It was a cold December night. Twilight was reading in her study by candlelight, and there was a ghost in the Great Hall.

“No there’s not, Spike,” she said when Spike came to tell her. She carried on reading, not even throwing her assistant a cursory glance. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“That’s what you said about Pinkie’s Pinkie Sense, but remember how that turned out? Just take a look, would ya? Please, Twi?”

It was less Spike’s words that caught Twilight’s attention and more the shiver in his voice, along with his wheezing, his puffing – he must have sprinted all the way upstairs without pausing for breath.

Twilight looked up.

Spike stood with his hands on his knees. He kept peering over his shoulder at the door – even though he had slammed the door shut upon rushing into the study – and his eyes were wide and his arms trembled. To Twilight, he looked less like her brave assistant and more a bundle of nerves and fright. He was less a dragon and more a child, lost and scared, and worried.

Outside, the night was less a winter wonderland and more a twin of the savage plains of Anthooftica, where the wind blew wild and the snow was villainous, stinging traveller’s eyes and piling into drifts dozens of feet high.

It was a splendid night for telling ghost stories around a roaring fireplace.

It wasn’t a night to go looking for actual ghosts.

“Spike,” said Twilight – yet she got no further, for from downstairs came the sound of door slamming like a shot in the darkness. Twilight gasped. Spike leapt a foot in the air, then darted over and dug his little dragon claws into Twilight’s leg, holding her for dear life.

“Spike,” she said again, sharply this time. “You’re hurting me.”

“But the ghost!”

“There’s no such thing as – ouch, I’m not kidding, let go of me. There’s no such thing as ghosts.” She huffed, not noticing Spike glowering at her. “Why, the mere idea, it’s… it’s preposterous. It’s ludicrous! Dumb, daft, downright nutty. I expected better from you.”

Spike fidgeted, keeping half an eye glued to the door. “But wh-what if you’re wrong, Twilight?” he whispered. “How d’you explain that slam just then?”

“This is a castle, Spike. It makes castlely noises. There’s drafts. Things go bump in the night.”

“You mean ghosts go bump in the night.”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Think logically, Spike. Ghosts wouldn’t go bump. They’d pass through the walls and make no noise at all.”

“Yeah, but that’s only if they really existed, right?”

Twilight opened her mouth, then closed it. Ghosts or not, she knew when she was defeated.

So she shut her book – with care, for the book had been retrieved from the wreckage of her old home, and the pages were charred – and with a sigh and a rub of her forehead, she said, “OK, Spike. You’ve got me for five minutes. What do you want me to do?”

---

It would have been quicker to ask what he didn’t want.

Spike was adamant that sleep would be impossible that night without the proper tests, experiments, and results. It wasn’t enough for Twilight to light the lamps and look under the chairs and the Royal Table. It wasn’t enough to hear her say, “Golly gosh, would you look at that! Not a ghost in sight!” Beyond all doubt, Spike wanted, he needed to know that the Great Hall, that the Castle of Friendship, was completely, certifiably, one thousand percent ghost-free.

To this end, the Great Hall had been transformed into a Great Laboratory.

There were notepads and bits of paper, and pens, and pencils with chewed ends from long nights of drawing graphs and diagrams. There were machines which went BEEP, contraptions that went BOOP, equipment which went MEEP. Little timers and clocks went tick, tick, tick and tock, tock, tock; screens flashed with mysterious green numbers; others showed charts, or strings of letters, or symbols the meaning of which escaped Spike, but which Twilight appeared to have no trouble deciphering.

“Alright, so,” she said, clopping her hooves and nodding as the last of the screens flickered into its strange green life. “If I prove that there’s no ghosties or ghoulies, or any other nonsense, will you please, please let me get on with my studies? Does that sound fair to you?”

Spike folded his arms. Had Twilight been looking at him instead of a tiny monitor on hoofheld device, she might have seen a frown pass over his face.

Or perhaps she wouldn’t have.

Maybe it was too dark.

Regardless, Spike agreed, then pointed to his chair besides Twilight’s throne. Stray comic books were strewn over the table. A mug of coffee sat there growing cold and looking sorry for itself, and there was a plate of biscuits, half eaten, abandoned. His lantern had burnt out. The only light, now, came from the green glow of the various monitors, and the shadows were deep and many.

Whatever had happened, Spike hadn’t stopped to clean up after himself.

“I don’t get it,” Twilight said, prodding the coffee mug with her little device. A red light blinked on the monitor. Twilight narrowed her eyes at it, and gave the screen a tap.

Spike pressed himself close to Twilight’s body, once more holding her leg as though the floor was the ocean and Twilight a precious life raft keeping him afloat.

He cleared his throat. “Well…”

“Go on, Spike. Are you nervous? Don’t be. Remember, there’s no such thing as ghosts.”

This time it was harder to ignore Spike’s frown. Before Twilight could say anything, Spike said, “Well, I was just sittin’ here, reading comics, minding my own business and all. When suddenly… I dunno what it was. I felt icky and squirmy, like I was being watched or somethin’. So I said to myself, ‘Spike, it’s just you and Twilight, so stop being silly.’ I did, Twi. I really did say that. Even so, I looked around just to be on the safe side, ’cause ya never know, ya know? Then I looked up at the roots, and, um… that’s when I…”

He gulped. Spoke a little slower, a little quieter. “I’ll level with ya,” she breathed. “I couldn’t see nothin’. But I swear to Celestia, there was something there, Twi. I know there was. I’ve never been more certain of anything.”

The young dragon juddered again, though in truth, it felt, to Twilight, like more than a mere shudder. A shiver-shake. A tremble-tremor. A quiver-quake.

For the first time Twilight saw that Spike kept his eyes firmly on the floor and the walls and the windows. Anywhere apart from the ceiling. Anywhere but at the great chandelier hanging in the darkness, the self-same one formed from the mighty roots of their old home, the Golden Oaks Library, and which had been placed up there so generously by their friends. A reminder of the importance of home and the joy of friendship. A token of their friend’s love.

Twilight almost threw her hooves around her Number One Assistant. She wanted to tell him not to worry, that everything was going to be fine, and that she was his family and his dearest friend.

Her love clashed with her annoyance.

It was so, so cold that night, in the hall. A night for Jack Frost, riding at the head of a pack of windigos. And that was to make no mention of the half-hour it had taken to set up her science equipment, half an hour which ought to have been spent reading…

So she sighed again, and said, though not unkindly, “No, Spike, that wasn’t what I meant, though it sounds like you were very brave. What I meant was: I don’t get why you were down here in the first place. Couldn’t you read comics in your bedroom?”

Spike shuffled uncomfortably, keeping his gaze locked on the floor. He stayed silent.

“Well?” said Twilight. “Couldn’t you?”

“I just like to read in here, sometimes.”

His voice was quiet and his heart pounded. Pressed as closely as he was against Twilight’s chest, she could feel it, his little dragon heart beating like a hammer. Twilight whispered in his ear. She spoke gently, the voice of one determined to uncover the truth, but who loved her dragon too much to press him too hard. “No, Spike, that’s not the reason. You’re hiding something.”

Now Spike took the deepest of deep breaths. “Promise you won’t laugh?” he whispered back. “Pinkie Pie promise?”

Twilight nodded, then mimed putting her hoof in her eye. Then Spike said, “I like reminding myself about how far we’ve come, is all. I mean, since moving here… you becoming a princess and everything. It’s just… nice. Warm. Sitting next to your throne makes me feel warm.”

This was too much for Twilight. She held her dragon, her Number One Assistant ever closer. Her family, her beloved, her little brother, and her best friend all rolled into one! She dug through her mind to find the right words to tell him how much he meant to her, how important he was – his love was as essential to her as oxygen in her lungs and a beating heart.

However, the words never came. There were none she knew of that covered the breadth and depth of her love for Spike; they had yet to be invented.

There were other things worth worrying about, that night, in the blizzard and in the darkness.

The red dot began to blink again on Twilight’s device.

On some of the monitors, the charts began to spike, and on others the numbers grew larger, and larger, until there wasn’t enough space for them.

Twilight shook off Spike. She thrust her little device towards the enormous roots bolted to the ceiling, then gasped as the red dot flashed so quickly that it was hard to tell that it flashed at all.

“You know, Spike,” she said, her every word drenched in amazement. “I think there really might be something up there after all…”

There was a number-filled pause, a chart-packed moment. BEEP, BOOP, MEEP, went the machines and the contraptions and the devices.

And Spike was finished. He was done pretending that he was anything more than a scared little dragon.

“Let’s get outta here, Twi,” he said.

“No, Spike. There’s no such thing as ghosts. Whatever this is, it needs to be studied.”

“Twilight! There’s some things ya just can’t explain. Ya said it yourself, once. I remember! I wrote it down for you in a letter! Let’s just get outta here, pleeease.”

But Twilight stood her ground. With supreme confidence – with the solidness of a mountain, the strength of an ocean and the firmness of the Earth – she said to Spike, “Everything can be explained. With enough study, everything can be understood.”

It was right then that the two of them felt a whisper of a breeze blowing through in the hall, caressing Twilight’s mane and chilling Spike to the marrow in his bones. Neither could tell from where it came: from both everywhere and nowhere, it seemed. From the right and to the left. From up above, and from behind them.

“Don’t just stand there, Spike, do something! Put that helmet on.”

Spike glanced at the machinery, bathed in the green glow of the monitors. “Ya mean the thingni with all the dials and knobs attached? The one with the wires sticking out of it?”

“Do you see any other helmets? I need to study the effect that your fear is having on… on whatever this is. A magical surge, perhaps? Something to do with the Tree of Harmony?”

She smiled hugely and clopped her hooves together, which for Spike was the most terrifying sound he had heard all night. Twilight had officially entered what the young dragon always thought of as science-mode, though the silly name disguised how stressful it could be for Twilight’s loved ones to see her in such a state. Sometimes, the unicorn’s pursuits were innocent, and she would stay up for hours working on her latest discovery or preparing her next lecture. On other occasions, it was a sort of madness, and it devoured her. Nothing else would matter to her, and all that mattered was the research, no matter what the price. Though often, too often, the price was the safety of both herself and her friends.

There had been the time when she had stalked Pinkie Pie, trying desperately to figure out how her Pinkie Sense worked.

On another occasion, she had stayed up for an entire week after a visit from her future self.

Spike tried not to think about the time Twilight Sparkle had stayed up for a week.

He threw the helmet on the floor. “I’m not doing it,” he said, and his eyes were wet with tears. “I’m not putting it on. You can do this in the morning when it’s light, but right now we’ve gotta get outta here. We don’t know enough about it, yet. This might be dangerous.”

Twilight blinked. “I thought this is what you wanted. For me to investigate.”

Spike dragged a hand across his face. “No, what I wanted you to come down and make everything better. Not this.”

If Twilight had a response to this, she never got to say it. The breeze picked up, and up, and up, and up. Loose papers were tossed around like snowflakes in a blizzard. The machines, the helmet, and the monitors were knocked to the ground and scraped across the floor, getting snagged in the corners of the room, against the crystal walls of the Great Hall, and one of them crashed through a window. And now snowflakes were blown inside – fat snowflakes, thick snowflakes, some the size of saucers.

And this, more than Spike’s pleas and tears, was what yanked Twilight Sparkle from her mania.

The world can be studied, and oftentimes explained in detail. It was the basis of both science and magic, and the foundation upon which Twilight’s entire life was erected.

Yet…

Try as she might to forget them, she thought of the words she herself had written years previously, in a letter to Princess Celestia. There are wonderful things in this world you just can’t explain, but that doesn’t necessarily make them any less true. It just means you have to choose to believe in them…

So in her panic, Twilight Sparkle closed her eyes and believed.

With all her heart and her soul, and for the sake of Spike, she believed that the whatever lurked in the roots was real – real, yet gentle, for she couldn’t bring herself to contemplate that a castle so filled with love as theirs could attract a being with hatred in its heart. She sensed that whatever was causing this, it didn’t mean to terrorize them. It was an accident. A result of tremendous power but a poor grasp on how to control it. That was all.

And now that she believed in it, she began to feel the thing’s presence.

She felt that it held not a single shred of malevolence, but instead loved them with an intensity rivalled only by fathers and mothers meeting their new-born foal for the first time. Twilight felt it. She felt it. From the tips of her hooves, through her legs and chest, her wings, her tail, her mane: she was loved.

The wind ceased.

Then she gazed, astonished, as a bolt of light flashed amongst the roots. And then the roots themselves began to glow, softly at first, but as the seconds passed they grew brighter, and brighter. They were green, so exceedingly, exceptionally, extraordinarily green! The colour of sunlight through the canopy of a forest. The shade of meadows in high summer.

“Twilight! What’s going on?” cried Spike. Yet Twilight was transfixed by the light. She felt Spike’s claws grip around her foreleg, yet was scarcely aware of his presence. She heard his cries, yet they sounded as distant, to her, as the chitter-chatter of mares and stallions through an open window on a sunny day.

All that mattered was the light.

All she knew was that the light loved her, and there was nothing else of importance, neither death, nor life, or anything in between.

“Twilight? Twilight! Quit lookin’ at the light. Snap out of it.”

Spike waved a hand in front of her face. Without a word she brushed him aside and stepped closer to the roots.

“Twi!” Spike sobbed. “Come back, Twi. I need ya.”

But Twilight was enveloped in a feeling of warmth, and she sighed in bliss. The light grew ever brighter, forcing Spike to shield his eyes, for the Sun Herself appeared to be tangled within the roots…

Then darkness.

Snowflakes.

Silence.

Spike opened his eyes. “Twi?” he whispered, yet there was no reply, for Twilight had vanished. The little dragon stood alone in the vast room.

Some moments later, he curled up on Twilight’s throne and hugged his knees and cried until it hurt.

---

Twilight fell.

She fell into darkness, tumbled through empty space and into an infinity of black. Oddly, she wasn’t scared and she didn’t scream, although she felt that she ought to. Yet her lack of fear intrigued her, so she remained quiet so as not to shatter the feeling.

Stars appeared in the void, then colours and shapes, and hot and cold and light. Then she gasped, for she fell through the memories of a life that had never happened! Memories, memories, so many memories. Every last one of them took place within the interior of the Golden Oaks Library; it was as though a hundred thousand libraries had been balanced on top of each other to form a tower a thousand miles in height, yet all connected by a shaft which cut right through the middle of them. As she fell, Twilight caught glimpses of familiar rooms over and over and over and over, from her and Spike’s old bedroom at the top of the library, to the main hall, then the basement beneath. Over and over the sequence was repeated,

bedroom,

hall,

basement,

bedroom,

hall,

basement,

bedroom,

hall,

basement.

And she was sure that what she was seeing were memories, albeit strange, warped versions of them. There was no doubt of it. None at all. In each of the rooms, she saw herself and Spike, sometimes accompanied by their friends, other times by family, and occasionally even by her fellow princesses. Twilight recognised all these moments, every last one of them. They were her memories. Everything she saw had really happened to her – it was merely that the locations were wrong. In real life, everything she saw had actually happened in the Castle of Friendship, not the Golden Oaks Library…

There, right there! Shining Armor was crying over a burnt comic, and Twilight was trying to console him—

A horde of yaks was trashing the library—

They were dressed up for Nightmare Night and playing games in her bedroom, and Fluttershy wanted to join in for once—

There was the map of Equestria, and she and her friends were discussing their latest mission. Yet the map and the thrones were on the ground floor of the old library. There wasn’t a trace of crystal to be found on the walls, and—

It stopped.

There was a floor.

Twilight landed on her hooves, so gently that, in and of itself, it was disorientating. Only by tapping her hooves upon the wooden floor did she convince herself that she had really stopped falling, and that she genuinely stood inside her old beloved library.

And though she searched for the feel of dreams, they were nowhere to be found. The floor felt solid. The books had the smell of reality about them, old, yellowing paper bound in wood, sitting alongside newly pressed novels. The shelves were real. The stairs were real. The front door was real, though locked, and through the windows she saw endless stars, bright and blue.

A reindeer watched her from the foot of the stairs.

With one look into the reindeer’s eyes, Twilight knew that this was the being responsible for all that had happened that night. With one look, Twilight knew that her instincts had been right: that the reindeer hadn’t scared them not on purpose, but that its understanding of magic was so far removed from that of a unicorn’s that possibly it hadn’t occurred to her that its spell work was alarming.

The reindeer was huge. Enormous. Crouched on the floor, she took up a full quarter of the room.

Her antlers weren’t antlers at all, but miniature oak trees, their proud roots growing into the base of her skull.

Already, Twilight Sparkle knew the truth.

“You’re… you’re…”

I am, said the reindeer without opening her mouth. The words appeared in Twilight’s head and was the most natural thing in the world. Yet Twilight needed to say it anyway.

“You’re the spirit of my old home. You’re the ghost of the Golden Oaks Library.”

The audacity of her own words astonished her. Part of her half-hoped that she would wake up and find herself in bed, or that her friends would burst from the kitchen door and reveal that this to be an elaborate prank.

When neither of these happened, she kept on speaking. It was the only thing she could think to do. “How is this possible?” she asked.

The life-force of a tree is different from that of a pony, the reindeer explained. Even after my trunk was destroyed, life lingered in me, in my roots, slowly draining away. Until tonight, at last, it’s almost time for me to say goodb—

Twilight didn’t want to hear how the sentence ended. The idea that not only had her former home been watching over her, but that it loved her, well and truly loved her, was more wondrous and precious a thought than almost any she had ever had. She couldn’t stand that love being snatched away from her; so before the reindeer could finish, Twilight threw her forelegs around her – or tried to, considering the spirit’s sheer immensity – and she wailed, “Don’t go, don’t go! I miss you. I miss you all the time, every single day.”

Twilight—

“I need you.”

A moment’s pause. Twilight wondered why tonight, of all nights, the spirit had chosen to say goodbye. If it knew such great and powerful magic, why not earlier?

Unless it had been saving up the last of it’s magic.

Unless it had been planning this for months upon months, waiting until it had gathered the strength to summon Twilight into this strange other world.

“I don’t understand why you have to go,” she sniffled. “Well, OK, I understand, if you get what I mean, but…”

Twilight paused, gulped. She took great care over what she said next, trying, with all her vast knowledge, to put into words how she felt. Yet she was alike to spinning platinum from out of the air, or standing on her back hooves to try and touch the distant stars. What she felt was simply too enormous to be forced into spoken sentences.

“Some things just can’t be explained” she whispered at last. “Some things just aren’t fair.”

The reindeer shook her head. No, Twilight Sparkle. Take it from a former library, she said. Despite herself, Twilight couldn’t help but grin a little. Everything in the world can be explained. Whether or not the explanations can be understood is another matter – and matters of the heart are the most complex and mysterious of them all. So don’t feel bad for not being able to conjure the right words.

“I’m the Princess of Friendship.”

Even a princess never stops learning.

Twilight shuffled her hooves. Time was precious: she was afraid to speak. She was afraid, because she knew that every breath she took and every word she spoke was one less breath, one less word to spend with a loved one she had never known existed.

Yet peak she must. “Maybe I don’t understand, and maybe I never will. But I’ll never stop trying.”

The ancient reindeer smiled. I believe you, she said. And that’s what makes you the mare I love. That’s what makes you Twilight Sparkle, and I am so, so glad that I can say goodbye to you properly. I am so, so proud of you. But hush, now. The dawn is coming. The time has come for make a new friend.

The reindeer bent down and whispered in Twilight’s ear. You are very loved in this new castle of yours, you know, and not just by Spike. So very, very loved.

A shiver ran through Twilight, darting up her spine and making the hairs on her neck prickle – though not in fear. Not in horror, nor coldness, nor shock. It was the same feeling she had experienced the first time she laid eyes on Spike, the same as when she had heard that her brother was getting married to her old foalsitter, and the same as when she had first suspected the depth of the bond between her and her fellow Elements of Harmony. This was how she knew that the reindeer spoke the truth.

It was Twilight’s heart, however, that told her she wasn’t referring to any of her Ponyville friends, nor to far-flung relatives in distant cities.

“You’re wrong,” Twilight whispered.

The reindeer raised an eyebrow. Oh?

“Yes, you’re wrong. You said this was a castle, but it’s not. Not whilst Spike lives there, or the spirit of the castle. It’s a home.”

The reindeer smiled again, and nodded. Then she lent down and kissed a trembling Twilight upon the forehead: a mother’s kiss, much like the ones Twilight’s real mother used to give when the storms of winter raged over Canterlot. For a moment, no longer was she a Princess of Equestria, but five years old and reading deep into the night and losing track of time. Until things went bump in the dark. Until branches tapped against the windows, scaring away the joy of reading and making her cry out loud, “Mom, Mom! Dad, Dad!” Because only her mother and father could frighten away the monsters and make everything right again.



She was a foal in need of love…



She was Spike, and nervous and shaking, wondering why Twilight refused to take his fear seriously, why she just wouldn’t let him explain how scared he was…



She was stood in the Great Hall, and the lamps were lit.

The air had the feel of reality about it. The night was freezing, and snowflakes were piling on the floor by the smashed window.

And there was Spike.

He was smiling at her, and crying harder then she had ever seen him. “You came back,” he said.

Twilight didn’t know what to say or do, whether to rush to his side and smother him in kisses, hold him to her chest, or take him upstairs to his bed and sleep the night away. She wanted to do all these things and more besides. Yet her legs failed her. She was exhausted, and in trying to take a step towards Spike, she discovered that she could barely stand, let alone walk.

In a whisper as broken as the window, she said, simply, “I came back.”

It wasn’t enough. Her Spike. Her beautiful, wonderful, brilliant, incredible Spike. Her dragon-child, who relied on her to always be there for him in the darkest nights and coldest winters. To respect his fears, and know never to make light of them, or tell him she expected better of him than to believe in the unbelievable: she had let him down tonight, and that was the truth. So she added, “Look, I can explain—”

Spike held up a hand. “You’re back, and you’re safe, and all that’s matters. Ya look tired, Twi. I don’t mind if you just wanna tell me about it in the morning.”

Tears began to stream down Twilight’s face. “I’m sorry I didn’t take you seriously right from the start. I’m so, so sorry.”

“Shush, Twilight. It’s alright. I’m here for ya.”

And it was Spike, and not a drained and shattered Twilight, who hurried across the Great Hall and embraced her with all the fire of his heart, the fire of friendship. Twilight did her best to hug him back. It was hard, for Spike held onto her leg yet once again, and led her out of the hall and along the corridor, up the stairs to her bedroom where they would spend the rest of the night holding onto one another as though the consequences of letting go weren’t worth thinking about.

Spike spoke to her as they walked. “Ya know, I love living in a castle made of crystal, but let’s face it. It can be pretty creepy sometimes.”

“But Spike, it’s not a castle. Not whilst you’re here with me.”

The little dragon raised an eyebrow. “Then what is it, then?” Twilight smiled at him.

“It’s a home,” she said.