Monarch HQ, October 10
11:32 AM — 15 hours after the Fracture in Time
Back in the medical ward, Starlight paced back and forth. Sunburst was talking to Serene, and she was restless.
Everything — everything that had happened so far was because Serene had gone back in time from the End of Time. Including Serene going to the End of Time. It was… confusing. And, Starlight realized, kind of disturbing. It implied there was only one possible option for anything. Only one timeline. No free will. If the past was set, that meant the future was set, because the future was the past of the future plus one second.
Suddenly Serene’s disconnected disposition made a lot more sense. You couldn’t fight the current, so why bother?
But Starlight pushed that thought to the back of her head. She had to think about now. And now… she didn’t have a whole lot of options. She was effectively a prisoner here; she didn’t know how long they were going to keep her in the medical ward. She’d tried teleporting — just a quick blip to the other side of the room — but no dice. The room was teleport-proofed, and probably the whole building, too.
Serene had said she’d let Starlight choose. But Starlight suspected she wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. Whenever Starlight turned down the offer, Serene would probably keep squeezing until she caved. Which, honestly, wasn’t that bad of an option, but it meant just accepting the End of Time was coming and doing nothing to stop it. The idea of letting such a huge disaster happen left Starlight with a bad taste in her mouth.
She could wait for Twilight to get back and come looking for her. But that, too, meant giving up. Starlight was studying under the Princess of Friendship, surely she could persuade Serene, right? It was hard to say; she was better about it now than she had been a few months ago, but Starlight wasn’t much of a ponies pony. She might bet a few bits on it, but not a lot.
Her train of thought was interrupted by Sunburst being pushed back into the room. He stumbled a little on his bad leg, then hobbled back to the bed. He flopped down and kept his leg out straight, but he looked more thoughtful than in pain.
“I’m guessing she said the same things to you as she did to me, right?” asked Starlight. “Can’t change the past, something about a filly, End of Time is coming, join her?”
Sunburst cocked his head for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah, that,” he said, “that sounds about right.” He licked his lips. “Heck of a thing, ain’t it? I mean…”
“Yeah,” Starlight said. She went back to pacing. “What do you think?”
“I, I don’t know, to be honest,” said Sunburst. “I tried to convince her that, that with a bit of work, we could fix the Fracture now, but…” He sighed. “It’s, it’s just, I don’t see the point in waiting until after it passes to try. Yeah, she, she said it was her past, but…” He made a small noise of frustration.
“And she’s really got us in a bind, hasn’t she? Ten to one says she’ll keep us here until we agree.” Although, if she did, how would Twilight react?
Sunburst coughed. “The Serere I knew wouldn’t do that, but, but, well… Yeah.” He swallowed.
“Yeah.” As she kept pacing, Starlight glared on the ground. If she weren’t being held hostage, she might be able to think better, more fairly. Right now, without hearing any sob stories, she wanted to oppose Serene simply on principle, even though she knew Serene was probably right.
“You alright?” asked Sunburst.
“Not really.” Starlight snorted and flicked her tail. “I don’t like being cooped up.”
“Probably my fault,” whispered Sunburst. He looked away from Starlight and folded his ears back. “It’s, if I hadn’t, we-”
“It’s not your fault,” Starlight said quickly. “You had no way of knowing that soldier was there. I mean, yeah, it would’ve been a bit easier if you’d had four good legs, and we might’ve gotten away, but that’s past, and we’ll never…” An idea popped into Starlight’s head and her voice trailed off.
“If…?” Sunburst asked.
A grin crept its way onto Starlight’s face. “I know how to safely get us out of here,” she whispered.
“Um, Serene’s going to, she’s gonna have-”
“Not that. We’ll-” Starlight glanced at the door, then sat on the bed next to Sunburst and dropped her voice down to a whisper. “We’ll never be captured in the first place. Star Swirl’s time travel spell.”
Sunburst started blinking a lot. “Starlight-”
“It’s not teleportation, and I’m not sure it’s blockable.”
“Starlight-”
“I’ve already seen it change things, I know it can change things-”
“Starlight-”
“-so I’ll just go back and take out that stallion-”
“Starlight!-”
“-before he can shoot you. From there, it’ll be-”
“Starlight!” hissed Sunburst. “That’s, that’s absurd. Do you really think-”
“Yes, I think,” Starlight hissed back. “What’s the big deal?”
“Well, it’s…” Sunburst thumped his head a few times. “You already tried to change the past, and it, it didn’t work. So…”
“I don’t think Star Swirl’s spell and your machine work by the same rules. I might not’ve changed things now, but when I went back all that while ago, I did change things. They didn’t stick, but it’s gotta mean something that I could change the past then.”
“Well, that’s, you’ve got a point there, but, uh…” Sunburst pushed his glasses up his muzzle and laughed nervously. “The, uh, the last time you did that, you kinda, uh, destroyed Equestria. Like, several times.”
Starlight snorted. “That was almost two decades of changes, Sunburst. This is barely half a day, if that. Besides, time itself is going to end eventually. That’s going to take the whole universe down with it, and that’s a bit of a difference, isn’t it?”
“I, I guess.”
Her voice softening a bit, Starlight said, “Sunburst. It’ll be okay. And if Serene’s trying to keep us alive, then she’s got to be careful, and, well, we can’t be much worse off than we are already, right? Besides, if it doesn’t work, I’ll be back here immediately when the spell runs out.”
Sunburst looked around the room and coughed. “I, I guess. But if you’re sure about doing this, then I, I don’t think I can come with you. It’s…” He hefted his bandaged leg and grinned sheepishly.
“No, no,” Starlight said quickly, “that’s fine, but…” She swallowed, then reached out and hugged him. “This might be the last time you talk with me,” she said quietly, squeezing. “Rewriting history and all.”
Sunburst squeezed back. “It’s not like the other me will miss much, is it?” he asked.
“No.”
They sat like that for a few more moments, holding each other, then released and drew back. “Be safe, okay?” said Sunburst.
“I will.” Starlight’s horn lit up as she concentrated on the space and time she wanted to be, then there was a flash of light and she was gone.
Everfree Forest, October 9
11:25 PM — 3 hours after the Fracture in Time
The spell vomited Starlight up in the Everfree. The time machine room in the Doctor’s lab, to be precise, just after she and the Doctor had left through the machine. Serene was nowhere to be seen.
Starlight blinked a little, trying to help her eyes adjust to the dark. It just barely worked; she decided to chance it and start moving. She had to go sometime, right?
She moved slowly, trying to recall where she and Sunburst had headed. She didn’t light her horn up, not wanting to risk exposing herself to Monarch soldiers. There was at least one of them in here, after all. Maybe she’d hear them.
“-eally don’t think we should split up.”
Yeah, she’d hear them.
“Oh, come on. They’re civvies. How bad could they be?”
The soldiers, wherever they were, were talking quietly. Just loud enough for Starlight to overhear them, just quiet enough to make it hard to tell where the sound was coming from. But one of them would be the one who snuck up on her and Sunburst. Hopefully, she’d find whoever it was before they found her. Or the other her.
“One of them’s chronon-active, and they both escaped Streamhaven wi-”
“Oh, come on. They got out during a stutter. That’s completely out of our control. An army couldn’t’ve kept them in then.”
The second one had a point, Starlight thought, but splitting up was pretty much always a bad idea. The whole reason you had a partner in situations like this was so they could cover your back (or you cover theirs).
“And Serene s-”
“Look, we’ll cover more ground this way. You want to get this over with or not?”
“…Yeah.”
“So you go that way, I’ll go this way, and we’ll get it all done in half the time.”
“If this goes wrong, I’m blaming you.”
“And if they get away because you’re standing here arguing with me, I’m blaming you.”
With that, Starlight heard the faint clip-clopping of hooves. Two sets, one quickly fading away, the other growing louder. The other was probably the one who snuck up on her. Starlight ducked into a side room as the pony walked past. He wasn’t looking around very intently, just skimming the hallway kind of at random. Soon, he’d past her room without giving it a second glance.
Then she heard him whisper, “There you are.”
Taking a risk, Starlight poked her head out of the room. The soldier was almost around a corner, looking down another hallway. She silenced her hoofsteps with a spell and scurried behind him. She saw herself looking out a door, with Sunburst behind her on his tiptoes. The soldier was drawing a bead on Sunburst.
This was it. This was what she’d come back for. But for a second, Starlight froze. Paradoxes didn’t exist. They couldn’t. That was what made them paradoxes. So what if-
The “save Sunburst” part of her brain dropkicked the “avoid paradoxes” part over the horizon. Right before he loosed the bolt, Starlight hit the trooper with a crystal prison spell. She tensed up, waiting for it to miss. Nope. Magic crystallized around the trooper, trapping him in place.
That had not happened before. Time was changed. Starlight tensed again, waiting for a paradox to sweep reality and do timey-wimey things.
Nothing happened.
Well, technically something did happen, but it was the perfectly mundane something of Sunburst hearing the sound and spinning around. When he saw the Starlight standing in the hall, his jaw dropped and he looked over his shoulder, at the Starlight still looking out the door (past Starlight). He swallowed and tapped her on the shoulder. “Um, uh, Starlight?” he whispered.
“What?” past Starlight asked. “I think we’re good out there-” She turned around to talk to Sunburst. “-is something wrooooooo…” She saw Starlight and started blinking a lot.
For the first time, Starlight wondered just what would happen when the time spell ended. Would she just vanish, overwritten by her alternate-present self? Would her alternate-present self vanish, overwritten by her current self? Would two versions of her exist at the same time? Would she go back to her ow- Wait, that last one was actually impossible; she’d gone to the changed timeline that one time.
Whatever. For now, she just had to keep past herself and past Sunburst from running into Monarch. She didn’t know how long she had, so she talked quickly. “Listen,” she said, “there’s Monarch soldiers out there with night-vision goggles. If you go out that door and straight to Ponyville, you’ll run into them.”
Past Starlight opened her mouth, then blinked and rubbed her head. “But if we never meet them,” she muttered, “I only know that because you told me, but I’m you, so I only know that because I told me, and-”
Starlight didn’t feel the need to correct past Starlight. She did, however, feel the need to tell them to move it. “You’ll work it out later, trust me,” she said. “Just get going. Take another route to Ponyville, and you’ll be fine.” She realized, with some dismay, that they wouldn’t necessarily be fine. Things could easily go very, very wrong.
“Um, uh, listen,” Sunburst said to past Starlight, “she’s, she’s right.” He pushed his glasses up his muzzle. “We, uh, we can’t stay here. I say we go out that, out that door, around to the other side of the building, and-”
“Make it up as you go,” hissed Starlight. “Just move. More soldiers are coming.”
“Hem. Right. Sorry.” Sunburst nudged past Starlight. “Come on.” He whisked out the door.
Right before she left, past Starlight turned to Starlight. “I know I don’t need to say this,” she said quickly, “but thanks.” And then she was gone.
Before she could do anything else, Starlight began to feel a slight pressure as the time spell began running down. As static began to collect on her fur, she considered chasing after them. But really, what was the point? They were away, she’d be away when she got back. She and Sunburst were safe, and all they had to do was get to the Doctor. It couldn’t be that hard, right?
The air started buzzing.
Right?
The time spell collapsed and Starlight was gone.