It's been many years since Twilight took the throne as Equestria's sole ruler. Running a country is hard, especially now, but she has little choice in the matter. The trip to the wasteland was required though, her friend went not too long ago in order to investigate.
Hopefully she'll reunite with them so they can go back to taking care of Equestria, after all, who else will?
Written for the 3rd Annual Cozy Glow Short Story Contest. And was written in a single evening, with editing done later.
This is a spoiler of sorts, but the prompt used was: Cozy Glow vs Twilight Sparkle.
Cover art by: Artistincproductions, I'd link their DA but it seems to be deactivated.
Special thanks to Perfectly Insane for pre-reading and helping!
Chapters (1)
so that's gross and gross... Twilight should just go back in time and kill her old self and replace herself, she can just use a spell to make her look like her old self and change everything, yes it will be cruel to kill herself but she avoids the cascading effect and thus saves everyone....
Ehh....
It felt deep but actually really shallow if you really think about everything logically.
11326573
Provided there's not a resultant paradox effect that screws up the timeline even further, or just paradoxes it into nothingness outright. After all, with the past 'fixed', what would have driven her to go into the past at that point? And sure, she could go travel back in time to repeat her actions again and again, but seeing as she herself wouldn't have an 'out' of this loop without risking damaging or outright destroying the timeline, which could undo everything she's managed to do, it'd essentially doom her to endlessly repeat a certain period of time, infinitely.
If anything, that's even more horrifying.
11327382
Right because time travel is a little bit hard to understand but what is the most common occurrence when you screw around with events that must occur or equally she could just create another alternate branching timeline and just never know about it because to her everything changed but in reality it still stayed the same
11327382
Not necessarily though she could instead of killing herself kill Cozy by doing this she would prevent the entire timeline from occurring because she wouldn't be alive to begin with the only thing that you would have to do is decide when to do it and if she's willing to live with herself for doing it now of course she could kill her alternate future self which is herself after killing cozy this would remove any chance of their timeline existing because by them dying the timeline they were Tethered to would also fade away
11327827
And paradox again. Kill cozy? Her future self has no reason to go back in time. Kill herself and do things right? Her future self has no reason to go back in time to that point.
Whether this would work or not heavily depends on how time travel and timelines is handled. Best case is that it branches off and paradoxes just aren't an issue.
Worst case? There's only one line that time travels, it can't branch or split in any way, paradox happens and the timeline is severely damaged, if not outright destroyed.
You don't usually see a story go along this route instead of the typical vengeance path. I think befriending Cozy after everything is way more interesting than Twilight smiting her in a fit of rage, then going back in time to kill her again. I do like their interactions, two opposing forces coming together for companionship because everyone else is gone.
It's a pretty story. Nice job.
11326573
Well, no matter how paradoxes are resolved, even if we take the most fluid timeline there is, it won't work for ONE reason. If you kill "young" you - "older" you will die too. Twilight can replace herself, move herself to another dimension, literally anything else, as long as SHE(Twilight "prime") survives, and comes back to the dimenesion later in one fasion or another.
11328194
Have you missed the point at which if you kill your younger self your older self will not LIVE?! It is kind of a biggest problem here.
I normally don't read Cozy Glow stories because they tend to white wash her actions too much for my case. But damn if this wasn't a pretty fun story. It's a pretty interesting idea for a Cozy Glow and Twilight "friendship', if you can really call it thatm