Twilight stared at the body before her. Her breath was shaky, and her heart felt like it was ready to burst out of her chest. Applejack’s unfocused eye stared at her with a glazed look. Twilight used her magic to close her sister in law’s eyes and placed a hoof on her throat. The pulse was faint, but there. Twilight breathed a sigh of relief. She would live, assuming Twilight hadn’t given her permanent damage. It was a heavy rock.

“I told you not to come down here, why didn’t you listen?” Twilight asked the unconscious body. She stomped a hoof in frustration. “Darn it Applejack, why couldn’t we just have a nice dinner?”

Twilight opened a drawer and pulled out the spare pillows she kept for Pinkie, and placed Applejack on it. Then she pulled out a bottle of hard cider forced the cork out. Twilight took a long swig of the sugary liquid, barely tasting it.

She looked around her messy workshop. Journals and notes had been thrown around haphazardly, giving the impression that a storm had recently blown through. Months of research and theorizing to undo the damage she had done in a few hours. Months of hiding evidence, pretending to organize search parties for the friends she kept prisoner just beneath her house. The friends she betrayed.

Well, what was one more going to hurt?

Putting the bottle down, Twilight began searching her workshop for something to restrain Applejack with. She had straps of webbing, but she wasn’t sure that Applejack couldn’t break those. She needed chains. Big, heavy chains that no earth pony could ever break free of. Or she could find a way to disable Applejack’s motor functions. A few minutes with her chemicals would give her plenty of time to cook up a neurotoxin.

As Twilight searched, she began formulating ways to hide Applejack’s disappearance. It wouldn’t be easy, Ponyville was still traumatized by Pinkie vanishing and ponies might start suspecting foul play if another major pony went away. If Twilight was lucky, she could convince every pony that Applejack had gone away to get money to pay for a new playground, sort of like that time so long ago. Ponies would believe her, they always trusted Princesses.

Twilight took another swig of her cider and threw the nylon rope she was looking at across the room. What was she thinking? Was she really considering lying to her family and neighbors, imprisoning her friend, and maybe maiming her again, just to protect her dirty little secret? What had she become? She wasn’t Twilight, that was certain. Twilight wouldn’t do things like this, she wouldn’t even consider them!

She downed the last of her cider and got out another bottle. “I can’t keep doing this,” she said to herself, and pulled out a quill and a blank sheet of paper.

Twilight stared at the parchment for a good five minutes, wondering if she should do it. Her mind was only made up when Pinkie let out a loud moan. With a heavy sigh, Twilight once again wrote the familiar “Dear Princess Celestia,”

The entire shuttle shook, startling Twilight awake. She looked around to see if any pony else was up, but found that she might as well have been in an empty room. Sighing, Twilight laid her head back onto the satchel she’d been using as a pillow, and tried to go back to sleep.

She lay there for several minutes, then opened her eyes again. Sleep, she decided, would not come for her just yet. Instead, she decided to pass the time by reading, and began rummaging through the satchel. She considered pulling out the Book of Newt, but there was a smaller tome just underneath it, and Twilight preferred her reading material readable. She was considerably disappointed when it turned out to be some children’s novel that some pony had covered in stickers. In the dim light, Twilight could just make out the book’s title, ‘The Best Party Ever’.

Twilight looked at the book for a moment. It seemed to her that she had seen it somewhere before, though she couldn’t say where. Curious, she opened it to the first page, and found that it was some pony’s journal. She wondered for a moment if she should continue. This was some pony’s private journal after all, and she was sure they wouldn’t appreciate her reading it.

She was just about to close the book when the shuttle shook again and the book fell onto the floor. When Twilight reached down to pick it back up, she found that it had opened to a page with a picture glued to it. She strained her eyes to look at the image and was surprised to see that it was a normal looking Pinkie Pie posing next to a light grey stallion in a tuxedo. Twilight stared at the image, fascinated. She was now so used to the hideously mutated Pinkamena that seeing a version of her standing on all fours was almost surreal.

When she had recovered from her initial surprise, Twilight’s attention shifted to the stallion. She didn’t recognize his face, and his tuxedo obscured his cutie mark. Twilight searched the page for a clue to his identity and found a caption written under the picture; “Silver Platter and Me”. The name sounded familiar to Twilight, but she couldn’t quite say where she had heard it before. Shrugging, Twilight turned the page to see what else she could find.

On the next page was another picture. Again, the picture only had the version of Pinkie Pie and the stallion named Silver Platter in it. This time however, they were at some sort of diner. There were two hay burgers on the table between them.

Twilight flipped through a couple of pages, skipping any more pictures that seemed to just be Pinkie and the stallion eating at various restaurants, and found a page that consisted of a picture of a sapphire ring, surrounded by little crudely drawn hearts.

From that point on, the pictures rapidly began to populate with more ponies. The next picture depicted Pinkie and the stallion at the Pie family rock farm, with the entire Pie family showing their rare smiles. After that was a picture of Pinkie picking out dresses in Rarity’s boutique, with some other mares sitting close by, their expressions giddy. She was about to turn the page when she noticed that one of the mares had their face burned off by what looked like a cigarette. She stared at this oddity for a moment, then turned to the next page.

The next image showed Pinkie Pie having some sort of party with their friends from Ponyville, along with a few other mares. Twilight perused the images of her friends, particularly herself. It was strange seeing a photo of herself doing something that Twilight was sure she had never done.

As Twilight examined the image, she found that once more one of the mares had their face burned out of the picture. This time, however, Twilight could make out their cutie mark, which was some kind of harp. Realizing that the cutie mark must’ve belonged to Lyra Heartstrings, Twilight quickly flipped through the journal to find if any more pictures had been burned. The only remaining photos depicted a wedding, another party, and a carriage with bells. Lyra was in all of the pictures, and in all of the pictures her face was burned off.

Twilight wondered what the owner of the journal might’ve had against Lyra, but she doubted that she would find an answer. So, deciding that she should try to get a little more sleep, Twilight replaced the book in the satchel, laid her head down, and closed her eyes.

Author's Notes:

Deep in earth my love in buried
beneath a lonely stone
to hell or heaven her soul is ferried
while I am left to weep alone

Deep in earth my love is lying
in a box, cold and dead
I've lost myself to endless crying
and all that's left of me is Dread