When Twilight Sparkle, the Uncrowned Princess who became royalty by her own hoof, left the tutelage of those who imagined themselves her teachers, she was just a filly. When she was cut down by her only surviving friend four years later, she was still just a filly.
In the passing time, she barely grew or improved, but she became wildly different all the same. As if by accident, she completely distorted, as all living things must do to fit their cages, living flesh wrapping around fences and pulling it tight to it.
Yet, no one who read the last message she sent to her father could have known this. In fact, her father was totally amazed when, years later, there was a sudden interest in the life of his daughter.
Twilight Sparkle’s departure began with a simple discovery, the atom of recognition. The barest shred of a pony that made them inevitable, that forced one to remember them despite the passing of years was a simple, reproducible atom. Each pony had one, just slightly different from the others in the exact moment at which an electron was noticed to be passing an exact second of the orbit. This atom, this single, instantaneous arrangement of particles, forced one to recognize friends and lovers no matter how many years had passed.
Twilight was soon in the business of selling these atoms, and just as soon rich, and almost as soon imprisoned on grounds that no one really understood. What little anyone could confirm was that there were 18 Princess Celestia of Equestria’s roaming the streets of Canterlot, plus a few dozen Cadences roaming the countryside. This was simply more princess than anyone could handle, although producing atoms was not illegal at the time, and wouldn't be until the Law of Conservation of Matter was passed in 76 N.C.E.
To make matters worse, Twilight, in her equal capacity as instigator and investigator of the counterfeit persons, had forbid any atoms from entering the prisons of Equestria on the grounds that anyone could be a made counterfeit by any one atom. The resultant isolation from economic exploitation and prison guard violence resulted in Equestria’s prisons becoming communes run by the former inmates that profited none of the bourgeois interests who ran the private prisons.
This was simply intolerable. The law could accept any crime with even hoof, except those offenses which insulted its own existence.
So, the filly who would one day be branded the Mad Mare Herself was locked away on charges of counterfeiting on the grounds that Princess Celestia of Equestria’s likeness adorned the currency, and Twilight had replicated the impression of the likeness, if not the likeness or the currency itself.
It was then that Twilight took up her own legal defense. And, with the blood that would very soon pump across the dirt path at the hoof of the last of those it considered a friend now pumping wildly, Twilight had stood in court and proclaimed her guilt and accepted a life sentence.
Even this was just a card in our poor filly’s hoof as she beat the rap with an appeal on the grounds that she had no life. The investigators that the court sent were appalled and deeply depressed at the conditions of the filly who spent all her days locked away in a library, but they could not but agree.
Twilight Sparkle had no life to speak of, and therefore her sentence could not be served.
Princess Celestia of Equestria, able neither to accept that she had been beaten nor find a way to prove otherwise, settled on banishing the filly who would later return at the head of her own personal army and claim for herself the birthright she would steal.
There were no photographers that first night in that small town of Ponyville, and so we must imagine Twilight’s timid arrival. We must also imagine her trying to swagger as best she can as she walks through town, finally arriving in Sugar Cube Corner.
We must imagine her, this tiny filly, kicked out to the furthest edges, because the only images of our Uncrowned Princess are from years later when she returned to Canterlot to demand what she felt herself owed.
We must imagine her, but we can perhaps recall others in a similar place. Hunched over table and cowering from the passing bulk of the earth ponies. We may imagine the figure of an impending justice, the outcast lurking among the non-All before she returns. Not nearly ready yet to become what she was.
Not until a pegasus slammed through the front doors and declared herself to be the Rainbow Dash, slayer of all legged things. The pegasus had been misraised in Cloudsdale, until the day came when she was emiled from the barbarian lands on charges of having discovered fire. Charges that had, certainly in her case, been trumped up. As if lusting for a return to her homeland, The Dash had spent the past years in bare-assed barbarism, destroying anything that came across her path.
Until that night.
The Rainbow Dash had barely finished bellowing a challenge when the splintered leg of a table split her face open. Teeth scattered like tic tacs among spilt sodas and blood as the pegasus collapsed.
The Dash’s skull was split open before she hit ground, and she was still laying their quivering in the silence as Twilight stepped over the twitching corpse and into the center of the floor and into history and into something she would have to remember to scrape off her hoof later.
“My name,” she cleared her throat, her voice squeaking and barely up to the task it had just accomplished, “my name is Twilight Sparkle.”
The assembled ponies stared at her in confusion.
“Twilight Sparkle,” and in a sudden twist of inspiration, she shouted at the ceiling, “The Mad Mare Herself.”
The crowd began to applaud. Though they had no idea who the Mad Mare Herself was, anypony with a title so grand must be fearsome and famed.
That night she would sleep beside the dead Dash. The next morning she would send a letter to her parents telling them that she had made her first friend and would be travelling Equestria for a while. Twilight’s mother was filled with that unique elation that only the relatives of recovering shut-ins can know, and she died on the spot so as to prevent future disappointment.
Twilight was unable to attend the funeral as she was busy making acquaintance with the local artisanal arsonist community, lead by a unicorn who styled herself Herostratus. The Mad Mare Herself instead sent an inflatable facsimile in her stead, which lived a quiet life floating around the graveyard. The eventual deflation of the balloon started rumors of Twilight’s premature demise, rumors which would plague her throughout her life and for years after her death.
It was in the next four years that the Uncrowned Princess personally slaughtered over a hundred ponies, including The Dash’s fellow barbarian Fluttershy, the maid Pinkie Pie and the entire Apple family, who marched one by one into the Mad Mare Herself’s path only to be mowed down.
She was never heartless in victory, collecting the hearts of her newly slain friends and drying them so that they would remain close to her.
Meanwhile, she assembled the beginnings of her strange and terrible army. Starting with the performance arsonist Herostratus.
Herostratus, a fellow unicorn, encouraged her on to greater and more absurd acts of criminality. It wasn't enough to rob a train, the whole train must be disassembled, lifted off the tracks and carried away so that the locomotive could be used to steal an entire bank vault, tearing it out of the building and carrying it away. Cities were besieged until they surrendered their gravitons, floating in the sky where they became a hazard for pegasi. Fancy Pants was forced, at knifepoint, to don a pair of pants so that his pants could be pulled off before an adoring public.
The Mad Mare Herself even took to forging her own signature on autographs.
It was in the course of distilling a truth serum for distribution to economists that the Mad Mare Herself was first taken by the law. The firefight was fearsome and left three ponies dead, seven mortally injured, and a pigeon with severe shock. After being captured, Twilight expressed great remorse that she was unable to collect the hearts of the ponies she had killed.
This began a series of daring escapes. The first time, she did so disguised as her mother, who was still dead at the time. There had been some confusion as the casket was carried into and out of the prison, but Twilight had almost neatly escaped her sentence until, two days after being reburied, she erupted out of the ground and into the middle of a funeral.
A funeral, as it would turn out, for a lawpony she herself had killed while being captured.
Though she insured repeat business of the same kind for two further funerals, she was recaptured and all ponies in prison were forbidden visits from any of their deceased relatives. The spirits of the restless dead are said to still lurk outside the gates of Equestria’s prisons, rattling their chains in frustration and generally being unconducive to civic atmosphere.
Her second escape had gone much better when, disguised as an escaped convict, she had slipped over the walls and into the waiting hooves of her gang, who at this time numbered some five thousand, mostly pegasi and unicorns cast from aerial barbarism or urban civility into the strange, mixed land of crime.
It was then that she noticed her wings, sprouting proudly from her back, and organized her assault on Canterlot to force her coronation. She assaulted several arsenals as she advanced, stealing weapons, armor, gun powder, and the occasional horse who complained unceasingly until being returned to the Saddle Arabian embassy. When she arrived at the gates of Canterlot, she unfurled her new banner, the traditional Celestian colors turned over.
Like all of the soon to be Uncrowned Princess’ campaigns, this failed to proceed in any sensible pattern as her mob burned half the city to the ground, fired cannons point-blank into storefronts, and launched towers like rockets across ths sky in celebration of what one of The Mad Mare's lieutenants later described as "some damn thing, I forget what we was there for. A birthday? Did the Boss have a birthday?"
Twilight’s orders to obtain a suitable tiara for the coronation were forgotten, and the Mad Mare Herself settled for the empty hoofed gesture that lowered nothing upon her head before the Uncrowned Princess lead her army back out of Canterlot in triumph.
And it had become an army now, bearing over 1000 cannon and innumerable crossbows from the gutted Canterlot armory.
It was in the wee hours of the morning a year later that the Mad Mare Herself, the Uncrowned Princess, met her demise.
Her left side left a hideous scar--from the avenging grenades of Fluttershy, who had certainly discovered the secrets of fire and the forbidden ways of geometry--her right eye lazy--from a kick delivered by the largest of the Apples--her heart closed--a gift from her mentor--her residence a small inn behind a bar--the Pie family’s persecution having driven her from even town’s as small as Ponyville--Twilight walked out the back steps and deposited a letter addressed to her father.
The short missive assured him that all was fine, that she was making a great many friends in her travels, and that she would visit soon.
She stood in the empty Main street, completely secure. Her gang was scattered around the mountains, lurking at every pass, camped in every sky island, tens of thousands of ponies who followed her for fear of finding themselves before her.
Twilight walked across the street and then headed to the train tracks that crossed the street. Her steps were bored. No train would come this way, for fear of the Uncrowned, her fearsome army who carried Celestia’s own banner turned upside down.
Or were her steps filled with trepidation instead? Perhaps she felt, shivering backward from her final moments, the initial death throes?
Twilight stepped onto the wooden boards as a light approached.
Her lieutenant, Herostratus by adopted name, approached her. Light blossomed around them both from the unicorn’s horn.
“Celestia’s finest are on their way,” she said.
“We will be gone long before then.”
“Some of us, darling,” Herostratus shook her purple mane out of her eyes.
The last thing Twilight heard before her flesh burst into flame with a fearsome crackle and vile odor, was Herostratus saying, “A temple bombed and burnt to ruins is all the more uplifting to the spirit than one intact, and so much more Celestian.”
The last thing the Mad Mare Herself saw before dying surrounded by flame, before her eyes burst, was the manicured hooves of her greatest friend and last confidant.
And Rarity left that night, having guaranteed that the Mad Mare Herself would forever be remembered, much as her pseudonym had saved an ancient and irrelevant temple from being forgotten by burning it into the history books.