𝄆
-And Twilight's hoof recoils away from the object with a gasp, and it's too cold and too hot, and the air rushing in is the desperate choke of a drowning pony.
“Whoa, hey! What gives?” says the purple and turquoise to her left, and she hears her but does not turn, eyes fixed on her hoof, waiting for it to feel normal.
"I - I've been here before."
And she smirks, because Starlight always smirks. “You live here. Of course-”
“No. Here. This instant. This instance. I think-” and she shakes her head, because what she is thinking only barely exists as a thought, some afterimage of something concrete. “This has been before.”
And now Starlight is concerned, which she should be. “What, like deja vu?”
“Yes, I think,” but it doesn’t feel like deja vu. “Maybe? It's-” and there is a hole in Twilight's memory, and there are never holes in Twilight's memory, and the hole is wavy and square and there are too many ways in and out of the space in her mind like mane spilling out of Applejack’s ponytail, a hundred thousand golden threads bundled into one smear. “It's that … thing.” She looks at the thing on the workbench and she can see it with her eyes and hear it hum and she knows it’s real but it's too crooked in its place to be a thing and she can see too many sides of it at once, faces and facets like a fun-house mirror. “I-I think I've been here with that before.”
“Twilight, deja vu usually means a miscast spell.” The unicorn cocks her head, like she can't see that thing in the room. "What were you doing just a moment ago?"
"I was doing-" and there is that hole again, because every time she tries to place a moment before this moment it is the same moment "-doing this. Exactly this. I was doing this. I am doing this."
"Doing what?"
"Doing what we are doing." What were, no, what are they doing? "What are we doing? What were we doing?"
"Artifact analysis?" Starlight gestures towards the thing. "From the dig? Y’know, the one you dug up?"
“Yeah, sorry. Just a little … lost.” It was an artifact. That made sense. “I think I remember.” And maybe Twilight remembers; she couldn’t remember if she did or not. “What is it?”
“Uh,” and Starlight snorts a laugh, but Twilight doesn’t get the joke, “Yeah, great question, Twilight. That's why we’re doing this, remember?”
"Right," and Twilight allows herself another look at the thing, and she can see the color of it but it isn't a color like how deja vu isn't Ponish, like a macroscopic piece of ontological errata, a shoe sticking out of a filing cabinet. “Uh, Starlight, does it – does it look like–” and Twilight tries her best to figure out what it looked like, and all of her vast catalogs of visual references come up empty. “What – what do you see when you look at it?”
She smirks again, like it was obvious. “Dirt. Stone. Some carvings of circles. Exactly what we wrote down a few minutes ago.” She levitates up a clipboard and taps on it, and the hoofwriting on the sheet of paper clipped to it is Twilight’s, but she doesn’t remember writing anything. “We already got the visual part, remember?”
“Sorry, yeah, I forgot.” But she hadn’t forgotten, because Twilight didn’t forget things, but if and when she did forget things there would be an epiphany, a set of fireworks across her memory in celebration of making her ironclad recollection of things whole again, and there had been absolutely nothing in her mind when Starlight showed her her own writing, and Twilight shakes her head, because, seeing how the other option did not make sense, maybe she really had miscast a spell and that was why she was seeing and thinking weird things which happens sometimes when a horn fizzles a bad spell-draw, fleeting thoughts the half remembered ashes of a spell that was not and had not been. “Right, yeah. Sorry. What's next?”
“I’m doing a spectrograph spell on it to date it,” and her assistant's horn lights. "Ready to boost me?"
And, briefly, there is some fizzle of remembrance, some ember of knowledge which flits and flutters around the shape in her mind that isn't a shape, but she ignores her memory because what is coming out of the linear thread of thought is a messy foal’s bow-tie knot on the ribbons of presents, and Twilight nods, and Starlight's horn lights and a field snakes towards the thing, and Twilight lights her horn and field meets field and her field and her field meet thing and it's-
All wrong.
And as field touches thing it disappears - no, drowns, sinks like water through the hole of a pail, not dissipated but just gone, no longer present, no longer extant,and the air in Twilight's lungs is lead-heavy and it stops in them, and she can feel the magic flow into that un-space and the color goes from not-color to all of them, ones not named and could never be named, and the thing is hungry for magic and matter and conceptsand it is consuming the things in the room which are all losing their meaning by the moment, it's the same moment as the last moment, and she turns left to where Starlight is and Starlight isn't, it's a hole in rationality occupied by a puddle of lilac and not-quite lilac and it has wavy edges that don't end, and Twilight knows she has to end this thing, that this thing won't stop at her or the door or the roof or the town or until what is isn't being in the way things are, and her field is dead and her lungs are burning and with all she has left she raises her hoof and pulls back and swings at the thing in front of her-
𝄇
