Twilight awoke to find herself in a completely different place than where she had fallen asleep. It was a startling experience, without a doubt, but at the same time it left a strange feeling of familiarity lingering in her mind. Had she experienced this before? Had she slept, only to awaken somewhere she knew she couldn’t be? In her gut, she felt the answer to be a ‘yes’, even though her mind remembered nothing of the sort.
Once again, she felt detached from the world, like everything she saw and felt was simultaneously real and yet not real. Or was it really ‘once again’ if she didn’t remember it happening the first time? She couldn’t be sure.
All that she was sure of was that she wasn’t in the tent from before, but instead standing in a street in the middle of Ponyville, just outside the library. Stars blanketed the night sky above, their light mingling with the light of the crescent moon, providing sparse illumination as the many houses had long since extinguished their lamps. The town at first seemed to be as quiet as she would expect, but she soon noticed that there was a stagnation in the air that felt... off. Even during the most peaceful of nights, there was still a feeling of life that permeated her lungs whenever she breathed in the air. All of that was gone now, replaced with nothing but stillness. Twilight could almost swear she wasn’t actually breathing at all.
Her mind was immediately pulled away from the thoughts when she noticed something parked at at the edge of the tree she called home. It was difficult to notice in the darkness, but it was unmistakable. A stagecoach. More specifically, Trixie’s stagecoach, nestled right up beside the front door.
“What the hay?” said Twilight. Her voice had an odd sound to it, distorted and unclear, seeming to pass her ears entirely and burrow directly into her brain. “What is she doing here? And why is everything here so weird? Just what is going on?”
Twilight, of course, wasn’t surprised when her question was met only with more silence. Resigning herself to the odd feeling that she wasn’t entirely real, she decided the only thing to do was to investigate herself.
A short trip to the library door had brought her to the interior, though it wasn’t in a way that she expected. As soon as she reached to grab the doorknob with her magic, she found herself on the other side, looking at the home she had grown so used to living in. She hadn’t even felt the familiar pop of a teleportation spell, or the usual flickering in and out of reality. One moment she was simply standing in one place, and the next she was standing somewhere else.
Twilight didn’t have time to contemplate this, as her attention was immediately drawn to a pony standing in the middle of the library, draped in a black hooded cloak that concealed everything, save for a single horn sticking out of their forehead.
“Huh?” said Twilight. “Trixie, is that you? What are you doing here?”
Trixie—or at least she thought it was Trixie—ignored Twilight, as though they couldn’t hear her at all. The unidentified pony spoke, though way their distorted speech bypassed Twilight’s hearing went straight into her mind made it impossible to hear what they actually sounded like.
“At long last, I’ve finally found it! All this time being scorned and rejected, while she earns all the fame and glory that was rightfully mine! Princess? Ha! With the Element of Magic, I’ll become so much more than that!”
Twilight felt her jaw drop. Sure, she never exactly trusted Trixie even after her apology, but the sheer gall it took to declare her intention to steal the Element of Magic astonished even her. Could the regret she showed over her actions really have been a lie? It was almost unthinkable after she realized what the Alicorn Amulet did to her.
“Hoo! Hoo!”
“What?” The cloaked pony turned their head towards the sudden sound. Sitting on his usual perch was Owlowiscious, staring wide-eyed at the intruder. His posture and cry were both agitated, recognizing the threat the cloaked pony presented.
“Stupid bird! Begone!” The unicorn let loose a blast of bright teal magic from their horn. With a panicked hoot, Owlowiscious just barely dodged the attack, flying away from the perch and darting out a window that the robed pony had apparently left open. The top of the perch was left completely disintegrated, burned away as though it had been hit with a flamethrower. Twilight tried to cry out for Owlowiscious, but anything she could have said died in her throat.
The cloaked pony then turned their attention to the glass case where Twilight had kept the Elements of Harmony before her friends had taken them to the Digital World. The pony approached the display, their mile-wide grin gleaming even in the utter darkness beneath their hood. Then, suddenly, their entire body froze.
“It’s... it’s empty!? No! No, no, no! Twilight must have hid the Elements away some time before she disappeared! No, no, no! What do I do? What do I do!?” The pony pulled back their hood, revealing a long and wavy mane and a feminine muzzle, though anything beyond a silhouette was obscured. It wasn’t just the darkness, Twilight realized, but something else about the unreality of the environment that concealed the pony’s identity.
“Damn you, Twilight!” She screamed. “Just how much more do you have to take from me before you before you’ll be satisfied!? First you steal my life, then you steal the wings and title I deserved, and now this!? I hate you! I hate you so much!”
The unicorn collapsed onto the ground, her body shivering as she descended into a mess of inelegant sobbing, though the sharpness that remained in her not-voice signalled just as much rage as it did sorrow. The pony truly meant it when she said she hated Twilight, a fact that put Twilight on edge for a number of reasons.
If the mystery pony really was Trixie, it was profoundly unsettling just how easily she had been able to adopt a remorseful disguise the last time they’d met. Even a pony that practically made her career stretching the truth couldn’t have lied so convincingly. Yet even more disturbing was the creeping suspicion that it wasn’t Trixie at all, as not once could Twilight recall ever meeting a pony with as much reason to envy her. And if it really wasn’t Trixie, then why was her stagecoach just outside the door?
Too many questions, and not enough answers. She couldn’t have spent too much time pondering them anyway, as she began to notice a pool of liquid forming, seemingly out of nothing, around the sobbing unicorn. It was pitch-dark, darker than anything even in the completely unlit room, and it writhed and pulsated like a living blob of... something. Twilight felt her stomach turn just looking at it, and she wasn’t even sure she still had a stomach in the ethereal state the world seemed to exist in.
A thin rivulet of the dark liquid leaked outward from the pool, flowing closer to the wall. Then, in defiance of gravity, it began to flow ninety degrees upward, straight into the air. From there it gathered into a single solid mass, which expanded outwards and slowly took shape into something that made Twilight shiver in fear. It was a mass of shadow in the shape of an immense and monstrous figure, with large claws and massive horns sticking out of a pointed head. The suffocating darkness of the figure was pierced by a pair of red dots in the center of the head, though the blood-colored glow they cast over the room didn’t feel anything like light.
The mystery pony, appearance beyond her silhouette still hidden by a force Twilight didn’t understand, turned towards the looming monster. Then, with a voice that rumbled like an earthquake, it spoke.
“Become my Lord of Magic, and I will grant you power beyond imagination.”
The words echoed in Twilight’s mind, unbidden. It was a promise that carried within it a magic unlike anything she had ever felt, tearing away at her perceptions, until the entire scene before her dissolved into a blur of swirling shadows and sounds. As she felt herself gradually lose the last of her sensations, she could just barely make out five other sentences being spoken, each reverberating with the same dark power.
“Become my Lord of Kindness, and your children will be forever rid of suffering.”
“Become my Lord of Loyalty, and I will restore your purpose as a Knight.”
“Become my Lord of Honesty, and let the living be stripped of all delusions.”
“Become my Lord of Generosity, and give your life to a higher power.”
“Become my Lord of Laughter, and the Gate you seek will open.”