Twilight actually felt much better than she expected when she finally came to. After a spell that intense, with so much of her magic being used, she expected to be a weak little husk of a pony, or at the very least for her horn to hurt. Instead she was… mostly fine. Her head ached in time with her pulse, and her vision was swimming with blobs of color, but other than that she felt almost better than she had before speaking with Celestia. At least, this was certainly no worse than a couple of magical backlashes she had back in school.
Twilight shook her head to clear it, turning the blobs of color in front of her into a sickening smear of brown. After a few blinks, it became most of an orange, as Applejack’s swirly face echoed somewhere in front of her. Then other dots behind her: blue, pink, white, yellow.
Oh, thank Celestia.
“Oh girls, I’m glad you’re all here! After what happened with the spell I wasn’t sure if you all would make it,” she said. She rubbed furiously at her eyes. “And as for your question, Applejack, I’m afraid it’s kind of complicated. You see, after the spell activated and the Elements hit me I--”
After a good few seconds of scrubbing, Twilight opened her eyes properly. She was met with almost nothing but grass. Stretching near endlessly in every direction was a flat plane of soil and emerald grass that looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in eons. No trampled marks from hoofsteps or carts, no taming of weeds, and not even the evenly-patterned patches that came with earth pony magic. The clouds above were churning and angry. A wild land, almost like the Everfree if not as spooky. And immediately around her, her five friends were gathering themselves up from the grass below with tiny groans of pain. None of them seemed injured, thank goodness, but--
They were staring at her. It was as if she had grown a second head or something.
Twilight gave a snort and followed their gazes to her back. What was it? Was something behind her? Was some horrifying snake-creature crawling up her or--
Oh.
On her sides, where once was only purple fur, now sat two wings. They were tiny and frail, curled up and tucked delicately to her coat like the wings of a fledgeling bird. The only time Twilight had ever seen such small wings on a pony was with Bulk Biceps; slightly larger than Scootaloo’s, looking stable enough that they should in theory be able to lift her from the ground, but so tiny all the same. Her feathers caught the faint light above and shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow, as the new pegasus magic inside every primary, every bit of fluff, breathed for the first time.
Cautiously, Twilight rolled her shoulders, felt the shifting of her withers against two new knots - no, muscles and bone - against her sides. Her wings -- wings!!! -- shifted. When she flexed the muscles there, felt them fluidly move like they were always a part of her and not magically duct-taped on a few seconds ago, her wings flapped.
And- yes, with a poke of her hoof and sigh of relief, Twilight realized she did still have her horn. She was an alicorn now.
Fighting off the impending freakout was incredibly, incredibly difficult. Twilight scooped up all of her anxious squealing and her endless questions, and pushed them all down. She did her breathing exercises and then she moved on. She could deal with this later. Right now, she had work to do.
She turned to her friends and tried not to grimace as they all bowed to her, their snouts grazing the dirt. With a flick of her horn, she gently but firmly dragged them all back to a standing position.
“Please, girls. I may have wings now, but that doesn’t make me a Princess. In fact I’m not sure what it means for me at all right now,” she said, and proudly her voice only cracked a tiny bit, “but I do know that I need all of your help to save Equestria right now.”
Immediately, the five of them stiffened (well, except for Pinkie. She did pause in her bouncing for a moment, though). Rainbow Dash stopped from where she was brushing off her feathers and snorted.
“Yeah,” she laughed. “After everything earlier, and then the Elements activating for some reason, we all kinda figured something was up. Where the hay did you go?”
Fluttershy stepped up beside her and let out a little whine. Her eyelashes were wet. “Oh, yes, where did you go, Twilight? After the b-beams shot out we were so worried that something bad had happened, or you were sent off all on your own, and all because of us. What’s going on?”
Twilight reached out and brushed Fluttershy’s mane immediately, and pointedly ignored how her own wing came up to Fluttershy’s without her even meaning to move it. After everything had happened, Twilight almost forgot the thing that started this whole mess. That spell, what she had done to her friends…
Twilight sighed and pressed harder into Fluttershy’s hug. “Well, that’s a long story. Most importantly, I need to know: what do you girls all remember from this morning?”
Pinkie Pie lifted her face up from the ground with a few sprigs of wild grass still stuck in her teeth, and giggled. “Oh, well I think that maybe I slept in super late on accident again, because all I can remember is this really silly dream I had!” she laughed, but after a second it drooped into something softer. “Well actually, it wasn’t super silly at first. At first I was working on Applejack’s orchard for some reason, and I had her Cutie Mark, but I sort of hated working there. I mean, no offense AJ, but I left my old farm for a reason. All work and no play makes for a dull Pinkie Pie, and plus I kept messing things up. I felt like I did back as a filly, so sad and bored all the time… but then you guys showed up and made it better again, so it was okay!”
Applejack hummed at that. Her hoof traveled back to her own flank, her Cutie Mark, and she stared hard at it with blank eyes.
“I don’t know, Pinkie,” she whinnied. “I’m thinkin’ that that wasn’t any dream, or at least if it was then it was a real detailed one. I can remember it so well; I was workin’ in Rarity’s shop with her Cutie Mark, ‘cept I couldn’t ever make anything half decent. I was even startin’ to stress that I’d have to close down the shop, sell it, and move back on home since sales were so low… I…”
Applejack drifted off for a second, her eyes glazing over. Twilight bit her lip, and thought of just what she had done to her friends without meaning to: having your entire life and memories seemingly lost or switched around, listlessly wandering and trying to do your best to no avail despite your destiny telling you that this was what was right? Twilight shivered. If she hadn’t found a way to reverse it…
Twilight cleared her head with a breath.
“You’re right, Applejack. That wasn’t a dream.”
Twilight steeled herself. Around her, her friends gathered single-file and pricked their ears.
“Last night, Celestia sent me a book which contained an unfinished spell by Starswirl the Bearded. I was so excited at the prospect of finishing one of his works on my own, I… didn’t think. I attempted the spell knowing that it was incomplete, just as a test, but didn’t put up any protections or think of the consequences. I thought that, at the very worst, it might just literally blow up in my face. The next morning though, I had seen what I’d done to you all. I don’t know the specifics, exactly, but I somehow altered your very destinies in a way I’d never thought possible before, and locked you into lives you were never meant to live. I…”
Her throat burned. She remembered seeing Applejack, of all ponies, with tears of frustration and desperation in her eyes. Pinkie Pie with a flat mane angrily trying to fix that watershoot over and over. Rainbow Dash nearly got eaten!
Fluttershy pulled her into another hug, and Applejack patted her cheek.
“Oh, it’s quite alright, darling,” Rarity tutted, with a nuzzle. “We know you didn’t mean it, and everything’s… well... “ she blanched, and looked around at the sea of grass surrounding them, “I can’t say it’s fine because honestly I have no idea what’s happening, but! That’s why we’re here, is it not?”
Twilight nodded. She swallowed around the knot in her throat and kept going, “Yes. After I completed the spell with the help of all of you, the effects were reversed, and the Elements hit me with a modified teleportation spell that sent me to… ah-”
Twilight tapped a hoof to her chin. What exactly was that place? Another realm altogether, or perhaps a pocket dimension like the one Discord lived in? Hopefully once this was all over she'd be able to study it more with Celestia’s guidance.
“Well, I don’t really know where I went, to be honest. It’s a sort of… cosmic library, that records events in the lives of the Element Bearers. Celestia was there, but she was injured, and in the little time we had she explained that there’s a darkness that’s crawling over Equestria, and the only way to stop it was to teleport us to a sacred place outside Equestria and for me to… raise the sun and moon, somehow… Unfortunately I don’t have all the details, but Celestia assured me that I can learn more by going back to that Library.”
Her friends were mostly blank-faced after that, but there was a layer of determination burning behind Rainbow Dash. Or at least she was grinning wildly like that because the thought of her nerdy friend raising the celestial bodies was simultaneously hilarious and awesome.
“Well alright, no biggie,” Rainbow said, stretching her wings. “We’ve been through way worse than that. Let’s get to it! So where is that ‘sacred spot’ you were talking about, anyway, because this place is kind of, uh…”
Fluttershy said “desolate” the same time Rarity said “dirty”. Twilight had to admit they were both right, really.
“Well, there was supposed to be some dais or pedestal to stand on. I thought the spell would immediately take us there, but it might have been intended to send us to a safe location nearby instead. And because Celestia was hurt when attempting the spell, there’s no telling what could have happened.”
“Well,” Applejack snorted, “that’s sure helpful.”
Rarity gave her a little flick with her tail, then turned to Twilight. “Come now, Applejack, we’re supposed to be helping. So, the Princess did give you access to that, erm, Library of yours, so surely even if we’re off the path a bit you should be able to guide us with that. Right?”
“In theory, yes. The only problem is that I have to teleport to and from there by myself, which would leave you all… well, right now, stuck out in the middle of a field somewhere.”
“And look at the clouds,” Fluttershy muttered. “It could start storming any time.”
Twilight looked up. Above, a blanket of wild, jagged clouds rolled over a section of the skyline, casting deep shadow over everything. It was pretty dark where they were standing with the sun blocked, and Twilight could begin to feel the cool touch of dew and sweat start to run down her neck. Looking ahead, even the land that was bathed in sunlight was pale; it must be almost time for the sunset, she wagered. So if she just left her friends out here in the cold and dark… Not to mention that meant she would be teleporting back in the middle of what could be a real pourdown...
“Hey, well, I could give the clouds a try,” Rainbow shrugged, “I mean, the wild ones are pretty nasty to wrangle, but I could at least give us a patch of sun for a few minutes. Or, uh, look for that ‘dais’ thing you were talking about.”
Twilight almost slapped herself, she was so relieved. She couldn’t believe she had forgotten Rainbow Dash could fly up and have a look. Or, she supposed she could herself now that--
Nope. Not thinking about the wings. Focus.
“Okay, but be careful up there,” Twilight said.
“Yup, and if nothing else, just try to find us a place to lay low for a while and we can work from there. Don’t mess around with none of that wild lightning,” AJ dropped in. Slowly, she smirked, “after all, wouldn’t want to hear you whining about your tailfeathers gettin’ burnt up by some little cloud.”
Rainbow barked a laugh and prepped herself. She spread out her legs and braced them, her muscles rippling up into her flared feathers. “Yeah, yeah, no problem. I’ll have this done in ten, nine--”
And then Rainbow Dash exploded.
At least, for one dizzying, terrifying moment, that’s what Twilight Sparkle truly believed. One second she was watching her friends casually lift off as she had a million times before, and the next the world was a cacophony of noise and color. A concussive blast of noise rang in Twilight’s ears, and then she was bowled over as a wave of sickening energy rolled over her in a flash - a flash of red, yellow, green, of every color of the rainbow. The taste of ozone lay heavy on her tongue, and the nostalgic scent that she associated with the Cloudsdale weather factory burned her nostrils and filled her lungs. Grass poured into her mouth as she was tossed a few feet away into the dirt, and her horn pounded with the weight of all the magical energy being poured out around her.
Dizzily, with her stomach roiling, Twilight sat up and managed to croak out, “What in Equestria was that?”
And Rainbow Dash was gone! Where she had been standing, just feet away, now sat a dusty crater with blades of grass still raining down into the epicenter from above. It was like a meteorite had struck the earth right where she had been moments before.
Twilight felt the terror, the confusion, the grief, welling up in her, but before she could scream she heard Rainbow Dash yell instead. And it sounded… happy?
Feeling numb and lost, Twilight lifted her head up to the sky in a desperate search for that noise. And there was Rainbow. In the air. High up in the air. So very, very high. It-- that had to have broken the speed record for takeoff surely, but-- but how, she was only doing a casual takeoff, not trying to, to do a--
“W-was,” Fluttershy wavered. Twilight looked over and saw her sitting wide-eyed, spitting up dirt and trying to flatten her mane that had been blasted back. “Was that a Sonic Rainboom? From the ground?! But she-” Fluttershy’s voice hitched, and a giddy little smile bordering on manic was worming up her face. “There was no lead up. No acceleration! She just! Just!”
“Yeah,” Twilight whispered. She couldn’t think straight already and these ponies were driving her even more insane.
Above, while her friends tried to recover from that, Rainbow Dash whooped and hollered like never before. Twilight watched with glassy eyes. She almost expected some sort of celebratory stunt, or for her to set off a chain of Sonic Rainbooms or who knows what else, just to show that she could. But instead Rainbow floated prone in that yawning emptiness where she'd busted a hole in the angry clouds above. She was still and wavering, just gently floating down while screaming in excitement.
Twilight looked away from her for a moment, to the moon. She could see it through that crater of clouds.
Or-- no. Twilight’s breath hitched and she choked back a wad of saliva and grass. Her head swam. That wasn’t the moon.
Rainbow Dash was silhouetted against the sun, and the moon sat right beside it. But they were both so very pale.
The sun was dim and flaring at the edges, so tiny compared to what Twilight was used to. Its wan light filtering out over the field was flickering and uneven, and such a cold shade of off-white. The moon was just as large as the shrunken sun now, but dim. It barely reflected anything, and it was almost lost in the sea of the orange sky. It was cracked down the middle. Shards of space rock broke off of it into the twilight, surrounding the moon in a corona of its own broken parts.
Before Twilight could faint at the sight, the wild clouds had already rolled over the hole Rainbow busted through. Twilight thought that was strange even for clouds filled with black magic like those over the Everfree, but she couldn’t think too clearly about that right now.
Why were both the sun and moon in the sky? Wasn’t Twilight supposed to raise them herself? And what happened to them? Is this was happened when an alicorn… were Celestia and Luna both--
As soon as Rainbow Dash touched down, she vomited. Then she turned back to Twilight with a drunken-looking smile on her face, with her whole body wobbling.
“That. Was. Awesome,” she wheezed. Her voice was hoarse from the screaming. “And uh, I guess you saw the sun and moon, so that’s a thing. Anyway, I didn’t see any fancy pedestal or anything but there’s a, um… forest nearby. We could probably hunker down in a cave or something in there?”
Nopony said anything for a long time. Perhaps it was because they thought Twilight might pass out if they did. Eventually, Twilight nodded, and numbly everypony got to their hooves and, as a shaky unit, turned to the south-east where Rainbow Dash pointed a hoof to.
Well, everypony but Pinkie. She bounced up and down near Rainbow dash in a babbling frenzy, literally shaking with excitement as she spoke at the speed of sound. Not only had Rainbow performed the legendary Sonic Rainboom, but she had done it in a way nopony had ever even attempted before! Well, technically nopony except Rainbow had done a Rainboom at all to begin with, but that didn’t squash Pinkie’s optimism, and if anything made her even more extra excited. She gave Rainbow a crushing hug, which the pegasus accepted with a grumble, and then she suddenly chirped,
“Hey Twi, look! These neat little flowers are popping up everytime I step! Wowie, look, that’s a pink one!”
Twilight’s eye twitched. There were, indeed, flowers and other assorted flora sprouting at Pinkie’s hooves with every step, bounce and wiggle. The flowers perked up and drifted happily in the whipping breeze, already fully grown and glittering with neon colors. Twilight identified one of them as a variety of begonia. On a whim, Twilight snapped her head around and saw that beneath Applejack's horseshoes rested a tiny baby sapling, most likely that of an apple tree.
Nearby, Fluttershy squeaked in panic and firmly tucked her wings to her sides. After all, for all anypony knew, even she could be blasting off and doing Sonic Rainbooms any minute.
Twilight sucked in a ragged breath, as deeply and calmly as she could under the circumstances.
Oh, she really wasn’t prepared for this.
The walk to the forest, while uneventful, at least helped Twilight to clear her mind a bit. Her brain was still itching with half-formed theories and millions of questions, but now she was able to turn to meditation to keep herself calm. As her friends chatted idly and Rainbow Dash boasted about her new-found talent to do Rainbooms whenever she wanted, they mostly left her alone, and she was free to turn to Celestia and Zecora’s old advice. She let their voices, calm and familiar, relax and ground her, with the babble turning to white noise while their steady hoofbeats kept time with her heart. Then it was a matter of breathing, sensing her own body, and gently letting her magic flow through her in gentle waves. Like the ocean lazily lapping against the shore.
There definitely was more magic within her - Twilight could feel it pressing against her chest and horn now that she focused in on herself. She centered in on that magic, especially on the new pegasus and earth pony magic she felt welling up, and tried to adjust to the new “normal” that was her own body. Hopefully, this form of concentration would make it so when she did try to go back to the Cosmic Library she would actually teleport there, instead of her turning into a raging ball of untamed magic like the day she got her Cutie Mark.
Hopefully.
“How about this, then?” Applejack asked, as she flung aside a clump of vines.
The forest, though near pitch-dark and clogged with thorny foliage, seemed to be rather peaceful. Unlike the Everfree, where dark magic hung heavy in the air and a pony’s coat instinctively stood on end, this was much more like Whitetail Wood. A calm, silent atmosphere with only the occasional hoot of an owl, and no sign of dangerous wildlife that Fluttershy wouldn’t be able to talk down. Shortly after tearing their way through the brush, Applejack and Rainbow managed to find what looked like a decent spot for setting up shelter. The canopy above was still thick and left the area in murky darkness, but the trees themselves were separated enough within the clearing so that, if one of them were to be struck by lightning and fall, they should be safe. At the very least they should have time to move out of the way or put up a shield.
“Erm,” Rarity muttered, swiping ahoof at her dirty fetlocks, “Well of course I would like something a bit more… clean. But if this is our best option, then I suppose I’ll have to make do.”
With that, Rarity turned to the nearest tree, one littered with gnarled and knotting branches that swung in the breeze. She lit her horn then - with a start, as she probably remembered Rainbow’s incident - she gently, gently grabbed hold of the end of a branch. It came free with a snap of the weakened bark, and shakily bobbed to the center of the clearing.
“Uh, no offense, Rarity, but if it takes you that much time to get one good stick down then we may be here all night,” Rainbow scoffed.
AJ rolled her eyes. “Yep, and that’s before you go tryin’ to turn our one-day shelter into a palace.”
“Yes, well,” Rarity huffed, “you know normally I’d be much more adept at moving multiple things at once. It’s only…” She rubbed her horn with a wince. “It feels like so much more now. I’d hate to accidentally send a whole tree flying to the moon.”
Twilight stepped forward as she left her reverie, almost clopping her hooves as she realized this was something she actually knew the answer to. And it might even lead to her learning a bit about her and her friends’ new magical surges!
“Oh, well, ever since a filly I’ve had to do magical control exercises to prevent more outbursts. Just recently I talked to Zecora about different meditation techniques to try. If you want, when I get back from the Cosmic Library I could try to help?”
“I would appreciate it, dear. Oh, and that reminds me!”
Rarity trotted around Twilight and gave a gentle shove, guiding her towards where the branch was resting. With a flicker from Rarity’s horn, Twilight’s legs buckled and sent her to her haunches.
“You need to get to that Library of your’s, correct? You go on then, and we’ll finish up right here for whenever you’re done.”
Fluttershy stepped forward with a nod. “That’s right, Twilight, you won’t need to worry about us. Living by the Everfree, I’ve learned all kinds of neat tricks for this sort of thing, and you know Rarity is wonderful at making things cozy.”
Twilight nodded. All around her, her friends were already jumping into action. With Pinkie it was literal, as she jumped up and snapped larger sticks to throw to the pile, while Applejack bucked some larger leaves from the trees. Rainbow set to using her Cloud Scout’s tricks to make the base of their shelter, and Twilight could imagine Rarity diligently, twist by twist, knotting together beautiful cordage with her bare hooves to hold it all together as soon as Twilight blinked off. Or Fluttershy, collecting pebbles and clearing bushy foliage to maintain a safe fire pit.
For a second, Twilight couldn’t help but feel warm. Even though things were confusing, her friends were already working so hard to help her through this. Now that she could go to the Cosmic Library to study, surely all of this would click together and they would save Equestria with ease.
“Thank you, girls, “ she whispered. “Now, I don’t have a surefire way to tell the time while I’m in there, and to be honest with you there may be some sort of time dilation I haven’t accounted for. But I’ll try to come back with any news I’ve found in around an hour, if I can.”
Rarity noddeed, though her eyes were unfocused and she was already drifting some vines and ivy to her muzzle. “Yes, of course. We’ll be here when you get back.”
The others drifted off, milling about and already prepping the base of their structure around her. Twilight breathed deep, through her nose, and steadied her body fully to the grass below. She licked her dry lips. She focused every thought, every ounce of her consciousness, on the image of the astral plane, of the screens floating past, of the vast starscape; she shuddered as an unexpected tidal wave of energy blasted against the base of her horn as she called it forth, before she had to force the majority of it back with another deep breath. Pull it back, as the moon to the tides, just as Zecora taught her. Then she readied the spell, and teleported.
The familiar pop, and then Twilight’s silent hooves settled to the magical floor. Her mane whipped endlessly, and her feathers rose and fluffed of their own accord with that buzz of magic which filled this entire realm. Their tips gleamed with the lights of those distant stars as her hooves and horn vibrated, and Twilight took a moment to think about how she must look like a true alicorn now, with her mane flowing ethereally like Celestia’s and her new wings splaying.
Twilight narrowed her eyes. Alright then. Time for answers. So first things first: compartmentalization.
She sorted through her thoughts to think of every pressing question she had buzzing around in her head. What happened to Celestia during the spell? Why was she an alicorn, and why the magical surge in her friends as well? Why were they sent to what seemed to be an incorrect location?
Twilight sighed and jotted them down on a mental checklist, suddenly craving a scroll or for Spike to be by her side. She had to close her eyes as the yawning emptiness, sparkling on for eternity, only made her head spin more, then raised her hoof to mimic a quill. It might look silly to check invisible boxes like this, but it worked - she knew firsthoof from back when Spike was too young to take proper notes and she had used all of her allowance on ink she’d already used up.
After a bit of thinking, she decided it would be wisest to find out where exactly the dais she was supposed to be raising the sun and moon upon was located. Everything else could come in time with the next step being to study how Celestia herself had first risen the sun, so she could visually deconstruct the spell and learn it for herself in time. Everything else could then, hopefully, be told to her by Celestia herself assuming that raising the celestial bodies was all she had to do to banish the dark magic still crawling over Equestria. If it were more complicated, then the further steps could be learned once she’d gotten the main task finished with.
Twilight clicked her tongue, finished her invisible plan-sheet, and decided it was time to get started.
Oh! But one thing first.
Twilight lit her horn with a tiny spark and, with a tightly-controlled burn of magic, bloomed a shining orb of light at its tip. If not for the magenta aura of her magic, it could almost be mistaken for another of those faraway starbursts. Then it was as easy as getting the count right in her head, gently folding a modifier into the lattices of the spell matrix, detaching the light from her head to float on its own before crafting an invisible tether to her horn’s base and- aha!
An orb of light now wavered beside her, flickering slightly at every approximate minute and set to extinguish on its own in approximately one hour.
It was a simple spell, but Twilight couldn’t help but feel a bit giddy - it hadn’t even left a dent in her new massive magical reserves, and her horn hurt no worse despite the strain it had gone through earlier!
After letting herself do a little skip in place, Twilight brought a hoof to her chest to balance herself, and settled down to the task of studying.
With just as much ease as she remembered from last time, like opening a book, the screens came filing in as soon as Twilight called for them. With a twist of her horn those shimmering cards filed to her front in a near-endless strand, filling her vision with light and casting the field below in the colors of Celestia’s mane. Twilight flicked to the most recent recording, and watched as the screens floated silently past towards the present - Twilight thought that, with no real “table of contents” and all of the events coalescing only recently, it would be fastest to go in reverse chronological order. Finally, the screens, which had blurred into a smear of white as they accelerated impossibly faster and faster, settled to their destination. Immediately the screen buzzed to life and started over from the beginning of the recording and--
Celestia let out a broken, wailing scream that tore into Twilight’s eardrums. She watched as the rot enveloping Celestia’s side pulsed and wormed its way further up her body, a series of black veins snaking up her body with sickening pulses. Celestia fell to her knees with another shriek. Tears beaded up from her eyes before floating up into the nothingness, while that darkness kept choking away at the white of her coat. Celestia kept hold tight on the flare erupting on her horn, but her whole body shivered and twitched; as if she were seizing, she rolled and flailed with wild abandon, as the spell at her horn flickered but held true. The blackness, the cold rot, kept creeping up her body with no remorse. Celestia’s eyes rolled back and--
The screen went black. It stopped right there.
Twilight didn’t know when exactly she collapsed, but when she got back on shaky hooves, her light was still flickering and the memory had mercifully stopped repeating. Somehow, she hadn’t retched all over herself.
Twilight sobbed into her hoof. She was shaking. She just couldn’t help it.
Celestia. She- she couldn’t be gone, could she? Just because the entity recording had stopped it at that moment didn’t mean that she was dead. She could be fine. Everything was fine and Celestia definitely wasn't dead and--
And there was a black magic sweeping across Twilight’s entire home country, apparently reducing the population to agonized, screaming spasms before swallowing them whole or… something else far worse. Who else had been hurt like this. The entire of Canterlot for sure. Her parents. Her old friends from Celestia’s School. And if it had traveled further - Spike? Everypony?!
Twilight choked and gasped at the heat in her throat. Her tears didn’t even give her the satisfaction of rolling down her cheeks. Instead, they floated off before dissipating into nothing. No. It couldn’t -- she couldn’t let this happen. Surely if she restored the sun and moon then everything would go back to normal. It had to. She had to.
It took her ten tries to get Cadance’s breathing exercise correct. She kept hitching at the agony twisting in her chest, kept seeing horrid flashes of Celestia moaning in agony and collapsing.
It all kept echoing in her head, ghostly afterimages poking at her heart through the fog, but she swallowed it down.
Like turning a page. It didn’t matter that the memory in front of her was frozen on an image of Celestia sobbing and choking. It was easy. Turn the page.
She did. The memories listlessly scrolled away. Eventually noise and color once again erupted as Celestia hugged a tiny Luna to her front, as rose-petals rained in Ponyville and Twilight’s brand new friends huddled in close.
It all echoed dully against the forcefield below, casting Twilight’s mane in the color of her friends and washing over her with the sounds of their voices. She watched that screen, over and over again, until she felt calm enough to search further into Celestia’s past.
Twilight sighed. She rubbed her aching, swollen eyes with her foreleg, gave a flick of her tail, and then radiated out the thought of Celestia raising the sun, and of the mission she was given.
The memory that came next seemed less traumatic, at least, if the first image of a plain white terrain was anything to go by. Twilight gave an anxious snort, and settled to her haunches to watch.
Immediately, Twilight was almost shocked back up to her hooves. Ahead, both Celestia and Luna stood in a gaggle of other ponies Twilight had never seen before, but they were, well - tiny! Around the same height and build as Twilight, at first glance. Luna looked as she had after the Nightmare was banished, though lacking regalia and her mane cropped a bit shorter. Celestia was near impossible to recognize, and if not for those same, gentle pink eyes then Twilight would have thought it was another pony altogether. She was downright petite compared to her current stature, with a delicate swirl of pink (and no other colors! Just pink!) coming to a set of blunt bangs at her eyebrows. Both of the sisters’ wings were small as well, not unlike Twilight’s own.
Celestia and Luna nestled close, nuzzling one another. Dark tracks stained the fur under their eyes, and they sniffed as they held each other close. The other ponies did the same, with a pegasus nearby sobbing fully into her hooves.
“I know,” Celestia whispered, in such a young voice, “but we have to keep going. It will all be for nothing if we don’t”
Luna nodded. Around them the other ponies gathered themselves, stood on shaky hooves, and they all turned to the scene behind them.
The land was both deolate and pure. A circular stone dais, decorated with a beautifully complex, twisted rune but marred with hairline fractures which tore across the ley lines, was surrounded by a field of pure whiteness. The landscape looked to have been smothered in plaster- in what used to be a lush, green forest there was now a field of dust, the trees and all plantlife frozen forever in time. Their chalky branches, leaves, petals, stems, all, lay completely still in a pregnant silence. That light, that whiteness, seemed to have taken every drop of life once oozing from this place- at its edge, it was jagged like a scar, the few living blades of grass pulling away and curling into a dead yellow. There were no animals. No birds singing in the pristinely still treetops, no insects crawling among the underbrush. It was devoid of all sapient life, and all life besides was cast as a skin-crawling statue, a still-life painting left unfinished and cast into the real world as-is.
Celestia muttered with her friends, mostly apologies and a sharp promise that they would end this for good, one day, and then she and Luna were stepping to the pedestal. Its eerie red glow was so stark against the pale sea.
The two alicorns looked up, and Twilight saw that both the sun and moon were hanging in the sky. Only, unlike the shattered and dimmed copies that Twilight had seen, they were full and bright. Not as glorious as the ones Twilight remembered from Ponyville afternoons, or her nights stargazing, but full and warm enough to make the snowy-colored landscape below near-blinding as the cold white refracted the light.
Celestia and Luna turned to their friends.
“And you shall be with us? Always?” Luna wavered.
The ponies all drew close in a warm, crushing embrace. An earth pony, his mane swirled up on his head like a spoonful of pudding, gave a laugh that broke in the middle.
“Of course. We promised, remember?”
And then- the sun and moon were absorbed. Numbly, Twilight watched as, without any clear spell being woven together or cast, without an aria being spoken or sung aloud, without either Celestia or Luna’s horns igniting… The heavenly bodies above liquefied and pooled into two great pools of pure energy, before that magic spiraled down from the great beyond and struck Celestia and Luna directly in the hearts. Their eyes blasted open with a flash of rainbow light. The two sisters were engulfed in a hurricane of pure energy, which Twilight felt shake within her bones despite only witnessing second-hoof. They went limp, two marionettes with their strings cut, and rose on that rising column of pulsing magic; they rose up and up, the energy coursing through their veins, visibly burning a hot white beneath their skin. It traveled, up through their hooves, into their barrels and chests, through their wings. The feather tips alit with flaming energy, pouring spotlights of blinding color across the white wasteland below, before the wings themselves began to elongate. Strengthen. Curve to an elegant and royal shape. Then that magic flowed to their horn and - after a blast of energy so bright that it left Twilight’s vision spotting - there was a new sun in the sky. After squinting, Twilight realized there was indeed a new moon as well. They looked just as vibrant as they did from the balcony of Golden Oaks.
The vision ended. When it began to repeat, Twilight raised a hoof and it paused.
Well. Twilight snorted. Her tail and the loose skin above her withers flicked with irritation. That explained nothing! And left her with even more questions! For instance, how were the sun and moon turned into a purely magical form and then absorbed? How did Celestia and Luna do it? Where even were they?! Twilight had seen the pale wasteland, of course, but the memory showed little of the area beyond it. With a start and a rub to her aching temple, Twilight also realized that she was following in Celestia and Luna’s hoofsteps, at least in part. They had just performed the exact task Twilight was instructed to fulfill, and while Twilight had blindly accepted that the moment she saw Celestia and Luna just as young and scared and newly-winged as she was, that didn’t necessarily make much sense at the moment either. Was that mass of black-magic some manifestation of another of Celestia's past foes? Why had it come back now? What did raising the sun and moon have to do with it?
Oh, why hadn’t Celestia told her anything?
Twilight cradled her aching head in her hooves. Beside her, with one final flick of light, her light-orb died and evaporated into the ether. With a sigh and a grumble, Twilight figured she might as well check on the girls and hopefully get a sip of water to soothe her aching everything. Maybe they would have some ideas, or at least be able to scrub that awful image of Celestia out of her head before she had to come back in a while.
One last huff of air, a gathering of energy, and Twilight teleported back to her last on-ground location.
“Girls? I’m back!” Twilight called as soon as the dying light of her teleportation spell waned.
Then she gasped into her hoof as smoke curled into her lungs.
Twilight blinked once, twice, and then realized.
Oh dear Celestia, the forest was on fire.