The climate within the Everfree Forest stood in stark contrast to the warm, sunny day in Ponyville. Inside the forest, the seasons changed independently of the rest of the world; while Ponyville was in the full heat of summer, the forest was well on its way through autumn, and about thirty degrees cooler. Nopony in the construction expedition had dressed for this chilly weather (with the exception of Applejack, who took several opportunities to disdainfully point this out to all the ponies who had so recently mocked her hat and vest), and they simply had to endure the cold, silently shivering and hoping that it would grow warmer as the day progressed. On top of the unfortunate weather, the ambient atmosphere was dark and murky, and carried the unpleasant scent of rotting wood. The trees and bushes all around rustled unnaturally, as though there was always something watching them, ready to pounce if they so much as let their guard down for a moment. Some of the ponies were tired, some were frightened, and all of them were uncomfortable. If anypony among them had openly stated that the forest was her favorite area in all of Ponyville, the rest would have declared her to be absolutely nuts.
But for one pony in the group, the Everfree Forest was the best place in Ponyville.
Because when she looked at the Everfree Forest, she saw more than the endless sea of trees, or the fearsome monsters that lurked within, or the uncanny sense of dread that seemed to linger everywhere.
When she looked at the Everfree Forest, Twilight Sparkle saw questions.
The seasons in the forest were out of phase with the rest of world, and didn't require intervention from ponies to change. Why? They were rigorously scheduled in every other part of Equestria and didn't change at all without the help of weather, magic, and farming teams, why should just this forest be any different?
And there was even stranger magic than than that at work within these woods: for example, there were reports of ponies wandering into the forest and going missing for days and days on end, and suddenly emerging just when the town believed them lost forever, thinking that they had merely been gone for a few minutes on a quick stroll. How? How could a pony's very perception of time be manipulated so, and without intervention from any unicorn?
On top of all that, there was the collection of horrifying creatures that called the forest their home, hydras and manticores and cockatrices and who knew what else, monsters that could surely destroy Ponyville in an instant if they wanted to, but they almost never left the forest, as if some invisible force was holding them back. What? Who or what could be powerful enough to control the wills of so many powerful beasts?
The questions rushed through Twilight's mind like a stampede of buffalo, and she couldn't contrive a satisfactory answer to a single one of them. But that was what made the forest so beautiful in her eyes. It was a whole different world, a nearly bottomless well of questions, questions that seemed so ridiculous to most ponies that they weren't even worth pondering. But they were still questions, and questions could be answered. And with the Axioms at her disposal, they were questions that one day could be answered by her.
That was what Twilight saw when she looked at the Everfree Forest.
Or at least that's what she would have seen, if there hadn't been a hard hat and pair of safety goggles obscuring the vast majority of her field of vision, making it so that she could barely see the ponies in front of her without rudely bumping into them.
I'll bet you're glad you accepted these now, Common Sense commented dryly.
We couldn't have possibly turned them down! retorted Friendship. Can you imagine how sad Applejack would be if we had? I mean, everypony else was just laughing at her!
I'm starting to think we should have been laughing at her too.
Common Sense, what a HORRIBLE thing to think...
“Oh, excuse me,” Twilight muttered apologetically as her gait drifted sideways and she rammed directly into Rarity. The unicorn shot her a quizzical look before jumping back into the conversation she had been holding with Fluttershy.
See what I'm talking about here? Common Sense thought smugly.
Simmer down there, Twilight reprimanded. You know the rules in my brain: civil discourse ONLY.
What, so Friendship gets us to wear this ridiculous, vision-reducing getup and somehow I'M the bad guy –
I, for one, approve of the decision to wear this safety equipment, interjected Science. In case you haven't noticed, we seem to have a remarkable penchant for getting things dropped on our head, especially with Pinkie Pie in the vicinity. This seems like a reasonable way to counteract the problem.
Okay okay okay, fine. But can we at least take them off until we're actually AT the construction site?
I'll allow that, thought Twilight. She funneled her magic into her horn and deftly lifted both the helmet and goggles off her head. Somewhere in the back of her mind a voice recited, hard hat, hemisphere of inner radius eight inches and outer radius nine inches, approximate weight two pounds...the telekinesis calculations were second nature to her now, they took essentially no mental processing power. She floated the equipment into her left saddlebag; she had brought her favorite pair of bags with her on this venture, big, blue, and spacious, the fasteners a startlingly accurate representation of her cutie mark. They were mostly filled with the materials for a certain secret project she had planned for the renovation of Zecora's hut.
Her vision fully restored, Twilight gazed around herself at the mysterious forest pressing in from all sides. She had read many books about this place, practically all the books on the subject she could find in her library and a few from the Canterlot archives to boot. Many of them were quite fascinating: in-depth classifications of the wildlife within, guides on how to survive the many horrors it presented, harrowing tales of adventurers who had nearly met their end in its depths. But not a single one of them attempted to explain anything. These woods lived by their own baffling set of laws, and if anypony had ever tried to figure out exactly what those laws were, they had given up quickly. Every pony in Equestria had simply accepted that the Everfree Forest just did not make sense.
Apparently none of them had ever heard of Twilight's Second Axiom.
Twilight grinned to herself, silently walking along while her friends chattered amicably amongst themselves. This forest would be hers. She had her refined knowledge of magic, she had the scientific method, she had the Axioms. Someday, she would take all those things with her into the forest and wouldn't come out until she had constructed her Grand Unified Theory of Everfree. The only missing elements in this plan were her food supply, which she could just take along with her on a giant wagon or something, and a means to protect herself from the monsters lurking about...
...Which was a problem. Twilight had already had several unpleasant encounters with the creatures of the forest – she still squirmed whenever she remembered being turned to stone by that cockatrice and covered with slugs – and she still couldn't think of any way to reliably defend herself against them. Fancy spellcasting could only go so far in magical combat; when it came down to it, if she wanted to use magic defensively, she needed power.
Power that, as she had been constantly reminded since her days in magic kindergarten, she did not have.
She shot a glance at Rarity, still chatting animatedly with Fluttershy. The white unicorn didn't know it, or at least didn't fully understand it, but she commanded an extraordinary amount of magical energy, several times more than Twilight. If she had spent her entire life honing her magic the way Twilight had, she could have quite possibly become one of the most powerful unicorns in history. Twilight had never told her this, because it would have come across as simply being jealous of her. And in a way, she was.
Twilight needed a spell. A spell to somehow amplify her own magic, to overcome the barrier that had always separated her from true greatness, to become the all-powerful unicorn she deserved to be. She suspected that such a powerful spell might reside somewhere in the deep recesses of the private area of the Canterlot archives, but Princess Celestia had explicitly forbidden her from ever visiting those sections without express permission, and she would never dream of disobeying a direct order from Celestia. Still, if a spell like that actually existed, and if there was even a chance in a million that she could get her hooves on it, then she would not be content until she had it.
Failing that, she would just have to find a way to become extremely wealthy, and hire out the Royal Guard to fight off the forest's monsters while she put the scientific method to work and –
The dark ambiance of the forest was suddenly replaced by a radiant beam of sunlight, instantly derailing Twilight's train of thought. The group had stepped into a clearing, a small break in the vegetation where the sun was allowed to shine straight through to the ground, brightening and warming the atmosphere considerably. Across from them stood a very peculiar tree; its trunk was enormous, perhaps thirty feet in diameter, and several thick branches shot off in odd directions, ranging from straight up to parallel to the forest floor. Into the trunk was carved a door and two oblong windows. This was Zecora's hut; it would've been more appropriately named a treehouse than a hut, Twilight believed, but she lived inside a tree as well and called it a library, so she wasn't exactly in a position to argue.
But as she and her friends approached the doorway, she realized that the hut was in rather poor shape. Shards of bark were strewn all over the meadow like a pile of mulch. The topmost offshoot sported a thick, black streak of charred wood, as though it had been struck by lightning. And what Twilight had at first mistaken as a branch of the hut was actually an entirely different tree sticking out of the roof, the roots splayed out all across the sky. The rest of the tree, she surmised, must be inside the house.
It was going to be a long day.
Applejack broke from the group to announce their arrival, but before she had reached tree, the door swung open and out stepped Zecora herself.
“Ah, ponies, I'm so glad you're here!” she said warmly. Over the zebra's shoulder, Twilight caught a glimpse of the interior of the tree. It was normally a vibrant place, populated by masks, pots, and cauldrons of every color. But on this occasion, it just looked green. Green like leaves. “My hut is worse for wear, I fear.”
“I'll say!” remarked Applejack. She peered up at the exposed roots of the tree within the tree. “Looks like that thunderstorm really did a number on the place. But don't you worry, we'll have it fixed up before you can say topiary!”
Well said, Applejack! thought Friendship.
Maybe if it takes her six hours to say topiary, thought Common Sense.
I wonder how on earth she can see so clearly through those goggles, thought Science.
Zecora was retreating back into her hut, followed closely by Applejack. “Grateful to you I shall always be, for helping to remove this tree.”
The rest of the ponies funneled in after them, first Rarity, then Pinkie Pie, then Rainbow Dash. Twilight, however, quietly extricated herself from the group, standing in the center of the clearing. Fluttershy glanced concernedly at her as she too entered the doorway. “Twilight, is everything alright?” asked the pegasus.
Twilight nodded vigorously. “Absolutely! I...I just thought I should start out by clearing all this bark out of the way. You know, since I have wind spells and all that.”
“Oh...okay.” Fluttershy disappeared into the hut, gently easing the door shut behind her.
Twilight promptly trotted over to the left side of the clearing, to where a strange stone pillar protruded from the ground. She hadn't completely lied to Fluttershy: she would need to blow away a few bark shavings to create some space for herself. And perhaps when she was done with her little project, she'd take it upon herself to clean out the entire meadow. But there was something she wanted to do for Zecora, something she'd been planning for some time now, and she wanted it to be a surprise.
The stone protrusion was triangular in shape, coming to its peak about three feet off the ground and sloping downward from there, making a right angle with the earth on one side and about a sixty degree one on the other. Instead of being stuck in the dirt, it was fastened to a huge, flat stone disk, positioned on a slight upward slope facing toward the hut. Disregarding the mess of wood chippings littering its surface, the disk was blank, save for a deep gouge cut into it at the top. It was quite a peculiar setup; Twilight could have spent hours pondering its function if she didn't already know what it was.
It was a sundial. An extremely crude, simplistic one, but a functional sundial nonetheless. During one of her past visits to Zecora, the zebra had explained that in the art of potion-making, it was often critical to keep careful track of the amount of time for which a brew matured in between adding ingredients. This had spurred her to construct the sundial, angled in such a way that it was clearly visible from her window. The notch marked noon or midnight, and she could discern the passage of time based on how far the shadow of the triangle moved. Simple yet effective timekeeping.
Effective timekeeping, my purple rump!
With one deft motion, Twilight magically latched onto the stone triangle and wrenched it out of its fastenings, tossing it aside and allowing it to fall to the ground with a tremendous thud. It was an absolute travesty that Zecora had to rely on such an awkward method. Why, there weren't even any markings on it except for twelve o'clock; she couldn't possibly tell the time to any better accuracy than half an hour. Not to mention the sundial would only work during the day, and only on sunny days at that. Twilight wouldn't allow this to continue any longer. By the time Zecora said her farewells to the ponies at the end of the day, she was going to have a clock.
Twilight cleared the stone disk of bark – a simple matter of telekinetically pushing all the air behind it out of the way, creating a pressure differential which was quickly resolved by a strong gust of wind that carried all the wood shavings into the forest – and then magically inverted her saddlebags, the contents spilling onto the ground in front of her. Alongside her hard hat and goggles came everything she needed to turn the faded stone surface into a solar-powered, spring-driven, second-accurate analog clock. Several metallic rods of three different thicknesses, from which she would assemble the hour, minute, and second hands. A pile of large brass numerals, five 1's and two 2's and one of each other digit, exactly enough to construct the numbers one through twelve on the clockface. And finally, a black rectangular box with three thin axles sticking out the top: the gearbox. The mainspring within was made of a magic, light-sensitive material she had specially ordered from Canterlot; as long as it was in the sunlight for at least a few hours a week, the clock would wind itself.
The first task was to properly arrange the numbers, and Twilight promptly set about doing just that, picking up each numeral in turn and positioning it on the edge of the stone circle. Once she was finished, she would cast a Sealing Spell to lock each one in place.
One, two, three...it quickly became apparent that she should have brought a protractor to properly measure out the thirty degree arcs between each number. As it was, she'd just have to place them by trial-and-error.
Four, five, six...should she put on the hard hat? No, Applejack was inside the hut, so nopony would be offended to see her without it, and so was Pinkie, the primary source of bodily injury to Twilight. There was no good reason to sacrifice her vision like that.
Seven, eight, nine...
Why were there so many numbers? This question had been pondered by Twilight many times: who in the name of Celestia had decided that Equestria should use a base ten number system? She would have much preferred an even power of two. Four would have been nice – that way she could count on her hooves – but eight would be fine too, even sixteen would be understandable. But ten just didn't make any sense. What were there ten of? She had once actually gotten an answer to that question, from Lyra of all ponies. The green unicorn insisted that far before the founding of Equestria, there had existed a strange race of creatures, with only two hooves and five phalanges protruding from each one – fingers, had she called them? Twilight took the explanation with mountainous piles of salt, but as it remained her only working hypothesis, it would have to do for the time being.
Almost finished. Ten, eleven –
“Hey, Twilight!” called the voice of Rainbow Dash. “What are you doing over there?”
Twilight spun around to see the blue pegasus hovering above the hole in Zecora's roof, next to the exposed roots of the tree. “N-nothing!” she stammered. “I mean, I'm working on cleaning up all this bark...”
“Hardly sounds like work to me. Why don't you come in here and make yourself useful? We need your help with something!” With that, Dash disappeared back into the hole.
Twilight heaved a sigh of relief as she trotted to the door. That had been a close one – if Dash had discerned that she was working on a secret project, the whole hut would have known about it in seconds, and she really didn't want Zecora to see the clock until it was completed. In any case, it was only fair that she partake in some of the hard labor as well.
Upon entering the hut, she was immediately impressed with how much progress had already been made. The trunk of the tree stretched down from the roof into the center of the room, directly on top of Zecora's potion-making cauldron, but most of the branches had been ripped off and piled in a corner near the back door. As she watched, Zecora picked one of them up in her mouth and carried it outside. Fluttershy and Pinkie were hard at work removing the last of the branches, while Rarity walked the perimeter of the room and examined the various pots and masks adorning the walls, apparently determining which were heavily damaged and which were salvageable.
“Hey there, sugarcube!” called a voice from above. Applejack was up by the hole in the roof, standing precariously on a wooden rafter, a saw balancing next to her. Dash hovered beside her, ready to catch her if she fell.
Oh no, we forgot the hard hat! moaned Friendship.
Who cares, thought Twilight, choosing to side with Common Sense on this issue.
“This is one mammoth of a tree,” continued Applejack. “I just finished sawing clear through the trunk up here, but for the life of me I can't think of a way to move it. Why, I reckon we'd have to build a whole scaffold and bust out the ropes and pulleys just to get it out of here! You feeling up to movin' a big chunk of tree, Twi?”
Twilight peered up at the tree. She could see the saw marks where Applejack had cut it, about three feet below the ceiling. That meant that she had to move the tree's entire base, along with the enormous web of roots outside. And wood was almost as dense as water; she figured the whole section weighed about eight hundred pounds, maybe more. With her magic alone, it would take ten unicorns like her to even attempt to lift it.
“Can do,” she responded. Fortunately, Twilight wasn't in the habit of relying on magic alone.
Tree trunk, roots included. Largest part is cylindrical, radius one foot, height five feet. Ten feet directly above my head. Weight: about eight hundred pounds. The trunk began to glow with a purple aura. And then: Air. All of it within the region encompassed by a sphere of radius eight feet, centered on the trunk. Weight: negligible. White sparks began to spew out of the tip of her horn, not because of the power of her magic, but because of its complexity; simultaneously holding on to two objects as large as these was no simple feat. Especially when a third one was added: Divide the sphere into two equal hemispheres, upper and lower. Keep track of both halves. The whole room was now alight with the glow of her horn. All activity had ceased; she could feel six pairs of eyes pressing in on her, waiting to see what would happen next.
Air in upper hemisphere: MOVE.
And in the middle of the Everfree Forest, hundreds of miles from the ocean, a hurricane struck.
Twilight immediately funneled the entirety of her magical energy into keeping the tree from smashing into a wall as gale-force winds buffeted it from all sides. The forest may have had its own unique set of laws, but there was one rule that even it could not break: the universe does not like vacuums. The air in the bottom hemisphere frantically tried to fill the hole left by the air in upper, but Twilight's hold on it was too strong; it could blow angrily on the walls of its prison as much as it liked, but it could not escape. Her tail and mane were caught up in the whirlwind that suddenly filled the room, dancing about as air desperately attempted to seep into the vacuum through any cracks it could find...
And slowly but surely, the tree began to move. The only object in the vicinity that was able to fill the gap, it grudgingly acquiesced to the laws of nature and rose through the ceiling as Twilight allowed air to flow back into the lower hemisphere, pushing it even further. Before long, the entire trunk was floating outside the hut, supported by the raw power of Twilight's mind.
Supported not by her magic, but by her ingenuity.
This was usually about the time that she silently thanked whichever pony had invented the spell she was casting. Except in this case, that pony was Twilight Sparkle.
Satisfied that the tree had fully cleared the hut, she released all three entities at once and looked down at the floor, overcome by a sudden wave of fatigue. The room was then filled with a series of cacophonous noises: first a loud pop as the vacuum was instantly filled by the surrounding air, then a much louder THUD as the tree trunk crashed to the forest floor, then the thunderous sound of hooves stomping against the ground as her friends applauded her.
“Darling, that was amazing!” cried Rarity.
“I sure wouldn't like to be that tree!” remarked Fluttershy.
“If that's the sort of the thing you can do now,” said Dash, “I can't wait to see what you're like when Hayley's Comet gets here!”
Hayley's Comet. During the heyday of the past couple hours, Twilight hadn't thought about it at all.
It was probably the only time during the past two months that she hadn't.
July 8th would be her chance. For the first time in her life, she would know what it felt like to be a truly powerful unicorn. Her library was piled high with scores of magics books, filled with spells that simply required too much energy for her to cast, and when Hayley's Comet appeared in the sky...she could cast them. Just like that. There was a nearly infinite number of things she would be able to do that night...which was exactly the problem.
We need to cast spells, asserted Common Sense. Every spell we can get our hooves on. This is the only night in the next seventy six years this is going to happen, we should just savor the experience. After all, it's not like we'll be able to change the world in just one night.
Nonsense, retorted Science. We need to study the comet, discover the mechanism by which it imparts magical power to the unicorns of the earth. Perhaps if we understand it well enough, we'll be able to replicate its effects in the future. Harness that power whenever we want.
Don't forget to help out other ponies, thought Friendship. Our friends do amazing things for almost every day. This would be a good opportunity to return the favor.
Twilight wanted to do everything that her internal voices had suggested. She really, really wanted to do all of them. But there wasn't enough time. The comet would only last one night, and one night only. Unless she came up with a plan by then, decided exactly what she wanted to with the eight or so hours that the comet would be in the sky, she was doomed to spend the time doing nothing.
Fortunately, she had all week to come up with that plan. And in the meantime, there was a half-finished clock sitting in the front yard –
“TWITCHY TAIL!!” bellowed Pinkie, and all around Twilight, ponies scattered in every direction. She only had enough time to nervously glance behind her before a branch broke from the tree above her and collided with her head.
Stars danced across her field of vision as she stumbled around drunkenly, her sense of balance completely thrown out of whack. She thought she could dimly make out concerned gasps from Fluttershy, Rarity, and Applejack, but Rainbow Dash and Pinkie were laughing at her. Even Zecora was chuckling. “It seems to me what Twilight lacks,” the zebra said jovially, “is a sturdy hat, like Applejack's.”
It was going to be a really long day.
….......
“Hi, Twilight!” said Spike as the door to the library creaked open. “You sure have been gone a long time – Twilight, what happened to you?!”
“Nothing, Spike,” sighed Twilight, sitting down heavily and allowing her mostly empty saddlebags to slide off her back onto the floor. She didn't have a mirror in which to view herself, but she was sure that she must look like quite a mess; a full day of hard labor tended to do that. Not to mention the prominent bump on her head that marked the spot the branch had hit her. “It's just been a long day, that's all.”
“I'll say it has!” remarked Spike, eyeing her up and down with a shocked expression. “You look awful! You want me to get you some food, or some water, or anything –“
“Bed,” groaned Twilight. “I'm just...going to bed.” She should have reprimanded the baby dragon for being up so late – his bedtime was ten o'clock, which was a full hour ago – but she was far too exhausted to think about anything but her own sleep schedule.
“Alright, suit yourself,” said Spike.
Twilight trudged up the staircase with her eyes almost fully closed, inwardly thankful that Spike hadn't carelessly left any debris in her path. It had been one of the most tiring days of her life, filled with her magically moving things around almost constantly; she had actually run completely out of energy near the end and had been reduced to carrying items in her mouth like the rest of her friends. But it had all been worth it; Twilight had rarely seen someone as happy as Zecora as the zebra bade the ponies a teary farewell, her hut fully cleaned out and the roof patched so well that Applejack claimed it would never be breached again. The clear highlight of the day had been when Twilight finally revealed to her the finished, calibrated, and operating clock; Zecora had stopped dead in her tracks and simply whispered “oh my!” without even attempting to rhyme it with anything.
She reached her bed and flung herself onto it without restraint, bouncing up and down several times before finally coming to rest. She glanced over to her bedside table and noted the single book that sat alone on its surface. Twilight had implicitly ruled that books were not allowed around her bed; it was the only way she could ever actually get any sleep. But this particular book was the exception.
A Short Course on the Scientific Method for Earth Ponies.
She lifted the book and began thoughtlessly flipping through its pages. The paper was old and worn and the text upon it was faded in places, but the book had been the target of a restoration spell that Twilight had learned specifically for this purpose, and it was immune to further damage. Page after page passed her field of vision, spelling out the thought processes that had single-handedly shaped the way her brain thought about everything. She finally reached the back cover, on the inside of which she had written her own little contribution. A short list of fundamental rules about the world. Laws that she could always depend on whenever a problem needed to be solved. The Axioms.
Twilight's First Axiom: If something makes sense, it can be understood.
Twilight's Second Axiom: Everything makes sense.
And then came the latest addition to the list, carefully inscribed in the tiny space between axioms two and three:
Twilight Second Axiom, Addendum One: Pinkie Pie does not make sense.
This one still left a bad taste in her mouth; it seemed a little too specific for what was supposed to be a fundamental law of the universe. But the second axiom was one of the most important of the bunch, and until she had an explanation for Pinkie's Pinkie Sense, or how she occasionally seemed to break the laws of physics at will, or just why she acted the way she did – basically anything Pinkie related – she'd have to choose between putting up with the addendum and scrapping the second axiom entirely. She could live with the addendum for now, and formulating a rational explanation for Pinkie Pie was somewhere on her to-do list...
Twilight's Third Axiom: I am a smart pony.
Twilight's Fourth Axiom: When in doubt, use Science.
And finally:
Twilight's Fifth Axiom: Princess Celestia is always right.
She had added it many years ago, on the night following her fateful examination at Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns, and since then it had been validated time and time again. Celestia had known that she would be able to hatch that dragon egg. Celestia had carefully guided her education, building inside her an encyclopaedic knowledge of magic unmatched by any other filly in Equestria. Celestia had sent her to Ponyville, forcing her to make some friends and making her a happier unicorn than she'd ever thought possible. Most of what Twilight was today, she owed to Celestia, and the princess had fully earned her own Axiom. Whenever she spoke, Twilight didn't have to waste her time analyzing her words, trying to verify them herself; she already knew that they were true.
She closed the book and lay back on the bed with a final exhausted sigh. Through her closed eyelids, she could see the moonlight shining through her window. This managed to keep her awake for a few moments longer, not due to the light itself, but because even in her mind's half-asleep state, it was still coming up with questions for her to ponder.
She thought of Luna, the lovably awkward princess who had once been the tyrant known as Nightmare Moon, who Celestia had imprisoned in the moon for one thousand years. But how was that even possible? The moon wasn't exactly well suited to sustaining a pony's life for a millennium; it was nothing but a big, barren chunk of rock, thousands of miles away in the middle of space, with no water or edible material to speak of, not to mention the little problem of air. And even if Celestia had found a way to teleport Nightmare Moon up there and keep her alive for a thousand years, couldn't she have just...teleported back?
Twilight had a sneaking suspicion that Nightmare Moon had never been on the moon at all, that she had simply spent the past millennium locked in a dungeon somewhere, and the whole lunar thing was some literary pony's idea of a good fairy tale.
The next time she saw Princess Luna, she would remember to ask her what had actually happened during her years on the moon, how it felt to spend so much time alone, with nobody to talk to, miserable and scared –
No, you most certainly will NOT ask her that, warned Friendship menacingly.
Okay, I won't, thought Twilight, and then sleep overtook her.
….......
Midnight was one of the few times that Fluttershy's cottage was privileged to experience the wonderful atmosphere of silence. The animals had all been fed their final meal of the day, albeit much later in the evening than usual, and had drifted off into slumber. The chickens, the birds, the mice...even Angel the bunny, who habitually threw a fit over the indignity of bedtime, had finally dozed off. The only awake creature in the cottage was Fluttershy, putting the finishing touches on the animals' breakfast for the next morning, and in just a few minutes, she would be joining them in dreamland.
But that plan was suddenly interrupted by a sharp knock on the door.
What pony could be visiting her at midnight?! Perhaps it was Nightmare Night? No, that wasn't until October, and even it was, Fluttershy had made it abundantly clear to Ponyville that she preferred to spend Nightmare Night alone. She continued to rack her brain, wondering if she had forgotten about any important engagements that day –
The knock was repeated, slightly louder this time. “Who is it?” asked Fluttershy uncertainly.
The door swung open.
Outside stood the largest pony that Fluttershy had ever seen. It was an alicorn, towering above her so high that the top of her horn was obscured by the door frame; even Princess Celestia could enter her hut without needing to stoop. Her coat was bright red, the color of fire. Her mane and tail were a dazzling mixture of orange and yellow, majestically blowing behind her in the windless night like a flame. Beyond her roaring mane, Fluttershy could catch only a glimpse of her cutie mark: a sword.
“Fluttershy,” spoke the alicorn in a deep, commanding tone. It sounded somewhat like Princess Luna's regal voice, only...colder. “The Element of Kindness?”
Fluttershy opened her mouth, but no words came out.
The alicorn chuckled softly. “The name suits you. You would have been wiser to build your residence closer to the town, where somepony might notice if you were attacked in the middle of the night.”
A terrified squeak escaped from Fluttershy's throat. Her mind was instantly flooded by the thought that the alicorn meant her harm, that she should run away...but her legs didn't seem to be working. Looking down, she realized that each of her four legs was surrounded by a glowing blue ring that had materialized out of thin air, rooting her to the spot.
“No resistance at all?” said the alicorn coldly. “Just what I expected from a pegasus like yourself.” Her horn began to glow, and a red sphere appeared at its tip, shining so brightly that Fluttershy had to look away from its incandescence, growing larger every second. “I have amazing plans for the future of this world, Fluttershy, and I'm sorry to say that you aren't part of them.”
Fluttershy desperately flapped her wings, but to no avail; the magic binding her to the ground was too strong. Completely overcome by awe and terror, she could only stand where she was, trembling violently, watching through squinted eyes as the alicorn's spell became brighter and brighter, larger and larger. After what seemed to her like an eternity, the spell detached from the horn and rushed through the air directly into her body, and she clamped her eyes shut as the world around her was dominated by a vibrant red haze...