Twilight let go of her teacher with the biggest smile on her face. It was making her cheeks hurt. "I'm so happy you're back, Princess," the mare said. "There's so much you've missed!" She paused and her ears drooped. "Yes, I know. I used a taboo magic, but it was for a good cause!" Another silent pause. "I did, but they're fine now too, although I still need to fix them up properly." She cleared her throat and smiled sheepishly at the princess that looked straight ahead, its body unflinching. "I..."
A familiar sensation hit Twilight, freezing her in place, but wasn't it just a hallucination? The mare slowly turned around after a white light caught the corner of her eye to see two large rectangles of light slowly approaching her from a distance that didn't exist in the tomb.
"No! You can't take her! I brought her back!" Twilight pleaded. "Leave her alone! She's not meant to be dead! That isn't fair! You-urk!"
Now the rectangles were attacking Twilight, and the closer they got, the more constrained her body became and the harder it became to breathe. She could even feel her blood being too constricted to move throughout her body. Spike immediately went to action and jumped at the rectangles, but its fists hit nothing. It was like the rectangles were on another layer of existence and overlapped the dragon's which found itself collapsing to one knee when Twilight's magic started to flicker. Feeling that she was about to die, the mare smiled, knowing that her teacher was finally back and she had done her duty. She regretted that she wouldn't be able to live with her teacher anymore, learning from her, making her proud, and maybe even teaching her a thing or two. It was always fun to see when your teachers still loved to learn as much as you did.
The mare's death would not come to pass, however. Celestia's head instantly turned to the rectangles and her horn started becoming engulfed in purple fires that undulated like semi-liquid gelatin. She forced her magic onto the owner of the rectangles, forcing them off of Twilight and eventually pushing them back to wherever it was they came from. The unicorn coughed and laid on the ground, exhausted and waiting for her numb limbs to refill with blood, but she still had the strength to look weakly up at her teacher.
"Thank you...Princess," she whispered.
Everypony outside not embroiled with the newly visible spirits at Canterlot Castle watched in horror as the ground gradually cracked apart and a green light emerged from the fissures, imitating the sun above. Dead plant life started growing again from desiccated roots, dotting the landscape in the brown, skeletal remains of undead plants unaware of the rest they were meant to have. Shining and the guards could see old vines crawling up the ruins of the castle, digging fearlessly into the glass of the windows even as the shards cut them apart. The dead fear no death, even when they are plants.
The employees of the castle, trapped by the undead outside were stuck in the former throne room of Princess Celestia where several, lengthy tables sat in rows in front of a single podium atop the former throne area. A few had been struck by the damages the tomb guardian had caused and were groaning in pain while they were tended to with emergency first aid kits. They trembled when green light seeped in through the plain windows, coating everything in its horrific radiance and gradually revealing the presence of hundreds of tiny, semi-transparent wisps swimming casually through the air. Their becalming appearance helped relax some of the dozens of ponies hiding away. A few were sitting in front of the barricade of chairs, benches, and tables they had just set up, expecting the troops to overcome the horde and free them from their entrapment.
Grunts of pain and quiet whispers served as ambiance to the refugees of the castle when the large doors that reached high to the ceiling moved forward slightly, pushed by something on the other side.
"I think it's stuck, Princess," a voice behind them said. "Maybe you should push harder?"
The doors started to screech painfully as the barricade kept them stuck. Everypony watched with bated breath as the doors kept stuck. At first they felt excited to hear a voice, but hearing 'princess' set off alarm bells in the minds of everypony hiding away.
"Huh. They're really stuck there."
The speaker went silent for a moment, and the ponies at the barricade hurried away when they heard an ominous crackling behind the doors. In a flash of light, the doors and the barricade were blown away into splinters, leaving behind a thick cloud of dust and debris from which a lavender unicorn emerged.
"There we go!" she said as she looked around with a big smile on her face.
One of the stallions at the barricade got up and glared at Twilight. "What are you doing?!" he yelled angrily. He raised a brow as Twilight's appearance and voice started to reawaken a part deep within his brain. "Wait...I know you...Twilight Sparkle?" The mare turned to face the stallion and immediately paled. "You're alive?! I thought you died! We all did!" He smiled with relief, seeing the sickly mare instead of the undead. "Thank goodness," he sighed. "Did you come back to rescue us? Ah..."
He and the other ponies bore witness to a green gleam shine through the calming debris, followed closely by purple lights. As the cloud settled, everypony there got full view of Spike and Princess Celestia, and Twilight didn't take her wide eyes off her interlocutor.
"P-P-P-Princess Celestia?!" he gasped. "Wha-But...But I saw you die! You-!" He looked to Twilight, and several of the ponies there fainted in response. "Twilight? What did you do?!"
"I did what none of you did: Rescue Princess Celestia!" Twilight bellowed angrily. Spike and Celestia surveyed the room, keeping watch for any signs of danger. "I spent years learning necromancy just so I could heal her and bring her back to life because none of you cared about her!"
"I-is that what you think?!" the stallion shouted. "I helped everypony flee from the castle when those revolutionaries flooded in..."
Twilight's cheek dampened and the fiery mane and tail of Celestia flared as she moved past the unicorn and toward the podium. "You all betrayed her! Not one of you tried to help get Celestia away!" the mare shouted in return. "Princess, tell them! Tell them that's what happened! You were there. You know better than anypony!"
The alicorn, guided by some old instinct remaining in her body, moved to the podium, ripped it off with her magic, and sat down on the hardwood floor. Twilight was quick to rush to her aid while the terrified ponies eyed the doorway, only to see Spike standing there as an unintended obstacle.
"Princess!" Twilight panicked. "You can't just wander around like that," she said as she checked her teacher. "I know you want to get back into your position at Canterlot, but I only just revived you. We have to wait for you to recover properly. You need your rest." The mare looked at Celestia looking straight and frowned. "No, I know you have a lot to catch up on, but..." The crowd stared, baffled by Twilight's display. She was talking to no one. "N-no! I have to put my hoof down!" the unicorn protested. "As your..." She pointed her hoof at Celestia, waving it slightly as she tried to think of the word. "As your necrodoctor, I say that, as my patient, you need your rest." Her warm smile immediately turned to fury when she looked around the assembly room and grit her teeth. "Where's the council?!" she yelled with a voice crack.
"They're not here!" a mare said. "They disappeared when the undead came out."
"And what happened to the castle?!" Twilight walked along the walls, looking at the stained glass now replaced with soulless, transparent material. "The history...everything they talked about..." the unicorn whimpered. She turned to the crowd. "Why?"
"Because it reminded us of Princess Celestia!" one of the employees yelled angrily. "We didn't want to be reminded of the famine and poverty she put us all through for decades!" She was pulled down by her fellows in an attempt to keep her quiet. "No! I'm not going to keep quiet! I-"
The mare immediately shut up when the windows burst apart as a black, spiraling, serpentine entity with no head flew into them and out the other side. It warped the stone around it, making the material look like twisted, disheveled raisins. Celestia's presence also thoroughly corrupted everything she existed near, charring the wood black and causing the planks to reshape into awkwardly positioned trees. The husk of insects that had been folded into the material started to wiggle out as they reformed and ended up stuck in the wood, horrifying the ponies. Other ghostly spirits, long since trapped in the realm of the living and having forgotten what they looked like, came into 'focus' and started snapping at the employees with various mouths across a mishmash of shapes and limbs.
"Us having all left isn't entirely true. I'm still around," a voice announced.
Twilight looked at the doorway and watched a councilor squeeze past Spike. He was an elderly stallion cloaked in a blue vest with an exposed, tan-colored, buttoned undershirt and pants matching his vest. His vanilla-colored fur almost meshed into his undershirt, but his black mane with two, thin, vertical strips going through them created a deep contrast to his colors, as did his green eyes. The elder pegasus swiped his mane away from his face with a hoof and cursed quietly at it no longer being pulled back against his head.
"I..." He froze when he saw Celestia, the left side of her face burning with green fires and exposing her skull beneath. "Celestia?" he gasped. "Who did this?"
The counselor grunted in pain when Twilight lifted him with her magic and threw him across the room to slide to Celestia's hooves.
"It's your fault that the princess had to go through this!" Twilight screamed. "It's your fault that everything went wrong!" She started crying uncontrollably as memories of her past life started to resurface, as did her dreams of the future. "But I worked hard!" Twilight said as she poked her chest eagerly and angrily. "And I brought her back! She still needs her rest, but when she's all healed up she'll be back and ready to guide everypony again like she used to!"
"You...what have you done?" the counselor asked in horror. "You used necromancy to bring her back?!"
"Yeah!" Twilight spat out. "And now I won't let anypony hurt her! Not this time!" The old pony struggled to his hooves, realizing that Celestia wasn't reacting to anything around her. "No! Princess! They should be punished for having killed you! You can't just let them off with a slap on the ankle!" Twilight protested. The counselor looked at Twilight and then to Celestia whose body continued to be slowly consumed by the flames. "Put him on the chopping block like everypony else!"
"Who are you talking to?!" the counselor asked Twilight.
"Wh-To the princess!" Twilight said. She shook her head like he had said a stupid question.
"She's dead," the counselor said. "All you did was raise a thrall so powerful it's corrupting the very values of the pony herself."
"No, she isn't!" Twilight protested. "That's just a side-effect from me bringing her back! I can fix her just fine, but her magic needs to settle!"
"You stupid foal!" the elder shouted back. Twilight backed away, shocked. "We killed that tyrant for a reason, and now you raised her as an undead thrall?! Are you that obsessed with power that you want to control Equestria through this abomination?!"
Twilight put her hooves to the side of her head and started stomping her hind legs on the floor erratically as she fought with conflicting emotions of information stimuli. "She's not dead! You're just trying to kill her again because you don't want to fix your own problems! I don't want to hear anything from the murderer of Princess Celestia!"
Everyone but Twilight was pushed slightly back when another wave of corrupting magic was emitted by the undead alicorn. The sky cracked apart in small sections, letting strange, monstrously gigantic things peer through and start trying to get through the breaches.
"Everypony is always obsessed with using Princess Celestia as a scapegoat!" Twilight yelled erratically. "Shut up, shut up, shut up!"