I'm going to try as hard as I can to write things down without complaining in advance, but Dear Princess Celestia I have reached and surpassed my limits with this one. Apparently, I can't even go an hour now without having some horrible new experience. Nonetheless, the stakes are too high to waste on forgetting all the glorious details, so, here we go. Forgive me, brother.

As I wrote previously, I left Pinkie and Spike and went for a midnight walk. I guess I walked a little farther than I'd planned, and apparently I found the castle's master bedroom. I'm sure there is at least one buffer foyer between the two guards at the grand doorway and the actual bedroom (for privacy), because the area is enormous and there's no way King Sombra didn't like his personal space.

I turned around to retrace my steps, walking around what must have been the back of the bedchamber, mind focused only on the recent nightmare I was still trying to shake off. I have an innate tendency to organize and multitask even when I don't mean to, and as I walked by I telekinetically straightened a painting which slipped and bumped a grandfather clock, and then long-story-short this eventually led to a barely-pony-sized panel in the wall opening up right in front of me. Now, mind you, I'm not actually surprised by this. The Castle of the Two Sisters in the Everfree Forest will probably end up being my personal castle someday: it's the only castle I know of which nobody uses (probably because it's in smack in the middle of an extremely dangerous, toxic forest filled with thousands of deadly pony-eating magical monsters and one unnervingly resourceful zebra shaman) and it's not like a castle's just going to magically spring up in the middle of Ponyville or something. I mean, that's why we were all fixing it up, obviously, because I may be forced to live in that delightful dump someday. Anyway, that castle is positively brimming with bizarre traps and revolving doors. I never bothered to ask if it was Princess Celestia, Princess Luna, or both of them that had a weird fetish for secret passages, but I guess big bad old King Sombra had the candlestick-and-bookcase bug too.

Naturally, I was just about to shut the passage and continue walking (sorry, journal; no interest whatsoever in spying in on my brother's bedroom, I swear). But then I heard something I couldn't ignore. It was Shining Armor saying my name in the middle of a sentence: I couldn't make out the rest, but the "Twilie" was too familiar. They must have been talking about me. I needed to know what was going on so badly, I just couldn't pass up the opportunity; but Dear Princess Celestia, how I wish I had. I honestly do this time: I would go back in time and smack myself so hard, I would do anything at all to forget the events of tonight and let the pod ponies (or whatever) win just to make this one event of the evening not have happened. But stupid, unknowing Past Twilight was blissfully unaware of the fate of poor, unfortunate Future Twilight, and into the narrow passageway I blindly crept like the complete idiot I was. (Fine, am.)

I'd like to take a brief moment to mention that King Sombra was, in addition to a horrible, terrible pony who almost certainly needed to die when we exploded him into teeny tiny pieces, a complete and utterly depraved pervert of an exhibitionist. The reason I could hear my brother's voice is that the passage contains a peephole directly into the bedroom! It was easy to spot, and easy to avoid looking through, so avoid it I did. I still had a few shreds of decency remaining, way back when these events started a whole whopping hour or two ago. (Past Twilight, I envy you so damned much right now.)

"(something) ...is going to be a problem," said Shining Armor's voice.

"I know. Poor Twilight... She's the worst possible pony we could have to deal with right now," said Princess Cadance. "Powerful, dangerous, and impossible to control. My adopted Auntie doesn't even come close, and Celestia's nothing like my actual ancest—MMPH! Mmmmmmn..."

I didn't really know what to make of that. It sounded like she just got force fed a banana or something else weird. Part of me wanted to look, I admit.

"Shhhhh, sh-sh-shhh," said my brother. "You're much better this way, my dearest," he continued, his voice filled with, it couldn't have been... condescension? Sarcasm? I was starting to get really worried, and pretty uncomfortable, so I began tiptoeing away, but then I heard this:

"Fuck. If only we'd had more time. Anypony else, no problem! Even the dikedyke or Twilie's little adopted dragon brother, it'd be wham and bam, just like that. Done, finished, game over, happy ending and smiles all around. But there is NO possible way to break my sister properly in just a few days, she's just too bucking clueless! It's maddening! How can she be so talented and sweet and brilliant, not to mention drop-dead gorgeous..." he said.

Um... What. Did my brother just say about me. I didn't get the "break me" thing at all, I didn't know which dike he could have been referring to (there are no rivers that I know of in the central Crystal Empire), and the "clueless" slam hurt. But, I do know what "gorgeous" means, and that's just not something for a brother to say about you, not to mention all the casual profanity. My cheeks burned bright red with, let's say, extreme confusion. Short-lived, at least...

"...yet at the same time, that fine piece of royal ass is the most naive bitch in all of Equestria. Probably in our entire fucking universe. It's all the books, it has to be, I'd be mad at my parents for what they did to her if they'd known any better. Twilie's got so much going for her, yet she is the canonically perfect example of everything that is wrong with a typical mare-cunt*, except, like, a billion times worse. Just, fuck. She didn't even have friends until a few years ago. Seriously! Celestia had to risk the fate of Equestria itself just to get my sister to make the first Sun-damned friend in her peer group, at what, twenty-something years old? A university graduate for fuck's sake! I mean, she's come light-years since, but there's still no chance. You can't change something that incomplete in a single damn weekend, no matter how much you try; oh Luna, how I want to, but you just, fucking, cannot do it."

(* Yes, I am not making this "word" up. It was clear as a bell.)

I think it sounded like Cadance was choking on something, but I hardly noticed. I was trying my damndest not to make a choking noise myself with the tears running down my cheeks. I came to the Crystal Kingdom thinking, despite all the odds, that I was somehow prepared for anything, once again. And I truly was prepared for almost anything. But it turns out I wasn't prepared for this. Not this. Not losing my brother's love, or finding out I never had it, or just not even knowing who he was anymore. I wanted to walk away, but I was frozen with despair, rage, confusion, everything all at once, even emotions that, I mean I still don't know what they are. And somehow, the worst part of all was that it sounded like, despite those horrid names and things that came right from my "BBBFF" (ugh, I'm feel like I'm going to vomit), he was complaining out of some kind of legitimate "concern" for me. He was trying to protect me from... what, myself? What about me needs fixing? How long has this been going on? Why hasn't he ever told me about any of this?

Dear Celestia, what am I going to say to him at dinner tomorrow?

Then I heard a loud sort of plunger-like sound, followed by Cadance gasping for breath. It was weird enough to bring me back to reality. I sniffed quietly, wiping my face clean, and recovered somewhat. Shining Armor still cared about me, and maybe he had been affected by this thing too. It was the only possible explanation. Then there was another odd sound, my sister-in-law yawning, something metal clinking... She started making weird moaning sounds, and I was worried she was crying. My brother... he couldn't be hurting his beloved wife. I would not believe that, not even after all I'd seen and heard. No amount of changelings or pod ponies or evil cursed artifacts could ever make that happen.

It was at that low moment in which I made what probably isn't, but currently feels like, the biggest mistake of my life. I don't think I can be blamed, really. My mind was just not in the right place, not with everything that had just happened. But, I did it. I craned my stupid neck down, and I looked through the stupid hole.

King Sombra's bedroom was like something straight out of my worst nightmares, except my nightmares aren't anywhere near this creative and, as I quite vividly recall, I just had one about an hour ago featuring several dozen hoof-spike-things jammed painfully into my body. The testament to his empire of slavery was everywhere: cages, hanging cages, manacles, weird metal poles and tools, odd wooden boards, things that could only possibly be torture devices of all kinds (none of which I recognized or understood, however), whips, different whips, even more kinds of whips (how many whips could one pony need?), and posts with rings attached to them. The posts were there for the purpose of tying down ponies. I was able to derive this fact, because Princess Cadance, my loving sister-in-law and Equestria's best foalsitter ever, was currently hitched to one of them by way of a velvet rope connected to a metal harness on her muzzle that I really don't care to describe in great detail at the moment.

Now, I can understand my brother taking a while to redecorate, but actually using King Sombra's devices of evil? I was horrified beyond all measure, and of course I immediately realized King Sombra's castle (or something within it) must be having some kind of a corrupting influence over my brother. I mean, it makes perfect sense, as long as you can just disregard the Flutterbat clues and Rarity's mutilated horn accessories and pretty much about half of the other evidence we've already collected. Still, I'm sure it's a big part of the puzzle, and I intend to bounce the idea off of my friends once I'm cogent enough to talk about what happened.

Don't get me wrong. I was more than ready to rush in and rescue Cadance from being tortured my poor, completely insane big brother, and I almost did just that, but then I saw her face, and... I, I just didn't know what to think anymore. Princess Cadance had this awful, goofy-looking expression, like Rainbow Dash after her third mug of cider (or Pinkie Pie after her third barrel). Her head was in some kind of harness, like she was a rabid dog for heaven's sake, and a metal ring forced her mouth open wide as she drooled down one side of the thing, making a bubbly, nasalized moaning sound that could only have been some kind of giggling. Her cheeks blushed a deep red through that soft pink pelt, and sweat collected on her brow. (I immediately felt this weird itching sensation in my legs, and for a moment I thought the effects of the magical bite had come back. Thankfully, it passed quickly.)

I think I understand, if only at some small level. Shining Armor was right about me being naive. I don't have a clue how my naivete somehow ruins his evil plans or ends up destroying all of Equestria, but I admit it: this is a thing about which I know nothing. I could not make heads or tails of this scene in my mind, in any way that made logical sense. Between you and me, journal, I'm a flipping genius and easily one of the most powerful ponies within three kingdoms; but I still don't get it. This experience is as far beyond me as the stars are to a worm.

My brother sighed. "We'll have to be as honest as we can risk it, and hope she just doesn't flip out. And if push comes to shove, well, I guess we shove right back and hope for the best," he said, and then lifted Cadance's tail and tied it to something, a fancy saddle of some sort she was wearing? And then he, then he...

I... I can't actually believe I'm writing this down.

My brother took this long object (at first, I didn't have a good look at it) and he, um. He placed it. On his wife, sort of. Okay, in. In his wife, inside his wife. In her, well... into her butt. The part where poop is supposed to come out, you know the one, right? Yes, I just wrote those words down on paper, in my journal, go me: woo-fucking-hoo. I guess the invisible ink finally pays off, congratulations Twilight Sparkle ingenuity! Oh, and the object, it was all shiny like, like it was wet or greasy or something, and after just a little bit of pressing and some really weird sounds from Cadance it just popped right up in there, yes-sirree. With room to spare, because, yeah. Well, I guess that's why it's nice and large and all back there, I thought to myself. I wonder if my sister-in-law has to write friendship lessons about this to Princess Celestia, I thought to myself? My holy horn, I bucking hope she does. I really, actually, honestly do, and that is not a joke. I don't even care if means my teacher is a pervert too, because that would just be so... perfect.

"Dear Princess Celestia, guess what my husband shoved up my ass today!"

Ohhhhh, but we're not done yet. No, no, no. Not by a long shot.

Then Shining Armor turns to his beloved wife, and he gives her this big, painful-looking hoof-slap on her haunch right over the cutie mark, eliciting a yelp and then a giggle. And then he gets this nasty grin on his face, and my Big Brother, Best Friend Forever says to his beautiful spouse (and by the way, this is burned into my brain for the rest of eternity, so I do, in fact, quote his exact words): "Sweetheart, I think I'm going to have to stop fucking your ass with my cock so often, or this thing isn't going to stay in where it belongs."

Yeah.

Except, I fibbed. It wasn't "this thing" that he said, my goodness no. I was being nice. I changed that part. He was more precise than "this thing", but I really didn't want to accept what I had just heard. Oh, sweet, cleansing magical backfires of the end times, I could actually see it winking at me as it rested there snug as a bug in a rug right up inside my sister-in-law's rectum: a shiny, stone-like solid with, suspiciously, the exact same color as my sister-in-law's pelt. It couldn't have been, it just couldn't have been, but once I heard the words it was absolutely unmistakable: a thing which has no business in anypony's cavernous anywhere, EVER; like some abomination that my brain simply could not process until actually hearing the filthy words spill from his filthy bucking stallion mouth and that's when everything finally clicked and my innocence died forever.

My beloved big brother had just shoved his wife's own severed alicorn horn all the way up her glorious Princess butt.

And I, his lucky little sister, had front-row tickets to the show. But now, for some mind-numbingly stupid reason, some unfathomable reason, I found myself still looking through the hole! as he stands up on two legs and walks awkwardly on them like a teenage alternate-universe monkey to tower over his bound and gagged little wife like she's some kind of sick pet in traction, and then he goes and gropes my sister-in-law in the, well, the other place, and rubs her teats with his left hoof, and then I see this weird thing bobbing in front of my brother and I'm like, gee, what on Equestria is that thing?, why, it looks a lot like my nightmare hoof spikes crossed with a tree branch, and now I have to stop writing completely. That's it, book over, storytime is finished. I am done with using words for the rest of my life. The End. Thank you for reading Twilight Sparkle's Journal of Horrors. No refunds.

In the process of losing my sanity, at least I regained some common sense. I rushed out of that secret room so fast I'd have made Rainbow Dash's head spin (though thank Celestia I still barely had enough presence of mind remaining to shut the secret door). I don't remember the gallop back to my room, but at least I wasn't crying over what he'd said about me anymore. My brother and sister-in-law were both insane, and that was simply all there was to it.

I'm sitting here writing this, emotionally shaken but (surprisingly, to me) still holding things together. I don't want to wake Pinkie or Spike right now, and I really don't want to discuss this with anypony at all, but I know I need to. I'm going to steel myself and have a chat with my friends, and maybe somepony can help me shed the tiniest pinpricks of light into the darkness of the impossible.

I may be a naive bookworm, but I could really use a telescope right about now.