//------------------------------// // The End of All Things // Story: Becoming Aunty Celestia // by Skywriter //------------------------------// Shining Armor's climb back to the castle's guest room was the single longest walk he'd ever experienced. Every step felt like a furlong. Twilight's spell had clearly done something, whatever she believed, but was it the correct something? The sky was the proper color. The grass was green under the moonlight. The delicate ice-cream stalagmite of Canterlot still clung to the side of the Canterhorn like a single frame of a fashionista performing a choreographed twirl around a lamppost. Everything looked perfectly ordinary. He paused for a moment at the door. Then he decided that it did not behoove a stallion of action to tarry at portals. The future was the future, after all, and unless he felt confident asking his little sister to keep rolling dice with the cosmos—which he did not—it was best not to continue to dwell in suspense. Best get on with it, really. Strike while the iron was hot. Something like that. So, after spending the time span of multiple sentences explaining to himself why he shouldn't delay opening the door, Shining Armor opened the door. His wife wasn't yelling at the ant farm any more. That much was a heartening sign. She was not, however, immediately in view. Hesitantly, Shining pushed the door open further. The first thing he noticed was the box. It was huge, and dark, and contained within its depths a host of dancing arcane sparks. Near the top of the box were rows and rows of crudely depicted changeling invaders marching inexorably downward. Occasionally the box would make a little whizzing sound, accompanied by a small squee of satisfaction from the beanbag chair planted in front of it. Draped across the beanbag was a rumpled swath of pink alicorn. She was staring intently into the box and fiddling with some buttons on a tiny panel in front of the beanbag with her hooves. A spoon was suspended in a pale blue telekinetic field spare inches above a bowl of cereal. No, wait—not cereal. To his dawning dismay, Shining Armor noticed that the bowl was full of extracted marshmallow bits from a box of Magic Charms cereal—specifically the heart-shaped ones. The pink alicorn looked up from her wooshing, bleeping box. Her face lit up in an expression of joy. Oh no, thought Shining Armor. "Hail, sweet husband!" bellowed Cadance, knocking him backwards out of the room. "How fared your adventure with the destiny-alteration spell?" Shining struggled vainly for a moment to upright himself in the hall outside the door. "Went great, honey!" he said, with the feeling of a cavern opening in his gut. "No complaints!" Shining tried again to get his legs under him, but before he could sort everything out, he felt himself being lifted gently into the air and placed on his hooves back inside the room. "Buh," said Flurry Heart, setting him down as her aura winked off. Shining Armor's foal returned her gaze to the ant farm on the floor in front of her. Occasionally she telekinetically plucked one of them up and placed it in a location unfamiliar to it, whereupon she watched its confused flailing with rapt attention. A half-eaten slice of mushed-up angel food cake lay on a colorful baby plate nearby. "Bah buh bah," said Flurry, to the ants, imperiously. The ants waved their little feelers around in royal deference. Cadance gave Flurry Heart a sour look. "Look how the ants fawn upon you, dear daughter." "Bah," said Flurry Heart, airily. "Would that they looked upon me with such respect!" she cried. "The ants have never loved and appreciated me the way that they have you!" "Buh," Flurry Heart replied, narrowing her eyes. "Do not strike that tone, daughter of mine! You do not possess the power to banish me!" "Bah," said the foal, coldly, toddling over to Shining Armor's hoof and hugging it tightly.. "Your father will not fetch you the Elements of Harmony, young filly! For one thing, they are in a tree now!" Shining Armor watched the escalating feud between his wife and his daughter, expression blank and eyes distant. Eventually he wandered over to the ant farm and gave the collected mass of lowly creatures a brotherly pat. Shining had once read a legend that a pony who happened to become the object of an alicorn's affection would never pass from Equestria; that the powerful magic of a princess's love would sustain them through the ravages of age and keep them alive for centuries, so that they might forever experience the beauty of a relationship with one of the most noble and powerful creatures in all Equestria. Shining Armor now found himself beloved of two of them. He found himself hoping that the legend was wrong.