Swaddled in bedcovers and trapped in Twilight’s uncomfortably warm embrace, Spike lay awake. He wriggled slightly, but all the slumbering mare did was pull him tighter. The view of Ponyville from the window was pitch-dark, and Spike knew that the moment was now.

Slowly and carefully, he would take a deep breath, puffing up as much as he could against Twilight’s vice-like grip, then gently release it while creeping his way deeper into the bed. A furtive claw pulled a pillow from the head of the bed. By the time his feet were touching the floor at the foot of the bed, he’d slithered the length of the bed and replaced Twilight’s affections with a pillow, all while nearly boiling himself alive under the sheets.

Sliding out from the bed, he noiselessly laid himself out on the cold crystal floor, panting lightly. Rolling over onto his belly, he started the slow and laborious process of silently sliding out of the room on his belly.

[hr]

After setting up the decoy of a particularly violent comic book and a lit taper on the bedside table of his old room, Spike was ready. A lantern had been lit, and the key had been filched from Twilight’s third hiding place, the existence of which Spike had only discovered when the first two came up dry and he’d checked on top of the ice-box.

Now he stood in front of the basement stairwell, a locked door standing between himself and his innate curiosity. 

It had only been a month or two ago when the door hadn’t even been a thought. Spike and Twilight had been cleaning out one of the various storage rooms, trying to at least reduce some of the prodigious clutter that the castle generated. Spike had been moving a dresser when Twilight screamed and a bolt of black lightning rang out and struck the ceiling. For a moment everything was still, then a few dragon-crushingly large chunks of the ceiling came tumbling down. In a whirlwind, Twilight had grabbed him and teleported them both out of harm’s way. 

After that, going downstairs had been forbidden, and Spike hadn’t wanted to press the issue. Twilight had seemed sickly from the stress of what could’ve happened, her hue noticeably grayer. After a week she’d recovered, and set strict rules in place. The castle now had a single locked door, and it led to the basement.

But putting an actual lock on the door seemed strange. It gave the odd noises at night an extra layer of mysticism, heightening the regular whispers of the wind into the sounds of creatures scurrying about unseen.

Spike turned the key in the lock, and cringed when the bolt dropped with ear-splitting click. He swung the door open noiselessly to reveal the stairwell. Hoisting the lantern, Spike descended down into the darkness.

At the bottom of the stairs, he opened the first door. The room was still in disarray, but through the light of his lantern a path through the debris was visible. In the middle of the far wall, a jagged hole opened into gloom. 

It beckoned.

Trudging through the clutter, he pulled himself onto the ledge and peered into the gloom. A tunnel opened up. He caught the scent of something earthy, carried on a light wind. 

He walked forward. The shaft twisted and turned as he went deeper, but there seemed to be no end. 

At the edge of the lantern-light, spiders moved, and with every passing moment more seemed to flow past.

Unerved, Spike turned to retrace his path out. His foot caught a protruding rock and he stumbled, the lantern dropping from his grasp. It fell to the floor and shattered, the flame guttering as oil dripped from the enclosure. The flame extinguished.

In the sudden darkness, Spike could only hear the noise of crawling.

Panicked, He started running only to slam into the wall a few steps later, falling down as the oily invisible arachnids swept past him. He whimpered, curled on the cave floor, holding his claws over his ears as countless spiders scrabbled over him. 

Darkness took him.

[hr]

Spike jerked awake. For a moment he was trapped in the cavern, then reality asserted itself. He felt the warmth of the sheets, the tightness of Twilight’s embrace. On the ceiling the barest hints of the dawn were starting. He turned and made to push Twilight off of him, but froze.

Twilight wore a key around her neck.