It was dark as Twilight Sparkle stared up at the unfamiliar ceiling. The ceiling of her new room. Her castle. Not home.

By any right, she should have been sleeping. She was exhausted. Behind one blink she saw Tirek, his destructive magic rushing towards her. It could have ended there, had she been slower. Another blink, Celestia, Luna, and Cadance, slumped and drained of magic. They had risked everything on her. Another blink, her friends in a cage, her library burning behind them.

A soft sneeze and rustle from nearby pulled her back from her thoughts. Her friends weren't in a cage -- they were here, with her. On her ridiculously-oversized bed. Princess-sized. Her castle had grown with a bed. She looked at her friends, piled around and against her, and a smile threatened her lips.

The castle had grown with empty bookshelves. At this moment, Twilight knew, there were eighteen books on them. A precious eighteen books on shelf space for tens of thousands, and many of those were caked in soot, barely presentable. The only respectably clean books were a tiny cross-section of the Daring Do series, long-since "forgotten" loans that Rainbow Dash had faithfully returned when most necessary.

Behind a blink, she saw the library again, smoldering, its walls still issuing whorls of smoke from the embers deep within. She saw the ash, dancing in sad pirouettes to tumble into the basement through the ruined floor. She saw her magic lifting ruined tomes, gored and maimed and hollowed, useless and contaminated. She saw the bent tube and cracked lenses of her telescope. The hem of her printed bedsheets, burned to strips.

Somewhere downstairs she had a new pair of saddlebags, made just for her by Rarity. They lay empty, draped over a ledge or folded neatly and set on a table or the floor, maybe. She would see them for the first time in the morning.

On the balcony above and to the left, she knew, sat a pristine telescope, gleaming under Luna's moonlight. If she thought about it, Twilight imagined that she could see it when she didn't blink.

Twilight had a home. A wonderful home, one in a tree. A library that was her home. Everything had been in that wonderful, perfect home. Had, past-tense. Now she had a castle. A crystal castle of sharp, geometric edges that had everything she needed. A crystal castle that had nothing at all that she really needed.

She tried closing her eyes, to sleep, but the memories wouldn't cease.

An unknown time passed as she lay there, eyes drifting listless from this to that about the room. Twilight thought she saw Owliscious passing through the window -- in or out, she couldn't tell. She heard the slow, some-more-soft-than-others breathes of five other fillies; felt their heat. Their friendship.

A rustle and a motion from beside her, and friendship in the form of a limb abruptly slid across her, and she stifled a surprised yelp. She ran through her checklist: did it hurt? no. Is this a problem? not really. Is it helping? ...actually, yes.

Yes, it was helping. Twilight glanced around again, and looked -- actually looked -- at her friends. Here, in her alien room and her alien castle, in an awkward and, it must be admitted, somewhat uncomfortable heap of bodies, for no other reason than she asked them to not leave her alone after the horror that was the day. Friends, there for her.

Maybe, she thought, the castle wasn't meant to provide everything she needed. Maybe it was a place she needed where the things that mattered would be.

Without realizing it, Twilight Sparkle drifted into restful slumber.