Racing clouds, as black as coal dust, their choking billows enveloping her mind. They shivered, and swam, first sped up so that they resembled a slurry and then slowed so that she might see every particle. Ponies rise out of the dust, and speak to her in words that had no meaning, though it seems as if she should know them.

A laughing voice cut through the malaise like a knife of radiance, the sun itself shining and slicing through the fabric of gloom, piercing uncertainty and bringing clarity to that which had lacked all reason. When Twilight Sparkle - for that was her name, now that she paused to remember it - lifted her face to bathe in its warmth, it seemed to her that, even in this cold gray world of half-knowledges and incomplete thoughts, it should be strange that the sun was a bright, vivid, and unrepentantly crass shade of pink.

Gasping for air, her lungs kicking into high gear after their rather unasked for silence, Twilight Sparkle burst her way out of her stupor and into something resembling consciousness. The reviving pony beat her hooves involuntarily against the air, the ground, and anything that happened to be in her way, a staccato stutter that, blessedly for poor, beleaguered Spike, who had been desperately trying to rouse her, ended as soon as it began. Her thoughts refused to gather into any real causal relationship at first, with effects following causes while her brain went into what might best be described as a hard reboot. Air filled her lungs, and then she breathed. Her body shuddered, and she felt her heart race and muscles contract. The girl yelped and winced, and then felt pain. Wings flapped and cringed of their own accord, and then she felt itching, scratching, twinging shoots up her wings.

I am going to kill Rainbow Dash, she promised herself when her thoughts reversed themselves into the proper flow. Refreshing herself on the memories that had gotten scattered in the blast, she realized that the shoes she had worn to temporarily change herself into a pegasus must have still been on her if she could still feel her wings, and she knew that whatever disaster had just befallen her and her beloved library, they, and by proxy Rainbow Dash, were responsible.

In absolute terms, she had not been out for all that long, though it certainly had felt like longer in her head, which meant that she had probably lost consciousness due to a head injury or magical effect. Ponies were durable creatures, but even they could not survive failing to breathe without lasting harm for very long. Worried she might have had a magically induced seizure, or even worse, a stroke, Twilight Sparkle quickly ran through a rather extensive mental list of facts and figures to make sure she was operating smoothly. To think, Spike had laughed at me when I had drawn up that exact list for just such an eventuality, calling me a hypochondriac of all things, she scoffed to herself. Satisfied that she knew who she was, who her family was, what year it hopefully was and the exact proportion of tomatoes-to-celery sticks she liked on her CLT sandwiches, she concluded that she had probably suffered no lasting mental harm, though she would have to pull the physical copy out of her safe upstairs to double check.

Regrettably, it seemed that she still remembered having, as a young filly in Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, making a Hearts and Hooves Day card for a colt in the same class and becoming so distraught with nervousness over the project that, when the day came, she not only had to excuse herself from class all day to dry heave into the sink, she ended up unleashing a burst of magic that knocked everyone’s drinks at lunch into the air and unto their heads. It had taken her mother, her father, and Princess Celestia together three days to talk her out of her room. If she was going to suffer severe brain trauma, she would appreciate it if it would at least rid her of a few of her more inconvenient and embarrassing memories.

The ragged, gasping coughs coming from her and other voices in the room distracted her from her own private imaginings. A persistent bouncing noise alerted her to the fact that Pinkie Pie, apparently, had recovered before her. Unaffected by the thick dust from demolished books and wood choking the others, she stuck her face into Twilight’s with a face-splitting grin, apparently quite pleased, filling all of Twilight’s vision. “Hey Twi!” she said, sugary, “You’re up! That’s great! I was yelling at you for like, for-ever, and you were all ‘blaaah’ only you weren’t all ‘blaaah’ because you weren’t breathing, so I gave you mouth-to-mouth, which is totally okay because I had to learn it because sometimes ponies at my parties would be just so surprised that-”

Twilight flattened her ears against her skull, and, quite deliberately, coughed even louder. Though grateful Pinkie had, apparently, managed to save her from a fairly unenviable fate, her head was still ringing loudly enough to make the chatterbox’s voice rattle in her skull like a set of pink dice. On the plus, that face shining down on her so enthusiastically and the manner in which she was revived certainly explained where the pink sun in her imagination had come from. The purple-furred pony wasn’t quite sure she wanted to contemplate that line of thinking too closely, so she quickly shunted off into other, more important ones.

First thing’s first: I need full access to my magic, not a piddling trickle. I think Snails could probably overpower me without half trying right now, she decided, and concentrated. She focused first on the idea of her being a unicorn. Yup, just me and my horn, a twisting growth of keratin sheathing a shaft of bone with the Cornuatic Nerve going right through my skull into all the most important parts of my brain, she narrated to herself, as she concentrated on the key difference between the unicorn race and their equine brethren. Unnoticed by her, Pinkie Pie bounced off to go make sure the others were coming back to life, and that they were not, in fact, zombie ponies. After a few false starts, however, Twilight gave up on that route, and could quite understand why, since not only was her vision swimming but her focus was gone and her concentration was almost completely shot.

Fumbling her hooves against one another, the mare wondered if she could just peel the shoes off and be done with it that way, but there was no such luck. It was as if they had been blown off entirely, for the reaching toes didn’t feel anything attached to their bottoms, which, to Twilight, indicated that she had become sufficiently numb that she may be partially paralyzed or that she just couldn’t concentrate enough to tell the difference between her own hooves and a clamped on strip of metal. That had only happened once before, and she and the entire Chess Club had sworn never to speak of it ever again.

If she could clear the dust out of the room through that new and dramatic hole in her house she had apparently just made, she wagered that she could probably get enough clean air to try again. And I do happen to have a pair of perfectly good wings for doing just that! she informed herself cheerfully, pleased to have happened upon such a useful line of reasoning at last for, though they weren’t exactly useful for flying, her fake pegasus wings were perfectly apt for clearing a room of air.

Rising to all fours very nearly did her in right then, her muscles burning as if she had galloped for miles, she shivered and began to quiver. Her hooves clattered frightfully on the wooden flooring of her library as her legs shook like a newborn filly’s, and, with a sad thump, her bottom found it much preferred not fighting gravity. Resigned to the fact that she wasn’t going to be standing up anytime soon, Twilight settled for resting her rump on the floor and leaning against her two front hooves.

Wincing, for it seemed as if her wings had never been used before from the intense muscle fatigue and pain that shot up her spine, Twilight Sparkle raised her wings as high as they would go, figuring she could get a few determined flaps out of them before she-

CLANG!

Unscrambling her brain for the second time that afternoon, Twilight was able to reconstruct exactly what she had just done to herself. Quite impossibly, it seemed, she had put all of her strength into a full flap of her useless wings and had managed to generate considerable downward thrust. This accelerated her body into the air and, predictably, crashed her skull directly into the ceiling above her, where the stunning impact robbed her of the sense to notice when she crashed back down on the floor again. Thus, her wings were functional. Ergo, she had become, by some quirk of magic, a true pegasus.

One thing was for certain: At the rate she was giving herself serious head injuries, she was bound to get that traumatic loss of brain cells yet.

Three jackhammers were racing to see who could dig their way into Applejack’s skull first. In her imagination, each one was crewed by a different member of her baby sister’s little gang of adorable hooligans, the Cutie Mark Crusaders.

“C’mon, you wimps, I’m so going to get my cutie mark in brain surgery first. If you two slow pokes don’t hurry up, all the good brains’ll be surgeried!” Scootaloo announced, the orange filly located somewhere above Applejack’s forehead.

Halfway around her skull, at the left temple, Apple Bloom was determinedly trying to knock aside enough bone to see what it really was like inside her sister’s noggin, and if it was, indeed, filled with apple custard filling. “Nuh uh, she’s mah sister and ah’m gonna get through first, you’ll see! I’ll fix her up right!”

Meanwhile, at the base of her skull, it seemed Sweetie Belle had given up, much to Applejack’s relief, looking in a puzzled fashion at her own hammer and asking in a confused voice, “Where did I even plug this thing in?”

Bracing for the deafening shout of, “Cutie Mark Crusader Brain Surgeons, Yay!” that never came, Applejack slowly began to realize that she was in fact only hallucinating them. The farmpony wasn’t quite alone, however, as it became obvious that she had, in the blast of whatever unwholesome magic had knocked her over, become thoroughly tangled up with another pony. The pain in her left temple probably had more to do with the fact that she had banged the side of her head into Twilight’s hardwood flooring than any new malignant plot her disaster-prone sister had cooked up to earn her badge of identity.

Grateful for the thickness of her cranium and its wonderfully efficacious impact resistance, she groaned, loudly, to let the world know how she felt about the aching bones in her body and doggedly began to extract herself from the butter yellow hooves that had snaked themselves, tentacle-like, around her. To her not inconsiderable surprise and the loss of all the air in her lungs, the seemingly soft yellow legs tightened and crushed themselves around her barrel, driving all of the air out of her chest, air she sorely needed to breathe right just then.

Applejack gasped, as pointed a criticism as she could muster without any real breath to work with. The blond mare knew that Fluttershy could be strong when she was panicked or upset, but this was far and away more force than she would have expected or found necessary, for that matter.

“Gack!” she huffed, eloquently. The sudden oxygen deprivation made her head throb even more intensely than before, the spot above her forehead hurting, if anything, even worse than it had before rather than less. “Fluh... shy... can’t...” she wheezed, taking tiny little gasps of air to forge what few words she could.

Shockingly powerful hooves wrapped, if anything, more tightly around Applejack at her words, as if she were some sort of orange pony-shaped pillow the poor, pink-maned girl was snuggling into to escape a terrible nightmare. Of course, few pillows could undergo a distinct change in color from orange to burgundy to a deeply air-deprived shade of blue, but Fluttershy was clearly in no condition to worry about the state of her furniture, however organic.

“Ger...” air hissed faintly out of Applejack’s throat, and she cried, “...off!”. With a stunning report, an orange light exploded between them, filling Applejack’s vision with stars and sparks that only multiplied when she went bouncing and rolling along the floor to knock against Twilight’s table.

With life-giving air restored to her lungs, however much dust she sucked in with it, Applejack squeezed her eyes shut. The pain in her head had increased to unprecedented levels, as if somepony had gone and jammed a tuning fork into it, making even the tough-as-nails workhorse shudder and gasp with the reflected vibrations of intense sensation. In those miserable moments, Applejack almost wished she’d been able to lose consciousness for a minute at Fluttershy’s unintentionally harmful grasp for then, maybe, the hammering on her forehead would have stopped at last.

Outside the library, a small gathering of concerned ponies had formed a sort of half-ring, just outside where the chunks of displaced, formerly living wood were most heavily clustered. Ponyville was large enough to be cosmopolitan and just small enough for most, albeit not all, ponies to know each other, and so a certain level of compassion for their fellow neighbor was expected. Furthermore, aside from being something akin to celebrities, Twilight Sparkle and her friends were all quite well-known around town and almost everypony had benefited from their business, kindness, or aid in some way before. Several had already run off for medical aid, while others were moving in to see what they could do personally, while the remainder milled around, doing their best to stay out of the way while watching and waiting.

A few, showing some presence of mind, ran off towards City Hall, intending to get the attention of Mayor Mare. Some, showing superior presence of mind, ran off in separate directions, to find ponies who could actually be of help, like Big Macintosh, or even Derpy Hooves. Just about anypony would do over one of the Mayor’s speeches. Among some ponies, more skilled, more concerned, or simply more inclined towards bold endeavor, more direct action was called for

First into the breach was Thunderlane, a dark-coated pegasus with a flashy mane held in a saw-like pattern down his back. Enormous hooves clanked along with the distinctive ring of a shod Earth pony, and the charcoal-coated young stallion turned his head a hair to see an enormous, bulky blue draft pony, one he thought he recognized from the squash farm down south a ways, and to his other side a pretty young medical student in residency at the hospital, one he recognized from his not infrequent trips to the emergency ward. Flaring his wings, both to brake before he hit something in the dark and to present a more threatening posture towards anything that may be out to harm the girls - or him, for that matter - he winced at the sound of a pony slamming her head against the ceiling, and darted forward to break her fall on the way down. Too jarred to notice him, the midnight-coated pony in his forelegs screamed in pain and clutched at her head. Though uncertain of the identity of this somewhat plush pegasus mare, Thunderlane acted quickly, and turned to call out to one of his companions, shouting, “Help! She’s wounded!”

Stepping back, he had to take a double-take as he looked more closely at the other pegasus. Purple hair, with a pink stripe? Ruler-edge cut forelock? his thoughts reeled, trying to make sense of what he was looking at, But... where’s her horn? Wings? Huh?

Briefly, Thunderlane checked his own pulse and temperature, and discovered that he wasn’t, or at least it didn’t seem like he was, running a fever. He had even gone to the trouble of washing his hooves before entering the library this time, a mistake he wasn’t liable to make twice after Twilight had teleported him halfway across town into the ladies’ changing room at the spa the last time he was here, most likely because he had gone and left prints on the shelves with dust tracked in from outside on a hot summer day. The bruises alone had been enough to land him in a clinic; the humiliation had kept him away from his friends for a week.

Resolving to at least make himself useful, he steadied himself against the floor and beat his wings as hard as he could without actually taking off, using heavy, steady beats to churn as much air as it was possible for him to manage. He angled them so that the dusty air inside was forcibly ejected outwards with the intent of pushing clean, fresh air inside, thus clearing the library out and allowing him to see clearly inside.

No slouch among the local pegasi, he managed to generate a startling amount of force and, as he had anticipated, the wing action was having the desired effect. Halfway up the stairs, the pegasus could see Spike as the air cleared, hoofprints of mysterious provenance recognizable embedded into his scaly body, the purple dragon’s eyes half-lidded as he watched the ponies from on high. Thunderlane wasn’t sure why the young dragon wasn’t helping out, but reasoned that he must have taken an unintentional beating when the girls went down. This was perhaps a little callous on the dragon’s part, he considered, but reasoned that when someone is a tiny, easily stepped on creature, it may be the course of wisdom to stay out of the way of large ponies with very hard feet and not much consideration to where they’re stepping.

Aside from Twilight, it seemed that none of the mares had managed to seriously harm themselves, for which Thunderlane was grateful. Indeed, it seemed as if they were more exhausted than anything else, rising up on shaking hooves and leaning against the walls or the table or chairs. The young nurse-in-training was winding a bandage about Twilight’s head, and gave a reassuring smile to the pegasus, one he didn’t notice, owing to the fact that his attention was decidedly preoccupied just then.

When he had seen Twilight, with her wings splayed out and her hornless head in the clear sunlight from outside, he had thought that maybe he had been mistaken at first, but now he was back to questioning his sanity.

Rising from a stack of books that had fallen unto her, Fluttershy was easily recognizable by her soft pink mane and yellow fur, her eyes a little glazed. What was wrong, though, and what made Thunderlane’s charcoal gray wings shrivel up in impotent fright, was the fact that she had no more wings. In utter horror, he looked at her sides, fearing to see the ragged, bloody stumps of her struts and yet drawn to them in sick fascination, only to be drawn up short when he saw nothing but fur, somewhat tousled by being stuck under a book pile, some of which were still hanging on top of the other pony. He was so shocked that he didn’t even notice how sturdy she looked; as far as Earth ponies went, she was still quite delicate, after all, and he had more important things to worry about.

While Fluttershy half-collapsed against the pile of books she had just vacated, his eyes darted, more uncertainly now, to the next closest pony. Applejack’s hat had come off, and she was even now trying and failing dismally to pick it up, her eyes almost crossed in a fashion Derpy Hooves, a wall-eyed pegasus with a penchant for disaster could be proud of. From the looks of it, she was failing to retrieve her hat primarily because she had forgotten that she needed both of her front hooves on the ground in order to stay upright, and so in trying to reach up and rub at her forehead in pain, she kept slipping and having to start over after reaching for her hat at the same time. Why she was rubbing at her forehead became immediately clear as an orange glow flared about the new horn jutting out of her skull, a puff of telekinetic force blowing the hat away at her irritated shout of, “Consarnit, get up here, hat! Who said you could run away?” The farmpony chased after it, in a wobbly, coltish fashion that resembled a newborn’s gait. Thunderlane noted in passing that, unicorn or not, Applejack still had the nicest haunches of any of them, an odd thought that stood incongruous with his growing panic.

Starting to sweat quite seriously now, Thunderlane turned his attention to Rarity, who was already moaning about the state of her hair. Tugging at the purple locks with one hoof, the alabaster mare concentrated, but her mane remained unkempt, hanging long and bedraggled. Rarity started at the utter lack of a response from her horn, something that had never happened since she was a filly still learning how to properly control her magic in the first place. Patting herself over, as if she could somehow locate her defining trait as a unicorn elsewhere on her body, Rarity was quickly working herself into a panic. With her horn no more present on her head than Twilight’s was on her, her search was futile, and her descent into hysterics inevitable.

“First my glorious wings, and now my horn!” she wailed, and threw herself at the blue draft stallion, sobbing piteously. “Please, just... just crush me under your hooves! I have nothing left to live for!” she begged him. Apparently, even when she was completely out of her mind with grief and the dazed results of a magical accident, the proprietress of Carousel Boutique was not about to let a little high drama slide, “No, wait! That’s not stylish enough! We need a wagon of flowers, a carefully choreographed dance troupe, and a very posh knife, then I can die! Oh, the other ponies will be green with envy at such a beauteous demise, sages will sing of the tragedy of it for centuries, Celestia and Luna will weep over it eons from now...”

Right, moving on, Thunderlane thought quickly, trotting through the library. Pinkie Pie he saw at once, the pink pony looking a bit less excited after Twilight’s head-cracking incident, her concern for her friends outweighing any curiosity she might have had, in addition to her own exhaustion. After the shock the others gave him, seeing her equipped with a pair of violently pink wings only made him frightened for Ponyville itself, with the potential of her madness being liberated from the confines of the Earth looming like a dark cloud. Like the other mares, she seemed to be a little cross-eyed, her wall-eyed stare making the young stallion decidedly uncomfortable.

With Twilight Sparkle and Pinkie Pie as pegasi, Rarity and Fluttershy as Earth ponies, and Applejack as a unicorn, that left only one pony, and he had a sneaking suspicion he knew what he was going to find. It was as if the world were setting him up, laughing at his ill-fated heroic gesture.

The weatherpony didn’t have to wait long, as it turned out, as the last standing bookshelf exploded out with a cyan-blue flash of light. Thunderlane only barely managed to raise his wings and hooves protectively, though the spine of Practical Comedy: Pratfalls and Pitfalls did crack him across the face regardless, leaving an imprint of the embossed words on his cheek. When he could look again, what he saw horrified him as much, if not more, than his glimpse of Fluttershy. His boss, the leader of the Ponyville Weather Patrol, the fastest pony in Equestria, maybe in all of history, and probable future Wonderbolt, was wide-eyed with equine terror, her nostrils and barrel flaring with fast, heavy breaths.

Backing up, Thunderlane recoiled from the terrifying visage. Though he would certainly never admit it to anypony, he had always had a certain amount of awed admiration for the mare - or, at least, a certain competitive respect - and even without her wings flaring in a threat display, she looked like she might tear him limb from limb if he so much as breathed wrong. Though this notion may well have blinded him into insensibility, he had a moment or two of her stunned and shaking silence to contemplate her a bit more objectively. Taking the time to examine her from where he stood, it seemed to the pegasus that Rainbow Dash was a lot thinner than she should have been. Though always sleek and more than a little alluring, she looked downright underfed for any pegasus in her position. His eyes flickered up to her forehead automatically and he flinched back further, as a rather sharp and lethal looking horn was glowing a vivid sky blue, the tip shining almost white.

“Uh, Dash?” he cajoled, foreseeing a repeat of his teleportation-related assault and battery in his near future, even without benefit of supernatural Pinkie Sense, “You, uh...”

“Where are my wings?!” she demanded in a shout, managing a fair approximation of the Royal Canterlot Volume setting. If there was any humor in the situation, though, Thunderlane wasn’t seeing it. “Where are my wings?” she asked again, in not much less of a shout, her breaths coming faster and harder.

“Look, Dash, Rainbow Dash,” he tried again, glancing around to see if he could hide behind anything, but there was no such luck, for he was being backed into the open floor. Even with wings, he was skeptical of his chances of simply outrunning Rainbow Dash. He could still remember the sound drubbing she had given him on their last race, and she had been half-dead with exhaustion from running a major storm the previous night. The hissing sound of magic building up was growing like an angry swarm of bees, which made the prospect of escaping by retreat before she could do something drastic to him even more unlikely.

“What happened to my wings, Thunderlane?” she demanded, perhaps a touch irrationally to his ear. Maybe more than a touch, really.

“I-I don’t-”

“I am still awesome!” she shouted at him, and it sounded almost more like pleading than a statement of fact, “Tell me I’m awesome. I’m awesome, aren’t I?”

“Yes!” he answered, almost sobbing with relief at being offered a way out that didn’t involve him having to say something that would cause a distraught mare to beat him to death, “Yes you’re awesome, you-”

“And I’m going to get that promotion, I’m going to join the Wonderbolts, I’m going to be the best darned pegasus in Equestria, right?”

“Dash, please, calm down!” he shouted right back, deciding to try a different tactic, figuring in a less-than-stellar moment of decision that, should being solicitous fail, then the only rational choice was to try to smack some sense into her. He flared his wings to their fullest extent, his primaries and coverts rigid and making him as large as he could be, trying to assert himself. Mares sometimes said they liked him when he was assertive, and in his imagination he pictured her hesitating, snapped out of her hysteria. While he was at it, he even projected into the future, hoping that she might even grant him a grateful nuzzle or a promotion.

One small snag had failed to register in Thunderlane’s calculated assessment, however.

He was challenging Rainbow Dash.

And that was a really bad idea.

Lifting her head, slowly, gently, Twilight Sparkle was glad to find out that she had only managed to give herself a fairly severe contusion, instead of splitting her skin or even her head right open. The wood was softer up there on the ceiling, just enough apparently that it wasn’t a heavier injury than it could have been. Reaching up, she could feel the soft part of the contusion through the hair of her mane, and quickly snatched her hoof away at the glare from the trainee nurse.

Shifting, Twilight began to rise to her feet, her thoughts turning to thanking Thunderlane, when rage-filled shout split the air with a crack of thunder. A quite literal thunder crack, in fact, following an arcing blast of colorful lightning that briefly filled the darkening library with light and deafening sound. The charcoal pegasus stallion flew past her, bouncing out of the library with noisy thuds, his fur trailing smoke from several points. Trails of multi-hued lightning had thrown him into the clock maker’s shop across the street, forcing the gathered ponies to duck in shock and scatter before the projectile pony could hit them. Alarms began to clang noisily, cuckoos popping in and out of wall-mounted clocks to tweet down at the intruder, seeming to almost dance around his head.

Turning, her ears flattened against the sound, she looked in some shock and more than a little fright at her friend Rainbow Dash. As Thunderlane had perceived, she was, indeed, a unicorn. Unlike the stallion, however, Twilight was aware of the deeper implications of this turn in events, of that fact that her horn was shining with the inner light of the unicorn birthright, and knew that no mere party trick horseshoes were capable of anything so dramatic and all-encompassing. Even powerful transformation magic cast by a pony such as herself, with the Element of Magic behind her, should have worn away with an effect so deep it could change the fundamental nature of a pony’s magic.

The pain in her muscles had faded to a dull ache, and she was able to stand as the newly minted unicorn practically charged at her. The young nurse shouted, but her warnings went unheeded as Rainbow Dash grabbed Twilight in her hooves and bodily pushed her back, making the lavender pony stumble to the floor. “Where are my wings, Twilight?” she demanded of her as she had demanded of Thunderlane.

Intellectually, Twilight knew that Rainbow Dash wasn’t being sensible. It wasn’t like her to act like this, to strike out at ponies around her or to break down into a wreck.

As it had with Thunderlane, seeing her friend, who was normally so brash and elusive about her real feelings, be reduced to hysterics was almost physically painful for her to watch. The shaking wasn’t all that intense, as far as it went, but the look of pain and loss on Rainbow’s face cut into her heart like a jagged knife, slicing deep and drawing forth gouts of red emotion. In truth, Twilight could emphasize strongly, for she wasn’t sure how she was taking the loss of her horn and the magic that meant so much to her so well. Honestly, she suspected that shock was involved more than anything else.

In a very real and sickening sense, it was like being amputated.

Rainbow, like her, had realized that her wings, her real magic, her very personhood, were not coming back, just as Twilight had intuited her own loss would not be solved instantly.

“What did you do with them, Twilight?” she shouted, moving to accusations now, a strong note of pleading entering her voice. It’s like she managed to compress denial and anger into one single super-charged grief stage, and is slowly bleeding into bargaining, Twilight grimaced inwardly.

“Please,” Dash begged, her voice starting to crack with the pressure of it, “Please, just... I’ll do anything, I’ll rebuild your wall, I’ll pay you anything, I’ll give you anything I have...”

Lifting a hoof, Twilight waved off the blue stallion who had been trying to ease up on them, his massive forelimbs tensed to restrain the cyan unicorn. Desperate, she waved harder, and he reluctantly backed off, trusting Twilight in spite of his concerns about whether or not Rainbow might turn dangerous. Rarity and Applejack, Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy, all of them were staring, rendered speechless, watching the breakdown as one might a train wreck, feeling powerless to stop the tragedy unfolding.

The rose-colored eyes that filled the rest of her vision were still wide, but as her friend’s rage began to ebb they lost their force, leaving behind empty pools. Rainbow Dash could be mad at Thunderlane as she had been - she liked him well enough, even if he was still a bit of an irritant at times - but to threaten or accuse Twilight now was apparently beyond her ability to sustain.

“Twi... I...” she tried, her voice, which normally cracked and warbled at the best of times with her unrestrained excitement and energy, now low and steady with need and intensity, “Please.”

Twilight didn’t know what to say. Sometimes, even in a world of smiles, laughter, dancing, and singing, there can be no blue skies or sunny days, somewhere over the rainbow.