//------------------------------// // Chapter T5: Rejection // Story: [Redacted] // by McPoodle //------------------------------// [Redacted] - Chapter T5: Rejection - “...move the entire village!” the voice of Celestia mocked from above. “What kind of foal could have possibly fallen for that!” On the ground below, Twilight Sparkle rocked back and forth, her head buried under her forehooves. A part of her hoped that doing this enough would cause the earth to crack up beneath her and drop her into a bottomless pit where the sound of her mentor could never follow. “Forget about banishing Luna; thinking that that I could find anything worthwhile in you has got to be the biggest mistake I have ever made! The first thing you did after I brought you into the palace was to mistake asbestos for the talcum powder I asked for; if it wasn’t for my immortality, your stupidity would have killed me!” Twilight tried to shrink even smaller, but then suddenly stopped. “Wait a minute,” she said, getting up. “You’re not immortal! I only thought that when I was a filly. And you didn’t put asbestos on your coat; that was just a silly misunderstanding on my part. You’re not Celestia!” “What?! How dare you...!” “And this!” Twilight exclaimed, taking in the whole world with a sweep of one forehoof. “It’s all wrong!” The thought caused a huge smile to break out on her face, and tears to joy of appear in her eyes. “A motionless sun would cause temperature fluctuations that would have generated thunderstorms and tornadoes by now! The unending amount of ash in the air would have sparked an unending rain of lightning bolts! There’s no way that many zomponies could have survived this long if they were so ridiculously fragile! There’s only one conclusion, non-Celestia--do you know what that is?” The voice in the air was speechless. “I’M DREAMING!” Twilight shouted, rearing up onto her hind legs and twirling about in giddiness. “None of this has happened! Equestria is intact, and you...the real you...still believe in me! This is just a nightmare!” She dropped back down on all fours as a thought struck her. “I’m going to need a lot of therapy after I wake up. No normal pony would dream something as awful as this!” And then another thought struck her. “Why am I still here? I figured out that this is a dream, so that should have ended it!” Zompony Fluttershy jumped on her back and started tearing at Twilight’s flesh. “Ow!” Twilight exclaimed, bucking Fluttershy off in anger. The monstrosity fell into fragments as it reached the ground. The unicorn paid absolutely no attention to the fate of her friend, knowing now that she was but a phantom. “Why can I feel pain?” Twilight asked herself nervously, pacing around in a tight circle inside of her bubble. She then looked down at her hooves. “This pace is all wrong!” she observed. “The stride is far too short, and where’s the slight roll in my right hip? I mean, even in a dream I should know how I walk! It’s not like somepony else...is...in charge of reality....A dream trap spell!” “Pyrite!” cursed Spike from just out of Twilight’s sight. Without a second’s thought, Twilight bucked Spike into the nearest wall. Hard. She quickly turned on the dragon, watching warily as he put his claw to a broken rib. “I figured out you were not Spike as soon as you opened your big mouth about the ‘dragons’ worst mistake’,” she told him. “I take it that you are the Dreamer?” “If you distrusted my identity for so long,” the familiar-looking stranger asked, “why didn’t you turn on me? Why didn’t you leave me behind?” “The Ancients’ have a saying,” she replied. “‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies even closer.’ This is hopefully the first and last time I’ll ever have to use it.” A little purple dragon smiled in a manner that Twilight knew would give her nightmares for weeks. “A nice bit of advice there, about the weather...” With an immense tearing sound, lightning bolt after lightning bolt started pouring down from the heavens at Twilight Sparkle. She tried to dodge, and when that failed, she tried to use her magic, but she was both physically and mentally exhausted, and could not prevent herself being hit on her flank. For an instant, her legs utterly failed her and she dropped to the ground. “And now, Celestia’s student,” Spike cackled with a voice a millennium old, “it is time to meet your maker!” In an instant, Twilight’s eyes went wide, as facts in her possession suddenly re-arranged themselves in her mind: Her last certain memory was of the royal dirigible crashing into the Everfree. She and the Princess had been confronting Oars in Wells with evidence of his treachery, and he had produced a thoughtcaster. No...two thoughtcasters! Twilight wasn’t the primary target of the dream trap at all! But that must mean... “Celestia!” the unicorn screamed out, searching around her with her magic. Finding the alicorn’s distinctive magical signature embedded in the solid earth below her, Twilight did something that would mean certain death in the waking world: blind-teleporting into solid matter. It wasn’t until she was mid-leap that it registered to her that Celestia’s magic had been dwarfed in her scan by the magical field emitted by the frustrated baby dragon behind her. Twilight Sparkle materialized in Tartarus. That had to be where she was, for before her an immense black alicorn was re-enacting Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son with one of his own kind. It disturbed her that she knew the horrific Ancient painting well enough to instantly make the connection. The rocky landscape around her was draped in darkness, held back only by the gutting flames of a half-dozen cauldrons on slender stands. The flames fed on pools of animal fat, but even this gag-inducing scent was overwhelmed by the smell of death. Every bit of ground that Twilight could see was covered with the half-devoured carcasses of alicorns. Only one alicorn was left intact to witness this madness: a tiny pink filly, trembling so violently it looked like she would shake herself to pieces. But no matter how hard she tried, she could not take her eyes away from the carnage being enacted before her. Twilight nodded grimly to herself, and then teleported herself between the two living alicorns. “Celestia!” she cried out. The filly looked down at her hooves in confusion. “Lu...na?” she asked in a frightened voice. Twilight kneeled down and smiled gently. “Celestia...” She closed her eyes and thought back, trying to remember the pet name Princess Luna had for her sister. “...Tia?” Little Tia looked up at the purple mare standing before her. “Aunt Twilie?” “Not quite,” the unicorn replied, “but I’m pretty sure you arranged for me to be named for her about five generations in advance. You’re clever like that.” Twilight glanced over her shoulder at the gnashing monstrosity behind her. When she looked back, she was startled to see that the alicorn before her was now a teenager, although still pink and lacking her cutie mark. “This is just a dream, Tia,” she said. Tia nodded. “I know,” she said in a voice befitting her new form. “...his dream,” Twilight clarified, pointing behind her. “I know.” “And that’s not your father.” “I...I know that, Twilight,” Tia said with a stutter. “It doesn’t matter.” “Now if we combine our powers in a sudden assault, that should be enough to...what do you mean, it doesn’t matter?” “My mind knows who that is,” Tia explained, the fear growing in her voice, “but my heart is still fooled. He is my everything, Twilight. The sun, the moon, Neu...Equestria, the entire universe beyond the Shell of Stars, they are nothing to me next to having my father back.” She said this with the utmost self-loathing, knowing that she was betraying all of her ponies and the few surviving members of her kind, but she knew she couldn’t help herself. “He’s not your father!” Twilight shouted. “It doesn’t matter.” Twilight changed tactics, addressing her accusations against the pony Celestia believed he was. “He killed your family, your friends, thousands and thousands of your own kind!” Tia burst out in tears. “It doesn’t matter! I can’t hurt him, Twilight, I can’t!” Twilight looked hard at the trembling little princess, and then steeled herself. “Then I’m going to have to take him from you myself,” she said. Before she had even finished the sentence, she whipped around and started firing magical bolts into the gigantic black alicorn. The creature quickly put up a shield, and then began firing back at her, lowering the shield for just an instant to let each bolt through. Twilight staggered backwards, and then felt a more feeble series of bolts striking her from behind. “Leave my Daddy alone!” Tia screamed. She had reverted to being a filly again. A frustrated Twilight reached out a hoof in preparation for sealing Tia up in a protective bubble. And then she noticed how she towered over the tiny alicorn, and thought back on the stained glass window Celestia had commissioned to document the madness and overthrow of her father, and she knew what she had to do. Closing her eyes and concentrating, Twilight began to grow, bigger and bigger and bigger. As she grew, her fur roughened and turned into scales, and her tail flared out and suddenly became fleshy. She reared up onto her large hind legs and roared as her teeth became pointed and flames shot out of her snout. Her immense form now dwarfed the black alicorn just as that alicorn had once dwarfed her. Dragon-Twilight reached out a hand towards the Black King, and it began to glow. The dragon disguised as an alicorn knew this scene, and for the first time since he had returned from Faerie, the Dragon Emperor knew fear. This was the turning point in dragon history. This was the moment when they had made the ultimate sacrifice, stepping down from their godhood to save the world they had come to love. From this moment, Draconia would become Equestria, and the world would be governed by Friendship instead of Greed. Vasilyevich braced for the end, but then he realized that something was different. The dragon elder before him wasn’t pouring death into his body, but instead taking his god-magic into her puny pony body. It was a trick! The Emperor retaliated with a burst of magic too intense for the pony to absorb at once, knocking her out and forcing her to revert to her true appearance. But in doing this, he had resumed his true form. Tia shook her head, clearing it of the powerful charm spell controlling her, and then raced over to the unicorn, growing older with every step she took. The god-magic had caused Twilight to grow to nearly twice her former height, and extend her horn to be as long as her muzzle. The teenage Tia quickly nuzzled her awake. “Could I...?” she asked shyly. Twilight looked up at her from the ground and smiled. “Of course,” she said, and leaned her horn over to touch the filly’s. With a blinding flash of light, Celestia was restored to her full power, while Twilight once again became merely the third-most powerful pony magician in the land. Together, they laid their full power into the Dragon Emperor...and found that even together and with so much power stolen from him, they were still only strong enough to create a dangerous stalemate between them. “That’s it!” he declared. “I’m winning! As long as I sleep, I will grow more and more powerful, while you two will grow weaker and weaker. It may take days, but your defeat is now inevitable!” “Then maybe it’s time for you to wake up!” came a voice from above. The three combatants looked up to see an immense golden orb floating above them. Despite lacking a cornea or pupil, they all somehow knew this to be a gigantic eye looking down upon them. “Waking Terror!” cried out Celestia, recognizing the voice. She then pointed up with uncertainty at the orb. “And...Vinyl Scratch?” Was this what horn sight looked like from the other side? “I still don’t know what kind of world-shaking business your sister got me out of the last time,” the shiny orb “said”. “But it looks like you’ve got me back in it.” “Spirit of the Fae!” the Dragon Emperor said, pointing a claw at the blackness that hid Waking Terror from him. “You are in the presence of the Supreme Will, Master of Reality and Tyrant Over All Life! I order you to slaughter these ponies! ...and that eye thing. It creeps me out.” “No can do,” Waking Terror quipped. “I think instead I’ll live up to my name!” The world around them was suddenly shaken violently. The ground crumbled into nothingness, and the alicorn bodies tumbled down into infinity. Twilight, Celestia and Vasilyevich tried to use levitation spells to keep themselves in place, but they were suddenly battered by the falling cauldrons. With a mad look in his eyes, the Emperor tried to flee, but all three of them were soon covered with fuel and set alight. The Emperor screamed, louder and louder as he tumbled endlessly into the abyss. The alicorn and the unicorn were about to follow when they were caught up in a flash of magic that had been channeled through the golden orb.