Twilight had never felt so sluggish before.
Every single cell in her body felt like…
She struggled to find the words. That felt wrong.
More than the fact that she couldn’t feel her body, more than the fact that every memory she tried to grasp fell just out of reach, more than the fact that she couldn’t remember ever feeling so alone. More than all of that, she felt most robbed by the fact that her eloquence escaped her.
She felt like…
She didn’t know if she felt anything.
She was…
Work. Think. Anything.
Every cell in her body was a…sedated ant; intended to be part of a thriving, efficient colony, yet failing at everything it was supposed to do.
She wanted to scream at herself, scream at every little part of herself to just please. Please, move.
But nothing happened.
She wasn’t even entirely sure if she had a body to go back to. The edges of her awareness felt fuzzy. Like a cake with the icing licked off that Pinkie Pie would make a half-hearted attempt at insisting came that way.
Pinkie Pie.
Her friend. One of her friends. They were… they were the whole reason she was still…
It would be so easy to let go, wouldn’t it? She wouldn’t have to feel anything if she just let herself drift off. Her eyes were already closed. Did she even have eyes anymore?
What had Starlight done to her?
Twilight tried to squint. She furrowed her brow (or rather, imagined herself doing so), trying to imagine herself tracking a whip at a gaggle of unmotivated neurons. They hissed at her, axons flailing and myelin sheaths swelling intimidatingly.
The last she remembered…
Starlight won.
Twilight doubted such a victory was what she had originally intended but…
Any victory where Twilight didn’t get to be happy was good enough for her, right? Any reality where everything was ripped from Twilight’s hooves, any place where Twilight was alone, any place where she could well and truly be sure that she had nothing…
That’s what victory meant to her, didn’t it?
Twilight used to be defined by the fact that she loved her friends.
If you had asked her who she was, she would have said just that, among other things. She would have said she was a student, a princess, Celestia’s mentee, but above all, she was a good, forgiving friend.
She thought that she could befriend anyone. That anything could be cured with just… just enough of… just meeting someone halfway. Just figuring out the right combination of words and/or actions, like a puzzle. Like you could carve a piece of metallic good intention into the perfect key that could undo just about any damage done to a pony.
What a…
What a joke.
What had she been thinking?
Inside of her, she felt like there were two warring sides. One wanted to keep pushing, wanted to keep picturing herself getting back up and undoing the time-spell and maybe if she just figured out the right combination of this and that and so-and-so and then the perfect image of everything working out in the end, with her friends right back where they belonged–
Like just imagining would do anything.
The other side drove a far more convincing point.
How had she ever begun to think herself an optimist?
Where did all of that get her? Where did all of her friendship and other fuzzy, sentimental lunacies get her?
If she had never left her tower in Canterlot, if she had never made friends, if she had never become princess, if there had never been that stupid map, she never would have upset Starlight, she never would have been the victim of her revenge, she never would be what she was at that moment.
Twilight opened her eyes.
She was back at the library. The Golden Oaks Library.
That also wasn’t right.
It was empty, too. The only way she could decipher left from right in the dingy space was from the light streaming in through slats in thick boards over where spacious windows used to be.
All of the shelves were empty.
Once the library’s prized jewels, now scattered like garbage over the floor.
Twilight floated over them, staring morosely at the bent spines and ripped pages and smeared words. Ink pots lie capsized over worn floors, wood soaked through with dried puddles of black.
She… floated.
That wasn’t… that wasn’t right, was it?
She lifted her head slightly, tired. The act required more effort than she had ever remembered.
The mirror. Her mirror.
She missed the light from outside the further she went into the library, then out, then down the halls, all the way up to where her bedroom used to be.
The journey felt like it took a lifetime.
Yet it wasn’t getting any darker. That was strange.
She noticed the way the reflective surface looked before her own muzzle. Light etched into the surface. It almost had a thin quality to it, like organza. Airy, light, cold. Nothing insulating about it.
Twilight felt cold.
Staring back at her from the mirror, she saw a transparent mare.
She saw herself.
She saw a ghost.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to tear herself into pieces. She wanted to just be able to properly get up.
But all of her was just, in a word, sluggish.
She was helpless.
She couldn’t do anything.

“This… must be it,” Rarity said, looking around herself at her peers. Five mares, who, over the course of the past five years, had worked tirelessly to fix what had so long ago been broken.
What they had lost.
What they were now aware of was a timeline taken from them.
Back in the Old World, Rarity had considered herself somewhat of an important mare. Someone who left her mark on the world.
She could make anything beautiful, she always made sure to toss out greetings and compliments to anypony who crossed her path like doing so came to her more easily than breathing air. She dressed so that ponies would notice, she made an impact.
But under Starlight’s reign?
She had become nothing more than a factory mare, pumping out beige rags that had no function outside of bare-boned utilitarianism.
She wasn’t sure if that made her selfish or not that, had she been able to carve out some sort of status for herself in the New World, she didn’t think she would have been as eager to listen to Pinkie Pie as she had been.
In an alternate world, when Pinkie Pie showed up ranting and raving that she, among four others, had once been destined to save the world, that they had to go to Tartarus to save somepony they couldn’t remember now but had once been important, that it was their duty to fix everything…
Well, Rarity would have laughed. She would have turned up her muzzle and slammed the door.
If she had something to lose then…
“For Celestia’s sake, are we going to go in or not?” Rainbow Dash snapped. She was still wearing her Captain’s uniform. Pressed, stinking of starch and a haughty attitude.
They’d been off the grid for a number of months now, abandoning their government-assigned posts to pursue the idea of saving the world, but Rainbow Dash still wore her uniform.
Just the sight of it made Rarity’s insides flip. More than the fact that she had actually spoken Celestia’s name.
Luna, Celestia, Cadence. Those were names to be thought of in darkness, names to not even be uttered in hushed whispers.
If any of the guards thought you were thinking about them, you’d be carted off to the detention camps. Some ponies, years ago, when all of this began, thought that that’s where the princesses had been banished. That you wouldn’t even recognise them under the grime of prison labour, thinking them just another rule-breaker like yourself.
Applejack clapped a hoof over the back of Rainbow’s head, adeptly weaving back from the swing aimed at her in retaliation.
“Can you behave yourself for one darn’d second? Do ya not think this is hard for all of us?”
A silence fell back over the group, until Pinkie Pie extracted a heavy tome from her saddle-bag, embossed with a split-tone sun-shaped cutie mark.
She flipped through with purpose, eventually jabbing her muzzle into the centre, pulling back to reveal a hoof-drawn diagram of a tree-shaped library.
Surrounding it in the picture, there were houses, a street-sign and potted plants.
Yet, looking at it in front of them, a looming building with dark windows and dying grass as an inviting foyer, Rarity couldn’t imagine this ever being a place of warmth. Anything anypony would ever want near civilized folk.
This building looked like somepony had died there.
“How long do you think we have before she realizes that we’re here?” Fluttershy asked meekly.
The pink-haired mare didn’t look like she’d ever had much of a backbone to lean on, so it wasn’t hard to picture exactly how the current shell of a pony in front of them had been scraped out into the pallid, shaking figure she was. How long had it taken them to make her comfortable enough to speak more than one word at a time?
Starlight’s reign had hollowed them out entirely. Nopony had felt like themselves in a… long time.
“The barricade won’t last long,” Rainbow huffed, still rubbing a hoof over the back of her head.
“She’ll bring reinforcements,” Applejack nodded. “The fact the library is here proves that we were right. Everything Sunset Shimmer told us in the book Pinkie found was right. She knows we’re here, and she knows what we’re here for.”
“And if there’s nothing at all in the library then…?” Rarity asked. Her voice sounded small, even to herself.
She used to say everything with her chest.
The silence was starting to get suffocating. It had never been light or breezy to begin with, but now that they were at the precipice of their revolt, the climax of their resistence… they were about to win or lose everything.
The stakes turned the silence to tar in their lungs.
Tartarus hadn’t been a very comforting place since they first set hoof there, ambience fully equipped with screams of tortured souls and unidentified liquids dripping down the walls and Cerberus’ barks but…
The five mares stiffened.
Those were hoof steps.
“No, no, no-” Rainbow swiveled around.
“Quick! Get in!” Pinkie shrieked, joining Rainbow as the two of them lead the way towards the door of the library.
It was so surreal seeing it in person, so strange to see it be a reality, rather than an ominous warning from a faceless mare from another world, someone they had to choose to blindly believe knew the world wasn’t how it was meant to be.
Rainbow made it to the door first and Rarity felt her stomach bubble with timid excitement, treacherous hope, maybe… maybe they actually could–
The door didn’t budge.
“No!”
There had to be some other way to get in.
There were windows, and they were smart and strong and they had made it this far and it was right in front of them, but the guards were also getting closer.
The sound of their stomps, the roar of their commanders, there had to be at least a hundred of them.
They just had to think, they just had to be creative, they just had to work together and figure something out because they had come so far but damn, damn it, was thinking difficult when their hearts were pounding almost louder than the sound of the incoming army.
Then, the choice was taken from them altogether as they were seized by a veil of turquoise magic.
Starlight had found them.
The mares were helplessly ensnared in her magic, forced to face her as she leered at them from the front of the mob of soldiers.
A hundred enemies seemed like a modest estimate.
“Wow, I can’t believe you actually made it this far. I didn’t think there was a single shot in hell that you could–” she paused to laugh, glancing around at her army. “Oh! Hell! That’s funny, isn’t it? Because we’re in…”
She looked around, her brow dropping down in a glower. “That’s funny, isn’t it? Isn’t it polite to laugh when someone makes a joke?”
Starting at the frontline, the army started to laugh. In the Tartarus caverns, the sound bounced off the walls, sounding far more like a warbling cry like any sound of amusement.
“Wasn’t it funny, you girls?”
No one spoke.
Rarity couldn’t even turn around to see what faces her friends were making. Fluttershy was probably silently crying. Applejack and Rainbow would have ardently refused to even look at Starlight. Pinkie Pie must have looked so lost.
“Do you even know what’s in there? Do you even know what you’re looking for?”
Again, no one spoke.
Starlight hissed, her lips snarling as a beam of lighting erupted from the tip of her horn. It throttled through the hold she already had on them, causing every single fragment of Rarity’s body to feel like it was bursting.
Something like an Earthquake reverbed through the cavern, and Rarity wasn’t sure if it was all in her head of if the jolt had been just that strong.
“Twilight Sparkle!” Fluttershy squealed, and the agony in her tone made Rarity want to start wailing too.
“Twilight Sparkle?” Starlight momentarily looked aloof, though she most certainly had to have known who they had come all the way to Tartarus for. “How could you possibly even know who that is? How… how ridiculous that you even…”
And then, she started to laugh.
“I cut the timeline off at the root and… and you still seek each other out. Is this some cosmic joke?”
The army started to laugh again, but Starlight spun around, her eyes blazing, and with one mighty strike, caused a cascade of bodies with another jolt of lighting.
Rarity was almost amazed by her might, had it not been so horrifying.
What kind of pony had that kind of power? That kind of callousness? To just strike down an entire army of her own ponies like it was nothing?
“She’s dead! She’s dead! I killed her and you’re still seeking her out! She’s nothing more than a lost soul! Do you know what I did to her?” Starlight raved. Flecks of saliva mixed with pink hit the crystalline Tartarus floor.
She had bitten right through her bottom lip.
“I didn’t just kill her! I severed her soul from her body, trapping her in an endless nightmare! She isn’t even a pony anymore! She’s nothing more than a powerless whelp who would feel proud to even remember her own name!”
Rarity, realised the rumbling was coming from behind the library door.
“That’s the true hell! That’s what hell is! Being nothing! I reduced her to nothing!”
The door felt hot.
“And now! Now, I’m going to do the same thing to you!”
The door burst into flames and Rarity summoned enough strength to shield her head, though she needn’t have.
A purple aura protected her from the fire.
Her eyes wide, she met pure white eyes, glowing. The pupils were missing, invisible behind a flood of light so strong Rarity should have needed to look away, yet she couldn’t.
Something glowed inside her, warm, familiar, loving, and she realised this was a feeling she had felt before.
Maybe not in this lifetime. Maybe not this version of herself.
It was like every version of herself in the multiverse, every version capable of feeling at all, would recognise this feeling.
Like it was something meant to be.
The light kept climbing, kept rising, all up the Tartarus walls.
Around her, she saw the other mares, her friends, her best friends, glowing purple just like herself.
Between them she stood, translucent and pale, but there. Despite it all, still there for them.
Twilight Sparkle.
United again, the girls couldn’t have cared less about everything else that was wrong in the world. They could fix it.
It all sucked. It all had hurt so much. It was still so cold, still so dark, and nothing could fix the pain they had all already endured.
But they were together again now, standing with their backs against the library, covering each other from all sides and protecting every inch of each other that they could.
And in that moment, they felt invincible.
Starlight, in all her power, fended off their flames like it was nothing.
But that was okay.
There was a fight coming, but so long as they were together, they could do it.
“Girls… let’s finish her!”
They would win.