Dinner would, in fact, take a little over two hours to begin. This was partly due to the Princess’s guests requiring a much, much longer time to relax and recuperate than she probably had scheduled. Twilight and Sunset needed time to forget the crushing despair they’d briefly felt when the mirror had been destroyed, while Starlight and Trixie decided that they, in fact, deserved a quick trip to the spa. The Spikes were up in the dragon’s bedroom, reading comicbooks, which was an odd-yet-not-unenjoyable experience for the dog. Discord spent much of his off-time teaching Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle the finer points of Ponyville Hold ‘Em. And Applebloom spend her time cleaning out Discord of bits at Ponyville Hold ‘Em, because even the Lord of Chaos should never cross an Apple mare at cards.
The other reason dinner would take longer to make ready was that the host, the Princess of Friendship Twilight Sparkle, took a sleep spell to the face during her incoherent, mad cackling. All Starlight would say was that she was following Twilight’s Contingency Plan No. 128: In case of Twilinanas, take a nap.
The other Twilight silently wished she knew that spell.
Once the Princess had time to heal her clearly shattered mind, she was only mildly perturbed at her friend and former student’s decision to knock her unconscious. Dinner preparations were swiftly put under way.
The dining hall was lavishly appointed, with pink and lavender banners and bunting strewn between its high crystal columns and towering green glass windows. The Princess had taken up a position on the furthest side of the round table from the doorway, becoming the defacto head of the table. Sunset and the human Twilight Sparkle sat to the Princess’s right, while Starlight and Trixie took their seats on the left, and in that order. The Crusaders, flanked by a Spike on either end, sat directly across from the Princess, and Discord hung up in the bunting like a hammock. He seemed content to levitate the food up to his place near the ceiling.
Oh, and what a meal it was! Sunset hadn’t had a good, old fashioned Equestrian meal like this one in forever, and the way she tucked into every dish was evidence of that. The main course was daffodil and dandelion sandwiches paired with a creamy onion and vegetable soup. There were honeyed wheatcakes, lemonade, and even cupcakes from Sugarcube Corner and a few fried cinnamon apples, courtesy of Applebloom, who swore all to secrecy on the matter. Granny Smith would be furious to hear about fried apples.
Sunset’s face-stuffing drew many curious glances from the Crusaders, especially Sweetie Belle, who clearly held some of Rarity’s opinions on eating habits and manners, at least when it came to other ponies.
Eventually, the golden unicorn noticed the looks she was receiving. “Heh,” she smiled sheepishly after swallowing an entire mouthful of sandwich, “Sorry everypony… it’s been a while since I ate pony food. Feeling nostalgic, I guess.”
Scootaloo piped up, “What kind of foods do you eat when you’re in hooman world?”
“Oh yes!” Discord called down from his bunting hammock, a bowl of soup resting on his belly, “How does bacon taste, Bacon-hair?”
Sunset’s eyes shrank and her sudden blush grew.
The Princess raised an eyebrow. “Bacon?”
“Um…” Twilight had a shockingly out of character moment where nothing came to her mind, “It’s… um…”
Sunset took a breath, and seemed to come back to reality. This conversation had played out a few times in her mind. Better to rip the bandage off now. “Meat. Bacon is a type of meat.”
The table became… incredibly quiet, with the exception of a giggle from Discord.
“Did you…?” The Princess began, cautiously.
Sunset looked straight into her eyes, and said, “Yes. And,” she looked down at her plate with no small amount of embarrassment, “it was delicious.”
Discord, in his high perch, lost every trace of mirth or laughter in his face. And then it came back, fiercer and darker than he’d ever felt since being reformed. “Oh, Sunnycakes… I think someone’s trying to get on my good side! Assuming I have one…” he turned his head to reveal a small Fluttershy-head growing out of his shoulder. “Well, what do you know…?”
The Princess hadn’t heard. “But… but you’re a pony!”
“Technically,” Twilight pushed her glasses up more securely on her face as she entered lecture mode, “she’s human. At least over there. We’re omnivorous, so eating meat is entirely natural to us. And while some of us choose to avoid eating other creatures,” a blush started on her cheeks, “I must confess I enjoy the occasional meat consumable as well. Though not to the same… excessive degree as Rainbow Dash or Applejack.”
“Applejack!?” Applebloom cried.
“R-Rainbow Dash!?” Scootaloo squeaked.
Sweetie Belle stuttered as she asked, “D-do you eat… p-ponies?”
Both Twilight and Sunset shook their heads and waved their hooves, protesting their innocence in a babble of denials.
Trixie leaned on one hoof to watch the proceedings, a smile on her face. Starlight, however, had a perplexed look on hers. And once the screaming was over and the Crusaders alleviated of knowing their sisters and role models were… monsters in another world, she had another question for the trans-dimensional guests.
“So, why don’t you just keep eating food from here?”
“Not everything translates through the portal,” Sunset replied, taking a large bite of her sandwich, “Daffodils, for instance.”
Trixie snorted, “Daffodils?”
“Poisonous, especially to horses,” Twilight nodded.
Scootaloo pushed her plate away. She wasn’t that hungry anymore.
“Well,” Princess Twilight sighed, “I can’t exactly condemn you for something that’s biologically natural, no matter how much it disturbs me.”
At this, Sunset smirked. “Oh Twilight,” she crossed her forelegs and leaned in, “You remember that dinner we had at the Shake Shop? Right after the Sirens were defeated? I seem to recall a certain princess adoring their famous chili-burg...”
“Why! Would you look at the time!” Princess Twilight shouted, wings outstretched, hooves slapping the table and shaking all the dishes, “It’s getting so late! Time for some fillies to hit the hay!”*
It took some time, and a lot of protesting, but eventually the Cutie Mark Crusaders were upstairs and asleep, as far as anypony was aware. The rest of the castle’s occupants this night assembled around the Cutie Map. Princess Twilight took her throne, with her Spike taking up his own besides her. Sunset sat in Rainbow Dash’s throne to their immediate right, and then counterclockwise Twilight Sparkle sat in Fluttershy’s seat, Spike the dog in Pinkie’s, Trixie in Rarity’s throne, and Starlight in Applejack’s place to the Princess’s immediate left.
Discord dragged a chair from the dining hall all the way to the throne room, leaving both a long scar along the floor and the continuous echoes of screeching chalkboards in his wake, before he magically nailed it halfway up the wall and sat in the air next to it.
This aggravation aside, the Princess asked her guests to fill her in on the… disturbing adventure they apparently had in the Crystal Empire while she was away…
The first interruption in their narrative came when Tempest Shadow entered the story. Princess Twilight was ecstatic to hear of her friend’s success in the empire. She was equally depressed when Starlight informed her that they did not, in fact, take pictures of a filly-fied Tempest playing with Flurry Heart, the Princess’s niece. Though Trixie’s description, dripping with affection for the fillies, satisfied her.
As had the news of Tempest’s horn.
“I can’t believe it!” she beamed at her human-counterpart, “You actually did it?”
Twilight beamed back, “Well, when it seemed like magic wasn’t going to work, I decided to fall back on good old Human Science!”
The Princess shook her head ruefully, “I never considered combining crystals and prosthetics. They’re a fairly new field of research these days, and not very well developed compared to what I saw from your world. You have my eternal gratitude for helping my friend when I could not.”
Sunset laughed, “Oh that’s a neat idea! Why don’t you two trade magic for science?”
“Pardon?” asked the Princess, a curious smile dancing in her eyes.
“Yeah,” Sunset smiled back, “You give Twilight here magic lessons, and she’ll teach you about human science! It’s a perfect exchange program!”
Twilight Sparkle held back another yawn. They were coming on more and more.
The second interruption followed moments later, when the Princess finally put two and two together about her friend Tempest being temporarily reduced to a foal. Truly, it was a sudden interruption, as the moment Sunset began describing how Starswirl the Bearded, despite ostensively knowing better, had been experimenting with Time Magic, Princess Twilight’s head slammed against the map table.
Though her mouth was covered, her moan was clear in its intent.
“Yeah,” Starlight sighed, “That was my reaction too.”
Princess Twilight lifted her head back and bemoaned to the universe in general, “Why doesn’t anypony figure this out!? Time! Magic! Never! Works! Ever! What was Starswirl thinking!?”
“Well,” Twilight was happy to leap into a discussion of magical theory, “It was a blunt-force method he originally used with Tempest. Once Starlight showed him her corrections to his original time spell, and Sunburst and I came up with- “
“Starlight!!!” the Princess turned towards her former student, a vein popping out on her forehead, “What the hayseed!?”
“Look, I’m sorry,” Starlight held up her hooves defensively, “I knew it was a bad idea to begin with! I tried to warn them…!”
“Do I have to send you to the moon!?”
By the end of her friends’ tale, Princess Twilight had her head buried in her hooves, sighs and groans wracking her body. Time-displaced duplicates of her friends. Doomed timelines still existing. Midnight Sparkle. The only silver lining amongst the mess was…
“At least,” she lifted her head finally, “those… other ponies proved that the Magic of Friendship wasn’t entirely lost to them. Maybe, in time, they can rediscover it again.”
Starlight had grown extremely quiet during that part of the retelling. Trixie had moved over to her friend’s seat and laid a comforting hoof on her foreleg the entire time once they’d dredged up Starlight’s old mistakes. The showpony would never admit to not understanding everything that was going on, but she understood Starlight needed a friendly hoof, and simply held onto her friend during the whole thing.
“But… without their memories,” Starlight blinked back a tear, “how will they ever know? How can they fix my mistakes if the spell we used to send them back erased the knowledge that there might be a better way?”
Twilight Sparkle had also grown quite during the retelling, more so whenever the corrupted Midnight Sparkle came up. But as Starlight struggled to hold onto her composure, Twilight struggled against a far, far darker tide. It was only her concern for Starlight that kept her head above it all.
“They remember,” she said, barely above a whisper.
“Twi?” Sunset hadn’t quite heard her, “You say something?”
Twilight slowly met Sunset’s gaze with one that showed every lost minute of sleep, that practically screamed out for rest. Food and a bath had reduced some of that burden, but in that moment, it was clear as glass how tired the human-turned-pony was.
“I said, they remember.”
Starlight’s jaw worked for several seconds before she croaked, “How do you know?”
The purple unicorn let out a single, mirthless chuckle. “Because, I remember,” a flicker of electric blue fire flashed across the bridge of her glasses.
Sunset rose in her seat, horn glowing dimly. “Twilight…?”
“Don’t worry,” Twilight said, shaking her head, dissipating the flames, “It’s just me here. Midnight only shows up when I try to sleep. Which I haven’t been doing much of for a while.”
“You haven’t been sleeping well,” said Sunset, understanding finally coming to her. “It wasn’t just jitters then?”
Twilight looked to the map table, drawing a circle on its surface with one hoof as she spoke. “The first and second night weren’t terrible. Just a few… memories of the library. I didn’t pick up at first how my perspective on the events was different while I was dreaming. It was dream logic. So I thought.”
She returned to look at the Princess. “But since then, I can’t seem to escape her. Every dream is just her, laughing at me, taunting me. Reminding me of what I did when I was her…”
Sunset’s forelegs wrapped around her friend in a protective hug. Twilight hadn’t noticed her leave her seat. “Twilight, you are not Midnight,” she said, head buried in Twilight’s mane, “Remember what we went through in Camp Everfree? You’re better than her!”
“And yet,” the bespectacled unicorn sighed, “I still remember ripping your magic from your body and attacking the Crystal Guards. I still remember being dragged back into the time portal by our friends.”
Starlight scrunched her nose in confusion. “But Starswirl’s spell was supposed to erase your memories! How did you not remember what happened until now?”
“The spell was blocked,” said Twilight, reluctantly leaving Sunset’s embrace, “I think the Elements of Harmony had something to do with that…”
“Of course!” the Princess clapped her hooves together. She grinned and said, “The Elements are connected with the Tree of Harmony! And the Map!”
Trixie, squishing herself into the same throne as a grumbling, but not unhappy, Starlight, sniffed and announced, “The Great and Powerful Trixie understands completely. Understanding what you say is foal’s play! But, just for the non-ponies’ benefit, could you explain further?”
Starlight narrowed her eyes at her seat-mate, but then returned the Princess’s smile, or something close to it. “We’ve seen the Map protect ponies from the effects of time travel… like when I… you know.” She glanced away momentarily, “So, it stands to reason that the Elements have some similar effects when dealing with time magic.”
Everypony took a few seconds to consider this news. Trixie took a few seconds to nod her head along with the others. Nopony noticed the three fillies nodding along just out of sight past the open throne room doors.
As if the Cutie Mark Crusaders were gonna miss out on a bedtime story this amazing!
Spike, the dog, took that moment to speak up, “But then why did Twilight’s memory disappear and then come back?”
The other Spike added, “And if Sunset Shimmer’s evil demon self was there, why doesn’t she remember anything?”
Twilight scratched her chin with a hoof as she began to think out loud. “Midnight herself is the likely suspect. But I’m not certain what purpose that would serve. With the state I was in after the battle, she could have easily stepped back in and took over, but she didn’t…”
Sunset leaned over the table, “For me, I… I think I was just exhausted. I mean, in the span of a couple hours I’d gotten into a fight with Twilight, hit by one version of the Elements of Harmony, tossed into a magic duel with all of you, plus Starswirl and Tempest, then had all of my power ripped out of me again by Midnight, and then had to help tackle her into a swirling Time portal while channeling a second set of the Elements.
“And that’s not mentioning getting dropped back into my own time so hard I left a crater, or the hours I spent helping Luna patch up the damage I’d caused to the school,” Sunset seemed winded just from describing her worst day ever, a lifetime ago it seemed. She settled her chin down onto her hooves, which rested atop the table. “I had so many nightmares and fever dreams in the days after that. I… I think I just made myself forget.”
This time it was Twilight who placed a gentle hoof atop Sunset’s withers, her tired eyes returning some of the warmth her friend had always shown her. But this was short-lived, as she turned back towards the Princess version of her. “Sunset was exhausted and confused… but I was in my right mind the entire time between becoming Midnight, and when I was returned to normal. Obviously barring the moments leading up to my poor decision to unleash the magic.
“I hypothesize that Midnight Sparkle retained some amount of control over our magic while she was weakened by the Elements, just enough to allow her to cast some sort of memory spell on me.
“Now, I don’t know as much about Equestrian magic as any of you,” she took in both unicorns and alicorn princess across the table from her with a wave, which elicited a smug grin from Trixie, “but that… that sounds like an incredible feat of magic. Being able to cast memory spells while being under that kind of stress and pressure.”
“Yeah,” Sunset agreed, then said with some concern, “Wow! Midnight sounds more and more impressive when you say that… at least where magic is concerned. More than the last time we had to deal with her. You don’t think she got stronger?”
This last question was directed towards the Princess, who was exchanging a hurried, wide-eyed gaze with Starlight Glimmer.
“Uh, guys?” Sunset asked again, uncertainty edging her voice.
Both alicorn and unicorn looked back to Sunset. Starlight gave the Princess a weary shrug, which seemed to deflate something in the Princess.
Discord took that opportunity to call out, “Don’t keep us in suspense, Twilicorn! We’re all waiting for a juicy story!” He winked towards the open doors, though only the three hiding Crusaders noticed this. They took the hint, and continued peeking around the door frame.
Princess Twilight did not immediately respond. She seemed to scan the room, allowing her stare to linger on the face of each of her friends in turn. Yes, even Discord. Trixie sat a bit straighter in the throne she occupied when the eyes passed over her. Starlight avoided the gaze entirely. The Spikes hardly moved a muscle, while Twilight and Sunset felt a sudden chill enter their bones.
“Spike, please retrieve the Midnight File,” she finally, wearily said in as professional a voice as any there had heard from her.
The dragon rose into the air immediately, sudden worry in his eyes. He flew out of the room with uncommon speed and seemed to hurtle away from the library.
“Restricted section,” the Princess said, drawing attention to the odd direction he’d flown, “Best if nocreature besides him, Starlight, and I know where that’s hidden.”
She then slightly turned her head towards the open door. “And now, for real this time, three fillies in particular need to go to bed. It is well past the time.” Her voice gained suddenly in volume without any visible strain on her part.
Sweetie Belle broke first. “But… why can’t we hear about this Midnight filly?”
“Haven’t we proven we’re old enough for this sort of thing?” Applebloom kicked the doorframe.
“Seriously!” Scootaloo cried, “What could be so bad…?”
“No!” The Royal Canterlot Voice kicked up a layer of dust, reverberated through the map table, and seemingly every facet of the crystal castle walls began to vibrate with Princess Twilight’s command. The Cutie Mark Crusaders froze in place, and the adult ponies in the room covered their ears as best they could. Even Discord halted in his jeering, eyes wincing against the force projected.
Twilight Sparkle, human high school student, looked up to see her Princess counterpart, standing up in her throne with wings fully outstretched. The magically empowered shout only enhanced the sudden vision she perceived as she gazed up at this… this Royalty. For the first time, Twilight fully understood how large the gape truly was between herself and the Princess. Here stood a Goddess, full of righteous anger and justified sovereign might.
Sunset, Trixie, and even Starlight were having the same sudden, vertiginous realization of what Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Equestria, truly was.
The Princess’s voice returned to normal, but her tone was clearly now that of a ruler who expected to be obeyed. “Please, wait in the hallway. I will explain when we are finished.” All three fillies immediately turned and fled from the room.
There were no protests. The mares, Draconequus, and dog were left in a stunned silence. Moments later, a whirl of magical green dragon flame and ash drifted into the room and hovered over the map table. Spike’s signature mailing system dropped a tome from the air, and it struck the table with a booming thud, as loud as if a timberwolf had crashed down upon it. The book had to be as thick as Twilight’s head was tall!
Spike followed through the door moments later, closing the way behind him as he entered. “Sorry, but I am not carrying that thing.”
Princess Twilight smiled, briefly. Then she turned her magic upon the book.
“Novis Catalogus,” she intoned, casting the spell.
The tome snapped open, its bindings undone. Each page leapt from the book, and flashed with magical light. With each flash, a page became a folder, and each folder was fit to burst, held together with twine and string. The folders kept jumping from the book, landing upon the map table, and slowly covering up its entire face. Within moments, no part of the table was visible, and no folder was in a stack less than four high.
Trixie’s jaw nearly hit the floor. “Sparkle? What is all this?”
Starlight answered for her, “Everything we found on Midnight Sparkle.”
“What!?” Twilight snapped, glasses nearly thrown entirely from her face. “How is that possible!?”
Sunset shook her head and looked to the Princess for answers. “Twilight, what sort of research did you do? I only talked about Midnight with you after the Friendship Games!”
The Princess Twilight fixed her guests with a stare, then said slowly, “First, remember that I said the Cutie Map could protect one from the effects of time magic?”
Everypony nodded, so she continued, “Well, Starlight and I have been experimenting with the map, and we’ve found that, with the proper spells, we can use it to peer into other timelines and universes, to see what could have been, had a few things gone differently.
“You see,” Princess Twilight’s voice took on a lecturing tone, like a teacher delivering a grim lesson of history, or a particularly odious bit of homework in the last five minutes before the weekend. “There are an infinite number of worlds in the vastness of existence. If our world, or mirrored worlds, were but a single leaf on a tree, then every other leaf near us would be a world more similar to ours…”
“Oh,” Twilight perked her ears up, “Multiverse theory.”
The Princess stopped midsentence; mouth left agape. “What?”
“Multiverse theory,” Twilight said, helpfully, “The idea that there are an infinite number of worlds, or universes, each similar to each other, but more or less different depending on specific events that did or did not happen in each universe. Any one difference could be as minor as me picking cereal over toast for breakfast, or as huge as an entirely different species rising to prominence instead of humans… or ponies, as the case may be.”
“There’s a word for that!?” the Princess failed to even pretend to hide her shock. Trixie snickered in her chair, only to get an elbowing from Starlight.
“Yeah Twi,” Sunset laughed, “Books, movies, even comic books in our world have been playing around with the concept for years.”
“Can confirm,” both Spikes snorted in perfect stereo.
The Princess now hid her embarrassment with a cough and a return to her lecture. “Well, yes, um… alright. So, I’ll skip that part.”
She indicated the folders on the table with a wave of her wing. “After hearing about Midnight Sparkle, I was curious. Some of her behaviors and method of creation were similar to events in our world, such as Nightmare Moon, or Daybreaker.”
Trixie raised an eyebrow, “Who?”
“Nevermind,” Princess Twilight said, not even looking at her one-time rival, “The point is that Starlight and I asked the map to find worlds where… where Midnight Sparkle came to exist.”
“After realizing what ‘infinite’ truly meant,” Starlight added with a hollow chuckle, “we narrowed that down, like a case study, to around five-hundred worlds where she appeared.”
Twilight and Sunset’s eyes were wide in shock. “Five…?” Twilight asked.
“Hundred…?” Sunset finished.
The Princess nodded. “Of course, only three-hundred-and-twenty-one of those universes were close enough to our own baseline to use for comparison.”
As she spoke, folders began to vanish from the table with audible pops like a teleportation spell. With every folder gone, the original book appeared to regain a page. As the Princess noted the three-hundred odd universes out of the original five-hundred, a huge number of folders vanished at once.
“Of the three-hundred-and-twenty-one worlds we looked into, few had any major differences from ours. In some, you,” she pointed a hoof at Twilight, “chose a different pair of shoes to wear to the Friendship Games. In others, you never adopted Spike.”
Both dragons bore a worried expression at this.
“But out of all these worlds…” Princess Twilight took a deep breath, “In two-hundred-and-eighty-nine realities, Midnight Sparkle was born.”
The folders vanished at a slower rate, now beginning to reveal the face of the table once more. The table face beneath them shone with an inner light that began to shape itself. Twilight and Sunset recognized the white sphere as more and more folders vanished though. Both had seen it during the Friendship Games, though from decidedly different perspectives.
Beneath the piles of folders, the white sphere of light resolved itself into the… human form of a young woman who bore a striking resemblance to Twilight Sparkle. Her skin was darker, and her hair wild in style and with additional pink highlights. Not to mention the risqué outfit, the electric blue flames which formed a horn and glasses upon her face, nor the black wings which held her aloft, soaring over the grounds of Canterlot High School.
Midnight Sparkle, as she was that first night at the Friendship Games.
“And…” the Princess faltered, “… and in all but ten of those realities…”
The Cutie Mark Crusaders waited near, but not too near, the doors to the throne room. They hated waiting. It was boring, and it wasn’t something that Crusaders or any pony worth their salt would put up with, especially when there was a mystery or an adventure to solve or to go on.
But whenever one of them started thinking about sneaking back, that fresh terror of an enraged Twilight Sparkle gave them pause.
“This is silly,” Applebloom pouted, “Twilight’s still our friend! I mean… I guess she could be stressed about bein’ a real, ruling princess, but…”
Sweetie Belle scoffed, “Applebloom, she just yelled at us! And all we were doing was trying to help.”
“Uh, how were we helpin’?” the little farmpony tilted her head quizzically to one side.
“Moral support,” Sweetie replied, head held high, just like Rarity showed her, “That other Twilight clearly needed someponies to stand by her side, since she used to be a bad pony... or, um…”
“Person?” Applebloom offered.
“That’s not a word,” said Sweetie, certain that she was right.
Scootaloo, silent up until this point, piped up. “Guys? I think… I think the Princess might have been right.”
That certainly caught the other fillies off guard.
“How can you say that?” Applebloom’s face was the very picture of worry for her friend’s mental stability.
Sweetie concurred, her voice cracking as she said, “Where’s your Crusader spirit?”
Scootaloo didn’t look to her friends. She instead turned her own, worried expression towards the doors. “I’ve… I’ve heard a lot of bad news before,” her wings experimentally buzzed once, drawing the other Crusaders’ attention, “and… I guess I can tell when adults are being weird because they’re weird… and when they’re actually scared of something.”
She met her friends’ eyes again. “I think this is one of those other times. Twilight…”
She didn’t get a chance to voice her thoughts further. The doors swung open, slowly, with a deep groan.
The first to leave the room were the two mares from that other world, Sunset Shimmer and the other, still-a-unicorn Twilight Sparkle. Sunset walked with one foreleg held over Twilight’s withers in a tight walking-hug. She looked worried, afraid her friend would shatter like glass if left alone. And if Scootaloo could read faces, and she reckoned she could, she could tell this Twilight had been crying, heavily. Sunset was in a similar way… but it was Twilight having the worst of it.
Scootaloo had seen her parents cry like that once, when the doctors who looked at her had to tell them…
Awesome ponies don’t think about that stuff, she reminded herself. Dash would be upset to know Scoot had let it bother her again. Still, the Crusaders all collectively wished they could do something for the poor, crying mare. They just didn’t want their Twilight to think they’d run off yet.
Both Spikes followed, but neither would even look at the fillies. How bad was the news?
They could hear two ponies talking softly just within the doorway, but on the other side of the doors themselves. One sounded like Starlight, their sometimes-friend-sometimes-teacher, while the other sounded like Trixie, the crazy one.
“Look,” Trixie was saying, low and quiet, “I can put off dealing with the other me for a day. The mirror isn’t going anywhere. If you want, Trixie can take you down to the lake and we can fly kites?”
Starlight’s voice was… old. Not like she’d aged or that she herself was any older than one of their sisters, but even the Crusaders could feel the unbelievable stress and sorrow in her voice. It was a voice that belonged to someone with far too much sadness in her heart from living too long.
“That’s okay Trixie,” she said, nearly whispering, “I need some time.”
The Crusaders could hear the sweep of Trixie’s cape, and with a quick peek, Sweetie could see the two mares hugging one another tightly.
Trixie would probably have kept hugging had Starlight not clearly wanted to leave and seek out a bed to collapse onto. The Great and Powerful Trixie lowered her head as she made her way to her own bed, a hammock she’d set up in one of the guest rooms. You could take the pony out of the show, but not the show out of the pony, it seemed.
Finally, the Princess herself came out to see the Crusaders. She hadn’t gotten more than a few steps from the door before she felt three filly bodies press into her front and sides. Looking down, Princess Twilight felt the tiny hooves and forelegs grip her tightly in the desperate hugs of three fillies who didn’t understand what was wrong, but knew they wanted to help anyway.
She didn’t need to say anything, not yet. She wrapped her little ponies in her wings, and held them close while she wiped their tears, and reminded herself that these three were amongst the bravest, most loyal, and most caring friends and ponies she’d ever known. And she would remind them of that fact once she came up with the words.
Discord, Lord of Chaos, Mayor of Madness, Baron of Bonkers, and DDFBFF (Discord Draconequus Fluttershy’s Best Friend Forever) stood alone in the throne room, staring at the Cutie Map. It still displayed the sight that had driven all the others from the room.
What a piece of work, he thought. She floated there, in space, surrounded by the shattered remnants of two worlds, a cracked moon, and a sun she’d turned blue and crackling. She was cackling, completely hysterical with laughter, holding what looked like the head of a statue.
A statue that used to be Sunset Shimmer…
His arms were crossed behind his back as he contemplated the image. He knew evil. He was intimately familiar with the dark thrill that came from being the Bad Guy. But this wasn’t the sort of villainy he’d ever approved of. This was just mindless destruction. Not fun at all!
But… had he been fun? Discord didn’t like to think back on his bad old ways, but he couldn’t help but do so once he saw Bacon-hair and Little Twi break down at the sight of what could have been.
“Oh Cordy,” he sighed, “Should have kept your big mouth shut. If you hadn’t egged her on, maybe this would have been a happier night.”
A lightbulb popped into existence just above his head. He glanced up at the dark bulb, but it did not turn on. Looking about, he didn’t see anyone, so he raised a claw and tapped it a few times. And as its light engaged and shined down on the Draconequus, he got an idea!
Of course! What better way to lighten his pals’ moods than with a joke?
He’d been planning his little prank since Shimmy had shown up with that… spell scroll. He reached into a pocket he only just now decided he possessed, and brought out a small, worn piece of paper. It was nearly identical to the Reformed Villains Club card he’d jokingly offered Sunset earlier, and it had nine holes punched into it. Out of ten.
“Time for a bit of mischief,” he smiled, “and you’ll thank me for it, too!”