To be honest, I didn’t want to know. For all my curiosity, for all my life-long love of knowledge and all the time I’d spent with my friends and Pinkie Pie in particular; some part of me shuddered violently at her offer. I recalled a lesson from ages ago, when I was a filly just a few years into my apprenticeship under Princess Celestia, the lesson was short and succinct, but the gravitas of her tone made me listen, even then her words seemed to echo with greater force than usual. I think, looking back, that the reason was this: I’d never heard her speak in such a deadly serious tone before.

“Twilight” the princess called, entering the small study she’d allotted to me during my early years, “Twilight come here for a moment.”

I smiled and trotted over, eager for another lesson from my teacher, even after three years of tutelage I still found myself giggling with delight as each new lesson approached. This time was different though, the look on the Princess’s face was different, her brow was furled and her eyes didn’t have the almost-mischievous glimmer in them, they were hard and bright as stars, like gems taken from the bones of the world. My trot slowed and I approached my teacher, she was distant at the moment which was unusual, during our lessons she was usually so animated, now it was like looking up at one of the ancient statues of the creators, ageless, timeless, and impossibly removed from the mortal coil.

“Y-yes Princess?” I asked, trying for a small smile as I sat down in front of her, bowing my head low in deference.

“Twilight, we have a very serious lesson today, no more practice for now, no more drills on kinetomancy or divination, today I will teach you this lesson and you will spend the rest of the day meditating on it, are we clear?” the Princess stated, it was a tone that brooked no question, so I nodded. She continued on, saying “Twilight, in this world there are numberless wonders, endless vistas of majesty and beauty, realms so wonderful and terrible as to take your breath away...”

I nodded, I liked where this was going so far, even if she seemed terribly serious.

“…but” she leveled off, turning to stare straight into my eyes, her shining, ageless eyes boring into me, “there are some things in this world that were never meant to be seen. Never meant to be touched or detected. Things that were never meant to be known.”

I didn’t know what to say. To me, even at that age, the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of learning seemed almost sacred. The idea that there were things that were out there that I simply wasn’t supposed to know or learn seemed… wrong.

I opened my mouth to protest but stopped, I couldn’t find my voice, it wasn’t magic that stopped me, it was the look on her face. Her eyes no longer shone, they were like stone now, I realized I wasn’t looking into the face of my loving teacher at this moment, I was looking into the face of my goddess. I turned away, averting my gaze as she continued her lesson.

“I won’t lie Twilight, I give credit where credit is justly due, you are the brightest pupil I have ever taught, frankly you are also the most powerful and the most talented. You pick up in a matter of weeks what it takes some unicorns years to master and show no signs of slowing.” My heart swelled at the compliments, the Princess was always willing to praise me when I did well but never like this, “But… for these same reasons, you are quite possibly the most dangerous creature in Canterlot, maybe even in Equestria.”

I finally found my voice at these words, “W-what?” I blurted out, unable to contain myself.

The Princess lifted a hoof for silence, “let me explain,” she said, I nodded and she continued, “you do not just learn, you comprehend, you can utilize most information the moment it enters your mind while it takes many ponies, not just unicorns, a great deal of time to glean all the lessons from their knowledge. It is because of this that I’m worried. If you come across knowledge that’s dangerous, and do not doubt that there is a great deal of it, you will not only have the faculties to understand the knowledge, but to use it, what I’m afraid you lack is wisdom, that is no slight against you my little pony, wisdom comes with time, not books. Your love of knowledge may lead you down dark paths however, and if it does I’m afraid of what it might mean. For yourself and for Equestria.”

“Princess,” I started, a my heart hurting from her words, “I would… I would never hurt…”

Princess Celestia shook her head, her ephemeral mane drifting like sunlight through summer rain waved lazily in the air as she did. “Twilight I know you’d never purposefully hurt anypony, but unicorns are inheritors of power, and that power is not always controlled, remember your entrance exam?”

I lowered my head in shame, I remembered all right, it had seemed funny then but in the context of this lesson… it was horrifying.

The Princess just nodded, “that is what I mean, of all the words we’ve shared I want you to take this lesson to heart: ‘Some knowledge should be left in the darkness’.”

I spent the rest of the day crying in my bedroom, I tore several of my favorite books apart, even knocked over my bookshelf. It was one of the worst nights of my life, laying there in that bed sobbing into my pillow, “I’m not a monster… I’m not a monster… I’m not a monster…”

I took a deep breath.

There were many things in this world that should be left in the darkness, maybe this was one of them…

Maybe whatever it was that drove Pinkie insane, drove her to not only kill but torture and dismember innocent ponies, cannibalize their flesh, desecrate their bodies, and wear their remains, should be thrown to the wind. I knew one thing for certain: I didn’t want to know.

Unfortunately… I had there terrible gnawing feeling in my gut that as much as I didn’t want this terrible knowledge rattling around in my skull… not knowing it would leave me lacking a crucial piece in this puzzle. Part of me knew that while I didn’t want to hear Pinkie’s story, that I needed to.

I nodded.

Pinkie closed her eyes and sighed deeply, as if she had been dreading my answer as much as I dreaded her story, we both knew what the outcome of her offer would be though so she sat down. Before she started I had to ask her a question.

“Pinkie… before you tell me I have to know… you’re yourself now right?” I asked directly, she gave me a wry and tired smile.

“Heh, yea, I’m me-me, scary-me is mostly gone now,” she answered in trademark Pinkie Pie fashion.

I nodded, expecting the answer, “so, why do you still wear that… thing?” I couldn’t refer to her outfit as a dress, not knowing what it was made of.

A look of intense sadness passed over Pinkie’s face as she answered, “I don’t have a choice Twi’, they’re a part of me now.”

“But…” I started, Pinkie cut me off.

“No, I mean it Twi’, they’re… part of me…” as she said it I saw her dress move, there no wind, no rustling movement, but it didn’t just moved, it writhed, I hadn’t seen it before because quite frankly I hadn’t wanted to look at it, I’d focused on my friends face, but looking at the dress I realized that the body of it seemed form-fitting, rather than loose, it looked… alive.

“Pinkie when you say they’re a part of you…” I whispered, horror slowly creeping into my heart.

Pinkie nodded gravely, “All of them…”

I felt my stomach heave. I had thought I was jaded, that I had seen enough to inure me to horrors this place threw in face. I was dead wrong. Pinkie waited quietly as I emptied what little contents of my stomach were left onto the floor beside my cot.

I breathed heavily for a few minutes, sipping at the cup of water Rarity brought over to me after I was finished. Then I looked up, steeled and determined I met Pinkie’s gaze.

“Tell me.”

+=+

I didn’t sleep after Pinkie finished telling her story. I couldn’t sleep. I felt dead inside, I felt violated.

Everything was my fault.

Everything.

Pinkie’s madness. The deaths of all of those ponies including Rainbow Dash. What happened at Sugarcube Corner. All of this nightmare we were living through right now. All of it was my fault.

I had tried to justify it. To justify in my own mind why I had done it. I tried to blame him, to put all the blame up to his machinations… but in the end it was my choice to use them. I had done all of this.

But Pinkie was right about one thing, it had all started with him. Plots within plots, madness within madness, chaos within chaos.

+=+

“Discord,” Pinkie said.

I blinked a few times before processing what she’d said, “Discord? You’re… saying he made you this way? No… that’s not right, he made you angry, took away your ability to laugh things off, but you weren’t like that, you were still-”

Pinkie stuck a hoof in my mouth and shook her head, “not Discord himself, I mean, it was his fault kind of but then it sort of wasn’t but… uhm… we’ll get to that. Sorry, I know I’m not making much sense, my Pinkie head hasn’t been screwed on quite right since… since my element broke.

“What?!” I almost shouted, “No! It wasn’t broken, that’s impossible, I saw it, I have the necklace, it isn’t broken.”

Pinkie laughed, “C’mon Twi’ you’re the magic-pony, remember when Nightmare Moon broke the elements of harmony right in front of us?”

I worked my mouth for a minute before realizing what she was saying, she smiled one her old Pinkie Pie smiles as she saw it dawn on me.

“The element is more than a gem,” I whispered.

“I was the one who was broken. I’m not the only one though, we all were… well, except Rainbow Dash.”

“-Wait, wait…”, despite my desire for some real first-hand knowledge finally I couldn’t help but interrupting again, “why not Rainbow Dash, we’ve always fought side-by-side, we took down Discord together!”

Pinkie sighed and nodded slowly, it was so strange seeing her like this, she was soft-spoken like Fluttershy, she was somehow… reduced… like there was some vital part of her missing, it was almost as if I was looking at a washed out painting that you could tell was once a vibrant portrait full of color and life, but now all that remains is a gray and drab facsimile. At length she responded, “Yes, we did banish him together… it was so much fun, finally being together again, being away from you all was worse than I could have imagined, not distance-wise though…” she scratched her head with her hoof as she search for the words and for a moment I couldn’t suppress a smile as I was reminded of Pinkie Pie as she used to be. “…I mean… we were away away but… our hearts were far away from each other, farther than they’d been since the day we met… but remember Twilight, remember? There was a moment… just a little while really… when everyone but Rainbow Dash was present… Do you remember?” She had a pleading look on her face, I wrinkled my nose as I searched my memories for the moment she was talking about…

Then I remembered and the bottom fell out of my heart.

“You do remember then, when it all started, when you tried to awaken the Elements of Harmony inside of us all, not only did you use Spike as a substitute for Rainbow, but you used it when we were… well… when we were too far away,” she explained slowly, “our hearts were cold and angry, we didn’t feel like friends any more, instead we… we…” she stopped for a moment, choking on the word I knew she was trying not to use.

We hated each other.

She saw it in my eyes, saw that I understood, and nodded. “Granny Pie used to tell me, ‘Pinkie, always remember to leave room in your heart to forgive those what wrong’d you, especially your friends, there’s no hate quite so bitter as what used to be love.’ But I never really understood what she meant until recently.”

I felt the question that I needed to ask sitting on my tongue like a coal, “So… what you’re saying is that when we tried to use the Elements of Harmony while we… when we weren’t getting along…”

“They broke,” Pinkie answered in quite the saddest voice I’d ever heard. “and what used to be laughter became madness…”

“You said we all broke though didn’t you? How? No one else went…” I bit off the word ‘crazy’ before it came out my mouth, Pinkie smiled dryly at my clumsy attempt to spare her feelings.

“Psycho-batty-whackball-bonkers?” she offered, I nodded sheepishly.

“Uh, yea, I didn’t feel any different really, and I don’t think any of the others did…” I started to wonder though, there was so much we hadn’t told each other since the day Pinkie died and we all found out the truth of what had happened. Had we been keeping secrets even before that? Had I been keeping secrets too? I realized I had, I just hadn’t realized the importance of them, since we defeated Discord I had started getting headaches, small ones at first, but sometimes they got so bad I couldn’t get out of bed for hours. I had just ignored them though, I hadn’t wanted to bother my friends with something so mundane. “No… there was something wrong… but how come you…?”

I stopped talking as I looked up at her; tears were rolling down Pinkie’s cheeks, “I’m sorry Twilight… I was… I told you I was never really the most stable Pony in the world, when I was a little filly I would sometimes get really sad for no reason… when I got older it just got worse, I even wanted to hurt myself sometimes, just so I wouldn’t feel so sad anymore.”

I felt my heart breaking with every word, I had never known any of this about her.

“My friends were the only thing that made me happy, I just… I kept telling myself to smile, smile, smile and by making other people happy I could be happy… and it worked…” she was sobbing softly now, I put my hoof on her shoulder and drew my friend into a tight hug as she finished spilling out her soul. “But after Discord I felt it coming back, so I made myself laugh more, threw more parties, tried to make more friends… but I could feel the edges fraying, days were going by in a sort of haze… one after the other, soon two days, then three then a whole week might go by and I wouldn’t be able to remember any specific part of it, and that’s when I began…” I felt Pinkie shudder, I mentally filled in her sentence.

That’s when I began to kill.

“So the others though…?” I started, trying to steer her away from the memories of what she had done as she stepped back from me.

“You saw AJ while you were all trapped in the Castle remember? How she was so brutal to herself? She took all the blame, it was extreme, almost like she had…” she trailed off, letting me fill in the rest.

“Almost like she’d gone crazy.” I said, feeling that hole in my heart widen. “And Fluttershy? Rarity? Even me… we all broke apart in that place?” I grimaced as I remembered Fluttershy on that stained slab, begging to be punished for crimes she thought she’d committed, Rarity feeling so beholden to Dash that she helped her torture us to alleviate her own guilt. I saw Rarity lower her eyes to the ground; she was probably thinking the same thing.

Then I placed the final piece of the puzzle.

“…And my magic became a curse,” I whispered, aghast at the truth as I finally realized what had happened, when I tried to force the Elements to awaken despite missing one of our number and feeling antipathy towards each other, it had been like trying to put a key into a lock that didn’t fit it, but I didn’t just try the key, I had rammed the key in and tried to force the lock. I dropped to the floor as this new revelation sunk in.

“Then… it is my fault… all of it,” I whispered to myself.