering drool, globs evaporating just a moment after it touched open air. It have been painful for it to stay in the light. It made sense why something so huge, so razor sharp, was still relying on ambush tactics.

This Twilight considered her options. She could ‘ask’ the Master for another scout, but they all shared the same pool of magic. A golden horn would need to teleport to top it up. As it was, the Twilight in Ponyville was turning the pages of her book with her hooves, and the Twilight in Canterlot was going rustic with her cutlery, even without having been asked. She was selfless even to herself.

No, that settled it. She’d do this without a scout. She hated dying. A dead Twilight’s awareness, her continuity, carried to the next-of-kin. It was like taking a big gulp of pond water when you’re dehydrated, but the straw ran through your brain. The psychic equivalent of your body fighting to keep it down and force it out at the same time. At least that scout had only been hers, the Twilights in Canterlot and Ponyville only had to feel it second-hoof.

She hated teleporting even more, but she was going to have to, anyway. She needed to know how to kill this monster.

They weren’t clones, was the thing.

Pinkie stumbled out onto the street. Fireponies and bucket chains worked overdrive - even with the lizard contained in the mostly-stone tavern, like a fireplace, stray and deflected shots had kept hitting everything nearby. A firefighter stopped what she was doing long enough to press a water bottle into Pinkie’s chest.

“You’re dehydrated. Drink.”

“Have you seen Princess Twilight? Is she out here?” Pinkie asked. The firepony shook her head. “I think she might still be down there. Underneath the rubble, where the lizard is. I think-”

The firepony’s eyes went wide. “It’s still alive?”

“I think so. So if Twilight’s trapped down there-”

“Then we can’t get to her.” The firefighter cut her off. “Not without those clouds. We just need to trust that the Princess can hold that long.”

The way the firefighter said that helped. Like they thought Twilight was still alive too. Pinkie tried to take a sip of water, but ended up downing the whole thing in one go by accident. The firefighter pressed against her, and walked her to a stoop to wait.

So, Pinkie waited.

She only had time to count to three. Pop. Twilight was there next to her, with all her hair. No burns, no nothing. She just looked really confused, even before Pinkie screamed and hugged her.

“I thought you were too slow! I thought you died!”

“I was,” Twilight squeezed back hard. “I think I did.”

The Canterlot-Twilight sensed the train-Twilight start to teleport and pointedly turned her attention away. In Canterlot she excused herself from her dinner guests for the next minute, and went to find a quiet place. The Twilight in Ponvyille was just reading to herself by candlelight, all she had to do was set her teeth and bare it.

When she tried to explain it, she said it was like being different people in your dreams. You were always all of them, and sometimes you felt like being all of them, while other times it was easiest only seeing through the eyes of one character at a time. Following where the story was most interesting.

All those ‘characters’ are just different facets of the same dreamer, existing as the third person omniscient. That was the perspective Twilight became, when she teleported.

Before, she’d never sensed the Dreaming. Now, with the Master inhabiting it full time, the experience was different. With her body gone, she was the Master for as long as it took to reappear at the other side. She moved through the Dreaming faster than thought could form, before. But when she was the Master again, that fraction of a second stretched to the horizons, and her mind filled all the space between.

Then she was forced into a body again.

Even the golden horns didn’t teleport much. The Master’s mind didn’t fit in a brain anymore, couldn’t be made to fit. The feeling of coming back to the material was the feeling of forgetting everything ever known. Like trying to hold on to a dream, if you had the dreams of a God and woken up an ant. Only an impression could remain.

Twilight fell into the fetal position and sobbed, like she always did. She took a risk teleporting, the creature of liquid night could see how vulnerable she was, but she still needed a few seconds to compose herself again.

The Master couldn’t help herself, as hard as she tried. Every time she promised to try harder next time.

Teleporting took a whole second, because it didn’t happen all at once.

First she closed her eyes. She sent her focus to where she wanted to be. She made a connection from her body to her focus with her magic. Then she was there.

Pop.

Well, normally. This time, no pop.

Twilight was surprised with how quickly she worked out where she was. No “But that can’t possibly…?” or “Surely not”. Just, understanding.

In the time between sending her awareness and arriving, she had died. She had no body left to send. She was caught in the space between, a space she had experienced hundreds of times before, and yet had no experience of. She’d always moved through it faster than memory could form.

But here she was. No biological brain to house her, her mind formed of pure energy and information. It made everything… clearer, actually. Faster. No longer did she have to wait for the firing of neurons, pulses that moved at only fifty meters per second through a sugar-fat vat of organic wetware.

How fragile it had been, now a semi-carbonized smear against melted cobblestone.

Wait. How did she know that?

Because she was where ‘there’ touched ‘here’. Just by thinking about it, she had moved to where her brain was. She knew it like you know things in a dream. That meant she might be stuck ‘in here’, but she wasn’t stuck ‘out there’. Whatever she decided to call ‘here’, anyway. The liminal? The interstitial? She liked that, ‘the interstitial’ had a good ring to it. The space between spaces, connecting them.

Here in the interstitial, her mind was unfathomably compressed, probably the size of a photon, but she could still send it just as she did whenever she teleported. And, just like always, she got a sense of where she ended up. How else did she never teleport herself into the middle of anything? Forget walls, she’d never so much as ended up with her hoof inside the ground.

She cast herself about. To the lizard, to Pinkie Pie outside. She could only see as much as a pinhead of the world at a time, but when that pinhead could move as fast as thought, and she was thinking so much faster… she read the expression on Pinkie’s face by concentrating on each individual feature. Her eyebrows, her nose, the curve of her lips. It took only a second of ‘out there’ time.

Pinkie was scared. Very scared. It didn’t take much to work that out.

That was the first time Twilight began to worry. Something she could still do, apparently, still feel. She didn’t need all those chemicals to care about her friends. Good.

How did she tell her friends she was okay? For all the zipping, Pinkie hadn’t felt her, not once.

Twilight tried to stand up, but it hurt, it hurt, it hurt so much.

The creature of liquid night climbed the side of the carriage, warily. Why had its prey come for it in the dark? It was so much more itself, here. It held its forearms arched like batwings, its forearms honed to spikes puncturing gripholds in the steel carriage. Hadn’t it already killed this one, though?

She could read books by sensing the ink on a page. That meant the book didn’t need to be open for her to read the pages, she didn’t need light. Still, even with the forbidden libraries now available to her, she’d found precious little useful information on her predicament.

If she wasn’t the first to experience this, none had figured out how to return to Equestria and write a book about it.

If anything, she found her mind was getting faster. She’d started being able to read a book every second. The longer she existed in this space, the more she adjusted to the freedom of it. She needed to figure out how to talk to her friends like this. First to let them know she was okay, but after that, the things she could tell them! Teach them! The awareness of anatomy she had, now that she could inspect every individual cell in a living body, observe the individual and the whole simultaneously, she could advance medicine by a hundred years as it was!

She-

When she teleported, she transmitted her body as magical energy and reassembled it at the destination. But she could still control magical energy - she still had most of it, even. She needed a horn to do anything with it, like a nerve needed a muscle. Her attempts at acting on the world through telekinesis had given her an intense feeling of phantom limb syndrome, to say the least.

But she had already sent the signal for teleportation, while she had a horn. Maybe she could complete that signal, still?

She found Pinkie again, sitting on the stoop outside the destroyed tavern, waiting for her. There was an exciting feeling of slipping as she anchored the spell, like being the sand that passes through an hourglass. In one place disappearing, arriving in another, but always the same sand.

No. The metaphor was wrong. Something was deeply wrong.

“I thought you were too slow! I thought you died!”

“I was,” Twilight squeezed back hard. “I think I did.”

She experienced herself say that. She felt Twilight hugging Pinkie Pie back, she felt Twilight’s heart race, her mind rush, and then slam into the limits of its new container. She experienced the world totally, through the part of herself that had completed the teleport. But the Twilight she had made was just a template from her last spell, and as much of her new awareness that could fit. Already, the Twilight in the world was forgetting what it was like to be vast.

The experience of the flesh-self felt like an afterthought to her interstitial self, but her interstitial self was incomprehensible to her flesh-self. But that connection existed. If she could scream down it, maybe something-

“Twilight…? Your nose is bleeding.”

“It feels like my head’s going to explode. I think… sorry… please…”

“Twilight?”

Enough. She had plenty of time to work this out, and more able to do it than ever. In fact, forming the new body had diminished her far less than she had hoped.

With a growing curiosity, she realized she could complete the teleport spell again. Whatever new body she’d make would surely be connected to each other, as much as to her.

Maybe that was the trick to it? Make enough of herself, to spread out the load. Slow her interstitial self down, and separate the load of communication along multiple threads…

The night creature struck out, more testing than anything. Still, it tore off one of Twilight’s forelegs, feebly brought up to protect her face.

There. The shock, the pain, the adrenaline, those were physical, those were chemical, those anchored her as herself.

A woozy hiccup as the limb was there again. The Master could make whole bodies out of the Dreaming. Making just a leg was a parlor trick, at this point, but still the limb glowed bright with excess magic. The night creature hissed and recoiled from it, effluvious skin broiling.

You didn’t lose everything after contact with the Master, that was the whole reason to teleport anyway. You could carry the most important idea, the one thing you could not forget with you. That one flash of remembered dream when all else fades.

The cost, though, was feeling everything the Master wished she could tell you, wished you could remember. It was too much for her. No matter how much she tried to hold back, what she couldn’t restrain was still more than could fit in Twilight’s brain.

In one moment, the night creature flinched.

In one moment, Twilight grabbed it with a spell she only half-remembered.

In one moment, Twilight pulled the brake line in the carriage below.

All she remembered was that it wouldn’t be enough to drag the creature under the wheels of the train. She had to drag it into the blinding sparks grinding from the steel-on-steel. It was the sparks that shredded the creature, that tore through it like canister shot. Its scream was unheard underneath the sound of squealing metal.

What was that modified levitation she had used, to grab it with? She regretted asking herself, she got a migraine trying to think about it.

Twilight took a deep breath, and made for the ladder back down. Already, even the memory of what she needed to do was fading, as if awakening from a dream.

She touched her face, and felt her nose bleeding again.

Fluttershy found the textbook that Twilight didn’t know to look for, and opened it to octopii.

“Octopus have a brain in all their legs. They all think on their own, even as they’re all controlled by the brain in the head. Is this what you were looking for?”

Twilight rubbed her eyes. “It’s the first time our headache’s gone away for hours. So I think so. What do you think it means?”

“I’m sorry,” Fluttershy watched Twilight’s face carefully, “What do you mean ‘ours’?”

Twilight blinked. Before she could even think to react, Fluttershy had a wad of tissues pressed to the blood running from her nose.

“Sorry about the snot.” Twilight grimaced, but Fluttershy stared at the tissue. “That bad?”

“Snot isn’t this clear,” was the only explanation Fluttershy was willing to give. “We need to get you to a hospital.”

“It’s gone now, everybody.” Twilight announced proudly as she swung the door open to the dining cart she had left everybody. Where they were supposed to be safe.

Her stomach turned. They weren’t where they were supposed to be, and she had a guess where they would be instead.

Rainbow spun pressed vinyl like it was a basketball. “What made you get into albums all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know. I just feel like I need to ask you… how they’re made. Like it’s the only way my head’s going to stop hurting.”

Rainbow frowned. “What? Really? Uh. Well. I don’t really know a lot about it. I think they just make a recording, and that’s your master copy. And from the master you press the gold records. And then the gold records stamp the vinyl. And you get to keep the gold records if you sell enough albums, I guess. I think that’s how it works, anyway.”

Twilight blinked. “You’re not going to believe this, but that actually helped.” She rubbed her temples. “But why do they do it that way? Why not just use the master?”

“I dunno. I guess the master’s barely touched, no matter how many albums you need to press that way? Like, you don’t know if you’re going to sell ten or ten million, maybe?”

“Huh.” Twilight flopped back on the cloud-sofa. It was too soft for her, she wanted more back support, but the fluffiness was nice. “Apparently that was all we needed to know. The headache is gone.”

“We?” Dash wasn’t about to let the slip go, like Fluttershy had. “I didn’t want to say it in front of Pinkie, but I was there when they found you. I mean, your body. I mean, it was your body, right?”

“One of them, anyway.” Twilight grimaced. “If that’s what you’re asking me.”

“Right. Okay.” Dash put the record back in its sleeve and tossed it into the coffee table, just so her hooves were free to press together and peer over. “So, you have clones now? Or like, how does that work?”

“Nine, I think, but we’re not clones. We all see everything the others see, all think everything the others think. It’s exhausting.”

“So you remember what dying’s like?” Dash asked with the careless curiosity of a child. It changed the answer Twilight gave, at least in tone.

“It was like if falling asleep really hurt.” Twilight grimaced. “Except some of me stayed dreaming.”

“How come if you’re all the same Twilight, like, how can you tell which one you are?” Dash tipped her head back and squinted at the ceiling, like she was trying to read the answer in it. “How do you tell the difference between the one talking to me or not? Are the rest all saying the same stuff to a wall right now?”

“They aren’t.” Twilight felt her brain get heavier, like she was being stared at from the inside of her head by eight pairs of eyes. “We don’t know.”

Rainbow rocked forward. “Wait. You don’t know? How do you not know?”

“I don’t know!” The headache came back so hard and fast that it came out a scream. Dash startled so hard she hit the roof.

Dozens of ponies were crammed into the narrow aisle of the first class corridor, all staring at the eviscerated body. The only casualty, gratefully.

When Twilight cleared her throat, all eyes turned to her. Faces turned, half in fear and half in shame. The ponies closest to the golden horn took a step back.

“I’m sorry about the mess. Even though I’m clearly fine, it’s never fun to see, is it?”

The Ponyville Twilight was already thinking kind and gentle thoughts for her, even before the five year old filly started bawling her eyes out crying.

She tried as hard as she could to never let anybody see this. Every time she promised to try harder next time.

Most of the nine Twilights had found a cupboard to hide in and closed their eyes at the same time. The one out in Appleoosa had to find a dark cave, and the one in Canterlot had jumped into a warm shower for the ambient noise. There wasn’t a place quiet enough in the city, otherwise.

Nine sensory feeds was too much to think through. If the choice was between cutting the amount of senses, or cutting the amount of feeds, it didn’t take a genius to figure out.

Like this, though, the walls between them melted. All of them felt it almost the same way.

“Woah,” the Canterlot Twilight thought. “That’s so weird.”

“What?” The rest thought in unison. There was a collective shiver through them. “Nevermind. We worked out the ‘woah’.”

“Should I get out of the shower or…?”

“No!” Another shudder. “I mean, it’s an answer, right? We can’t tell which ones we are, right now. We all have the same memories, so, without a really distinctive stimulus…” A shiver. “What’s it like for you?”

“Like I started sharing a brain with one really focused Twilight instead of eight exhausted ones. How did it feel to you?”

“Like we stopped being nine Twilights, and now we’re two Twilights talking to each other. Do you feel that, too?”

The Canterlot Twilight was so shocked she opened her eyes, and her head rang with the annoyed hiss she got for doing it. She closed them again. “I’m not just me, but this is the closest I’ve felt to that since we died.”

There was a long pause from the eight-Twilights. “There stopped being a difference between us. We can’t tell which ones we are anymore, we’re all the eight of us right now. Like Dash thought we should be.”

The Canterlot Twilight got hit by a wave of empathy so hard she slid down her shower wall, being careful to keep her eyes closed while she did. Also making sure the water kept hitting her the whole way down. “You all got really sad thinking that. I can’t tell why, but there’s a lot.”

“We feel like eight Twilights just died and got replaced by the same Twilight, eight times.” There was quiet. “Now it’s just you and me.”

“Don’t you mean you and ‘us’?”

“No, I don’t.”

The Canterlot Twilight cracked one eye open just enough she could find the hot tap, and turned it just a little higher, until it hurt a little. Just in case.

“There needs to be less of us.” The eight-as-one said out loud, eight voices through eight lips in perfect synchronicity. Then, just in the privacy of their thoughts. “Maybe when we’re not all having seizures from trying to process nine brains worth of information at the same time, we can learn a way to keep ourselves separated.”

The Canterlot Twilight didn’t need to ask if it was really that bad. She could feel it for herself.

The other ponies were gone now. She’d give them time to process before she tried to console them again.

Twilight’s hooves were stained in her own blood where it had soaked into the carpet. She looked at her mangled corpse. How it highlighted just how fragile and temporary flesh was, how vulnerable it was. How she felt her mind end, reduced to the meat it had only ever been. This must be how the Master saw her.

Was that why the Master stayed how she was, trapped as she was?

The headache screamed at her again. It was hard to stop asking questions the Master wanted to answer.

The Twilight in Appleoosa considered her suicide note. She’d made sure it was hers, too, not all of theirs. They were all practicing that, trying to be individuals. It didn’t seem to be working. Change had to come from the outside, it seemed.

Done because we are too many.

She grimaced. “Hey,” she yelled at the cave roof. Her isolation meant she drew the short straw. She couldn’t even be mad, she remembered making the decision when they all knew it was as likely to be their body as hers when they opened their eyes again. “I think I have a better way than this.” That feeling again, of eight pairs of eyes watching the inside of her thoughts intently. “Have any of us tried teleporting?”

It was rhetorical. She already knew none of them had. Their heads hurt enough as it was.

“Maybe if I try teleporting I’ll just turn into magic and not come out the other side. It’s worth a try, right?”

There was a collective fear that swept through them, each in their own way. It made sense it might work that way, which was the problem. Now they were all too scared to test it. Once again, Appeloosa Twilight drew the short straw for having brought it up. The rest closed their eyes to help her concentrate, careful not to be too similar in how they did it. Still, Appleoosan Twilight only felt six pairs of eyes still watching, and an empathetic sadness.

It was just enough breathing room to cast the spell. She tried to teleport into the same spot, just to make things easier.

The Canterlot and Ponyville copies had both been ‘themselves’ for months, now, the longest of any ‘perspectives’ since she’d first died. Originally they’d tried to rotate the high risk stuff around, but eventually they’d figured out something important: While a new copy had to deal with the total collapse of their individuality, new copies also got to have their memories of being divergent for so long. There was a specialness to that, something worth preserving.

Of course, it also meant that if they tried to keep something relatively private between them, only sharing when they knew the questing Twilight was too focused to pry, the secret could only last until the next time she died anyway.

“Do you think it’s worth trying to date, again?” The Ponyville Twilight wondered to the Canterlot Twilight.

“The venn diagram of anyone who would want to be with us, and someone we would want to be with, is zero.”

“You say that because you like Rarity.” Ponyville Twilight pursed her lips and blew a big raspberry, then immediately covered her face with her hooves when she felt the questing Twilight on the train’s curiosity. She focused as hard as she could on her reading until that Twilight got distracted by workshopping her reassurances again. “What about Pinkie?”

“It’d be cruel. To you and to her. At least Rarity knows how to read red flags.”

One sigh from two pairs of lips.

There was a digital scream, and then a nurse was shouting. “Code blue, bed seven is coding!”

Pinkie and Fluttershy barely looked at each other before they took off running, moving so fast Pinkie didn’t feel the splash from her hot chocolate hitting the floor where she dropped it. Twilight had seemed fine a few minutes ago, better than she had. Still a little sad, but-

Pinkie took a narrow lead. “I thought she worked out how to stop the seizures!”

“She must have tried something,” if Fluttershy sounded calm, it was because she spent all her stress waiting for something bad to happen. All that was left now was the doing. “Maybe she got overconfident.”

A nurse bodyblocked them, a silver haired older woman with an unshakable solidness to her. “I’m sorry, but we need you to keep clear. We’re doing all we can for Princess Twilight.”

“I’m a vet.” Fluttershy informed her.

Pinkie swallowed back a nervous giggle. Fluttershy had been so serious- but then her jaw dropped when the nurse actually nodded back, and let Fluttershy through.

“What?! Hey, no fair, I’m a clown doctor! Let me through too!”

Fluttershy stopped just long enough to give an apologetic grimace back. “I’ll meet you back in the waiting area.”

There was no hurry left to the doctors by the time Fluttershy slipped between the green privacy curtain. Twilight’s eyes had rolled far back in her head, and she’d vomited up a lot of blood. Her fur and bedsheets had been soaked with it. With that much internal hemorrhaging, even trying CPR would have just made things worse. One was reading time of death, while three nurses worked out the grim practicalities of cleaning the bed for the next patient.

“I’m so sorry,” the nurse that had bodyblocked her outside the curtains leaned next to Fluttershy. “But I wanted you to know, there was nothing you could have done.”

Fluttershy swallowed the lump in her throat, and was careful to watch her step as she made her way to Twilight’s side. “Please, Twilight, stop scaring us like this? Imagine if Pinkie had seen, this time.”

She didn’t like how the doctors and nurses were staring at her, but she didn’t know if she was allowed to explain, yet.

The questing Twilight stormed out of the dining car. The reassurance had gone as well as she could have hoped, given how bad a mistake she had made. “Neither of you are as subtle as you think.”

Awkward silences are different when you can hear the tumbling rush of panicked thoughts that are happening beneath the frozen expressions.

“Sorry.” Ponyville Twilight bit her lip. Canterlot Twilight was forced to keep a poker face for her dinner guests, instead.

“But you know what I think of, when I think about trying to get that close to someone, again? I think of Her.” The Twilight on the train cast a quick spell, and fixed the shattered glass she remembered being forced through. “When’s the last time either of you teleported? Because that’s what we’d do to them. That’s who we are.” She shouted it, so it rang in her own ears.

The Twilight in Canterlot apologized to her guests. No, that joke had been very funny, and she hadn’t taken offense at all. It was a stray thought that had upset her so much.

The Appleoosan Twilight finally, finally managed to stand on wobbly legs, and wipe the snot bubbles from her nose. Alone, now. The snot was bloody, too, but at least this time it really was mostly snot. The irony wasn’t lost on her that she’d be the one to live.

For a fraction of a fraction of a second, she’d been the Master again. All at once, there had been excitement at reunion, the realization that this Twilight was coming back, the exaltation at a messenger, and the desperate need to fill the vessel with everything - everything - that would fit.

It had almost killed her. The rest couldn’t handle all of that, plus all their own senses on top of it.

She collapsed, dry heaving, against a cave wall. She forced it down. Just her, now. So much easier on her. Whatever the Master Twilight was, though, teleporting had recharged her, had brought the magic of this body back on her side of the network. Had made her think faster, again, wider, more. Had made her even more impossible to fit back into a brain.

So that was why there had been so many, more than they could handle. It was the only way the Master Twilight could slow herself down, could try to talk to them. Those throbbing headaches, obviously. To get her back down to that level…

“She’d need to make another nine of us.” Twilight grimaced. “Since I kept my body this time.” Her eyes shot wide. “Wait, stop! Don’t!”

Another appeared in Canterlot.

The empathetic wave crushed both of them to their knees again. What had happened to the Master since they were first made? It hadn’t been so painful, then. It had just felt like… waking up from a dream.

Canterlot Twilight croaked, twitching, fetal on warm bathroom tiles. “I remember being all of them.”

Appleoosa Twilight screwed her eyes shut and pressed her head as hard into the cold stone of the cave wall as she could, trying to match the internal pressure of her skull with the external. “I don’t.”

The Twilight in Canterlot managed to force the words out no matter how hard her jaw wanted to clench itself shut. “You came from your spell. I came from hers.”

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Please, please I’m so sorry!”

Canterlot Twilight shifted. She remembered being the body she was laying next to. At least the smell of lavender soap cut through. “We’re going to have to keep doing that. Talking to her.”

“No! I’m sorry! No, sorry, no, no, sorry-”

“Twilight!” Canterlot Twilight shouted so hard her jaw clicked.

“No!”

“If we don’t, the headaches are just going to keep getting worse. You felt how desperate she is. If we don’t, she’s just going to try in other ways.”

“I can’t! I can’t do that again!”

Canterlot Twilight spat, and steadied herself upright. “She knows how bad she messed up. She’s going to do her best not to hurt us like that again.” One of eight bodies. She felt guilty that other ponies would have to handle the other seven, that wasn’t fair to them. “Trust me.”

Her horn wouldn’t stop glowing. It wouldn’t stop glowing until it had flared off about seven unicorns worth of magic, she guessed. The Master’s mind was incomprehensible to the Twilights, now, but apparently it still needed to make mistakes to learn from them. Even fatal ones.

Of course, the Canterlot Twilight learned - and so the Appleoosan Twilight knew too - the Master would always keep power in reserve. Just enough to keep Twilight in the world. The Master loved how much she knew and she still loved learning, she was only suffering because she couldn’t share that. But the more she grew, the more distant she felt from the only parts of herself that she could share with other people.

No matter how hard it got for the Master, she had to exist as something real. There had to be something of her that could move through the world to be with her friends. They might be sad to see her suffer, but they’d hurt worse to see her gone.

The Twilight in the cave sniffled. “I think I need to go to Ponyville. Fluttershy and Pinkie were-”

“Yeah.”

“Are you somewhere dark? Can we…” That Twilight trailed off awkwardly, knowing what she was asking. “I don’t want to be this me anymore. I want to be the us that can handle this.”

Canterlot Twilight set her jaw, wondering where they’d keep garbage bags in the palace. She took a deep breath. “Yeah. Okay. Just close your eyes. Try to match my breathing. Now-”

One Twilight opened two pairs of eyes again.