Twilight reappeared in a relatively small chamber, the walls of which immediately began to press down on her. This sensation passed as she grew accustomed to her new surroundings. The collection of books in her mystic grip arranged themselves neatly in a corner, out-of-the-way but kept safe by her hold. Stain-glass windows that depicted philosophers, scientists, and authors, including Starswirl the Bearded and Seaspear the Mutable Protector, lined the walls and cast faint streaks of colored light that intersected and blurred together on the floor. More bookshelves lay along the back wall just behind a weathered reception desk. Twilight recalled the storm clouds that she'd seen earlier and noted that the pegasi must have finished passing through Canterlot. The air here was fresh as the outdoors. Though the scent of books still lay heavy on her, mingled with it was a heady mix of fragrances from nearby flower gardens, visible out a second tier of less ornate, open windows.
Twilight frowned at the lonely desk, and then looked about her. There was no receptionist; it was distinctly unprofessional and inconsiderate for a pony to leave her post. A sound of hoof-falls caught her attention. Each beat was off time, accompanied by a shuffle only to be followed by an unnatural pause. She blinked and nodded slightly.
"Hello?" she said, before the shuffling had reached the nearby entryway.
The hoofsteps ceased, their echo still ringing, though she could barely hear the soft sound. Twilight moved to the doorway, poking her head out to look down the hall.
Before her stood a stallion whose golden mane was barely visible, shaved almost into nonexistence. His size outstripped even that of Big Macintosh. Unlike the farmer, who was thick but lacked definition, fine muscles cut through this stallion's barrel-like body. They rippled under his light blue coat as he began to move forward. What set him even further apart from the gentle giant of the Apple family was that this stallion was not an earth pony but a Pegasus. On his hip there was a small but radiant sun, split with a smile, and Twilight couldn't help but think that it seemed rather pathetic compared to the Sun on Celestia's flank. Twilight looked into his left eye and then shifted her gaze out and down. The side of his face was free of wrinkles, though he was not youthful, and his square jaw jutted out like an outcropping of rock.
She acknowledged that he would have been handsome had not the right half his face been melted into a twisted patch of red scars. His right eye was gone entirely, missing, but seemingly covered over with congealed flesh. The hue of his scars shifted as they moved down his neck, changing from red to a shade of brown, and then they blossomed out over his side, encompassing the empty pocket in his shoulder that was all that remained of his right foreleg. It then splashed upwards over his side and back as if it had consumed his entirely nonexistent right wing.
"Hey, Kid," the stallion said, shambling towards her with a level of dignity at which Twilight could only marvel. It seemed amazing that he could stand, let alone walk, but with awkward, if obviously practiced, flaps of his remaining wing, he somehow managed to do both.
As he drew near, Twilight saw that he was appraising her, his good eye trailing over her face and relatively petite body. While she was hardly the best judge of such things, she knew the gaze was not in the least improper. There was nothing unwholesome there.
"Hello," Twilight replied. "I think I've seen you around once or twice, but I don't believe we've ever met." She quirked her head. "That's something of a surprise, really."
"I guess I stand out, huh?" He lurched forward, causing Twilight to hop and then glance around furtively. "Name's Sun Bright. Been here a while, but only just started to work the counter. Not that strange that you never saw me. It's a big place. Lot of jobs; lot of staff."
"It's a pleasure to meet you," Twilight replied. "I'm-"
"Kid," he interjected, and Twilight felt a prickling sensation over her back, "everypony knows who you are. You're something of a celebrity."
"Ohl, I don't know about that." The books off in the other room wavered in her grip, and her horn sputtered ever so slightly.
"I do. It was a big deal when you moved out to Ponyville. Or it was after you took out Nightmare Moon. How's it working out for you?" He joined her in the doorway, Twilight pressing to the side slightly to accommodate his bulk. Together they shuffled into the room.
"Well, the research is both fascinating and fulfilling, and the ponies... the ponies are wonderful," she replied, though she found that the question was somewhat personal and, perhaps, a little untoward. Her steps were awkward and clipped as she tried to keep up with him far larger strides while accounting for his disability. At the moment, the only thing that was more difficult than struggling to match him was trying to hide the fact that she was trying.
"Fieldwork is more enjoyable than I ever imagined, though I think that's a function of the "who you're with" variable, double-u, rather than the "what you're doing" factor, double-u subscript one." Her head bobbed sagely. "I admit that I'm still working out the equations."
The stallion huffed and snorted at the same time, culminating in a rumble in the back of his throat. "As far as I can tell, that means that you're getting out more and you're doing it with other ponies. That's good to hear." He shuffled behind the desk at the back of the room. The fair half of his face twisted. "How about a coltfriend?"
Now that, Twilight thought, was distinctly untoward.
"Oh no," she said, coughing uncomfortably and waiving her hoof back and forth so fast that it blurred. She had too many potential topics of research, too much reading to get done, too many adventures to share with her friends. Relationships took time, and a romantic entanglement, such a silly thing, was hardly worth the effort expended. She took up a position on the other side of the desk. "I'm not interested in that sort of thing."
"So a marefriend, then." He nodded with a strange mock dignity, the creases around his eyes deepening. "You look like the type."
"Ugh," Twilight muttered as she shrunk in on herself. "If you're looking for research on romance, talk to my brother. That's his specialty. I don't have the time for it."
"That was another big deal, Kid. I saw that he got married, but had some trouble with wedding crashers." He laughed; the two sides of his body shook unevenly. "All the Canterlot snobs needed the exercise anyways."
"I'm glad you enjoyed it more than I did," Twilight grumbled.
"Anyways, Kid, friends are miracles enough in themselves. Shouldn't ask for too much," he said, plopping down to the ground. The muscles of his one foreleg rippled as it held his weight without any signs of discomfort. His head and shoulders poked out from behind the desk, despite the fact that it was built for a standing pony.
Twilight replied by turning her nose up at him. In the corner, her books swirled, shuffling around each other before gently crossing to room to rest at the purple pony's side.
"So, what are we checking out today?" the stallion asked, leaning forward, his left brow furrowing. His right brow was always furrowed.
"Oh, just some references for private study," Twilight said while levitating the pile of books down to the reception desk.
"Let's have a look. Got to keep records in case you forget to return one, right?" he finished before gripping the first text in his teeth and pulling it to the side. After repeating the action with the rest of the collection, the texts lay spread out before him.
He hummed thoughtfully at them. "Hard times, Kid?"
Twilight trailed her eyes over the books, examining their titles and authors, some famous and some obscure, ignoring the obvious look of understanding on the stallion's face. "I don't know what you mean," she said finally.
"I see." He slid himself slightly closer to the edge of the desk to lean his head out. "Thought it was kind of odd, you showing up back in Canterlot. I take it that it wasn't just for the library, was it?"
He looked down and then up, his eye half-lidded. Then he nosed one of the books so that it lay straight in front of him. The collection was out-of-place, disorganized. There was no longer any principle behind them. Dates and authors' names splashed around haphazardly. It was no worse than it had been a few minutes earlier, but it was worse.
Twilight felt her hooves itch deep inside the soft flesh. There was a pumping mechanism there. Horses and ponies were built to move. When they raised their legs, veins opened up, connected to the soft core of the hoof, and blood welled, carried in by gravity and the strength of a pony's mighty heart, even that of the weakest and frailest bookworm. When the hoof fell, impacted against the ground, cartilage and bone shifted to send the blood roaring back.
The physics and biology of it all was fascinating. It was a rather complex process; fluid dynamics dominated. Hooves were like miracles, designed to offset the inferior design of the body. No system of muscles existed to pump deoxygenated blood up from the lowest parts of a pony's body properly; the legs were too long, too far away from the heart. So it was like they had four little hearts in their hooves. The systems were different, and so was the oxygen content of the blood they transmitted, unused or consumed, but ponies had five hearts. They linked to each other, worked together, sending lifeblood back and forth in constant communication.
The faster a pony ran, the faster her hearts beat. Of course, that was the only thing that made sense. In the chest or in the hoof, hearts were no different. They set their pace to a pony's need.
"Somepony I knew died," Twilight said.
He hummed again, the exact same hum.
"I see." He slid himself slightly closer to the edge of the desk to lean his head out. "You were here for Tempest Rouser's funeral, right?"
"Did you know her?" Twilight asked in response after swallowing something deep in her throat.
Sun Bright shook his head, the thick muscles that clenched across his shoulders and neck sending obvious ripples through his deformed skin. "More like I know of her, and that her funeral was today. Most ponies around here do now. That sort of thing is uncommon."
"Of course," Twilight said, face constricting as she nodded glumly. "I should have realized."
Silence fell over them for a time while Sun Bright leaned down, using his mouth to grasp the handle of a drawer set in the table's rear. Twilight peered over the desk at him, watching inquisitively as he fished about. His jaw clenched and a light smacking noise of tooth enamel meeting with something solid sounded out before he withdrew from the drawer with a metal pen in his mouth.
Twilight herself could never stand them, preferring a quill and ink. The other races found that it was not in the least pleasant to write using something soft when it was held in the mouth. That didn't even cover how distasteful it was for a pony to get the downy material stuck inside of her teeth, something which was unavoidable. Most unicorns had similarly abandoned quills, and it was rather difficult for Twilight to fathom why "Quills and Sofas" so frequently ran out of the former item. As Sun Bright clicked the nub at the end with his tongue, extending the pen's tip, and began to take note of the titles that adorned the collection of texts before him, the purple unicorn reflected that her love of the less efficient, almost archaic writing utensil did not really make any objective sense.
Her mind wandered, her eyes fogging over, and, without thought, she stared down at Sun Bright while he worked. She prided herself on her rationality and reasonability regarding most matters and in most circumstances – other than, perhaps, cases of tardiness. Given that, there was no reason for her to prefer the messy and inaccurate utensil over something that was in all ways more effective. It wasn't even that the tactile sensation of gripping the quill was more pleasant, something she would have ignored anyways, as a quill and a pen were almost indistinguishable to a telekinetic touch. The quill was a relic, and she was a modern pony, sometimes consumed with ancient literature, perhaps, but always concerned with what was practical. New inventions often were. Of course, Princess Celestia had always used quills.
"Say, Kid," Sun Bright said, causing Twilight to jump. It was then that she saw that he had finished taking down the titles of her loans and had stacked them back up into a pile. Doing so must have taken him quite some time, given that he had to do it by mouth, and Twilight narrowed her eyes at her lingering inattentiveness. She had no idea how long he'd been done. For her, it was so easy to get lost while cogitating.
"Mind if I tell you something?" the stallion continued, not betraying any sign that he had either noticed or cared about her lack of focus. "It's not a secret or anything. I've told other ponies before."
The alicorn atop her head seemed to sizzle, as if it was piercing into molten metal. "I don't suppose that would be a problem," she said slowly, rubbing her mouth with the front of her leg, hiding her lips behind it.
"When they get a load of me, most ponies wonder what happened. Do you?" he asked, twisting his neck and turning the healthy side of his face from her to allow her to see his scars and nothing else. From that angle, with only his deformed flesh in view, he was eyeless and blind, and it suddenly struck Twilight as one of the most horrible things she could ever imagine.
"Oh, well, it's not my place to ask about something like that," she said, fumbling slightly until he turned back to watch her, face to face, letting her see his eye once again. "It would be rude. A pony should always help a friend, but part of that is knowing when it's best to leave them be."
He rolled the pen along the table, back and forth, with his wing. "Maybe, but we aren't really friends, and you're you. From what I can tell, you're the curious sort."
"I'm sorry. I never meant to offend you," Twilight responded, trying to recall any improper words, actions or looks on her part. It often came as a surprise when her natural inquisitiveness caused offense. She found that she could sometimes bumble into things without recognizing how other ponies might react, not through a lack of planning or care, for she over-planned most things and certainly did not wish to upset anyone, but because she simply hadn't grasped how other ponies might feel or react.
"It was wrong of me to pay attention to how you looked, rather than being curious about the kind of pony you were on the inside. A pony is who he is, and that's what's important. I should have known better." She ignored the fact that he had appeared so horrible only moments before when she had lost sight of his eye.
He snorted and dismissed her with a shrug of his massive frame. "Don't be hard on yourself, Kid. You didn't do anything wrong, and, heck, it wouldn't have bothered me if you'd asked. I'm made of sterner stuff." He sniffed, turning his head upwards in a look of clearly feigned indignation.
"I'm glad" she replied, raising a hoof to brush back her mane as if wiping away perspiration. "The last thing I ever would have wanted to do was to offend you just because you looked different."
"It'd be because I look terrifying, not because I look different," he said while absently rolling his pen back and forth along the table with his lone wing.
"Regardless."
"Oh, irregardless, indeed," he said with a smirk that only played across the left side of his lips.
Irregardless? It was a needling, a ribbing, a gesture to provoke, and thus to ease and apologize. She could tell - and she was usually not so perceptive - because she could feel it, a twitch running through her entire body, wiping something clean. She rolled her eyes with a hearty groan, shuffling closer to the desk to jab a hoof under the stallion's nose.
"You should know as well as I do that 'irregardless' is a completely unnecessary construction," she groused. "It is a useless, nonstandard adverb with two negative elements that introduce nothing but pointless confusion, and it doesn't conform to the grammatical standards of the Equestrian language. It should be done away with."
"Alright, Kid, I get it," he sighed. "Can't take a joke, can you."
"Not when it comes to nonstandard adverbs," she pressed. Her eyes were alight. "They're serious business."
He stomped his forehoof to the desk, and then leaned over, nickering. "So do you mind?"
"No," she said, fingering one of the books between them with her telekinetic grip. "But maybe I should. It seems rather personal. Why would you talk to me about it?"
"Because you're Twilight Sparkle," he replied, like it explained anything, and he shook his head as if he pitied her stupidity. "Now, I'll try to keep this short. I had a fine, regular childhood in Cloudsdale, a normal Ma and Pa, though I was always stronger than most other kids. You can tell why." He flexed the muscles in his one leg, though he seemed in no way boastful.
"My special talent... well, doesn't really matter." He rubbed his chin into his shoulder. "I joined the Imperial Guard for the usual reasons. I was a pretty idealistic kid. Most of us were at that age. Honor. Serve. Defend. All that stuff."
A sharp cracking noise broke into the room; a fall. It rang through the starting Twilight and the unaffected stallion, artificial and icy. Together, they glanced to the windows and saw nothing. Perhaps, Twilight thought, it was distant construction work.
Once the reverberations had died away, Sun Bright continued to speak. "As a kid, it all seems like you're doing something with your life. Like it matters. The training was hard, but you get through it because you know it means something. First day there, I learned that I wasn't as strong as I thought I was. It's a big fish, little pond, kind of thing. A tiny little guy could beat the feathers off of me. You don't fight strong; you fight smart. I was never very good at that. You get out of training eventually, and you get out there, and you think that now you're going to really do something. But things start to change. Maybe I just grew up... I don't know. I saw a lot of ponies die out there over the years. Going hard, going easy. Slow and quick. Good and bad. Both the ponies and the going," he trailed off, his eyes glazing as the hairs of his coat bristled.
Twilight shuffled about silently, leaning her head down to rest her chin on the desk. From that angle, she could see the clear division of flesh and hair along the stallion's chin. He didn't seem to mind.
"I was already pretty seasoned by the time my last real assignments took me out to the Empyreal Thunder mountain range back when us and the Griffins were staring each-other down over it thirteen years ago. Don't ask me why, but they wanted to stick some aeries along the border. It didn't make any sense to me why they'd want to raise young in a constant thunderstorm, but we weren't going to let them set up so close to Equestrian cities on the other side of the range. Now, the Princess could have stopped them in a heartbeat by refusing to raise the sun over their territory. The boys would have gotten a real kick out of throwing the fear of the Goddess into 'em, but she..." He stopped for a moment and smiled, thick, hearty and bulbous like an engorged maggot, before continuing in a voice that contained equal measures of boisterousness and reverence. "She was better than that," he said, and Twilight allowed him a moment's pause, though the desire to learn, and to inquire, burned her.
"We were at a stalemate for a while, with the Griffins on their side of the border just beyond the mountain range," he continued at last. "We figured that they outnumbered us because earth ponies were at best only useful for support when we had to fight Griffins at the top of a mountain, unicorns couldn't make the climb, and something in the mountains screws with teleportation magic. So all we had to our advantage was the mountain range itself. You can't fly over the Empyreal Thunder mountain range; you'd get blasted out of the sky in a second. So they'd have to go through one of several passes that let you cross the mountains safely just under the thunderstorm. We set up our defenses in those, but the tight spaces took away our mobility just as much as it did theirs. For a while, neither side looked like they wanted to start something, even if we were all itching to get at each-other."
Twilight shambled up to the table, her eyes flitting from Sun Bright's face to the pile of books between them. There was something simply wrong about staring at him, but glancing away was equally unacceptable. For his part, the stallion simply looked at her, into her, with his one eye. Every blink was criminal.
"We realized why they'd been waiting when they hit us by surprise. See, the last time that the Pegasi had gone to war with the Griffins, before we all settled in Equestria, there was no such thing as a griffin with magic. Even worse, Griffins aren't like us ponies. Their spell-casters can still fly just as well as their regular soldiers. We later guessed that they'd spent their time whipping up a mass invisibility spell that let their mages get the drop on us twice over. In the confined space, they just let loose. There was no way out for us. I didn't really last too long; a fireball grazed me, took off the right side of my face, and I went down. Right after that, as near as I can figure, one of their mages set off a disruption spell that caused an avalanche. Getting half crushed under a rock was probably what saved my life. They thought that they'd killed me, along with almost everypony else. Lost the leg, and shattered the wing. They had to, well, you know," he clenched the muscles along his scarred side, highlighting the obvious absence, "when they dragged me out. A few months later, they let me out of the hospital and shuffled me around for a bit. They didn't know what to do with me; there was a good report for faithfulness, and loyalty, and bravery, but I received nothing for it. Now, it was about this point where the Princess got involved and arranged jobs for wounded stallions like me, and I got set up here."
"Why?" Twilight asked. Even to her, the sound of her one word was like a whine, high-pitched and irritating compared to his deep bass. Of all times to interrupt, for all the reasons to break into his tale, into him, she had chosen now. How utterly foolish, she realized, but she had committed herself.
"Forgive me," she began, uncertain and asking for his grace twice over, "but you didn't have any experience, and judging by the bookshelf behind you, you've never been able to catalog very well, and since your arrival - twelve years ago, was it?- the library has misplaced seventeen regular books, five manuscripts, and two texts from the rare books collection. That's worse than the previous twenty years. I know. I keep track of library records." Even as she spoke, she was self-conscious enough to know that she had done something inappropriate and that bumbling around the issue, trying to make it better, only made it worse. She lowered her head. "Of course, correlation doesn't imply causation."
He shuffled back and forth, eyebrow raised, obviously amused, tolerant, not angry.
"Sorry." She knew to apologize anyways, and she doubted if the pony who had left over a year ago would have understood enough to do so. Had that younger pony been in her place, she likely would have been proud had she realized her error and apologized. Today, she also knew enough to not feel proud; quite the opposite.
"Anyways, nopony told me, and I never asked. I didn't figure it was important," he continued. "Before the boys rallied to beat the Griffons back and then drag me out, I just managed to get an eye open to watch everything burn. It was hard to breathe, for a lot of reasons. I remember, clear as day, seeing one pony go down. He was screaming and frothing, and his eyes were about to burst from the heat and the pain. I just stared at him, and I couldn't feel anything. I couldn't feel anything for him, and I couldn't feel my leg, my wing, or my eye." Using his wing to support himself, Sun Bright shoved a hoof to the space that would have been between his eyes and twisted the appendage back and forth. It split his face in two, allowing her to see only the edges of the grin along his face, lips peeled back from his teeth like a wound clamped open, exposing the jagged, interlocking, off-white vertebrae of the spine.
"I think he was trying to say something." Sun Bright's head shook; it shuddered, though the rest of his body was still and there was no visible strain in his muscles. He pulled his hoof away.
"I know he was. He was begging. Then a Griffin walked by and split his head open. I kept on watching him burn, and I realized something while I looked at the flames eating up what was left of everything. Pops of burning wood or fat sent sparks flying, the wind caught them up and took them away, and it all just came to me as they floated off. I watched the sparks rise up into the air and I realized that the kind of pony who's born into troubles, who's sure to suffer, is lucky in his own way."
Twilight frowned, tempted to reach out to the books that lay between them. He returned his focus to her, and began to tap his lone forehoof against the counte, resting his weight on the upper portion of his leg. His eyes were intense, locked on her, but they were still clouded over, somehow both wholly in the present and somewhere else entirely.
"Now, I'll never run again, or fly again, or see right." He rolled his shoulder, and huffed loudly, though his face was bright. "And now I feel it every day. Every second."
"How could any pony leave you like this?" Yes, this was the time to interrupt. There was a wrong here that was intolerable. "You could use magic. I- There are spells that could let you fly." She stumbled for a moment between sentences when she bit her lip to keep herself from say that she knew spells that could let him fly. "Surely somepony must have told you. They could get you flying again in a few hours, and I'm sure that there are doctors who could proscribe periodic anesthetic spells. "
He laughed, and it was neither bitter nor mocking. "Kid, I don't have a leg, and my leg hurts. There's no magic in the world that can take away that kind of pain. As for flying? You're a unicorn. You don't understand. If you set me up with a new pair of wings so that I could fly without using mine, without feeling mine, it would be worse than never flying ever again. I know. I tried."
"But," Twilight started, her voice wavering, unsure, as she assessed his claim with reason, rather than the emotion that had provoked her outburst. She looked away from the large stallion who stood before her. "By your logic, isn't that a good thing? I mean-" she trailed off, wishing she had a quill and paper to properly formulate a written question.
"I know what you mean, Kid," he replied. "And you're right. I never pity a pony who goes painfully, especially when it's a long time in coming, because that's the best way to go."
"I don't get it. All this just doesn't make any sense," Twilight interjected, stamping her hoof into the ground, heedless now of the danger of interruption or insult. The loud crack rang like a hammer on an anvil and she winced immediately at the sound and the unintended, accidental violence. But, again, she had committed herself.
"With everything a pony goes through in life, she deserves peace at the end. Ponies who are loved in life, and especially the ones who aren't, should be loved in death. Someone should be there to show them that they mattered." She saw her forelegs and muzzle before her. She focused on them.
"No, dying should be like climaxing. It should be a release. It's a miserable thing for a happy pony to die, and a happy thing for a miserable one." He withdrew, and for a moment he reminded Twilight of a tortoise. She waited for him, lips pursed and face tight because the sun was low in the sky, and as it shined through the windows, partially blocked by the gaps between them, it cast colored light and shadows that mingled on his face, meeting, fusing, and breaking apart with every subtle movement of his form. It enthralled.
"At that last moment, he can go with a smile because he doesn't have to think or feel anymore. A happy pony wants to hold on to life, and screams as he loses his grip. In the end, a pony who struggle to let go, falling apart and crying for the pain, is better off. He doesn't have to feel it anymore. There are no more unfulfilled wishes. No more disappointments." His sunken, healthy eye was lit red. It remained constant, but it seemed to throb painfully, as if he'd been rebuked and lost heart.
"Despite that, I guess that we can't help it," he said. "Most foals don't take their medicine because it's too bitter, even when they're sick to death. You have to force feed it to them." His lips cracked, sending shards of light and slivers of cracked flesh scattering. It was a broken smile.
"So, do you get it, Kid?" he asked, pressing his chin down to the top of the stack of books that lay between them, separating them.
To say she understood him was simple. His words had been easy enough to grasp. All of the tension that had been in her face, shoulders, back, and legs – not her whole body, but just its parts – melted. Names and titles stared up at her from the desk, embroidered or stamped or soaked into cloth and paper. What it meant for Tempest, a pony she hadn't even known, was self-evident, but all she could do was pause on the edge of something that she couldn't identify.
"Do you still want the books?" he pressed, but it was so very gentle that it seemed like a comforting hoof placed on her body. That did not capture the sensation that ran through her. The hoof was alicorn, a horn of a pony blessed by the grace of Celestia, trembling and electric with magic.
"Definitely," she replied, and her face was stern, creased as was his, but unbroken. Learning was everything, and books held the answers that ponies didn't.
He stared directly at her, though his good eye was closed and he was blind. It turned her stomach. She stood tall and unflinching, gazing straight back into him. Finally, without opening his eye, he simply said, "Alright."
The collection of texts throbbed purple and the stacks rose up. After twisting about in the air, they fell along side of her. And then he was at her side, just like the books. The back of his one wing pressed into her barrel, feathers soft against her side.
"Are you going to be ok?" she asked almost as a reflex to his touch.
"Kid, I was going to ask you that," he said, and his wing drew away from her, dragging and catching at the hair along her back. "I'm always fine." He thumped his healthy side with the wing between them, his only wing. "Made of sterner stuff, remember?"
"I do, Sun Bright," she said, her smile full and heartfelt and bright. "I'll be seeing you."
"Sure thing, Kid." With that, he turned back to his books, almost as if he was ignoring her and the light of her magic that shone forth. It undulated around her, piercing, as mystic muscles flexed and the alicorn bled warmth into the flesh of her forehead.
As Sun Bright raised himself up, pulling out a book while resting his forehoof on the shelf, it looked for a moment as if the mass of the wood and paper pressed him down. It was like it would come down on him and crush him. The very moment she thought this, her brain burst free from that plane of reality.
Twilight reassembled once again. Before her stood the largest building in Canterlot, the Princesses' home and hers. Dwarfing all the nearby buildings, it stood unassailable. It was all pure white spires, reaching up and out, and sun-like golden turrets. Instinctively, she drew breath on arrival. The scent of books still lingered in her nostrils and a hint of acrid smoke reached her from the hearths of some nearby homes.
It was then that Twilight remembered the Lunarian priest. And in that moment, the spires of Celesita's castle, the faint smells that played in her nose, the pipe, the tombstone, the kind face, the sudden, surprising submission to selfish addiction, and the warmth of the sun low in the sky all came together.
She set her shoulders and trotted towards a side entrance and the twin pegasi guards, white coated and gold armored, who stood before it. They acknowledged her. She ignored them. The larger of the two leaned down and unlatched the door, and then stood ramrod straight, throwing his chin out and puffing up with the slightest flutter of his wings. After entering through the passage, Twilight barely caught his mutterings that chased her inside along with her glowing collection of books. His words, like the doorways, hallways, and servants she passed, went unheeded because she remembered. As she would have done had she failed to recall an equation during an exam, she berated herself for ever forgetting. How could memory work like that? How could it be so fickle? Perhaps it was not a matter of forgetting; it was a failure of connection, an inability to see the links that bound things together.
When she had been a little filly, she had adored her grandfather. At the time, he had been so very old and so very frail. Twilight recalled that he had fought in a war as a young stallion, but she wasn't certain if he'd told her that or if she'd learned it from her parents or brother. She also wasn't certain why, now that the thought had occurred to her, it seemed to matter. In the years before she had truly learned to read, a precociously short period of time, she would often see him sitting in his armchair, a volume of poetry or a classic novel in his hooves or in the grip of his horn, and demand to join him. As her parents told the tale, the first time she had done so, they had thought that she was just being a silly filly, that she would quickly become bored, sitting with an old stallion, but her grandpappy had simply taken her up beside him, just as he would every other time she would ask in the future. His coat had smelled of smoke and his weathered book's pages of old age. Wrapped in those scents and his warmth, she would listen. Sometimes she could not understand the words, but she adored them just the same, hanging on his every wavering tone.
He had been so very old, and there had been something rotten inside of him, something that had been there ever since the war, but he had lived long enough to take her up onto his lap and have her read to him from texts that would have confounded ponies twice her age. By then, Twilight was able to understand death as did an adult. His loss had sent her into something akin to a depression, perhaps her first brush with a precursor to her admittedly neurotic tendencies as a fully grown mare. This was not, however, simply due to his death. Her extensive reading had added to her grief. Even though there was joy in reading and learning, there was so much sorrow in knowledge. Oftentimes, they grew together. She had learned the fate of the dead. Since Nightmare Moon's rebellion, the religion surrounding the lunar Princess had been all but dissolved. In its place, a series of superstitions and stigmas had arisen. After a millennium, the memory of the benevolent, if distant, Princess Luna had been almost washed away, and only those superstitions remained. By the time of Twilight's birth, the traditional belief was that the hour of a pony's death revealed something of his or her character and nature. In general terms, dying during the day was a final acknowledgment of a pony's commitment to the benevolent Princess of the Day. To die at night was a curse. It suggested that the soul would share in part of the bondage of its mistress, and that there was something deviant, some hidden and unconfessed darkness, at the pony's core, like selfishness or inconsideration.
Her Grandpappy had died during the night.
The knowledge that he had somehow led a morally questionable life, that another kind of rot had festered inside of him, sickened the young Twilight. Her parents had tried almost everything to bring her out of her melancholic state, from taking her to the Canterlot Library to buying a collection of accessories for Miss Smarty Pants. It was strange series of reactions, almost bumbling. Despite having raised a son, they were simply at a loss as to how to deal with the issue of death and address their daughter in some way that accounted for both her age and her intellect.
It was her brother who had found the answer, and it hadn't even had anything to do with the fact that he always seemed to have some way of understanding her, of dealing with her, that transcended their bond of blood and natural closeness. As he told the story, while attending classes at the Canterlot Academy, he had been studying in the library for a research paper on pegasi aerial combat techniques. Taking a break from his readings, his thoughts had turned to his younger sister and the problem that neither he nor their parents could seem to address. His troubled expression had caught the eye of a particular aged stallion who approached Shining Armour and inquired as to the cause of his distress. Her brother, while not generally open with strangers, least of all ones who would so readily intrude into an unknown pony's problems without invitation, had felt himself lulled into openness by the almost tangible sincerity in the older male's incredibly soft eyes. And so, Shining Armour had told the other pony about his little sister's problem.
The maroon stallion sat down next to him, commending Shining Armour for his empathy, and then proceeded to tell him a myth set down by their ancestors in pre-rebellion religious traditions. Twilight had later learned that they were fringe, heretical traditions, but the stallion had said nothing of that. According to texts which were supposedly penned by the primordial Alicorns before the birth of the first mortal pony, the divine realm divided into two distinct spheres, corresponding to light and darkness, day and night. As a system of worship developed around the two pure-blooded representatives of the Alicorn race, Princesses Celestia and Luna, and to a lesser extent the highly uncommon faux-Alicorns, or winged unicorns, ponies of renown and offspring of the sons and daughters of the Goddesses, scholars began to conceive of an afterlife inside those two heavenly realms.
To die during the day was to be raised into joy and eternal light. Details were remarkably precise regarding the eternal home promised to Celestia's devoted servants. As a mare, and from a purely objective perspective, Twilight found this rather strange, for most suppositions about things which a pony could neither see nor prove were often frustratingly vague. It was held universally that a pony would experience some form of never-ending activity in Celestia's heaven. This afterlife was something akin to a party, with companions reveling eternally in perfect bodies, restored, renewed, and free from any defect. They would share, and share in, every one of life's aesthetic pleasures. That kingdom would run over with sensuous delights for the eyes and the flesh. The realm itself was like a city of gold with unassailable towers of diamond that stretched for hundreds of cubits into the sky. Every kind of flowering plant and delicate fruit would grow, ever abundant and ever in season, in the wild gardens that rose up through the land beside crystal lakes. The city's meanest paving stones, let alone its works of art, were of such splendor that the fire of the reflected sun, of which the Equestrian sun was but a pale shadow on a dull cave wall (imagine, the sun, a shadow), would cauterize the eyes of any mortal pony so that she would not go mad from the sight.
It was all really rather formulaic.
However, a pony there would never be at peace. There would be no time for reflection, a sense of calm, or solitude with and in her own self, but she would never even have time to miss them.
A pony who died during the night would be ushered into eternal rest. She would know nothing but peace. What had once been tradition, at least among some heretics, held that existence in the realm of night was like unto the bliss of half-sleep experienced by a pony lying in bed on a frigid winter morning, knowing that outside the bubble of sheets and half-consciousness was the cold of the day, but also knowing that she was eternally secure from it. She would drift in sensation from powerlessness non-existence in the warmth to the god-like state of a lucid dreamer, detached from imagined pleasures, always knowing that they were nothing more than dreams, yet in complete control of them. She would always know that reality was a step removed but not care or need to care; she was in a warm bed, and she would have absolutely nothing that needed doing all day. It was an eternal Sunday morning without the glare of a sun.
However, the pony would not have companionship. She would be forever alone, but she would be at peace with her solitude just as she was at peace with all else.
Twilight had believed that story as a filly, though as she grew into marehood she adopted a more rational perspective on life. She would try not to believe anything. To believe was, at best, to hold something as true despite an absence of evidence. At worst it was to hold something as being true though the available evidence contradicted it. She had learned that reason excelled ignorance, excelled belief, just as much as the light did the darkness. Even when her vision was clouded, she still had eyes to see. To ignore reason was to walk in darkness, always blind. In the case of things she could not explain rationally, such as Pinkie Pie and her ... being Pinkie Pie, there was still ample evidence for the existence of her "Pinkie Sense," among her other talents. Whatever the cause of the pink pony's preposterous preternatural power, its results were observable, consistent phenomena. Twilight had realized that she needed neither to explain it (though being unable to do so irked her to no end), nor to believe in it. Its existence was objective.
An afterlife could not be observed or tested. She could find no substantiating evidence as to its existence or nature, merely superstitious supposition. In short, as a rational, grown mare, she could not believe the myths of the solar and lunar afterlives.
The books trailing behind her sagged, dragging her back, slowing her down. She knew that she had faith in them, in a system of knowledge, in there being answers and in her capacity to unearth them. Was not the infinite library itself an ideal, something in which she believed? Rationally, at best, there were no new arguments, no new struggles in nature, no new heartbreaks, no new experiences. Things changed forms, genres evolved, but the fundamental stories were the same. There was new knowledge, new discoveries, but a pony was always a pony; anger, fear, hope, and the fundamental nature of disagreements were now as they had always been. The characters of a story had always been there, even before they were written; their type had existed.
Perhaps, Twilight reflected, like her, Tempest had known of the doctrine of separate eternities. Perhaps, unlike the grown Twilight, she had believed in them. Maybe that was why she had died during the night; she had just wanted peace.
And that was the most horrible thing. Whatever her belief, what happened to Tempest would happen even to her. How could it possibly be true, Twilight wondered, that she gained nothing from her reason and the accumulated knowledge of a lifetime of study?
And then she came upon a weathered door. It appeared before her as if she had simply teleported there. She leaned her forehead against it, stretching her neck to a strange angle to accommodate her horn, pulsing with purple energy. A faint series of clicks sounded out from the other side of the door before it gave way, swinging open with a creak of old metal. Stepping inside, she closed the door and locked it behind her.