Shine

by Lucky Dreams

Chapters

• 1. Nothing that's Lost
• 2. Out of Time
• 3. Sliver of Starlight

1. Nothing that's Lost

For the second time that night, Apple Bloom shot up in bed, her breath racing and her heart pounding, and with her stomach in her mouth. “Applejack,” she cried. “Sis, where are ya, where are ya?”

No answer, so she called again. “Applejack!”

Her ears perked as something tapped against the window. Apple Bloom faced the glass: moonlight, bright and ghostly, was pouring into the bedroom, casting stark shadows and making everything seem strange, unfamiliar; her half open wardrobe was a dark gateway into another world; and all around she imagined a hundred sets of eyes staring at her, beady red eyes which glowed in the darkness. Whimpering, Apple Bloom pulled the sheets over herself a little more. She turned her bedside lantern on.

At once, everything changed.  

Shadows fled. The eyes vanished into nothing—of course, not that they had ever existed in the first place—and in the yellow lamplight, the buckles on her hoof boots gleamed from inside the open wardrobe. Apple Bloom gulped. She was shaking. “Just a bad dream,” she whispered to herself. “Just a nightmare. Go back to sleep.”

She forced herself to take deep breaths, the cool air making her feel calmer, more secure.

What a dream! What a terrible, awful, horrible dream. Against her better judgement, she tried her best to remember it: she’d been chasing something, her... her hair bow, had it been? And then...

She would’ve had better luck trying to hold buckets of sand in her hooves. The details slid out of mind, out of memory, and the harder she tried to hold onto them the more difficult it became; then they were gone. All that remained was the unease lingering in her belly.  

She sighed. She laid her head on the pillow, but falling asleep was easier said than done. “Go to sleep,” she mouthed. “There ain’t nothin’ to be scared of, ya hear?”

The wind howled through the branches of dead trees and whipped flakes of loose snow against her window. Tap. Tap. Tap. Apple Bloom shivered. She didn’t like that sound.

“Go. To. Sleep. What ya scared of? You’re eight years old! Ya got no excuse to act chicken.”

She huffed, for a moment wishing that she could be somewhere, anywhere else, a nice new house with a proper heating system that actually worked. And thoughts of gloomy corridors and bare wooden rooms filled her head. Her house was old. It was the sort of place where the floorboards creaked in the dead of night even when nopony was around to hear; and it hadn’t just seen better days, but every type of day imaginable, from bright mornings and lazy afternoons, to bitter evenings where ferocious storms battered the windows and threatened to blow tiles from the roof. Apple Bloom loved her house. She loved how busy it was, how ponies were always coming and going or else were hard at work making apple jam, apple juice, apple cider, apple everything. But there was no denying it: sometimes—right then, for instance—it could be plain creepy.

Tap. Creak. Rattle.

Something that Apple Bloom prayed was the water pipes let out a long, low moan, and quick as a flash, she opened her eyes and flicked the lamp on once more, staring, staring at the clock. One in the morning, it said. Her heart sank.

It was going to be a long, long night.

As far as Apple Bloom was concerned, she’d been sent to bed at nine, had drifted off by ten, and then nothing had happened save for troubled dreams of bows and darkness. In fact, what had actually happened was this: two hours previously—though she had no memory of this—she’d woken up screaming, and somepony had heard her.

“What’s in tarnation’s going on in here?” her sister Applejack asked, poking her head through the door. But Apple Bloom was in no fit state to answer. She was stood upright on her bed, her eyes full to bursting with terror, and she pointed at the window whilst babbling incessantly about... something, something about “shadows” and “monsters, monsters”. Yet before Applejack could ask what she meant by any of this, the fright in Apple Bloom’s eyes suddenly vanished. Her breathing grew softer.

Applejack placed a hoof over her own heart in an effort to calm it. What, in all Equestria, what in the name of Celestia and Luna, had her sister been dreaming about?

Foals have nightmares, Applejack told herself in an effort to believe that everything was alright; but there was no fooling the chill in her guts. Not my li’l Apple Bloom. Why, she can sleep sounder than Granny Smith on a Sunday afternoon, and she don’t ever wake up screaming like this.

Gulping, the mare stepped hoof into her little sister’s bedroom, all the while keeping half an eye on the shadows built up in the corners, under the windowsill, and lurking underneath the bed. “Shush there, li’l cowgirl you,” she said, sitting down next to Apple Bloom. The poor filly! Every hair on her yellow coat of fur standing on end, and her cheeks were so hot that it was possible to feel the heat radiating off of them. Applejack tucked her under the sheets before giving her a kiss on the forehead. “What’s gotten y’all shaken up like this, Apple Bloom?”

Apple Bloom blinked. A few moments later she was so deeply asleep that Applejack doubted that even thunder and lightning would’ve been enough to wake her.

And just then, Applejack knew exactly what her sister had been dreaming about.

“It’ll turn up,” she said, leaning in close to her precious little sister and stroking her mane, where her bow ought to have been. The beloved pink bow: a present from their mother. “You’ll see. It’s like what Granny Smith says. Nothin’ that’s lost stays lost forever...”

2. Out of Time

The room was full of noises: the breeze rattling the window, the sound of her own breathing, the thumping of her heart against her chest. “Why can’t Ah sleeeep?” Apple Bloom whispered before burying her face into her pillow. With her ears pressed so hard against the fabric, her heart seemed louder than ever before. Thump. Thump. Thump.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

Rattle. Rattle.

With a sigh, Apple Bloom abandoned all hope of falling asleep and instead sat up in bed. Surely dawn was approaching—what was the time, anyway? Five o’clock? Six? Closing her eyelids, she pointed her head in the direction of the clock, changing her guess to four o’clock just to be on the safe side. She opened her eyes.

“Five past one?!”

Rubbing her disbelieving eyes didn’t make the slightest shred of difference. After all, the cold gears of the clockwork were incapable of lying: five past one they said and so five past one it was, five, long, noisy minutes since she had woken up. And now the clock taunted her further still by seemingly slowing down, each tick of the second hand feeling like a minute, every tock of the minute hand feeling like an hour. Supposing Apple Bloom hadn’t known better then she would’ve sworn that the clock was doing this on purpose. “Is this ‘cos of that time Ah gone kicked the wall and ya fell off?” she asked. “‘Cos that was only once, honest! Ain’t Ah taken good care of ya since?”

It responded with an indignant tock. Apple Bloom, stop talking to the clock, said a voice in her head. Go to sleep.

Groaning, she fell back down on the mattress, facing the ceiling. And she shivered. It was so chilly that even her radiator couldn’t save her breath from misting in the moonlight, and she cursed her thin sheets, wished that, for once, she could be the one with the thick, woolly blanket and not Granny Smith. “It ain’t fair,” she said under her breath. “Ah’m only little. Why can’t Ah have a nice blanket?”

Just then, the moonlight dimmed. Though Apple Bloom couldn’t recall any snowfall being scheduled for tonight, nevertheless the clouds acted like nopony had told them, creeping over the disc of the moon, long, thin tendrils of cloud followed by bigger, thicker brothers; and then the moon was gone, eaten up, leaving behind nothing but a bright white lining around the edges of the clouds; and even that too vanished in time, and then the snow began to fall in earnest. It was only now that Apple Bloom finally turned her lamp back on so as to watch the snow gather up on her windowsill—anything to distract from the dread building in her chest.

“Apple Bloom, ya already gone through this tonight. There ain’t nothin’ to be scared by.”

Saying it and believing it weren’t one and the same, and the truth was that she was worried to her bones. There was something else, too, which couldn’t be explained: it was all around in the air itself, the sensation of being caught in the quiet minutes before a mighty storm. Something was going to happen. Something big. Apple Bloom knew it, and she also knew as surely as the sun, the moon and the stars shined above her that this was no ordinary night—though her head told her that it was the tiredness talking, her heart, on the other hoof, said otherwise: trust your gut, it whispered.

Running a hoof through her mane (this had become a habit since her bow had gone missing), Apple Bloom thought of her nightmares: deep shadows, starless skies, running, running, and running; and there had been snow everywhere, snow up to her chin, and she’d screamed for the blizzard to stop before it buried her, then—

And then her stomach lurched. Something happened...

It was the clock: it read five past one. Common sense said to Apple Bloom that it went without saying that time was moving slowly tonight, yet for as loudly as her mind screamed this, proclaimed that it was the truth and that there was no other explanation, her guts were adamant that ten minutes, at least, had passed since she had last checked the clock. There was a difference between time going slowly and stopping completely...

“It’s just outta battery, is all. Stop being so darn silly.”

But no amount of excuses could account for the absence of any tick, tock, tick, tock—not when the batteries had been replaced two days beforehoof. The window wasn’t rattling either, nor was the snow patting against the glass or the roof. The pipes weren’t groaning. The floorboards weren’t moaning. The wind wasn’t howling through the trees, and where once her bedroom had been overflowing with a hundred little noises, the only ones she could hear now were that of her own shallow breathing and the pounding of her heart as imagined terrors swarmed in her imagination, visions of monsters with sharp, clever claws waiting to drag her under the bed or into the back of the wardrobe. Apple Bloom shook her head. There was no denying it now: the clock had ticked its last tock.

“You’re being thick on purpose,” she said, voice shaking. “Just replace the batteries.”

And so she would’ve, except when at last she gathered the courage to place her hooves on the floor, Apple Bloom found herself drawn over the window instead, feeling incredibly small, a tiny foal lost in the night. She opened the window. The lamp lit up the snowflakes, along with Apple Bloom’s gaping jaw and her astonished eyes.

The snowflakes were all suspended in mid-air, frozen in place; none were falling. There was no wind either. There were no signs of life at all, and she knew then that though what she was seeing was surely impossible, her guts had been right all along.

Time had stopped.

3. Sliver of Starlight

Had Apple Bloom been raised differently, it’s possible that she might have doubted what she was seeing, or else convinced herself that she was, at that very moment, wrapped up snuggly in bed and fast asleep, dreaming the craziest of dreams. As it was, thoughts like these did in fact cross her mind, yet only for moments: maybe it had something to do with being raised by ponies who valued truth and honesty; or perhaps it was more to do with growing up on a farm and having little chance to stretch her imagination— beyond thoughts of her long awaited cutie mark, with so much work to be done there was almost no time for fanciful thinking. Apple Bloom was a very practical pony. She bit her tongue and trusted that her eyes were showing her the truth.

“Wha’... what is this?” she said, reaching a trembling hoof out of her window to touch the snow. The flakes were cold. They sent shivers up her skin and stuck to her fur. When she brought her hoof back inside, she could see a small swath of missing snowfall from where she had brushed away the flakes...

Apple Bloom felt sick. Her breath was short, her head was swimming, and her throat was hot and parched; she wondered if she was about to throw up. “A-Applejack?” she called out. “Can, can ya hear me? Hello?”

The response was silence. Apple Bloom held onto the windowsill, for her legs had turned to jelly—she didn’t trust them to support her weight. And when she spoke again, her voice was so small, so massively tiny, that she could barely hear herself. “Applejack... Where... Where are ya? I need ya...”

Her eyes watered. A moment later, she sniffled, and tears streamed down her face. I don’t even care, she thought bitterly, making no effort to wipe away the tears. I don’t care if anypony sees ‘em.

Another glance out the window, and the last fragments of hope that she was dreaming faded away: this was real. As certain as she was that she lacked a cutie mark, so too did she know that time had really ground to a halt, and what in Equestria was she going to do about it?

The question was a flame in the darkness. What was she going to do about it? “Nothing that’s lost stays lost forever,” she whispered to herself fiercely, at last letting go of the window frame and wiping her tears. “That means time, too.”

Apple Bloom gulped. She ran a hoof through her mane.

Then she looked from the window to the clock and to the bolt on her bedroom door. Time had stopped. Applejack wasn’t answering. Her brother was away on family business, and she had about as much chance of waking up Granny Smith as she did being made a Princess of Equestria—that, or course, was assuming she could wake the old mare up in the first place. What if Granny was frozen in time as well? What if she, Apple Bloom, was the only one who could walk, talk, who could act as though the world wasn’t standing still? What if she was the only one who knew that time had stopped?

Images of Ponyville flashed through her mind, a town full of ponies who were stood as still as statues. She thought of trotting unnoticed through silent crowds, and of sitting at a table outside Sugercube Corner; imagine Scootaloo pouring herself a glass of cola, except the drink may as well have been made of ice and her friend out of wax. Imagine pegasi hanging in the air, held up by nothing and their wings deadly still, their eyes unblinking. Imagine... imagine being the last pony in the world, and all of time stretching out forever and ever and there was no-one with which to share it; and the sun was dead, the moon and the stars were dead, and it was dark and it was cold. Imagine. Imagine.

“Ah don’t like it. Stop thinking ‘bout it, Apple Bloom, stop it, stop it!”

Her tears had returned with a vengeance, transforming her into a blubbering mess. Apple Bloom forced herself to sit down. She wiped her cheeks again. They were boiling hot, and her tears matted into her fur messily. “None, none of that’s gonna happen,” she said shakily, her skin icy cold and her stomach churning like the bottom of a waterfall. “Not one bit of it. You’re... you’re gonna fix it up ‘cos that’s what ya do, ya fix things. Sweet Celestia, if ya can mend the clubhouse then... then this’ll be nothin’...”

Apple Bloom hiccupped. A fragile smile spread over her face. Forgetting about what she had just imagined wouldn’t be easy, or perhaps even impossible, but there and then she decided that the one thing she couldn’t do—wouldn’t do—was let the nightmares scare her. She had to keep moving. She had to keep her mind focused, and she had to keep doing things.

What she needed was a plan.

“Stupid Apple Bloom,” she said. “Use ya head! Wasting time in your room ain’t gonna solve a thing. Go see if Scoots and Sweetie Belle are alright, that’s what ya gotta do.”

Now that she had said it, the idea seemed so simple that it was a wonder it had taken her this long to think of it: go and find her two best friends, pray that that too hadn’t been affected by whatever darkness had fallen over Ponyville. She pictured Sweetie Belle’s worried face as she tried to wake her sister; she saw, in the eye of her mind, Scootaloo franticly dashing around her house, nerves preventing her from keeping still. But thinking about her friends, even in such dreadful states, was enough to lift Apple Bloom out of her misery. Sudden determination passed over her face. Once she had found them, the three of them would put their heads together and figure out a way to... to...

Apple Bloom stared at the door, and no wonder. A dull red glow seeped under the edges, a light which put her in mind of hot coals. The most frightful light possible.

Something in the corridor was burning...