The Price of Power · 2:29pm Mar 24th, 2019
Princess Celestia guided her star pupil, Sunset Shimmer, to a room which contained something that she'd long been making excuses to herself to never show the filly.
"I had hoped... wished and prayed, even, that I'd never have to teach you this lesson, my dear little Sunset."
"Who would you even pray to?" Sunset asked, both genuinely curious and desperate to deflect and alleviate the crushing gravity of the conversation and its context.
"I guess ultimately I was just lying to myself, denying that something like this could ever happen." Celestia continued as though she didn't hear question, although in truth she just really didn't need another existential crisis right now.
Without any kind of preamble, she swept away three huge tarps covering what Sunset had previously believed were innocuous sections of wall. The absence of the covers revealed what at first looked like glimmering dragon scales. Engraved near the top of each monolith like ridiculous theater titles were names. The Day Breaker wall boasted about a hundred such scales. Nightmare Moon's had 150. Another, reading Libidinosa Tempo, bore roughly 70. Sunset was about to ask what they were supposed to mean when Celestia's horn glowed yellow again, and a section of the floor elevated until it made another monolith of equal dimensions to the first three. Then it pulled away one of the "dog tags" formerly belonging to a Guard, which Sunset had been made to carry since he had the misfortune of being technically successful in his effort to prevent her from going through the mirror portal.
As the younger pony watched in growing horror, the words "Nightfall Flare" were stamped into the new monolith, and the tag was pressed into the stone under it until it stuck. Her mind was working through a hazy sludge due to recent events, but she couldn't avoid sorting out the implications of everything she just witnessed if she tried.
"The lesson I never wanted you to learn, my little pony, is that the duty of the Royal Guard is not to protect us. Rather it's to protect the populace from us, at the cost of their lives if necessary. You have just killed your first Guard, Sunset Shimmer." Celestia declared as she gestured to the other memorials with a sweep of her forehoof. "Please do not be in any kind of hurry to catch up to the rest of the Princesses."
"But... but you said that he was still alive!"
"I said that there was a chance, Sunset. And if you'd been an alicorn at the time? There wouldn't have been."
