Twilight wasn’t paralyzed. She could move her legs and tail just fine. But her horn seemed to be stuck to something, and she couldn’t lift her head.

Her rump ached where she had landed. She couldn’t see anything because the room was totally dark. She felt the others thrashing about next to her, and heard their shouts and whimpers.

Panic and shame took hold of her. This was all her fault. Everypony knew better than to poke about inside the Bank. She had wanted Princess Celestia’s praise so badly that she had behaved very stupidly. And worse, she had dragged five others into her mistake.

“I’m sorry,” Trixie said. “I had the idea for how to get into the Night side of the Bank. It’s my fault we’re stuck here.”

“What? No, I wanted to get the key, I hallucinated a quest for us to complete,” Twilight said.

“Girls, I’m sorry,” Twinkleshine said. “I shouldn’t have said anything at the beginning, but I was so excited to see the Gold Room.”

There was a pause, then Minuette started to laugh. “Does everypony blame themselves?”

“I’m not used to having others to blame,” Twilight admitted wryly. “Most ponies are for dealing with, not for having expectations of.”

“Girls, we’re Gifted Unicorns,” Trixie said. “Have some faith in the rest of us.”

“You blamed yourself first!”

There was more laughter, which gradually died down, leaving them in the darkness. The air was creepily still. Twilight blew out with her lips a few times just to have visceral confirmation that there was air in the room.

“We made it to the Earth Room, anyway,” Twinkleshine said. This brought out a few giggles. But not many.

Twilight was nervous using her magic when her horn was stuck to something. She had a good idea what it was anyway. But she didn’t want to lay helplessly in the dark any longer.

The lavender glow from her horn lit up a small, round chamber. It was bare but for the circular table they were stuck on and a couple of chairs that were wooden and plain and looked very, very old.

“This is really uncomfortable,” said Minuette.

Twilight agreed. They all seemed to be lying in a circle on the table, their horns stuck to something at the very center that she couldn’t quite angle her neck to see. But she knew what it was, and knew escape was impossible.

She looked elsewhere. There were words in gold wrapped around the ceiling.

“Make new friends, but keep the old,” Twilight read out loud. “One is silver, the other is gold.”

“There are words over here too,” Moondancer said. Twilight could see soft pink light in her peripheral vision. “A circle is round, it has no end. That’s how long I will be your friend.”

“What color are the words?”

“Color? Um, silver?”

“The ones I read are gold.”

Trixie snorted. “They have a theme, don’t they?”

“There’s a tunnel leading up,” Twinkleshine said. Her light was intensely white, like a flashlight. “I think it goes to the door we fell from.”

“Do you think we can get up there?” Lemon Hearts asked.

“...It’s really high up,” said Twinkleshine. “It looks like it goes a really long way.”

“We should stay where we are,” Twilight said. “Princess Celestia will come rescue us soon.”

“I can’t move anyway,” Twinkleshine said. “Just saying I can see a tunnel.”

“Will Princess Celestia come rescue us?” Trixie said. “She needed our help to get in here in the first place.”

“Heeeeelp!” Lemon Hearts shouted at the tunnel they had fallen out of.

“They’d be shouting things at us already if sound got through the door,” Twilight said. “You know what we’re all stuck to, right? It’s the Numeraire.”

“But Princess Celestia has the key and is going to open the door and rescue us,” said Minuette in a rush. “Right?”

“I have the key,” admitted Twilight. “I don’t think she can get in here.”

“We’re going to die?” Lemon Hearts asked.

No pony answered. “Moondancer, did you read anything in your book about the Earth Room?” Trixie asked.

“No,” said Moondancer. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“Sorry.”

“I said it’s okay.”

We really are going to die, Twilight thought. Starving to death while stuck to a table. Not how I was planning to go. I wonder if Mom and Dad can get back the money they spent on clothes and books for next year.

Twilight turned her magical light off to preserve energy. After a minute, so did Moondancer and Twinkleshine. In the darkness, Lemon Hearts began to cry.

---

Twilight lost track of time in the absolute darkness. There were a few half-hearted attempts to make conversation, but they didn’t last long. Twilight’s back was starting to hurt, but there wasn’t a way to get comfortable. In the end, she slept.

She dreamed. She was standing on a beach, and the ocean was bobbing and flowing in a strange way. It took her a minute to realize that she was looking at waves. That was when she knew she was dreaming. The ocean didn’t move like this anymore. The ocean didn’t do anything anymore.

The other sign that she was dreaming was the color of the water. It wasn’t blue or clear like it was in old picture-books, and it wasn’t black and disgusting like the real dead ocean was. This water was silvery and sparkling under a cold blue sun that was much too big in the dark and starless sky. Despite the proximity of the sun, the sand on the beach was freezing her hoofs. She hopped in place to keep warm.

Waves crashed against the shore. Some were forty or fifty feet high, but even when they slammed onto the beach like a giant’s palm, Twilight wasn’t afraid. Nothing bad could happen to you while you were dreaming.

She walked along the beach for a while, shivering and looking for some driftwood to make a fire with, but the beach was bare. There was a hill sparse with vegetation on the other side of the beach. It looked like she could climb it, but when she tried, the sand crumbled under her hoofs. She gave up and returned to the beach.

Twilight kept walking, but there was nothing to find. Her legs hurt from walking so much. She did her best to curl up into a tight ball for warmth, settled down on the sand, and closed her eyes to sleep.

She dreamed.

---

“...I fell asleep,” said Twilight. In the total darkness, she wasn’t sure how much time had passed. “Is anypony awake?”

“I was asleep,” said Moondancer. “I woke up just a minute ago.”

“Hi,” said Twilight. “Anypony else?”

There were no answers but the sound of soft, rhythmic breathing.

“They’ll write about us, you know,” said Moondancer.

“Huh?” said Twilight. “What do you mean?”

“When they write about the history of the Bank,” Moondancer said. “We’ll be in it.”

“Oh.” That was morbid.

“We’ll be in a book,” said Moondancer. She sounded pleased. “I’ve always imagined myself in the books that I read. Now somepony else will imagine me in the books that they read.”

“I guess you found the silver lining in our Gold Room adventure,” Twilight said, cracking a smile.

“I would always watch you in class,” Moondancer said. “When I wasn’t reading, I mean. All of us struggled when we came to this school. But not you. You’re, like, perfect. You just know everything and figure things out so fast. I saw Candy Coating try to bully you. I saw that it didn’t work.”

“Oh,” said Twilight awkwardly. “Um….”

“The reason Twinkleshine spoke up, the reason Minuette and Lemon Hearts stepped forward, it was all because of you,” Moondancer went on. “They believed in you. They believed that if Twilight Sparkle is thinking about something, then that something is worth thinking about. They believed that if they followed your mind, then they’d be led to somewhere amazing.”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

“You didn’t,” said Moondancer happily. “I only regret…that there were a lot more books to read.”

To her right, Twinkleshine made a few smacking noises with her mouth.

“Good maybe-morning-maybe-evening,” said Twilight.

“Hi,” said Twinkleshine sleepily. She sat up. “So we really are down here, huh? Normally the bad stuff ends when you wake up.”

“Twinkleshine, how did you—” Twilight sat up as well. There was no resistance. She lit up a bright lavender light from her horn, twisting around to see that the plain wooden table they were on had nothing at its center but a small photo in a picture frame.

“Girls, wake up!” she shouted. Trixie, Minuette, and Lemon Hearts all blinked and sat up as well.

“We’re free?” said Trixie muzzily. “How come?”

Minuette hopped off of the table and stretched her legs. “What a relief!” Lemon Hearts jumped off too, stumbled on unsteady legs, and lit a dim yellow light from her own horn to explore the Earth Room.

Twilight looked at the photo on the center of the table. She saw two young fillies, one with a white coat and a pink mane, the other purple like herself with blue hair. Curious, she reached out to angle the frame toward her, but when she reached for it, it disappeared, and it didn’t return when she retreated her leg.

“There’s a door here,” Twinkleshine said.

“To the Gold Room?” Twilight slid off the table and tried to hurry over, but she ended up doing an awkward dance as blood began to flow into them and feeling returned

“I don’t think so.” Twinkleshine was standing in front of a tall but otherwise ordinary-looking door. “We fell down from that long tunnel above us. This is a door to somewhere else.”

“It’s to the Silver Room,” said Moondancer, adjusting her glasses as she joined them. “There’s no other possibility.”

“It wasn’t here earlier,” said Twinkleshine.

“Well, we went to sleep, and….” Twilight shrugged. “It is Nightmare Moon, right?”

“So this door leads to Nightmares.”

“Um….”

Trixie, Minuette, and Lemon Hearts noticed them congregated by the door and trotted over. “Are we getting out of here?” Lemon Hearts asked.

“It’s the door to the Silver Room,” said Twilight. “Probably. So…no?”

“We can’t just stay here and starve,” Minuette said.

“We can’t brave the Night side of the Bank and live.”

“Look, all we have to do is find the exit, and we already know where it is,” Trixie pointed out. “We just retrace our steps to the entrance. Sure, we might be killed horribly by a creature of pure nightmare, but that’s better than dying mundanely of starvation. What we do, we should do amazingly, and that extends to death.”

“That’s quite a philosophy,” Twilight grinned.

“I’m quite a pony,” Trixie said. “Twinkleshine, would you do the honors?”

Twinkleshine pulled the handle down and opened the door. A frosty chill swept into the Earth Room and left them all blinking against it.

“Go!” said Twinkleshine hurriedly. One by one they rushed into the Silver Room, shivering together and looking around.

After a while, they forgot about the cold. There was so much to see.

Dark purple light ebbed and pulsed in walls of pure silver. It was an otherworldly experience, shadowy and unreal.

The walls weren’t covered in tiny detailed etchings like the Gold Room. Instead, the purple light took on dimensions that seemed to respond to proximity or body heat, shifting in ways that were as patterned as they were formless. It was like trying to make sense of a dream.

“We can’t get distracted,” said Trixie like she was coming out of a dream herself. “If we really were asleep for a while in the Earth Room, then everypony is totally panicking about us on the Day side of the Bank.”

Twilight tore her eyes away from the flowing shadows in the walls. “Yeah,” she said in a quiet voice. “Come on.”

There was another door opposite the one leading to the Earth Room. Twilight opened in, and the others followed her out.

The corridor was cold and still and silent. Twilight found herself huddling together with the others for warmth without anypony having said a word.

There was hardly even any dust. That was how empty this place was.

“Is this what space feels like?” Twinkleshine said. They were all whispering for some reason.

“You can breathe, so no,” whispered back Trixie, to muffled giggles.

Suddenly Lemon Hearts started choking.

“What’s wrong!” Twilight shouted in alarm.

“Choking—no air—on the Moon!” wheezed Lemon Hearts, before breaking into a grin at Twilight’s face.

“You scared me,” Twilight said accusingly while the others laughed.

“It’s better that we should be scaring each other,” Lemon Hearts said shyly. “Otherwise we might get scared by stuff that isn’t us.”

Twilight thought about that, then nudged her, smiling. “Hopefully we won’t be here for long. I remember what the map looked like, so…this way.”

In the middle of the hallway was a wavy, blurry patch of air, like looking through a piece of distorted glass. Twilight couldn’t see a way around it.

“Does anypony know what this is?” There were murmurs and head-shakes. Twilight cautiously reached her hoof out to touch the shimmering air. Nothing happened.

“Well,” she said, “it seems like—”

The air rushed over them. Twilight was in school, and she’d forgotten to wear her homework. Everypony was pointing and laughing, but that mattered less than the itch in Twilight’s upper tooth, which she had to scratch. She wasn’t sure what her upper tooth was, but it was very itchy.

Anyway, she was flying, which was good, because she’d lost an important book, and she could see a lot flying overhead like this. Only…now she was starting to fall….

“AAAAAH!”

Twilight stumbled backwards out of her vertigo, landing on the floor. The other five had fallen around her with similar expressions of shock. They were several feet away from the distorted patch of air, which was hovering in place.

“I was falling,” said Minuette guiltily. “I was flying and then it went bad—”

“I was dreaming in there,” said Trixie. “When the air touched me, I started dreaming.”

“I had a nightmare,” said Lemon Hearts.

“What happened?” Twilight asked, fascinated.

“Nothing really. Just this feeling of dread. But it was really bad. I felt like I was going to wet myself.”

“How do we get past it?” Twinkleshine said. “If it puts us to sleep when we touch it, then we’re stuck.”

“We could try to blast it apart,” Twilight suggested.

“Do you know what happens when you fire a magical laser at a patch of dream air?”

Twilight chewed her lip. There had to be something she could do. Teleporting past it might work…unless the magic went through the dream patch, with whatever resulting effects. This was no time to be experimenting, yet she couldn’t think of any sure answers.

“Princess Celestia probably made it easy to walk around her side of the Bank for the visitors,” said Moondancer morosely. “But Nightmare Moon didn’t have any reason to do that. This isn’t a game like we were playing with the princess. These are real barriers, and we might not be a match for them.”

Twilight bodily refused that possibility. “I’ll try teleporting through it. If that doesn’t work….”

“Wait, hold on,” Trixie said. “There’s no need to do anything drastic. We know exactly what this is. It’s dreaming. We do that every night, haven’t you girls gotten good at it yet?”

Before anypony could answer, Trixie marched into the patch of distorted air. A trance came over her. Twilight watched as an odd relaxation moved through her, a visible sort of anti-shudder traveling down her body like a wave. Her forward motion stopped, and she began to drift very lightly through the air, as though gravity no longer took notice of her.

“Grab her!” said Twilight, and didn’t wait, sending out her magic to rescue Trixie. But first, she had to explain to the teacher why she hadn’t remembered to eat her homework.

“Hey, Twilight,” said Trixie. “You’re dreaming about homework? I didn’t know ponies actually did that.”

Twilight peered through the splotchy colors at Trixie’s face. “I need to my leg.”

“Think you missed a verb there. Guess you’re all in here with me, huh? Oh, and there’s Minuette, looks like she’s falling again. Hold on….”

Everything was dark for a long instant. Trixie’s face suddenly appeared again, cartoonishly large and blurry, squinting at Twilight with one enormous eye. “Try to pay attention, huh? I’m saying logical words. You can understand me somewhere.”

Twilight struggled to focus on the words. Trixie was making sense. Just a sort of splotchy sense that so easily faded into needing to her leg.

“Hey. Twilight. Stay with me.”

Trixie’s giant face loomed, and suddenly came into sharp relief.

“How are you doing this?” Twilight asked. The words came out painfully slowly, like she was trying to move her mouth but couldn’t. She didn’t think she would be comprehensible, but Trixie responded easily.

“I’m a lucid dreamer. Pretty great, huh? I always thought to myself, ‘Trixie, you never know when you’re going to need to take control of your dreams.’ And here I am.”

Twilight started to close her eyes.

“Pay attention to me!” said Trixie. Light exploded, reds and blues and greens and purples exploding in particle showers against a dark velvet background. Twilight squinted in anticipation of the next round as the pop-pop-pop of fireworks went off.

“Welcome to my show,” Trixie said. They were standing on a hill together. Trixie was wearing a purple hat-and-cape combo with colorful star patterns all over. She carried a wand as well, and she carried herself majestically. “Just a second, Twilight, I need to get you all together.” Her wand flashed four times. “There! There! There! And there!” Twinkleshine, Minuette, Lemon Hearts, and Moondancer all appeared on the hill by Twilight, blinking and looking around in astonishment.

“Now,” said Trixie. The sky was a red curtain, and Trixie stood before it on a sparkling platform. “Welcome, one and all. I, Trixie Lulamoon, wizard extraordinaire, Great and Powerful, do proudly present to you the show of yourselves!” Fireworks exploded together in the shape of Trixie’s head.

“Well?” said Trixie’s head, not falling to the ground like fireworks should’ve. “You can do whatever you want in here?”

“How?” Twilight shouted up at her. “How are you doing that?”

“Don’t shout, Twilight, I’m right next to you. As for how I’m doing it, it’s the same trick you’re using to stand on that hill there. See, it’s all in your head, so you’ve just got to look around in there and see what you find….”

Words flew over a sky that was suddenly the color of paper.

“Amazing!” said Trixie as the plane they were standing on was domed by the text of a book. “Great job, Moondancer!”

“How’d you know it was me?”

“I just had a feeling.”

Lemon Hearts suddenly lifted in the air. Laughing, she wobbled one way, then began to float in another direction, giggling as she revolved like she was turning in space.

“No fair,” complained Minuette. And she rose as well, at an awkward angle, and collided with Lemon Hearts. Laughing, they began to tumble, and the sky of words opened up for them, making space as if it was actually quite close. And yet when Twilight tried to touch it with her hoof, it seemed as distant as the real sky.

“Aren’t you going to try, Twilight?” said the giant floating Trixie head as it passed by.

There was an explosion of light. When the pale glow faded, Twinkleshine was reclining on a couch, dressed in torn jeans and a black tank top, her hair done up in a way that Twilight was pretty sure would get her kicked out of Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns immediately. But she seemed perfectly at ease with herself in a way she hadn’t since she’d first joined their class. “Hey, Trixie, how do I get a drink?”

“The taste is all in your head,” warned Trixie. “It doesn’t fill you up.”

“I don’t know, I kind of like it anyway,” Lemon Hearts said. She and Minuette were sharing a lemonade in the sky, drinking from a glass with two straws. Or, Minuette was drinking, and Lemon Hearts was struggling to close her giddy smile around the straw.

“Come on, Twilight?” boomed Trixie’s giant head. “What about you?”

Twilight watched them start to dance, with Minuette leading and somehow managing to make Lemon Hearts look like she didn’t have four left legs.

“You have to pay attention to yourself, Twilight,” Trixie tutted.

Twilight had, and she didn’t like it. “This is great and all,” she said, “but don’t you think we should be figuring out how to escape?”

“But it’s easy,” Trixie frowned. “You can do anything when you’re dreaming. You can even wake up….”

It was as instant as opening your eyes. Twilight blinked, and she was standing in the silver corridor along with the others, looking normal again and feeling, perhaps, quite a bit different. The distorted patch of air was gone.

“You did it!” Twilight said. “I’ve had enough of dreaming.”

“I think you’ll have more of it yet,” Trixie said. “I think we’re still asleep.”

Lemon Hearts pinched herself. “I think I’m awake.”

“I disagree,” said Trixie. “I’ve been thinking about it. At first we went from day to night, but we remained awake that whole time. But to Nightmare Moon, that’s not how it would be. She’d awaken to the Bank and a land full of sleeping ponies.

“It’s not the Night side that we’re on. It’s the Sleeping side.”

They were all quiet for a moment. Then Minuette said, “Does that mean the Bank has been awake for almost a thousand years?”

“Wouldn’t you go crazy?” Twinkleshine said.

“I don’t know,” said Twilight gravely. “But I think we really need to escape from here. We’ll bring Princess Celestia the key to the Gold Room. The Bank needs to be taken care of.”

Do not mess with the Bank, children….

“Come on,” Twilight muttered. They started walking again. While Lemon Hearts took the lead, skipping ahead, Trixie grabbed Twilight and pulled her back.

“Don’t worry,” she said quietly. “About what happened back there in the dream patch. I don’t let anypony find out what I’m really about either. That’s why I took control of my dreams. It’s something you can do too, if you want.”

---

“I found something!” Lemon Hearts shouted, her voice echoing from a distance. Twilight and Trixie hurried to catch up.

Lemon Hearts had found a dining room. It was filled with round tables covered with white tablecloths, like the tables were set out for guests. Each table was surrounded by six chairs, and there were nine tables in all.

The tables each had a silver candlestick for a centerpiece, each holding a long white candle. Each candle had dried wax-drip down their sides; none of them were pristine. All of the tables had six white plates with floral patterns except for one, which had only the centerpiece.

The tables were arranged in front of a stage as if there would be a speech or musical performance during dinner. The stage, though, was bare.

“Where are we?” Twilight asked in a whisper. “Trixie, do you know….”

But Trixie’s eyes were wide with terror. Twilight followed her gaze and saw a giant, sand-colored bug leaning against the wall, tall enough for its head to curve against the white ceiling. It was shaped somewhat like a beetle, but with the uniform body of a worm. All together it had ten long, thin legs.

They were all frozen for a moment, like frightened deer.

“I think it’s asleep,” said Twinkleshine after what felt like an eternity. Her voice was barely audible, just a faint breath.

“What does that even mean here?” Twilight mouthed back. Twinkleshine looked uncertain.

Then Lemon Hearts sat down at one of the tables. Twilight’s shout of terror died in her throat as the sand-colored bug stirred and lowered itself down from its reclining position, landing on all ten of its legs. The floor rumbled as it swiftly made its way across to Lemon Hearts.

Twilight was so utterly convinced that Lemon Hearts was going to die that she didn’t even comprehend at first what was happening when the bug took out a sheet of paper from nowhere and put it in front of Lemon Hearts.

It set out a thin crystal glass in front of her too and skittered away to the wall.

“It’s a menu,” said Lemon Hearts, smiling at them.

“Lemon Hearts, what are you thinking?” whispered Minuette. “Get back here!”

“Um, but, let’s see...they’ve got Château Rêver by the glass. Oh, I don’t think it knows I’m underage.”

She glanced up and giggled at their pale expressions. “What? What are you all scared of?”

“The giant bug!” said Minuette, tears in her eyes.

Lemon Hearts blinked at them. “Oh. That’s just my imaginary friend.”

“Your friend?” exclaimed Twinkleshine. “Have you lost your mind?”

“I know it’s silly.” Lemon Hearts looked a bit embarrassed. “But I used to have imaginary friends, and this bug is the only one left.”

“You dreamed this bug?” said Trixie.

“Not exactly.” Even Lemon Hearts looked unsure. “I just know it, that’s all. Maybe Nightmare Moon knows it too.”

“But she couldn’t have done anything to the Bank since you were born,” pointed out Moondancer. “She was banished almost a thousand years ago.”

Lemon Hearts turned the menu over and looked it over. “Um, that might be true, but…there’s oat fries with star salt.”

There was a moment while they mulled it over. Finally, Minuette said what they all were thinking: “I would quite like to know what star salt tastes like.”

“It wouldn’t be real, just whatever Nightmare Moon could make up,” said Trixie, but she didn’t sound very full of conviction.

They all sat down at the table. Lemon Hearts waved the bug over. “Six orders of oat fries with star salt, please. And do you have anything non-alcoholic to drink?”

“It’d be a Surely-From-The-Temple,” Twinkleshine said sarcastically, but to her surprise, the bug bowed and slithered away, returning a minute later with five more glasses and a bottle of something pink, which it poured for each of them.

“We can’t stay long here,” Twilight said after the bug had slithered away to…wherever.

“Why not?” Lemon Hearts inspected the drink, then lifted it to her lips and sipped. “I like it better than the real world.”

“I’m about 100% sure that you just drank liquified brains,” Twinkleshine said.

“It’s fizzy.”

“Are liquified brains fizzy?” Twinkleshine whispered to Twilight, who shrugged.

The bug waiter brought out the basket of oat fries, which were golden and steaming. It placed them on the center of the table along with a shaker of salt, clasped its forelimbs together in a sort of “Please enjoy” gesture, and ducked away to somewhere.

Twilight tried a fry on its own first. They were good, if unremarkable. The star salt elevated them. It tasted like regular salt, but there was a warmth to it that stayed in her stomach long after the fries had cooled down. Good for eating, if you were floating out in space….

“So is a show going to start?” Trixie nodded at the stage.

“It might have ended.” Twilight pointed at the built-up candle wax near the base of the candlestick. “We weren’t the first ones here.”

Twilight knew they should have been moving on. But now that they were seated, eating and drinking, she found that she didn’t have the willpower to urge them to get up. Ever since they’d first arrived at the lobby on the Day side of the Bank they’d all been in a state of elevated excitement. It was nice to finally relax.

They were also hungry. It had been a long time since breakfast. The basket of fries was generous even for six ponies, but they went through it in no time at all.

“...I ate too much,” Minuette complained, settling back in her chair.

“Dunno, I kind of want a hayburger now,” said Twinkleshine.

“It was fun when we ordered hayburgers while we were working on the class project over the weekend,” Lemon Hearts. “It felt like having a vacation at school.”

“School is a vacation,” sighed Trixie.

“Wait, I don’t remember this,” said Twilight. “What weekend?”

“You weren’t there,” said Moondancer.

“I worked on the class project.”

“For a day,” Twinkleshine said. “The rest of us barely finished in a month.”

“I would have come by for hayburgers.” Twilight tried to smile.

“Really?” Lemon Hearts looked surprised. “I wish we would’ve invited you. I don’t think anypony could imagine eating hayburgers with Twilight Sparkle. ”

Twilight frowned. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Just that you never eat lunch with anypony,” Minuette said quickly.

“Neither does Twinkleshine!”

“That’s because I don’t want to,” said Twinkleshine.

“Yeah, no pony is scared of Twinkleshine,” Lemon Hearts laughed.

Twilight felt hot around the ears. “I’ve never done anything to anypony! Has Candy Coating been saying…oh, that filly, I’m going to—”

“No, no,” said Moondancer quickly. “It’s not like that. It’s like…with the class project, I almost went crazy figuring out a spell to get the stars to animate right, and Trixie had to ask some older girls for help with the physics of the nine orbits. But you just came in and were like, boom, here’s what the solar system used to look like, boom, here’s how living oceans move, and then you were gone.”

“I hated that project,” Twinkleshine said. “Remembering when you stuck Neptune in and everything went haywire?”

“Yes,” said Trixie sourly, “and I figured out what was going wrong. Only took me an entire weekend.”

“No, the funniest thing was when Gamma went and found out what previous classes had done,” Minuette cut in, “and she thought she was being so clever, and then it turns out our project was way harder than anything girls in our year have done before. Gamma fully freaked out in the middle of the classroom. She had a literal meltdown.”

“That’s because she’s never done anything without cheating before,” Trixie said. They all laughed, except for Twilight.

She hadn’t been there for Gamma’s meltdown, or whatever Moondancer or Trixie had to do with the stars and planets. The class had voted for her to do the hardest job, which was perfectly reasonable, she had done it, and that was that.

The class project had been the focus of the last month of the semester, and she had barely been there for any of it.

“So I’m a jerk, is that it?” Twilight said. “You could have asked me for help.”

They looked at each other.

“What?” demanded Twilight. “Didn’t think of that?”

“I didn’t think of asking the teacher either,” Moondancer said.

“I am not the teacher!”

“No,” said Moondancer, “you’re smarter than she is.”

“We all are, that’s the whole point of the school!”

“Maybe. Maybe I'm more intelligent than she is. But I’m not better than the teacher, not yet. That’s why she’s the teacher and I’m the student. You shouldn’t even be in our class. You could be a Sister already, it seems like.”

“So—so why is that bad?”

“It isn’t bad,” Moondancer said. “But you only focus on Princess Celestia like she’s your goal and none of us even matter.”

Twilight stared at her. Twinkleshine spoke up. “Lay off Twilight, you all. No pony here is normal.”

“Easy for you to say,” Minuette said. “You weren’t here for the first three weeks.”

“Why, what happened?”

Twilight said it before any of them could. “The teacher would start lecturing normally. I’d raise my hoof to answer a question. Then I’d keep talking. I’d go to the board and start scribbling with the chalk. My lectures would go on for a while.”

“The teacher stopped calling on Twilight a few days before you showed up,” Minuette said to Twinkleshine.

“I guess I can’t say I wasn’t like a teacher,” Twilight said. The star salt was still warm in her stomach. She thought she wanted to cry, but she felt like she wanted to laugh.

“You were a better lecturer anyway,” Trixie said. “Frankly, I think the teacher stopped calling on you because she was worried about her job.”

Twilight laughed. It wasn’t a handsome sound. And there was a hiccup in there from the fizzy drink.

“I’m glad you’re all here with me,” Twilight said. “Sorry for not being around more.”

“I thought you’d be scary,” Lemon Hearts said shyly. “When you and Twinkleshine were figuring out the door, Minuette made me share my idea, I didn’t want to. But you’re actually really nice.”

“...I think I’m scary too,” Twilight said. “I look at myself the same way I look at other ponies.”

“I think we’re hearing somepony pretty great,” said Trixie. “So try listening to yourself the way other ponies do.”

Twilight breathed in and out, feeling the strain of her full stomach. They all looked at the empty basket of fries. Even the loose pieces of star salt had been eaten.

“...So,” said Twinkleshine. “Who’s paying for this meal?”

Who?

“Um,” said Twilight. She was trying to remember something Simple Pleasure had said, something on the Day side of the Bank, which seemed like much more than a day ago.

“Dine and dash?’ shrugged Minuette.

“I’d feel better if we left a note,” said Moondancer.

Do not mess with the Bank

“I think Princess Celestia was supposed to pay for lunch at the Bank anyway,” said Trixie. “She can handle the tab. Let’s get moving. Twilight? …Twilight!”

The Bank is dangerous

Do not mess with the Bank, children

Princess Celestia would never put us in danger

but Princess Celestia didn’t put us here

DO NOT MESS WITH THE BANK, CHILDREN!

The bug was leaning over Lemon Hearts. There was a straw being held between its legs, and it was nearly about to touch the end of the straw to the head of Lemon Hearts.

“NO!” screamed Twilight. She leaped over the table, knocking over the basket of fries and the candlestick, sending Lemon Hearts crashing to the floor. Twilight landed on top of her.

The bug swiveled around, its horrible long straw held to its mouth, pushing it down past Twilight to get to Lemon Hearts. Twilight held onto Lemon Hearts and did a spell she’d never done before, which was to teleport with another pony attached to her. They disappeared in a lavender flash, and to Twilight’s relief, neither one of them had lost any body parts.

But she hadn’t gotten the direction right. They’d gone further into the restaurant, the bug between them and the door.

Minuette was screaming. Twinkleshine threw the empty basket at the bug, which bounced off and clattered away.

“Can you teleport on your own?” Twilight said to Lemon Hearts.

“No, but—”

“Hang on.” She grabbed Lemon Hearts and teleported again just before the bug slammed the end of the straw onto the floor where Lemon Hearts had been standing.

They reappeared on the stage. “Twilight, stop, that’s so disorienting,” Lemon Hearts gasped.

Twilight wasn’t paying her any attention. The bug was coming for them—no, for Lemon Hearts—again. She stepped in front of her. “I don’t know what your problem is,” she snarled at the creature. “But if you were listening, then you just listened to them talk about how scary I am. You can walk away, or—”

The bug moaned in a distorted female voice that hurt to listen to. “She-e-e’s mmmmmine! Nnnnot yours!”

Twilight stared. “Wait, you can talk?”

It grabbed her. Such was the horror of the clicking mandibles and waving antennae as she was lifted to the bug’s mouth that she completely forgot how to teleport.

“DO SOMETHING!” screamed Minuette.

“STOP IT!” yelled Lemon Hearts. “THIS IS MY FRIEND!”

To Twilight’s astonishment, the bug stopped.

“You too!” said Lemon Hearts. She was glaring at Trixie, who’s horn was glowing dangerously. “This is my friend!”

“...What?” said Trixie, mouth agape.

“Put her down,” Lemon Hearts scolded the bug. It set Twilight down, who stumbled away feeling like she very much wanted to puke up the oat fries sitting in her stomach.

“I told you!” Lemon Hearts said. “This is my imaginary friend.”

“It’s a horrible monster, and there’s something wrong with your imagination,” Trixie said shakily.

“Maybe,” said Lemon Hearts. “Yeah, actually. I totally suck. Right?” She grinned up at the creature, which was leaning its straw toward her again. “Not now,” she scolded it, and it stopped.

“I’ve been living with this bug for as long as I can remember,” Lemon Hearts said. She jumped off the stage and trotted over to Minuette to wipe the tears from her face. “It’s okay, Minnie, I’m here.”

Minuette was shaking. “What’s going on, Lemon Hearts?”

“I owe you an apology,” Lemon Hearts said.

“No kidding!”

“Listen to me,” Lemon Hearts’ voice was urgent. “Listen to me. I’m really sorry, okay? I’ve been greedy like this my whole life.”

“Lemon Hearts, we need to get out of here!”

“Listen to me! Oh, Celestia, I’ve thought about explaining this a million times, and now I can’t remember how I was supposed to start. Okay, uh, so, we’ve been friends a really long time, right? Well, you have a lot of friends, but you’re sort of my only friend. I was really scared when we came to this school together that you’d make a bunch of new friends and I wouldn’t be friends with any of them, which is pretty much what happened, but, um, I sort of also stopped it from happening as much as it could have. I’ve been a little clingy. I’ve been a lot clingy. I’ve literally clung onto you a few times to stop you from noticing other ponies you like to talk to.”

“Lemon Hearts—”

“This bug is me,” Lemon Hearts said in a rush. “I made her up so I’d have something else to be the gross part of myself.”

“You said it was your imaginary friend!”

“Yeah, isn’t that what imaginary friends are?” She glanced around at the others.

“No,” said Trixie, sounding as shaken as the rest of them felt.

“Oh.” Lemon Hearts looked genuinely surprised. “Okay, well, that changes things—I had a speech planned out, I promise—”

Minuette clapped her hoofs against Lemon Hearts’ cheeks. “What the heck are you talking about?” she shouted.

“The bug is the way I feel about chaining myself to you. The straw is for sucking up all the good memories. The bug is sort of bad because it’s ugly, but when it’s full it looks happy, and so I figured I must’ve been happy.”

“That’s not great.”

“Yeah, I know. But since I wasn’t benefiting from it, I figured it wasn’t immoral but something else, something that doesn’t have any bad or good in it at all—”

“Dead water,” said Twilight automatically. She felt like she was learning about something horrible, yet what she was seeing happen was good, and her body was very confused about it.

“—yeah, anyway, I’ve got four new friends now, so I don’t think I need the bug anymore.” She turned around and looked up at the bug, considering it. It waved its straw at her, and she pushed it away like it was the snout of an intrusive dog.

The bug spoke in its twisted moan. “Nnneed fooood….”

“I’m not going to abandon you here,” Lemon Hearts said. “But me and my friends are going to go, and you’re not going to stop us. I’ll come back someday, and if there’s anything good in my head, you can suck it out then. Got a problem with that?”

“I have a problem with that,” Minuette said.

“Yeah, me too, actually,” said Twilight.

“We can talk about it,” said Lemon Hearts. “This is a part of me. I can’t just stop being who I am. But I hope that you’ll all stick with me, and I’m sorry for putting you in danger, Twilight.”

“N…no problem.”

The bug didn’t move. Twilight began to edge backwards toward the front of the restaurant with the other girls, and it didn’t so much as twitch.

Lemon Hearts stopped though. “Also, if you have any more of those oat fries in the back, I’ll totally take some to go,” she said. “Extra star salt, please.”

---

Twilight wouldn’t have expected to be hungry after eating that much, but utter terror was a great stimulant to the appetite, apparently. The extra fries were nice to munch on as she led them down the next corridor to where the exit would be according to how she remembered the map on the Day side of the Bank. Lemon Hearts and Minuette leaned against each other as they walked, and Moondancer was talking about the symbolism of bugs in ancient mythology according to some books she’d read.

They were getting pretty close to the exit, according to Twilight’s internal map. It was just around the corner, in fact.

Twilight turned the corner and saw…what looked like one wall smashed through another, a pile of rubble around it, and no way through.

The others trotted around the corner after her and stopped short.

Moondancer gasped. “That shouldn’t be here.”

“Help me clear the rubble,” said Twilight. She was fighting down panic, telling herself to be calm. But after levitating the rocks away, what remained was a wall in front of them.

“I must have missed something,” said Twilight. She glanced at Moondancer, who seemed to have memorized the map as well.

“I thought we were going the right way,” Moondancer whispered.

Twinkleshine got up close to the wall to inspect it. “Girls, this wall is warm. Like…Sun warm.”

“Princess Celestia is coming to rescue us?” Lemon Hearts said excitedly.

“I don’t think so,” said Twilight quietly.

Oh, Princess…you messed with the Bank, Princess!

Trixie was apparently thinking along similar lines. “She was trying to get into the Night, or Sleeping side of the Bank. And…messed it up.”

“There has to be another way to the exit,” Trixie said.

“No, there doesn’t,” Moondancer said, looking down. “There doesn’t.”

“We should go back to the Silver Room,” said Twilight.

“Why?” demanded Twinkleshine. “Want to waste away in there instead of here?”

“Princess Celestia was trying to get onto this side of the Bank for a reason,” Twilight said, recalling something she’d heard about the story of Hearth’s Warming Eve. “If she wants the Bank to take a nap, then she can’t just have it not be awake. It has to also go to sleep. That means something has to be done on this side of the Bank.”

“What has to be done?”

“I don’t know, but it probably requires the Silver Key. Maybe we can open up some other stuff with it and get out of here and give Princess Celestia both keys.”

No pony had a better plan, so they followed Twilight back to the Silver Room. She’d been so concerned by what lay beyond the door out of the Silver Room that she hadn’t looked at the side of the door going into the Silver Room. There was a key in the keyhole, the same size as the Gold Key. Twilight took it out.

The key was as silver as a beam of light. It wasn’t silver like the Moon, which was dusty and gray. It was silver like the light that reflected from it at night. That light seemed to be billowing off the key, wisps of moonlight that didn’t quite glow or shine, but moved like smoke and faded.

“Now what?” Minuette asked.

“Well, if we go around opening random doors, we’ll certainly die,” Twilight said matter-of-factly. “So we want to find a non-random door to open. So there’s the entrance, the exit, the gift shop, but I doubt Nightmare Moon has one, and the Silver Room.”

They went into the Silver Room.

“So I have an idea,” said Twilight. “It’s probably going to kill us all, but we’re going to die anyway. I’m a little more worried that it destroys the world, but…I don’t think that’s super likely.”

“We’ve got to work on your presentation skills,” Trixie said.

Twilight took a deep breath. “Princess Celestia works her greatest magic from the Gold Room because of its proximity to the Numeraire. I think the same must be true for Nightmare Moon.”

“You want to use the Numeraire to cast a spell to get us out of here?” Trixie’s voice rose in pitch syllable by syllable until she was shrieking. “Twilight, and I say this with love, but that’s a super bad idea.”

“If there’s a way out, then I want to find it,” Twinkleshine said.

Trixie threw up her hoofs. “Oh, well, if it’s a way out you want, there’s a million of those! I was hoping for a way out that didn’t involve being splattered against a dimension of reality or, I don’t know, redefining Time so that it works differently depending on whether it’s day or night!”

“Moondancer, do you know anything about how they used the Numeraire?” Twilight asked.

“No,” she said, “but I don’t know if we could use it in here even if we knew how. On the Day, or, no, on the Awake side of the Earth Room, we were stuck to the Numeraire at the center of the table. But after going to sleep, it wasn’t there. I don’t know if there’s a sleeping version of the Numeraire.”

“Okay,” said Twilight. “I’m going to sit down and think for a bit. Is everypony okay with that?”

They looked at each other.

“Honestly,” said Twinkleshine, “I think it’s what we’ve all been waiting for.”

---

One of Twilgiht’s favorite techniques when thinking about economics was not being stupid about metaphors. Sometimes, a problem wasn’t tractable to mathematical analysis or required too much data to solve. What you had to do then was come up with a toy example and work through its details, and then it was very important not to be stupid about it. The toy example was just a toy, no more predictive of the real economy than a doll was of an actual pony, and if you tried to use it anyway, then reality would violate your predictions along many margins.

Twilight was going to break that rule.

The Numeraire was older than Walras the Bearded, but most of what she knew about it had first been set down by him. The Numeraire was basically the observation that goods didn’t have to be priced in terms of money. They could also be priced in terms of other goods. If you had an economy of apples, oranges, and pears, and one apple traded for two oranges or four pears, then you could say that oranges were priced at ½ of an apple and pears were priced at ¼ of an apple. And since one apple always traded for one apple, then the apple, the numeraire good, was worth 1, always.

The Numeraire, or numeraire, when you weren’t talking about the Bank specifically, wasn’t the idea of using apples as a substitute form of currency. It was simply the idea of using apples, or any good, as a form of measurement.

One advantage of thinking about the numeraire was that it let you understand the nature of general equilibrium as a circumstance of mutually compatible measurements, or beliefs held by the measurers, between all goods in the economy. So if somepony grew five pears to buy three oranges, this wouldn’t make sense from the orange-seller’s perspective, as they could instead buy two pears for one orange and take their remaining two oranges and trade it for one apple, which buys four pears. So we have an excess demand for pears here which is being balanced by an excess supply of oranges. Relative values will have to adjust, or the pear-grower will have to grow another pear for everything to make sense. But at this moment, something that the pear-grower thinks, some belief the pear-grower has about reality, is not compatible with some belief held by the orange-grower.

You could go a bit further than that if you wanted, and Twilight didn’t want to. She could feel herself preparing to rules-lawyer reality, to insist that it let her behave in a way compatible with her motivated reading of it rather than its own logic. This was extremely not okay, and she fully expected to get blown into a million pieces for trying. It was only the knowledge that five sweet, dear ponies were depending on her that kept her going.

So she did go a bit further, and she noted that the concept of mutually incompatible beliefs suggested that there might be some reason to think about equilibrium along the lines of Autumn Agreement’s Theorem. Autumn Agreement was a notably acquiescent pony who lived centuries ago, and her theorem said that ponies should never agree to disagree. While this had ended tragically for Autumn Agreement, as she’d had her house stolen by a group of ponies who had followed her around loudly insisting that it was theirs, the theorem, modified to have the requirement of “truth-seeking,” lived on.

There was an analogy between disequilibrium and disagreement, which is that their very existence functioned as evidence for irrational behavior. If the pear-grower and the orange-grower both had the same belief about the relative value of their goods in terms of the numeraire, and they both knew that they both believed this, then there was no sane reason to be growing incompatible amounts of fruit or to be trading them at incompatible exchange ratios. Profit-maximizing, or utility-maximizing in this moneyless example, served the same function as truth-seeking, which was to disallow an equilibrium of disagreement.

Twilight further reasoned that although rational agreement was surely the domain of intelligent ponies, a general equilibrium of trade could be reached by simple rule-following behaviors about how to logically adjust exchange ratios. There was no reason you couldn’t build a simple buyer-seller for a simple market, and if the teacher hadn't started screaming in horror when Twilight suggested it, she would’ve already done so. (This was no discredit to the teacher, who would have been encouraging of anypony else. It was only the fact that the suggestion came from Twilight Sparkle that caused her to experience a certain degree of existential horror. It didn’t help that Twilight’s initial sketch including glowing red eyes “to distinguish it from sentient ponies and to enable long-distance binary signaling with other artificial traders.”)

Once you took the intelligence out of economic equilibrium, it only stood to reason that you could take other pony things out of it as well. Because it was all well and good to say that general equilibrium consisted of mutually compatible measurements taken by all traders, but that raised one final question: what were they actually measuring? In the world of science, this was a pretty fundamental question. And the answer Twilight had usually been given and had usually accepted was “value.”

But her hypothetical artificial traders didn’t have values in the sense of wants and goals and pleasures and distastes like real ponies did. So what were they valuing? The answer to that was obvious: their values were the values of the measurements they took, specifically the measurements that could conceivably cause them to behave differently. Measurements came in values—e.g., “this table is six feet long”—and there wasn’t an obvious difference between pursuing equilibrium on the basis of externally measured values versus internal values of the “I like oranges more than pears” type.

And once you’d made that leap, it was hard to remember why trade played an important role in this process. The process of the mutual compatibility of measurements did not need to be managed by a dimension of property; two ponies walking on a street toward each other, on a trajectory to collide if one or both did not move aside, would either have to update their beliefs or accept a painful disequilibrium of slamming into each other.

And then you remembered no-trade theorems and realized that trade was actually a pretty weird thing in economics, it wasn’t something that economics found so easy to talk about in a natural way. If it didn’t happen so often, economists might never talk about it at all.

So if you stopped thinking about trade and just started thinking about general equilibrium as a situation of mutually compatible paths, then you could really take the pony out of it altogether. Rocks bumped into each other too…and while they couldn’t make plans to avoid bumping into each other, they way that they bounced off of each other sure looked like they were trying to minimize the probability of bumping into each other again, either shooting off in opposite directions or coming to a stop. Sure, this didn’t work so well when there were lots of rocks or other things to bump into, but that just meant ponies were smarter than rocks….

Because rocks didn’t buy and sell things, but they did have values—descriptions of their mass, location, three-dimensional structure, etc.—and those values changed when rocks interacted with other rocks. A rock might gain velocity in one direction while losing it in another direction, for example. And while those tradeoffs didn’t happen intelligently, they did happen in a predictable, rules-based way, just like they did for her artificial traders. And it sure seemed like for any particular interaction, the function of the rule was to minimize further contradiction, however unsuccessful that rule would be over time and across multiple objects.

So yes, goods could be priced in terms of each other. But that wasn’t fundamental. The Sun and Moon didn’t bargain, and the ocean had never gone shopping even before it had died. So there had to be something else, a more general sense in which things could be compared in terms of each other. And if you believed, as scientists apparently had before water had died, that all of reality was governed by a single rule, then there was just one quantity, one value being tracked for all things that governed all interactions so that no contradictions ever occurred in terms of that quantity.

It sounded like a numeraire, which didn’t mean that reality wouldn’t laugh at her for the theory and blow her up for the application. But maybe in the Bank, it didn’t matter if it was true as long as Princess Celestia and Nightmare Moon had been trying to make it true….

Where was the Numeraire on the Sleeping side of the Bank? That was obvious. It was where it was everywhere else, which is to say, it was everywhere else. The Numeraire on the Awake side of the Bank had been at its very center, perfectly centralized. And the Numeraire on the Sleeping side of the Bank was utterly throughout it, perfectly decentralized.

Because dreams may have been about unreality, but they themselves were perfectly real….

Twilight opened her eyes. “Let’s give this a try.”

---

The purple light that filled the silver walls seemed to pulsate as Twilight stood up. “What are you going to do?” Minuette asked.

“I’m going to dream about a way the world could be,” Twilight said, “and find out how much it costs to get there. Stand back, please.”

They cleared a space around her as a lavender glow surrounded her horn. She wasn’t sure how to actually touch or talk to the Numeraire. But the Numeraire pulled things to it, or in this case, it already ran through everything, so maybe there wasn’t much she needed to do.

I’m not trying to do anything crazy, she thought. I just want to move that wall out of the way. So if this is going to destroy the world or anything like that, please give me warning.

BAM! The purple light slammed against the walls. Twilight jumped back.

“Twilight,” said Minuette shakily, “are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

That wall can’t be good for you either. It’s not supposed to be there. So we can work together to get rid of it.

BAM! The light bashed against the walls like it was trying to break through. Twilight’s heart thudded in her chest. She spun around, looking at the purple shadows shifting behind the silver barrier as they surged forward a third time.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

“TWILIGHT WHATEVER YOU DID STOP IT NOW!” Trixie shouted.

“I didn’t do anything!” The six of them circled up together, forming a perimeter, watching the shadowy light crash and recede and smash against the walls of the Silver Room.

Something broke.

Whatever you did, stop it now, the shadows seemed to say as they began to choke the light from the room. But it didn’t stop, did it?

“Girls!” Twilight screamed, but she was all alone in a void. It wasn’t dark, just empty. It wasn’t quiet, just empty. It wasn’t sad, just empty.

It’s never stopped, and it never will.

“Girls?” said Twilight, but she wasn’t alone, just empty.

Minutes or eons might have passed, Twilight wasn’t sure what the difference was. There was nothing else to look at, so even without a mirror, Twilight began to look at herself.

She saw the difficult child she had been. All of the meals she had refused to eat, the room layouts she had refused to sleep in, the battles over brushing her mane and reading during family hours. She saw that a lot of what she had read had been very pleasant for her but not very productive either. Had she read different things, maybe none of this would have happened.

She looked at herself in school, saw herself flinching away from Princess Celestia every time she walked through their part of the building. Had she been less of a coward, maybe none of this would have happened.

How much of this was my fault? What if I’d cared more, paid more attention, asked the questions that I should have asked if I had been thinking like I should have been?

How can I prevent this from happening again?

The emptiness all around her seemed to pull at her, and that gave her an idea.

Twilight examined herself again. She looked deeper and deeper and saw that a lot of the way she was wouldn’t be reformed so easily. It made much more sense to junk it all and start all over again. So she began to empty herself out.

First she got rid of all of the distractions. The tastes of delicious food and the pleasures of comfy bean bag chairs, those were out. Every pleasant fantasy of being a heroine or great wizard that she’d gotten from her books had to go. In fact, the interest in books themselves had no utility. Books were sources of information, not things to be treasured themselves. Her parents were still a distraction, so she let the void take them. Concerns over grades and report cards were in the same bucket. Good grades followed from good work, so she would do the work and let the teachers worry about grades. It all got tossed into the void, and the void sucked it away.

She’d always pretended not to care about her looks, but now she would really have to not care. The mane would be cut to stay out of her eyes, clothes would guard against the weather as needed. Everything else was given to the emptiness.

Priorities had to be set. If she was in pain, she could address the issue medically to maximize productivity, but otherwise it would be kept to a dull background setting so as not to be a distraction. Food did not need to taste like anything, as she could verify its caloric and nutritional content by other means. Sleep could happen when it needed to, but only for a few hours, and was to otherwise be minimized. Indeed, its minimization seemed like the best way to achieve her goals for the reformulation of herself.

She kept going, marveling at the waste. So much of her was a creature that attended to light and warmth and pleasure and comfort. There would be room for so much more when she had gotten rid of it all.

It took a while, but she’d done it, thrown everything out into the void so that she could start on the process of remaking herself.

Now….

She reached inside of herself for something to build with, and found that there was nothing there.

Not a problem. She reached outside of herself, to the void, for something to build with, and found that there was nothing there, the void had taken everything and was still utterly empty.

It should have been scary. But Twilight didn’t feel anything about it at all. She was nothing, and that didn’t seem totally congruent with something she’d been thinking a few seconds or maybe a million millennia ago, but there were pluses to the way she was now. Nothing hurt or felt scary anymore. And if she never ate and never slept and never felt again, at least what she wasn’t eating didn’t taste like ash, at least the dreams she wasn’t having didn’t terrify her, at least the feelings she wasn’t feeling weren’t pain and loneliness and loathing.

The thing checked inside itself one last time to make sure the job was done.

“Hey, Twilight,” said the ivory Unicorn within. “What’re you doing?”

The thing looked at it.

“You too, huh?” the ivory Unicorn sighed. “What’d you do, throw it out? It’s not gone, you dingus, it’s just making you feel that way.”

The thing felt totally indifferent to what the Unicorn was saying.

“Here,” said the Unicorn. “Take this.”

The thing looked down. It was holding a sandwich. Peanut butter and jelly. Wheat bread.

“You look like you need to eat,” Twinkleshine said. They were sitting next to each other on the end of a slide at a playground that the thing didn’t recognize. “If you stop eating, it’s all going to fall to shit. Trust me.”

The thing looked at her. It was hard to express in words how little she cared about that happening.

“I know you don’t give a shit,” said Twinkleshine. “Neither did I. When my parents...my dad’s a total dick, you know. He builds things just to sit on top of them and show the world how high up he is. I don’t understand how anypony can be that high up and still not take the bird’s-eye view of things. He’s happier with Mom out of the way. It lets him do the things he wanted to do anyway. Mom was all right. Well, she was pretty useless. Like, I don’t know how you don’t see it coming. How do you date a guy like that and not realize what he’s going to do? Maybe it’ll make more sense to me after I hit puberty. Do you know what puberty is, Twilight?”

She had read books about it, yes.

“That’s good, Twilight. It’s great how much you like to read. I stopped reading for a while after I figured out that my dad’s secretary is my real mom. I love the characters in stories so much. I can really imagine being friends with them, you know? So when I felt like I couldn’t be friends with myself, I had to stop reading, because I knew the characters would be just as grossed out by me as I was. Eat the fucking sandwich, Twilight, or I’m going to beat the shit out of you.”

She bit off a piece of the crust. It didn’t taste like much.

“Lemon Hearts is struggling with it even worse than you are. Trixie is being weird. Minuette doesn’t know how to handle it at all. Moondancer is trying to turn herself into a book, I’m pretty sure, and it’s not a good look at all. Eat the fucking sandwich.”

She started to eat, chewing mechanically.

“I have to say, I’m impressed by how methodically you went about it. You really emptied yourself out block by block, step by step. But I don’t give a fucking crap what you want. This isn’t a world where you get some of what you want and I get some of what I want and we compromise and trade off our values. This is a world where I get everything I want and no pony else’s opinion matters at all, and I want you to be full of light and life and to be my friend, Twilight Sparkle, eat the fucking sandwich.”

Twilight was getting thirsty. Twinkleshine gave her a water bottle.

“When I was little,” said Twinkleshine, “and I know I’m just a fucking filly still, shut the fuck up, Twilight, I read a book about how the Earth used to be in a solar system with eight other planets traveling around the Sun. Don’t fucking look at me like you know this shit, just keep eating. But now the Earth is going on wherever, just wherever its inertia at the moment of the break sent it. And that kind of sucks because we left the other planets behind and the stars we used to be able to see, but on the other hoof, there’s going to be new planets and new stars, right? Most of those places don’t have anything interesting going on with them. This universe has some crap in it, but mostly it’s empty, and mostly the crap that’s there isn’t doing anything. But we can make it do stuff. I mean, if you think about, like, a stage play, right? You can just slap some particles around and suddenly the particles are going on about to be or not to be. You just have to regulate their behavior right. Then the regulated particles get so interested in crap that they start freaking out about how interested they are and try to turn back into regular particles. I don’t know. Anyway. I started thinking about filling things up some. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a little more out there? Finish the fucking sandwich, you eat so slow, for fuck’s sake.”

Twilight ate the last bite and drank the water.

“Cool,” said Twinkleshine. “Sorry for cursing. I sat in the back corner during a lot of meetings with a lot of stressed-out businessponies.”

Twilight shrugged.

“Yeah, yeah, you don’t care. So cool, Twilight. Want to hang out?”

Twilight didn’t have anything better to do.

“Siiiiick. Help me get the merry-go-round started, will you?”

They got the merry-go-round moving with their legs, and then got it going a lot faster with their magic after they jumped on. Twilight got so nauseous that she had to teleport off, and only realized after slamming herself along the woodchips that she’d forgotten to account for her momentum.

“How's that feel?” Twinkleshine crouched down by her with an ice pack. The intense cold hurt a lot worse than the stinging from her scrapes.

“Get off of me!”

Twinkleshine stepped away, then turned back around, eyebrows raised. “I bet we can get it going a lot faster than that.”

Twilight grinned. A few minutes later, tears were streaming from her eyes as the wind pulled at her lips and eyelids. She grabbed Twinkleshine and teleported them both off the merry-go-round, and this time, she got the momentum right. Twinkleshine was nice enough not to say anything about the tears that kept coming well after the ride had stopped.

It was nice to chill. Twinkleshine had chips and juice and very loud music about how screaming was a fun and cool way to express yourself. Twilight was exhausted, and she dozed off at one point against Twinkleshine and woke up to Trixie and Lemon Hearts standing over them.

“Can I have some pretzels?” Trixie said.

“Twinkleshine, you’re amazing, but if I have to listen to this music for one more minute, I’m going right back to that void, ” Lemon Hearts said.

“Help yourself, Trixie. No problem, Lemon Hearts. I’m still working on Minuette and Moondancer. Twilight, you can take over here. I’ll handle the rest when we’re all together.”

Twinkleshine didn’t leave, but she did go sit by herself under the monkey bars. Twilight made sure that Trixie and Lemon Hearts got something to eat. They chatted for a while on one of the benches. Lemon Hearts mentioned that she and Minuette were going to play frisbee at the park near the school this weekend, and Trixie and Twilight both confessed to having no plans.

“Maybe we’ll see you there,” said Lemon Hearts.

Twinkleshine came over to them with Minuette and Moondancer in tow. She watched them eat and drink and insisted they all take a nap, even Twilight. When they woke up, she gave them a few minutes to stretch and rub their eyes.

“Ready?”

“For what?” Twilight asked.

“For the rest.”

“No,” said Twilight honestly.

“That’s all right, Twilight. That’s why you have me. That’s why we have each other.”

The playground disappeared. The void was around them, but it wasn’t empty, because they were in it.

The void was angry about that. Twilight could feel the cold sucking at them, trying to take everything out of them and put it somewhere that it couldn’t exist.

“It’s not angry, Twilight,” Twinkleshine said. “It’s afraid. It’s afraid of what happens when you let others in. It’s afraid of the pain of living.”

The cold pulled. Something sharper than ice and more invisible than air was cutting into Twilight, making her whimper. She knew the pain would go away if everything else did.

Lemon Hearts’ teeth chattered. “I hate this,” Minuette hissed. Moondancer was muttering to herself, and Trixie’s eyes were unfocused like she was daydreaming in class.

“It’s cold here, isn’t it?” said Twinkleshine. “That’s what cold is, isn’t it? Things going away from you. But the void isn’t getting any warmer. When you lose things like this, it doesn’t go anywhere else. It just goes away.

“I think it’s missing its old master,” Twinkleshine went on. “I mean, the entire Sleeping side of the Bank has been abandoned for almost a thousand years. That’s just what it feels like to me. And now it’s trying to…cope.”

“Y-y-yeah?” shivered Twilight. “D-d-do something!”

Twinkleshine took a step forward. “I’m not going to tell you it gets better,” she said to whatever was listening. “Because it doesn’t. But you can get better.”

The cold pulled at them again, a faint vacuum scream reaching into everything.

“Sh,” said Twinkleshine. Her voice filled the void, and Twilight realized that the void was very small. “Listen, I’m not even saying it’s a bad decision. If the pain is too much, sometimes you have to turn it off. We’re hurting you right now by being here, aren’t we? Because you’re starting to remember that being alone isn’t always how it is. You can shut it off if you have to, but that has to be the start of something, not the end. You can’t quit the game and announce that you win.

“I’ve been empty too. You can get to a point where that doesn’t feel reversible. You’ve shut so much down and taken so much out of yourself that there’s nothing left to rebuild with. But things you can’t do alone, you might be able to do with others. If you let others in, you won’t feel so empty.”

The void seemed to twist around them, shuddering like it was in pain.

“Is blood rushing into your legs for the first time in almost a millennia?” Twinkleshine mused. “I get pins and needles like that if I sleep in a funny position for a few hours. I can’t imagine how bad it would be after a thousand years.”

The cold rushed through them, yanking at their insides. Minuette shrieked again, and Moondancer stumbled into her.

“That’s a bad habit,” Twinkleshine said quietly. “Attacking others. I think that’s the worst part about pain. The habits you form to protect yourself make it harder to let yourself heal.” She looked down. “I wish somepony had found a way to fill the empty spaces up for you sooner, so that even if you were banished to the Moon, it wouldn’t be lonely there.”

Twilight winced at an explosion of light. It took her a moment to realize that they were back in the Silver Room. The silver walls were blinding after the utter emptiness of the void.

“You did it!” squealed Minuette, holding a hoof up in front of her eyes.

“I’m glad you were the one dealing with that,” moaned Lemon Hearts. “I just wanted to give up.”

“That’s what friends are for,” said Twinkleshine, a look of mild puzzlement mixed with amusement on her face.

Twilight went over to her. “Twinkleshine,” she said quietly, “are you okay? You said a bunch of stuff back there…and I don’t know how you did any of that.”

Twinkleshine shrugged. “I know what it’s like to feel abandoned. I’ve been alone for a long time even though there were a lot of ponies around me. But really, it’s all thanks to you, Twilight.”

“What do you mean?”

“When you’re alone all the time, you learn how to keep yourself entertained. I build worlds and friends and adventures alone in my head. I never cared about science or anything like you do. I just like making stuff up.” She grinned at Twilight. “But when you started trying to get into the Gold Room, that was way more interesting than anything happening in my head. Thanks for bringing me out here.”

“I don’t think anypony owes me thanks for bringing them to the Sleeping side of the Bank.”

“That’s not where I am.”

“No?”

“I’m with my friends.” For a moment, Twinkleshine’s smile was brighter than the light of the Silver Room. “And I’m pretty sure they can do anything.”

“Hey,” said Minuette. “Look!”

They looked. A doorway had opened up in one of the silver walls, showing a deep, dark space beyond. But it wasn’t a void. It wasn’t empty at all.

It was full of stars.

---

“I hope that’s a way out,” said Moondancer.

“It’s definitely a way out,” said Trixie. “But it looks like a way far out, if you know what I mean.”

“It wouldn’t want to take us out,” Twinkleshine said. “It wants to take us in. Somewhere deeper into the Bank, the real heart of whatever is going on here.”

“Wouldn’t that be the Silver Room?” Twilight said.

“Apparently not.”

Do not mess with the Bank, children….

...Yeah, right.

Lemon Hearts groaned. “Why does everything on the Sleeping side of the Bank have to be so crazy?”

“Because the Numeraire is everywhere throughout it,” Twilight said. “If you really wanted an answer to that question.”

“No, it was rhetorical!”

“Still, it’s nice to be able to answer it,” Twilight mused. “Look, either it’s perfectly safe or we die instantly, so let’s just try it.”

“I too have studied decision-making under uncertainty,” Trixie said. “I too am familiar with this theorem you just cited.”

“It doesn’t want to hurt us,” said Twinkleshine.

“Which is different from saying that it won’t hurt us,” Trixie countered. “This room was built for an Alicorn!”

“We can test it,” said Minuette. She trotted over to the black doorway and stuck her head through it.

“Can you breathe?” asked Lemon Hearts breathlessly.

Minuette pulled her head back in after a few more seconds. “No,” she said, “but I wasn’t suffocating either. I think we’ll be fine.”

“If we get out of here,” said Trixie, “I am going to go to an actual bank and I am going to stand in line and talk to a teller and I am going to deposit some money and order a new checkbook and complain about something on my statement and—”

“You’re too young,” interrupted Twilight.

“—and it’s going to be really normal and really boring!”

Twilight went over to her. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll go first, and I’ll bring you along second. We’ll be holding onto each other the entire time.”

Holding Trixie’s hoof, she led her to the doorway to the stars. Looking out, she was relieved to see that there were too many stars dancing in the blackness. This wasn’t really space.

Probably.

It might have been what space was like when it was sleeping.

Twilight held her breath—then realized how pointless that was and let it out—and pushed off into space.

With Trixie’s grip on her, she didn’t go far. Twilight rotated around. “Give me your other hoof.”

‘You’re not suffocating? Freezing? About to explode?”

“No, no, define ‘about’?”

Trixie waited a few seconds. Then she offered her other hoof. Twilight took it and pulled Trixie gently out into space.

They spun around a shared point between them until both of them gradually settled their back hoofs on…something.

“What are we standing on?” said Trixie.

“I definitely have a logical explanation for all of this,” Twilight said, “and I’m not telling you what it is because it’ll stop working if you know about it.” Trixie stuck out her tongue at her.

One by one, Minuette, Twinkleshine, Moondancer, and Lemon Hearts jumped out into space as well. With a little bit of flailing, all of them eventually found purchase on the same nothing that Twilight and Trixie were standing on.

“I’m never going to believe anything I read in a science textbook ever again,” Moondancer muttered under her breath.

The Silver Room was floating in space, a box with light shining out of the doorway.

“Now what?” Minuette looked around. “Where do we go?”

“There,” said Trixie.

Twilight twisted around. She saw it as well: suspended in space, round with brown lands and black oceans, dappled with clouds, spinning gently: the Earth.

“We can go home!” Lemon Hearts cheered.

“We could land in the ocean or another continent,” Trixie said.

“That’s a sleeping Earth,” Twinkleshine pointed out. “Who knows how it works?”

“We can get closer and figure it out from there,” Twilight said. “Come on.”

There wasn’t a path for them to trot along, but Twilight found herself naturally moving along a slow looping orbit toward the planet. It was hard to judge distances, but it seemed like it would take a while to get there. To pass the time, they pointed out different groups of stars, making up new constellations and marveling at the continents visible on the surface of Earth that they’d only ever read about in old books.

Eventually Twilight felt a pull in the direction of the planet. It wasn't like the pull of the void, which wanted to suck everything out. It was more like the pull of gravity.

“Hey, girls,” she said. She put her hoofs out in front of her to slow down and found that she couldn’t. It was like running downhill, and the hill kept getting steeper as she went. “Hey—whoa!—HELP!”

It was all she could do to stay on all four hoofs. If she lost balance now, she would be falling too fast to recover. They had to aim, and the Earth was spinning, and she wasn’t in control. Shouts and cries from behind her confirmed the others were in the same boat. Twilight had to run even faster to avoid falling over, and they were going to crash into the ocean and drown in dead water.

Something blazed past her with all the fire of a blue star. “Follow me!” said Minuette. She changed the path, nearly stumbling, but carrying herself onto a wider orbit. Twilight strained to keep up.

After a few minutes of the most intense uphill run Twilight had ever done, the gravity slackened. They all fell in a heap together, breathing hard.

“Okay,” gasped Twinkleshine, wincing from a stitch in her side. “That was scary.”

“It was,” Minuette agreed. "Twilight, why did you choose that path?”

“I didn’t!” Twilight said.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Minuette said grimly. “O-kay. Look how it’s spinning. That’s our continent, that’s Equestria right there. And so the school is up there somewhere. We just have to be really precise as we get close. It’s all down to timing. Luckily, I'm kind of good at that.”

“That’s not the Earth,” Twilight said. “We’re still in the Bank.”

“It’s the Numeraire?” Minuette asked.

“I don’t think so.” Twilight felt puzzled as well. “I don’t think we woke up. We’re still on the Sleeping side of the Bank. The Numeraire isn’t anywhere in particular.”

“It’s a way of getting around,” Twinkleshine said. “Since we’re blocked off by the wall that got moved.”

“Do you think this can take us to the exit?”

Twinkleshine hesitated. “I don’t think…so. I think…maybe…there was a part that it didn’t want to keep because it didn't want to keep anything, but there was also a part it didn’t want to throw away, so it put it somewhere else….”

“So where should we try to end up?” Minuette paced back and forth, studying the Earth.

“...The Bank,” said Twinkleshine. “We’re going to another part of the Bank.”

“Yeah,” said Twilight suddenly. She felt a little panicked at the realization. “All of this is the Bank, so if we want to end up in a part of the Bank we’re relatively familiar with, we should aim for the ‘actual’ Bank. That’s where the exit is.”

“Gotcha. Okay then,” said Minuette. “Right. No problem.” She jumped up and down a few times, then paced back and forth like she was warming up for an athletic event.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting ready. Finding a rhythm. Cool, cool.” She was talking to herself now. “Just gotta…come around and…take it slow…so we can hit it real fast, and…yeah. Follow me.”

She took off trotting. Lemon Hearts glanced at them and raced after her.

Twinkleshine grinned. “Gifted Unicorns are just full of hidden depths. I say we trust her.”

They followed behind Minuette in a tight line. She took them on a long curving path heading away from the Earth.

“Minuette!” Trixie called out from behind Twilight. “Are you sure you know where you’re going?”

In response, Minuette began to whistle. It was an old, slow, dancing tune that made Twilight think of ponies in gray wigs and stuffy clothes. But the sound was stunningly clear without the medium of air to get in the way. Listening to it, Twilight felt like she could run forever without tiring.

It felt like they were running forever. Twilight lost track of time as the sound endlessly repeated in variations that were never the same, yet the changes were never distracting.

They were speeding up. The strange, shifting colors of the stars seemed to blur against the endless night until the six of them hit a certain stride. Then everything refocused, and the stars were in motion.

Constellations built themselves out of scattered arrays. Stars dipped through wells of gravity to bow to each other and clasped hands in fiery explosions. Partners changed and structures developed, nova pulsing in the darkness like heartbearts.

The stars were dancing.

Minuette kept whistling.

The Earth was coming nearer. They swung around it, closer and closer, the fiery tail of their orbit sweeping around like the end of a dress. They rushed by the Earth so fast that the atmosphere sizzled. The Earth whipped around on its axis, and Twilight laughed. They were dancing with it and spinning the Earth around.

Then the Earth stopped moving.

We’ve matched speeds.

They fell through layers of dreamy atmosphere and sleepy clouds. The mountains dozed as they plummeted by and heard the snoring of the forests further down. Only the ocean was as it ever was, dead and dull and silent.

Twilight saw the dark towers of Canterlot at night and the tumble of a single leaf along an empty street. There was the castle, with no guards, and the school, with no lights visible in the windows and no troublemakers sneaking out. And there was the Bank.

They were galloping through its empty corridors, hoofs barely disturbing the scant dust on the floor. The gallop became a canter, then a trot, then they were walking as their momentum wore itself out. They stopped. Minuette stopped whistling.

“Minuette!” Lemon Hearts had tears in her eyes. “That was amazing.”

“I’ll say,” said Moondancer, looking up at the sign on the door they had stopped in front of.

It read, LIBRARY.

---

“It brought us to the library?” Twinkleshine snorted. “Nightmare Moon is such a nerd.”

“We should be careful,” said Twilight.

Moondancer pushed the door open.

“We should be careful,” said Twilight.

“Libraries are only dangerous to bad ideas and boredom,” said Moondancer, “and I am neither.” She trotted in.

Twilight and the others followed her in, glancing around. It looked like an ordinary library, with a central desk and bookcases going all around. It wasn’t particularly large, and the books didn’t seem to be unusually magical.

Moondancer stopped in the middle of an aisle and took a deep breath. “Do you smell that? It smells like books!”

Twilight wiped some dust off of one of the shelves. “I mean, yeah….” Twilight had fond memories of the library by her home because she could read anything she wanted and the librarian had stopped bothering her after a few days. But whatever experience Moondancer was having was something else altogether.

Moondancer started taking a book down.

“Don’t touch that!” Twilight said. “You don’t know what will happen!”

“I want to see if these are Sleeping versions of the books,” said Moondancer. “Oh, no, but I haven’t read this one.” She sat down in the middle of the aisle with the book open.

At this point, Twilight was half-expecting a giant book-monster to jump out and start reading them. But with Moondancer’s act apparently triggering no alarm, the lure of shelves upon shelves of books was too much for any of them to resist. Twilight found one for herself, a history of Walras the Bearded, and sat down on a cushion to read.

Minutes or hours passed like that. The six of them converged eventually and sat quietly together on a small pile of cushions as a large pile of books built up between them. Nothing broke the silence but the sound of pages turning and the occasional cough or sniff, or, when Lemon Hearts was reading a comedy, stifled giggles.

Then it must have been evening, because the lights came on. Their silver surroundings had faded to an evening purple, and all along the walls and ceiling little white lights winked on like decorations on Hearth’s Warming Eve.

“It’s beautiful,” whispered Twinkleshine, who looked more gorgeous than ever in the starlight. Her eyes were wide and utterly rapt by the sight of the tiny little stars.

Hoofsteps clicked down the hallway. Instantly the fillies drew together.

“It couldn’t be Nightmare Moon,” whispered Minuette. “Right?”

“Shh!” said Twilight, eyes strained. They were behind a shelf, able to see the door to the library through the gaps in the books.

Dark purple smoke, almost black, curled under the door. Twilight’s heart was thumping so loudly she was afraid it would give them away.

The creature that stepped through the door wasn’t a pony at all. It looked like a Unicorn, standing taller than even Princess Celestia, but it was all shadows and smoke, impermanence given order, for what reason Twilight had no idea. The clacks its hoofs made on the ground didn’t quite match its steps, as if they came from some other source.

Its voice was as loud as a volcano erupting. “WOULDST THOU LIKE TO CHECK ANYTHING OUT?”

“What?” whispered Trixie. Twilight felt her body trembling against her.

The shadow Unicorn waited, then spoke again. “IF THOU WOULDST NOT LIKE TO CHECK OUT A BOOK, PLEASE RETURNEST THE ITEMS THOU PERUSEDTH TO THEIR ORIGINAL LOCATION ON THE SHELF.”

“It’s a librarian?” Twilight said in disbelief.

“PLEASE KEEP NOISE TO A MINIMUM,” the shadow librarian added in a voice like thunder.

“Enough of this,” said Moondancer. “I’m not afraid of a librarian. I’m going to be the royal librarian one day.”

She trotted out despite Twilight and the other’s attempts to pull her back.

“Excuse me,” said Moondancer to the shadow librarian. “We’re fillies who got lost on a school trip, and we need help finding our way out. Can you help us?”

“DOST THOU FIRST WISH TO CHECK OUT ANY BOOKS?”

Moondancer cast a longing look back at the bookcases, but shook her head. “No, my friends and I really need to get out of here as soon as possible. Everypony is worrying about us.”

“THEN FOLLOW ME.”

Twilight and the others hurried after them, not wanting to miss the opportunity to get home. The shadow librarian went down a few twists and turns rapidly until they reached the same blockading wall as before, albeit from a different direction than they had previously. The shadow librarian passed through the wall like it wasn’t even there. When Moondancer tried the same, she got a bruised snout.

After a minute the shadow librarian emerged from the wall. “FOLLOW ME, YOUNG ONES.” It passed through the wall again.

Twilight tried to get through the wall, and so did the others, but it was totally impermeable. The shadow librarian returned again and repeated its message to follow.

Twilight had a horrible sinking feeling in her gut. “It doesn’t know the wall is there. It’s not intelligent.”

“Do you know if there are any other ways out?” said Moondancer to the shadow librarian.

“WOULDST THOU LIKE TO CHECK OUT A BOOK?”

“No, a way out,” cried Moondancer.

“FOLLOW ME, YOUNG ONES.” It passed through the wall again.

Trixie collapsed, holding her head between her legs. “It’s somepony else’s turn to freak out,” she mumbled.

“I don’t have the energy,” Minuette said. Her face was deathly pale. “I don’t want to, to, to have to stay here forever.”

“You won’t, you’ll die before forever happens,” said Lemon Hearts, sinking against the wall.

Twinkleshine had a wry expression on her face. “It could be worse. I’m not exactly the ideal daughter.”

Minuette gave a hollow laugh. “My parents couldn’t get me into a boarding school fast enough.”

Twilight thought of her relationship with her own parents. “It’s tough when you don’t know how to help somepony,” she said. “I, I think at some point, it’s like if somepony had a thorn in their leg that you couldn’t remove. And you could see it hurting them every day. Wouldn’t you just want to cut their leg off?”

Trixie looked miserably at Twilight. “I get along perfectly with my parents.”

“Lucky you,” said Lemon Hearts. “I wish I knew mine.”

“My parents are really smart,” said Moondancer. “They buy me any books I want and answer all of my questions.”

“That’s great,” said Twilight encouragingly.

Moondancer shrugged. “They don’t do anything else though. They just read all day. And write. And send their letters and manuscripts out. They’re very bright. I mean, I was doing most of the cooking before I left to come here.”

Twilight called up the image of the map in her mind again. “I’m not giving up.”

But she did, after fruitless minutes spent studying a map that had only one way in and one way out.

“The library’s open,” said Moondancer with a hopeful note in her voice. She sounded like she was trying very much not to scream. “If anypony else wants to go with me.”

“Anywhere we go, we go together,” said Twilight. She was glad to have a sense of purpose. “The library sounds good. I saw a fireplace there, maybe we can light it and get some rest and come up with a plan in a few hours.”

“We need food too,” said Trixie, but she got up quickly to go.

The library was a twinkling night sky. Twilight glanced back to see the shadow librarian had followed them inside.

“Do you have any food?” she asked it, just in case.

“HAST THOU HEARD THE MOON IS MADE OF GREEN CHEESE?”

“Um, yes?”

“IT IS A LIE.”

Was that a no? Maybe there was just no eating allowed in the library. But she was too worn out to care.

No, she had to try. “Is there some food we can have if we eat outside the library?”

“NOT EVEN GREEN CHEESE.”

Oh well.

“The library by my house at home has a coffee shop to one side where you can get snacks and things,” Minuette told it. “If you get that too, then the next group of fillies to get trapped in here will have something to eat.”

“I WILL TAKE NOTE OF IT. THANK THEE FOR THY SUGGESTION.”

“Thy’re welcome.”

With the shadow librarian’s help they were able to light a fire in the library’s fireplace. There were a few chairs and a couch big enough for the six of them facing it.

They all settled together on the couch. A couple of questions to the shadow librarian procured a few quilts, which it settled over them. Twilight noticed the way its mouth bit through the quilt rather than against it, yet there was no visible mark on the quilt after. Just what kind of spell was this? When you had lived for centuries, and were an Alicorn, what kinds of magics could you perform? This wasn’t a peak she had never seen, this was a completely different mountain range.

But she was so tired that she couldn’t even work up the desire to ask the shadow librarian about its origin. She leaned her head on Trixie's shoulder and listened to the conversation.

Any attempt to come up with a plan once they had rested died quickly. They watched the fire flicker and dance. The occasional pop from the fireplace was incredibly soothing. It was a natural sound, one of the outside world.

“Shame we don’t have any marshmallows,” Trixie said.

“I always wanted to go camping,” said Lemon Hearts. “Is it fun?”

“Do you like walking into a grove of black walnut trees? And then running out and tumbling down a hill and spraining two of your ankles?”

“Oh, yes!”

“We never did family outings,” Twinkleshine said. “I don’t look like my dad and I don’t look like my ‘mom.’ I think it makes everypony uncomfortable.”

“I only pretend to get along with them,” Trixie said suddenly. “My parents, I mean. I pretend a lot. I would play Pretend because I didn’t have anypony to talk to. I wasn’t allowed to read the books I wanted to either, so I just played Pretend.

“Why couldn’t you read what you wanted to?” Twilight asked with morbid curiosity.

“They wouldn’t let me. The books were too hard for me or something. Just because they only had pictures on some of the pages.”

Twilight felt a wave of appreciation for her parents. However...insufficient they had been, they hadn’t done that.

“That’s wrong,” said Moondancer firmly. “And Twinkleshine, you should try dyeing your mane to look more like your mom.”

“Of course I tried that,” Twinkleshine said. “My dad just got mad and told me to wash it out. When it wouldn’t wash out, he had it cut really short.”

“Oh.”

“It was a good thought though.”

The conversation moved on to other things. What the other fillies thought of their disappearance. How much Simple Pleasure was freaking out. What Princess Celestia was doing.

Eventually the conversation slowed down. Twilight blinked at the stars and realized that she was nodding off. She sat up suddenly.

“Hm?” said Trixie sleepily.

“Girls!” Twilight whispered.

“What?” yawned Minuette.

“We’re not going to sleep. We’re not…staying here. We’re going to figure something out.”

“Then why are you whispering?”

Because it was evening and they were in a library and the fire was cozy and the quilt was soft. Twilight got up and struggled out of the pile of fillies on the couch and trotted off to perk herself up. The shadow librarian was visible on the other side of the library, walking through the shelves one by one as if in search of errant books.

Twilight stopped at the central desk. It had things on it like sticky pads and paper clips and a photo frame turned down on its face and a small black cube. Twilight picked it up.

The cube was very, very cold, almost too cold to handle, yet an inner warmth pulsed within it. It was the same kind of warmth as the out-of-place wall. It felt like a little bit of the sun. Twilight glanced again to check where the shadow librarian was and quickly pocketed the cube.

She strolled back over to the fireplace. Moondancer was sitting up and keeping the rest of the girls awake by reading to them from one of the books she’d taken off the shelves. Twilight leaned over the back of the couch to tug the quilt up over Lemon Hearts’ shoulders and walked over to a window. She opened the blinds and blinked out at a purple sky. The sky seemed to be made of clouds and was a dim, deep violet color. In the distance was the shadow of a city, the silhouettes of buildings standing out against the horizon. It didn’t look anything like Canterlot.

Where are we? What is this place really?

A burst of high-pitched giggles made her turn around. Moondancer was doing voices for the characters as they spoke, and right now her impression of a disgruntled toad was making Lemon Hearts shriek and bite her hoof while Twinkleshine snorted uncontrollably. Twilight went over to the couch, nudged Trixie over, and curled up under a quilt with her to listen. And she couldn’t help but think even while she did.

The weakening eye of day…like strings of broken lyres….

It really was a funny story. Moondancer didn’t just have a suite of voices, she also had a great sense of comedic timing, and her eyes and movements were incredibly expressive.

Alluring, Earth seducing, with high conceits….

It was a sad story. Friendships were made and broken and remembered and forgotten. Twilight had read sad stories before, but Moondancer brought them to life in a way that was different from her own imagination. With that perspective, Twilight could see that the events weren’t just sad but were also something to be sad about. And there were reasons to tell sad stories, which was a different point altogether.

Burning to wash, at every beach….

Mostly it was a strange story. Twilight thought of thoughts that followed from water like alluvium. Economists had stopped writing books when they all agreed enough on everything that papers sufficed instead. If you were writing a book, then you were probably pretty lonely.

It was nice to be listening to a story together.

And I wonder about this lifetime with myself, this dream I'm living.

It ended. Moondancer closed the book and smiled at them.

“That was wonderful,” said Twilight. Something felt like it was glowing inside of her. It was too bright to look at, and yet she couldn’t tear her eyes away.

“It was a story,” said Moondancer simply.

“Look,” said Twinkleshine sleepily.

Twilight looked. Outside the window, the sky was changing color. Its deep purple was brushed with silver all of a sudden, and lights from the distant nameless city began to reflect along its surface.

“I think we stayed up all night,” said Twinkleshine. “That’s twilight.”

“It’d be dawn, wouldn’t it?” said Moondancer.

Trixie flashed a smile. “Dawn is twilight, just coming around from the other side.”

The sky continued to come to life. Silver light became a warm, generative blue. Twilight could make out the shape of the clouds now and saw how they were made of fine strands tossed over each other like wind-combed manes. Reflected images of city streets swam between them.

“I, I think,” said Twilight, “that if you reverse everything, you don’t get a sunrise with different colors. Everything sort of starts changing, and it changes in unexpected ways.”

“Do you get this?” Minuette gawked open-mouthed at the sky.

“What makes you think I’ve done the math?”

“You’re Twilight Sparkle!”

Everypony laughed.

“I suppose I am,” Twilight said, “for voluntary defense fund purposes, if nothing else. But I’m not sure I’m the same pony that I was at the start of this field trip. I never paid much attention to the ponies in our class before…maybe I got too used to having no pony to pay attention to before I came to this school. I’ve learned now how incredible you all can be. Trixie, who helped us take control of our dreams so that we could explore the Sleeping side of the Bank….”

Trixie blinked at her, then dipped her head in a bow.

“Lemon Hearts, who faced the monster in her mind and soothed it with promises of care….”

Lemon Hearts grinned toothily.

“Twinkleshine, who put light into the darkness and built structure into the void….”

Twinkleshine’s smile was pretty and sad and proud.

“Minuette, who danced with the Earth and led us into the heart of the Bank….”

Minuette beamed.

“Moondancer, who passed this night for us with joy and laughter and the good kind of sorrow, the anticipated pain of realizing that good memories are being made….”

Moondancer looked like she was about to cry, her smile being squeezed by her quivering cheeks.

“I wish that I hadn’t taken you all along with me on this adventure because it doesn’t seem like it’s going to have a happy ending. But I’m glad that all of you are my friends.”

Light was blooming in the sky. Rain fell like melting silver from finely spun clouds, and light weaved a path through the raindrops. As the light curled and spun past the rain, it began to bend and refract, the light brighter and brighter as the light twisted to find a path through the rain. As the angles sharpened, the light brightened, separating, until a brilliant rainbow arc suddenly erupted in the middle of the sky. Half of it went in one direction, flying over the end of the Earth or something else, wherever they really were, and the other half of it flashed through the window and spilled into the library. It dodged past them and struck a hard right angle at the central desk, heading out of the door.

As the light brushed by Twilight’s cheek, it didn’t feel like a Sun-thing or a Moon-thing, an Awake-thing or an Asleep-thing. It felt like a real thing, because light really is built like that: it’s not one color but many, and when you challenge it to find its way, it shows you how beautiful it really is.

“Follow that rainbow!” Twilight leaped to her hoofs. The others didn’t need to be told twice.

“NO RUNNING IN THE LIBRARY!” the shadow librarian thundered as they galloped toward the door.

“Sorry!” Moondancer called back to her. “Thank you for the lovely evening!”

“THANK THEE FOR ENJOYING THE BOOKS!”

The rainbow zigged and zagged down the sleeping corridors. Twilight and her friends raced to keep up. They were going so fast that she didn’t notice when they were running up the underside of a flight of stairs or down a winding ramp of shadow and starlight. Their dozen-and-dozen hoofs hammered the floor and made the only sound that’s ever heard in space, the sound of things following paths anciently determined and newly computed.

They stopped in a lobby with a welcome sign, a map, and a front desk for somepony to sit at. Aside from them, it was empty of ponies. Twilight gazed at it all and saw the dream of visitors….

The door to the exit of the Bank was right in front of them.

“I guess this is it,” said Moondancer. “Will we still be asleep when we go out there?”

“It is morning,” said Twinkleshine, a smile free of irony on her face. “So we had better be waking up, like it or not!”

“My alarm is probably going off soon,” Trixie said. “I bet the girls in the adjacent rooms will be upset if I don’t get back in time to turn it off.” She grinned mischievously. “But they’ll miss the beautiful sunrise if they don’t wake up.”

Lemon Hearts suddenly had a dreamy expression. “And they’re probably making breakfast in the cafeteria…hot oatmeal crammed full of apples and cinnamon, pancakes smothered in honey, hazelnut smoothies and hashed oats….”

“No pony is going to believe us,” Minuette said. “They’ll say we made it up while we slept in the Earth Room, waiting for Princess Celestia to rescue us. I’ll be wondering myself in a week if we didn’t dream this whole thing.”

“There’s no mistaking that,” said Twilight, looking at the rainbow light flowing through the crack under the door to the Bank.

They looked at each other, none of them wanting to say it, none of them sure what would be lost and what would be gained when they stepped outside, what they would wake up to and what they would dream of again. Something was pulling them together, and it had nothing to do with the Numeraire.

“Come on, girls,” said Twilight. “I think they’re worried enough about us out there.”

She took a step toward the door.

“EXCUSE ME.”

They turned to see the shadow librarian drifting through the wall blocking off the corridor they had tried to walk through earlier.

“I BELIEVE THOU HAST SOMETHING THAT BELONGS ON THIS SIDE OF THE BANK.”

Guiltily, Twilight pulled out the icy-cold, faintly warm black cube and held it out, but the shadow librarian didn’t respond. “Here,” said Twilight. She handed over the Silver Key, and the shadow librarian drifted back through the blocked passage.

“Didn’t Princess Celestia need that?” Moondancer asked.

Twilight remembered the strange dance of gain and loss on the map in the Day side of the Bank. “I think…maybe she wants the key to the Night side, but what she needs is somepony to walk in with.”

She took a deep breath. “Ready?"

They were. Twilight opened the door.

Golden sunlight flooded in. The rainbow rushed out and disappeared in the morning air. But Twilight never forgot what it had looked like.

Next Chapter: Twinkleshine Estimated time remaining: 1 Hour, 31 Minutes