“You have a lot of nerve showing your face to me right here and now.”
Twilight felt her filter dissolve instantly as she stared face-to-face at Moon Dancer. The two stood across from one another, a few seats apart, in a large governmental rotunda in which reporters, politicians and royals were gathering to find their seats.
Moon Dancer nodded, her face blank. “I figured you’d want nothing to do with me—”
“And you’re right,” Twilight snapped. “The only reason you’re here is because I don’t have the right to throw you out.”
Moon Dancer sighed and took a step closer, and Twilight frowned and pulled away. “Look,” the former spoke low, “I didn’t know Thunderbolt would do this. But when you think about it, he didn’t really do anything wrong. Discord gave himself up, and royal guards are looking for Changelings in the Crystal Empire. That’s like cops looking for robbers, it’s the status quo.”
“Thorax?” Twilight muttered back. The pause that followed assured her that Moon Dancer knew exactly who that was.
“They haven’t reported any findings yet, so he must be in hiding,” Moon Dancer finally replied. “If he’s smart, he left the Crystal Empire altogether.”
Twilight didn’t speak. She simply turned toward the center of the rotunda, waiting for the princesses to arrive.
“Twilight, come on,” Moon Dancer spoke up, “if you weren’t so stubborn, we could compromise here.”
Twilight aimed her eyes at the Unicorn without turning. “You’re not interested in compromise. You or Thunderbolt. All either of you want is revenge.”
Twilight heard an annoyed sigh and hoof steps approach her. “Look, I get it. You hate the guy. I’m not fond of him either. But there’s a reason he’s the Captain of the Royal Guard.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” Twilight bit back.
“Because he worked to get there,” Moon Dancer spat. “He was just a normal soldier up until a few years ago. Made it to lieutenant just before the Changeling Invasion, and that’s what really spurred him on.”
“One bad event with real villains, and he wants to ship us all to Tartarus?”
“One bad event that took everything from him.”
Twilight’s ears twitched and she glanced back at Moon Dancer. She did not speak, but the slight traces on her face were all the speaking she needed.
“Everypony’s past gives them reasons for their actions,” Moon Dancer spoke low. “Yours. Thunderbolt’s. Starlight’s. Even mine.” She lowered her head, her ears dropping with it. “Especially mine . . . .”
“Doesn’t give you the right to steal ponies’ freedom,” Twilight retorted. “Thunderbolt, either.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, Twilight, you’re smarter than this!” Moon Dancer cried. “You were Celestia’s most gifted student, you worked as a librarian, and now you’re a princess! I would have thought research was second-nature to you by now! If it was, you’d know what happened to Thunderbolt’s family!”
Twilight’s face twitched this time, giving away the chink in her mental armor. Not a lot had been spoken of the invasion that had almost destroyed Canterlot and ruined Shining Armor and Cadance’s wedding. Only Spike’s new friendship with Thorax had brought it up again, but really only as some unspeakable thing no one wanted to remember.
Twilight realized the reason for this too late.
“Now you know, right?” Moon Dancer spoke up. “Ponies lost their lives during the Changeling invasion . . . Thunderbolt . . . his daughter, she—”
Moon Dancer stopped and both ponies looked up as the doors opened and the captain himself walked imperiously through. He glanced at Twilight with his usual caustic stare, but there was something in it this time that warranted a double-take. Something like movement in a frozen pond, just beneath the icy surface.
Melancholy?
Thunderbolt turned away, looking disgruntled, before Twilight could see it more clearly. At this point, the room was just about full, so Twilight merely took her seat and focused on the podium in the center of the room. At that point, Moon Dancer may as well have no longer existed.
Applejack, Rarity, Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash found Twilight and took seats around her, and soon, the bustle in the room dimmed. A few minutes later, Princess Celestia emerged from a side door and walked straight to the podium, Princess Luna accompanying her and standing at her side. As she faced the seated crowd, the bustle died down completely, and Celestia spoke into the microphone.
“Oh, don’t be upset, Ly!” Bon-Bon spoke softly as the two faced the desk of the certifications office of the palace. “Just because the Princess is busy, doesn’t mean it won’t happen!”
Lyra, ears drooped, turned toward Bon-Bon with glistening eyes. “I thought she’d be here to do this personally before her big conference,” she mumbled. “I mean, I know the whole RARA thing is important, but . . . is she not attending to this kind of stuff anymore?”
“It’s okay!” Bon-Bon laughed. “It’s not like Celestia doesn’t have ponies all over Canterlot that are qualified to handle this. We’ll get our license, you’ll see!”
“I know, I know . . . .” Lyra trailed off as she looked out a window into the streets. “I was just looking forward to this so much, and if there’s even a slight chance that something could go wrong, I . . . well, I don’t know what I’d do . . . .”
“Listen,” Bon-Bon cooed as she stepped up to her. “Nothing bad will happen. It’s just a slight setback, that’s all. Once we have it, we’ll spend the rest of the day exploring Canterlot together. We’ll go to lunch, take in a show, and when we get home, we’ll find a beautiful frame to put it in and set it up somewhere in the living room. It’ll be a confirmation that our lives and our love matter. And heck, maybe RARA will make Equestria safer for us. I trust Twilight and her friends, but this is supposed to be a good thing, right?”
“Maybe . . .” Lyra replied, her voice gaining a bit of strength before slipping into a girlish, humming giggle. “Is there anything you want to do when we get home?”
“Well, I did have some plans for us for dinner, if you’re okay with it, but if you—”
Lyra pressed a hoof to Bon-Bon’s mouth, silencing her. “That’s not what I meant,” she said in a low, alluring whisper.
Bon-Bon’s eyes widened and her face flushed, eliciting another giggle from Lyra. Bon-Bon giggled in turn, and the two started laughing uproariously after a few seconds. After their laughter died down, they eyed each other and held each other in their forelegs, foreheads pressed together and inches away from a loving kiss.
Until a bright light went off across the street.
“What’s going on over there?” Bon-Bon asked as she and Lyra unfolded themselves from each other. They both stared out the window and saw the mid-sized building across the street. On the roof of the building, a small beam of light, shaping into a column, was slowly growing.
“The incident with Ponyville Town Hall has forced us to reexamine our reactions to threats to our nation,” Princess Celestia spoke to the crowd in the rotunda two floors up. “While the former villain known as Starlight Glimmer has shown clear intentions to redeem herself and take responsibility for her actions, it is clear her attempts thus far have not been sufficient. Despite her good intentions, her tendencies to use her extremely proficient magic without thinking has caused controversy in Equestria. We hope now that the Reformed Antagonist Regulation Act will provide a safe and effective alternative to how our cities, our citizens, and our allies cooperate in assessing these situations.”
Twilight heard words being spoken, but they were all a haze. Despite being surrounded by friends, she sat in her seat as though she were the only one there. Glances at Thunderbolt provided nothing; his face was turned away from her the whole time. Glances from Moon Dancer to Twilight were avoided almost as much. Birds of a feather, Twilight thought bitterly at seeing the two sitting so close.
Don’t be like that, another voice in Twilight’s head spoke to her. Moon Dancer really is trying to do the right thing, even if it comes from a wrong reason. And Thunderbolt . . . oh, that poor stallion, who knows what he’s gone through . . . ?
It’s no excuse, Twilight’s first voice broke through. Taking away rights won’t fix what happened.
But he’s not trying to hurt anypony. Maybe he seems like he is, but he really believes he’s doing good.
He’s delusional. And a control freak.
But he’s a good guy, too.
Twilight closed her eyes and shook her head to cast off her thoughts. She turned to focusing on Celestia to keep her thoughts from returning. The conflict going on in this room was difficult enough.
“We have spent too long,” Celestia continued, “laboring under the idealistic belief that everypony can be redeemed. Maybe they can, maybe not. But after the recent attacks all over Equestria, including on our own library here in this very palace, and after the incident in Ponyville, one thing is certain: we cannot risk allowing these powerful, formerly villainous entities to operate on their own devices. I wish to thank my fellow princess and former pupil, Twilight Sparkle, for her presence today, and to her friends, and to the Crystal Empire, for supporting this initiative . . . .”
Twilight found her focus waning again, and the haze returned. She sighed, staring at Celestia as if she were merely an extension of the inanimate podium she spoke from. A heavily filtered voice coming from an extremity of a hunk of wood in the middle of the room: Twilight had strength to picture little else.
Suddenly, her attention snapped back up. Through the window directly behind Celestia, Twilight could see a beam of light that was slowly growing, in size and shape. First the size of a beach ball, the bright beam reshaped itself into a tall, thin column. The spectacle began to cause murmurs and stirrings in the listening crowd, and the bigger the light became, the louder the murmurs became.
A quick glance his way showed that Thunderbolt saw the same light—and reacted the same way.
“Fillies and gentlecolts, please,” Celestia spoke up in a steady voice, “these may be troubling times, but as Equestrians and as ponies, we must stand together for a safer future—”
“EVERYPONY GET DOWN!!”
The call, from Thunderbolt, came a split-second after the distant light started swiftly approaching the palace. Thunderbolt made it to the podium, shoved both princesses out of the way, and conjured an enormous deep-blue shield that covered the length of the large window.
The light shattered the window with a deafening BANG!
The powerful beam shredded through Thunderbolt’s shield and raked into him, sending him flying across the room and plowing into the far wall. The screams started a second before the blast went off, and everypony stood and either ran or flew to the door.
It all seemed to happen in a split-second; the window was in shards by the time Twilight was finally shaken from her senses by Rarity, who’d been screaming in her ear. Twilight felt the urge to move fill her like lightning in the blood, and followed Celestia and Luna’s example, taking to the air above the rotunda and filing the panicked victims out of the room safely. With such a rush of ponies to the door, the room cleared within seconds, and Twilight stayed to glimpse the last pony in the room, being levitated carefully out by Luna.
Thunderbolt, bruised, filthy and bloody, sparks from the behemoth spell still radiating from his prone body as it floated, cocooned in Princess Luna’s magic as he slowly drifted out the rotunda door.
And for the first true time, Twilight hoped against hope that he would be all right.
Her silent, yet tender moment with an imprisoned Discord had been violently interrupted by a rumble in the ground. Fluttershy rushed back up to the ground floor without even saying goodbye to the guards, and upon emerging from the elevator, gasped at the first sight she saw.
Along the side of the palace, a large smoking trench had been carved. Bits of stone, plaster and wood littered the square, ponies ran away from the building, sobbing and shaking and trying to locate their loved ones, while paramedics carted away the injured into medical wagons on their way to the hospital. Injured ponies waiting for a ride were tended to by skilled Unicorn surgeons on the scene.
Now feeling her own body shudder, Fluttershy raced to the first group of ponies she saw. “Excuse me!” she called out. “What’s going on?! Who’s attacking us?!”
“We don’t know!” the first of them, a powdery-gray Unicorn stallion in glasses, spoke in a nasal, pretentious voice. “One moment, we were listening to Her Highness give her speech on RARA, next moment the whole room exploded!”
“Thank goodness Captain Thunderbolt was there!” said the pale-yellow Unicorn mare next to him in a similar voice. “He took most of the attack for Their Graces and softened the spell! He saved us all!”
“He . . . what?” Fluttershy’s eyes widened.
“Yes, and a good thing, too!” the mare continued. “Ponies have been saying they saw that Starlight girl running away from the spot the spell came from!”
“What?!”
“That’s what they say!” the stallion added. “That must mean she was behind it!”
“Oh, dear . . .” the mare said to her husband as they slowly trotted away from the group. “Twilight was wrong about her . . . all of Equestria was wrong about her . . . .”
Fluttershy felt her insides plummet. “Starlight? No, that can’t be . . . she’s back in Ponyville. Did she really leave? Could she . . . no.” Fluttershy shook her head as if to banish the thought right away. She’s different now, she thought. She wouldn’t do this. Not now. Not when she has every chance to show she’s better now—
But on the day the world is deciding her fate for her? It makes sense . . . .
She shook away her thoughts again and raced to another group, this one of injured ponies. The worst of them were being carried out on stretchers, and at one of them, Fluttershy did a double-take.
“Lyra?!”
Filthy, broken and covered in slash marks, Lyra Heartstrings lay on a stretcher as the paramedics rushed it away to another wagon. As more stretchers were being carried away, Fluttershy scanned them for any more familiar faces, her heart punching the inside of her ribs as she hoped none of her friends were among them.
No faces stood out amongst the injured, but one face sat off to one side as a nurse finished treating small cuts on her face and forelegs. Bon-Bon had a blank look in her eyes as the nurse finished treating her.
“Bon-Bon!” Fluttershy called out to her and raced toward the bench she sat on. “Are you all right? What happened? Are Twilight and the others okay? What about Thunderbolt? Is it true what they say, about who they think did it?”
“She . . .” Bon-Bon whispered as she felt the wood beneath her with a hoof, her voice shattered beyond recognition, “she loved benches . . . .”
“Bon-Bon, what happened?” Fluttershy repeated, softer this time.
“We were so excited to get approved for our marriage license . . . then the light went off, and . . . she pushed me down and . . . she didn’t have time to cover us both . . . .”
“Oh . . . oh, Bon-Bon, I’m so sorry . . .” Fluttershy said, her own voice shaking. “Will she be all right?”
“They say she’s critical,” Bon-Bon replied, “but she’s a priority patient, so she’ll get the best treatment at the hospital. I . . . had to stay here . . . .”
“It’s okay, Bon-Bon,” Fluttershy cooed, sitting on the bench beside her. “It’s gonna be okay. They’ll help everypony, and they’ll find whoever did this—”
“I could have stopped her, Fluttershy.”
The Pegasus blinked, taking in what she just said. “W-what?”
“I saw her. We both did. As we walked into the palace, we saw her going over to that building where the spell came from. When they brought us out, I saw her leave. Lavender fur, cowlick and everything. And she smiled.”
Another feeling of vertigo struck Fluttershy as she put the picture together. The Unicorns were right after all. It was her.
“Bon-Bon,” Fluttershy spoke low, almost warningly so, “Thunderbolt will decide what happens here. If it really was Starlight, then let the RARA panel handle it.”
Bon-Bon, her blank face beginning to harden into a look of cold fury, got up from the bench. She turned to Fluttershy and aimed that coldness at her.
“Don’t bother, Fluttershy . . . I’ll get her myself.”