Days turned to weeks and, despite the creepy little dragon spider thing lurking around outside somewhere, not much happened—at least, nothing ground breaking or explosive. More than anything I was getting a bit bored, and passed a lot of the time just reading.

I'd seen Spike lurking around outside a few times at night, and Twilight had even left the library once or twice, for some materials for whatever she was working on, but whatever plan she followed seemed to work, because she came back no worse for wear. She didn't even look worried or scared, just... sad and resigned. Although, I did notice there seemed to be a bit of resolve in her eyes whenever she left, so that was good.

I guess it made some sense, as she'd been dealing with this for years now. I suppose following the routine to get by safely for so long, and seeing what Spike had become so often would get old after a time. Thankfully Twilight never let her guard down, even if she was used to her routine.

She also drilled the routine into my head just in case I ever needed to go out there with her, not that I would be much help at the moment. Traveling outside involved quite a bit of teleporting around, and apparently, dragging my ass with her through the process would get tiring real quick, something neither of us were willing to risk, so I stayed in the library.

Didn't stop Twilight from lecturing me on how to avoid Spike every other day though.

With all the time I spent in the library, I did try to bone up on any kind of info regarding Discord, but, as I expected, I didn't find anything particularly useful or that I didn't already know. Giving up on that, I switched my focus to thaumatology. with mixed results.

Twilight had books on the basics, and had even taken some time to clarify a few things about how magic worked in general. Knowing what I knew about how fanfiction worked however, I couldn't help but feel this would all be pointless in the long run, as each world may have had its own rules regarding how magic worked.

Still, I made an honest effort to learn, as it might've helped me while I was still here, and again, I had nothing better to do for the moment while Twilight was still working on unlocking Discord's restriction. At the very least, I might be able to keep up with the smart purple pony whenever she got into those kinds of discussions while we were, or rather she was eating.

It was a dull and mind numbing process, and there were some things that wouldn't stick no matter how much I studied it, but eventually I began to make some headway in understanding how magic worked, at least in this Equestria. I wouldn't be holding any kind of discourse on magical theory with Twilight any time soon, but I'd learned enough to put two and two together whenever the mare would tell me about the progress she'd made.

Aside from that, there were a few oddities I'd noticed during my stay with Twilight, and in my opinion, not all of them were bad. For example, I apparently had no need to use the bathroom anymore. As far as I was concerned, that was a blessing, and I gladly welcomed the change with open arms.

Now I didn't have to worry about hitting the bathroom before bed every night. A small grievance, sure, but it's the little things that get you sometimes, and I hated having a full bladder to the point that I'd verbally complain about it every now and then.

It was an odd change, and I had no idea how it worked, but given the tiny ass bladder I seemed to have, it definitely wasn't an unwelcome change. I hadn't noticed the change until Twilight mentioned needing to go while we were talking during lunch one day, and when it was brought to my attention, I realized I hadn't once gone since I began this crazy trip.

I had mixed feelings about losing the ability to sleep. I hadn't yet, but with the way things were going, I was giving the possibility some serious thought on more than one occasion. I really had no idea how I'd feel about it if it were to happen, but in the end, I decided to just cross that bridge when or if I came to it.

Another, more worrying change was that I began to see things. It wasn't full on hallucinations or anything like that, it was more like looking at a clock whose hands were resting at one position, then seeing an image of that same clock imposed over the original with its hands in a different position.

Okay, so maybe they kind of were full on hallucinations, but they were minor and hard to notice... at first. The first few times it happened, I had just chalked it up to my imagination, then double vision. It was easier to miss because it didn't happen too often, and when it did, the images didn't last for very long and usually disappeared when I blinked.

I ruled out double vision because the images that were imposed over what was really there always had subtle changes, like a chair being a slightly darker shade, or curtains having a different design, or even my jacket being torn and tattered in different places when it really wasn't.

What made me really take notice and treat as a serious issue was when I visited Twilight in her lab one day. I'd gone down to check on how she was doing, and had tripped going down the stairs. I caught myself before I'd actually fallen down them, but when I looked back up to where Twilight was standing next to the table, it wasn't the Twilight I was expecting to see.

The white lab coat was there, but it was in tatters, and there were suspicious dark red stains, no doubt exactly what I thought they were. As for the mare herself, she looked far more emaciated. Her face was gaunt, her eyes a milky white, most of her teeth were missing, and those that remained were oddly serrated, and parts of her mane had fallen out in clumps.

Basically, for an instant, I was looking at Twilight the zombie scientist, and she was looking back at me. Up until this point, the odd visions had been fairly benign, but this was something else entirely. Yeah, I could sit here and say it was something out of one of those B-movie zombie flicks, but no, it wasn't.

It was terrifying because I wasn't expecting it, and the image had only appeared for an instant before I blinked and saw normal old Twilight looking back at me with both surprise and concern. It was terrifying because, rather than the superimposed images I'd been seeing up to that point, this nightmare was far more solid.

Needless to say, I cried out in alarm, and my heart nearly exploded out of my chest at the sight, but I managed to calm down pretty quickly once I realized it hadn't been real. Then a moment later, my mind began to follow a tangent in which the visions got more frequent and horrifying, until I was seeing nightmarish imagery all over the place all the time, and slowly going insane from it.

It wasn't a pleasant thought process, and I wasted no time in telling Twilight what I'd been seeing, praying that she could do something about the images before they got that bad. I'd already told her about my altered bodily functions, and, while I didn't mind if she didn't find a fix for that, I did ask her how things were coming along otherwise.

She'd made a bit of headway in hacking into the restrictions Discord had placed on me, and could now monitor the flow of mana without too much effort, but that was about it for the moment. That did mean I didn't have to sit around for hours while she did her magical scan, so there was that.

The way she explained it, she was able to use something called 'mage sight' to create a 'window' into the inner workings of Discord's transference spell. Now, I had a general idea of what mage sight was just based on the name and a bit of what i'd read, it being a spell that let you see how magic works in some way.

Twilight confirmed this, but evidently mage sight normally didn't work when it came to spells born of chaos magic. It was something to do with unraveling and breaking down a spell into an easily understandable form, and how chaos magic, by its very nature, tends to defy understanding.

Using the knowledge of chaos magic she'd gained from scanning my mana however, Twilight was able to create a new form of mage sight that relied on chaos magic to work, at the cost of being completely useless for any other type of magic. Using this spell, she checked me for any other magical anomalies that would caused the strange images, and lo and behold, she found something.

It wasn't good, and by that, I mean the mana inside me had suddenly become far more unstable for reasons Twilight couldn't explain. That probably explained why the weird double vision phenomena, was happening, but didn't explain what the actual visions meant.

To my dismay, Twilight didn't know enough to do anything about it at the moment. She was getting there, but for now, I'd just have to deal with it and hope she'd find a fix before it got worse. One advantage I hoped I had was that I was expecting it to get worse, and therefore could mentally prepare for it.

In reality though, there wasn't any way to prepare for the worse when it came to chaos magic. Sure, the images could become more frequent and gruesome, or they could stop altogether, and something even worse might happen. Or I could suddenly turn into a pony, or some hideous Lovecraftian monstrosity like Spike, or even another draconequus or something.

Hell, I could just straight up become a god of some kind.

Literally anything could happen if this got worse, and right now, there would be nothing Twilight or I could do about it. That, I think, was the most terrifying thing of all, for both of us. Even through all of this uncertainty, I made sure to keep an eye on Twilight herself.

After awhile I began to notice that this whole situation was having a strange, but not entirely unwelcome effect on the mare. With all these changes happening to me, and a limit to how much time she had left until some horrible thing happened, her stress levels were through the roof.

At the same time though, it was like the light had come back to her eyes, and there were even times where she was genuinely happy, usually when she was explaining some sort of breakthrough she'd made. It was like she was back in her element, and I had to admit, it was extremely refreshing to see.

Though she never said as much, I could tell that she relished the challenge the situation presented, and that alone was enough to keep me somewhat content despite my potentially imminent transformation into something horrible.

The melancholy was still there, but over the course of the few weeks I stayed in this library, Twilight had come a long way from how I'd first found her. I was pretty sure just me being there as someone else to talk to helped immensely, and the more we communicated, the stronger my desire to save Spike and get her the hell out of this place became.

And then she brought up that goddamned crystal.

I hadn't mentioned it at all since I first explained it to her, and even though I knew she knew more about it because of my memories, she hadn't said anything about it, but for some reason she decided it was finally time to talk about it.

I'd been finishing up the last book in another series that was oddly reminiscent of the Pendragon series, when Twilight popped into the library looking extremely uncomfortable. She looked almost apologetic, and I was wondering why, when she finally told me.

From what she told me, she'd been thinking about the crystal and how she could utilize its energy to help with her research. She theorized that, with my help, she could use it to power some sort of spell to cancel out the barrier and escape.

When I told her I had a similar idea, she told me, she already knew, and that was when I remembered she had looked into my head and probably already learned it that way.

She'd based her idea on the one I'd had, except hers would use more science and less sacrifice. I canned the idea because it was horribly stupid and even with her proposed precautions, I still thought it was a stupid idea. I asked her how she'd even use it when it was completely intangible to her, and her answer was, of course, her altered mage sight spell.

She claimed that it should let her see it, and the magic that it was made up of, and as long as I was the one that was handling it, we could find a viable way of controlling it. In this vast, infinite multiverse, there were not enough words to express how bad this idea was, and I told her as much.

She wanted me to find it, and I flat out refused. We argued back and forth for awhile, but I wasn't budging on my stance, and, realizing she was going to get nowhere, she ended up dropping the matter altogether. I still wasn't satisfied, because if she could really use her spell to see the crystal, she could just look for it herself.

It wasn't until after our argument that I realized I was stuck.

With the way she was acting, she most likely would try to find it herself, and knowing her, she'd find it sooner or later. I could try and find it myself and hide it, but assuming she could see it, it would only be a matter of time before she found it.

Sure, even if she could see it, she still couldn't interact with it, but if she was desperate enough, there was probably a spell she could use to force me to cooperate. I didn't want to believe she'd do that after we'd become as close as we had, but I wasn't willing to rule out the possibility.

The biggest question now was what I was going to do about it, or rather, what I could do about it.

Since I was doing a timeskip, I decided to forgo the dialogue this time around in favor of a more journalistic approach to what happened. Dialogue will be back in the next chapter.