Hope is the faith of the young. Losing everything she holds dear, Puppysmiles embarks on the adventure of her life to find her mother, her hopes of meeting her again driving her through the horrors of a world not of her making. Too bad the Wastelands doesn't care about hope.

While preparing for a sad celebration, Fashion Plate and Rivet reminisce about a lifetime of happiness.

Winner of the 2022 M/M Shipping Contest!

Best read online for proper formatting.

Cover art by Bright Sight. Thanks to Bright Sight and Rillegas08 for pre-reading.

Teapot, a small pegasus orphan, lives on the streets of Manehattan. Every year ponies celebrate Hearths Warming. But Teapot has no Hearth to warm. This is the story of their coldest and darkest winter night.

After taking the throne, Twilight had a lot of things to do - a transition that had never happened before was bound to be fraught with a thousand unexpected complications.

As part of the transition, Twilight finds herself going through Princess Celestia's old personal papers, finding secret after clue after instruction long forgotten about. And among those papers, Twilight finds a letter.

A letter addressed to My Faithful Student, Twilight Sparkle.

A letter never sent.

Special thanks to RanOutOfIdeas and SymphonicSync for proofreading!

Featured 4/13/2021 to 4/18/2021!

Reviewed by Ghost Mike and rated as Really Good!

And by Loganberry in the blog Louder Yay!, earning a three out of five stars rating!

Now with an audio reading by StraightToThePointStudio!

And a second by Dear silent future me!

Princess Celestia always knew that Twilight Sparkle was destined for great things, but she never revealed the source of that knowledge, not even to those closest to her. When the day of Twilight's true destiny finally arrives, can Celestia fulfill an ancient promise to save Equestia's past, present, and future, even it means saying goodbye to Twilight forever? How can Celestia refuse her mother's last wish?

Art by the inimitable Harwick

Banded Agate and his family flee across the snow-swept wasteland to escape their life of slavery in the Crystal Empire under King Sombra.

One thousand years later, a group of ponies arrives in the Empire with a story to tell.

Written for Everfree Northwest's Scribblefest 2017 Contest. Winner of the coveted Fluttershy Award!

Rainbow Dash's mom receives a letter about her daughter's heroism in combat. Now she sits, shaking and trying her best to keep it together as she reads the letter at the kitchen table with tears coursing down. Her daughter was a hero. Was. You see, Captain Rainbow "Danger" Dash of the 91st Wing...isn't coming home.

EDIT: I was contacted and a brony (Seal2001) did a translation of it in Chinese. It's beautifully done and I think it deserves some love. You can find it in the following link
https://fimtale.com/t/10016/ta-shi-ying-xiong

A suicide right by the school of friendship.
Why would someone do that when there was help so close?
Twilight can't let this go as just a tragic incident. There has to be a reason.
*UPDATED*
I just added some detail and fixed a couple small problems. The story itself is unchanged.

This story is a sequel to Lines and Webs

For four long years, Celestia's apprentice Twilight Sparkle, once a model pony and a hero among heroes, has waged a bitter and secret struggle with her onetime mentor. Though she works from the shadows, directing her forces from the Old Capitol in the Everfree Forest, Twilight Sparkle is unable to gain any advantage,

Likewise, Princess Celestia finds her once-faithful student far more cunning and elusive than she had anticipated, and even now searches for a way to bring Twilight Sparkle's rebellion to its knees.

It is a game of greys, of knives in the dark and of poisoned wine, where pawns are moved and traded and exchanged for greater advantage, all the while drawing both sides nearer to the conflict which shall tear Equestria in two.

At the center of this conflict is a new pawn, one who only wished to see the truth for herself. Drawn into a deadly game whose rules she does not understand, Sweetie Belle must learn to survive in a world where all is darkened, and nopony can be completely trusted.

Because when gods play chess, all pieces are expendable.

A nation will crumble, old enemies shall return in the most unexpected ways, and regardless of who is victorious, only one thing can be certain.

Nothing shall ever be the same.

Followed by Stormsinger.

There are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, and humanity is determined to explore every one. We send probes, probes with the blueprints to reproduce human explorers upon arrival. Uninhabited worlds the galaxy over can be colonized and populated, until after many years they too can join the vast throng of interstellar civilization. But if a probe is very, very lucky, it will land on a populated world instead. Equestria is one such world.

Even so, it's far from perfect for colonization, not with an environment lethal to human life. But each probe is resourceful and armed with the greatest machine intelligence mankind has devised. If placing a human mind into a newly manufactured human body won't work, it will just have to get a little more creative.

This book has a Hardcover! If you want to pick it up, you can grab it here: https://starscribe.net/

This story was written at the behest of Canary In The Coal Mine, who is sponsoring it on my Patreon. As usual, cover by Zutcha. Editing by Two Bit and Sparktail.

Fantastic prereading help from: Chyre, Danger Noodle, Doctor Disco, and Doggyshakespeare (who also did the Esperanto translation). Thank you all for helping to make this story more readable and more consistent for everyone.