Eq Renaissance Part 17 (Ed)

    “Which way are we supposed to go?”
    It was one of the first questions asked after Zecora had broken the mirror.  Nobody remembered who the first one to ask it was, yet the question was now on everybody’s mind.  It was unavoidable.  It haunted them.  Nearly from the outset they lost their way.  To call the place a maze was to give it too much credit.  Mazes had a plan, a right way to go, and numerous false leads.  This place was nothing like that.  Applejack and Big Macintosh had been here before, but their experience was of little help.  Both of them, having spent most of their lives outdoors, had a keen sense of direction.  If asked, they could point north, east, west or south without even looking up at the sky.  Here, any sense of direction was gone.  Corridors led down to other corridors.  Doors opened onto more doors.  Hallways which seemed straight proved to be slightly curved when the group was stretched out.  They went on for so long that they must have turned more than three hundred and sixty degrees, but without intersecting themselves.  Other hallways seemed to tilt sideways, the group having to walk on a slope, and finally the walls would be more level than what had been the floor.   There were massive chambers so big they couldn’t see the other side in the gloom.  They passed through until they found another exit, not knowing how many different exits they missed.  Zecora, as well as AJ and Big Mac, were of the opinion that they should just keep walking, searching for Twilight, or another mirror.  Fate, or providence, or magic might deliver them to their destination.  They hoped it would anyway, none of them felt too confident about it.
    “Which way are we supposed to go?” was a question that was often asked, and on everybody’s mind.  There was another question that was on everybody’s mind, although nobody had yet spoken it out loud.  “Does anybody else feel like we’re being followed?”
    During the first day, they traveled perhaps ten or fifteen miles, although how far they actually were from the starting point was anybody’s guess.  That was about as much distance as their feet would allow, given all the work that had gone into the morning’s misadventure.  It was cold in this place, perhaps a little warmer than a walk-in refrigerator.  Rarity had been the first to change out of her dress and into something warmer, the same functional outfit she had worn into the Everfree Forest. Others put their coveralls back on, simply for warmth.  They slept, uncomfortably, without a fire.
    They slept until they were rested, and then got up and started moving again.  To call it the next day wasn’t entirely right.  There was no sense of time here.  There were no windows, no sun, no moon, no night or day.  The place was lit by what must have been magic.  They could see, though there were no visible sources of light.  Every surface was the same ashy black stone, if it even was stone.  They weren't sure.
    Big Macintosh and Applejack had packed the most sensibly.  Big Mac’s backpack alone was twice the size of any other.  They had brought clothes, toiletries, first aid supplies, a small gas stove for cooking, and enough food for many days.  It was bland food, but non-perishable and nutritious.  Of everyone, they had been the most concerned about this place, and getting lost in it.
    Pinkie, on the other hand, had packed the worst.  Her backpack was mostly full of junk food.
    Pinkie, of all people, was also the one who took the loss of Fluttershy the hardest, at least on the surface.  She cried openly.  She cried regularly.  At times, the group had to stop their journey and wait for her to finish bawling, before she could pick herself up again and continue.  That first “night,” when they stopped for sleep, she opened her backpack, and all the foil wrapped candy bars, and soda, and a few changes of underwear spilled out.  The others opened their mouths to chastise her for being so air-headed.  They bit their tongues.  They watched her face breaking again, this time triggered simply by her stuff falling to the floor.  They let her be.
    This was not to say the others didn’t grieve just as hard in their own ways.  Zecora was the oldest among the group and by far the most powerful.  While the others wouldn’t have agreed, she considered herself responsible for them all, and that Fluttershy’s death was her own personal failure.  Rarity, Dash, and Applejack each took turns crying, just as hard as Pinkie, while the others would try to be strong and supportive towards her.
    Nobody asked how Big Macintosh felt.  Big Mac didn’t say anything about it at all.
    Their first time here, Big Mac and Applejack had spent, at most, a few hours behind the mirror.  Now they were spending days.  Or, at least, the vague waking/sleeping cycles they were still calling days for no other reason than psychological comfort in a place so totally alien.
    On the evening of the third night, when they stopped to eat and rest, the subject of Princess Luna came up in conversation.  They tried to understand what had happened.  Zecora reminded the girls that it was they who had stopped Nightmare Moon.  Luna had attempted to usurp Princess Celestia’s reign.  Indeed, she had already done so.  It was Twilight and her friends who had stopped Nightmare Moon.  With Twilight, her friends, and the Elements of Harmony now out of Luna’s way, there was nothing to prevent her from trying it again.
    Zecora openly wondered if Luna had been whispering into Celestia’s ear all this time, if she had been the reason behind Celestia’s seemingly unreasonable behavior.  Big Macintosh asked, innocently, if perhaps it was really Luna who had been responsible for the death of Golden, Zecora’s former lover.  Zecora didn’t respond to that.  She got up and left the camp, and went off to be by herself.  She only returned, silently, many hours later, when most of the others had fallen asleep.
    The next day, not long after they stopped around “noon” for a meal, they found a door.  This in itself was not unusual.  They had found many hundreds, perhaps thousands of doors.  There were hallways filled with doors on either side.  This door did not look like any of the others.  It had been painted once, in a bright blue.  Most of the paint had long since peeled off, revealing the wood underneath.  There were scratches in the surface.  Not quite claw marks, not quite fingernail scratches.  It was random everywhere, although in some places it almost seemed to form letters, or maybe geometric figures.  It gave an illusion of meaning.  There was no doorknob, only a black hole where the doorknob was supposed to be.
    The door breathed.  It looked like a bedroom door might look, when somebody opens the front door to the house, and the air pressure changes.  This door would bulge outwards on its hinges, as if some immense pressure were behind it, then not much later, it would seem to suck inwards, creaking under a change in pressure.  It did this over and over.  It never opened or shut again.  How it did so without a knob, or a latch to hold it shut, nobody knew.
    Zecora warned them not to touch it.  They listened to her.  It growled at them as they turned and walked away.  They could hear it moaning in the distance after over a mile’s worth of walking.
    On the evening of the fourth night, tempers began to flare.  There was an argument over the portable stove, and everybody who wasn’t involved in it wasn’t surprised that it happened.  Emotions had been fraying from the outset.  People were scared.  They were grieving.  They had no logical reason to hope for salvation.
    The situation was defused.  Some went to sleep angry.  The next morning, however, they got up as if nothing had happened, and were eager to move on.
    It was late in the fifth day when they finally found something.  They came across the remains of a small, discarded camp.  It was the only sign they had seen that anybody had come here before them, that they weren’t alone in this disturbing universe.  They all took it as having belonged to Twilight.  Hopes lifted.  None of them felt so good since they came to this place as they did now.
    The high morale did not last long into the sixth day.  It was by accident, really, that they made their next discovery.  Dash had been reaching into a pocket to pull out a snack as they walked.  She dropped it on the floor.  As she was stooping over to pick it up, she noticed something a couple of yards away.  She almost missed it.  The floor, or ground, of the place was discolored.  Darker.  There was a patch that was blacker than the usual black.  She called it to the attention of the others.
    Somebody asked for a light.  There was general fumbling around as they searched through their packs for a flashlight.  Rarity was the first to get hers out.  Under the light, the splotch didn’t appear black.  It was a kind of dark brown.  A dark, reddish brown.  It looked to all of them like dried blood, although nobody said that out loud.  There was one great dried pool of it, dried footprints and dried drops leading away, and another smaller pool that had been smeared as if something was rubbed into it.
    Rarity paid extra attention to the footprints.  They were the right size for Twilight.
That night spirits were at their lowest.  Everyone had strange, disturbing dreams.  They started to wonder what they would do with themselves if they never found an exit.
    It was on the seventh day that they found her.  It was in one of those great chambers that were so wide that they couldn’t see the walls if they were anywhere in the middle.  They had been walking six abreast of each other.  Big Mac was the first to see her, and raised his hand to point at the horizon.  There was just a faint figure, far off there.
    They called out to her, but she didn’t respond.  Perhaps she was too far away.  They started jogging towards her, still calling out.  Then they dropped their packs and ran for it.  Dash took an early lead, sprinting ahead of the pack.  She had underestimated just how far off Twilight really was, and slowed her pace until the others caught up.
    They kept calling out her name as they drew close.  Twilight was walking in the opposite direction, away from them.  They could tell there was something wrong with her.  Her dirty clothes looked baggy on her.  She looked too thin, as if she hadn’t been eating.  She actually seemed to speed up her walking as they came up behind her, as if she wanted to get away.
    Twilight finally stopped when they were only a few feet away.  Her friends stopped too.  They formed a sort of semicircle around her, stunned at her appearance.  As they been approaching, they had thought she had been holding her right arm across her belly, as if she had been in pain.  Now they got a better look.  Twilight’s right arm was heavily bandaged above her elbow.  Below, the arm was gone.
    “Twilight?” Applejack spoke.  “What...” She didn’t finish the sentence.  She wanted to ask what had happened to her.  There would be time to talk about that later.
    Twilight started to turn around and acknowledge their presence.  She knew that she couldn’t out run them.  She only turned to face them halfway, ashamed they had found her.
    “Oh, Twilight,” Pinkie said.  “Fluttershy. She’s gone.”
    Twilight looked at each of them, upset that they were here, but thankful to see their faces again.  She looked at their faces through eyes clouded thick with tears.  The tears fell to her cheeks, then freely to the floor, reflecting the strange light of the place.
    “I know.”