Number One Fan

Chapters

Number One Fan

Number One Fan

“What do you mean ‘that was the last train’!?”

The frustrated exclamation echoed across the train station louder than even the hustle and bustle of the operating station and the ponies there. Other ponies turned towards the source of the commotion: A chubby, dark purple pegasus, wearing smart, thick-rimmed glasses, with an untidy mane that looked like Neapolitan ice cream – that is, predominantly bright pink with a streak of brown and white in it – and the stuttering little attendant she had just yelled at.

The poor train attendant mare was just confused and scared. Like other ponies looking on, she couldn’t get over the fact that an up-and-coming writer like Crazy Quills was chewing her out like this over the lack of late trains. The pegasi and the winter are to blame for that! Why was miss Crazy Quills so pissed at her? She wanted to yell back at the writer, to put her in her place… But she had a job to keep and her stutter wouldn’t be any help. Besides, pissing off the pudgy purple pony seemed like the worst possible idea, given their size difference.

For her part, Crazy Quills knew better than this; she knew the attendant was just doing her job and that missing the train wasn’t the attendant’s fault. But she just didn’t care at the moment. A book-signing in Canterlot, in the middle of a cold winter, had not gone too well. In fact, today she rather regretted ever putting quill to paper to write the start of her ongoing book series, the Raiders’ Quest.

Briefly, she reflected on her so-far career; the first book, Raiders of the Storm, had been a slow but sure success: the epic tale of the Estella Kingdom and its fall at the machinations of the evil dog lich Shavreed and the narrow escape of a hoof-full of survivors who then set out to find a way to avenge the fallen kingdom and end Shavreed’s reign of terror.

It was a great big ball of cliché, she knew it. But the way she could balance seriousness with unexpected bouts of downright bizarre humour (such as her ‘obsession’ with pink cephalopods or hats that sung jazz), her use of unexpected twists, turning the cliché on its head and her vibrant characters make it good. She wasn’t after high-brow literature; she just wanted to tell
her readers a fun and exciting story about unlikely heroes that could take them on a fun journey of their own.

There was Princess Stargazer, the unicorn princess who may not be that gifted in magic but will discover her talent to bring ponies together as a ruler; her loyal knight Sharpe Edge, a battle-tested pegasus with nerves of steel and his loyal squire, young Valiant – oh he’s a promising character, that one. And then there’s Witless. He’s the real protagonist. He’s just a humble young unicorn bard, who never thought of himself as particularly brave. But he’s just starting to find out
that he’s a cunning little colt who’ll think very quick on his hooves when he has to. And that’s just so far.

The first book’s success had been a bit of a shock to her, though. She hadn’t been ready for all that... well, adoration the fans showed. Sure, the book had nothing on the on-going Daring-Doo stories (she was a huge fan too, she never hid that; in fact, she wanted her books to give ponies the same excitement). But the book sold. Ponies loved the story.

And after her initial delight... well, she went and buckled under the terror that she wouldn’t be able to deliver a second book of that quality. That breakdown had cost her a bit of her peace of mind, a year’s worth of wasted time and the book came out late. Three months later, it still caused quite a stir, as evidenced from the way the book signing went.

Fallen Kingdom had not sat well with many fans. The company had plodded on through the scorched ruins of Estella and practically tumbled down to the valleys beyond the border, with one of Shavreed’s minions, the traitorous Count Caudecus and his band of evil undead hounds, hot on their heels. That was fine. It was some other things that her fans were grumbling about and with whom she had to deal with. Still, oodles of them came to the signing to get their copies signed. She’d always appreciate feedback, but when so many ponies wanted her to give more of the spotlight to their favourite character or start an out-of-the-blue relationship between two entirely unrelated characters because “it’s meant to be”, it all started to wear on her, especially towards the end of it. Combined with missing the train due to the crazy fans holding her up, she felt justified in being unusually sharp.

Her usual cheerful, eccentric and somewhat spacey attitude was being smothered under metric tons of mental exhaustion, disappointment and an overwhelming desire to just go home. To Ponyville. The attendant mare snapped her back into reality.

“I’m-I’m-I’m sorry, Miss Quills,” the attendant meekly said, “B-b-b-bu-but the l-late t-t-trains—“

“Oh, gosh, you don’t have to apologise,” Quills replied, suddenly overtaken by the expression and cuteness of the meek little snow-white unicorn attendant with the stutter, “I’m sorry Iyelled at you. I...I’m really tired.”

The mare just stared at her with a very worried look. “I...I understand m-m’am, but there-there’s r-r-really nothing I-I-I can do...”

Quills just huffed, lowering her head a bit and drooped her ears, just staring at the cold cobblestones of the Canterlot train station. It was snowing. She then stood straight and flicked her tail.

“I suppose I’ll just wing it back to Ponyville,” she said and turned around and away from the attendant.

She rummaged through her saddlebags and retrieved her vintage brass flight goggles. She never left home without them. She quickly fitted them on and after a running start, took off into the snowfall with a flap of her wings. After a few wobbly first meters, she got into a good rhythm (it’s never easy flying when you’re a chubby pony). As she flew away from Canterlot proper, she kept an eye on the road below her, through the snow, and tried her best to follow it.

She was sure she heard the meek little attendant pony say something just as she flew off, but she couldn’t hear her words. The little unicorn reminded her of a yellow pegasus she had befriended back in Ponyville. They had the same pale violet hair, by some odd coincidence.

The snowfall hitting her face and the chilly wind engulfing her while she flew made her shiver. She thought of Fluttershy, huddled in a warm blanket in front of a fireplace with Angel Bunny and all her non-hibernating woodland friends. It didn’t matter how short a time she knew Fluttershy and her friends; those six young mares were just so friendly and inviting that it hadn’t taken long to become friends with them.

Thinking of Fluttershy inevitably made her think of her own pet fruit bat, Poptart. That pink little blighter must be hanging around Fluttershy, making an utter nuisance of himself. He was awfully fond of Fluttershy, so before she left for Canterlot, Quills had left him in her care, so he wouldn’t get in the way of her Sunny’s cooking and running the bistro. Poptart was a small bat, but he could be a real pest if he wanted to and the last time she’d left the two of them alone to go visit her family in Trottika, Sunny’s kitchen was a disaster zone.

The wind had gotten stronger and chillier, and her goggles were getting covered by snow that hit her in the face as she flew. She was starting to get mad again. Thinking about Fluttershy and Poptart and Sunny and everypony just made her even more homesick than she already was. Her train of thought turned to current matters… which reminded her that she could have been warm and sleeping it all off on the train if she hadn’t been held over by the fan-ponies that wouldn’t take no for an answer when it came to their shipping and denial about the way the story was going. Even the promise that the third book would be done within the year couldn’t keep them calm.

The problem with some fans, she thought, is that they think they own you and forget you're just another pony who can get tired and cranky. I want to go home. I haven’t even had a cola all day...

Ah, cola. She loved that soda. She never drank coffee – cola was all she needed. It was even on her cutie-mark, along with a quill-totting inkwell. Sunny would joke that was her talent: cola-fuelled writing.

She realized that with all this thinking, she hadn’t been paying attention to her course and told herself she could grumble all she wanted when she was home, with Sunny and having a big mug of hot cocoa. She looked down and found the road again just as it was blanketed by the canopy of trees that made up the Everfree Forest. She felt a tad impressed by herself: She was no Rainbow Dash, or heck, not even a terribly practiced long-haul flier and she was pudgy, but she’d actually covered the distance between Canterlot and the fringes of Everfree relatively fast, given the weather. She supposed the tailwind that she had been riding since Canterlot had helped.

But the snow-covered treetops were giving her a hard time keeping her course by using the road as reference, so she gulped a bit and flew lower. Her forelegs and nose were sore from being battered by the cold wind and she couldn’t really feel her ears. Her wings were okay so far, but she was getting that familiar, stiff sensation that all pegasi got when they made long flights after being even a little out of shape. The wind picked up suddenly and this time he was coming from the front and her side. Quills faltered in mid-air and was blown a little off course, just barely missing doing a mid-air tumble.

Luna’s glittery tail, that’s what I call wind shear! She thought and righted herself before the wind could blow her all the way to Las Pegasus.

The wind had now gotten ridiculously strong, as had the snowfall, blasted at her with the help of the wind. She had to fight her way through the winds and then a big mess of snow blew right in her face, covering her goggles with sticky flakes.

“Guh!” she blurted, but barely heard herself over the din of the weather.

Unable to see, she drifted to the side again and tried to stop in mid-air, righting herself to try and wipe the snow off her goggles. When she lifted her hooves to her face she felt the wind picking up yet again. This time her position and speed were not enough to help her recover. She squeaked in fright as a blast of wind propelled her down, with enough force to make her feel like a runaway cart had punted her. The force and direction of the wind made her think of what was possibly going on and the notion frightened her.

Microburst!! She thought, panicking.

If anything in Equestria had hurt more pegasi than mid-air collisions, it was microbursts. The weather-ponies could control the weather alright but some things were just beyond their control, the wind being one of them. Microbursts were sudden, violent blasts of wind that could take a flying pony and toss it this way and that way before slamming them to the ground if they didn’t have enough height to recover. Inexperienced flies could even have a wing broken in the chaos of being thrown around.

Now with her goggles all but whited out and the wind making her go topsy turvy, she was tumbling out of the sky like a brick. She tried desperately to right herself and remain airborne but the relentless winds of the microburst kept her in the dangerous spin she felt she was in. Calculating the distance she had been from the ground, she knew she didn’t have enough height to dive and try to gain some lift. So she braced herself for impact, somewhat thankful that she at least had remained close to the road. Just before she smashed into the treeline, she screamed an obscenity from her home in Trottika that would’ve made anypony within earshot blush.

Having kept her eyes shut, she had no idea how many branches she snapped on her way down. She felt one of them leave her with searing pain as it broke against her wing and another scarred her snout as it snagged on her goggles and ripped them off. The impact with the ground, still hard under the as-of-yet-shallow snow, knocked her out.

***************************

“Miss Quills? Miss Quills, are you awake? Can you hear me? You took quite a nasty fall there.”

Those were the first words Quills heard as she dredged herself out of the depths of unconsciousness. Groggily, she parted her eyelids. It was hard to focus at first and all she could see was a blur of colour and shapes, along with feeling a dull sense of pain. She blinked a couple of times to clear her sight and managed to finally concentrate and focus on a light-blue earth pony with a salmon-red mane and a nurse cap perched on her tidy mane. The next thing she really noticed was that this mare was honest-to-goodness big. Heck, she could’ve stood hoof-to-hoof with Big Macintosh.

“Who are you?” Quills asked, surprised to hear herself sound like a tired old mare. “How do you know my name?”

That last question felt a bit moot as soon as it left her lips; she was a writer after all, chances were this pony was at least aware that there existed a fat purple pegasus who’d written one or two books.

The light-blue mare’s caring smile was replaced by a look of utter shock.

“You don’t remember?” she gasped, “I was at your book signing today!”

“Must’ve hit my head harder than I thought…” Quills slurred in response, “So many ponies… can’t remember them all…”

The nurse’s caring smile had returned.

“Oh, it’s alright, Miss Quills,” she spoke softly, “I’ll just introduce myself again. My name is Band Aid. I’m your number one fan!”

Quills wasn’t sure what brought that funny feeling up in her. Maybe it was the fact that Band Aid had said it out of the blue, or the way she said it that had set her wrong. It reminded her too much of the feeling she had after her breakdown, when she moved to Ponyville. Back then, meeting any stranger declaring to be her number one fan was enough to make her flee in a kind of panicky terror brought about by her inability to just be comfortable about her hard-earned success. It hadbeen so bad, she had practically fled from Canterlot due to the stress of thewhole thing and if it hadn’t been for Sunny dragging her sorry flank to Ponyville with him when he opened his bistro there, she might’ve still beenrunning around the countryside in a blind panic.

If it hadn’t been for those six girls too...

But she didn’t drop into memories. Right now, Band Aid managed to bring back such a feeling, like she wanted to leg it again. But she was exhausted and the mare had done nothing to justify screaming her head off and making like a panicked chicken out the door.

Quills took a quiet, deep breath and told herself to calm down. She assumed her paranoia was from the shock injury and would pass.

“I’m… flattered to hear that,” she responded, forcing a smile despite her tiredness.

She was lying on a relatively soft bed, in a small, bleak-looking room. She was comfortable, but amazingly sore and something definitely hurt.

“You’re lucky I was following you, you know!” Band Aid said.

Several warning bells went off in Quills’ head. Even during her breakdown, Quills had not been what one might call a paranoid pony. Neurotic, sure... but not paranoid. In fact, it had often been remarked how she usually did manage to keep her cool where other ponies might have what her daddy (a very sensible and no-nonsense stallion) had once referred to rather tactlessly as a ’shitfit’. But that line just made her want to get out of there more than ever.

“Following me?” she asked, unable to hide her discomfort anymore.

Band Aid turned round and put away some linens in a closet. “Why, you took off from the train station right before a scheduled blizzard!” she explained, “If I hadn’t follow you, you’d be a popsicle! I saved your life!”

The nurse pony uttered that last line with an enthusiasm that made Quills’ heart sink and did nothing to ease her fears. But she didn’t doubt the truth in them. She wasn’t sure just how badly she was hurt but she felt lousy. She hadn’t felt this bad since she was a little filly first learning how to fly (somewhat harder given that she came from an earth pony family!) and had crashed headlong into the neighbors’ duck house.

Yeah, the nurse pony had probably saved her life. And she was being a massive fussy-pants at the very moment.
“Thank you,” she finally told the nurse, “I’m grateful for that.”

The bulky mare smiled, flattered. “Oh don’t you worry your noggin’ about that. I even found your glasses! I can’t believe they didn’t break!”

Quills was wondering why she could see clearly. Without her glasses, she was as blind as a bat (she never used that expression around Poptart; it upset him). She lying on her back, propped up by several big pillows. She squinted at her glasses. They were indeed in one piece.

“Yeah they’re... made of stern stuff. I—“

“Walk into things a lot! Oh I know, it’s so endearing!” Band Aid giggled.

Quills tried not to gulp. “O-oh. You... do?” she uttered.

“Well, that’s what all the papers say about you!” the nurse said candidly. “Writer’s attitude, is what I call it.”

Quills smiled stiffly. “So... How long have I been out?”

“Two days, Miss Quills,” the mare replied coolly.

Quills eyes widened in abject horror. Two days, knocked out?! And in the clutches of an excitable fan! She was suddenly drowning in a sense of worry unlike anything she’d ever had.

“Oh, no,” the writer exclaimed, “I...I gotta get home! Sunny must be going crazy with worry!”

Band Aid smiled kindly. “Oh, is that your special somepony?” she said and giggled, but then apparently noticed her horrified expression. “Oh I’m so sorry, miss Quills. I’m afraid you can’t go anywhere.”

The writer tensed and tried to sit up but found that she couldn’t. “What? Why?” she blurted.

Band Aid’s smile stiffened. She went closer and rolled back the blanket. Quills got her first look at her hurt right wing. It looked scabby and swollen, held in place by a clumsy medical brace and some bandaging.

“You have a compound fracture,” the nurse explained, “You have to stay in bed for at least a week before it’s safe to move you.”

Crazy Quills realised then that Band Aid did have some medical training at the least. As part of her writing, she had to write several instances where her characters sustained and treated injuries in her books. So she had gone to the library many times to consult medical books and journals. What Band Aid just told her coincided with what she had found in her research.

“There’s one more thing I’m worried about,” Band Aid added, “Could you please move your hind legs for me, Miss Quills?”

The writer looked at her legs. They weren’t moving. She willed them to move, she put every iota of her thoughts into moving them, and yet they didn’t move. They felt limp and useless like two pieces of meat attached to her. The nurse proceeded to poke the legs with her massive hoof. Quills didn’t feel anything and she started to stare at her legs with an utterly horrified expression.

“Oh, my…” the nurse said, “I was afraid of that. You must have sustained neural injury in your crash. You can feel above the hind legs, right?”

The nurse kept poking her higher and higher. When she reached her belly, Quills felt the sharp poke and nodded vigorously.

“Okay, then. The injury’s probably at the bottom of your spine...” she said thoughtfully. “I didn’t see any injuries but it could be internal. I’m so sorry. That’s not within my experience, I’m afraid...”

Quills wanted to scream but every sound had vacated her dried throat. She was potentially paralyzed, unable to fly and stuck with a fan of hers in the middle of nowhere. She was starting to panic. This entire situation went against every instinct she had. Worst of all, none of her friends knew where she was… but at least that could be fixed, she thought.

“Can you get a message to Ponyville?” she asked the nurse breathlessly, “I want my friends to know I’m okay, especially Sunny. He must be going out of his mind right now.”

“Of course,” she said, smiling warmly, “Ponyville is about twelve hours away, though, and I’d hate to leave you on your own… But I will try as soon as the snow storm dies down.”

Twelve...hours?! Quills thought, stunned. But...Canterlot is just 8 hours away, technically! Where has this crazy mare brought me?!

She started to distrust Band Aid. Quills looked out of the window near her bed. It was oddly dirty. Even though the accumulated grime, he could see the snow flowing past the window. There was no way Band Aid would go out in this weather.

“In the meantime,” the nurse continued, “I’ll be back with your lunch and your pain-killers. You must be famished by now!”
Only when the nurse stepped away from her and towards the door did Quills realise how enormous she really was. She and Quills were about the same size, but where the writer had a modicum of fat and a belly, the nurse was all big bones and muscle. Even if she had the use of all her limbs, Band Aid could still wipe the floor with her if she so wished. She felt a little easier when the nurse finally closed the door behind her.

The crippled pegasus looked out the window at the snowstorm. Two days away from home and the ponies she knew and loved. She was sure they’d gone crazy with worry. She thought of a past winter night, feeling snug and warm in front of a bright fireplace with her two best friends, her darling Sunrise and their buddy, Codex (another newcomer to Ponyville), hanging out, playing a fun board game called Elder Sign and sipping mint chocolate, Codex’ favourite.

It was hardly surprising that Codex Bright and Crazy Quills became friends, given their similar interests and professions. But if you considered that Codex had been a massive fan of her writing, and at the time he moved into Ponyville, Quills was still getting over her nervous breakdown brought about by adoring fans... you started to wonder. But they were friends, best in the world, in fact. Quills had stopped thinking about it. Maybe it was just Codex’s personality. Maybe it was because both befriended the same six ponies...

And then it occurred to her. Codex would know what to do in situations like this!

He’s a problem solver, and he rarely panics. Good old Codex. The moment they realize I’m missing, he’ll be the first pony to organise a search party… if Twilight Sparkle doesn’t beat him to the punch.

****************

“Will you take it easy? You’re wearing a groove on the platform.”

Codex Bright had been getting rather fed up with Majestic Sunrise’s pacing. Not that the deep blue unicorn didn’t have a reason to worry, mind you… It’s just that they had been there for an hour waiting for Quills’ late train to arrive and Sunny had already paced up and down a bazillion times. Codex had brought some light reading with him (an article on applied workplace magic that would make his life easier) but he couldn’t concentrate on it anymore.

“What’s taking them so long?” Sunny blurted in exasperation, staring down the rail-tracks .

“Well, you see,” Codex began explaining, “The train has been detained by the snowstorm for six hours. That means they had to put out the engine to preserve coal and six hours can do a lot to a steam engine’s machinery. Maybe they had to thaw the water and the hydraulics, maybe they had to warm up the coal before starting up the boiler again—”

“You’re not helping!” Sunny exclaimed with a groan and almost trotted in place from nervousness.

Codex tried to return to his reading. He had reached a rather fascinating section about a book-sorting spell that he knew Twilight Sparkle would like to practice too. The spell required a modicum of concentration, but it was doable for any unicorn with well-practiced telekinesis, and—

“How are you being so calm?” Sunny asked him, interrupting his reading.

Codex looked up at Sunny. The blue unicorn had the biggest black bags under his eyes. The worry for Quills’ safety had kept him up since last night, when the train’s delay was announced. His hair, awfully reminiscent of cheese and chocolate, was scragglier than usual, no doubt rubbed into this state from all the tossing and turning. Codex, while worried as well, had done his best to get some sleep. The off-orange unicorn looked well-rested and his freshly cut lawn-green hair was surprisingly well-kept compared to Sunny’s messed-up mane.

Usually it was the other way around.

Codex got off his blanketed bench and looked Sunny in the eye before saying: “Look, Sunny, I’m just as worried as you are. I just think there’s nothing to fuss about right now. The train’s certainly on its way here. The train authorities get the weather schedule ahead of time, so the train was definitely stocked up for spending the night stuck in a snowstorm.”

“I know all that,” Sunny said, “It’s just that I have this bad feeling—”

He was interrupted by the unmistakeable sound of the train’s whistle in the distance. Codex took his blanket off the public bench, folded it and stuffed it in his saddlebags along with the article. He faced his worrywart blue friend and smiled.
“Buck up, buddy. Give us a smile. You don’t want to greet Quills with that look, do ya?” he said cheerfully. “Or she’ll take one look at you and get back on the train.”

Sunny let out a long sigh, then smiled tiredly.

“You’re right,” he replied, “Nothing’s wrong. Quillsie is just going to step off that train and all will be well. We’ll go home and I’ll make us the biggest cheese and hay burgers you never saw!”

Minutes later, the train rolled into the station with the huffing and puffing of the steam engines against the cold air, blowing powder snow about and blowing its whistle cheerfully. It slowed to a halt in front of the platforms and conductor ponies started helping open the doors. Passengers began flooding out. The train was amazingly packed. Codex wasn’t surprised by the volume of passengers; it stood to reason that the last train out of Canterlot during a snowstorm would carry a lot of extra ponies. A smaller influx of passengers’ relatives surged into the disembarking mass, and there was a mass exchange of hugs and kisses. Codex and Sunny still stood there, waiting for Quills.

It’d be easy to spot a purple, pudgy mare with a bright pink mane hauling two massive saddlebags full of books, no doubt purchased during her stay in Canterlot. Quills was always buying books, she was actually worse than Twilight in that aspect.
The outflow of passengers started to thin out. Soon, other ponies started getting on the train for the trip to the next stop, on the way to Appleloosa. Ponyville wasn’t the last stop, but it was certainly a popular one, given how many ponies got off the train there. Codex and Sunny still stood on the platform, waiting for Quills.

The train shut its doors and began chugging out of the station. Sunny was nerve-wracked. Codex’s smile had become a contemplative frown.

“I knew it!” Sunny exclaimed, “I knew something was wrong! Oh, Quillsie… Where could she be?”

“Take it easy,” Codex said, for both their sakes, “Maybe she just stayed the night in Canterlot.”

Sunny looked into Codex’s eyes; the off-orange unicorn could tell that his friend was hoping for that to be true, but he didn’t believe it to be so.

“No way. After book signings, Quills always wants to come home. She always says they’re the most exhausting thing because all the fans get so darn worked up since Fallen Kingdom was published!” Sunny said, shaking his head. “But...but she might’ve, if she missed the train...”

“It never hurts to make sure,” Codex added, “You head to Twilight’s house and tell her what’s happened. Ask her if she can send a message to Canterlot and ask about Quills’ whereabouts.”

“What will you do?” the blue unicorn asked.

“Gather volunteers for a search party,” the level-headed pony said and dashed off.

*****************

Quills opened her eyes and glanced out the window. It was morning again. A whole day had passed since she first woke up in the crummy bed with a broken body; a day trapped in an alarmingly obsessed fan’s house. It’s a wonder she hadn’t attempted to run away screaming yet, injuries be damned.

Band Aid’s creepiness had escalated the night before.

Quills’ food preferences weren’t really a secret (even that she was a meatarian) but the nurse had brought her a dinner that was exactly what she preferred to have as sick food. Chicken pie, hot cocoa and apple sauce, just the way Sunny made it for her whenever she was sick. No amount of guessing could get every single detail right. If she weren’t so hungry and numb, she would’ve thrown the food off the tray and crawled away as fast as she could. To Band Aid’s credit, though, she was a decent cook…

After Quills had eaten, Band Aid came in and took the tray away. She cheerfully said she was going to let Quills sleep now and sit and finish up reading The Lost Kingdom at last. She’d come to the signing specifically to get her copy signed and had left when the questions time came up to avoid any spoilers. She even showed Quills the pristine-looking book. She was very excited and chattered on about her favourite moments and characters.

She looked so pleased and happy and Quills felt a big twinge of guilt about the way she’d felt earlier. This fan, this absolutely delighted fan, reminded her of herself at every book signing of the acclaimed horror writer Story King that she had been to. She had the same look on her face when she held signed copies of her favourite books: Just After Sunset; Full Dark, No Stars; Everything's Eventual and, her favourite of them all, Lisey’s Story. Lisey’s Story in particular made her giggle as excitedly and skip as joyfully as Band Aid had done in her presence.

Perhaps, she thought, I may have been too harsh on the poor nurse. She can’t be just a lunatic. Maybe she’s just a bit too enthusiastic about the stuff she likes. I know I go a bit overboard with the Story King books… Maybe she’s not so bad after all. I could be getting paranoid here.

Just when she was settling in and starting to doze off, the door swung open with a crash as it slammed against the wall, making Quills yelp and almost sit bolt upright if she could. She whined in pain as her hurt wing tensed from the shock. Band Aid stormed in with a loud hoof-fall. She looked angry and sorrowful, like a mare that had just discovered her significant other sleeping with another pony. She looked like she’d been crying for some time. And worse yet, she looked about twice as big as before, as though emotion had caused her to swell.

“You!” she snarled like an animal, seemingly too upset to articulate, “You—you—you bitch! How could you!?”

“What?” Quills asked her in utter confusion. She instinctively shrank back against her pillow. “What...what’s wrong?!”

Band Aid stomped closer and with a sweep of her foreleg tossed the glass of water and the night light next to the bed to the floor with a loud crash.

“How? Why!?” she cried, “Sharpe Edge can’t be dead! How could you kill him?! He’s the hero!!”

Quills balked at that. That’s what had gotten fans so upset. She was always afraid someone would lash out about that, but seeing it in action was an entirely new and frightening experience. Sharpe Edge’s death was the most universally derided thing she had ever written in her so far short career, given the amount of hate-mail she received for it. Band Aid’s new hardback edition of the book was an answer to that, in which Quills had forced herself to write an afterword about the reaction.

The Q&A session after the book signing, which Band Aid chose to skip due to not having finished the book yet, was another answer to the disgruntled fans. But the fans arguing against Sharpe Edge’s death (and to her surprise, the fans arguing for it) were calm and sensible for the most part. They were upset, but unlike the huge nurse in front of her, they at least didn’t look like they were ready to throttle her in her bed, no matter how venomous some of them could be in their correspondence.

“Band Aid,” she started to say, trying to console the nurse. “Listen to me, I know you’re upset—“
“You’ll change it!” the nurse said, “You’ll change it and make it right!”

The young writer shrank back into her pillow again and bit her lips. “E-Excuse me?”

Band Aid snarled again before continuing. “I saw that script in your saddlebags! The Wolves of Blackmoor, you call it! The new Raiders book! Well, you’re going to change that script! You’re going to bring Sharpe Edge back to life!”

Quills stared at Band Aid for a long, hard moment. She weighed everything in her head. She was a hurt, largely immobile and defenceless pony. Band Aid was a big, strong nurse and she was an angry, unreasonable fan – and one thing Quills knew about unreasonable ponies, if they got obsessive they could get bad. She was a writer – knowing about the best and worst of ponies was what she did, what she wrote about.

Writing was her life.

But this time, Quills’ fear was overshadowed by her anger. She glared at Band Aid and gave her that definitive answer:

“No.”

Band Aid appeared to be a bit stunned and reared he head back a little. “What did you say?” she uttered in quiet disbelief.

“I said ‘no’. I won’t change anything. Sharpe Edge gave his life so that the others could live. He died a true hero, as he would want to die and then passed the torch to Valiant,” she said with a kind of brave patience. “Valiant is meant to be the hero, not Sharpe Edge. He... he was the grown up for them, the last thing left of a kingdom that’s no longer there. He gave his life so that the next generation could start anew, pick up the ideals of the past... and raise them even higher. You’re asking me to negate all that, to betray my own integrity as a writer and just bring him back to life just ‘cause you don’t want him to be dead. You want me to render pointless an act like that, and deprive Sharpe Edge of the peace he needed.”

She shook her head. “Band Aid. I can’t do that.”

Band Aid looked pitifully shocked and upset at Quills’ refusal. Her lower jaw trembled and her ears dropped. But her expression suddenly changed to an unbridled rage that the writer instantly knew would not bode well for her. She could see it in Band Aid’s eyes. They grew... empty and bloodshot with anger.

“You don’t get it, do you?” she growled, “Nopony’s coming to get you! Nopony even knows you’re here!”

She walked up to the writer as she talked, her enraged scowl slowly shifting into a frighteningly deranged grin. Quills felt her jaw start to tremble as it hunt open and she leaned back and away from Band Aid, helplessly pulling the bedsheets up against her with her hooves.

“You're a worthless nag and I'll make sure you stay that way!”

Band Aid raised a hoof above her patient. Quills wanted to plead with her, to talk her out of whatever she was going to do, but the words wouldn’t form.

“P-p-please...! No!”

“Because a worthless nag will always need a nurse,” Band Aid said in her bedside manner voice and brought her hoof down.

**********************

“I just wanted to help find Miss Quills,” said a crestfallen Derpy Hooves with her head down low and a really sorry expression.
If she were any other pony, Codex would’ve read her the riot act. As it was, he couldn’t bring himself to do that. There was just something about that bubbly grey pegasus that made him feel terrible about even thinking of chastising her.

“I know, Derpy,” he said softly with a caring smile, “and you’re doing a great job! Just make sure you keep close to the other pegasi, okay? We need to keep the search party organised if we want to find Quills quickly.”

Almost at once, the grey cross-eyed pegasus’ shame gave way to her usual chipper attitude. She stood at attention and gave Codex a salute with a determined smile.

“Yes, sir!” she exclaimed excitedly.

Then she hugged him.

“Thank you,” she added.

Codex froze up and just stared. “Um, what was that about?” he asked, dumbfounded.

“For being nice!” she explained, “Lots of ponies yell at me for making mistakes, but you were really nice!”

Codex just kept staring at her as she took off to resume the search. Once again, any ill feelings he may have had towards Derpy and any guilt he may have felt about his frustration to her had been extinguished by that noxiously chipper attitude. The smile she had given him was the best thing he could’ve asked for at a time like this. He shook some snow off his mane, got up and caught up with his position in the search party.

He called out Quills’ name again at the top of his lungs. His voice was echoed by several others, all part of the search party he had assembled. Some of those voices were circling the sky overhead; others were muffled by the dense and snow-capped forest around him. None of them had any luck whatsoever. Knowing that if she tried to fly back to Ponyville, Quills would’ve stuck to following the road, they had scoured every hoof of the road to Canterlot, expanding the search to a one-mile-perimeter around the road in every direction. Even with that much ground to cover, so far they had found no trace of the missing writer, which was odd given how hard it’d be to miss her in all that snow.

Four hours into this search and more than halfway to Canterlot, Codex was starting to lose faith in his own plan.
His plan was simple and foalproof. The search party would spread in about half a mile in every direction and move along the road to Canterlot, relative to an “anchor pony” on the road itself. The pegasi, who would conduct their search in the air, would keep positions relative to the pegasi around them as well as the “anchor pony” to ensure that the search party would not be split up or lost. Twilight Sparkle, the best manager Codex knew, helped him organise the ponies into manageable groups within the party before she took on her own appointed task. And back in Ponyville, Sunny was waiting for any news, while preparing a high-energy meal for the ponies in the search party when they returned – and waiting for Quills in case she somehow made it back to Ponyville on her own. Codex had thought it better for him to stay in town and do what he did best to calm his nerves.

It all worked pretty well until Derpy lost track of the other pegasi and got herself and the ponies using her as a reference point lost.

To be fair, they had all been going at it for so long with no real break and no real breakthrough either. If exhaustion hadn’t broken their resolve, it certainly would have broken their formation. They were all beyond tired, but nopony was prepared to stop until they found some sign, any sign, that Crazy Quills was at least on this road last night—
“Over here! I found something!”

Codex jumped and his ears perked up excitedly. At last, a breakthrough! Codex abandoned his position, leaving Lyra in charge of his group, and rushed towards the voice. But given the sound of branches breaking and frosted foliage being trampled, every pony in the search party was doing the same. Soon, all twenty four ponies were gathered around the discovery…

…which was a hole in the tree-line at the side of the road.

“It’s better than nothing,” said the discoverer, Rainbow Dash, flying above the hole.

Uncharacteristically, Dash looked sombre and subdued compared to her usual boisterous attitude. When the word for the search party had first got to her, it’d taken Applejack grabbing her by the tail to prevent her from darting off on her own to look for Quills. She’d taken the news of Quills’ missing rather hard; when she first met Quills she’d reacted like any excitable fan of her books would’ve (although not as much as if she’d met Daring Doo’s creators) and had felt incredibly bad afterwards for sending Quills into that nervous tizzy that took them a day to get her out of. But after that, Quills and Dash became good friends. Quills liked Dash’s enthusiasm and whenever Ponyville was scheduled for storms, Quills would be up there with Dash, bouncing on clouds and getting some thunderbolts booming.

She called it ‘stress relief’.

Presently, Codex looked at the hole. It certainly looked as though Quills had fallen through it. His inspection was interrupted when another pony from the search party stepped forward and a puffed up, pink candy-floss mane sailed past him. Pinkie Pie had put on a deerstalker cap and was blowing bubbles out of a ceci n’est pas une pipe. Celestia help them all, leave it to Pinkie Pie to do detective work in her own quirky way even at a time like this.

“Aha! Yes,” she began her cursory examination, “Note the really big size of the hole in the treeline. So what fell through here is either a teen dragon or a pudgy pony. Also note the red stain on the broken branch, possibly blood from a damaged wing. Now judging from the direction of last night’s storm, Quillsie fell like this!”

Pinkie proceeded to trace a line across the sky and through the hole with her hoof, making improvised falling sound effects with her mouth. She kept the line going until she pointed at a very specific place on the ground with a sound effect of an impact as would be performed by a ten-year-old that just discovered the awesomeness of explosions.

“This is the point of impact!” she concluded, blowing more bubbles from her fake pipe.

After a moment of just staring at the whole charade and Pinkie being... well, Pinkie, some ponies bunched closer to the indicated spot. Codex examined it more closely while some ponies held a couple of torches overhead so he’d see better. He finally spotted something sticking out of the snow. He tried wrapping his magic around it, but he didn’t know the extent of the object. He bit into it. He noted it was rubbery and yanking on it made him realise it was elastic. Try as he might, he couldn’t ease it out. The snow had refrozen around it.

“There’s a strap here,” he declared, “Pinkie, Dash, good job, both of you. Now, everypony stand back! This is gonna need some melting…”

Codex cleared his mind. He let his worries, his anxieties, his wishes, all slip away. Then he concentrated his will on a single word: fire. He felt the warmth rise from his very core, warming him up as it travelled to his extremities. Then he reined the warmth in and directed it to the focal point of his magic. A trail of fire ascended the ridges of Codex’s horn, engulfing it up to the tip. The pyromancer spell was ready.

Now to use it… Codex thought of the fire in his fireplace, the warmth that exudes from it; with the temperature set, he imagined a spray of flame, like a dragon’s breath. His fire-engulfed horn began shooting fire in controlled bursts. The lump of refrozen snow began melting into water, seeping away at the hooves of the search party ponies, and it soon melted enough to free the object.

“No mistaking it,” Codex announced, lifting the object up, “These are Quillsie’s vintage flight goggles.”

Just then, a faint purple glow started amassing amidst the ponies. Exactly six of the ponies in the search party knew what it meant and hurriedly urged the ponies to move away from the glow as it intensified and grew in size. It was slightly larger than the average adult pony when it burst with a loud bang. The glow was replaced with a unicorn mare that all the assembled ponies knew as Twilight Sparkle. She was unsteady on her hooves and her mane was unsettled and singed.

Applejack was the first to get to her side, with Codex right behind her, both ready to assist her if need be, but she stopped them both with a forehoof.

“I’m fine everypony,” she said with a tired smile, “Four long-range teleport spells in a day are enough to daze anypony.”

Codex counted them off in his head. First Twilight had ported right to Canterlot to check if Quills was there, before the search party set off. Then she came back to report that Quills was in fact, nowhere in Canterlot and in her worry, the idea of asking around for her had completely slipped her mind. So she went back to Canterlot to ask about Quills’ last whereabouts, which had taken the longest. And now she’d just teleported back to them.

“Good,” Codex said, breathing a sigh of relief, “What did you find out?”

“No more than we already guessed. One of the train station attendants talked to Quills about an hour before the storm hit. The attendant had a pretty pronounced stutter and Quillsie was frustrated and in a hurry, so he couldn’t warn her about the storm before she took off.”

Codex cringed. “That sounds like Quills after a book signing these days, alright. Well, now we know for sure that she flew into the storm. The question is, how far did she fly?”

Twilight shook some snow off her. “By my calculations, based on how fast we know Quills can fly and the tailwind she would’ve had last night, it would be around the midpoint of the road between Canterlot and Ponyville, which is exactly where I just ported.”

She said that last bit quite proudly. Twilight had been working on her long-range teleportation spell for months. Codex (and, really, anypony who would listen) had heard her ramble about the particulars, which always came back to a complicated term for how close you teleport to where you wanted to be and he was confident that the rambling was coherent enough to be transcribed into a graduate thesis for the school of gifted unicorns. In fact, he was quite sure this was Twilight’s initial graduate thesis before Celestia assigned her with the friendship of magic study, given all the work and practice she has put into it.

Codex also recalled Twilight’s first field test of the spell. It had gone so awry that it ended up with Twilight and her friends scattered across the furthest ends of the Everfree Forest and other regions of Equestria and it had taken intervention from Codex, Sunny, Quills and a tag-along Spike to find and rescue them. Thus in his book, any success with the spell was good, let alone repeated successes. Under different circumstances, this would’ve been cause enough to celebrate. Now, however, it was just a pleasant aside to a bad situation.

“The search party,” he said matter-of-factly, “has scoured every inch of the road and surrounding area in a mile-long radius. The only trace of Quills we found was a hole in the tree line… and this.”

He lifted the goggles up so that Twilight could examine them.

“Etched C. Q. on the frame…” she said, “Those are Quills’ flying goggles, alright.”

Codex nodded. “Well, now we know that she flew off, probably not knowing of the storm – or if she knew, she really underestimated it... and crash-landed here.”

“We also know the duration of the flight, thus we know it’s been half a day since the crash,” Twilight added.

“I hate to think the worst, but,” Codex interjected. “Even if she was flying close to the ground, after a fall like this, there’s no way she could’ve just walked off so soon… Somepony or something must have carried her off.”

Twilight made a pained expression. “Sixteen hours ago… She could be anywhere between Saddle Arabia and the Dragon Lands right now!”

Many of the ponies in the search party groaned at that and some even turned around began trudging through the snow back to Ponyville. Codex couldn’t blame them. They had essentially wasted several hours of their day confirming what they already knew and they were just told that the search radius had expanded to cover most of Equestria. It was more than any search party cobbled together like that could handle. Really, who could blame them?

But Rainbow Dash had other ideas. “Hey! Hold on a second!” she yelled at the deserting ponies after swooping down in front of them, glaring. “What if one of you was lost out here?! You think Crazy Quills would've given up like that?! FINE! Go home. I'm staying till we find her.”

But her declaration didn’t hit a chord with everpony. Quills was liked by everypony in Ponyville, but they still had been trudging and flying through snow and slush and cold, looking for what amounted to a needle in a haystack. This was now becoming a matter beyond the capabilities of any civilian pony. A few other ponies opted to stay behind, all close friends of Crazy Quills. Codex took a long look at them. Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Applejack, Fluttershy, Derpy Hooves, Twilight Sparkle and himself; just eight ponies to cover the entirety of Equestria. Even if he went back to Ponyville and brought Sunny and Big Macintosh here, it would be absolutely impossible. He wasn’t willing to give up, though. He pondered on other solutions, on anything that could expedite the search…

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Dash said to the remaining ponies, “Let’s get searching!”

“Rainbow Dash, Ah know how much ya wanna find Quills,” Applejack told her, “Believe me, sugarcube, we all do… but we ain’t gonna find her just by lookin’! There just ain’t enough of us!”

The rainbow-maned pegasus cringed and landed in the snow with a crunch before stomping the ground with her hoof. “But she could be in danger!”

Applejack was firm “Ah know! But we can’t go blunderin’ around in the snow an’ just hopin’ for a clue! Tha’s worse than takin’ our time to plan!”

Surprisingly, Fluttershy supported her. “Applejack is right,” she said meekly with the biggest frown Codex had ever seen her with. “Crazy Quills depends on us getting this right. I know we’re all tired and worried but if we don’t keep it together we can’t help her.”

Maybe Twilight can modify a locator spell to track ponies based on their body mass index… Codex mused. Problem is, Quills isn’t the only pudgy pony in Equestria…

“Well, we’re not gonna find her just by standing around and thinking about it, are we?” Rainbow Dash insisted, “We gotta try something! Isn’t there any magic that can help?!”

“Ah reckon we oughta get ourselves some fresh volunteers ‘fore we try again,” the Applejack suggested, taking her Stetson hat off and shaking some snow off it.

Dash paced about. “We don’t need more quitters! We can find her ourselves!”

“They ain’t quitters, Dash! They ain't well-acquainted with Quills like us is all… This ain't personal enough for 'em to keep goin' into the night! They’re tired! Some’s got families to mind, too!”

We could make this public, Codex thought, and get all the professional ponies looking for her too! But no, what would make them look for Quills over all the other missing pony cases they’re probably handling? And how long would it take to get them mobilised?

Fluttershy looked like she had something to say. In fact, she was opening her mouth to say something when Rarity stepped forward.

“I am entirely behind Rainbow Dash on this,” she announced.

Rainbow Dash and Applejack had a look of surprise on their faces that would’ve made Codex laugh his flank off had he seen it, if the situation wasn’t so serious. Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie shared in that expression. The four of them could not help but ask in unison:

“You are?”

“Why is that so surprising to you?” Rarity countered before continuing, “Yes, I believe that continuing the search ourselves is our best option at the time. After all, who knows what dreadful situation Quillsie may be in!”

“Rarity…” Twilight said sympathetically.

“Why, even as we speak, poor Quillsie could be lying unconscious at the mercy of some horrible creature—”

“Rarity!” Twilight yelled in a scolding and disapproving manner.

It was at that moment when the bulb of ideas in Codex’s mind, the very thing his cutie mark literally was, lit up. For the first time that day, he smiled.

“That’s it!” Codex exclaimed unexpectedly, “Rarity, you’re a genius!”

“I am?” Rarity blurted, sheepishly before recovering at record time. “Oh, of course I am! What do you mean?”

“Oh, Codex, not you too!” Twilight uttered in dismay.

“No, that’s not what I—Just think about it!” Codex said and stomped his hoof on the ground while looking at Twilight in the eye. “If Quills was conscious, she’d be fighting tooth and hoof to get back to us! In fact, we would’ve heard from her by now! You know how neurotic she can get about being stuck somewhere she doesn’t like! So by all accounts, she’s probably unconscious!”

And then it dawned on her. “And if she’s unconscious, she’s probably dreaming!” Twilight finished the train of thought, mirroring Codex’s smile, “I know exactly what to do! I’ll get started on that letter right now! I’m sure Princess Luna will help us! See you in the library!”

With that, she stepped a safe distance away from the other ponies and focused her magic. Soon she disappeared with a loud bang and a bright purple flash.

A tap on his shoulder caused Codex to turn around and meet the quizzical gaze of the rest of Quills’ closest friends.

“Ya mind clueing the rest of us in?” Rainbow Dash asked, sounding slightly miffed.

“I’ll be glad to, Dash!” he announced merrily, “Quills is as good as found!”

*****************

Crazy Quills stared at the typewriter on the bed-table set before her, glaring at the blank page set into the roller.
The typewriter was a priceless antique, a Princess Deluxe, loaded with features and one of the sturdiest typewriters ever built. Under different circumstances, Quills would be thrilled to type just five letters on this beautiful antique and revel on the sounds and the clean typewrite.

Here, though, at this time… this was Band Aid’s typewriter. An old wreck that had hardly seen any of the maintenance that was required for these sorts of machines. The ribbon hadn’t been replaced in a while, so Band Aid had to leave her alone for a bit while she got a new one, and quite a few keys were missing, so typing any more than a single line on this would be awkward and painful. The badly maintained antique was nothing, though, compared to what the insane fan wanted her to do with the typewriter.

Quills stared at the page harshly, as though she hoped it would catch fire. The imagination that had drove her to write the Raiders series in the first place was glorious in its complete absence.

It’d been a whole week since the demented nurse had brought her hoof down and broken Quills’ other wing. If she wasn’t purple, it’d be easy to see all the other bruises she had from Band Aid thrashing her in a vain effort to vent her frustration. That beating broke her will and finally Quills surrendered. She’d shouted that she’d do it, she’d rewrite Wolves of Blackmoor for Band Aid, just for her, anything she wanted as long as she’d stop hurting her. She’d cried like a foal. Band Aid had then left the room to calm down for quite a long while, although Quills heard things breaking in the rooms beyond the door, which Band Aid took to locking.

Quills grit her teeth, staring at the blank page, which was becoming an object of hate almost as intensely as Band Aid.
Band Aid had a way of getting what she wanted, a way that included breaking Quills down completely. And the first thing she did to ensure Quills’s obedience had been crueller than beating the everliving snot out of her.

Quills had woken up with a start from her painkiller-induced dreaming that evening. She was still incredibly sore from Band Aid beating her around and her broken wings both hurt her very much. The one Band Aid had stomped on was bandaged in a clumsier, careless fashion. It hurt very much when she moved. She was starved too because Band Aid hadn’t brought her anything to drink or eat since that morning.

When Band Aid finally entered the room with a rolling tray carrying food, Quills was almost elated to see her. But the nurse wouldn’t give her the food immediately. Instead she brought up, in a very business-like manner, the unfinished manuscript for Wolves of Blackmoor.

“You said you’ll do it. That you’ll rewrite this and bring back Sharpe Edge. I don’t believe you,” she said, in a melancholy sort of manner that was underlined with an icy demeanour.

Quills, now almost a little frantic with thirst, pleaded with her. “Please Band Aid... give me some water. I promised I’d do it and I will, just give me some water...”

But the big mare looked at her coldly. “I don’t believe you.”

Quills was starting to lose her composure, her drug-addled brain fixed on getting a little water. “What do you want me to do?”
Band Aid tossed the manuscript into a metal bucket, which she placed next to the bed. She then threw a pack of matches at Quills. “Then you’ll burn this stupid script and start over. Properly.”

Quills whimpered. “No! I...I can’t!” she quibbled.

Band Aid was asking her to burn what she’d written – it was almost as if she were asking Quills to burn her own foal.

“Please don’t make me do this!”

But Band Aid was resolute.

She closed in and pressed her hoof on Quills’ broken wing. “You’ll do it. Otherwise it won’t count. The old garbage needs to be destroyed so you can start afresh. You’ll forget about these stupid ideas you’ve got going in this piece of trash,” she said sternly.

“You’ve got that idiot, Witless, running the show. Why is that stupid bard the leader? He’s just a dumb commoner – he can’t even do a bit of magic, why is he even a unicorn? Because he can strum two notes together?” she went on, sharply, rubbing her hoof into Quills’ wing and making the writer shriek in pain and curl up in the bed. “What’s got to happen is Sharpe Edge needs to come back, take control and he and Valiant can then kill the evil wolves. Witless can just sit and gawk like his name implies and do bard-stuff. Nobody cares about him.”

She took her hoof away and Quills was left sobbing and whimpering in pain, trembling like a leaf. She couldn’t believe that somepony could be this cruel and sadistic.

“Get on with it. Burn it,” Band Aid went on.

In the end she did it. She cried while trying to light the match, wasting a few because her lips trembled and she couldn’t strike the match properly. Band Aid had to strike the match for her and with a sob of immense regret, Quills dropped it in the bucket and then sat there, watching the flames devour her precious manuscript until nothing but ashes and a few scattered bits of charred paper remained. Band Aid had sat through the whole thing, just watching with a cold but incredibly pleased, calm expression that filled Quills with immeasurable hate. She then left the tray of food for her, taken the bucket and left.

Quills’ appetite had gone. All she could do was sit there and cry until her eyes hurt and her face was wet from tears.

But then something burned in her; something few ponies were able to nourish to such a white-hot extent. Anger. Vengefulness. A sense of wanting to hurt what had hurt them. The seed for that feeling had been planted the moment Quills had first woken up in Band Aid’s care and it had been nourished for all this time. Burning the manuscript had made that seed flourish and it only needed a little more to bloom.

Quills eyed the pile of notes she’d already typed up for the rewrite and wrinkled her snout in disgust. Among them she’d hidden notes about the real Wolves of Blackmoor, as she’d written it. She was trying to remember. She stared at the typewriter again and typed a few more such notes. It was hard to type. A horrid line of burnt flesh on her foreleg popped very much against her purple coat, raw red and charred.

It was another punishment. Quills had talked to Band Aid about the poor condition of the typewriter. If she’d been healthy maybe she would’ve dealt with the rickety machine better but in her invalid state she needed all the ease she could get. The old and worn ribbon, Band Aid responded reasonably to; she promised and delivered a new one. But as time wore on, Quills couldn’t help herself and one day, she had a little fit and snapped at Band Aid about the missing keys. The nurse’s reaction had been awful. She’d thrown Quills off the bed and then pressed the hot iron against her foreleg, threatening to cut it off if she didn’t stop complaining.

“You can type with one leg, you know!” she’d snarled – no, it wasn’t a snarl. It was a noise that Quills had thought impossible for a pony’s throat to make.

After that ordeal Quills had fainted. She didn’t know what Band Aid had done in the meantime but she woke up in the bed again, with the typewriter in front of her and Band Aid meekly apologizing for ‘losing her temper’. She hoped that Quills wasn’t mad and that she’d keep writing because she was so talented and it was a shame for her talent to go to waste.

“After all... I am your number one fan. I saved your life. I deserve to read Wolves of Blackmoor first,” she’d said in a manner that had made Quills shiver.

Quills stopped typing again. She looked at the page of gobbledigook (that’s what her father called nonsense) that she’d typed up: Scattered ideas but nothing pertaining to the actual Wolves.

She grit her teeth; not even survival would convince her obstinate muse that she had to write. She couldn’t bring herself to start this abomination that Band Aid demanded and her original story was starting to slip from her mind. A mind that was growing divided. Part of her had given up, was already plotting ideas of how to bring that stupid pegasus, Sharpe Edge, back to life. But the other half was willing to go down with her book. The two sides were bickering in her head endlessly.

Her muse wouldn’t allow her to gut The Wolves of Blackmoor like this, to take out everything that made it an actual story, a tale somepony would want to read, just to pander to one fan. Her muse was fighting her self-preservation instinct and Quills didn’t want either of them to win.

You’re stuck in quite the situation again, pipsqueak.

That was her daddy talking. Col. Sparky Gadget, one time terror of the Royal Equestrian Army. Sparky Gadget, the gruff and slightly crazy captain of the border patrols, too unrefined for duty in the palaces but too smart to send to the boonies.

You remember the time you were asking me how I made it back from the last border patrol with all my bits in place, when my whole troop didn’t?

“I remember, pops,” Quills whispered, staring blankly into space. “You grabbed the Pale Mare by the scruff and told her to call back later. And she still hasn’t called back.”

The seed of vengefulness had bloomed now. Daddy Sparky’s grin had been the last drop of water it needed to bloom.

“When the enemy is bigger than you... you cut’em down to size,” Quills whispered.

And when he’s down to size... you let ‘em have it, pipsqueak!

The whispering went on. “Let ‘em have it...”

Quills picked up the notes she’d compiled and arranged them in a neat pile which she put aside. She typed up a neat cover page with the title big and proud.

The Wolves of Blackmoor

A Novel by Crazy Quills

She put a fresh page in the typewriter and typed up some more. Princess Deluxe typewriters were lovely. But they were such heavy old things. Newer models had shed much of the hunk-n-junk that gave them their heft, but this one had come with all the trimmings. Through the years ponies using them had complained about the weight, how it was impossible to move them around – and Celestia preserve if you wanted to actually take one on a trip with you. Ponies in the writing trade used to call them ‘legal lethal weapons’, provided you could lift one! All the while she went over her daddy’s other mantra: There ain’t no honour among crazies, pipsqueak.

That nag is crazy, pipsqueak, Daddy Sparky said in the kind of soft-spoken tone that he had these days, when the army was long behind him and he’d raised two kids with a loving wife. There ain’t no reasoning with her. She won’t let you have another go if you miss the first time. Fair play’d sail right over her screwy little head.

Quills was never fond of deception. But having built a writing career on making up things, she found it only too natural to drop right into the part she needed to play to set her plan in motion.

She was going to kill Band Aid.

Crazy Quills smiled. It was a very soothing sort of feeling, this vengefulness.

She thought of Ponyville. The ponies she knew and loved there. A twinge of doubt crawled into her head. Surely they were looking for her. Why hadn’t they been able to find her? It’d been at least two weeks since she had woken up here... but had it? She’d been losing track of time so much. Quills assumed it was because of the painkillers Band Aid dosed her with all the time. Time was fuzzy.

She thought of them all. Twilight Sparkle, always eager to help with research. Fluttershy, such a sweet girl and willing to help with Poptart. Rainbow Dash, that up-and-at-em pegasus with not a fearful bone in her body and yet so excitable about Daring Doo. Rarity... Quills would’ve been lost without her; Rarity could whip up the loveliest outfits even for a fat pony like her. Good ol’ Applejack, there was no other pony she could count on for a more honest opinion on something. And of course... Pinkie Pie. The only pony in Ponyville who was even more random than her. Always able to put a smile on her face.

“And Codex and my sweetie, Sunny,” she whispered.

She thought for a moment that if she went through with her plan and succeeded... they would be so shocked. But her desire to see them again outweighed her fear that they’d turn their backs at her if she did it.

“I’m so sorry everypony.”

She took a deep breath. She was ready.

She sat up straight and stared at the door she knew Band Aid would come from.

“Band Aid! Band Aid!” she called loudly.

It took a few calls but eventually the large mare pushed open the door and walked in, looking puzzled but managing to put on a concerned look as always.

“What’s the matter?” she asked and as she looked at the typewriter in front of the writer, added: “Why aren’t you writing?”

That last line carried a menace with it. She didn’t even need to threaten her with more pain. Quills knew that already.

And she played her part wonderfully. She shrank back in the pillow, as miserable as anything. “I...I can’t write. I’m stuck.”

“Well get unstuck,” Band Aid said dryly. “What do you want?”

Quills began to cry. “I’m having a writer’s block. Oh Band Aid I’m so sorry! I...I need some help!”

Band Aid just looked at her, a little confused and possibly a little angry. “What kind of help?”

“I...I need a drink. My muse,” she quibbled. “I’m not complaining! I’m doing what you want! I’m just... exhausted. I know that ponies say the best writing comes from misery but... but that’s not true! Good writing needs help. I need some help...”

Band Aid looked around the room awkwardly. “You... want absinthe?” the nurse asked, like a filly in class giving an answer to a question she doesn’t really know the answer to.

Quills perked up a little. “Yes!” she said quickly. “Oh I know it sounds strange but... but I just can’t write well without a sip. It’s a habit you know – I know you do, you know everything about me. And... and you know that I don’t like breaking from my habits. I get... wonky. Bad wonky. And I can’t write. Just a little would do.”

Of course Band Aid knew. Quills would’ve bet her fat flank that Band Aid knew she liked that green, strange beverage with the odd flavour of anise and wormwood. Many of her fans did. And Quills was banking on Band Aid having some because like all extremely devoted fans... she’d want to try what her idol was into.

Band Aid smiled reluctantly. “Oh, of course!” she said and that was the most positive emotion she’d shown yet. “I understand! Ever since that interview you gave to that magazine, I bought some and keep it in the house! I’ll fetch it.”

Quills smiled gratefully and wiped her eyes, sniffling. Her tears were genuine and she watched the nurse turn around and leave the room again. Truth be told... she really did need that drink. This deranged fan had broken her, for real. She’d called her a worthless nag and Quills really felt like that. Her muse was still alive and kicking and to be honest... she’d brokered a truce with her self-preservation instincts. The plan was the creation of both of them. Without her muse, Quills would’ve never thought it all up.

Escape was still an option, even with her disabled legs... but she had to kill Band Aid.

She had one thing going for her. Absinthe was not a popular drink in Equestria. With a funny flavour and up to a whopping 74% alcohol per volume, it was easy to understand why. Not a lot of ponies were accustomed to something that strong or were even able to handle it. There was no pony in Equestria who could handle liquor as strong as absinthe like Crazy Quills could. It came with being a writer and having traded some of the common sense that would tell any other pony to not touch the stuff, for her shot of imagination.

There ain’t no honour among crazies, pipsqueak.

Quills would not allow herself to smile, though she wanted to. Soon she’d get that stiff drink she needed... and the key to her plan. She maintained her miserable look as her joyful jailer came back, carrying a silver tray with two shot glasses, a jug of water and a big absinthe bottle. She placed it down on the writing table, next to the pile of papers Quills had written so far.

She eyed them with a kind of expectant look. “How is it going?” she said, looking at the title with the same way that a foal would look at candy.

“Well enough so far,” Quills said, wiping her tears. “Thank you so much,” she said, looking at the bottle in the way any soak does. “That’s very thoughtful of you, having bought this. Have you tried it?” she asked harmlessly.

Band Aid was pouring her a drink, a bit of absinthe and topped off with water poured over a lump of sugar. She looked at Quills a bit quizzically. “No. I... took a sniff of it and I wasn’t sure I liked the smell.”

“Oh I know it can be really off-putting, but why don’t you give it a try? If you don’t like it there’s no harm done. I just feel bad if I’m drinking alone and somepony else is just watching,” Quills said shyly.

Band Aid’s face formed a flattered smile, sending shivers down Quills’ spine and poured herself a glass as well. Band Aid took a tentative sip and winced a little at the strength and flavour, but then smiled, apparently liking it.

“Oh it’s interesting after all,” she said sheepishly and then stared as Quills took her glass and downed it rather alarmingly fast.

She watched Band Aid stare awestruck at her, glancing between the writer and the empty glass. Then she looked tentatively at her own.

“It’s not as strong as they want you to believe, you know. When you drink it right, with water, it’s not bad at all,” she said casually. “It’s better if you drink it up before the sugar starts to settle at the bottom.”

Band Aid obediently drank it down fast and blurted an exclamation of delight and surprise. “I think I’m beginning to like it,” she confessed.

Quills smiled and put the glass down. “I thought you might. I... actually think we should celebrate. You have, after all, given me very good ideas for the book. It’s all you,” she said. “So... care for another? It’s been ages.”

It went like that. Quills talked her into drinking through the sizeable bottle with her. She took over pouring the drinks because Band Aid was getting a little unsteady. Quills, of course, cheated, putting more water and less absinthe in her drinks than Band Aid’s. The nurse was chugging back the absinthe and talking about past patients that had tested her patience with vigour and spite, as if they were vermin. Quills was drinking along and nodded in understanding whenever she needed to, biding her time.

They talked about Quills’ other writing. Band Aid said she looked forward to reading her attempt at poetry but declared that she hated horror as it was so base and uninteresting. Quills just nodded in agreement as well; perhaps it was a mistake to try horror. Band Aid droned on and made Quills tell her about how other fans, those awful, awful and inconsiderate ponies could get so grating and pushy...

A little more than half-way through the bottle, Band Aid was so sloshed, she could just stare at her glass in a sort of dazed, puzzled manner.

“Oh dear, Band Aid, are you alright?” Quills asked her, putting down her glass.

She felt a little dizzy too but still clear-minded and with her plan wedged firmly in her brain.

“Yes! Yes, wonderful. I think... I just... need to take a break...” the nurse said and then belched and excused herself prudishly.

“Perhaps we ought to cork the bottle then and save some for another day, eh?” Quills suggested.

“Oh... oh you’re right. Off to writing, you... got a book to finish...” Band Aid said vaguely and gathered the glasses and the water pitcher to put back on the tray and take them away.

Quills lost no time. When Band Aid turned around, Quills grabbed the heavy typewriter. She grit her teeth at the pang of pain her spine and muscles gave, from the effort of lifting that rickety old thing and heaved it overhead. The Princess Deluxe let a muffled click of loose gears as she swung it down, bringing all the weight she could into her throw. Quills slammed the typewriter onto the back of Band Aid’s head.

It made a sickening crack on impact, mixed with the mechanical noise of the typewriter’s parts as it connected with the mare’s skull. The cracking noise though made Quills’ stomach turn but she savoured it; something in the pit of her stomach loved hearing that sound coming from that horrible mare’s head and she grinned wildly. Band Aid blurted a surprised sound, dropped the tray and sent the absinthe bottle, the pitcher and the glasses smashing to the floor and collapsed herself. There was a stain of blood marring her pale salmon red mane.

Quills wasted no time. She rolled over and using her forelegs she crawled out of the bed and fell onto the floor with a thud. Her useless hind legs landed on Band Aid’s limp body and Quills yelped in pain as one of her broken wings took the full weight of her falling on the floor. The typewriter had bounced off Band Aid’s head and hit the floor. The metal casing had cracked and spilled some of the machine’s components, which rolled across the room before stopping at the walls.

Crazy Quills panted wildly and then started to crawl along the floor on her front legs, half-laughing in an almost hysteric manner. She didn’t waste time trying to ensure that Band Aid was dead. She felt too frightened to do so. She just moved.

Get a move on, slow-poke! You know storms don’t wait for anyone!

That was Rainbow Dash talking in her head. She grit her teeth and kept going.

Git a move on, sugarcube! Ah know it burns, but y’gotta work through it! That’s the only way you get through pain, Applejack’s southern comforting tone rambled through.

Quills reached the door. Band Aid hadn’t locked it when she came in with the drink an she’d actually left it ajar. Quills almost cried with joy. She knocked it open with her hoof and dragged herself out.

Talk about lucky-lucky, Quillsie! Pinkie Pie’s chipper voice said in her head. I knew you could do it! My left back hoof was all itchy!

The door led into a decrepit living room. It looked as though it hadn’t been cleaned in months. There was trash (mainly convenience food wrappers and cartons) strewn everywhere, the couch and armchair were stained and there were several broken pieces of china swept into a corner – no doubt from Band Aid’s last screaming fit.

What a pigsty, darling! Rarity’s lovely voice said in her head. No sane pony would ever want to live in such squalor! I suggest you expedite your efforts to leave there immediately!

Quills thought she could say that again. She wanted to get out of that house no matter what. She dragged herself over the dirty carpet and every bit of distance she covered made her wish her wings were working. She winced every time she instinctively tried to flap them, both thankful for the absinthe’s numbing effects and cursing it for making her forget her wings weren’t working every fifteen seconds. She dragged herself through the front hall to the door and only then it dawned on her: How as she going to open the front door?!

Keep calm, Crazy Quills... keep calm. Fluttershy whispered. I know you’re scared, but you have to keep calm...

Quills looked about, frantically. She thought for a moment that she heard a faint groan coming from the house, very likely from the room she’d just left, where a big mare was bleeding out of her head all over the hardwood. A mare that was very possibly not dead.

She saw an umbrella, one of those old-fashioned types with the curved handle and knocked it over. She grabbed it between her teeth from the pointed edge and used it to pull at the handle. She missed a couple of times as the umbrella’s handle slipped off but after what felt like a lifetime, she did it. She pulled the umbrella down hard and the handle turned with a snap. Quills pulled the door open, knocking over the coat hanger in the process and scrambled out.

You can do it, Quills! You can do anything you make up your mind to do, Twilight Sparkle pepped up in her head. Now get out of there!

Quills grit her teeth harder than ever and pulled herself over the door’s threshold. She found herself on a small wooden porch. Outside it was cold and there was snow still everywhere. She didn’t care, it’d numb the pain. Cold was good. To her amazement, it was night, she was sure of that, but the moon shone almost like a pale sun overhead. The pale light made the snow almost glitter. She was faced with an expanse of snow with some trees in the distance, downhill. She had no idea where on earth she was.

She made it to the edge of the porch and tumbled down the short flight of stairs and into the snow. It felt wonderfully cool for a moment but then it grew sharp like needles. She looked back at the house. It was a small, shabby-looking cabin and there was something... blurry about it.

Don’t dawdle, Quills! Codex’s barely-calm voice said.

Quills whimpered but swallowed down her tears. She would make it back to Ponyville on her belly if she had to. She began to drag herself through the snow, up to her nose in the cold powdery stuff. She was still worried about that groaning noise she’d heard when she was leaving the house. Was Band Aid dead? Or alive, and just pulling herself together before going after the miserable, crippled writer.

You didn’t imagine it, hon, Sunny’s soft tone said. You’re imaginative but you don’t make up stuff like that to scare yourself. Hurry up hon, you gotta hide...

She glanced back to see how far she’d gotten and to her dismay found that although the distance she’d covered had felt like it was a marathon and a half, in fact it had been less than a dozen feet away from the bottom of the porch stairs. She groaned a little and struggled further through the snow, even though she was starting to lose feeling in her forelegs from the cold.

The snow had blanketed everything with an eerie silence, it seemed, so she heard that creak of the door clearly and she froze up. Then came the hoof-fall on wood. Quills whimpered.

Look at the enemy, pipsqueak! Her daddy shouted at her.

She turned her head as much as she could and looked over.

Band Aid, her salmon-colour mane smeared with blood was standing at the porch in front of the door, holding the smashed bottle of absinthe in her teeth and shooting a blood-freezing glare at the writer. She looked dazed but there was something terrifying about the way she still looked determined to hurt her even as blood trickled down her forehead.

Every voice in her head said it at once: Quills! RUN!

But run, where? She panicked and dug her hooves through the snow in vain as she heard the heavy steps of Band Aid clumping down the porch stairs. She suddenly gazed up at the moon, a gloriously big, pale full moon. That madpony would kill her, slowly and painfully under that moon. A shadow flew across it.

“Luna save me...!” Quills whispered in panic.

There was a sound like thousands of window-panes shattering all at once. Princess Luna broke through what Quills thought was the moon’s surface. She landed between the mad nurse and her intended victim with grace and a surprisingly soft thud. She sent flurries of snow flying around her and her starry mane and tail flowed about her as she glared down Band Aid and bellowed with her terrifying Royal Canterlot Voice:

“YOU SHALL NOT HAVE HER, FOUL CREATURE!”

It dawned on Quills very quickly. The hole in the sky where the moon should be, the blurriness of the house’s exterior and its surroundings…

“Princess Luna!” Quills blurted.

“Stand your ground, Crazy Quills, but do not leave my side! You will be safe, with me,” the princess said in her normal voice, which to the tired and broken writer sounded wonderfully soothing.

“So then...” she blurted. “So then, this is a dream, isn’t it?! All this time... I could’ve just opened my eyes and made it go away!”

But the princess shook her head, never taking her eyes off the nurse. “This is not a natural dream Crazy Quills! This illusion is a trap and a product of this creature!”

Band Aid made a screech that no pony should be able to make. Quills finally realized that the mare now had eight blood-red spider-like eyes on her head.

The spell had cracked. Instead of lying on her belly, broken and cripple, Quills stood on her feet, although she felt pain still. She must be hurt for real, in the waking world, but certainly not paralyzed.

“Wh-Wha-What is it?” the writer asked, a slight tremble to her voice as she glued herself to Luna.

The monster pony screeched again and charged them, a huge dark shadow growing along it, but Princess Luna blasted it back into the house with a burst of magic.

“’Tis called a Dream Catcher,” Luna said. “It snatches ponies with great imaginations when they are weak and puts them in a deep magical sleep. There it feeds on their dreams and their will and imagination runs dry...” she paused and glanced meaningfully at Quills, who understood immediately and gulped.

“But... how do I wake up?” Quills asked. “Can I even wake up!?”

The princess turned to face her at last. She gave her a reassuring and confident smile. “You’re halfway there, Crazy Quills. You’ve done what few ponies could ever hope to do: you’ve loosened the Dream Catcher’s magical hold on your imagination. You fought back.”

Quills’ ears drooped down. “But what do I do now?!”

Luna didn’t answer immediately. She swung around to face the monster again and put up a magical barrier around them and the monster, now looking very little like a pony and more like a vague monstrosity clad in shadows with some spindly legs protruding from them, slammed against the dome.

“You are not alone, Crazy Quills. The Dream Catcher’s mind is here, its body is vulnerable. Your friends are there for you. Trust in them. The Elements of Harmony will take care of the Dream Catcher and her spell on you will be broken.”

The creature that had been Band Aid lunged at them again with a screech, showing an articulated maw like a spider’s, full of teeth. Princess Luna faced the creature again, a dark blue aura enveloping her horn.

“Until then,” she told the writer, “I shall keep you safe. You have my word.”

***************

Codex gulped. It was a giant arachnid. It was a repulsive eight-legged creature, with a big furry black abdomen, swollen like a rotting prune. It was twice as tall as Big Macintosh and eight times his size. Codex and Sunny together amounted to one and a half Big Macintoshes (Everypony always did remark that Sunny seemed to wear his bistro’s little kitchen rather than work in it!) and they had but a fraction of that awesome stable-pony’s strength and between them the two unicorns had about half the magic power of Twilight Sparkle.

And to top it all off, the cave that this creature had made its den in, covered in webs and smelling of the remains of the creature’s meals and the rotting webs... it was full of smaller arachnids, scuttling around on their slinky little legs and making these hair-rising shrieking noises. The two of them couldn’t hope to defeat it, of course, but they weren’t trying to, anyway. They were buying time for the girls to disentangle themselves from the webbing and fire up the Elements of Harmony. That thing held Crazy Quills somewhere in that cave and that enough was giving them all the guts they ever needed to face the Dream Catcher.

When Princess Luna came personally to Ponyville after Twilight’s letter reached Canterlot, they’d all known things were bad. She told them that she had felt a Dream Catcher prowling the very edges of the dreams of ponies but had not been able to find it. Quills’ intensely vivid dreams guided her (and them) to it as much as to herself. She had told them what horrible fate awaited their pudgy friend if they failed. Luna had remained behind, diving into the dream world once again to watch over Quills, and they had run off to find its lair.

She told them that Dream Catchers started out as normal, harmless spiders that spun their webs and caught their meals. But a combination of magic and old age could lead some to create webs that could catch more than just bugs. The oldest and most potent magical spiders became Dream Catchers. Supposedly there hadn’t been one in Equestria for several centuries.

Codex was sure he had its attention by now. The Dream Catcher had caught them by surprise after they made their way in its lair, catching them in webs and swarming them with its terrible young. They’d all had other ideas. The sticky web was no match for Rainbow Dash’s speed when she started flying herself out of it and she tore it all up, flying about like a multicoloured streak. Rarity discovered (to her delight) a deposit of fine shard crystals in the cave’s ceiling that would do wonderfully to cut through the spider silk. Codex and Twilight disentangled themselves with fire and some clever teleporting respectively. Funny enough... Pinkie Pie’s Party Canon scared off a lot of the spider young.

And then there was Sunny, who seemed to have carried with him all the contents of his kitchen’s knife drawer – and then some.

Really, there was no way the six girls could’ve talked Majestic Sunrise into staying in Ponyville once he’d heard what had happened.

Codex made a funny ‘eep’ sound as the spider scuttled right for him. Seeing no way out he galloped straight at it... and right under it as a frying pan came whizzing through the air and smacked on the spider’s face with a loud BONG! He heard Sunny lamenting that he’d have to buy a new pan. However, finding himself in an uncannily good position to disable the spider’s web, the green-haired unicorn took aim. His fire, now charged at a smelter-hot temperature, shot right at the spider’s big abdomen. The Dream Catcher shrieked in pain and reared back, smoke coming from its underside.

“Codex! Sunny!” Twilight Sparkle shouted from the back. “Hold on a little longer! We’ve almost got the last Elements loose from the webs!”

Codex looked back at the giant spider just in time to see its front leg coming at him with the intent of spearing him. In a slight fit of panic, he upped the temperature of his magic flame as far as he could imagine and blew a cone of super-hot white fire at the dangerously pointy leg as the spider was bringing it down.

The fire was so hot that the temperature of the cave itself warmed slightly and the creature screeched in pain as it drew its char-grilled leg back. Codex panted heavily from the effort. His horn was no longer on fire, but it was smoking like a coal engine. He doubted he could ignite it for a while and he felt very dizzy after that. So much so that he didn’t see the Dream Catcher moving and smacking him with its char-grilled leg. The green-haired unicorn was went flying into the nearest web-covered wall with a thud, while the giant spider’s brittle leg snapped on impact.

Fortunately for him though, the creature had no time to pursue the irritating target, though. Sunny, his horn glowing bright electric blue, was wielding all of his pristine kitchen knives telekinetically. He charged the Dream Catcher and about a dozen cleavers and meat knives (for Sunny and Quills were meatarians) flew and sliced through the hard chitin of the other front leg of the spider. Ichor shot out and the spider screeched again and wheeled around, refocusing its attention on the other irritation.

Sunny kept dodging and launching and swiping his knives at the Dream Catcher, infuriating it more than damaging it, as it kept approaching him. He was surprisingly agile and Codex, after sitting up from his knock against the wall, realized that no doubt he’d gotten so good at running about by running about in a similar fashion in his kitchen, during his bistro’s rush hour at lunchtime. The spider suddenly swept two legs at him and that pushed him in a corner. Stunned for a moment, Sunny yelped as he saw the second hit coming and brought all his knives back in front of him, bracing for what was going to be a painful impact.

The cave lit up with magical light and the spider screeched and pressed itself back against the back wall of the cave, as if sensing what was coming.

“Sunny! Codex! Get out of the way!!” Twilight Sparkle shouted over the din.

Sunny dashed over to the orangey-white unicorn and with a rather panicky expression he unceremoniously picked him up with his magic and slung him over his back like the sacks of potatoes he carried from his pantry and just boogied on out of there.

“Let ‘er have it, Twilight!” Rainbow Dash shouted.

The full blast of the Elements of Harmony came along, and the unrelenting beam of colour enveloped the screeching arachnid completely. Codex covered his ears with his hooves and Sunny cringed. When the barrage of friendship and harmony extinguished itself at last, the spider had disappeared completely. The only sign of it ever existing was the cobwebs in the cave and the bits of sliced and char-grilled legs left behind. They all stood and stared at the spot the spider had been, looking utterly surprised.

“D’we get it?” Applejack asked tentatively, looking at the remains. “Ah can’t believe we just blasted away a whole creature.”

“What about the smaller ones?” Rarity added her own question, looking around with squeamishness written all over her face.

“Oh those won’t bother us...” Fluttershy uttered. “They’re just small spiders...”

“Not that small!” Rarity groaned.

“Where’s Crazy Quills?” Twilight asked, sounding very worried as the others gathered round.

Codex limped along Sunny who supported him. “She must be somewhere here, Princess Luna told us that Dream Catchers keep their victims close by,” he said.

“Listen!” Sunny said and they all hushed.

They heard a weak whimper from the back of the cave, an area that the creature had made sure none of them could reach, webbed over many times and looking like a veil had been drawn over it. But there was enough visibility for them to see some lumps on the walls here and there. They ran over. Sunny passed knives to everypony and they all worked through the web, cutting a hole through the sticky stuff. They got through into a little niche in the cave lined with many cocoons – most of them dry and brittle. The newest-looking and biggest one was shaking and whimpering.

“That’s her!” Codex and Dash said together.

“Dash, Fluttershy!” Twilight said. “Get the stretcher we brought. Sunny, get her out of that thing, we need to see if she’s okay!”

She didn’t need to say it, Sunny had already rushed next to the cocoon, expertly using his carving knives to strip away the webbing. Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy had returned with the stretcher just as he pulled away the final layer of webbing from Quills. Twilight and Fluttershy were all over her when they put her on the stretcher.

“Her wing’s broken. I think that was really from her crash,” Fluttershy said.

“She’s feverish,” Twilight added, nodding, “but I think she’ll be okay.”

“Thank Celestia…” Sunny exclaimed, sighing loudly.

“No,” Codex corrected, “Thank Luna.”

Sunny smiled tiredly “True… I’m guessing you want a lift to the hospital.”

“I wouldn’t mind it…”

************************************

Quills opened her eyes slowly and tiredly. For a long moment she thought she was still in that wretched bed in that wretched house with Band Aid. But she glanced around and saw a sterile, clean-smelling room with white-washed walls and sunlight streaming through a window across her with soft cream-colored curtains. No, she wasn’t in the dream. There was an IV drip going into her front right leg. Her right wing was bandaged very carefully. Her left wing was fine. She tentatively tensed up and moved her back legs. They moved just fine under the covers. Her back was incredibly sore.

She looked around, confused and dazed. She felt... at home.

She perked up a little when she heard some noise outside her door. She recognised two voices and smiled weakly.

“Codex? Sunny?” she called out to them.

“She’s awake!” one of the colts said.

Then the door to her room opened with a slam and Sunny rushed in with the biggest grin she’d ever seen on his face and hugged her on her unhurt side. Immediately he started weeping and Quills became a little weepy herself.

“Sunny!” she quibbled. “Oh, honey, I was so scared!”

The chef sniffled. “Quillsie! Sugarcube! I was so worried! I thought I’d lost you!”

“Oh gosh, sweetie, you look like roadkill!” Quills then exclaimed, lifting his face in her hooves and looking at him. He had black bags under his eyes and his mane looked like a bale of hay. He also had a big bandage wrapped around his torso. She hugged him again and didn’t say anything. She looked over his shoulder and saw Codex standing by the door, looking a little embarrassed but smiling.

“I’m glad to see you’re okay, Quillsie,” he said.

Quills was shocked to see what condition her friend was in. There was a bandage around his head and what looked like ice packs around his horn. She could see the bits of mane poking out of the bandages looked blackened. He limped over and placed his front legs on the bed frame, giving Quills a clear sight of the long bruise running from his left shoulder diagonally down.

“What the hay happened to you?” she exclaimed in surprise.

“Stupid heroics,” Sunny explained matter-of-factly.

“I object to that!” Codex said hotly, “My heroics are not stupid!”

Sunny raised an eyebrow at that and without missing a beat, elaborated:

“You made yourself the centre of attention of a giant pony-eating spider. You supercharged your fire so much that you gave yourself magic burnout and singed your own head and left yourself defenceless so the big spider could smack you against the wall! What do you call that if not stupid heroics?”

Codex was about to protest when the door opened again and six ponies dashed in. Quills found herself surrounded by overjoyed mares, asking all sorts of questions and giving her hugs all around.

“She’s awake! She’s awake!” Pinkie Pie nearly shrieked and somehow managed to throw confetti all over the room.

“Ah told y’all she’d wake up soon! She’s as strong as Big Macintosh!” Applejack laughed and put on her night-table a big basket with jars of zap-apple jam and what smelled like freshly baked apple scones. “Granny Smith and Applebloom wanted me to bring ya this. Speedy recovery.”

Quills looked at the basket hungrily but then a flash of rainbow colours succeeded in almost launching Sunny off the bed and Rainbow Dash gave her a hug.

“AAAW YEAH! I knew you’d be alright!” she said in her most excitable tone. “What were you thinking, trying to fly to Ponyville through a snowstorm!? You’re either really crazy or the bravest pegasus from here to Cloudsdale! What’d we do if you’d really kicked it?!”

“Rainbow Dash!” Fluttershy scolded her. “Shame on you! Don’t say things like that! What matters is that she’s alright.”
She gently pushed the excitable blue mare away and gave Quills a much gentler hug. “Oh Quills, somepony’s missed you very much. I know it’s against the hospital rules... but I sneaked him in.”

On cue, a faint squeaking was heard and a bright pink fruit bat peeked out of Fluttershy’s mane and flapped over to Quills, shrieking happily.

“Poptart!” Quills said with a choked voice and the bat landed on her hooves. She bumped noses with the little animal and he practically hugged her head with his wings and nuzzled her. “Aw Poptart, I missed you too, little man! I hope you didn’t give Fluttershy a hard time!”

“Oh no,” said Fluttershy, shaking her head. “He’s a perfect little gentleman. He was so worried when you were late coming back. I almost didn’t know what to do with him. But I’m glad he looks so happy now.”

Indeed, after getting his much-awaited for nuzzlings, Poptart made a beeline for Quills’ mane and nestled on her head, blending almost perfectly against her mane and looked exceedingly comfortable and content to be there.

“Oh don’t hog her, everypony! She’s been through enough!” Rarity said rather imperiously and squeezed near them. Quills was shocked to see her with her hair not in the most excellent state, as was her usual and she actually looked rather sleepless. “Quills, darling! I’m so happy to see you’re better now!” she said with a big, wonderful smile and Quills knew she meant every word.

Then she brought up a most unlikely sight. Quills personalized saddle-bags and her flight-goggles. The former were patched in a manner that was almost impossible to tell from the original stitching and the latter were stitched together and the broken lens replaced.

“Rarity...” Quills said, looking at them in awe and then at the pretty unicorn.

“Oh don’t mention it, darling, I was delighted to fix them up for you. They are such lovely saddlebags anyway, it’s a shame to even think of throwing them away just because they got a little torn. And I know how much you love those goggles!” she replied defiantly.

Quills pulled her in a warm hug. “Thank you. You must’ve stayed up all night to fix them.”

Rarity smiled a sweet smile. “You’re welcome, darling.”

And then, last but not least, Twilight Sparkle came up to her. She looked tired as well and her mane was also singed a little bit. “I’m so glad you’re alright, Crazy Quills,” she said softly. “You gave us such a scare. Oh, I brought you some books! I know you like to read when you’re resting.”

Quills touched Twilight’s forehoof with hers. “Twilight... I can guess that it was you who got Princess Luna to come in the dreams to find me. Thank you so much...”

Twilight blushed but shook her head. “Codex gave me the idea. I was too busy panicking. You can thank his cool head.”

And then it was Codex who blushed and looked pleased as peaches.

“How long have I been out?” Quills asked tentatively.

“Three days. You were missing for one and a half,” Dash said quickly. “We were gonna start looking all over Equestria for you.”

Quills looked stunned. “Oh gosh... it...it felt much longer in that dream.”

“Time is very fuzzy in dreams, Quills,” Twilight said soothingly. “What’s important is that you’re better now. You were exhausted, physically and mentally. You’re the first pony to survive a Dream Catcher attack in centuries.”

“Princess Luna saved me...” Quills said with a choked tone.

Twilight shook her head. “You saved yourself, Quills. If you hadn’t fought back in your dream, we never could’ve woken you up. We just found you and brought you home,” she said gently.

Quills looked incredibly moved and felt a heaving big weight on her chest. She sobbed a little and held out her hooves to hug as much of the six mares as she could.

“I...I love you guys. You’re the best friends I could ever have!” she blubbed.

“Aw don’t get sappy, Quills! It doesn’t suit you!” Dash said cheekily.

There was a big interruption from Codex and Sunny, who were standing beside the bed and wanted to settle once and for all who was the most heroic of the two, rather loudly. None of them won, incidentally, but everypony got a pretty good laugh out of it.

The door opened yet again and Nurse Redheart stood there, looking disapproving and strict, but a million times sweeter than Band Aid.

“Alright everypony! Visiting hours are over! That mare needs quiet and rest! You’ve ganged up on her! She’s come through a terrible ordeal! Out, everypony!” she said and herded them all towards the door. “You can come again tomorrow, but for now she needs rest!!”

“Hey! What gives!?”

“Oh but we haven’t seen her in three days...”

“But we were gonna throw a Get-Well Party!”

“We ain’t even opened the zap apple jam!”

“This is most distressing; can’t you make an exception for us?”

“Calm down everypony, I guess we’ll just pop back tomorrow. We all need some rest.”

Nurse Redheart fluffed up Quills’ pillow and straightened out her covers. She didn’t touch the basket with the apple goodies, but she did warn Quills to take it easy with the snacks because she was still convalescing. She didn’t see Poptart, who had dove into Quills hair and kept quiet.

Left alone at last, Crazy Quills finally relaxed. For the first time in what her mind told her were days, she found herself smiling and quite safe and sound, all thanks to her friends.

****************************

It was four months down the line. After the Dream Catcher was defeated, after suffering in that dream from that terrible nurse and all the time since she made a full recovery (physically, anyway) Quills still couldn’t put down a word on her typewriter.

She wasn’t afraid of it. Oh, no, it would take much more than a badly maintained typewriter and a crazy nurse with over-the-top acting to make a pony as creatively insane as Crazy Quills afraid of a mere typewriter. It was more like her muse had taken a long vacation. It was... almost as if the writers’ block from her dream had carried over to reality.

This wasn’t the first time Quills’ muse had left her. The very reason she had moved to Ponyville after her big breakdown was to find that pesky runaway muse. She wasn’t too sure when the muse would return... if it would return at all. She was worried the shock of her experience might cripple her writing, permanently.

Turns out the Dream Catcher’s nightmare was somewhat prophetic. Her manuscript for the Wolves of Blackmoor had disappeared during the whole ordeal. Rarity had told her that her saddlebags had been emptied and torn and many of her things broken or lost, the manuscript among them. It was the final blow the damn arachnid had dealt her. She really was back to square one and she had forgotten what inspired the book in the first place. She knew the story she wanted to tell... just not how she wanted to tell it.

She had paced around her writing desk so much that the grooves in her floor up in the attic were starting to get as deep as the ones in Twilight’s library. And that was just in the first month, before Sunny reminded her that his bathroom was right under the floor she’d eventually wear a hole through. The rest of the time she was flying around the desk.

Once again, she circled around the typewriter, hoping her muse would make an unexpected comeback, until her frustration mounted to the point of boiling over. She made a groan and plopped herself down by the roof window. She had taken to keeping it open during the day, mostly due to Sunny and Codex insisting that her attic room got unbearably stuffy whenever she spent more than ten minutes in it. She never noticed that, actually, but she did like the clear air of Ponyville, so she kept the window open anyway.

For a small town, Ponyville was certainly quite active. The writer could just stare out the window for hours and spot two or three happenings that inspired a story. For four long months, though, everything outside seemed mundane and routine. Today felt like no exception. She spotted Rainbow Dash in the sky showing her aerial tricks off while bucking clouds again. On the ground by the shops was the self-proclaimed Anthropologist, Lyra Heartstrings, trying to convince a couple of impressionable fillies about the existence of humans. A frustrated Bonbon was closing in on that scene, ready to bite Lyra on the tail and drag her back home. There were the Cutie Mark Crusaders, bless them, off to launch another half-baked scheme to earn their cutie marks. These things occurred so often that they lost all their lustre.

Quills sighed and rested her chin on her hoof. She’d put together several notes about the Wolves but she couldn’t get started.

Then she suddenly perked up and look down, at the tree right outside the bistro. Under the tree she saw a pair of unlikely friends. Dinky and Stronghoof. Stronghoof, Codex’s little sister, was a sky-blue earth pony with a straight black mane who was rather very talented in partial arts but wasn’t overburdened with intelligence. Dinky, Derpy’s daughter, was an adorable, grey blond-maned asthmatic little unicorn with a brilliant little mind and a knack for drawing. One would think these two fillies could never be friends.

They spotted the writer and waved at her. Quills smiled and waved back. If she didn’t know those fillies were the same age, she’d have a hard time figuring it out. Stronghoof was bigger than most ponies her age, almost twice as big as Dinky, and one would dread to think how big she’d get once she reached adulthood.

Quills recalled that it was their personalities that made them inseparable. For all their contrasting interests, they each respected and admired the other’s talents. Dinky was cheering her friend on as Stronghoof performed an intense-looking kata. When her kata ended, Stronghoof trotted over to Dinky and admired the sketch she had drawn during the kata. The story of how they became friends was just as strange as the friendship itself, and Quills could never forget the first time she heard it…

“That’s it!” the writer thought out loud, “That’s what inspired The Wolves of Blackmoor!”

It all came back to her now. The story was about the characters being trapped in the fort-town of Blackmoor and besieged by the proverbial wolves and the intrigues of the town that would change the course of the whole plot. But the core, the living heart of the story was in fact such an unlikely friendship: Valiant, the squire who was now thrust into the role of a knight without even half the experience needed, but with more than enough courage for it. And Witless, the inexperienced bard who was suddenly thrown out into an extremely hostile world and had to discover the amazing depth of shrewdness and wit he actually had.

Of course they were the real protagonists. Wolves was all about the two of them striking a balance between them and realizing that to defeat the wolves and their master, both their talents are needed. They were growing as friends in the shadow of Sharpe Edge’s death. The book was meaningless without that. Oh sure there was the introduction of two new characters: Pumpkin, the eternal optimist earth pony who was the size of a barn and a griffon named Talon who was an old friend of Sharpe’s. And sure there was a lot of action and suspense and mystery but the point was... there was no story without Valiant and Witless.

Quills realized she must’ve been sitting at the window with a completely goofy look of joy on her face for more than five minutes because the two fillies had stopped what they were doing and were staring up at her with a mix of awkwardness and alarm. Quills just waved at them frantically and dove back inside. She alighted in her chair in front of the typewriter more quickly than she ever thought possible. She began typing. The words were flowing out onto the paper like a river. Her muse had returned.

The Wolves of Blackmoor would be written once more.

Author's Note

Thank you for reading through this admittedly long one-shot. This was a joint effort between me and my friend, ElvenAngel, whose OC stars in this story. If you have any suggestions or need any clarification on the OCs here, please let me know in the comments and I'll try my best to answer your questions. Once again, thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed this.