When the cool brush of fresh air breathes past Twilight's cheek, she knows she is no longer alone.
"..."
The urge to call out a "hello" or "who's there" is incredibly strong and just as stupid as it is dangerous. Still, it wouldn't do for whoever is here to find her splayed out and half-broken on the floor. She carefully levers herself upright, biting down the pained whimpers and groans that long to eke out through her clenched, silent teeth.
The flagstone floor of the Castle of the Two Sisters is cold, but the stale air is positively frigid without sunlight or life to warm it. Twilight glances up at the cloth covered window, an old habit. It’s not as if it would tell her anything useful about the time of day—as if time was a useful construct anymore. There was nothing to mark the passing of hours, not even the gnaw hunger, even that was too omnipresent and constant: an unceasing tide that never ebbed.
"Hello?"
Twilight's ears flick forward, her body tense.
"Hello?" The voice calls again, a little closer.
"Rarity...?" Twilight rasps out, slamming her jaw shut too late to stop the traitorous words from slipping free. Stupid!
She takes a muffled step back, another, and another, until she’s backed against the wall, the dead stone pressing into her flesh and leeching yet more warmth from her tired body. Half a thought about heat and thermodynamics and the universe forms in her mind for the briefest instant, only to be snuffed out just as quickly as it had come.
"Hello?" The voice calls again, and there she is, out of the corner of Twilight’s eye, standing in the doorway.
Rarity.
Her white coat is luminous in the gloom, dazzlingly bright. Like a full moon in the middle of the sea, it blurs the darkness like a chandelier. She turns her head to peer around the room, and the breeze carries her scent with the motion, so fresh and clean. The front door must still be open, Twilight realizes, blinking her dry eyes furiously to try to bring Rarity into clearer focus, but she hasn't had water in two days and there is nothing to moisten her eyes, nothing to aid in bringing clarity, in bringing Rarity into focus.
Twilight shouldn’t even be looking at Rarity sidelong like this. It’s dangerous.
"Twilight. Twilight, is that you, darling? Good heavens." Rarity, or the blob of fuzzy white that looks and sounds and smells so much like her, trots towards Twilight. Her hoofsteps are so loud and sure, so unmuffled—nothing like Twilight's own, not since she had taken to wrapping them in cloth to deaden the noise of her existence, to evade and avoid and hide, like a coward—
"Twilight, it's alright, dear," Rarity coaxes, her steps slowing, and Twilight knows that the fear must have shown plainly on her face.
"You can't be here, Rarity," she croaks out.
"But I am," Rarity answers simply.
"How did you find me?"
"Well I am your best friend, darling. Surely that counts for something?"
Twilight jerks her head to the side. Don't look, don't look at her, it's not her, it can't be—
"Twilight, will you please look at me?" A gentle white hoof reaches towards her chin.
"No." Twilight sidesteps the hoof. The broken stairway yawns behind her, and she shudders as the dungeon-like chill creeps across her skin.
"Please, Twilight. Please look at me."
"I'm sorry, Rarity. But you know I can't do that." Twilight takes one final step backwards, into thin air, and for a moment, as her gut drops and she falls… she is finally free.
Is this what flying feels like? She wonders. I wish I could ask Rainbow.
And then her head meets the stairs, stone winning over bone, and everything turns to peaceful, blessed black.
"That was incredibly foolish, Twilight Sparkle," Rarity scolds.
“—!” Twilight wakes with a start, her eyes instinctively popping open, and then half shut—but there is nothing to worry about, because some sort of cool compress has been laid across them. It feels nice.
"And I mean really foolish. Far be it from me to call anything you do stupid, but I think you really outdid yourself here. What were you thinking?"
"That the Rarity I know is gone," Twilight answers dully, pressing her head back into the soft cushion beneath her. Rarity's stomach, she realizes, by the scent and clammy warmth.
"The Rarity you know is right here," she retorts sharply.
"Is she?" Twilight mutters.
"I saved you, you know," Rarity snaps. "The least you could do is thank me, or maybe at least promise not to do it again."
"But then, that would be lying." Twilight shivers, feeling around the ground with her hoof. Sharp, dead grass pokes into her flesh, turning to dust before the pointy blades can do more than poke vaguely at her frog. "This world is dead, Rares. Pretending anything else is just a lie." Frankly, Twilight isn't entirely sure why she'd been trying so hard to stay hidden. It started out, she considers numbly, as thinking she could solve the issue. Like a friendship problem. Like an equation.
But ultimately… maybe the reason she had not given up, as it were, was down to her deep-rooted fear of losing control. That sounds right to her exhausted mind, or at least good enough. Twilight had never been much good at uncertainties. She had always preferred to deal in facts and absolutes and truths. She does her best to push Applejack’s smiling face from her mind as it flashes past on the heels of that thought.
Unknowable time and silence stretches between them, Rarity too affronted to speak, and Twilight too dead inside to attempt it.
"So why were you looking for me?" Twilight finally prompts with a sigh.
"Because you're my friend," Rarity says, sounding thoroughly wounded.
Twilight snorts. "You really believe that."
"There's no need to be so hurtful," Rarity mumbles, and the tears in her voice are real enough to break Twilight’s heart.
Twilight sighs again, long and low. She presses a hoof to the still-damp cloth covering her eyes.
"On some level you must know. You wouldn't have covered my eyes otherwise." Twilight smiles, rueful. "A part of you, the real you, however small, is still inside." It’s oddly reassuring.
"All of me is the real me," Rarity insists. "I don't know why you think otherwise."
"Alright, let's try a different line of questions," Twilight decides, her hoof dropping listlessly to the ground. "How's the weather?"
"The weather? Be serious, Twilight."
"I am," she insists right back. "Describe it to me. Don't leave any details out."
"You could just look yourself," Rarity says, still peeved.
"I want to see the world as you see it," Twilight answers simply. "You have such an artistic eye."
Rarity doesn't have an answer for that, if her stretching silence is anything to go by.
Uncountable moments pass, marked only by breaths and Twilight's sluggish heart.
"It's a beautiful day in Equestria," she finally, grudgingly, says. "The grass has gotten long since March, and it ripples and dances in the breeze in cascading, gentle waves of waving green. The sky is a deep, dark, clear blue, and the moon is shining bright. It's full."
"Just like always?"
"Yes, just like always!" Rarity cries, her muscles clenching under where Twilight’s head still rests. "It's gorgeous and white and graceful the way it always is, the way it's always been! What is the matter with you, Twilight? You're scaring me."
"I could say the same for you." Twilight reaches up to fiddle with the compress again. She tries not to think about the precious water that has been wasted in preparing it, tries not to think about what awaits her on the other side of it.
I am inevitable.
The words ring through her head, through her body, through her very soul like a heartbeat. Insistent. Present.
Inevitable.
"I'm tired," Twilight says.
"Then let's go home," Rarity sniffles. "We can both go home."
"I'd like that." And Twilight would. She just also knows that home doesn't exist anymore.
"I would, too." Rarity sniffles again, and two teardrops patter onto Twilight's dusty coat, and she flinches. Regardless of the source or meaning, they are real, physically. Rarity's feelings are, too, even if she doesn't realize how they'd been twisted and turned.
"Let's go together, then," Twilight decides. She presses her hoof down on her eyes, the cloth muting the pressure.
"Do you mean it?" Twilight has never heard Rarity sound so dubious.
"Mhm," she affirms. "I'm... tired." Of running, hiding, surviving—all alone.
"Then let's go, Twilight." Rarity says, her voice a tremulous whisper. "Let's go home."
Twilight tugs the cloth off her face and opens her eyes.
The abyss of space stares back: mostly void, partial stars. She glances up at Rarity, who is indeed crying. Her eyes are red, and it’s impossible to say if it’s from her tears or from the madness that stretches her pupils impossibly wide, her irises thin rings of blue that almost can’t contain them.
Twilight sits up slowly, creakily, painfully. "Show me the moon, Rares."
"It's right there," Rarity hiccups, pointing her hoof forward. "It's so bright, can't you see it?"
Twilight turns, and sure enough there It sits.
A perfectly circular, impossibly black hole punched right through what had once been the sun.
Tendrils of It’s light spread lazily out from It’s center in a sleepy spiral, and Twilight's eyes burn as she stares into its maddening core. It shines down darkly on the sea of dead grass and dusty earth and the skeletal hands of long-dead trees that break up the horizon. They’re in the middle of Sweet Apple Acres, Twilight realizes. Or whatever little was left of it, with no sun or rain or earth pony magic to feed its growth.
"Tell me about It, Rarity."
"What?" She asked. "But I already did."
"Tell me more, about the s—moon," Twilight insists. "Describe it like you did with Sweet Apple Acres earlier like... like a painting."
"A painting?"
Twilight nods, the edges of her vision darkening. "I want to see what you see."
Author's Note
I hope you enjoyed my nebulously spoopy horsewords.
Thanks for reading!
🌙
