Lacking a sense of self, are you truly conscious? Do you actually exist?
Numbers, like fiery comets, whirled in a halo around a gravitational center—lazy red or orange digits, blurring in waves of heat, trailing fire; still readable. Sometimes they became green, blue, orange, and purple, spinning so quickly they merged into a thousand white lines defining chaotic orbits forming a bright wobbling ring around a...
What? Somepony? Who was no longer there?
Not outer space.
Not dark.
Instead of a colorless void, this was incredibly bright. The accelerated magic rainbow-halo faded in and out of awareness.
Sounds.
Words floated in the ether, collecting as waves jostling pools now and again, then more often with babbling brooks of nonsense connecting them, working to bring order to bewilderment. Where they appeared, they acted as a brake on the all-surrounding magic, willing it from a parallel universe to stop.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
A familiar voice gave the words substance as syllables in a foreign language, more than babble, with cognates and accents so intimately familiar it ought have more been meaningful than the screech it rapidly became.
Yelling. Some of that. Sound could hurt, apparently.
Crying and begging. Some of that—
Stop! Stop!
Refusal!
The magic had to flow until the unseen worlds became whole again.
And the magic flowed.
And the worlds unseen became...?
Then—lest darkness fall to envelope a world far away, far more significant than any perception—the ambient magic shifted. A ticking sound grew, filling space with slowly flowing honey. It dripped in dollops of time itself. The insubstantial grew near, resolving into walls of metal, metamorphosing to layered fractal plains of moving gears and jittering little hammers that tilted right than left, right than left, right than left. Clockworks—time intersecting the magic dimension. Each gear, each hammer resolved into tiny fiery digits caught in congealed time, whirling and dancing as the reality they represented drifted together in the center of what I recognized as a cutie mark.
Darkness must not fall: The wish got wished, and the wish wound the clock thunderously. It would tick for another day...
Then another day...
Then another...
Darkness did not fall. The sun shined. The moon rose. A world turned without a curse reborn.
Then...
#
I reached out a hoof, and realized I did reach out a hoof. I floated, lay on my side pressed into something cloud-like. The floating sensation was a sensation of numbness, numbness that masked pain.
I'd been torn apart, I decided, flayed and sewn back together. So, I did feel the pain. I simply didn't care. I floated, manipulated by a drug to ignore a pain that ought be as annoying as would be somepony yelling in my ear.
Then...
Suddenly...
I cared. I shrieked. My world shrank to hot needles jabbed... everywhere! I jerked and spasmed. I hit metal and fabric. Restraints dug into legs that cramped and felt on fire.
Hooves and furry bodies pressed me into what had to be a bed.
A syringe stung my neck... Then, swiftly...
#
Darkness did not fall. Apparently, it had been me making it so that it did not fall.
#
Hooves kneaded my back muscles, alternating hoof pressure and frog pressure, pinching and circling. Tender muscles eased, but I hurt all over.
I realized I was thinking and thinking worked. I cared to analyze, and could.
I'd been hospitalized. Bed sores explained the massage.
I remembered the sensora and startled.
The hooves jerked back. Without the stimulation, pain filled the void. Muscles cramped. Tendons pulled. Simple aches returned, like having exercised too hard too long too many days in a row. It was like the worst flu imaginable. With drenching sweat I felt beading in large drips. Heat radiated from me like from a hot road in the desert.
I lay on my stomach. Wriggling taxed all my energy. An IV pulled at a vein. Sticky heart monitor pads pulled at my matted fur; lead wires cut into my chest.
With that clue, I heard my heart beat, amplified by a magical appliance. It echoed, sounding strong, if rapid. Light filled the room, but wasn't sun. Hooves returned to massaging. So good! I smelled menthol and cloves.
I lacked energy, but was healing.
I'd forgotten how to make my vocal cords work. A pillow propped up my chin. I could look. I tried. Sleep goo and dryness glued my eyes shut until repeatedly trying caused crystallized crust to release.
I levered myself up. Steel gleamed. A hospital bed. Daisy wallpaper lay beyond. An IV stand stood sentinel.
I slid my head over.
I expected to see the prince, who'd stretched me out the day of the Running of the Leaves— and I had a graphic picture to prove it. Maybe Citron, who struck me as a hooves-on type of guy, were I to give him the chance. Most likely was a random nurse-therapist.
A large pumpkin-colored mare with a brown mane massaged me. I recognized her and remembered her special talent allowed her to levitate herself by levitating brooms she straddled. Hooves jerked back. Her unique pale pink eyes flicked my way.
I got out in a whisper, "Broomhill Dare?"
She was my former teammate from Hooflyn. I'd sent her to Prancetown to earn her PhD—all tuition, room and board, paid. One of the ten I'd ensured received a royal pardon.
Was I still in Hooflyn? Had my time in Canterlot, at Celestia's School, being blackmailed as Running Mead's enforcer, having been coronated crown princess been a dream?
Was I actually that type of stupidly loyal pony? One, who told by Carne Asada to teleport her away from the bomb she'd tricked me into setting, would have? I was also the type who'd then think to evacuate the adjacent building—
—only to get caught up in the explosion.
In my muddled confused brain, that made a lot more sense than the remembered reality of me abandoning my employer to die in the explosion.
The mare cried out, "She's awake!"
In point of fact, I was already unconscious.
#
I was, however, conscious of being drugged. Not the overwhelming thing that had left me so apathetic about my pain that I didn't care if I were in pain. Whilst it didn't make me float, anymore, it did damp my sense of will.
For a controlling pony like me, also not good.
I saved the world from eternal night. Again. Commanded, I mindlessly cast the daily spell.
On Celestia? On Shining Armor?
I didn't know.
I heard chanting. It rhymed. The commands I perceived— through my ears, through scent cues, and through vibrations of tuning forks pressed on various point on my body—insisted I need to concentrate on healing myself, here, there, and this other place...
I woke fogged. I tried to think, but nothing happened. I found medicinal leaves stuffed in my mouth. Wide, cardboard-like—bitter when I tried to chew—I leaned my head to the right and spat them out.
A nurse rubbed my chest (I lay on my back), then patted my cheek. As I relaxed into my pillow, she said, "What she does is not fake, this pony I think is also awake."
Expert hooves wet my eyelids. Eye drops washed away mucus as I blinked them open. I saw a blurry powder blue ceiling with a magic light. A hoof used a metal rod to light me in places. A nurse's hooves resounded as she stepped into the hall. Over the beep-beep-beep of my heart, a page—unmistakably from a book—rustled as it turned.
A voice that could be none other than Twilight Sparkle's asked, "If reading to her about quantum superposition thaumaturgy woke her up, shouldn't we read the part that explains the happy/sad pony in a box superposition paradox, now?"
"Shhh!" Broomhill Dare said, then gently, "Grimoire?"
I remembered Grimoire, the name I'd chosen and used for a while, before Carne Asada created Starlight Glimmer and gave me emancipation papers—to make it unlikely I'd ever change the name. Though a pony could never trust an evil mob boss—giving me the name and papers was likely her manipulating of me—she'd been grateful I'd given my life to save hers from the griffon assassin.
I'd died that time. I'd died this time.
And been revived, I gathered, this time, too.