A/N: Apologies for what might be kind of crappy formatting. I literally finished this beast three minutes before the deadline. Fix'd. —Roger



“... so that’s what I’m saying, I don’t even know if she’s really that into me or if it’s just some weird emotional thing. I mean, I like her, an’ I guess she likes me back because she told me all that stuff about her issues with her dad and running away from home and all that, but like, there’s being a good friend and then there’s being better good friends and I don’t know where...”

Doctor Sparks yanked a piece of tape off the roll of his hooves and slapped it over the box he’d just finished packing, and briefly entertained the notion of using it next on the straw-haired colt jabbering away by the window. He wasn’t sure what it was about new medical residents that made them so prone to romantic disarray. His best guess was a potent cocktail of rampaging hormones and an alarming amount of caffeine, but he had also hypothesized that there was something about him that just made him seem approachable. Perhaps there was a thing as having too good of a bedside manner.

“Sheets,” he said, cutting off the other stallion’s monologue with a voice carrying a bit less nervous, early-morning energy, “do you remember what I told you the most important part of being a doctor was?”

“Uh... sign everything in triplicate and wear masks around the waiting room magazines?”

Sparks lit his horn and moved the sealed box on his desk down to the pile of them on the floor, leaving him ample space to level a cock-eyed stare at the resident. “Be observant,” he said. “And for the record, that one was a joke.”

Sheets swallowed audibly and nodded with his clamped between his teeth. A moment later, he blew it back out. “So...”

“So given your expertise in the area of observation, what would you say my perspective on your love life right now is?”

Back went the lip between his teeth. If they’d lived in a cartoon, Sparks could’ve imagined buckets worth of sweat spurting out from the young colt’s brow. “Sympathy?” he said after a few seconds of thought.

“Mmm,” the doctor said, rooting around in his desk drawer for any loose items he’d left behind. “Keep going.”

“Anger?” came the resident’s slightly shakier next guess.

“Warmer, but a little extreme.”

“Disinterest?”

“Ooh, so close...”

A single ballpoint pen rolled into view as Sparks jiggled his desk a bit, and he grabbed it just before he kicked the drawer shut and straightened up just in time to see bashful comprehension light up the resident’s face.

“Complete, crippling apathy?” Sheets said quietly. Sparks winked, and tapped the pen against the resident’s nose before tossing it into the last open box at the end of the row.

“Bingo.”

Sheets grinned and ducked his head a bit as a blush washed over his cheeks. “Sorry, Doc,” he said, shuffling out of the way as his boss navigated to the front of the room and started loading up a cart waiting in the hallway outside. “Guess I just... gotta get all this stuff out now, y’know? Seeing as you’re leavin’ and all.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, don’t be so sentimental about it,” Sparks said, grunting with exertion as he shoved a box into place on the cart. “Honestly, Sheets, it’s not like I’m falling off the face of the earth. I’m just moving to Canterlot. Not even a day’s walk from here.”

“Yeah, I... I guess you’re right,” Sheets said, picking up a box with the aura from his own horn and helping the doctor finish his work. Once the cart was full and Doctor Sparks's former office was more or less bare, Sparks himself let out a satisfied sigh and pointed a sideways glance at Sheets.

“And yet, you’re still worried about something.”

Sheets blushed again and scuffed his hoof against the floor. Sheesh, no wonder he couldn’t tell whether that mare was into him for his sex appeal.

“Nah, it’s... stupid,” he said, choosing to walk around to the back of the cart and start pushing instead of looking Sparks in the eye. “I don’t even wanna talk about it.”

Sparks stuck his forehoof out, and the cart slammed to a stop before it went more than a foot. “Well, Sheets, I’d say that’s highly unfortunate, because now you’ve gone and made me curious,” he said, “so as punishment for ruining all that good apathy I’d worked up, now you pretty much have to tell me.”

For a moment, Sheets was all smiles and sunshine again, but soon enough his face darkened. “It’s just...” he said, constructing each word slowly as if each were made of china and he was terrified of breaking them. “I mean, you’ve heard the stories, right?”

“About you and Buttercup? In incredible detail, yes.”

“No, about... about Canterlot General,” Sheets went on, pushing the cart back into motion with a bit more force this time. Sparks followed closely, even more intrigued now that he could hear a bit of an edge to the resident’s voice. “They... they say it’s haunted.”

Despite his best efforts—okay, maybe his half-flanked efforts—Sparks couldn’t suppress a snort. “Sheets, every hospital is supposed to be haunted,” he said, a friendly nudge in the shoulder serving as his way of adding “You big-hearted dolt” to the end of that sentence. “Matter of fact, there’s a ghost here too, down in Pediatrics. Big white mane, wrinkled face, paradoxical hatred of children and pathological fear of cats. We call her Hildy. She just adores residents.”

Once again, Sheets’ good cheer was fleeting. “I’m not just talking about creepy stories, though,” he explained. “I went to the library and read about the place a bit, and it’s, like... hardcore haunted. Apparently, there was this huge magical accident there a few centuries ago, and ever since it’s almost just normal for crazy stuff to happen. There was even a whole list of doctors that just straight disappeared there. Right in the middle of a shift.”

The two ponies reached the end of the hallway, and Sparks didn’t break stride as he pushed the exit door open and made his way out into the sun-washed courtyard. As Sheets squinted and blinked away the newfound spots in his eyes, Sparks turned around to face him and cocked his brow again. “A list?”

“Well... okay, it was like three doctors,” Sheets said once he’d regained enough of his senses to see the look his boss was giving him. “But that’s still a lot!”

At the end of the yard, a yellow-painted taxi wagon was waiting by the curb, its driver relishing in being a perfect Manehattan stereotype by leaning against the hitch with a grungy cigarette in one hoof and a cup of cheap coffee in the other. Sparks whistled and waved until he got the stallion’s attention, then turned his own back to Sheets. “Sheets, ghost stories are like alicorns,” he said. “Everypony knows one, and everypony wants you to think theirs is the only one that’s actually real.”

“So you don’t believe in ghosts, doc?”

Sparks shrugged, and motioned Sheets out of the way as the cabbie took hold of the cart and began loading its contents into the storage space beneath the cab. “I believe in imagination,” he said. “I believe that some ponies really think they heard something moving through their house after dark, and that their minds convince them it was something beyond the realm of normal magic. But as far as the real thing goes? They’re just old legends, Sparks. Nightmares, campfire stories... you know, I’d even say that in rare cases, intense fear or guilt alone can sometimes manifest as hallucinations.”

With a throaty cough, the cabbie packed the last box into the wagon and yanked up the tailgate up to lock them into place, then clunked his hoof against the bumper and gave the pair on the curb a reproachful stare. Sparks raised his foreleg to ask for a couple minutes more, and the cabbie responded with a dismissive shrug and a big swig from his coffee cup.

“There are all sorts of explanations for that kind of stuff, Sheets,” he said. Rare was the occasion that he’d drop his voice into an undiluted friendly tone for a resident, but Sheets, for lack of a better word, was special, if only because he was a potent reminder of how dopey Sparks had once been when he’d started at Manehattan General a decade and a half ago. “And most of them don’t take more than half a second’s worth of thought. Believe me, I’m gonna be fine. And hey, if I’m not, I’ll make sure to stop by here and haunt you a bit just so you can say ‘I told you so’.”

Finally, he got a genuine laugh out of Sheets, and for Sparks that was as good an achievement to skip town on as he could ask for. He clapped the resident on the shoulder and winked again, then hopped up into the back of the wagon and called out for the driver to shove off. As the cabbie begrudgingly stomped out his cig and made his way back around to his hitch, Sparks clambered over to the railing and looked down at a still chuckling Sheets.

“Oh, and since you’re so desperate for my advice,” he said, “just grow a pair and ask her out already. Worst thing you can do is fail, and that’s not about to change your life forever.”

It took Sheets a moment to notice that his jaw was bouncing off his chest, and another couple after that to push it back up and give him a jerky nod. “Yeah, I... I’ll do that,” he said. “Thanks, Doc.”

Sparks raised his eyebrows, and put on his best austere glare. “That’s Doctor Sparks to you, newbie,” he said. “Now get back inside and make your fellow residents proud, or I might just hop off this junker and steal that pretty little mare myself.”

Sheets laughed again, and lifted his hoof into a lazy salute. Sparks was halfway through returning the gesture when the wagon lurched into motion, and he managed to finish the gesture once he regained his balance.

“You just gotta have a little optimism, Sheets,” he called back as the wagon pulled out into the street and joined the flow of midday city traffic streaming by. “Trust me, it’s gonna be fine.”

Sheets waved and turned back into the courtyard, and Sparks settled down into his seat with nothing but content in his heart. He’d miss Manehattan once he was gone: all the noise, all the drama, and especially all the characters that inhabited it. But at the same time, he couldn’t bring himself to be all that sad about it. He wasn’t just moving on; he was moving up, to the biggest and best hospital in Equestria to take on the position of assistant chief of surgery. It was a dream job. This was a dream opportunity. And even though Sheets could no longer hear him, he went ahead and repeated his last words to him under his breath.

“It’s gonna be fine,” he told himself. “Everything is going to be fine.”

Sparks leaned back and relaxed, and the sun beamed down at him overhead. It was going to be a beautiful day.

---

A hypnic jerk, sometimes colloquially referred to as a night start, is an involuntary twitch that occurs just before going to sleep, often accompanied by a falling sensation and an elevated heart rate as if you’d just been shocked by something you hadn’t expected to see. Doctor Sparks had heard countless patients ask him about that ailment, and every time he gave them the same answer: it’s normal, it happens to everyone, just try to keep a regular sleep schedule and do relaxing things before bed. He told himself the same things whenever he felt one, and usually they worked. But every time he had experienced that phenomenon, it had been during hypnagogia, during the last stage of consciousness before his brain shut off.

You weren’t supposed to feel it once you were already asleep.

Sparks awoke with a shout, his teeth gritted and his hooves clenched against the edges of the cot inside his office. For a minute or two, he just lay there without unwinding his coiled limbs, focused only on taking deep breaths and slowing down his pulse to the point where it didn’t feel like his heart was about to break through his ribs. Once he felt relatively calm again, he let his head fall back onto his pillow and pried his forelegs loose from the metal supports underneath his makeshift bed. As he stared up at the ceiling, his mind raced with questions. What was that all about? What kind of dream had he been having? Why was it still so hard to calm himself down?

Why was the hallway outside so dark?

Sparks rolled out of bed and gingerly stood up, his legs sore from his earlier shift and still a bit stiff from what must’ve been a doozy of a night terror. Stars, if only he could remember what it was! He’d been here at the hospital, he thought... something to do with a patient. A surgery, perhaps? Yeah, a surgery, and a tough one too: flying accident, severe spinal injuries, massive internal bleeding... familiar. Almost like déjà vu. Had he had that dream before? And then at the end, a throbbing hum, and a giant flash of light...

Sparks shook his head and forced himself to take another breath. There’d be time for interpreting his dreams later. Right now, he had more pressing matters to attend to. Like why, for example, why the emergency backup generators were still apparently about as useful as two three-hundred-pound paperweights. Of course, he was sure the higher-ups had a lot of other things on their plates besides replacing the generators. After all, he’d only been hounding them about the issue ever since he transferred here two years ago.

Sparks swung his office door open and stepped into the hallway, mostly just to confirm what he’d been able to tell by looking under the door from his cot: against all manner of government regulations and public health codes, the power was out seemingly building-wide. He scowled and swung his door closed, resolving to be much less civil in his next angry letter to the Board about proper maintenance and procedure. On the one hoof, it wasn’t terribly critical that they maintain power here every hour of the day; unlike some newer hospitals, Canterlot General’s technomagical assets mainly consisted of overhead lighting and standard medical equipment.

But on the other hoof, what in Equestria was he supposed to do if something did happen at a time like this? Forget his nightmare a moment ago; they’d be living in a real one soon enough if a patient so much as caught cold with the whole building out of commission. Months of paperwork, a media scandal, probably a full-scale investigation and the vetting of at least half a dozen key personnel... and the stars only knew what the Princesses would think. Thank the both of them that they at least didn’t have any patients in critical condition at the moment. With a bit of luck, he’d be able to corral some nurses and have this mess sorted out by morning.

Sparks took a moment to situate himself in the darkened corridor, then faced him to the right and started walking. Every building looked different under the hood of near-complete darkness, and Canterlot General was the poster child for that effect: long hallways, cramped ORs, outdated furnishings and a musty smell that somehow pervaded even the new psych wing on the building’s east end. To be perfectly honest, it was nothing short of a certified dump. But it was a big dump, and an important one, Sparks often reminded himself. And sooner or later, he’d be in a position to whip this place into proper shape.

Sparks rounded the corner at the end of the hallway, and a shudder crawled down his spine. Stars above, it was cold in here. Had the central heating gone down too? Sparks adjusted his course a bit and brushed his shoulder against the wall, and goosebumps rose on his skin as the peeling wallpaper came into contact with it. Ice-cold. This night just kept getting better and better.

He quickened his pace and kept going, the fur on his neck beginning to prickle. There was another more personal reason he’d been so eager to solve the generator problem when he’d been let in on it during his first month here, and in fact it was a rather simple one: hospitals at night were just damn creepy. His hooves clacked against the tile with every step and the noise receded far into the distance, only to echo back a second or two later than he figured they should’ve, like the delayed response of some copycat at the far side of the wing. The silence, contradictory as the phrase was, felt deafening; there was no sound but that of his own breathing, of his heart pounding deep inside his ears like the thump of a hoof against a heavy wooden door. Hidden away in this wing were fifty-six patients and the rest of the night staff, but for all the world Sparks could’ve sworn that not a soul remained in the building besides him.

Sparks took another breath, and rolled his shoulders. He’d come to a stop in front of one of the doors on the hall; a faintly visible plaque on its front displayed its room number overtop a patient identification sheet too blurry to make out, and twenty feet down the hallway he could see the protruding corner of the nurse’s station. A part of him wanted to veer off course for a moment and push the door open, to peek inside and ensure that there was a patient asleep in bed, that there were other ponies in here still perfectly content and blissfully unaware of the situation outside their doors.

His hoof was half-raised to touch the knob, actually, when his neck prickled again and he tore his eyes away. As much as he was sure everything inside was completely normal, the hypnotizing, infuriating possibility that it wasn’t made the choice unbearable. The broken lights were messing with his head. He needed to get himself under control and keep moving. He needed to fix this.

He jogged the rest of the way up to the nurse’s station and opened his mouth to start berating them for not coming to get him sooner, but the words died in his throat as soon as they’d formed. The nurse’s station was empty, not just of anypony who most certainly should’ve still been there, but of anything at all. The desks were cleaned out, their drawers left yanked open and their tops coated with dust, and the big board showing the schedule for ward rounds and operations for the day was blank, its surface scratched and faded as if somebody had scraped it clean with the edge of their hoof. A single lit candle stood at the front counter, but other than that there was no movement. He shivered again. If anything, it was even colder now.

He made his way towards the candle, his eyes never straying from it despite the flickering shadows tugging at his attention. With no breeze to disturb it, the flame on the wick was still, and only a few thin strips of wax had dripped down into the pan beneath it. It hadn’t been lit that long ago. Somepony still had to be around. So where were they? And why weren’t they still here trying to figure out what was going on?

Another shout built up in his lungs, and as he took in a breath to fuel it, something caught in the corner of his eye. Movement in the window. Something darting out of view just before he could turn to see it. He looked over anyway, and it reappeared: a tiny white speck, fluttering around on the wind. It was followed by another speck, then another, and soon the window was full of them. They bounced noiselessly off the glass. Piled up on the sill.

Snow.

It was snowing outside the window.

It was August.

Sparks let out the air trapped in his chest, and it came away from his mouth in a shapeless white cloud. Something was wrong here, not just with the lights but with the whole building. There should’ve been somebody else here, should’ve been a functional generator, should’ve been some sign that he wasn’t the only pony left alive in the world, snowed into a silent hospital in the middle of summer. He stared back at the candle, watching the flame imperceptibly eat away at the wax and trying to absorb as much of its feeble light as he could, and reasoned out his next move.

Even if this wing was empty, there should still be somepony down in the lobby, or at least some other indication of what was going on. If not there, he could go outside, wade through the newborn drifts and check a few houses along the road. There was an explanation for all this, and all he needed to do was keep his head on his shoulders and go hunt it down. He turned in place, and the report of his hooves echoed back at him a second too late. The stairs. He needed to find the stairs. He needed to start moving and keep moving and keep calm and not panic and—

Beep.

Sparks twitched and whipped around, and the candle flame dipped and shuddered from the sudden motion. That sound. He knew that sound. Quick, sudden, like the sound of a glass cracking. Like the pulse in his ears.

Beep.

An EKG machine. There was an EKG machine somewhere in the ward, and if the machine was beeping, that meant it was on, and if the machine was on that there must be power. And yet, the lights stayed dark, and the hallway cold.

Beep.

Down the rightside hallway, maybe a hundred yards away. Once he walked over that way and peered around the corner, he could see the door open about a hundred yards away, light flooding out from inside the operating room. Why just that room? What happened to all the other lights?

Beep.

Just one room. He had to check just that one room, then he could go downstairs. Sparks stared down the hallway at the flickering light. He didn’t move.

Beep...

He had no choice. He had to go.

Beep... beep...

He had to go now.

Before he could think better of it, Sparks ducked out from behind the nurse’s station, starting out with a composed trot that soon evolved into a jog. His hoofsteps reverberated all around him, ever so slightly off pace with the motions of his legs.

Beep, beep, beep, beep...

Speeding up. The monitor was getting louder, and behind it he could now hear something else: a constant rattling noise like somepony shaking a chainlink fence. He picked up his pace, and the echoes got louder. Closer.

Beep beep beep beep beep beep...

He reached the door already breathless, his legs weak and his ears numb from the cold. The machine was reaching a crescendo, and the rattling doubly so. It was coming from inside the room.

He took a step forward and looked inside, and the air froze around him. Rusted tools and instruments lay scattered and broken on the floor and embedded in the walls, and lit by a single flaring surgical lamp, a green-coated earth stallion lay convulsing on a spindly operating table, his chest peeled open and pinned back with black clamps coated with congealed blood. The straps crossed over him cut into his legs and neck as he thrashed around underneath them, and when a particularly violent spasm arched his back off the table and made his bindings screech in complaint, Sparks caught a glimpse of frothing, bone-white lips and half-lidded eyes rolled all the way back in his head.

There wasn’t time to think. There was barely even time to react. Sparks let out a panicked cry and bolted inside the operating room, and the echo following his hoofsteps was almost immediate.

Be-be-be-be-be-be-be-be...

“Nurse!” he screamed, his throat seared raw from the shout he couldn’t even be sure there was anyone around to hear. “Somebody, get in here!”

Diving into a procedure without prepping in the washroom or getting into scrubs was a one-way ticket to a new career as a fry cook, but at the moment Sparks couldn’t have begun to care less. The building was deserted, the power was on the fritz, and some despicable lunatic had left a patient alone on the operating table in the middle of a moondamned open-heart surgery. At this point, anypony still worried about regulations could go marry the freaking things for all he cared.

As best he could, Sparks got himself into position overtop the patient and tried to get a gauge on the situation, but the stallion was moving with a strength that he couldn’t begin to contain. He could guess well enough that the patient was in the middle of a full-blown cardiac arrest, but without full knowledge of his medical history he’d be shooting blind on a gut instinct. Not to mention the fact that there was a gaping hole in his chest filled with distended intestines and broken ribs, the visibly battered heart beneath all of them frantically pulsing to keep pumping blood out of it and into his exposed abdomen.

His lungs heaving, his hooves still hanging helplessly in midair, Sparks stood paralyzed over the shuddering body. He thought of yelling for help again, but no one had come the first time. Why would this time be any different? He was alone. He was alone in an abandoned hospital, with nothing to work with and a dying stallion whose remaining life was surely being measured in seconds. He couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t help this patient.

He couldn’t save him.

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—

The stallion’s head lolled back, and the twitching organ inside his chest went horrifically still. Every hair on Sparks's body was on end, and every inch of skin beneath them was numb. Flatline. Full arrest. No hope of defibrillation. Nopony even left to share in the terror, to grasp onto and huddle together with to block out the keen of the EKG and the terrible silence behind it.

He stepped back from the table, stumbling off the raised dias hard enough to smack into the wall behind him. Alone. The word sizzled in his mind like it had been branded there. Alone. One patient had died, more would surely follow, and here he was unable to move, struck dumb by the thought of being in a powerless hospital surrounded by countless clueless ponies whose countdowns to expiration had all started ticking down. Of being stranded. Of being alone.

He barely registered the noise the first time it reached his ears; it was so faint and so obscured behind the wail of the machine beside him that he’d half-believed he imagined it. When it came again, though, he could no longer ignore it. Metal clattering against metal, somewhere in the hallway that looked black as pitch from where he stood mutely staring out at it. Surprise gave way to fear, and from there developed into anger. Somepony else was in the hospital. He wasn’t alone in here. And Celestia help her, somepony was going to answer for this.

He pushed away from the wall too hard and careened back onto the dias, bouncing off the edge of the table and jostling the slack, deadened leg of the stallion still fastened onto it. He stared down at the corpse as the edges of his vision went red, and then threw open a nearby cabinet and dug around inside it until he found a threadbare sheet to cover the body with. Once that was done, he shoved into the open door hard enough to send it careening back into the wall with a resounding crack. He stood waiting outside for one second, two seconds, five... and he heard it again. Creaking metal. Squeaking hinges.

A wheelchair, ditched in the hallway who knew long ago, rolling slowly into view from around another bend a few yards away. He could see a figure shambling away into the shadows behind it. They hadn’t noticed him yet. He was about to change that.

“Hey!”

The pony was close enough to be in earshot, but didn’t even miss a step as they continued their plodding journey down the hall. There was something odd about the way they were walking, like the hallway was tilted slightly and they were trying to compensate for it. It occurred to Sparks as he jumped into a jog again that this might not even be another staff member, that it might very well be a patient wandering around trying to find someone to help them. As he got closer, he saw the tattered gown hanging off their flanks, the loosened bandages trailing from their legs. He lowered his tone a bit, and called to them again.

“Excuse me, I... I’m Doctor Sparks, I’m assistant chief of surgery. We’ve had a power outage and I need you to... hello? Hello, can you hear me?”

Still, the patient didn’t respond. It seemed to be a mare, as best he could tell, and with that clarity came a similar recognition of why her pace through the hallway was so odd. One of her hind legs was bowed out at a sickening angle, the bone clearly broken at the joint and not set with even a basic splint. The hoof dragged uselessly behind her, scuffing and bobbing against the floor as she clumped forward, and Sparks could hear her muttering to herself beneath the skittering noise.

A chill rose up on the back of his neck again. A normal pony would be lucky—or perhaps unlucky—to be conscious with an injury like that, let alone mobile. “Ma’am?” he said, no longer strong enough to let out much more than a whisper. “Ma’am, are you all ri—”

The mare’s breath hitched, and Sparks stopped dead in his tracks. She had frozen no more than ten yards ahead of him with her head bowed and her legs still as stone. It seemed for a moment she had even stopped breathing. Then without warning, she twitched again, and her broken leg scuffed at the floor. There was something wrong with her neck. Her head shouldn’t have bobbed that much. He should’ve been able to see it above her torso.

She turned around.

Sparks's mouth went dry, and his throat sealed over and stopped up with a silent scream. The mare’s head stayed suspended over her chest for a moment, then tipped over and sagged sideways in front of her shoulder, swinging back and forth at an almost perfect right angle at the end of a neck that had been snapped cleanly in two. Her mouth hung open under widened, veinless eyes, and from deep within her throat, her hoarse, wheezing voice resurfaced.

“Daaaaaah...”

Sparks tried to breathe, but his muscles wouldn’t obey. He stood staring at her, gasping for air that wouldn’t come, fighting against legs that would not, could not move.

“Daaaaahccck...”

Her moan was pitiful... plaintive. She was pleading with him. Begging him for help. Begging him to help her.

“Daaaahccktooooor...”

Sparks's jaw snapped shut, and his mind flashed blank. The mare lurched forward at twice the speed she’d traveled before, and he tore his eyes away and threw himself into a dead sprint back down the hallway.

His breaths came in searing bursts, each one bigger than the last and yet seeming to pull less and less oxygen into his lungs. Roaring, blinding panic overwhelmed him, stopped up his ears and narrowed his vision to a pulsing black tunnel that ended at the little speck of light still visible from the operating room. The clicking, ear-splitting sound of hoofbeats came at him from all directions, punctuated by his own desperate sobs and an implacable ragged growl that seemed to be getting louder with every step. He had no way of knowing how close the mare who should have been dead—who must have been dead—who couldn’t possibly not be dead—was behind him, and he didn’t bother looking back. He didn’t care to know. He couldn’t bear to know.

Instead, he just ran, slipping and sliding over the freezing tiles until he reached the operating room again, until he crashed against the frame and slammed the door shut behind him with enough force to shake the whole room. Bits of metal and glass went flying beneath his hooves as they kept moving without any force to guide them, carrying him past the sheet-covered table and leaving him in a sprawling, shuddering heap in the far corner of the room. He scrambled a bit farther under the table, sending more debris skittering away from his uncoordinated hooves, and kept unblinking watch on the door, counting off each second that went by without a sign that the mare had seen him come in here.

One.

Who was that?

Two.

What had happened to them?

Three.

What had happened to him?

Four.

What the hell was going on in here?

Five.

Sparks leaned his head against one of the support struts bolting the table to the floor, and the cold, pockmarked steel gave him something physical to hold onto, something to anchor him down long enough to give himself some clarity. He let his eyes fall shut long enough to fill his lungs and empty them, and the piercing knot in his chest loosened ever so slightly

Ten.

Something had gone horribly wrong. Not just in the hospital, but maybe in the whole city. Maybe all over Equestria. The hospital staff was gone, vanished or imprisoned or something unimaginably worse, and in their stead they’d left... well, they’d left him. For whatever reason, he was still here, trapped in a ransacked OR beneath a stiffening, mutilated corpse and running from some unholy creature that he had no way of escaping from.

Fifteen.

Until he’d actually been quick enough. Unless she really hadn’t seen him come in here. Unless, provided he stayed in here long enough and waited for her to wander off, he could sneak out of the wing and make it out to the city proper to find out what was really going on. He took another breath, and his pulse impossibly to slow. He was safe in here. He could wait her out in here. He could just—

Twenty.

The impact against the door was titanic, the frame groaning and the hinges shrieking in pain as they desperately tried to keep from breaking apart. Sparks's head banged against the table, and he cried out in equal parts pain and sheer terror as stars floated in his eyes and sawdust sprinkled down from the door in front of him. Was it her? Had she heard him yell? Did it even matter at this point?

The door shook again, and the deafening crack of splintering wood was even louder this time. With limbs that seemed to be carved of stone, Sparks pulled himself up onto his hooves and faced the door, backing away without any thought or intention until his rump was pressed into the cabinet in the back. There were no windows in the room, nowhere else big enough for him to hide. He could attack her... and do what? Break her neck again? Tear off the head of a monster that clearly didn’t need it to pursue him?

A third collision rattled through the room and vibrated in his bones, and a jagged fissure split open down the center of the door. On the next hit, she’d break through. He’d have to run again. Sparks gritted his teeth and steeled his legs. He braced a hoof against the cabinet to give him leverage, and lowered himself into a runner’s crouch. And he waited.

But the final blow never came.

He waited ten seconds, twenty, a full minute, and the door held firm. With every moment that passed, his head grew lighter, and a buzzing keen grew louder in his ears. He swiveled his head around and let his eyes dart across the room as much as he dared, and eventually he realized the noise’s source: the EKG machine was still on, still screeching in alarm at the flat green line blazing a constant, redundant trail across its tiny monitor.

He reached out with his hoof and slapped it against the control panel on the wall, and finally found the switch to cut the machine off. The silence nearly knocked him off his hooves. He’d be so concerned with the mare in the hallway that he hadn’t even registered the sound in the background, and now that it was gone it felt like a hole had been cut in his head and been left to eat outwards through the rest of his body. Once again, only his own breathing cut through the suffocating hush, along with a low, barely audible throbbing noise that seemed to be coming from deep beneath his hooves.

He’d thought before of leaving the operating room, of slinking away once it was safe outside and searching for somepony sane enough to explain to him what he was dealing with. He harbored no such heroic ideas now. Right now, all he could think of doing was standing here with his eyes closed, leaning against the wall and just breathing in and breathing out. Listening to the gentle pulse of the noise down below him. Feeling it reverberate up through his hooves and tingle in his stomach.

Was it getting louder?

Sparks opened his eyes and took a breath... and this time, it echoed. Just like in the hallway, the noises from his body repeated a moment later. A second too late. The pulsing was in the walls now, an immense heartbeat amplified by the very building that seemed to contain it. It was getting faster too.

His lips parted, and he took another breath. The echo came two seconds late. With every pulse, the overhead light flashed a little brighter, painting the walls a cleaner shade for a split second at a time. Sparks turned his head and scanned the room, but there was nopony else inside with him but the stallion on the table, still covered with the sheet in the same place Sparks had left him.

One more breath. The echo came almost right on top of it.

It wasn’t the overhead light that was making the walls brighter. The walls themselves were pulsing, glowing with some unknown energy that grew in strength every time it surged through the building and painted the walls a brilliant white. In between flashes, Sparks watched the sheet on the table. The changing, quickening light made it look like it was moving, like the stallion beneath it was still thrashing around without the influence of a functioning heart.

The noise pressed down on him from all sides. The pulses were almost blinding now, and in the last second before he was forced to squeeze his eyes shut, Sparks turned his gaze towards the stallion’s covered head.

He held his breath. The echo came anyway.

And in the split-second before the pulsing stopped and the light exploded with an earth-shattering boom, in perfect sync with the reflected sound, he saw the portion of the sheet covering the corpse’s mouth flutter.

---

When Sparks opened his eyes again, he had to stop and stare for a moment before he could be sure he was still standing in the same room. The operating table, the dead stallion, the scattered tools and broken cabinets... everything was gone, whisked away without a trace as if it had never been there at all. The furnishings that had now replaced it seemed almost quaint by comparison: a wooden-framed bed made up with spotless grey sheets, a rickety side table, a window with a dim ray of light sneaking in through the gap in the curtains. What had just moments ago been a nightmarish OR was now just an ordinary room. Almost a familiar room, somehow...

Sparks straightened up from the crouch the blast had pushed him into, and with his heart pounding in his throat, he faced the door. The wood was flawless, the hinges dull but clean and unbroken. He grasped the knob with his magic, and it swung open easily with only the tiniest of squeaks. Good sense told him to wait until he could piece together what could’ve caused all this, but overwhelming curiosity pushed him forward and forced him back outside. Without the immediate danger of the walking, breathing dead, he found himself much more willing to duck out from his hiding place and look around for clues about the bizarre twist his night had taken.

The hallway was still dark, but not so much that he couldn’t easily find his way around. He craned his neck up to look for the broken overhead lights, but all he found was a smooth plaster ceiling. Instead of technomagical lights, the hallway was lined with old-fashioned oil lamps, all of them filled up with fuel and not a single one of them lit. He definitely wasn’t in the hospital anymore, and that meant he was definitely safe from that awful mare that had chased him back into the OR. The warmth of that thought did wonders for his nerves, but with it came a new and perhaps even more pressing question: if he wasn’t in Canterlot General, then where in Equestria was he? And what kind of building in the nation’s capital city would still run on gas lamps and not have so much as a whiff of magical security?

“Hey, Sparky!”

Instinct told him to jump at the sudden call, but a strange union of rationality and forgotten memory settled him down a moment after. That shout wasn’t made out of anger or bloodlust; it sounded innocent, even playful. Sparks looked down the hall and zeroed in on a tiny figure waving at him from the far end, but he couldn’t make out any details from this far away. He squinted his eyes and took a few steps forward, and suddenly a blue-coated unicorn colt who couldn’t have been a day over eight crystallized into view, his eyebrows bumping against his fringe and his face split in half behind a gap-toothed grin.

“Yeah, you!” the colt shouted. “What, didya think I was talkin’ to the wall? C’mon, egghead!”

The colt waved again and pointed towards a split in the hallway next to him, and Sparks racked his brain for some sort of concrete memory to connect with him. He knew he recognized the kid from somewhere: that brash look, that excited tone, that cheeky grin he never went without. Who was he? And why was he so sure he’d chased after him like this before?

“C’mon!”

Without waiting for a reply, the colt planted his hooves on the ground and darted out of sight into the other hallway. Sparks stared at the spot he’d left for a moment, then picked up his hooves and started running, his mind spinning and some unidentifiable corner of his heart twinging with phantom pain. He skidded around the first corner just in time to see the colt’s bushy tail disappear around another one, so he kept running, always a step close enough to tell where he’d gone and a step too far back to catch another solid glimpse.

“This way!”

Sparks ramped up his pace and pushed himself nearly into a full sprint again, but no matter how fast he ran, the gap between the colt and him never got any smaller. Sweat began to bead at his temple and dripped into his eyes, and the hairs in his mane prickled with heat. It had been freezing inside the hospital a few minutes before, but in this place it was scorching, the heat getting more intense every time it washed over him as he entered a new hallway. It had been snowing outside the last time he’d checked, but now all he could see under each door he passed was an otherworldly red light that spilled across the creaking floorboards and dyed the overcast sky an angry shade of maroon.

He rounded what must’ve been the dozenth corner the colt had led him past, and without warning a wall of scalding air stopped him dead in his tracks. This wasn’t normal. This wasn’t right. As the colt bounded away again, Sparks slowed to a walk, about all he could manage through the oppressive heat he could see distorting the very air in front of him. Ahead of him, the entire hallway was flooded with orange light, all of it seeming to shine in from a floor-to-ceiling window set right in its center. He pushed his way over to it and looked outside, and for just a fraction of a second, he felt cold again. It took precisely that length of time for him to realize what he was seeing, and that same period doubled for him to realize it was real.

Outside the window, the city of Canterlot was on fire.

He couldn’t identify the source of the blaze, but at its current stage knowing the cause would hardly help anyone. There wasn’t a house or building in sight that wasn’t swathed in rippling red flames, that wasn’t collapsing into cinders or crumbling away into ash before his very eyes. From this vantage point, he could even see portions of the building he was in, and he watched in mute horror as a bell tower across the street splintered at its base four stories below and toppled over the abandoned road towards the burning wing over to his left.

The tower touched down with a blast of superhearted air and a stomach-churning crunch, its colossal impact enough to cleave through two floors and nearly knock Sparks to the ground. By the time he straightened back up again, his heart had sank. That wing was where the little colt had just run off to. He would’ve been there himself if he hadn’t stopped to look out this window.

With watery eyes and aching, smoke-filled lungs, Sparks staggered around the corner and yelled out for the colt whose name he’d never even asked for. In the distance, he could see the raging inferno that had started up where the tower had crashed through the ceiling, and in front of it, a small figure stood staring into it, untouched by the flames but only a few short yards from where they were crawling across the floorboards towards him.

“Kid!” Sparks said, coughing from the exertion and from the smoke clogging up his throat. “Kid, c’mon, we gotta get out of here!”

At the sound of Sparks's voice, the colt slowly turned around, but he made no motion to come back towards him. His eyes were rimmed red from the blaze, but no tears were dripping down his cheeks.

“You’re such a baby, Sparky,” he said dismissively. “What’re ya afraid of?”

Sparks opened his mouth to speak, but his throat seized up and he dissolved into a coughing fit again. The colt shook his head, and a smirk played across his lips.

“You know what Miss Heart always says. You can’t fail unless you don’t try.”

The colt’s smile vanished, and suddenly his eyes were black as coal. “Have you tried yet, Sparky? Have you really tried?”

“What... what are you...” Sparks tried to say. The colt shook his head, and his smile returned.

“Honest, Sparky, just do it,” he murmured. “I trust you, Sparky. Didn’t you trust me?”

The flames were inches between the colt, practically licking at his heels. There was still time for Sparks to sprint forward and grab him, but he couldn’t have moved now even though his life probably depended on it. He’d finally remember where he knew the colt from, and the thing standing ten yards in front of him couldn’t possibly be him.

“C’mon, Sparky...” the colt said. The flames were upon him, surrounding him, batting at his tail and dancing around his hooves...

“Come on and play.”

The wind roared in triumph, and the flames finally caught. The colt went up like a lit match, the fire enveloping him and swallowing him up in the time it took to blink, and Sparks collapsed as a thousand screaming voices tore into his ears. They were coming from everywhere, from every room he’d passed and every hallway he’d left unexplored: the sounds of colts, fillies, adult mares and stallions burning and suffering in incomprehensible agony. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, could barely breathe as the noise pounded him into the ground and ballooned inside his throbbing skull.

And behind it all, behind the sounds that came from everywhere and from nowhere and from deep inside the recesses of his mind, he heard something else. He recognized it from sometime long ago; his heart trembled at it in this hellish building. He looked up at the colt down the hallway, saw his mane and tail dissolving into ash, felt his stomach turn over as the scent of burning flesh pushed its way into his nose. He watched. And he listened. And he finally figured out where the noise was coming from.

As the flesh melted off him and his figure was whittled down to blackened, brittle bone, the little colt stared at Sparks with sightless, empty eyes, and laughed.

He didn’t have enough strength left to run, so Sparks crawled down the hallway and away from the fire, scrambling on his hooves and knees without a clue where he was going and half-delirious from the smoke. The pulsing in his head was getting worse. Getting louder. The walls were on fire, and the walls were glowing, and his hoofsteps were echoing and he couldn’t move fast enough to get away from them.

He grabbed onto a stray doorknob and pulled himself to his hooves, and the echoes seemed suddenly to be right behind him. He ran blindly, deafly, dumbly in any direction he could, and the pulsing around him shook the whole building and seared into his brain. In the distance behind him, an explosion rocked the building and sent him stumbling, and a fresh wave of heat told him that he had maybe a few seconds before he and that colt shared the same fate. He stopped in the middle of the hallway and turned to face his fate, and framed by a wall of unbroken flame racing down the hallway towards him, he saw a soot-caked stallion sprinting towards him.

He had only moments to pick out details: white eyes. Brown coat. Grey shirt splattered red and black. The walls flashed. The stallion tackled him hard enough to knock his breath away.

And in the split second before they hit the ground, the glowing light obliterated the flames around them and sent them flying forward. Sparks's head smacked the floor a moment later, and the world around him was dark.

---

Sparks tried to scream for help, but a strong hoof clamped over his mouth and hooked around his neck before he could utter a sound. Feebly, he battered at the leg of whoever the hoof was attached to, grunting and moaning as best he could, but another hoof clocked him on the head, and what little vision he’d regained after the second huge flash faded away again and filled with glowing lights.

“Shut up!” a voice hissed in his ear, ragged and unsteady as if its owner couldn’t decide whether to keep pulling him down the hallway or break his neck right then and there. At this point, Sparks couldn’t have cared less what the thing wanted to do to him as long as he got away before he could, so he kept struggling until he saw a gap in the darkness overhead and saw the walls of an unoccupied storage room pass by on either side of him. The thing that had dragged him there from the hallway threw them inside with a vicious growl and swung the door closed behind them, leaving nothing but the soft glow of what looked like moonlight sneaking in through the window.

“Shut up shut up shut up!” the voice repeated, pushing his hoof into Sparks's mouth again and leaning in so that their faces were inches apart. Sparks's vision was filled with a pair of twitching, faded blue eyes for a few seconds, then his captor pulled away and scuttled over to the door, peering out into the hallway and muttering something unintelligible.

“W... w-wh...” Sparks stuttered. He cleared his throat and found his voice, and his tone solidified into something angry enough to draw the other stallion’s attention. “Who are you?”

The stallion made a noise and jerked his hoof back at Sparks to motion for him to keep quiet, but Sparks was having none of it. “No, I’m not gonna shut up until you tell me what you are and what the... what is this pla—”

“No, nononono, you’re ruining it, you’re ruining it!”

Sparks backpedaled as the stallion came at him, once again stopping an inch from his nose. He could see a bit more of him in the moonlight now: his mane was gritty and clung to his scalp like wet paper, and he was dressed in what looked like hospital scrubs stained with long-dried blood. He kept walking until Sparks was pressed against the wall and then stared him down for a few more seconds, but then he cocked his head to the side and wiggled his brow, and the teeth in his mad grin flashed white.

“Don’t you know, Doctor Sparks?” he whispered. “When the stars come out, there’s ghosts about.”

He bobbed his head up and down and bounded back over to the door again, and Sparks swallowed back the lump in his throat. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said.

“Oh, but you do, Doctor Sparks,” the stallion immediately replied. “You most certainly, indubitably do.”

Sparks sucked in a breath through his nose and squared his jaw. After everything he’d just been through, the last thing he needed was some lunatic in a surgical gown making things worse. “What in the hell are you talking abo—”

“Ah-ah! Ssssssh, ssh-ssh-ssh-ssh! You hear that?”

Sparks returned the stallion’s giddy look with what he hoped was one of fiery disapproval. “Hear what?”

Shaking his head vigorously and groaning, the stallion leapt forward, hooked his foreleg around Sparks's neck, and yanked him forward, pressing his eye against the tiny gap between the door and its frame. “He’s coming, he’s coming,” he whispered. “Listen listen listen.”

“I don’t hear anything, get off m...”

Sparks trailed off, and for a moment he could’ve sworn the other stallion had poured a bucket of ice water over his back. He could hear something in the distance... grinding. Jagged metal, scraping against the floor. Shuffling. Muffled breathing. Moaning.

“Stars out, Doctor Sparks,” the stallion whispered, bouncing up and down in place and hardly able to contain himself. “Look.”

Sparks licked his lips and raised his eyes towards the corridor junction a few yards away, and his flesh crawled like it was ready to jump right off him. A lone earth stallion trudged into view from the rightside hallway, so malnourished that he was barely more than skin stretched tight over wobbling, creaking bones. His gown was tattered and torn, and filthy bandages wrapped around his entire head, covering every inch of skin and fur with two extra-think strips looped over his eyes. Limp wires and tubes trailed behind him, one end embedded in his leathery skin and the other end connecting him to a battered, rust-coated gurney that was missing three wheels and was dripping with some dark, unidentifiable substance. The three bare spokes cut deep furrows into the floor, and the tubes pulled on the stallion’s skin as he obliviously dragged it behind him.

“What is that?” Sparks whispered, his breath leaving his lungs without him noticing and happening to form into the words he was screaming inside his head. “What is that?”

The stallion made a noise again, and Sparks could’ve sworn he was rolling his eyes. “Oh, don’t give me that,” he grumbled as he pressed Sparks's head harder against the door, and Sparks was left with no choice but to keep watching as the stallion finished crossing over the hallway and shuffled out of sight again. The stallion released him, and Sparks went limp, his nose pressed into the ground and his eyes staring blankly at wherever they happened to fall on the floor outside. Had he not felt the breeze as the air next to his head was displaced, he probably wouldn’t even have noticed that the stallion had yanked the door open and trotted over to the junction. Sparks lifted his head and watched as the stallion peered around the corner and jerked his head back and forth far too quickly to be able to see anything clearly. When the stallion apparently decided he’d seen enough anywhere, he turned back towards Sparks, and his Cheshire Cat grin returned.

“Spooky scary skeletons...”

He waved Sparks towards him just before ducking around the corner and disappearing, his singsong voice carrying all the way back to the storage room as he continued his song.

“Send shivers down your spine...”

Gradually, Sparks got to his hooves and followed the stallion’s humming, eventually catching up to him again outside a square archway patterned with tiny blue tiles. From somewhere within, he could hear the sound of running water splashing against porcelain, as well as something else he couldn’t bring himself to guess at.

“Hmm-hmm, hmm-hmm skeletons, are silly all the same,” the stallion went on under his breath. “They’ll smile and scrabble slowly by, and...”

His gaze drifted up towards the ceiling, and he kicked his hoof against the ground and grunted. “Always forget that part,” he muttered. Without another word, he straightened up and trotted under the archway, his posture clearly indicating that he expected Sparks to follow. Without much better of an idea about what to do, Sparks went ahead and complied.

The archway led into a locker room, pitch-dark but for a candle the stallion had seemingly produced out of thin air. The sound of the shower was louder in here, and Sparks spent a few moments trying to place it before realizing the stallion was heading right for it. Just before they entered the showers, he stopped suddenly, holding his candle aloft with his horn as he stuck his neck out and peered inside. When he turned his head to the left, his motion hitched, and his gasp bore the tone of somepony just remembering that their birthday was tomorrow.

“Be very, very quiet,” he said back to Sparks, his eyes wide and his hoof raised in warning over his lips. “This one doesn’t like crowds.”

Before Sparks could even form a question in his mind, the stallion hopped over the threshold into the shower room and trotted onward, his candle bobbing over his head and throwing twisted shadows over the tiled walls and, every so often, flashing on the glistening, soaked back of somepony sitting under the shower over to the left.

Driven forward by nothing more than a tenuous, naïve hope that the stallion was leading him to safety, Sparks stepped gingerly inside the shower room and, inch by heart-stopping inch, crept over to where the stallion had stopped in the middle of the room. The pony, as far as he could tell from the fleeting glances he occasionally threw in her direction, was a mare this time, and a pegasus. Her long, dark mane was plastered down her back, covering up the small square of muscle where her limp, outstretched wings connected to her spine. She never turned away from the wall even when Sparks slipped and squealed against the floor as he found his footing again, but she was moving slightly: her right hoof was pressed flat against the wall, and was slowly sliding down to the floor again, producing a constant, squeaking drone as her wet sole rubbed against the dripping tile. By the time Sparks reached the stallion, the mare’s hoof had clacked against the ground, and without a sound she slowly raised it again and placed it as high as she could reach onto the wall, beginning the process all over again.

“Shame. Shame,” the stallion said with a shake of his head, not tempering his voice at all despite the eerie presence of the third pony. She didn’t seem to react to him, though, so perhaps he knew better than Sparks did.

“Tragic case, really,” he went on. “Manic-depressive, rotten home life, no job, no hope. Tried everything. Didn’t work.”

The stallion turned to Sparks and nudged him in the shoulder. “And now she’s here,” he said, his voice suddenly taking on an inexplicable upbeat tone. “With us. With you.”

Sparks half-listened to the stallion’s raving, but most of his attention was focused on the mare in front of him. Just like the colt before, she seemed so eerily familiar... in fact, every creature or ghost, or whatever they were had felt like this somehow. Had he had this nightmare before? Was this all just one big recurring fantasy he couldn’t remember in the midst of the dream?

“It’s not a dream, by the way.”

Gooseflesh rose up on Sparks's neck, and the nonchalant shrug the stallion gave him once he turned to look at him only made things worse.

“You were wondering if this was all a big, crazy dream,” he said plainly. “It’s not. It’s real. You’re here.” The stallion paused, and seemed to consider something. “Well, I guess you’re... here, and then you’re there, and then... you’re kind of everywhere, actually.”

An attempt at a reply withered and died in Sparks's throat, and a deep, rumbling pulse cut off any chance at making another go at it. “And pretty soon, you’ll be everywhere again,” the stallion said. Sparks stared at him mutely, and the tempo of the pulses increased.

“Who is she?” Sparks shouted as the walls began to glow. “She...”

“Suicide’s never the answer, Doctor Sparks,” the stallion said with a grin. “Until one day, technically, it is. And speaking of which... I think she’s noticed us.”

Sparks's eyes went wide, and he turned away from the stallion back towards the mare. Her hoof had reached the floor again, and her face was pointed straight at him. As their eyes met and the walls shuddered and flashed around him, her eyes lit up, and her lips split apart into a smile. In the same motion, a yawning, bloody gash under her jaw opened as well.

The room went white, and Sparks’s vision was blasted away. When he came to a moment later, the mare’s twin smiles still hung in the air in front of him, flash-burned onto his retinas like a brand into a hunk of wood.

---

When the light dissipated and the room was dark again, the mare under the shower was gone, and the tiles where she had sat were dry as bone. Sparks expected the stallion who had led him in here to have vanished as well, but somehow he was still there, patiently waiting for Sparks to notice him before he took hold of his candle again and jogged out of the shower room through the archway opposite the one they’d come in through. Once he’d followed him through a bathroom and past a heavy, wooden door, Sparks found himself back out in the hallway again, trailing a few feet behind the stallion as he whistled his way down a few dozen yards before hanging a sharp left through an open room into a patient’s room that seemed to be, like every other one on the hall, deserted.

“Well, that was weird,” the stallion said once Sparks had followed him in, kicking the door shut with a foreleg and leaving it hanging out in midair as he turned his expressionless gaze towards the wide-eyed pony next to him.

“What... what is going on here?” Sparks managed to spit out after a few initial attempts at speaking Equestrian failed him. “Th-those flashes, those... those things I keep running into, what...”

“You ever gone jogging, Doctor Sparks?”

Sparks kept talking over the first few words of the stallion’s sentence, and fell silent just in time for the stallion to scoff and take over again. “No, you’ve gone jogging, Doctor Sparks, of course you’ve gone jogging, how would I not remember that you’ve gone jogging once in your life? It’s weird, though, isn’t it? All those ponies exercising, sweating, running-running-running-running and for what? No matter how fast they run, it’s still the same damn track!”

“I...” Sparks began to say, but the stallion just cut him off again.

“It’s a loop, Doctor Sparks, it’s all a loop just a loop everyone loops everything’s loops,” he said. “Loops-loops-loops. Then, now, always, forever.”

Sparks raised his hoof to interject, but it took a moment of it hanging there before he could put his answer together into words. “You’re... you’re saying this... this is a loop, this hospital is a loop?”

The stallion shook his head, his mane flying around as he whipped his head frantically back and forth. “No no no, not this hospital, not this place, this... thing, this everything.”

Now he was shaking Sparks himself, grabbing his shoulders and twitching in front of them. “It’s a loop,” he whispered once he’d suddenly gone deathly still. “You are, I are, life death space time, time-time-time-time it’s all a loop.”

Finally, a single detail in the stallion’s raving clicked in Sparks’s mind. A loop in time... he’d heard of those before. Patchy details sprung to his mind: horrible magical accident, disappearances, mayhem, a pony flashing uncontrollably through time and space to wherever the volatile spell took him.

And ghosts?

Sheets had warned him about this building. He probably should’ve listened.

“We’re in a time loop?” he asked the stallion, who had since let go of him and wandered over to the window again. Caught up in his own mutterings again, he didn’t seem to notice Sparks had spoken.

“We stop and we go and we’re here and we’re there, but we’re still going around, aren’t we?” he murmured. “You’re still in the loop, we, we still are the loop. And all those things out there, all those ghosts you don’t believe in...”

The stallion chuckled, and flashed Sparks a cheeky grin. “They’re comin’ along with us.”

Now it was Sparks stubbornly shaking his head. Even now, he still couldn’t buy into everything the stallion claimed. “No, you keep calling them ghosts, they’re not ghosts,” he said. “They’re... I can see them, I’ve felt them, they... they have physical substance. They’re not ghosts. So what are they?”

Once again, the stallion ignored him, this time choosing to rock back and forth on his hooves and stare up at the ceiling. “November fourth, nine-seven-eight AL,” he said. “You were eight years old. You remember.”

“I don’t know what you’re talk—”

The stallion screwed up his eyes, and the side table next to the bed exploded as his magical aura smashed it against the wall. “You remember!” he screamed, sawdust showering down on him as his chest heaved and his hooves twitched beneath him. He stood there seething for a few terrifying moments, during which Sparks was sure he’d be the next thing that got broken in half, but after a few moments he’d calmed himself down and dropped his tone back into a murmur.

“You never forgot,” he said softly. “And that’s why you’re here. That’s why we’re here.”

“Why am I here?” Sparks shouted, adrenaline knocking his voice up a couple octaves. “Why me, why am I the one stuck in this moondamned loop?”

The stallion looked at Sparks and tilted his head, and in that moment Sparks was overcome with a depth of terror that even the other things that had chased him before hadn’t reached. The stallion was shocked, gobsmacked, completely and utterly blown away by Sparks’ response... and so gut-wrenchingly familiar all the same. November 4th of the year 978. He knew that date. What had happened then? Why couldn’t he remember now?

“Why you?” the stallion asked, in a voice so frail and pitiful Sparks wondered whether he was about to cry. “Why not you? Why couldn’t it be you, why wasn’t it you, why shouldn’t it have been you, why isn’t it you?”

Sparks took a step backwards. He couldn’t remember what had happened on that date. He couldn’t remember if the stallion had locked the door.

“Why a shy young mare with a sickness that wouldn’t heal?” the stallion said, his voice rising and growing more agitated with each word. “Why a starving factory worker with his face burned off by acid, why a headstrong pegasus who never saw that tree coming, why a father of four with a heart defect? Why an entire orphanage the month before Christmas, dead because the alarm never went off, alive because they went to the bathroom and smelled the smoke?”

The stallion was rounding on him now, slowly stomping forward as Sparks helplessly tugged at the knob on the deadbolted door. The walls were pulsing again. “Why you, why them, why us, why we? Why didn’t you do something, why couldn’t you do something, why can’t do you anything, why didn’t you help them why didn’t you fix them why don’t you remember them...”

The stallion was nose-to-nose with him. He raised his hoof. Sparks shut his eyes, and the walls flashed.

“WHY COULDN’T YOU SAVE THEM DOCTOR!”

---

Sparks didn’t move for several seconds, expecting at any moment the blow to the head that would end his life for good. When he finally opened his eyes, he had to cover them up with his hoof almost immediately. Bright sunlight was streaming in through the window, and outside the window he could hear birds chirping and the bustle of the city as the ponies of Canterlot went about their days. He lowered his hoof to see the sight for himself, and once he couldn’t help but laugh. The nightmare was over. He was back in the real world.

Still chuckling to himself, he pushed open the door behind him—unlocked now—and strolled out into the hallway, relishing in the warm glow of the technomagical lights overhead. Stars above, what a psychotic dream! And to think it had made him wander all the way over here into... where in Equestria was he? The walls were painted with smiling flowers and brightly colored flowers, but the pediatrics ward was in the rear of the hospital, not the front side closest to the street. And what’s more, where was everybody? No matter what ward this was, there should’ve been at least a few ponies milling around in the hallways or visiting with one of the patients.

Sparks stopped walking for a moment just so he could take the time needed to grit his teeth and order himself to get it together. It was natural to be a little edgy after waking up from a strange dream, but this was real life now, and he needed to get back to Surgery before he had to explain to somepony how he’d managed to sleepwalk all the way over to Pediatrics in the middle of the morning. Now wasn’t the time to think about the dream. Now wasn’t the time to let his mind drift back to that stallion, to his screaming, to the last words he’d said before the walls had flashed and he’d woken up here...

…

… why couldn’t he save them? What was THAT supposed to mean? He’d conducted successful operations with almost every one of his patients. Of course, every surgeon occasionally had a case that just couldn’t be helped, but his were certainly few and far between. In fact, over all of his seventeen years as a surgeon and all the procedures included therein, in his own memory of failed operations he could only remember...

Sparks stopped again, and his pulse quickened a bit. He could only remember... why couldn’t he remember them? He knew they’d happened, he was absolutely sure of it, but the details were... stars above, he was messed up right now. Maybe he needed to take the rest of the day off. What time was it right now, anyway?

He trotted ahead a few yards and approached a bulletin board coated with faded flyers to check the time on the clock hanging above it. When he looked up and examined it, though, his stomach started to drop again. The clock was ticking, but the hands stayed perfectly still, stuck at precisely 11:35. He shut his eyes, shook his head, did everything short of blast the clock off the wall with his horn and demand that it work right, but nothing changed. 11:35. A perfectly functional clock, stuck at one single time, hanging over a bulletin board full of get-well cards and crayon drawings and little notices about proper hallway maintenance...

… and a day-by-day calendar, its top half adorned with a picture of a kitten, displaying today’s date in huge black type.

November 4th, 978 AL.

Sparks stumbled back towards the wall, but his legs gave out before he reached it. This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. He was hallucinating, or he was still dreaming, or... it couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be real.

Hoofbeats. Someone was coming. He could hear them walking up to him, reaching him, passing him by, but he never saw them. He got back to his hooves and looked around, but the hall was empty. And the hoofbeats had stopped. Whoever it was had stopped. He took a step forward, froze in place, waited for a response. Received none.

He was about to turn around again when a droplet of liquid hit him on the nose. He jumped out of the way and rubbed at the spot, and his hoof came away red. Another droplet flashed by his ear and splashed onto the floor. Red. Stained on his hoof. Wouldn’t come off no matter how hard he rubbed.

He looked up.

Wet, glistening hoofprints stretched across the ceiling, curving around from a nearby hallway and traveling right over his head to stop a few feet ahead of him. Red. They were all red. Every print on the ceiling was red.

Red like blood.

He heard a noise like a grunt, and the ceiling dimpled overtop the last set of prints. There was a second of silence, and then a loud, thumping impact against the floor twenty feet in front of him, where four new hoofprints splattered into existence without anypony visible to make them. A fifth circle of blood blossomed in front of the four already there, then a sixth, then a seventh and eighth. The hoofbeats he’d heard before broke into a gallop, and the calendar fell to the floor as Sparks tore away from it and sprinted for the end of the hallway.

There was a doorway there, a closed door at the end of the hallway. He could make it there in time. He could hide there. He could stay in there until the loop reset, until he found the other stallion, until he woke up from this dream and was back in his office and he could just think for a second about what the stallion had said. He covered the distance to the door in a few seconds, and slammed into it without bothering to reach for the knob. The door gave, splintered, blew open in front of him as he bashed straight through it.

And the next thing he knew, he was tumbling head over hooves into the wall, tangled up in the legs of a squealing pink earth mare and surrounded by screeching orderlies and gasping doctors still making their rounds.

---

“... ctor Sparks? Doctor Sparks, can you hear m... Cheerio, get me a suture kit and call security!”

Sparks opened his eyes, and nearly lashed out at the pony hovering a few inches above his face. Although that pony pressing down on his shoulders and holding him to the ground didn’t help pull him back from fight-or-flight mode any, he did eventually pick up on the fact that the pony’s eyes were green and not blue, and that it was actually a yellow-furred pegasus mare and not a dark-haired unicorn with much stronger hooves than her.

“Doctor? Doctor, if you can hear me, just stay calm, we’ve got everything under control. I just need you to stay here long enough that we can make sure you’re okay...”

“Di... didn’t...” he struggled to say. His throat was bone-day, and his wind hadn’t returned from his impact into the other pony he’d run over getting out here. There were other ponies here. Why were there other ponies? Nothing had changed. There had never... he hadn’t...

“Doctor, it’s okay, we’re here, we’ve got you. Whatever happened to you, we can make sure it doesn’t happen aga—”

“Didn’t loop,” he finally managed to say. Before the orderly on top of him could protest, he pushed her away and turned around. The door he’d busted through hung on one contorted hinge nearby, and behind it lay an ordinary broom closet, its inner contents undisturbed despite the chaos just a few feet outside. “Didn’t loop, he’s still here, he’s still...”

“Doctor, just...”

“He’s still coming!”

The orderly swore under her breath and whispered something to a unicorn stallion near him, who nodded and motioned for the ponies gathered in the hallway to clear a path. “Come on, Doctor Sparks,” she told him, taking him by the foreleg and guiding him through the part in the crowd. “Let’s get you squared away, we’ll go someplace safe, I promise they can’t get you in there.”

Sparks shook his head, unable to resist following her yet incapable of explaining himself. His mind was moving too fast for his mouth to keep up, jumping back and forth between thoughts and memories and the all-consuming terror eating away at each one of them with every step he took away from that door and deeper into whatever fresh hell this was. He’d changed places again, jumped to a different spot in the loop, but the walls hadn’t flashed and the floor hadn’t throbbed. So he hadn’t really looped, just... moved. To where? To when? Was it over now? Would it ever be?

Lost in thought, Sparks let the orderly take him into a nearby room and set him on top of the bed. “I’m gonna lock you in here,” she said, “and we’re gonna bring in some ponies to check you out and figure out what happened. Nothing’s gonna get in here.”

She turned to leave, and Sparks leapt from the bed, grabbed her shoulder and spun her around. “When is this?” he asked. “What is today, what day is it today?”

The orderly tried to look him in the eyes, and could only manage it for a second. “Doctor, you’ve been missing for four months,” she said. “We don’t know what’s going on, but we’re gonna find out, I promise.”

She promised.

She didn’t know.

She was turning to leave again.

Through the tiles in the floor, he felt the building begin to pulse.

“Don’t leave,” he begged her. “Don’t leave, it’s happening again.”

The orderly’s eyes widened. She tried to tug her way out of his grip. “Doctor, please, I need to go—”

“No no no, please, stars above, I’m begging you. It’s happening again, it’s going to happen now.”

“Doctor—”

She pulled out of his grip, and in desperation he grabbed at her with his magic. His aura caught onto her tail and held fast. The walls were glowing. How could she not see the walls were glowing?

“I don’t know what I did,” he cried. “I don’t know what’s happening to me or why it’s happening or what’s going to happen before I get out, but I can’t do it anymore! I can’t go back in, I have to get out! I have to get out of the loop!”

“Doctor, let go of me!” the orderly screamed, but it was too late. The walls flared, the floor and ceiling shook, and when the light exploded all around him, it took the orderly with it. He was still holding onto her tail when it happened, so he could see her face as it withered in the span of an instant, how her flesh rotted away and her eyes imploded and her bones disintegrated into dust, destroyed and disappeared forever by an instantaneous glitch in time that took a second for him and an eternity for anything he dragged along with it.

He let go of her tail, and the single tuft of cherry-red hair he’d held onto vanished into thin air the moment he blinked his eyes. When the light faded, the hallway outside was quiet, and the air of the room he occupied hung heavy with dust. He had looped. He was alone.

And a brown-furred, blue-eyed stallion was standing in the doorway.

---

“Hmm. I remember when I tried that,” the stallion said, watching with noted interest as Sparks reached out for the empty space in front of him with tears beading in his eyes. “Never did learn her name. Guess that’s one more to add to the party here.”

“It’s you...” Sparks whispered. He looked up at the stallion and channeled every ounce of fury and pain and shame and fear inside him into the glare he leveled on him. “It’s you! This is your fault. You’re the one who dragged me into this, and I want out! You hear me?”

The stallion snickered, and the edges of Sparks’s vision went red. “But of course it’s me. It’s me, Doctor Sparks,” he said. “It’s you... they’re all yours.”

Sparks jumped to his feet, and before he could close the distance between he and the stallion, the stallion leapt forward and did it for him. “What do you think this is?” he hissed, so close Sparks could feel flecks of spittle splattering against his cheek. “Dream? Nightmare? Bad luck? Destiny? Ghosts, spirits, real, not real, tell me Doctor Sparks do you think it even really matters?”

Sparks stared him down, willing himself not to lash out, ordering himself to keep listening on the off-chance that the stallion might finally tell him what was going on. “Emotions are a powerful thing, Doctor Sparks,” the stallion said. “They define you. They show who you really are. Anger drives you, sadness frightens you, happiness inspires you, and guilt...”

The stallion’s nose touched against Sparks, and the contact burned like fire. Sparks jerked back, and the stallion grinned. “Guilt haunts you,” he said. “And now, finally, it’s broken you. Broken us. Broken we.”

With a mad yell, Sparks shoved the stallion outside and followed him as he went flying back into the hallway. He groped around with his magic on an abandoned cart nearby and came up with an empty syringe, which he held in front of the stallion’s neck and pressed up into his jugular.

“Let me out,” he said, his voice low and furious and barely even his anymore. “Let me out, or I swear on the stars I will kill you.”

“But Doctor Sparks, don’t you see?” the stallion said. “There’s only one way out of the loop. There always has been.”

The stallion glanced down at the syringe, then locked eyes with Sparks and leaned forward. The needle of the syringe pricked into his neck, and as blood started to fill up the chamber inside, he smiled one last time.

“And there always will.”

Sparks screamed, lunged forward, and shoved the needle straight through to the stallion’s spine. The stallion’s head lolled forward and the needed snapped off inside his artery, so Sparks resorted to his hooves, punching and bucking at whatever was in reach until the stallion’s crazed giggle died away and his smile was as hollow as the look in his eyes. When it was done, Sparks stood over him, face contorted with rage, scrubs dripping with blood, squeezing his eyes shut and spitting and cursing and doing everything he could to forget the fact that the hallway was still empty and the lights were still off and he was still all alone here and he hadn’t escaped. The floor was shuddering even now. The walls were beginning to glow. The loop was about to start again.

And he could remember now.

He could remember every detail, every step of the procedures, every name and face and file and exact time of death noted by another doctor on duty who wouldn’t look up and couldn’t speak to him because he couldn’t speak to them because they had trusted him and he had made them promises and his heart sank lower every time because he remembered paperwork conferences proper procedures family members anger hate betrayal misery tears dripping onto his scrubs because they he was their only other option because their blood was still on his sleeves and body bags wouldn’t let the liquid soak through because that was procedure that was surgery that was life and death and space and time and he couldn’t see it anymore and he couldn’t hear it anymore and he couldn’t bear the awful truth of it one more second because he remembers he could remember he was remembering right now:

Oak Knoll. 37. CPA, casual golfer, family man. Coronary bypass surgery. His wife left a bouquet of flowers to wilt in the waiting room.

Cloudburst. 23. Manehattan weather team. Took a joyride after work, flew too low, she was fast, trees weren’t. 7% chance of survival. Called off by coltfriend. Found a feather in his scrubs before bed.

Steel Screw. 31. Celestial Chemicals. Equipment malfunction in a factory downtown. Third-degree burns on his face and neck. Closed casket funeral. He’d been saving up for his mom’s birthday present.

Magnolia. 25. Black mane, violet eyes. Wished him good morning when he’d stopped by for rounds. She kept the knife from breakfast. She never told anyone she was pregnant.

Morning Light. 19. Top student at Canterlot Academy. Tried to combine invisibility and antigravity spells. Both went wrong. Run over in the street. Couldn’t operate on him until the spells wore off. Had to watch as the red circle on the sheets got bigger.

And Blueberry.

Today, so long ago, forever inside his mind. Orphans, all of them. Two young colts, the best of friends. On a chilly November night, a candle had tipped over, and he had been the only one awake. He had run to get the grown-ups and woken up everybody in his room. They told him later Berry had gone quick. He hadn’t. None of them had.

Every doctor has a reason for why they became one. For most, it was because of the ponies whose lives they could save. For Sparks, it was for the ones he couldn’t. Hadn’t. Didn’t.

And now he remembered them. He saw all of their lives flash before his lives, saw them loop from life to death and back again. He was like them now. Caught up in the loop, trapped inside one of his own creation, because no matter how fast you ran it was always the same damn track. No matter how many other procedures he did right, he could never escape the ones he hadn’t.

Sparks looked down at the corpse beneath him, and one last emotion floated through his mind: recognition. Now he knew where he’d seen the stallion before. Saw him now. Would see him again. And if he would never escape it... then neither would this stallion. When he came in again, he would be ready. When the loop reset, he would make sure it kept going.

After all, everything was a loop. Always had been. And always would.

---

It’d taken years to get it right. Months, maybe. Had it been days? Who had time for time when it no longer carried any weight?

But no matter. He’d found him. He’d gone through the loop countless times, followed it through and explored every corner and figured out where it began and ended and began again. And now he’d found him. The stallion was back, spawned into the loop for the first time. He’d caught him just at the end of the orphanage fire, just in time to save him from being burnt to a crisp. He could’ve let him die there, of course, but that would’ve be no good. He was more special than that. More important than that.

The stallion—ungrateful little whelp—kicked and screamed all the way into the storage closet where they’d be safe for the time being in this loop. Even when he was inside, he still wouldn’t stop babbling, but that wouldn’t make much difference here. Steel Screw’s ears weren’t the best anymore.

It was, however, incredibly annoying.

“W... w-wh...” the stallion stammered. “Who are you?”

“No, nononono, you’re ruining it, you’re ruining it!”

The stallion backpedaled as Sparks came at him, stopping just an inch or two in front of his nose. He could see him well in the moonlight now: brown coat, greasy hair, grungy hospital scrubs. Just like he remembered. Just like he knew it would be.

“Don’t you know, Doctor Sparks?” he said, a giddy grin splitting across his face. “When the stars come out, there’s ghosts about.”

He bounded over to the door again, and bit his tongue in anticipation. Wait for it. Wait for it...

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” the stallion said.

Bingo.

“Oh, but you do, Doctor Sparks,” he immediately replied. “You most certainly, indubitably do.”