Sunset slammed the door open and stomped into her quarters, gritting her teeth so hard that it was a dental miracle that none of her molars shattered. She was, rather unusually for Sunset, wearing a rather overwrought dress in white and gold. It was far removed from her usual style of wearing nothing at all around the castle, or a practical traveling cloak when hunting monsters.
The long train caught on something, and Sunset growled. Her patience had gone extinct approximately at the same time as the dinosaurs, and the frustration boiling in her veins instantly turned her dress from formal wear into uncomfortable restraints.
She tore the dress from herself, the destruction making her feel a little better as she threw it into a corner of the room, buttons flying. She kicked the last remnants away from her fetlocks and shook ribbons from her hair, leaving her wearing only the bandages around her healing wounds.
"Sunset?" Cadance asked, as she looked into the room. Her eyes fell on the dress and she winced. She knew how expensive it had been.
"What!?" Sunset demanded, not looking at her. "Did she send you to try and change my mind?"
"No," Cadance said, stepping in and closing the door to give them some privacy. "I just don't understand what happened. Are you okay? Did Celestia say something wrong?"
"Everything was wrong," Sunset muttered. "Not that you'd understand."
"Sunset, you're my friend, I want to understand," Cadance said, taking a careful step forwards. She could feel the magic pouring from Sunset. It had the same kind of aura as a thunderstorm, a lot of energy just looking for something to ground it. She could actually see sparks manifesting around her, harmless discharges of high-energy magic.
"Did you know what she was going to do today?" Sunset asked, turning on Cadance with her eyes narrowed in suspicion.
"No. I think she wanted it kept a surprise." Cadance almost took a step back when Sunset advanced on her, the firey mare terrifying even when she wasn't the object of her rage. Sunset watched her for a few more moments, then relaxed, her shoulders slumping.
"Well she should have known better before humiliating me."
A garden party. There were at least two or three a week in Canterlot, all of them rather dull affairs that were more or less an excuse for the nobility to socialize with each other. Even political enemies would attend each other's parties, and a lot of backroom deals were hashed out over punch and pie.
The ones held at the castle were of course the most widely attended, because everypony wanted to get closer to the Princess. Sunset usually avoided them like the plague. She hadn't been born to nobility, so she was either pitied or mocked depending on how sympathetic the ponce involved wanted to seem that week. Most of the time, it was a mix of both that shifted from one side to the other when the speaker was in public and back again when they thought they spoke in confidence.
Most of the mockery was behind her back now. Sunset might not have earned any real fame with her exploits, but the nobles knew that if they pushed her too hard, she'd do something about it, and Celestia may well not protect them.
"I'm glad you attended," Princess Celestia said, quietly. Sunset sighed and tried not to squirm in the dress she'd been given to wear.
"I didn't have much of a choice. You almost made a royal decree ordering me to come." Sunset tried to keep her expression neutral as she looked over the crowd. Part of her wondered if Celestia had brought her along just to keep ponies away, like having an attack dog at the ready.
"You need to learn to deal with the nobility," Celestia said, snatching two cups from a passing maid and giving one to Sunset. "It's better to start early and make some friends with the right ponies."
"And who are the right ponies?" Sunset asked, sipping carefully at the punch. She looked down at the cup and frowned. She had absolutely no idea which fruit that was supposed to taste like, but she suspected it had gone off.
"That is an excellent question, and I find myself asking that quite often. Princess Cadance is an excellent start," Celestia replied quietly. "However, I do have a tactic that I use, even if it's cheating."
Sunset's ears perked up at that. "Oh?"
"I'm the only pony that gets to make new nobility," Celestia said. "With the right choices you can stack the deck a bit." She winked.
"But it's impossible to remove nobility, right?" Sunset asked. "So you can't just make all your allies nobility."
"Not impossible, but the process is extraordinarily difficult. It's important to make the right choice, because you end up living with it for a very long time." Celestia nodded subtly across the garden. "For example, Lady Upper Crust. Her grandmother worked tirelessly to stop a famine in Zebrica. The care and charity she showed have, unfortunately, not been mirrored in her granddaughter."
"So you just hope for the best?" Sunset asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Educated guesses. But still guesses." Celestia shrugged slightly. "But I have been thinking it's time to create a new noble house. It might help smooth things out down the line."
"What?" Sunset frowned, not liking the tone that Celestia had taken with that.
"Everypony," Celestia said, clearing her throat to get their attention. "Thank you all for attending. I invited you all here today to make an important announcement." She looked down at Sunset Shimmer. "With her tireless efforts in hunting down threats to Equestria with no recompense, and her selfless sacrifice in protecting Princess Mi Amore Cadenza..."
Sunset's pupils shrank, her ears folding back.
"Sunset Shimmer has shown that she is one of Equestria's shining stars, and so I confer to her the title of Duchess—"
"Don't," Sunset Shimmer said, interrupting Princess Celestia.
"What?" Celestia said, blinking in surprise.
"I said don't even start!" Sunset Shimmer repeated, more firmly. "I can't believe you'd—" She took a deep breath and walked away, trying to rein her temper in.
"Sunset, wait," Celestia hissed, glancing from her to the staring crowd of nobility.
"I don't want to hear it. Enjoy your party." Sunset vanished in a flash of light, shattering the castle's teleportation wards as she went.
Celestia coughed and turned to the crowd. "Ah, well." She gave a small smile. "How about that weather?"
"Are you sure she humiliated you?" Cadance asked, skeptical. "I'm pretty sure it was the other way around. She was just trying to do something nice for you, and you acted like she'd insulted you."
"I don't want her pity or her titles," Sunset said, firmly. "If she'd spoken to me in private before trying to drop that on my lap, then I would have explained it to her then."
"Well, explain it to me," Cadance said. "Because I don't understand either."
Sunset turned to Cadance and glared for a moment before closing her eyes and taking another deep breath to calm herself. "She didn't try to make me a duchess because of anything I did. It's all about you."
"What do you mean?" Cadance asked.
"Do you know how many times I've been hurt protecting ponies?" Sunset asked. She tore the bandages from her side, revealing the shorn coat and healing wound there. "Sure, this was bad, but I've been hurt badly before." She raised her foreleg and showed off a small scar nearly in her armpit. "This doesn't look like much, but I've got a matching scar on my shoulder on the other side. Giant mutant manticore, hit me with an iron spine that went right through me and barely missed my heart."
Cadance paled.
"Then there's this—" Sunset turned her head and pushed her mane up, showing a scar on her head hidden by her hairline. "Mind flayer tried to eat my brain, and fractured my skull before I stopped it."
Cadance rushed forward and grabbed Sunset, pulling her into a hug. "But... Celestia always said you were just training, or you'd hurt yourself in an accident."
"And she never mentioned when I saved dozens or hundreds of lives," Sunset muttered. "Think about that. I save all those ponies, but it's not until I save you that she cares at all. That's why it's not about me at all! If it was about me getting hurt to save lives, that's one thing. But it's not. It's because I saved your life, and your life is just that much more important to her than mine is."
Cadance wasn't sure what to say about that, and just held Sunset for a few moments in silence.
"It makes me sick," Sunset whispered. "I keep thinking I'm getting somewhere and then I'm reminded that I'm just not all that important to her."
"Do you hate me?" Cadance asked, quietly.
"No," Sunset said, very quickly. "I don't. I envy you, sure, but you're... nice. Nothing that happened to me is your fault, not really. I blamed you for a while, but it's stupid. You never tried to do anything but be nice to me. It's Celestia and everypony else that makes things difficult."
"But if it's me, then I should be able to fix this," Cadance said. "But I don't even know where to start."
Sunset pushed Cadance away, stepping over to the dress she'd thrown aside and looking at it. "You can't fix everything. Tartarus, take this as a lesson for the future: don't be as stupid as Celestia. She probably honestly thought making me nobility would actually change anything."
"To be fair, a duchess does outrank almost all of the nobility. It's one step below being a Princess." Cadance scraped at the ground with her hoof. "Even if you don't get along with them, they'd have to respect your rank."
"They'd respect me to my face and talk about me behind my back even more than they do now!" Sunset snapped. "Nothing would change except they'd resent me even more."
"And what would change it?" Cadance asked, bluntly. "Do you think they'd respect you more if she put a crown on your head and made you a Princess? Even if you were an alicorn, would it instantly change their opinion?"
"No," Sunset sighed, putting the dress back down.
"So what would it hurt if Celestia made you a duchess? She just wanted to do something nice for you. Even if you think she's misguided, it's still a reward, isn't it?"
Sunset snorted. "You think I'm like a foal getting upset because their parents got them the 'wrong' gifts for Hearth's Warming."
"I wouldn't quite put it like that," Cadance shrugged.
"But only because you're polite," Sunset said. "I'll... talk to her later. I just need some space for a while to cool down." The aura around her started to fade, the tempest calming to a low rumble.
"Do you want me to try talking to her first?" Cadance asked.
"It's my mess, and I'll clean it up," Sunset sighed. "I'm just glad I stopped her before she actually made me nobility."
"I don't think you did," Cadance considered. "I'm not sure of the actual rules, but she did actually say she was making you a Duchess, said how you'd earned it, and did it all in public in front of your, well, peers." Her mouth twisted as if she'd bitten into something sour. "For lack of a better term."
"Sounds to me like you dislike them almost as much as I do," Sunset said.
"You're worried that they'll judge you, Celestia's personal student, who has lived in the castle for years and has obviously been being groomed to be Celestia's right hoof. How do you think they've dealt with me, when they'd never even met me before?"
"Probably not too nicely," Sunset admitted.
"You know, something we have in common is that we're both orphans," Cadance said, sitting down and starting to idly clean some of the mess Sunset had made in the room. "I don't remember how I lost my parents or when, but I remember being alone."
It was a tiny hamlet, no more than a dozen shacks let in a small inlet on the coast. Every morning, ponies would take boats out and gather fish, and every afternoon they'd return with their catch. Some would be frozen and shipped to Griffonia, some would be salted and stored away, and the rest fed the families of those that lived there.
The entire town was full of earth ponies who had lived and worked alongside the sea for generations. The homes had small gardens, the earth ponies using the least edible of the fish as fertilizer to help yield some growth in the sandy soil of the inlet.
One of those gardens was where Cadance had her first memory. She remembered sneaking in to try and steal some of the underripe tomatoes and berries growing there, and very distinctly remembered being hit with a broom several times until the old mare holding it had realized she was a filly and not a wild animal.
When it had proved impossible to find her parents, she had been taken in by the couple, though in such a small town, she was like family to almost all of them. As the only pegasus, she quickly made herself invaluable, being able to bring rain clouds to provide fresh water, give wind to the sails of the boats in the harbor, and improve everypony's mood with her brilliant spirit.
It was a quiet life, but one that was full of love and growing prosperity. If nothing had ever happened to change it, Cadance wouldn't have regretted a thing about it.
But while some seek greatness, and others achieve it, Cadance was in the unfortunate third group that have greatness thrust upon them.
The trouble started quietly, as some of the worst disasters do. Ponies who had been best friends started arguing with each other over the smallest things. Couples who had been together for years started breaking apart.
Cadance could feel it like a dark cloud hanging over the hamlet, an oppressive feeling of being watched everywhere she went, the eyes of the formerly-friendly ponies following her with thinly-disguised disgust.
Cadance found herself back out on the streets, a blank-flanked filly with no family or friends. Even the kindly couple that had raised her had been twisted, their love turning to hatred.
And that was when she appeared. Prisma. The ponies in town were too broken to stand up to her, blaming each other for tiny problems while Prisma fueled her dark magic on the disharmony she'd created in their hearts.
"I don't think that's actually possible," Sunset cut in. "Even if she was using chaos magic, the disharmony would be a side effect, not a power source. Traditional dark magic actually uses the negative emotions of the caster, not those around them, and—"
"I'm the one telling the story," Cadance pouted. "And I might not know a lot about magic, but she was definitely using evil spells."
"Fine, fine, keep going, even if it is totally inaccurate to the way that dark magic actually works..."
"So as I was saying..."
Prisma was a twisted, loveless witch of a unicorn who had been a criminal for as long as Cadance had been alive, using her magic only for personal gain. After being run out of every town she'd ever visited, she had turned to using dark magic, deciding to turn her talents from petty crime to true evil.
Cadance, for some reason, found she was the only pony not affected by the evil spell the witch had used to seal the hearts of the others. She was the only one who could stop her, but even then there was no guarantee that it would reverse the hate that had taken hold.
She confronted Prisma openly. With no knowledge of magic or tactics, all she could do was follow her heart and try to be brave.
Prisma focused all of her power on Cadance, trying to smash whatever protection it was that kept her dark magic from draining the love from the pegasus. But it wasn't enough. Cadance was like a bottomless well, and the more Prisma drained, the more love welled up to replace it. The spell Prisma used shattered, and the world turned white.
"And then I was an alicorn and I had my cutie mark!" Cadance finished.
"Just like that?" Sunset asked, raising an eyebrow. "You just... were an alicorn, no other explanation?"
"Well, I also got my cutie mark." Cadance said.
"I hate your story."
"There's probably a really good magical explanation that I don't understand," Cadance huffed. "The important thing is that I defeated Prisma using the power of Love. When it was all over, the ponies in the town were back to normal and Prisma turned over a new leaf and started helping ponies instead of hurting them."
"So you used mind control on her," Sunset concluded. "And rewrote her personality."
"No!" Cadance gasped. "That's not at all what happened! The power of love isn't like that at all. I didn't use my power to change who she was, I just brought out the good things that were already inside her."
"That's a pretty academic difference," Sunset retorted. "If she'd been a criminal for that long, isn't that who she really was?"
"It wasn't who she wanted to be," Cadance said. "Prisma had made mistakes, and she'd never had a chance to make up for them or be forgiven. I didn't change the way she thought, I just reminded her about what was really important to her."
"If you say so," Sunset shrugged. "I'm just not sure the power of love is really enough to stop dark magic."
"Well, that just shows how little you really know about love," Cadance said, smiling. "It can move mountains, drive ponies to madness, and makes life worth living. You want to get some space from Celestia, right?"
"Yeah...?" Sunset ventured. "Why?"
"We'll go out for a night on the town," Cadance said, wrapping a hoof around Sunset's shoulders and pulling her close. "I even know the perfect place to go!"