Spoilers Below
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You’ve been warned!

Grammar/Formatting—
Dialogue/Narration/POV—
Worldbuilding—
Pacing—
Impression—

These are the subjects I typically follow and fill in the blanks time and again. I take time to read the story title and then type up a review based on the content of the story as far as I can read. Simple enough, right? Just fill in the blanks?

It was until now. Boring. Repetitive. Drab... Look, I took this story on as a challenge to see how badly I could punish myself with some ‘Flim and Flam destroy the world by creating actual sunlight and selling it’, or something, ‘in a bottle’. I was ready to find out it was electric lights or some stupid trope and it would just drag it out.

I used my phone for the whole experience of this story, by the way. So, there I am scrolling over the name, description, I glimpse at the photo and look at the word count and I rolled my eyes at over 100,000 words and sighed deeply. I wasn’t ready for this read and I didn’t know why I took it. I put it off for two days before I loaded the first chapter then went to bed and opened another tab on my phone and just kept the chapter up in the background until I felt I needed to come across it.

Finally I was bored of everything, it was eleven at night when I went to bed, opened Chrome, and looked at my open tabs.

I rolled my eyes and started reading.

Celestia awoke.
She blinked as she adapted to the dim light, the last traces of some dream or nightmare lingering only for a minute on her confused mind, as the rest of her terrible reality came into focus like a distorted sunset dancing off rippling ocean waves.
She hated this time of day, this period of momentary confusion, because after the confusion always came the same thing. Realization. Realization that the only thing her eyes were awaking to was sharp electric light and four plain brick walls.
The confusion passed. The realization set in. Quick on its tails were dread, and fear and…
“Hmm…” Celestia pursed her lips, casting her blanket aside as she rose from her bed.

A description and then Celestia awoke. Wow, deep and introspective. I feel so dragged into the story and I know the plight of Celestia’s loss of her sunlight.

I huffed to myself and stopped my sarcastic narration and kept reading.

An angry, fang-filled grin. A flare of blue magic, and another flare of yellow cutting it short. A terrible, mirthless cackle. A weeping white alicorn, covered in blood that she wished desperately could have been her own.
Realization. Dread. Fear.
Guilt.
Celestia smiled with bitter familiarity. There it was. It had taken a little longer than normal, but it had come all the same. Sweet, terrible guilt. It clawed at her mind, it begged her to finally stop, and it also drove her forwards through each day.
That wasn’t to say her days entailed a whole lot now, though.
She groaned in pain as her hooves touched ground. Ten years. Ten bloody years, and still it was there. If anything, the otherworldly pain had only grown in intensity. As she stumbled up, her muscles singing out their protest, she carried out her familiar ritual. Some ponies rose and greeted a loved one, some sent thankful words to a deity above for another glorious sunrise....
As Celestia rose, she had a ritual, too, as familiar names echoed through her mind and off her wayward lips in synchronization with her throbbing pain.
“Damn you, Discord. Damn you, Sombra. Damn you, Chrysalis. Damn you especially, Tirek…”

Hrm. Ten years in some sort of dungeon? A ritual of cursing her various foes? Wait, her foes? I don’t see mention of the elements of harmony at all or any mention of them in the tags… I was genuinely interested. I kept reading and reading… and reading. I finished the chapter and looked at the time. Nearly one in the morning and I had to know what happened next.

I was up until I couldn’t see. My vision betrayed me and blurred, doubled, and finally I started to fall asleep holding my phone while lying prone in my bed, my pillow was supporting me as I nearly dropped my phone.

I reluctantly put my phone beside my bed and went to sleep. I woke up five hours later and read the rest of the chapter and started the next until I had to leave for work.

Every spare moment I have I’m reading for the rest of the story. The bathroom, in the parking lot before and after work. On my work breaks. I even blew off my wife’s advances because I had to read what happens next. This story is, hands down, not what I expected at all.

Celestia is a prisoner, that much is known from the start. Her life is only kept because she can raise the celestial bodies! What the hell have Flim and Flam done to take everything from Celestia and essentially break her?! Goddess, what the hell do I even say?! I couldn’t stop reading because it was an experience to see this alternate reality where everything went wrong from the moment Nightmare Moon was banished. Celestia made a different choice…

She didn’t come across her pupils/students, friends weren’t made, harmony wasn’t used and Nightmare Moon nearly won in a deadly battle against Celestia, cursing Celestia before her death when she returned. And death I use lightly.

This story is full of excellent world building, character development and descriptions, and explanation of events. There are legal battles and subterfuge with expert attention to detail on both parties. There are lots of times where I wanted to be with Celestia and Twilight while they just chilled wherever they were.

I had so much to say against this story when I started reading it but about a quarter of the way through the second chapter I was hooked and deeply saddened to see that it’s not updated very often. There are elements in this story that I can see are based in our reality that work with their magical lifestyle that push my mind even deeper into the mythos of this industrializing nation that’s given its soul to a corporation.

An example is the legal process that is used against and by Celestia. There’s a nuance in the story that plays out just as it would in real life, and that is that anything you say can and will be used against you. The line is drawn and often times the characters in the story cross it with regret.

They’re kept in character, albeit slightly alternate universe and consistent. Let me say that again, consistent. Often, so very often we come across alternate realities or what if stories that have the cast fluctuate their personalities between what the author wants to convey and what the show wants to convey.

This story not only takes the new personalities of the cast into play, but often reminds us through careful world building that they are very flawed. It’s organic in the way it flows through descriptions of scenes and areas. The way Celestia looks is reiterated every so often just as I think of her as the regal alicorn; she’s taken back to the AU version the author writes of.

Twilight isn’t a book smart nerd, she’s a chubby conspiracy journalist fighting against an evil empire ruled by no pony knows!

Geez, writing this review alone makes me ache for resolution!

Reviewer’s note:

This is a fantastic story overall and save for literally less than five grammatical errors through it all that I came across, it’s a definite read… However I’d wait until it’s finished or the author starts making regular updates. The reason is classic cliffhangers hinge chapter to chapter and once I got to the 100K most recent chapter I now have to wait until Norris updates again, and that could be months if the trend continues.