Twilight Sparkle just walking into the house accompanied by a negative-image copy of herself seems like exactly the sort of thing she would do. Having that clone then look at Shimmering Armor, take a step back in fear and stutter, “T—that’s Sunset Shimmer,” is simultaneously more alarming and a lot less amusing.
I surprise myself, too, to realize that I’m not too concerned for my own wellbeing. I just feel sorry for whoever this filly is because her little outburst there just ensured that she wouldn’t be leaving this house anytime soon… if ever. She takes another hesitant step away from the group of gathered ponies before her eyes roll up and she collapses on the spot.
At first I assume that she just fainted, until the tall, masculine figure of Night Light appears from somewhere behind Twilight and her apparent clone. He hawks and spits something to the side of the door before walking in past them, giving only the most general grunt of acknowledgment.
This Night Light is nothing like the one I remember listlessly going about his chores. For starters, he reeks like a smoker who spends all his time loitering outside of a sardine factory with a bottle of whiskey, and I immediately dislike him. Twilight Sparkle and Twilight Velvet, meanwhile, quickly drag the mystery filly in over the threshold and close the door.
I do my best not to focus on the filly and what’ll happen to her, so Night Light is the next obvious subject of conversation. “So, is he just home for lunch or has he been fired already?” I ask the room at large, scrunching up my nose in disgust. “Smelling like that, I’m surprised that he was even let in the door wherever he works.”
“Oh, do your best to ignore that,” Twilight Velvet says, still as upbeat as ever as she drags the filly into the living room, watermelon rind still around her neck. “That’s your changeling senses at work. Ol’ Nighty is something of a biter and fond of his poisons, but they’re made of hate, anger, selfishness and that sort of thing—really nasty stuff. He’s probably going up to shower now.”
Shimmering Armor and I exchange a concerned look while she busies herself toweling me down after our eventful morning, but eventually both of us shrug it off. He’ll figure it out. Moments later there’s a slow, steady banging coming from the upstairs bathroom. It lasts about ten seconds before trailing off, but I can still hear water flowing through the pipes. “Is he…?”
“Continuing to shower?” Shimmering Armor asks, glancing up in the direction of the bathroom. “Yes.”
Well, I guess that’s all there is to say about that. I follow Twilight and Twilight into the living room where they set the filly onto one of the sofas. “So, wait, does that mean he bit her?”
“Yep!” Twilight Velvet chirps with a smile, rolling the filly over and brushing the hair on the back of her neck aside to reveal two puckered holes.
I climb up onto the couch in order to get a closer look and instead get a whiff of the same smell that was coming off of Night Light, nearly sending me crashing back down as I balk away from it. “Jeez, when I asked about it the other day, you didn’t even have to mention odial stones; you could have just mentioned how awful that garbage reeks. Tell me that’s going to go away quickly.”
“Oh, sure,” Twilight Velvet says, wiping the excess away with her magic quicker than she can say it. “Ambient positive emotions will dilute and dissolve it, but so will changeling magic, since it’s not that different from the emotions that were digested to make it.”
“Then why the shower…?” I ask.
“Our bodies naturally sweat out the bad emotions like that unless we keep a real good handle on them,” she explains. “And old Nighty tends to keep himself topped off as much as possible. When you’re that bad off, it’s much easier to just infuse the water with a little magic and wash like you normally would.”
“Huh.” I search around for another topic other than the filly in the room, but I fail to come up with anything. “You know,” I give Shimmering Armor a look. “This would never have happened if you had just done your mane first like I said you should instead of starting with your tail.”
“Well excuse me for wanting to test it on something a little less vital. This face is actually kind of pretty when it’s not scowling, you know,” she says, rolling her eyes at me before directing her ire at a certain purple filly. “Besides, if we’re pointing hooves, this wouldn’t have happened if Twilight had buzzing warned us that she was bringing some random filly home. Just what in the hive did you think you were doing, Twilight? Oh, right, you weren’t—because the hive wasn’t involved at all in whatever you’re planning."
“She is not some random filly,” Twilight objects, retreating in on herself with an embarrassed pout. “Look, she wasn’t even supposed to come inside. The nurse sent her home with me thinking she was my sister, if she hadn’t, then she would’ve sent somepony else who would’ve probably seen you anyway.”
“No,” Shimmering Armor says covering her face with her hoof. “Because normal ponies knock on the door before they come in. Look, the hive can deal with punishments later. Tell us who this filly is, if she’s not just some random one.”
Twilight halts at that. “That’s kind of what I wanted to find out,” she admits. “Look, this isn’t as bad as it looks. I… I need her, okay? For my work. We were probably going to end up foalnapping her anyway, so really, we’ve only jumped ahead on the schedule a little.”
Shimmering Armor decides that one hoof just isn’t enough, so she buries her face in the other one too. “No, Twilight, there’s no way you would’ve gotten permission to foalnap anypony with things as sensitive as they are and I think you knew that."
Twilight begins to object, but Shimmering Armor cuts her off. “No, no excuses. We need solutions. We can’t just let her go, and we don’t know who she is—wait, Sunset; she knew you. Do you have any idea who she is? Twilight, do you at least know her name?”
Twilight doesn’t look like she wants to answer, but at this point I don’t think she’s going to risk making things any worse for herself. “Her name is Moon Dancer and I think she just transferred into my class at school. She was stalking me all day, wanting to ask me why we looked the same, but she only came forward after I smashed my face on the floor again and started a second crack in my eye socket.”
Moon Dancer, Moon Dancer… I try to recall if I’ve ever heard that name before. “It sounds familiar, but—buck,” I swear, suddenly remembering. “When I first met Twilight, I thought I recognized her. I might’ve seen this Moon Dancer with one of the ponies that I hung around with. Blitz Rush, maybe? I dunno if it’s her; he always described her as something of a spoiled little demon, but he might’ve been joking? I never really involved myself in those sorts of conversations.”
Shimmering Armor gets a faraway look in her eyes for a moment before wincing out of the blue. “Damn, yeah, I think you’re right. Okay, this is how we’re going to do this. First, Twilight, since this is your mess, then you’re going to clean it up. Disguise yourself as Moon Dancer and make sure you’re seen leaving. That’ll give us some time just in case things go poorly with her.”
“But—”
“If you want to know what’s going on then you can listen over the hive mind,” Shimmering Armor retorts angrily, cutting Twilight off. She takes a few breaths to calm herself and continues, “Look, Twilight, I realize that you have your whole… thing going on with the hive mind, and that’s fine, but this is the second time you failed to use it to keep the rest of us updated for really major things, and that’s not okay.”
From the look on Twilight Sparkle’s face, I really think she’s going to talk back, but maybe she does check in with the hive mind, because her rebelliousness soon drains away. She presses her lips together, says “Fine,” and turns to stomp off towards the door, pausing only briefly to remove her bandages and take on Moon Dancer’s appearance before opening the door and slamming it behind her.
“Was that really necessary?” I ask, looking over the unconscious form of Moon Dancer, trying to remember anything in particular that had been said about her but coming up blank. It’s then that I realize that Twilight Velvet has wandered off, and I hear a door open and close upstairs. Well, I did make a mess of her twice this morning, I guess she must need a shower too.
I try not to even question how far changelings take things when they’re pretending to be married.
Shimmering Armor lets out a sigh and drops herself heavily into the couch that Moon Dancer isn’t occupying. “Kind of, yeah?” she answers shaking her head. “There really is no excuse. What pisses me off is that she’s going to get away with it because this really is a coup for her project and somelings in the hive are willing to cut her a lot of slack because so long as things don’t go catastrophically wrong, it will actually make things more secure around here in the long run.”
I climb up over the back of the couch to give Moon Dancer another look. “Yeah, I can see that, I guess,” I say, jumping down to curl up against her chest, reveling a little in being able to actually touch someone without having to worry about a connection to the hive mind. In hindsight, maybe it’s a little creepy, but she looks just like Twilight Sparkle so the part of me that objects to getting feely with somepony we just foalnapped is confused enough to let it go. “So how bad is it really?” I ask.
Shimmering Armor cringes.
I snuggle closer to Moon Dancer. “That bad?"
“Let me put it this way,” she says, massaging her temples. “Her entire family is dead, and according to Twilight—” Shimmering Armor taps her forehead to indicate that the information is thanks to the changeling in question finally communicating over the hive mind, “—Moon Dancer is really hoping that Twilight’s family is somehow related to her so that we can, and I quote, ‘help her with her situation.’ I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s already been moved into an orphanage and that’s why she had to change schools."
I shrug. “That sounds great, then, doesn’t it? All we have to do is get her on side, as you said and it seems like that’s exactly what she wants. Sure, you guys are weird bug things and you want to make her a weird bug thing so that Twilight can use her body while Twilight’s is in the shop, but it still seems like this is an easy-mode foalnapping.”
Shimmering Armor leans forward and drops her head. “Yeah, kinda, except for two things; one, we’ve just undergone a thorough background check by Princess Celestia. If we forge any documents now to say that we’re related to Moon Dancer, somepony will absolutely know because it’ll throw up red flags with all the wrong ponies.”
Yeah, that’s… “Still, even if we can’t get her out of that place right away, we should still be able to do enough to get her on our side, and you guys will know if she’s lying, right?”
“Sure, but that’s where the second problem comes in,” she says, her ears folding back as if she’s bracing herself for a bad reaction. “The part where she probably recognized you because you’re kind of the one who killed her family.”
“I what?” I shout, shooting to my hooves. “Tell me this is a joke and you don’t have changelings out there doing shit like that disguised as me!"
Shimmering Armor shakes her head. “It’s something to do with the janitors keys that you stole that day when you were going after the mirror. The hive mind doesn’t know any more than that, but it does seem to be legitimate.”
Poleaxed, I fall back against Moon Dancer’s barrel, shutting my eyes against a wave of emotion as the quick anger that I just drew up turns against me. When I open my eyes again, I look over at her face and wonder if this is the first restful sleep that she’s had in the past couple weeks. This filly had to go through that all of that because of me. “Buck,” I whisper, and it’s not enough.
Shimmering Armor remains silent, instead allowing me the time for it to sink in.
“And if she doesn’t play ball, she’s not leaving the house without becoming like me,” I deduce.
“It’s a difficult situation even with her cooperation,” Shimmering Armor says, not mincing words with me. “Realistically… she might not have the option of leaving in her own body regardless.”
I frown, considering that. “How does that work? We hold her for another week until the pod is free, and then another couple of weeks for her to have her turn in it?”
Shimmering Armor shakes her head. “We’ll have to build a second pod,” she says with a grimace. “And yes, that’s ‘we’ as in all of us. As much as I’m sure that Twilight would enjoy making you do it, it’ll be an ‘all hooves on deck’ scenario.”
I share her grimace. “Everyone but you, I suppose, since I don’t think my old body is capable of helping with that.”
“True enough,” she agrees.
I spend another little while just thinking about this whole situation, but it’s not doing any good. “Well, I suppose I might as well get started on that, if you’ll help me down the stairs and explain what I need to do.”
“No, not yet,” Shimmering Armor says, getting up. “I’m going to take you and Moon Dancer upstairs to Twilight’s room, and you’re going to see what you can do to befriend her.”
I balk at her. “The Tartarus I am. You just got finished telling me she hates me and blames me for her family’s death—and I can hardly blame her, can I? I’m the last pony she’s going to want to talk to.”
Shimmering Armor picks both Moon Dancer and me up in her magic, levitating us out the room towards the stairs and ignoring any objection. “That is the point, yes,” she tells me from behind. “Because you’re not Sunset Shimmer—not right now. Right now, you’re ‘Whitewash,’ a pony half her age and adorable. If you befriend her like you are and explain things, then when she finds out that you’re really Sunset Shimmer, she’ll already have a new first impression of you.”
“I mean, most people don’t like being lied to,” I point out. “But I guess I’m not really the expert here. Wait, when you say explain things, how complete an explanation do you mean?"
“Eh.” I can hear the shrug in her voice. “Full disclosure, I guess, though obviously leave out the whole Sunset Shimmer thing until you think she’ll take it well. Remember, we want her to agree to give up her body and become a changeling the same way you have, so we can’t really leave much out. We’re hoping her need for a family will get her past any discomfort with the idea.”
“That’s… Gonna be a hard sell,” I admit. “I only agreed to this because it’s temporary. I’ll grant you it’s not actually that bad and there are a few things I’d still like to get out of it, but it’s still a body designed to be a prison. I can’t sugarcoat that; I won’t.”
Shimmering Armor levitates us to the side of the door and opens it with her hoof before taking us inside. “I’m not asking you to. If it helps, Twilight actually wants to rebirth her to test configurations out, so there’s a good chance that she can mitigate some of the downsides there are to being a nymph at the same time.”
As soon as she sets me down on the bed, I turn around to give her an unamused look. “And no one thought that I would like to know about that option?” I ask, somewhat snappish, though I know I’m just being difficult. “I mean, I get that it’s temporary and another week in the pod would just be a waste of time, but it would have been nice to know it’s even possible.”
Shimmering Armor takes my backtalk without any particular reaction as she sets Moon Dancer down next to me. “Well,” she says, returning my look with a flat one of her own. “Considering it’s never actually been done before and could be risky, perhaps you’ll forgive us for not mentioning it?”
I stare her down for a bit just so I’m not giving in too quickly. “All right, fine. Your point is made,” I grumble, not really invested in it regardless. “So, what’s actually on offer, then? Twilight gets to use Moon Dancer’s nymph body as her testbed and her pony body as a drone to ride around in while she’s being rebirthed? And in exchange, Moon Dancer gets to be a changeling, all the family she could want and any reasonable changes to her body she could ask of Twilight, pretty much?"
“Pretty much,” Shimmering Armor agrees.
“So, does Moon Dancer get to use her pony body when she’s in the pod?” I ask, eyeing up my own body that ‘Shimmering Armor’ is walking around in.
That seems to take her by surprise. “That might take some work,” she says, hedging her words. “She’d need the organ you’re missing that would connect her to the hive mind, so she would have to be okay with that.”
I cringe at that. “Yeah, I didn’t really think that through. If she had it, though, she’d be able to control the connection? She wouldn’t have to worry about touching one of the neurospasts like I do and she could just plain forget it’s even there half the time like Twilight Sparkle?"
Shimmering Armor stops and hesitates. “I think Twilight’s connection has a different basal state,” she hedges. “But I suppose that if it’s possible to give her the organ at all, there’s no reason that Moon Dancer’s couldn’t be based on Twilight’s. I’m really not the changeling to ask; I’m just repeating what I get from the hive mind."
“Right, right,” I say, ignoring her disclaimers and focusing on considering what it is they’re asking me to do. You’d think I might feel guilty about pushing somepony to give up what they are and become a changeling, possibly in mind as well as body, but if what Moon Dancer really wants is family, she could do worse than to join one that was connected in such a way.
At least she would always know how they actually feel about her.
“All right, fine, do your thing, I guess,” I say, walking around Moon Dancer’s prone form so that I can see her face.
Shimmering Armor shakes her head. “Nope, no can do,” she says, tapping her horn with her hoof. “No changeling magic, remember? Here, I’ll show you where to massage with your magic to dissolve the soporific. As a bonus, she should wake up feeling pretty good.”
She makes good on her word and before I know it I find myself working my magic into Moon Dancer’s neck and spine in a soothing rhythm. I don’t even notice Shimmering Armor leaving until she turns at the door and says, “Befriend her first. We don’t expect her to agree to everything in the first half-hour, and it’s more important that she come around to our way of thinking than it is for her to do so quickly.
“That said, I don’t imagine that holding her here against her will is going to endear her to us, but it’s all we’ve got at the moment. If worst comes to worst, we can take Twilight out of school for her injury and send her back as Moon Dancer with something more subtle to cover it. We can do subtle in spite of what you might think looking at Twilight."
I don’t directly answer and Shimmering Armor is satisfied with leaving it there, shutting the door behind her.
This really is a mess, isn’t it? Not that I was ever going to be able to get out of having to befriend Moon Dancer if she was going to become a part of this whole thing, but at least we could’ve been working at it from a position of amicability.
Eventually Moon Dancer begins to stir. I hold my breath, hoping she at least doesn’t freak out immediately. To my relief, she seems to come to consciousness in a pleasant haze like the protagonist of a romance novel waking up in the arms of her beloved, both of them ready to whisper sweet nothings in each other’s ears without having had so much as a drop of coffee between them.
Talk about propagating unrealistic expectations.
Come to think of it, I never did manage to convince the castle staff to give me coffee. They always claimed that I couldn’t be addicted to it if I’ve never had it before. Well, it shows what they know; I’ve had my brain liquefied, consumed and assimilated by the baby bug thing I’m now inhabiting, and I still wake up like a zompony that hasn’t had its fill of… Err, brains…
I just realized that it was technically me that consumed my own brain.
I wish very much that I could forget that.
Where was I? Oh, right. Little ‘Princess’ Moon Dancer is waking up like a Celestia-damned… morning pony? Okay, I’m really off my game and I can’t even blame the lack of caffeine since it’s been several hours and several showers spent helping bleach Shimmering Armor since I got up, not to mention several mouthfuls of love and wow that sounded less wrong in my head—err, before I’d voiced it in my head.
Mercifully, my terrible inner monologue is interrupted by Moon Dancer’s hooves wrapping around and pulling me close to her. “Shh, shh. Hey, little filly, no need to make that face. Can you tell me what’s wrong?” She asks, looking around for the source of my distress. “Actually,” she says, blinking herself more awake. “W—where are we?”
I feel like a medical professional would probably say something indeterminate and ask her what she remembers, but that seems kind of dumb if the point is to calm her down. “Uh, relax,” I say, attending to squirm my way out of her grasp and not really getting anywhere. “You’re at Twilight Sparkle’s house, in her bedroom, and everything is okay… err, by a certain definition of the word?”
“Twilight Sparkle?” She asks, still lost a little in the pleasant haze of having my changeling magic massaged into her. I can tell exactly when she remembers why she’s here by the smile falling off her face. “Oh, no,” she groans, finally acting like a recently woken pony should. “Now I remember… I saw Sunset Shimmer. This whole thing… It must’ve been Twilight Sparkle’s side of the family trying to get at daddy’s fortune. Now I’ve seen too much and they’re going to silence me one way or the other. Oh mare, nopony even seemed to know I had any family left. I bet they could just replace me with her and nopony would even realize it… or care.”
I have to parse her words several times before I’m sure I understand what she’s implying. “There’s something very wrong with you,” I tell her. “You’ll fit right in.”
She finally lets me go just to turn me around so she can look at me. “What do you mean ‘fit right in?’ I have been kidnapped, haven’t I?”
“Yes and… yes,” I admit, looking away. “Look, it’s complicated, but I promise you that nobody has said anything about your family’s money, so you probably don’t have to worry about that. In fact, we literally didn’t even know you existed until you walked in the door and… well, yes, you saw something you shouldn’t have—but I promise you, there’s nothing anypony here wants more than to see you happy and content, able to come and go freely.”
“And all I have to do is pretend I never saw Sunset Shimmer?” She says, split between suspicion and resignation.
I delay my answer by first making myself comfortable on the bed’s plush comforter and doing my best to look as nonthreatening as possible… So, my default state since I became a changeling. I don’t know why I bother.
“Well, yes… and no,” I begin. “It’s a start, but there’s actually a lot more that you can do for us and that we can do for you… or—regrettably—to you if it comes to that. We have a lot of resources and you represent an opportunity. I’m afraid that at the level of clusterfuck we’re at now, some of those resources will be used to fix things one way or the other.”
Moon Dancer frowns back at me with a calculating look that doesn’t quite have the confidence to support it. “I—I thought you said that this wasn’t some big conspiracy.”
…
I can’t help it.
I try, but I wasn’t prepared.
My lips tremble under the strain and it’s too much.
No sooner does Moon Dancer begin to look confused at my behavior than I burst out laughing, doubling over and pounding on the comfort with my hoof. “Not—not a conspiracy! Bahahahahahahahahahahaha! Oh Celestia!"
By the time I’ve calmed myself down, Moon Dancer looks pretty upset, possibly beginning to cry. Shit. “I—I’m sorry,” I say, still trying to catch my breath. “I’m not laughing at you, specifically, just… Yes, you could say there’s a conspiracy. It’s… I don’t even know how big it is, but it’s definitely bigger than anything to do with you or anypony you know. In fact, you, me and Sunset Shimmer? We’re all here for the same reason.”
Moon Dancer softens at that, as if just remembering what me being here implies. “Oh, right… So you saw or heard something you shouldn’t have, too? Does… Does your family know?”
"What?” I ask, confused for a moment. “Oh, no, you misunderstand. I mean why you came here to begin with. We’re all sort of here because, in one way or another, there’s nowhere else for us to go, and they can help.”
Moon Dancer gives me one very long look which transitions sadness back into one of concern. “Please tell me this isn’t some kind of cult,” she says.
“This isn’t some kind of cult,” I mumble, my face suddenly buried in the comforter. “Okay,” I say, pulling myself upright again and considering how to go about this. I don’t really have a lot of experience with explaining things to foals, except… Dammit. I’m really going to have to do this, aren’t I? “I was trying to ease you into this, but since you have a very… creative imagination, how about I tell you a story instead?”
She gives me a perplexed look, and I realize, looking up at her, that it’s probably because I look half her age. Oops. Well, it’s fine if she thinks it’s a little weird; maybe then it won’t come as such a surprise to her when I tell her I’m Sunset Shimmer. “Er, okay?” she says, uncertain but willing to go along with it.
Buck, how did Celestia do this, again? I open my mouth, only to immediately snap it shut. The first word out of my mouth was going to be ‘I,’ but I obviously can’t say the story is about me when I look like I’m five. Well, might as well go all-in. It takes me another moment to find the words, but once I start, they seem to come easily.
Sunset Shimmer was never a very happy pony. When she was young, she was actually in a situation a lot like yours. Uh, without the whole ‘heiress to mysterious fortune’ bit or whatever it is you have going; pretty much the opposite, in fact.
No, rather than coming from a wealthy family—or one of any kind of importance, for that matter—her mother was a seamstress and her father was an accountant. They were singularly without ambition and it showed in everything they did and how they lived. They were, as she would put it, ‘useless wastes of space,’ but they loved her and they tried to spoil her in the little ways that they could.
They succeeded. She was, by all accounts, a brat, and it showed in how few accounts there actually were that spoke of her. She didn’t have any friends and her parents never really had other ponies over, content as they were with their work and each other. They lived out on the farthest reaches of Canterlot, beyond its magical foundation and protections where land was cheap if it was paid for at all.
Unlike her parents, Sunset Shimmer was not content and she had all the time in the world to build castles in the sky around all the things she wanted and wished for things that her parents could not provide. She would spend her nights looking up at the twinkling lights of the city and believing that one day she would live there in the highest towers of her fantasies where everypony would wait on her and treat her like the special pony her mom always told her she was.
Now, it might seem unkind to judge a small filly on the flights and fancies of a five-year-old, and perhaps if she were to have continued to grow up in that environment, reality would have eventually settled in, but that chance was taken from her. It was a landslide that took her parents, wiping her entire house off the face of Canterlot Mountain as if it were never there, leaving her nothing but her dreams to hold onto. Suddenly orphaned and homeless, Sunset Shimmer chose to see it not as the tragedy it was but as the beginning of a quest that could only ever take her upwards into the city in the life that she craved.
Now, don’t get me wrong; she did love her parents and she did miss them after they were gone, but she never accepted that fact. She was taken up into the city, not to the life she imagined, but to a miserable, soul crushing, dead-end orphanage where she got none of the special treatment or love that she was used to. It was too late, then, for her to wish for the things that she’d had. She had vastly underestimated the mountain that she would have to climb to reach the Canterlot of her dreams, and doing so would require her to leave her former life behind.
It wasn’t a bad outlook, really. She had little, but she worked hard and studied hard at all the things that she believed would make her the pony she wanted to be. At some point, this platonic ideal of success ceased being imaginary and was replaced by a real pony; Sunset Shimmer strived to be on the top and there was only one pony in the world who represented that, for Princess Celestia had no equal. Even the cutie mark that Sunset Shimmer was graced with reinforced this belief, for though she told ponies that it represented fire magic, she saw it differently; she saw it as one of a pair.
Egotistical? Absolutely. Sunset Shimmer was that and more, and yet… she was never really proven wrong, was she? Her drive and desire took her to ever climbing heights. Starting with self-study at the orphanage and up through each level of schooling, she proved time and time again that she could best any challenge that was put before her, and if there was no challenge then she would make one. This attitude took her, eventually, to Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns and finally to her position as Princess Celestia’s own personal student. Whatever else could be said about Sunset Shimmer, she earned that placement.
In some ways, becoming the princess’ student should have been the end of her path, but she didn’t see it that way; she couldn’t, because if she did, she would have to face the fact that she still felt empty inside and would have to ask herself why that was. Things might’ve been different if Princess Celestia had recognized the hole inside of Sunset Shimmer and saw fit to fill it with all the things that the filly was missing, but she did not. Sunset Shimmer wanted more, and, unable to find anything else to strive for—unable to get Princess Celestia to acknowledge her in ways that she wanted to be acknowledged—decided that she must bridge that final gap between student and mentor.
The gap between unicorn and alicorn.
Mortal and immortal.
It became an obsession and she built it up in her head as the final, inevitable shape of her path—because if she was immortal, then that path would never have to end. She was already the greatest mage of her generation, so why stop there? Why ever stop? It was something that she could devote everything to because there was no greater goal, no greater destiny, and it was within her grasp. It was the destiny that she deserved, and she was ready for it.
Princess Celestia… did not agree. She saw her student’s ambition as greed and sought to snuff it out, but Sunset Shimmer was never a pony who would let anyone keep her from what she desired—not even the princess.
And so they clashed, and—as should be expected, though it was her first time experiencing it—Sunset Shimmer lost, chased out of the castle like a vagabond and with as much to her name. The rejection struck deep into her heart, gutting it until there was little more left of her dreams and fantasies than a barren ruin. Her path had led her to the top, and from the top she had fallen.
In her pain, Sunset Shimmer lashed out in the only way she could. As she had fallen, so did she think that the Princess should fall as well, and maybe then Sunset Shimmer could take her place at the top where she belonged.
It was a short-lived and shortsighted desire, but she grabbed hold of it as the last thread connecting her to the path that she had once been on. There was an artifact that she had heard about that could give her what she desired, and so, in her flight from the princess, she made her way towards this artifact—this mirror—to see for herself what wonders it could grant her, and it did not disappoint… Not at first.
She saw herself in this mirror exactly as she wanted to be—long-lived, long-limbed and powerful; an alicorn who would finally be at the top and remain there forever… and yet it escaped her notice that even in the mirror she was just as alone on the top as she had been at the bottom. A bit of truth, even from the vipers mouth, that, for yes, the mirror was a viper. Though the vision was pleasing, it spoke naught but lies, offering one thing and providing another.
Twilight Sparkle came to her then when she was at her lowest point. She told Sunset Shimmer of the mirror’s duplicity, but Sunset Shimmer did not believe her. She chose instead to forge on on her own, as was her way. Her determination, however, once shattered, did not stand against this new disillusionment and when she saw the mirror for what it was, she was well and truly broken, with nothing left and no way out of her situation.
No way out but that which Twilight Sparkle offered.
The offer was simple. Sunset Shimmer would give up her body, her life and her very identity. She would spend years or even decades aiding Twilight Sparkle in her goals, and in exchange she would spend those years and decades not as a pony or even an alicorn, but a newborn dragon with all that that entails. She would be given a new life, a fresh start and even a family of a sort, and when Twilight Sparkle’s goal was finally complete, Sunset Shimmer would have the rest of eternity to do what she would, be that to entreat on equal terms with the sun goddess herself or build around herself the hoard of hearth and home that she had been missing all her life.
And maybe she would finally be happy.
What.
What the Tartarus was that?!
“Wow,” Moon Dancer says, breathless and starry-eyed… for all of five seconds. “Still sounds like a cult, though. Like, that is one-hundred-percent cult-like behavior.”
I don’t even register Moon Dancer’s reaction because my own is taking priority. That… I want to say that it wasn’t me saying those words, but it’s more the opposite. The words were just there and I didn’t realize what I was saying until the whole thing was over.
Disquieted, I back up and fall off the bed in my panic. Thankfully, my tiny body takes the fall with a soft bounce and I quickly recover, dashing out the door with tears streaming down my face. I make it two steps out the door before I trip and tumble down the hallway thanks to having to dodge four midnight blue legs and not making a single attempt to do so.
The legs belong to Night Light, the infiltrator of infiltrators. The cynical part of me remarks that of course he was listening in. At first I feel violated that he heard all that, but it’s quickly replaced by anger. “What the tartarus was that?!” I shriek at him, pointing my hoof at the closed and glowing door. “That was… That was not what I was going to say! I was going to tell her some of that, sure, but not put my whole Celestia-damned life story out there as if it were some cautionary tale with Twilight Sparkle as my own personal savior!"
Night Light is anything but perturbed by my outburst. In fact, as he leans there against the wall, the only impression that I’m getting from him is an infuriating smugness. “I suppose you also forget that you are a member of this species that is ‘good at this shit as an evolutionary prerogative,’” he says, quoting the conversation I had this morning with Shimmering Armor.
That… That makes sense. Changelings are natural storytellers, and yes, it had slipped my mind that that would also apply to me somehow. Unfortunately, he has to go and ruin it with his next statement.
“I just helped bring it to the fore.”
My eyes widen as I slap my hoof to my neck in the same place that he bit Moon Dancer, but I feel nothing. Of course, he could have bitten me anywhere, but the slight spicy undertone I detect from his smugness and the barest hint of glow around his horn leads me to a different, much more repulsive answer.
Magic is a conduit for the hive mind.
I feel ill.