For Doctor Twilight Sparkle, life at Canterlot National Hospital was pretty good. She'd struck up a bond with the director and even had enough time to publish a paper or two. There's only one thing she needs to advance even further: better bedside manner.
For these reasons, Doctor Celestia carts her off to a tiny Ponyville practice. Now, Twilight must find a way to both cure and tolerate the village idiots--and try to convince a certain high-strung healer that she's not after her job.

Because "grumpy doctor Twilight" practically writes itself. Art by Punk-Pegasus

In the beginning, The Great Weaver brought together the world, from the mountains to the forests. Stitching it together, the Great Tapestry connects all living and nonliving things.

The Changelings found themselves especially connected to this Tapestry. Legend says that the first Changelings fell through the world as it was woven together, only to be caught on the First Weave beneath it all.

But what happens when something else is caught in the Weave?

Prince Phasmatodea, son of Queen Chrysalis, remembers what it was like before he hatched. He remembers being a human. He remembers dying. And he fully intends on avoiding another death.

But being gifted a new life does not matter when one failure, one false step, will lead to your untimely demise in the Changeling hive, for Prince Phasma must survive his toughest adversary from the start: Mother Dearest.

Cover art as of 1/18/21 by Nixworld

It's been three days since the Equestrian Railway Service incident, and things are finally calming down in the wake of the Dusk Guard's first mission. Three days since the team's first mission came to a successful conclusion. Three days since their first trial by fire. Three days since Sky Bolt, the team's engineer, had everything she'd created put to the test. And it all worked. Nothing went wrong.

So why can't she sleep?

First of the Side Stories to The Dusk Guard: Rise. Familiarity with Rise is not required, but recommended.
Side Stories so far:
Carry On
The Definition of Strength
Old Habits
Emoticon
Remembrance
Trust

The Saga has a TV Tropes page!
"This is 100% Approved by Twilight's Library!"
Added to Twilight's Library 12/5/2013
Featured on Canterlot's Finest
Special Thanks to Sonorus, Jorlem, Sinister Voice, Templar22 and Bronze Aegis for their help pre-reading and editing.

This story is a sequel to Ponyville Noire: Kriegspiel—Black, White, and Scarlet

Zugzwang is dead, Scarlet Letter is in prison, and Ponyville is safer than it has ever been before, the once invulnerable crime syndicates in fragmented disarray. But Daring Do and Phillip Finder still dream of the red sky and the empty black eyes; Trace's dying scream echoes in their ears when they try to sleep, and they feel Zugzwang's ghost haunting them.

But even as they struggle with their demons, more cases come to the doorstep of 221 Honeybee Bakery. And as hard as it is, Phillip and Daring cannot turn away from those in need. Dragons in Canterlot, changeling intrigue in their own hometown, murder in the Crystal Empire, and treasure hunts in the Aushaylian Outback: these new, fantastic cases will take the detectives on strange journeys across Equestria, introducing them to new allies and friends. And maybe they will find peace along the way.

The third story of the Noireverse, this smaller series is intended as a sort of coda to the previous story, Kriegspiel. As I prepare to plan out the next major story of the Ponyville Noire series, I decided to write a few shorter cases to keep the gears greased. The purpose of this story is primarily to introduce some new characters and locales to the Noireverse, but also to show Phillip and Daring dealing with the trauma of what they went through in the last story: all things I wasn't confident I could do well in the next big story, considering what I have planned for that.

I hope that you enjoy this work!

Featured on April 2, 2021! Thank you all!

Updates every Saturday. Edited by Eagle--Paladin of Shadows!

Click here to check out the theme music by The L-Train!

Ponyville is one of the largest cities in Equestria, a center for trade and finance, a melting pot of many races, tribes, and cultures. It is also a place where corruption is a way of life. Here, the cops that aren't on the take are forever chasing their own tails, citizens live in fear, and gangs battle for control of the streets.

Daring Do has just been released from prison after a year-long sentence for thievery, and no one is about to let her forget her place. Phillip Finder is a local private detective and the bane of the Ponyville Police Department. The new partners quickly find themselves at ground zero of a city-wide gang war; surrounded by dirty cops, mobsters, assassins, and bizarre crimes, they can only rely on each other and a few honest ponies for aid.

They're hardly heroes. Which means they may be exactly what Ponyville needs.

Updates every Wednesday. Proofread by Eagle—Paladin of Shadows

The first story of the Noireverse.

Sex and Gore tags for suggestive content and graphic descriptions.

Check out the theme music by The L-Train by clicking here!

Featured on 1/29/18! Thank you all so much! <3

A bit of background...

Three years ago, I introduced Phillip Finder in my first fanfiction, "The Pony in the Gray Trilby." Over the next many months, I kept writing and eventually turned my first work into a twenty-story series. I learned much and enjoyed the stories' moderate success, but unfortunately, I became dissatisfied with them over time. I realize that it's perhaps a bit of a cliche that many artists end up hating their own work, but for both Tchaikovsky and myself, it is the truth.

I initially planned to write this story as a prequel to the series, focusing on Phillip Finder and Daring Do. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wanted to improve upon my work, but felt as though I was being held back by the original series. While I am proud of my first stories for what I learned and gained through them, I decided that the best course of action for me, what would make me the happiest, would be to wipe the slate clean and start again from the basic foundations.

That's where this story comes in. A semi-reboot of the original series, the adventures contained herein, set in a vastly different alternate universe and replete with a mixture of reinterpreted and original characters, are the culmination of all the experience that I gained writing the original series. This is Phillip Finder and company as I meant them to be.

I hope that you enjoy reading this story as much as I enjoy writing it!

This isn't where I belong. I left all this behind years ago, moved on with my life. But a mare from my past brought me back, and now she won't let me go. So I'm stuck here, trying to make the best of it with ponies that don't understand me, don't even like me. But when something moves in the darkness, and when things go wrong in the cold, dead night, they'll turn to me to try to set things right.

Why? Because once a police pony, always a police pony.
~~
This is a spin-off story to 'Why am I Pinkie Pie?!', and will contain spoilers for that story, but it's not necessary to read that story to understand this one.
Cover art by the talented Conicer
Need more Cinnamon Swirl? Merlos the Mad wrote a fanfic of this story!

There is now a side-story: A Hard Day's Nightmare Night

Every department has them. The standouts. The supercops. The other guys. And for some reason, there's always one or two of THEM... a pair of loose-cannon cops who refuse to play by the rules, taking the law and throwing it in cuffs right alongside every mook and petty criminal they've apprehended on the mean streets of Ponyville.

These are the reports of two such officers in the Ponyville Police Department, Officer Cherry n' Berries and Officer Dodge Charger. Two officers that seem as determined to uphold law and order in town as they are to rip the place to shreds, upholding the hell out of law and order in town.

Image courtesy of TapeDiggity.