Renewal

Disclaimer: I do not own My Little Pony, nor am I profiting off this literary venture.

----

"So what's your story? You a runaway like Earnest Hooves?" Spike had been introduced to the other children and their caretaker.

"Nah man, he ain't got the feel of no runaway. Definitely an orphan." The woman who was in charge here, Marley? Sharp eyes, hooked nose and perpetual scowl underneath her brown hair. Spike would bet the rest of his hoard that she had a gryphon counterpart.

"An orphan, yeah? Pretty well fed for an orphan." Then there were four girls and two other boys. Earnest Hooves, while certainly not sounding feminine, was one such mare.

"Ain't got the scars for it neither. Wonder what's under that eyepatch?" Augate was another, she superficially resembled Marley though with different hair and eyes. There wasn't any sort of underlying sense of caring or niceness in her attitude.

"Probably a hole. I bet we could see his brain!" Plumb Drop was huge for a girl. A... Senior? In her last year of basic education. She was the female division local heavyweight in wrestling over at Crystal Prep academy.

"If he even has one!" Lemon Zest was the final girl in the house. She hadn't looked up when he'd been introduced, said hello or anything. She was just absorbed in writing on some paper while music was blasting from her headphones.

"I bet there's just a little lump of brain! Barely enough to even keep him alive!" The two boys on the other hand? Absolute nuisances, the both of them.

"I bet he doesn't even have that!" Lumpy Sweets and Sweety Lumps were their names, a rambunctious pair of twins. He was supposed to be sharing a room with them until the rest of the girls rooming assignments were reorganized.

"So let's find out!" Two voices shouted in unison as a pair of colts leaped from beds aside the cot Spike had been given.

He dropped, the twins heads colliding with each other as their intended target disappeared. They each ricocheted off the others hard head and landed on the ground beside the camp bed.

"Soo... I think I've got a little more brain than that." He could feel both of the boys glaring at him and grinned. "But only just a little."

"We'll get you next time."

"So you better be ready!"

"Hmm..." Spike grabbed their arms from where he was sitting and pulled them both up, onto their feet. "Why don't you try playing this game on someone more your level? I bet there are some foa-kids, kids you could play with? Maybe you could practice on a toddler."

He got a pair of confused looks, his insult washing right off of them.

"Dude, what were you trying to say?"

"Was it fu-?"

"No! No, I was not going to say that... My uh... My tongue slipped is all." He thought he had that under control. He couldn't afford too many more mistakes.

These two were suspicious enough already.

"Oh, uh, alright." Sweety Lumps pulled a cell phone out from underneath his pillow.

"Weirdo." While Lumpy Sweets got a book.

Spike fell back into the itchy cot, his mind awhirl. Tomorrow Marley was supposed to take him shopping for things like clothes and blankets. It played into his thoughts for a few brief moments before he let out a wistful sigh and dreamed about the closest thing he had to a family.

His friends.

----

Twilight looked over what information, however little of it there was, that she had on the incident with the mirror and Spike.

Her own reports, the reports she recorded of her friends take on what had happened and a hoofload of journals once belonging to Starswirl the Bearded.

There was too much she didn't know, and she was certain most of the answers were written in old equuish. Her magic gripped the first book and flipped it open to a page she'd bookmarked in the past.

Three vyle fiends were they the siren trio. Neither matching in cleverness nor sorcery did they succumb to myne will and were so forth banished to the blighted lands. T'were a world without magic nay source for their feed. May they rot in a land barren of what wert they call food.

Right. Lovely. Like she hadn't read that before a dozen times already. It was exactly that passage that told her what the monsters plagueing the other side of the mirror were.

She dropped the book gently onto the pile of others.

That was the most legible passage in Starswirl's journals. It wasn't even the terrible spelling or forgotten words that were the problem.

He just had very, very bad lettering.

She stood up, shaking off the fatigue. She knew, as her hooves carried her through the stacks of books in her library, that she would need to struggle through what he'd written.

She knew as she sat before a shattered mirror. The secret likely lay in one overly looped cursive scratch detailing some sleeping part of the mirrors enchantments. Maybe some defense mechanism or trap, something that would explain how it acted where Spike had been involved.

Something that would explain why she had an entirely new set of memories about someone who hadn't existed before.

She laid down, her eyes tracing the puckered lines around the edge of the mirror.

It didn't make any sense, she knew that. She'd tried altering the timeline before to no avail, failing miserably when she'd tried to warn her past... Self.

She sat up in a flash, her eyes looking at the hair-thick lines around the mirror.

She had a theory! It was important, it was simple! She traced the faded line with her hoof as it lead up, to the left, down and back where it started.

What if changing the past was possible?

"What if it's a lot easier than I thought it was? If I intervened in my own timeline and made a significant change to a specific event...?" Her memory fixated upon her showdown with Starlight Glimmer, where such an event had readily been common.

"Then would I even remember making a change because such a change would no longer be needed further down the timeline? I know that "I" don't just stop existing then, but what if I had during a time where my would be future self were both less resistant to reality altering magic on a grand scale as well as having been inoculated against a specific branch of magic through exposure? Spike! Take a let... ter." She dropped back down, depression warring against inspiration.

Her eyes traced a fading crack. She'd need... She needed to think about this.