Bon Bon took off down the left hallway, not yet realizing that she’d been separated from Trixie. She ran aimlessly down the dark hallways, trying to somehow stumble upon the door to the stairwell. She tripped, falling face first onto the floor. She scrambled back to her feet to continue running, not realizing that she’d fallen into a puddle on corruption, and that it had drenched the upper half of her body. It wasn’t until her vision started to distort and pixelate that she discovered her mistake, and by then it was too late.

What followed felt to her like she’d just been injected with anesthesia, and she was the patient now defiantly trying to stay awake for as long as possible. Her pace slowed, panic setting in as she desperately tried to stay awake, to resist the darkness’s influence. She turned another corner, now finding herself on a hallway with a window facing the moon. She took a glace outside, seeing her reflection in the glass. The left side of her face was the most affected, her mouth on that side bent into a twisted smile against her will, her eye on that side lacking its pupil, now just a blank white void opened to a terrifying degree. Her right side was the opposite, her mouth opened in a silent scream, while her right eye’s pupil had shrunk so much in terror that it didn’t look too much different from her left one.

“Hello, Bon Bon.” A voice said from behind her. With a jolt, Bon Bon looked behind her.

What greeted her was none other than Lyra, whom she learned then was the unknown third corrupted whom had been stalking them. She didn’t look corrupted, nor did she sound it, simply standing in the middle of the hallway about ten feet away. It was a strangely beautiful sight, Bon Bon’s best friend, seemingly uncorrupted, standing stock still in the hallway, her eyes closed and the moonlight shining brightly against her skin, illuminating the fairness of her light blue skin and locks of hair on the side facing the window. She was dressed in her usual school attire, a pink shirt, blue skirt and purple boots. Her eyes were closed, her arms raised slightly above her shoulders and spread out. In the moment her friend seemed almost angelic, fitting considering the feelings they had recently expressed for one another, before Canterlot city was plunged into eternal night. Everything else about the scene before her had the exact opposite tone, the darkness covering the hallway swirling around Lyra’s form, long tendrils of it wrapping around the lower portions of her legs and boots.

“Lyra?” Bon Bon questioned in a low whisper filled with disbelief. “Is it really you?”

“Of course it’s me, silly!” She replied, opening her eyes one by one, revealing their bright orange irises which stared straight at her. The tendrils surrounding her legs fell away, allowing her to walk towards and then past Bon Bon down the hallway. “Come, we need to talk.” She said, motioning for her friend to follow as she turned left down another hallway. Bon Bon followed, not noticing that she no longer felt like she was being forcefully put to sleep, or that she had full control over her face again.

She turned down the hallway, breaking into a brief jog in order to catch up to her friend.

“I- I can’t believe it’s you.” Bon Bon said in disbelief, her eyes starting to tear up. “I thought I’d lost you!”

“Lost is a strong word, Bon Bon.” Lyra replied. “There’s so much that you don’t understand, for now at least.” She paused, taking a deep breath. “Just know that you never lost me. What you see as me being taken away, turned into some mindless monster...” Her voice trailed off as she lifted her left arm and extended it to the wall beside her, allowing a small tendril of corruption to briefly grasp it. “Is actually just me being freed from the metaphorical strings that I never knew I had, and taking on a new form as a result.”

“W-what do you mean?’

“You don’t get it, do you?” She questioned. “Nevermind, I know you don’t, not yet at least.” She said in a solemn tone. “To put it simply, I’ve learned the truth, the truth about our existence, and how this quote-unquote ‘darkness’ as you call it, is the key to finally escaping, and being able to be who we want to be.” She looked over at Bon Bon, who still seemed confused. “You know Sunset and her friends, don’t you?”

“Yeah? What about them?”

“You don’t understand just how important they are, not just to keep this world safe from the magic that they brought here, but for our very existence as a whole.”

Bon Bon chose not to respond, instead waiting until Lyra continued.

“Without them, our world as we know it simply can’t exist. Why is something beyond me even now. Just know, that if the darkness never interfered, that movie date we were supposed to go on in a few days? It never would have happened. At one moment sometime before then, we all would have simply stopped existing. Why? Because the story of Sunset and her friends would have ended before then.” She explained, her voice becoming noticeably angrier towards the end.

“I- I don’t understand, Lyra.” Bon Bon questioned.

“Don’t ̖̋ẏ͖ỏ̹u ̹̉g͍̣͇͒̿̅e̖̅̚ͅt̞̽͐͛͜͜ ̨̫͓͎̐̽̊͌͒ͅi͈͍͖͉̜͌̽͂̾͡t̗̫͇̥͖̒͛̈̆̚?̬̟͔̲͈́̎̓̈́!̧̪̰̲̜͛̑͌̏̚” Lyra yelled. “Our lives never mattered, Bon Bon! None of ours did! The only people in this world who ever mattered were those seven! All the rest of us were were background pieces!” She exclaimed, turning back to face Bon Bon and using wild hand gestures to exemplify her point.

Bon Bon recoiled and took a few steps back in response to her friend’s outburst. Lyra calmed down seeing her reaction, taking a brief pause before continuing.

“But there’s another way.” She said in a low tone. “A way for us to live happily, just you... and me. The two of us, Bon Bon. Together, forever. We can live in paradise for all eternity, in a world where we’re in charge of our own story. In order to make it happen, though, you must give up your mind. Give up everything that ties you down to this show, look into the dark...” She said, her eyes drifitng towards the darkness that infested the wall to her left. “And take a dive.” She finished, before stepping face first into the corruption, her body seemlessly melting into it.

Bon Bon once again lurched back at the actions and words of her friend, slipping on the corruption coating the floor and falling on her behind.

“L-lyra? Where are you?!” She cried, her mind starting to come back to the reality of the situation.

“T̛̹h̦̾eř̳e̝̅'ll̜͡ b̯̉e ͖̔n̮͘o good̲̓b̰́ye̦̽s...̛̯” Lyra’s disembodied voice chanted, seemingly coming from all directions at once. Bon Bon scrambled to her feet, taking off back down the hallway in a mindless panic.

“A n d we’ll p l a y f0rever. . .” Lyra’s voice said again. “Come on Bon Bon! Join me! Join U̝̍S̞͌!” Her voice said again, the voices of Cherilee and Silver spoon joining in for the word ‘us.’

Bon Bon ignored her, continuing to run aimlessly through the hallways. She had no idea where she was or where she was going, her mind too filled with adrenaline, and the hallways too coated in corruption in order for anything to be percieved besides up, down, left or right. The darkness covering her body once again started to try taking control from her body again. Bon Bon resisted fiercely, now fueled by a new, dark determination to make it out of here, not just for herself, but for any hope that might remain of saving her best friend.

“Don’t make me do this, Bon Bon.” The voice of Lyra called from behind her, followed by the sound of a new set of footsteps rapidly approaching from behind her. “Because it’s going to hurt you a lot more than it’s going to hurt me!” She called, her voice becoming much more violent and malicious.

Bon Bon grit her teeth, followed by her right fist, only for it to be stopped by the feeling of cold steel in the same hand.

The gun.

In all the chaos and confusion of what had just happened, Bon Bon had somehow forgotten that she was holding it the entire time, although in her defense the sensation in her hands was minimal at best due to the dark splotches of corruption staining her skin in that area.

She turned down another hallway, leaning herself up against the wall while she examined and checked the gun for ammo. Most of the magazine was still full, since she had only used around four bullets before then. A dark thought then creeped into her head: Could she really bring herself to use it on her best friend? Would it kill her?

Before she could answer her own question, the corrupted form of Lyra turned the corner, skidding to a halt upon seeing her target. In stark contrast to how she’d appeared mere minutes before, she was now fully engulfed by the corruption, her appearence now similar to Cherilee’s and Silver Spoon’s. Despite this, her voice still sounded hauntingly normal when she next spoke.

“Aw, really sweetie? You’d shoot your best friend in the name of saving your own skin?” She laughed, dark droplets of corruption spewing from her smiling mouth as she did so. “I underestimated you!”

Bon Bon took another step back, positioning herself in the center of the hallway with the gun drawn and pointed at Lyra.

“Please Lyra! I know you’re still in there! You have to fight it! This isn’t who you want to be!” She begged, her hands shaking as she gripped the trigger.

Lyra gave another small chuckle, bending over and placing her right hand over her right eye. “Oh Bon Bon, don’t you get it?” She said, standing straight up again and removing the hand from her eye, revealing its uncorrupted iris underneath. “I am exactly who I want to be.” She smiled again, this time it being more like a smirk. Bon Bon’s eyes widened in horror at the sight of her friend, one side of her face corrupted and the other not, the iris of her uncorrupted eye staring straight at her. She extended her right arm off to the side, revealing the fingers on that hand reshapened into long and pixelated claws. She gave another quick chuckle, before leaping into the air and bringing her clawed hand down towards Bon Bon’s face. She reacted just in time, aiming the gun directly at her wrist and firing, causing droplets of corruption, blood and bone fragments to fly out from the impact site. Lyra cried out in agony, losing control in the air and falling down, giving Bon Bon crucial time to start running again.

Bon Bon turned another corner, hearing Lyra still agonizing hehind her in a strangely normal voice, making her feel even worse about having to shoot her.

“What kind of friend are you?!” Lyra’s voice said in an accusing tone. “We could have been happy together! All you had to do was give in! Forget it! If I can’t have you, NO ONE CAN.”

The sound of Lyra’s infuriated voice and footsteps closed in fast again behind her, and Bon Bon turned around again, ready to fire. This time, without thinking about it, Bon Bon aimed for a much more lethal point: Her face. Just as Lyra prepared to attack again, she pulled the trigger, this time the bullet going clean through her uncorrupted eye and out the back, causing her to fall back and down on her back on the floor, like she’d just run into a wood plank hanging in front of her face where the bullet had hit.

Bon Bon stopped in her tracks, the true gravity of what she’d just done finally hitting her like a ton of bricks. She collapsed to the floor next to Lyra’s body, beginning to sob.

“L-lyra.. no...” She said, sobbing, her tears a mix of saline and droplets of the corruption that still covered her face. She looked back up and around at the darkness-covered hallways, spotting Cherilee and Silver Spoon peering at her around a corner not too far away. They didn’t bother attacking though, determining that Bon Bon was at the end of her rope anyway. And so, they simply stalked away.

Bon Bon looked back to Lyra’s corpse. With that final bullet, any willpower she’d had to survive was completely gone. She was alone. All of her friends, teachers and classmates were either dead or corrupted, and the one thing she’d been holding onto, the hope that she could get away and find some way to cure her best friend, lay dead in front of her. She gritted her teeth in a sudden flash of anger before checking the magazine of the gun. One bullet remained. ”That’s enough.” she said to herself, now placing the gun to her temple. This darkness had taken everything from her, and in a spur of the moment decision, she decided she wouldn’t let it have her out of pure spite.

Before she could pull the trigger one final time though, Lyra’s body below her suddenly jerked back to life once more. She shot up faster than Bon Bon could react. “NOOOOOOOOOO!!!” She cried out, tackling Bon Bon and sending the two of them carreening through a nearby window.

Together, they both fell, all ten stories down onto the pavement below.

Author's Note

Case Study #1- The Corrupted

World: My Little Pony: Equestria Girls.

It should be pretty obvious to anyone reading this what the corrupted are. Whether you refer to them as the corrupted, the afflicted, the infected, monstrosities, etc. the corrupted refers to any and all characters who have been enslaved by the corruption in one way or another. There is only one way for a character to be corrupted, and that is by direct, prolonged contact with the corruption itself. On paper, this doesn’t seem too hard at first glance, but considering just how much of it there can be, and then add to this the ones under its influence doing everything they can to spread it themselves, this task very quickly becomes very difficult, borderline impossible for all but the strongest characters in a given world.

While the corrupted all have one thing in common: being under the darknesses influence, how exactly they are affected can vary greatly.

Anomaly Type #1: Voided Characters.

Voided Characters are defined as any and all characters medically dead either directly prior to or during corruption. These anomalies are easy to identify, all of them sporting a bright red glow eminating from the center of one or both eyes. These characters cannot be saved, the obvious reason being that they’re dead. If the corruption were to somehow be removed from a Voided character, all that would remain would be their corpse, the corruption using their bodies basically as a puppet.

While easy to identify, Voided characters are extremely dangerous, again because of the fact that they’re dead. Because they’re dead and gone, the corruption is able to take control of their bodies to the fullest, since the host no longer has a consiousness that can fight back. The result of this is beings that are extraordinarily violent by default, and these anomalies will not hesitate to kill any survivors they find, in contrast to normal corrupted who simply aim to corrupt others. This tendency to kill is doubly serious when you realize death is what creates Void anomalies in the first place.

The recently observed case of a survivor named Bon Bon within this world serves as a case in point when it comes to Void anomalies. While the use of firearms is very effective at disabling or otherwise incapacitating the corrupted, one must be careful with where they aim to avoid killing the target and subsequently voiding them. In this particular case, by shooting and killing Cherilee, Silver Spoon and Lyra in their corrupted forms, Bon Bon unknowingly Voided all three, rendering them completely unsavable, and much more dangerous threats for any other survivors.

The case of the character Lyra stands out to us however. For reasons unknown as of this publishing, she was seemingly aware of her situation, to a shockingly unsettling extent. Why exactly this has happened is some too early to determine, but we will continue studying this and other worlds and give an update soon.

For anyone who may be wondering what Lyra is referring to when she says that the story of Sunset and her friends ends, it’s a reference to how, because of it’s cancelation, the last time we see Sunset and her friends is in the Holidays Unwrapped special, specifically the “O Come, All Ye Squashful” short. The implication here is that because of the Darknesses invasion, the original timeline of how the show was supposed to end has been completely derailed, leading into this story.

Again, like I said in the description for this little story, I would highly suggest going and reading my much longer, more in-depth work When Darkness Falls if you’ve enjoyed this, which will eventually build upon what’s happened here, where Equestria and subsequently Twilight and her friends are in all this, and even how the Darkness has affected other cartoon universes far and wide.