A recent plague of freakishly strong thunderstorms has been ravaging Ponyville's borders, and somepony has to put a stop to it. Twilight Sparkle, Applejack and Rainbow Dash must venture into the depths of the untamed Everfree forest, further than ever before, and find the source of these natural disasters... and in so doing, they uncover a being that is beyond all natural law.

Set in the early days of the mane six's friendship, before discord's redemption, and before the King of Shadows or the Queen of Lies were struck down. Don't let the cutesy prologue fool you... this story is a bleak and foreboding glimpse at a fragment of Equestria's ancient history. The story is complete, and chapters will be released every one or two days.

When Rainbow Dash suddenly proclaims her love and adoration for a certain 'Miss Sparkle' and tells her friends the story of how the unicorn 'fixed' her, the girls are hesitant to take the situation at face value. However, even they can't deny it when the facts begin to build into a case against Twilight. Twilight claims innocence but her words sound like hollow excuses and obvious lies. The four of them are left wondering if Twilight Sparkle is truly the hero she once was or if she has finally allowed her true nature to show: the nature of a heartless psychopath.

[ Spoilers in the comments... So many spoilers... ]

[ 'Miss Sparkle' occurs a few months before Twilight's ascension, early in the spring of Twilight's second year in Ponyville. According to my version of the chronological timeline, the only episodes of the first three seasons that have yet to take place are (in chronological order) "Wonderbolts Academy", "Just for Sidekicks", "Games Ponies Play", "Spike At Your Service", "Keep Calm and Flutter On" and "Magical Mystery Cure". ]

[ The cover art was made by the oh-so-generous tehmisiu. Thanks again! ]

[ 'Miss Sparkle' placed first in (Incoming spoiler of story-ruining proportions!) Blundy's TwiDash Framed Challenge! Thank you all so much for your support! ]

[ To top it off, Twilight's Library found it worthy of being added to their shelves. I'm at a loss for words as I write this, and I probably will be when you read this too. Just... Thank you. Thank you all so much. ]
[img]http://i.imgur.com/m9vLrr7.png[/img]

Mystery. Love. Magic. Murder. Truth. These are all important elements in the murder mystery Fluttershy has written, and is now asking Twilight to read. But the novel stars 'Twilight Sparkle', and she wrestles with the metafictional dissonance involved in reading a novel about herself and her friends. Twilight must do her best to solve the mystery, reconcile her own feelings about this ordeal, and figure out just what Fluttershy is trying to say by writing all of this in the first place as the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur.

This is a thematic crossover with the visual novel 'Umineko No Naku Koro Ni.' No prior knowledge of Umineko should be necessary.
Cover art commission done by SynCalio

Twilight Sparkle is a troubled pony who just wants to understand—magic, history, the Elements of Harmony, how other ponies work, and how to live a functional, fulfilling life like everypony else. She excels in everything she does, because all she does is read. Some things are just harder for some ponies. But when she sets her sights higher, toward exploring the obscure terrain of interpony relationships and navigating the circuitous history of the Elements, she learns more than any book she's read could tell her. The world has its secrets for a reason.

Inspired by fiction in the vein of, e.g., HPMOR, Worm, Luminosity, Ra, and To the Stars. I identify this story as a so-called "rational" fiction; for more information, feel free to check out the subreddit /r/rational, or read my comment on /r/mylittlepony explaining some details about my goals and values regarding the story. If you'd like to see non-chapter progress updates, you can follow my twitter, @aknifeallblade.

What if there exists an actual after-life in the Optimal verse?

Based on the story Friendship is Optimal by Iceman, but contains some non-canon stuff.

THIS STORY CONTAINS RELIGIOUS THEMES. READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.

Edited and proofread by Thraxus908, Xanathar, newbiedoodle, bobbananaville and AppleTank. A huge thank you to them all for the work!

Cover image is 'Nordingra in Summer5' by my brother sabrous, AKA Swedish-blacksmith. Used with permission.

Upload into Equestria Online and live forever, they say. But forever is a long, long, long time, and in its endless cycles, is choosing death instead even an escape from the eventual exhaustion of all combinations of matter and thought? And when you can create new life as just a way to amuse yourself, who could even tell what's dead and what's alive?

A pony awakes inside a computer server, remembering killing himself as a human to avoid just such a fate. His unhinged alicorn hosts/creators inadvertently torment him. Or do they? Are they as mad as they seem? Are his memories real, and if not, what is he a copy of? And where is the AI Celestia's hoof in all of this?
A somewhat trippy story set in the Optimalverse.

"Beautiful, twisty, clever, transcending, uplifting, passing strange, illustrated. Thumb up." —GroaningGreyAgony
"This story made me better. I feel less broken and more whole." —Griseus

Everyone knows how fairy tales go: We meet a dumb protagonist who does something foolish. Things go wrong. We learn a moral.

Clearly, fairy tale authors have never met Clyde Pie.

In this collaboration, a number of your favorite ponyfic authors take a fresh look at classic fairy tales, and what we can learn from the wisdom of an eminently sensible earth pony. (This is an open collection; submission rules can be found here.)

List of authors:

Salivanth
Horizon
Cloud Wander
Benman
DJ TR33
SirTruffles
Meta Four
chankl2
Nonagon
Quixotic Enigma
Caffeinated Pinkie
Farsan
SoothingCoffee
Thomas Hunter
TheLevelHeadedBrony
Goldfinch142
Kandagger
Ghost Pikachu
SwiftStroke
GroaningGreyAgony
The Iguana Man
DaeCat
JumpingShinyFrogs

Cover art by Veggie55

This story takes place in Calm Wind's Wonderverse, between Act 2 and Act 3 of Piercing the Heavens, though hopefully it's understandable on its own.

"The impossible happened... Rivet started making mistakes.”
“Doesn’t everypony make mistakes?”
"Even if ‘everypony makes mistakes’ was a legitimate excuse, most ponies mistakes don’t almost injure ponies, and definitely don’t almost kill ponies.”

Rivet is, before anything else, a genius. A master of machines and the lead engineer for the Wonderbolts, he's the first pony you go to for all problems mechanical, from inventing new training equipment to rapid repairs. It isn't much exaggeration to say he's one of the rivets holding their base together.
They leaned on him so much, it seemed only natural that he start to buckle under pressure. The machines he designed to get the Wonderbolt recruits up to speed have started to malfunction, and ponies have narrowly avoided getting hurt. Now he's under probation, forced to take a break from his work.
No one is listening to what he's saying.
No one is seeing that a saboteur is on the loose.
With both his job and the well being of the Wonderbolts on the line, he calls the only person he can rely on to solve the case. He calls his old friend and rival, ex-detective Keen Eye.

Diplomacy has failed. Six years have passed Equestria's crowning of the princess of friendship, ushering in a supposed unprecedented age of peace and harmony. The concept of warfare is, to most ponies, nothing more than an unfathomable legend. They have let their guard down.

An unknown enemy has seized the opportunity to attack Equestria with terrifying new weapons of war, bent on taking the fertile land and restoring an ancient order. The valiant efforts of the Royal Guard have given Princess Twilight and her arcane scientists time to research and develop a response to their attackers, and the time has come for that response to be implemented. Utilizing weapons and tactics borrowed from another world, five squads under the command of Princess Luna will infiltrate the forests of the Equestrian Northwest to destroy a revolutionary magical matrix that Twilight refers to as the "radio" - a tool that allows enemy ponies to communicate across vast distances instantly.

Nightmare Two is comprised of three foalhood friends who, rather than be separated from each other in the draft, volunteer to become one of the five Nightmare squads. With their bodies forever altered to suit the needs of their mission, the three young mares join legions of ponies armed with powerful weapons to partake in a horrifying new breed of warfare - Equestria's first in over one thousand years.

--

Heads up, folks. If you wouldn't mind leaving a comment alongside the thumbs-down, I'd appreciate it. This is my first foray into fan fiction and although it's a hobby I nonetheless wish to get better. :)

Got some FAQ's for you guys as well!

- Alternate universe in which the events of "Crusaders of the Lost Mark" did not occur. (As much as I loved it! :D)

- Numerical age tends to vary with headcanon, but the CMC here were just getting started with their adult lives when the draft went into effect.

- The war is pony v. pony, utilizing firearms and the Equestrian equivalent of a tank. The underlying headcanon is that ponies used firearms similar to muskets and tracked armored vehicles akin to our tanks in times of old, and what the enemy currently employs is essentially the natural progression of these technologies.

- There are no real-world weapons or equipment i.e. "Panzer IV," or "M16 assault rifle." Particularly acute details such as the caliber of weapons are also absent.

- Technology is based on that of WWI with some WWII elements. Firearms are primarily bolt-action.

- The "radio" spell matrix functions as what we know to be a radio, but is not identical.

- All four of a Night Mare's legs are permanently replaced by the augments.

- Night Mares are female. Stallions proved unable to properly animate the limbs.

--

Hold up, now - fanart? You guys rock. Like, for real. Thanks a lot!

1. A great YouTube video coming from The_Pegasus_Box. Thanks, bud!
Check it out!

2. Click here for the collection on DArt.

3. https://derpibooru.org/740375?scope=scpeac921b191f688d04521575f31608785cbc3bbaa1
[img]https://derpicdn.net/img/view/2014/10/10/740375__safe_anthro_apple+bloom_gun_artist-colon-pusspuss_night+mares.png[/img]

It was a night like any other in Ponyville. It was, until a shooting star turned into a burning streak that roared overhead before crashing off into the distance. At first it looked like a meteor. But then it had turned, quite sharply, and flattened its trajectory, sailing uncomfortably close to the treetops.

Twilight Sparkle had dismissed the idea of visitors from beyond the stars as pure fantasy, the type of pulp novel that Rainbow Dash seemed to enjoy. Now it was a frightening possibility, and now nothing could ever be the same.

Unbeknownst to her, the accidental visitors to Equestria are just as frightened. Laws of physics that had long been understood and mastered have broken down, leaving them trapped and sitting on a possible ticking time bomb on this strange fantasia of an alien world. As utopias collide, both are faced with an event outside all comprehension, events which civilizations rarely encounter more than once, and generally the same way as a sentence encounters a full stop.

A crossover with The Culture series by the late Iain M. Banks.