The foggy feeling like you're wandering through a dream, disconnected from the world around you. Sunset Shimmer experiences that every day. Ponies struggle to remember her, she suffers from random bouts of exhaustion, and at eighteen, she still has no cutie mark.

Despite the claims her mother makes, Sunset knows she is broken in some way. It isn't until her nineteenth birthday that she discovers why.

When her perception of herself and the world around her shatters, Equestria will face the consequences of the villain... or the hero, it was never supposed to have.

Sunset Shimmer has hated Cadance since before they even met. After working her tail off for so many years as Princess Celestia's personal protégé, striving for perfection and aiming to eventually earn a royal title of her own, to have some random, two-bit nopony fall out of the sky and steal her crown felt like a kick to the horn.

So you can imagine Sunset's absolute delight when Princess Celestia assigns her to be Cadance's private magic tutor.

While at first it seems like some cruel punishment, Sunset quickly sees a golden opportunity. If she does this right, she might stand to gain far more than a mere grade.

Sunset Shimmer's life was good, she had plenty of friends and greatly enjoyed where she had eventually ended up in life. It's a shame then that reality had a different opinion on where she belonged. Now stuck in the past prior to first leaving for the human world, Sunset will have to figure out what kind of direction she wants to take in life this time around.

After all, the future she herself lived with her friends was not reachable without doing things that she now found appalling. Even so, she knows that staying in Equestria could very well doom the world to a much darker future. If she had time to draft a plan she could probably figure out something that would keep herself out of the way while also not affecting the timeline, it's a shame then that the two princesses of Canterlot would just not leave her alone!

Apparently this thing got feature mere days after publishing... somehow.

Sunset Shimmer isn't a normal girl. She can levitate objects with her mind, shoot hot energy from her palms, and when she's scared, she can disappear and reappear somewhere else entirely.

Her parents know. Her siblings know. What they don't know is how different Sunset really is.

When nightmarish creatures attack and kidnap her sister, Sunset ventures into the unknown and discovers a world teetering on the edge of total darkness.

What begins as a rescue mission turns into a struggle to save a kingdom, as Sunset learns just who and what she is, and the weight that comes with it.

A month or so after the Battle of the Bands, Principal Celestia calls Sunset Shimmer and friends to her office, for a long-overdue discussion.

Edited and smoothed over with help from the ever-patient Little Jackie Papercut.

Sunset Shimmer decides it’s finally time to return to Equestria to confront Princess Celestia and ask some tough questions about the treatment of Her protégés. She isn’t ready for the answers she receives.

During her time-twisting battle with Starlight Glimmer, Twilight finds herself in an Equestria ruled by a tyrant alicorn that calls herself the Queen of Equestria. In this world, Twilight's friends are gone and beyond her aid, and Equestria's citizens live in fear of their ruler's wrath should they anger her.

But no one has ever seen the pony who suffers the most in this world.

Pre-read by MythrilMoth and RT Stephens. Cover art vector by kindkristy99

[Now with a parody version!]
Sunset Shimmer: Ex-Queen bee of CHS. Ex-She-deamon. Ex-villain. Overall bad-ass.

However, as the hair 5 are learning, Sunset isn't all she may seem to be. This confident girl may just have a secret or two that she doesn't want out.

((Edited and altered 5/8/15))

Sunset is accused of spreading everyone’s secrets on a Mystable page calling itself Anon-a-Miss, losing all of her friends and reputation in the process.

But it seems the school forgot one thing.

Sunset Shimmer isn't one to be easily broken.

A story dearly inspired by wanting something different out of the Anon-a-Miss 'Genre' of fics. Many are wonderful stories, but at the end of the day, most tend to fall into the same couple of tropes with slight alterations, and many of those tropes are ones I'm not terribly fond of.

So with my ever present desire to take a well trod genre and flip it on its head, I present my own take on this story, and one I have not personally seen. So I hope I deliver on giving you something different from the others!

Pre-Read by the Wonderful and Loveable baes: Uria, the Sacred Beast and Sunny Days

This story is a sequel to How Not To Use Your Royal Prerogative

  In an Equestria where the Sonic Rainboom never happened, Sunset Shimmer is the prized pupil of the Princess of the Sun. As Sunset struggles to make up for her past misdeeds and come to terms with the pony she wants to be, Celestia sends her to find the classic work The Application of Unified Harmony Magic from the Royal Canterlot Archives.
  Right after lunch, some meddling by her friends and meeting somepony with firsthoof experience of the Sunset she used to be.

Featured on Equestria Daily on August 18, 2016!
Appeared in the FimFiction Featured Box!

Cast: Sunset Shimmer, Moon Dancer, Minuette, Twilight Sparkle & Princess Celestia

Stories set in the Wavelengths Timeline in chronological order:

Origins Arc
The Alchemy of Chemistry
Bards of the Badlands
Grading on a Bell Curve
Habits of the Equestrian Phoenix
How Not To Use Your Royal Prerogative

Applications Arc
The Application of Unified Harmony Magics
Princess Celestia: A Brief History
The Cloudsdale Report

Dreamers Arc
Tactics of Snowbound Unicorns
A Study in Chaos Theory
Teahouses of Saddle Arabia
As the Raven Flies

Cover Credits
Cover Design by Amber Spark
Sunset Shimmer Vector by TigerBeetle
Pony SciTwi Vector by Osipush
Canterlot Bookshelves Vector by FavoriteArtMan
Sunset Shimmer Cutie Mark by MillennialDan

Beta Reader Credits
Ebon Quill - Worldbuilding Writer on The Manehattan Project
Quantum State - Technical Director of The Manehattan Project
The Albinocorn - Master of Sunset Shimmer Stories

Strongly Recommended Stories:
The Brightest and the Best by Pineta - The events in this story are considered to be completely canon to this timeline and explain Twilight's entrance exam to Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns. I cannot recommend this story enough.
MLP Annual 2013 - "The Fall of Sunset Shimmer" - As above, the 8-page short comic in the beginning of the Annual is also considered to be canon, though with some major variations.

Version 3.0 Edit: Extensive grammatical and mechanics changes. Adjustment to timeline of Sunset's second mirror experience.