Sunset Shimmer Goes to Hell

by scifipony

"I Must! I Will!"

Brandywine broke into a furious gallop across the lawn, raining divots of grass behind him as he took the most direct route into the tower—through the crack—despite mustachioed unicorns who leapt to stop him. None tried to—dared to—stop me.

Perhaps his eyesight was better than mine. The contrast between outside and inside was too dark for me, but he sprang through the beginnings of a wooden scaffold without hesitation. I hesitated, looked, and ran through the side door of the Regent's Building instead.

My hooves clattered on the tile floor as I pushed open the door to the Luna tower, huffing loudly. Brandywine stood, blocking the space between his father and the mirror, his forequarters lowered in a fighting stance. Despite Celestia's acidic gaze, which would have stopped even me, and the cacophony of shrieking magic and smashing masonry, he bellowed, "Don't go through the mirror! Don't let her send you back!"

Ribbons of sparkle traces streamed like comets between the princess and the runt. Celestia's aura had completely enveloped the little pony. Twilit Sparkled looked as contained as a fire isolated amidst kindling, neither extinguished nor safe. I sensed untriggered spells flitting unseen like annoying gnats as I threaded my way past five sweaty royal guard who stood as close to the princess as the intense magical field allowed. All five were unicorns in brass armor. Some levitated away stones, others kept an eye on the tower structure. Their ill ease demonstrated that they too sensed the dangerous spells.

A lone Pegasus constable, dressed in blue with a round, billed uniform cap, fluttered in front of Brandywine. "Sonny—" he said.

"No," Celestia said, "He's right to fear me." She groaned as if she were pulling weeds from hard packed soil with her teeth. A glimmering ribbon snapped and burnt away to fading sparks. "My greater good is not an individual's good," she said suddenly, loudly, and profoundly. "My order stands. Wolf Run, go now."

The sergeant bowed. "I am always in the service of the Princess," he said and walked toward the mirror blocked by a sputtering Brandywine.

"N-no!"

"Brandywine," his father said gently, "You would do well to learn duty, trust, and acceptance." With his last words, a purple aura flared around the golden-brown colt. His father held him aside as he walked into the flame-rimmed mirror. His fetlocks instantly ignited as the glass spread around his face and sealed around him like a pool of quicksilver as he stepped in. Brandywine looked over his shoulder in horror as he struggled and shouted ineffectively, then dropped to the ground when the last smoldering hair of his father's tail slipped into the glass with nary a ripple.

Brandywine landed ready to spring, but his father had held him facing away from the mirror.

He was athletic.

His muscles rippled as he blurred into motion. He was Hoofball-striker fast.

Celestia conjured a splash of water and, in a feat of sympathetic magic worthy of only the best earth pony potion masters, extinguished the flaming frame.

Brandywine crashed head long with a wet bang into an inert vitreous wall.

I jumped to his side as he grasped his head below his horn and moaned. "How badly are you hurt?" Not a question of if.

Blood dripped from his charcoal-dust nose as he forced himself to look at me. "He's gone again," he said, and levered himself up, shaking, his irises way too tiny for the light. "What I feel is meaningless. I will get him back, again."

I levitated him upright.

Shaky, he looked at the mirror. "I must. I will," he said, and stared at it.

There was nothing I could do to help him, other than keep him standing, which he apparently could do himself. The princess, on the other hoof, grunted and strained as she untangled what the runt had wrought. When she paused long enough to send the constable off with orders to handle the havoc on Alicorn Way, I realized it was my chance to demonstrate that her first choice for a personal student remained her most worthy successor and only reasonable choice.

"Princess, what can I do? Command me."

"Observe... Ugh! Try to copy me," she said in a voice almost below a whisper. I crept as close as my growing unease let me. Suddenly, it felt like ants crawled on my skin and my fur began to crackle with static. Within a pony-length, a high-pitch whine filled the air.

She said, "I am weaving an unworking... teasing apart a composite hive spell. In the sense that I am unraveling it... pulling the visible threads... all spells are the same, my faithful student. I push and pull with my magic, with no specific spell in a mind... trying to catch the sense of skein, how the mess of tangled yarn implies a mathematical construct of reality... that violates base physical laws. As I do so, I assert the paradox…"

As she rambled on, talking out everything about each magical trick, she knew I would not understand exactly what she meant. I was late to this "student" and "school" thing, more of an uneducated blacksmith's daughter—a blacksmith's daughter whose father wouldn't teach her so she learned the trade by trial and error and became an artisan farrier—than an egghead prodigy or a scholar. Much of what she said was too technical or vague, but her patter helped. I understood magic very well, but not because I had learned theory first, but because I had discovered magic myself. Celestia had learned well how to guide me on the path she desired.

And, after a few minutes, I began to get it. How could I not? With the biggest best teaching toy ever to exist jangling all my senses like an avalanche of cowbells? You don't want to taste and smell rose and sulfur in the same breath. The incredible strength of the spells forced me to see the shapes I would need to work with. The construction surrounding Sparkle Pony did vaguely resemble a bee-hive with a myriad of hexagonal cells. If Celestia worked to pick apart this thing to make a gap that might collapse it, she had a lot more work to do.

I glanced at the mirror. Brandywine paced around the side of the apparition, shouldering it, testing it; as for why, I could not fathom. When Celestia noticed my attention had strayed, she said, "Free the proctors!"

I turned to look, and well...

"Huh!" That was something.

Not so much that the ponies inside the floating shield spell bubble had stopped struggling and looked at me with mild alarm, but because I saw a hairy mess of virtual shapes for which the best description would be a bouquet of spaghetti balloons with maybe fifty waving strings. If I pulled the right balloons from the mass, the static electricity holding them together might fail to hold, breaking the cohesion of the bouquet.

As the revelation made me smile, a whoop from Brandywine made me turn to look. While I was certain I knew his position from his voice, and thought I'd seen him in my peripheral vision, when I looked—he was gone.

No. That wasn't right.

I realized I saw him disappear into the side of the Tartarus gate apparition, but some effect had confused my eyes. It was like a ghost had faded into a wall.

I heard Celestia growl, so it wasn't an optical illusion. Nothing I could do, anyway.

About those strings...

Nothing is as easy as you think; that's an invariant law of the universe. The method I settled on was the right one because the magic felt elastic. I jerked my magic this way and that for minutes until something gave. I sensed when the shield spell began to unravel and caught the four falling proctors in my magic. Grinning, I trotted nose in the air and tail snapping against my rump, carrying them past Celestia into the Regent's Building.

Celestia told them, "Twilight's exam isn't over. Stay near."

I harrumphed. I could imagine myself spectacular on a battlefield in bejeweled gold armor, breaking the shields of the foe. Not that there were any wars... but the princess did maintain a military. Not so sure I liked "battle mage" as a career choice, come to think of it.

Spell canceling: just pull a spell shape until it fell apart. Easy for spells I'd cast. A counter-spell method if I could visualize other ponies' spells.

In this new light, I strained my horn to sense the shapes of the spells that composed the mirror into which Brandywine had disappeared. Vaguely, I sensed lots of merged crystalline shapes and rods, all knitted into a tesseract. It wasn't enough that it warped space—it warped dimensions and time itself! I could not guess the purposes of the shapes, but I could see ways that I might push to mess the entire thing up. It was like a non-magical clock, its gears and springs visible, levers moving, ticking. A stick shoved into the works at the right point? What I looked at was a violation of physics cycling over and over, a grossly magical house of straw in the face of the wind. All I had to do—

"Don't!" Celestia cried sharply, inserting the word between a straining grunt and a hiss.

Of course not. Celestia protected her subjects, as good queens are wont, and wanted Wolf Run to return, despite Brandywine's fear.

Her not wanting me to dispel it meant she wanted it functional. But…

Water to douse it…

Fire to…?

I felt my eyes go so wide that my eyebrows almost touched my horn.

The idea played with the building blocks of magic: sympathetic magic, the law of similarity— With a gasp, I felt my head go egg-shaped, figuratively. I galloped for the doors to the Regent's Building. Professor Whatsisname who taught potions, whose class Celestia often had me audit at the university, had always smelled of incense. Earth ponies could not conjure fire. I burst into his office and quickly found a match alongside an ash smelling of saddlewood on a soapstone holder carved like a reclining dragon.

Standing again before the mirror, I noticed it resembled an artifact that Celestia kept in the castle attic: a gem-studded frame surrounded by wrought iron. The dusty thing had smelled of magic, and on closer inspection I had sensed a slowly rotating magical field. The thing had required a trigger and I suspected a clock spell provided it.

I suspected that the trigger on Sparkled's mirror was manual because Celestia had turned it off with water.

I could not conjure fire. I hadn't learned that spell, yet. But, if I were to be able to stop Brandywine before he messed up his father's mission, or got himself hurt, I had to make this work.

Yellow red-streaked rock, brimstone by the sulfury smell of it, framed the mirror. Fire rock. The law of similarity implied I could use a match to re-ignite the magic because both had sulfur and both aligned with the element of fire.

I took a deep breath. All magic required spell mnemonics, though I certainly didn't know the right ones. Intention counted though; I had to do this.

Yellow and red… The mirror frame and I were the same colors; that gave me an idea.

Holding the match in my magic, repeatedly tracing the frame as if I were to strike it, I intoned, "Touched by the light of the setting sun, set me alight in a shimmer of fire!" Completing a last circle, I struck the match head against the frame. It made a click-pop.

Sparks flew, but not from the match to the mirror.

The match flashed into ash as the magical spray of earth pony magic surrounded me in a shimmering cloud of heat. My heart jumped in my chest as I caught a glimmer of my error, but not before I saw the result in the mirror.

My mane and tail burst into a raging inferno. Smokeless flames shot upward to blacken the rafters of the tower before subsiding into a flaming roiling aura that mimicked the cut of my mane and tail. The dazzling display did not consume me because this uncanny fire was part of me. It was ruby bright where my mane was red and brilliant sunlight yellow where my mane was yellow. It was no illusion.

I smiled. The implications… I did this!

Suddenly, a white glow fogged my view of the world as if I walked amongst luminous clouds. I felt light-headed and weight-free. In a supernatural state of glory, a veritable orchestra blared a crescendo in my head and peaked.

I had invented magic from nothing... and it had been easy, natural. It set my soul on fire.

It really did feel like I was floating, though I couldn't be bothered to look. Inventing magic was fine and good and all, but I had a mission. I flicked my tail and flung a genuine gob of fire.

It splashed across the frame.

The mirror burst to life.

My hearing began to clear as my hooves clattered to the ground. I immediately leaped, but by the time I realized Celestia had cried out, "Don't do it!"—she had probably had been shouting at me all through my revelatory stunt—gravity had taken over.

Like draperies to the wind, the mirror surface parted and I passed unfettered into another realm.

Comments

[Snow]

This is confusing as hell.

[brisa_mlp]

wtf is going on
8119561
I agree with that statement

[scifipony]

Hmmm.... That seems to be the consensus. It's a cliffhanger. You will find out what^(tf) Sunset experienced in the next next chapter.

[Lightning_Striker]

8119561
Wait, I thought it was Tartarus.

[Skulljack17]

Well Sunset, when you fall for someone, you FALL for them...setting yourself on magical fire at your age just for a colt! How shameless! And...kinda hot.