“Maybe…” She pauses, gazing out at the sparkling aura only she could see. “Maybe it’s been long enough.” She lets out a sigh, before turning away from the window. “Maybe I can tell them now.”
She walks sedately over to her desk. Unlike most of the furniture in her mansion, it’s made of cloud, hardened by a combination of pegasus magic and something far, far stronger. She reaches to the cloud behind it and, with a gentle tug and a thaumic equation, she flips the desktop inside-out. The meager contents of the desk, consisting of a single Daring Do novel, a scrap of paper displaying this week’s weather schedule, and the desk lamp she uses when she composes the weather each weekend, simply disappear. Vanishing tracelessly into the inside of the cloud slab.
In its place, the entire desk is suddenly covered in papers, levers, gears, wires, switches, sprockets, bolts, and lasers. She gives the circuit a once-over, glancing quickly at the tiny section on the left side with threads of red and green light glowing through the air, culminating in a great big red light at the front.
She breaks the orange beam reaching all across the front with her hoof. “Dad is dead.” She removes her hoof, watching the light flicker through the right side of her contraption. Processing her voice, extracting the meaning, recomposing the data, compiling it with everything stored in that steadily glowing corner. Eventually, the flickers reach that corner, change a few beams… and the great, big red light blinks to bright green.
She sighs. To bad that’s not the only input she has. She breaks the orange beam again. “We killed him.”
After a minute of processing, the light turns an angry red. She shakes her head- but she’s got more.
“The Crystal Empire has returned.” It fades to a gentler red.
“The Crystal Heart was returned.” Back to the angry red.
“Princess Cadence has taken over the Crystal Empire.” This takes it longer to process- and the red begins strobing gently. She shakes her head- and doesn’t break the beam again. “Figures,” she mutters. “I wonder what it’s going to take.”
She begins studying the new light matrix. She designed this machine; she knows its every working. She knows how to determine why it thinks it’s such a bad idea to talk freely to her friends. To tell them about her real past.
She jumps almost a foot in the air, very nearly reaching for the forbidden in surprise, when somepony yells up to her home, echoing through her standard cloud flooring. She manages to stop herself short, closing her eyes firmly against the forbidden energies born into her, before inverting her tabletop again- back to the book, schedule, and lamp- and turning to push open the window.
“I’m up,” she calls down. “What’s all the fuss about?”
“Princess Celestia wants us to come see her immediately!”
She raises her eyebrow. “You know the train left ten minutes ago, right?”
Pinkie nods. “But we don’t need that. Twilight’s going to teleport everypony!”
She lets out a sigh. Twilight’s teleportation spell is always so disorienting. “Alrighty, I’ll be right down.”
Huh, she managed it. Twilight actually managed to teleport everypony all the way from her castle to the Canterlot throne room without losing somepony, ending up off-target, or causing somepony to lose their lunch- events that had happened without fail in all of her previous attempts at the same feat.
Not that she has ever lost her lunch over something so minor as teleportation turbulence. No- Pinkie has been the most vulnerable to that, with Twilight herself a close second.
But they’re in the throne room. She shakes off the disorientation with her customary speed, faster than any of her friends can. The same speed she brags about all the time. The same bragging she uses to build the skin-deep image everypony sees… and disguise her real self. The real reason she’s able to reorient herself so quickly.
She waits patiently for her friends. Princesses Celestia, Luna, and Cadence, the former two on their thrones, wait with her.
“Thank you for coming so quickly,” Celestia greets, as soon as she judges everypony has reoriented themselves enough to listen.
Twilight emits a small yelp, instantly losing all her progress as the last to recover- this time- and becoming a heap on the floor while everypony else bows.
Celestia politely waits until Twilight both reorients herself and assumes a bow before turning to Princess Cadence. “Cadence?” She prompts.
Princess Cadence nods, stepping forwards to begin. “You may rise,” she begins- and waits until the Element Bearers before her do that before she continues. “While we thank you for your help in defeating King Sombra, We once again require your assistance.”
Celestia nods. “Long ago, when we first sealed King Sombra away, we believed we were done, until he should return. His daughter, we believed dead.”
“This, until just last night,” Princess Luna inserts. “Visiting Night Guard Unicorns detected dark magic remnants in the Crystal Empire- recent ones, with no match to Sombra’s signature.”
Cadence nods. “We believe they belong to his daughter. We request that you return to the Crystal Empire with us to aid in the investigation- and, when we find her, help contain her.”
Celestia finishes. “Can you do this?”
Twilight nods. “Yes Princess,” she states. “We’ll get started right away.”
“Hold on a sec,” Rainbow interjects. “What happens if… she finds out we’re looking for her?” She waves a hoof in a northern direction.
Twilight raises an eyebrow. “We stick together,” she states. “If we do that, she can’t hurt us.”
Rainbow sighs. “What if she hides instead? Or runs away?”
Twilight only stares.
“That is a good point, Rainbow,” Celestia nods. “She is believed to be even more powerful than Sombra. If she tries to hide, we will not be able to find her. We must conduct this investigation in secret.” She turns towards Cadence. “Perhaps we could arrange for an extended visit, on the pretense of wanting to explore the Crystal Kingdom?”
Cadence nods.
She watches out the window as the train approaches the Crystal Kingdom. The irony is almost tangible, to her. She and her five friends are on their way too the Crystal Kingdom with Twilight’s sister-in-law, Princess Cadence, to hunt for a dark magic user. Everypony thinks they’re looking for King Sombra’s long-lost daughter. But she knows better. They’re looking for somepony likely far less powerful than Sombra’s only daughter.
She hasn’t seen the mentioned spell traces herself just yet; unlike most ponies, she will be able to read the spell traces, to extract such information as what spell it was… What it was cast on, when, and so on. She plans to extract that information from any and all spell residue she can find before she tracks down the spellcaster and makes her decision.
If this new dark caster is good, like herself, she’ll teach them how to hide their dark energies. If not, she’ll avoid a confrontation- and instead find a way to subtly guide her friends to the discovery. She hopes she won’t have to protect them.
She smirks as they approach the station. Her friends, and the Princesses, think the traces were left by Sombra’s daughter. Yet, little do they know they’ve recruited her to help them in their search. She hopes briefly to herself that she hasn’t gotten too rusty.
It’s been only three centuries since she last used her power, after all. Besides, she isn’t so careless so as to leave traces detectable by Light magic.
The train pulls into the station. As she trots towards the exit, she opens her thaumic senses. She normally keeps them ‘closed’, so to speak, as it wouldn’t do for a pegasus to react to that which only a unicorn could sense- or even some things they couldn’t.
What’s more, since she’s only using her senses, she still won’t leave any non-pegasus magical traces of any sort.
She settles down in her “new” room in the Crystal Castle. Princess Cadence and Shining Armor had seen no reason not to assign each of them a room in the castle; they’ve got more guest rooms than they seem to care to count, since they repurposed her father’s slaves’ quarters as guest rooms.
It so happens the room they assigned her is the one she grew up in.
The one her long-term transmogrification spell is anchored in. The spell she’d used to convince her father she hadn’t changed, so long ago.
She can finally release it. Be who she truly is.
And, of course, convince her friends she never changed through the use of smaller, shorter-term spells, until she can get back to her cloud home. Which, of course, is a piece of cake. She’ll anchor a thousand-year-newer spell in her desk. One that lets her activate and deactivate it from afar, rather than this monstrosity. She walks over to the desk in the room, looking over it for a second, before looking back towards the door.
She touches into her power. The power she’d been born with, been trained in. The power she hasn’t touched for centuries. She stretches her senses outwards, reviewing this sector of the castle. Nopony is anywhere nearby. She locks the door with a flick of energy, binding them firmly shut- and wards her room against Light magic teleports with another. She then reviews her work.
Yes, she is getting rusty. The traces of these spells, while scattered to her various anchor points, will be detectable by Light magic. She scowls, focusing her memory. Her power, her ability. There’s a technique she’d figured out, that let her hide her activity even from her father. She concentrates for a minute, but comes up with nothing.
Oh well. Perhaps she’ll remember it soon, as she uses her power more.
She reaches forwards, touches the wall behind her desk. She closes her eyes, and concentrates on the passcode she’d made to release it so long ago. The war is over.
The spell matrix unravels itself. As soon as it starts, she concentrates her power in containing and absorbing the released energy; it wouldn’t do to unleash a power surge for the entire Crystal Empire to feel just when she needs it the least.
The surge is far greater than she expected; she’s grown stronger over the years, and faster than she’d expected. She lets out a sigh; she’s managed to contain most of it. Just as her growth has strengthened the surge, it has also strengthened her ability to contain it. The only scraps to escape should be fairly vague, and spread to no more than the nearest few rooms of the castle. Which are, at the moment, empty.
She lowers her hoof back to the floor, hanging her head down, as if staring at her hooves. She’s taller now; she can feel it. She lets out another sigh, remembering her birth colors. The ones she’d spent the first ten years of her life hiding with an illusion, because her father hated them. Honestly, she hates them too. She’d been an acid green pegasus with a sickly green mane and tail.
She opens her eyes, staring down at her hooves- and stops immediately.
They’re not green. They’re sky blue.
She whips her head around, checking her sides. The cutie mark remains unchanged; that had appeared long after she’d run away. Her wings have also retained their modified color. Her mane- and tail- have even retained their modified coloring as well.
She spreads her wings wide, sitting on the floor as she stretches her neck upwards and backwards. She’d been transformed for so long she’d grown into her chosen colors.
She feels for her power again. It’s far more potent than it had been before; this is the main reason she’d had to use a passcode unlock for her transform spell, rather than a counterspell: She’d sealed most of her power away with it. She finds her power. She takes a very small portion of it- she wants to minimize her footprint- and lights off the next spell on her plan.
The shadows seem to reach out for her, and she melts quickly into them, disappearing into the darkness. A minute later, the shadows expand once again, forming up to leave a normal-sized, cyan pegasus with prismatic mane and tail.
She smiles. That was successful. She reaches out with her power again, cancelling both the anti-teleport ward and the lock on the door, before heading back out. It’s not bedtime yet- and during the night, when everypony is asleep, will be the easiest time for her to perform her investigation.