Prologue: Who's Feeling Young?
Deep in the Unicorn Range, where the air is thin and the snow is thick and mountains reach to touch the endless sky, there is said the be a great peak, higher and more formidable than any of its brethren. It is said that few who have dared to climb this mount have returned to tell of it, and furthermore, it is said that on this peak lives an extraordinary mule. For it is said that mule could see the future.
This is not entirely true.
Oh, there is a peak, to be sure, and the mule himself is most certainly a mule. But the peak itself is closer to a glorified hill with aspirations than a true mountain, for the mule had once tried the 'wise old stallion on a mountaintop' schtick, and look what he'd gotten for it. He was lucky to get a single traveler in weeks, not to mention the drafts in a shack on a mountaintop are absolutely horrendous. So the Mule on the Mount was more the Mule on the Rather Large Hill, and his shack was more of a snazzy lodge, and he received more visitors than he knew what to do with. And don't get him started on this 'I see the future' crap. He's just been around the block a lot more times than most anypony else, and if he could tell a future politician from a future showmare and a sunny day from a rainy one, well that's their fault for being so gosh-darn obvious.
Most ponies don't really want to know the future anyway. They just want to be told what they want to hear.
All of this is, of course, beside the point, until it comes to a certain day. On a normal day, the mule would stick his head out his door, look at the line of a dozen waiting ponies that had formed overnight, and turn to look to the sky. He would then announce to the waiting ponies, and the occasional griffin or minotaur, what the weather for the day would be, in exacting detail, and, if necessary, give them shelter inside. He was invariably right.
On the day Rainbow Sparkle earned her cutie mark, he turned to see the sky, muttered "bugger this", and crawled right back into bed.
Somewhere else and somewhen later, as the light grows dim and the skies, grey, a day in Canterlot looks back upon itself.
It had started out so well, too, the day muses. It's newborn fingers had reached over the white and silver of Canterlot Castle first of all, as every day before has for nearly a millennia. The day had hailed once its dying sister night, shared a brief hug with auntie Etheria, and been on its merry way to Canterlot. The stuffy nobles in Upper Canterlot moaned and groaned and were altogether rather unpleasant to the day as it greeted each of them through their fancy drapes and veneightian blinds, and the wizened mares and stallions of the Mage's Quarter barely acknowledged the day, and so on and so forth through the seven levels of Canterlot. And so it was with a rather more sullen glow that it greeted the workers of the Lower Canterlot through the smog.
The nobles had tattered as their hangers-on had tittered, the fashionable had glamoured as their entourages had glittered, the workers and entertainers were battered and felt rather embittered, and the worker's riot in the Lower Quarter devolved into a song-and-dance routine complete with dueling accordion centerpiece, and really nothing extraordinary happened, save one.
It would all have been, the day thought, a perfectly good day, if it weren't for the explosion.
"But mo~om!"
"No buts, young lady, you are being absolutely ridiculous, and you know it!"
A young unicorn stands in her room. Her coat is the blue of the sky, and her mane and tail are striped every color of the rainbow.
"I've been looking forward to this for ages, mom!"
"Then it looks like you'll just have to keep looking forward to it!"
Her mother stands opposite her. Her coat is off-white, and her mane is similarly striped, although with alternating white and violet.
"I even opened up those stupid textbooks and studied for this! Studied! Me!"
"Well you should have been doing that anyway! And what were you doing instead, young lady? Hmm?"
The two unicorns are visibly red-faced from screaming at each other. The older appears to be on the verge of tears, and her voice is cracking on the higher notes of her tirade.
"Wha- I- That doesn't matter! In fact, none of this matters! Dad already sighed the forms, so that means I'm going. So there! Nyeh!"
"Don't you point your tongue at me, young lady! I- Oh, honey, why are you doing this to yourself? You heard what the doctors said just as well as I did."
On the older's flank are three stars, the same purple as half her mane. The younger does not have a mark.
"Look, mom. I'm not a foal anymore. I can think for myself, and what I think is I can sit on my ass all day-"
"Language!"
"Shush! I can sit on my bony, ten year old ass all day and read these stupid books, and never do anything, forever, or I can get up and actually try to make something of myself. You wouldn't never even let me try, would you?"
"Well, when you put it so eloquently, dear, of course you can try. Just remember what the doctors said and don't be dissap-"
But the young unicorn is already running out the door. She turns hear head back, barely slowing, and calls back one last thing.
"Yeah! You'll see, I'll do so much more than a measly try! I'll blow those stuffy geezers away so hard they'll have no choice but to move me up a grade on the spot! I'm going to get into the Princess' School for Gifted Unicorns or my name isn't Rainbow motherfucking Sparkle!"
"Moon and Stars, language, Rainbow!"
But today is the day that Rainbow Sparkle gets her cutie mark, and she is already out of earshot.
Later that very same day, a filly stands before a board of examiners. Although it is the vary same filly as that morning, a casual observer would be hard pressed to call them more than distant cousins. Where the filly that morning wore a carefree smile and, much to her inner displeasure, a carefully styled mane and tail, a proud, unshakeable stance and unwavering eyes, that same filly now sports a messy mane, not roguishly mussed as she prefers but very mush frazzled, and a nervous grin, eyes shifty and posture withdrawn.
She swallows another breath and turns to the room's centerpiece. A dragon egg.
That she has to hatch. Her.
With magic.
Fuck.
"We're waiting, Miss Sparkle." One of the the examiners on the balcony, a prim mare to the side, glances at her wristwatch and notes something down. The older stallion beside her continues, "We've several dozen more applicants today, and each and every one of them deserves our time just as much as you do."
Rainbow glances back with a nervous smile. "I, uh, what exactly am I doing here again?"
Rainbow's mother covers reddened eyes and looks away, while her father gives her an encouraging wink-nod-ambiguous hoof gesture combo. Beside them, the stallion clears his throat. "As I have explained twice already, Miss Sparkle, you are to hatch the dragon egg before you using any method available to you at this current time in your studies. As well as the completeness of this task, You will be graded on creativity of approach, demonstrated thaumic power, confidence, and time elapsed. Now get on with it."
Rainbow turned back to the egg, and, for the third time, focused on her horn.
Ma'am, we believe you daughter may have a rare condition known as Partial Alicornal Nervous Disconnect.
No, shit, I already know this, shut up brain.
PAND is a congenital nervous disorder wherein the subject's frontal lobes are unable to form a functional connection to the nervous tissue in the horn
Focus, Rainbow. Now, what did Teach say? Something about the inner self? Right, something about inner self and my horn onetwothreego!
While unicorns affected by this disorder will be able to live a mostly normal life, and normal cognitive abilities are even more rarely affected, nothing less than complete control of the alicornal cortex is required to ever tap into the Equestrian Thaumic Field.
"Rrrgh!" inner self! Horn! Inner self! Horn! "Nnngh!"
In short, your daughter will never do magic.
"Inner self horn inner self horn inner self horn c'mon you stupid thing work!
It is at this point that several things occur.
The 'dragon egg', which was never anything more than a particularly ostentatious rock, at last achieves it's lifelong dream of becoming a real egg and hatches. The resulting orange, purple-spined dragoness immediately begins floating at an angle fifty degrees from the horizontal and several minutes kata, spewing violet flames all the while. Several antique bookshelves catch fire.
Meanwhile, the onlookers are transformed into several species of insects that will otherwise not be discovered for several more years, and only in the distant Labyrinthine Rainforest; save for the father, who becomes a potted shrubbery.
At the summit of the seven quarters of Canterlot, the White City and the City of the Princesses, stands the silver and blue Palace of the Moon. Near the center of the palace, a hundred meters north (and several more west) of the throne room, stands a tower taller than all the rest. Atop this tower is a grand observatory, accessible only to the Princess and her favored guests. And in a balcony atop the great dome of the royal observatory stands the Princess Etheria, Steward of the Moon and Regent of the Sun, Crown Princess of Equestria, Firstborn of Fate, and champion of the annual Canterlot Karaoke Festival seven-hundred-and-twenty-eight times running.
She sees a great explosion from the direction of her sister's school, followed closely by a terrible roar.
She takes wing, and she would very much like to believe that her face does not betray an inch of her inner panic.
In a small hamlet in the Everfree Lowlands, known for little more than its proximity to the dreaded Everfree Forest and a modest but steady tourist industry, a pink unicorn filly has just finished participating in a primary school play. As is the wont of such plays, the performance was mediocre at best but was at least occasionally amusing, and the students are falling off of the performance high and entering the just-as-traditional post-performance funk.
As for the filly herself, no word in the English language better describes her than 'pink'.
Now, all her friends are all frowny-wowny that the play wasn't a big hit, but a sudden rainbowey-explosion-thingy outside gives her a super-duper-fantastic idea. Party!
Party party party get some punch from the teacher's lounge party party c'mon everyone I've got something to cheer you right up party party party ooh that prop would look just fantastic over there party party party party!
When the following shockwave destroyed every window in town eight-and-a-half minutes later, Pinkie Belle's party barely slowed down.
In the town marketplace, an earth filly is once again attempting, and failing, to sell per family's produce by attempting, and, once again, failing, to overcome her crippling shyness and social phobia.
Her coat is a canary yellow, and her light pink hair is tied in a braid down her back, over which she wears her father's stetson.
Just as her older brother (blue maned, white coated, and the subject of fervent female admiration even at his age) is about to show his little sis mercy, again, a strange, blinding light suddenly shines down from the Canterhorn and just as suddenly vanishes.
The filly has a sudden thought.
It is not an epiphany. It is not a vision. It is not even a passing fancy. It is merely connecting several disconnected thoughts she has had before into a cohesive whole.
She is cripplingly shy. For reasons she does not understand, adults find her terror of social interaction unbearably adorable. Ponies are more likely to do the bidding of somepony they admire. She needs to sell those damn apples.
Appleshy gathers her courage, swallows as much of her fear as she is able, and walks up to a brown pegasus stallion. "E- excuse me, s- s- sir. I'm r- real s- sorry for b- b- b- bothering you, b- but, w- would you- would you- wouldyoukindlybuysomeapplessir.
In a family-owned quarry several dozen miles down the road, an earth filly is doing her chores. She has done her chores every day without complaint her entire life, and, all things being equal, would probably have gone on doing so until she was as wrinkled and partially-preserved as old Granny Pie.
Her coat is white, darkened to a dull grey with slate dust, and her deep purple mane is set into a utilitarian bun better suited to a mare four times her age.
A coruscating, chromatic flash comes from the northeast, and her eyes are opened.
"Why," she wonders softly, and looks at her family's plain wooden house; their stark, rocky fields and plain useful tools and squeaky windmill spinning round and round and round. "Look how positively drab this all is. How did I ever not notice?"
She sits in a somber silence for ten minutes more, pondering this exciting and sobering new revelation, until, quite all of a sudden, a great wall of sound tears through the farm and rends half the crop into gemstones.
She pauses for a moment, too stunned to move, before she turns to look at the damage.
She looks at the glittering glory in the fields. Back at the farmhouse. Gems. Farmhouse.
"Ideeeeeeea!"
When her family finds her several minutes later, she is already industriously incorporating the gemstones into her family's living arrangements. Her attempts to bring beauty into the world are clumsy, foalish with inexperience, but she can see the vision in her head, clear as day and twice as shiny, of how beautiful this drab old farm could be with just a little effort.
Her father questions the wisdom of using valuables as decorations, but the filly blames the twitches, and he acquiesces.
"After all," says Rarity Pie, "If you can't trust the Pie Family gift, you can't trust anything."
A pegasus filly is reading alone in her room. The room is part of a cloudhouse, and contains several cloud pine bookcases, but is otherwise nondescript.
The filly has a purple coat and a dull blue mane with a single pink and purple highlight down the center. She wears her mane back in the standard strom-flyer's style, despite the fact she isn't nearly old enough to even consider something so dangerous.
She looks up from a book on the production of lightning by pegasi magic to see a scintillating flash through her bedroom window.
What was that? she wonders, but her planning on an interview schedule of the community to document the nature of the phenomenon is stillborn as her gaze passes her book on lightning magic, past a treatise on direct current electricity she skimmed and set aside for later, to a book on ancient pegasi military codes she read last week.
A connection is formed.
The filly stops to collect a small stormcloud she was saving for later and runs to her father's lightning rod workshop to commandeer the longest coil of electrically-conductive wire he has
When the blast's shockwave rocks Cloudsdale fifteen minutes later, Twilight Dash is able to send a message fifty meters down the wire to her father to discuss the phenomenon. She is already planning how to install a telegraph in every house in Cloudsdale.
A pegasus filly is playing with with her friends near the edge of the city.
Her coat is the orange of an autumn sunset, and her shaggy hair, the color of good hay, falls over eyes closed in concentration. She is muttering something under her breath.
Her eyes are closed, and she doesn't see the flash.
"...nety-eigh, ninety-nine, hundred. Ready or not, here I come!"
Fifteen minutes later, she and her friends have tired of tag and she is inching towards the cloud edge on a dare.
"Boo!" A colt sneaks up behind her and startles her before catching her as she teeters on the edge. "A-haha-haha, saved your life."
"Striker," she begins, "that wasn't funny, you know. You-"
A great and terrible noise suddenly shakes Cloudsdale, and all of the fillies and colts fall to the ground. Except for the orange filly.
She falls off of the edge.
Flutterjack is never seen in Cloudsdale again.
Now, these five mares, they aren't the only ones affected by young Miss Rainbow's great calamity. Far from it. Why, just outside that most prestigious of academies, a well-to-do noblemare's future husband saves her from falling debris. Down below, in the lower quarters, a fresh guardsman fights through his shock before any other and singlehoofedly breaks apart a worker's riot with nothing but one-and-a-half accordions, ensuring his later promotion to captain. A grey earth mare stands outside a strange blue device that is suddenly functional again. An aspiring DJ finally has the courage to sneak out. A marriage is saved. A statue is cracked. Ponies die. Ponies live. Ponies change, more at once than has been seen in centuries, but this is entirely outside the scope of our tale.
This is not their story.
Back in the examination room, Rainbow is celebrating.
"Yes! Whooh, yeah, ahaha yes, yes, I did it!"
She turns, grin wide, to request her grade from the exotic insects on the balcony. She is still smiling as she glances at the dragon in the corner, slowly setting fire to a fourth century tapestry. The grin begins to slip as she looks out the window to panicking ponies running through the broken glass scattered in the streets below. It is with the beginnings of a frown that she turns to the regal figure in the doorway.
"What'd I do?"