'None of this makes any sense. Rainbow Dash should have been devastated. Devastated, but not... not whatever she is now...'

"Stop being so quiet, you stupid purple horse," Rainbow said snidely from the corner.

"Would you prefer me to think aloud?" Twilight asked. This was a test of her loyalty to her friend more than any other test had been. She was trying all she could not to simply explode at Rainbow, or whatever was left of her anyway.

"No. Your thinking is stupid too. I don't wanna hear it."

"Then I will remain quiet." Twilight noticed herself sounding like Celestia and momentarily wondered if Celestia viewed everypony else - with their normal daily conflicts and imperfections - as she was viewing Rainbow Dash right now.

"Tell me why I can't fly."

"The spell didn't work. I told you it had a very very slim chance of carrying. It didn't. I didn't expect it to. You seemed to, though." Twilight was being perhaps a bit excessively matter-of-fact, but the only reason she would have for not speaking as she was would be to spare her friend's feelings. And frankly, right now, Twilight didn't notice the prismatically maned pegasus having any such feelings to speak of. There was a slight pause before Twilight asked her own question. "Why don't you care any more?"

"About flying? Because it's boring. I don't want to fly."

"Then what do you want to do?" Twilight thought this question might stump Rainbow for a while, long enough for her to get a thought in edgewise, but that was not the case.

Immediately Rainbow Dash responded, "I want to talk. You won't let me."

"You want to talk?!"

"Yes. Is that too much to ask?"

"No, of course not. I was just surprised that you wanted to is all."

'Of all the things she could want, why does she want to talk? Is there something I'm missing...? I'll just have to listen to what she talks about...'

"I've been acting weird recently and you know it," Rainbow said, "You eye me weird and you think I'm possessed."

'How did she know that...?'

"You must be wondering how I knew that. Won't answer that. To answer your next question, I am not possessed. My mind is just temporarily rented out to a tenant who, just so you know, promises not to destroy anything major."

Twilight's mind immediately thought, '...So you're possessed, in other words. Just whatever demon is possessing you is doing so with your consent... and... only temporarily... actually, that doesn't sound like a demonic possession at all. I mean I've never seen it but... isn't the demon supposed to force itself into someone's body? Like a sort of soul-rape? That sounds like consensual soul-sex to me. I'd have to consult Celestia though...' And further than just wanting to consult her mentor on the subject, Twilight had a nagging feeling that something about this was Wrong, though she had no ability to consciously put a hoof on it.

"A demon didn't possess me," Rainbow said as though that was the most obvious fact in the universe. She'd said it with a hint of irritation, as though at Twilight's stupidity (though Twilight didn't like to think of herself as stupid), as though Twilight had yet to comprehend the sky was blue.

"Then what did?"

"Nothing possessed me."

"Then what happened?"

"No clue. But if I had any idea I might not tell you anyway. The thing that happened to me might not want me to tell you that."

Twilight was starting to get a slight bit irritated. 'Well, it isn't a demon, so what is it? It can't be an angel. I've met angels and they don't do that. I don't know off-hoof of any other creatures that possess or take hold over the bodies of pon- wait.' Her thought had been interrupted by her mind mid-sentence.

"It wasn't a parasite, perchance, was it?" Twilight asked, violently pushing as much innocence into her voice as she could muster under the circumstances. It was barely enough to keep her from sounding ticked off.

Rainbow hadn't picked up on Twilight's forced innocence, or if she had she didn't let onto it in her voice. "If it was, I wouldn't know about it since I have no clue what you mean by 'parasite'."

"A parasite is an organism that lives in or on another organism (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the host's expense," Twilight recited the dictionary definition.

"Is a parasite allowed to be sentient?"

"Why do you ask?"

A shrug and an mm-mmm sound accompanied by an I know nothing, why are you asking me facial expression.

Twilight had to actually muster significant amounts of strength to not make an exaggerated and aggrieved sigh. "Yes Rainbow, I would presume that definition allows sentience."

"Oh. Cool. Useless, but cool. I knew I could rely on you for utterly useless information and definitions of random words, Twi." The words hurt, but the pony she trusted as a friend having insulted her like this and then having called her the same nickname with which she had always affectionately referred to Twilight hurt far worse.

"You're welcome," Twilight replied with far more cheeriness than she thought she could muster, trying not to let the hurt show on her face.

It wasn't even a conscious thought that Rainbow was not herself and had been taken over by someone else, something else. It was an assumption, one that proved to be correct, even. Twilight just couldn't accept that her friend would consciously be that nasty to somepony she was friends with, and she further rejected the idea that Rainbow would consciously be that nasty to Princess Celestia.

'But whoever or whatever is controlling Rainbow, it seems to be very very good at analytical reasoning. It can predict my thoughts before I even think them in my conscious mind. It's really mean, but it seems to know all my weaknesses. Hypothesis: it can read Rainbow's memories and use those as holds to get to me.'

'Obvious next thought: why does it want to get to me? I can't imagine what I have that it would want. Maybe it just likes being mean for the sake of being mean.' Twilight ruminated on this thought for a moment, then shook her head within her mind. 'No, every action has a motive. Being mean for fun would mean that this thing has a strong possibility of sentience. Or, actually, now that I think about it, I know literally nothing about how this creature works. It could be a pawn, or an offspring of sorts, for a larger organism that is sentient. I've seen at least one other organism that creates living-but-not-independently-sentient offspring to do its bidding, but we can't assume that this creature works the same way as the Tree.'

"You're quiet," commented Rainbow, "You should die."

"Why should I die?" Twilight asked, and then she thought, 'Forget the fact that it's fairly impossible for you at the moment unless you have an Alicorn Blade and just tell my why...'

"Because you're quiet and that's annoying."

"And anything that annoys you should die?" Twilight asked, not expecting the answer she got.

"Yes."

Twilight didn't expect whatever was controlling Rainbow Dash to have the answer to this. "Why?"

It was a few moments before Rainbow responded to this, but she didn't seem to be thinking about it. Then she spoke with a strange air of purity Twilight wouldn't be able to place if she tried. "Why not?"

Somewhere, deep within a forest many hundreds of thousands of miles away from Twilight's palace was a large tree. It was not taller, but wider, than the rest of the trees that surrounded the small clearing surrounding it. Rather, the tree did not sit within a clearing so much as it sat within a crater, and at that one of its own making.

Twilight had only vague hints as to this tree's existence. And even with her assuming that it existed in the first place, she yet knew very little. She knew that it was the second most powerful being on the planet, but that was all.

Nopony other than Twilight had any clue at all that the tree even existed.

A cloud of midnight blue mist twisted its foggy tendrils around through the forest floor, the mist capable of seeping into the ground in such a way that it could traverse back to the tree without being seen by any of the numerous creatures which existed within this forest, creatures which had been enhanced by the magic that leaked from the tree like radiation from a nuclear power plant.

As the mist neared the tree, the tree began to darken. Its bark changed from black to a shade so dark that your eyes wouldn't understand what they were seeing any longer. It was no longer a tree so much as a landscape floating incorporeally around a tree-shaped hole.

The mist, surrounded by a light violet aura as it did so, got very very close to one of the roots of this tree-shaped gap in reality, but it did not dare touch that root as if in fear. It was then that the mist lifted itself from the ground and floated more freely through the air, stopping before the trunk of the tree where there were myriad odd-looking symbols. The symbols were not carved there by some woodsman. A woodsman could not carve into this tree. Princess Celestia could not carve into this tree. Her long, elegant, pearly horn would sooner snap cleanly in two.

The mist lifted up three tendrils, two out to the sides like arms, one upwards like a head. The tendril facing upwards curved in towards the tree and then straightened, twice, in an odd nodding gesture (if a tendril-owning, midnight-blue, violet-aura-cloaked mist was capable of nodding). The tree seemed to shift, but not in any breeze as even a hurricane couldn't disrupt this tree, and even if the rest of the forest was flattened this tree would remain standing.

This sort of conversation that went on in incorporeal and near-imperceptible gestures between the mist cloud and the darker-than-black tree went on for some minutes, perhaps hours even, for neither the mist nor the tree had too much in the perception-of-time department, and nobody else was there to witness the event.

After the conversation ended, the tree changed to its usual color of black, taking its place in reality again. The mist sank back into the ground and slithered away.

And though a tree cannot laugh, no more than a tree can uproot itself, stand on two branches and dance a jig, if you were there and listened very, very carefully... you would certainly swear you heard a raspy voice, originating from the exact place the tree stood in the center of its small crater, and you would swear you heard it laughing.

The next chapter will be posted Wednesday, June 11, 2015.