"Pinkie?"
The party pony looked up from the cupcakes she was frosting. "Oh, hi, Ditzy! What's up?"
"Ever since the wedding, I've been thinking," began the pegasus. "I know the story behind Celestia and Luna, but what about Princess Cadance?"
Pinkie Pie nodded solemnly. Ditzy took a step back in case there was a delayed fuse. "Ah," said the earth mare, "you want to know about the Five Sisters."
"Do I?"
"Yup. It's an old story, almost forgotten. Barely even a myth anymore."
Ditzy smirked. "But you know it."
"Well, duh!" Pinkie exclaimed. "I was there!"
The pegasus nodded. "I thought you would've been. That's why I asked you."
Pinkie set down the icing bag. "You actually came at a really good time, you know."
"Why's that?"
"Oh," the party pony said offhoofedly, "once the new season premieres, it'll pretty much blow this out of the water in terms of canonicity."
Ditzy blinked. "What?"
"I said, 'I'm finished with the last batch of cupcakes and can take a break.' What's wrong, got stamps in your ears?"
"Oh. Okay. That's what I thought you said."
"Good. Come on, we'll talk in my room."
Once the planeswalkers were in private, Pinkie continued. "Anyway, it was just after Celestia and Luna had used the Elements of Harmony on Discord."
Ditzy scrunched her muzzle. "How long after the creation of ponies was that?"
Pinkie bit her lower lip and waved a forehoof uncertainly. "That's not as easy a question as you might think."
"Why not?"
"Well, you have to understand, all the weird stuff when Discord got out again? In terms of power and effort, that was basically him getting the cricks and the watsons and the holmeseses out of his neck. And I don't know if you've ever seen Discord, but trust me, that's a lot of neck."
Ditzy considered this. "So, the cotton candy clouds, the stilt-legged rabbits, the muffins that bit back... That was all a warmup?"
Pinkie nodded. "The Discordant Era was a lot worse."
"Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but why didn't you do anything about it?"
The pink mare shook her head. "I didn't dare. Remember, I was in the middle of one big time loop. Just because Equestria and ponies had been made didn't mean I was in the clear. The longer I stayed here, the more I risked doing something that could invalidate my own existence."
"But you showed up for these Five Sisters," noted Ditzy.
"Yeah, 'cause I got summoned." Pinkie adopted a distant look. "The few times me and Twilight and Dashie and everypony have used the Elements, I can feel something of Faust in there, supporting us, guiding the energies. She must have done the same when Celestia and Luna statutorialized Discord, 'cause afterwards they found the pendant I'd given him when me and Teferi left the plane for the first time."
"And they called you to help rebuild?"
Pinkie shook her head. "Nope. They didn't even know what it was. One of 'em might've poked it or something, but it activated spontaneously."
Ditzy's eyes bounced around their sockets as she tried to make sense of this. She soon gave in. "Wha?"
"Well, like I said," explained Pinkie, "the Discordant Era was a lot worse. Kind of my fault, too. See, I wanted to make entropy prefer the plane to nothingness, and I figured the best way to do that was a sense of humor. Nothing funny about the Blind Eternities."
This got a nod. "No kidding."
"But I didn't think about the repercussions. To be truly, intentionally funny, that take smarts, and a smart person's more likely to be curious. And, well, one of the few things more dangerous than a mix of boredom and omnipotence is a mix of curiosity and omnipotence. You start asking questions like, 'If I'm really omnipotent, what can't I do?' Then you try to answer them." Pinkie sighed. "The Discordant Era wasn't Discord being mean to ponies. That was a side effect. The Discordant Era was Discord stress-testing the universe. Time, space, causality, morality, everything was on the table."
Ditzy shuddered. "It sounds horrible."
"From what I've heard, it was." Pinkie gave an empty smile. "In any case, that's why a question like 'how long after ponies were made?' isn't easy to answer. It could've been a year, a millennium, or the smell of screaming purple."
The party pony took a deep breath. Her sagging curls bounced back to their usual vigor. "Anyway! It was right after Celestia and Luna beat Discord..."
The sisters stared, amazed at their work. Discord lay before them, the tyrant petrified midway through a boast about his inevitable victory. Already his influence was draining from the land. Little lengths of green had replaced the checkerboard pattern of the ground.
Luna sniffed at them cautiously. They seemed to be neither minty spun sugar or verdigrised copper teeth, her first two guesses.
"Grass," uttered Celestia. "It's grass."
Luna nudged a grass with a forehoof. It offered no resistance, showed no sign of retaliation. "What does it do?" she asked.
"It..." Celestia blinked. Her mind felt so strange now that she didn't have to force every thought through a yard of fog and custard. "I don't think it does anything. It just is."
Her sister considered this. "I... think I remember grass?" She wasn't sure. After so long under Discord's claw (How long? Had there even been a beginning?) her mind barely clung to sanity and sapience.
Celestia, an iota more stable, looked up. The sky was blue. That felt right. The sun hung above, a simple white sphere. The last time she'd seen it, it had been a violently lavender pretzel. "I... I made the sun." Yes. She had. She remembered it like her first meeting with her best friend. Who was her best friend? Oh, of course. Luna. Harmony wouldn't have worked otherwise. "And you made the moon."
"Did I?" The younger alicorn looked around dazedly. "Where is it now?"
"It's..." Memories raced through Celestia's head so quickly that she could scarcely keep up. "It's under the thing. Line. Edge." She waved a forehoof in the general direction of the whatsit.
A word came unbidden to Luna's tongue. "Horizon?"
"No. Maybe. Yes. Under the horizon. It's daytime. That's how it works. Day, then night, then day again."
Luna considered this. "Why?"
"Why not?"
"Okay." Celestial mechanics were hardly the most important thing the pair had to worry about. "Now what?"
"I, um..." Celestia's mouth worked silently as she pondered this. "I don't know," she admitted.
"Okay, what happened?"
Both sisters jumped and turned to the source of the voice. It didn't sound like Discord's usual slick wheedling, but that meant nothing. The alicorns huddled together, horns glowing with magic and eyes bright with fear. "Who's there?" cried Celestia, dreading the answer.
A pink pony appeared out of nowhere. How? She had no horn. She floated in the air. How? She had no wings. Did the seal fail? The statue was still there, but had some lesser bit of Discord slipped out?
The mare frowned at the sisters' fright. "Girls, what's wrong?"
"Who are you?" shouted Luna.
"What are you?" added Celestia.
The pink mare landed and stepped closer. "Don't you recognize me?"
The alicorns shied back. "Stay away!" Celestia cried.
Pinkie looked around, soon finding Discord's petrified form. "Oh my gosh, Discy!" She turned back to her granddaughters and examined them more closely. Both nervous, disheveled, balanced on the knife's edge between fight and flight. In a word, chaotic. And lying at their feet, six gemstones that emanated an all-too familiar aura of order and tranquility.
The planeswalker put two and two and two together without even needing to do a Sleipnir impression. "Discord went rogue." It wasn't a question but a certainty.
"He... I... We..." Celestia's stammering halted as she tried to collect herself. "Yes?"
Pinkie sighed. "I should've known. They were made to balance each other. Without one, the other would eventually..." She shook her head. "Stupid. And now order and chaos are masterless."
"Who are you?" repeated Luna, less afraid now that nothing had changed shape since the stranger had appeared.
"You really don't remember?"
The alicorn gave Pinkie a blank look. "Remember what?"
"Guess not." The planeswalker sighed. "Well, I have some planar governors to replace. The new ones won't be nearly as powerful, but they'll get the job done. For a while, at least." She rose into the air like gravity had lost interest in her (which, until recently, was a plausible explanation.)
"Wait!" cried Celestia. Whoever this was, she seemed to have a sense of purpose, more than the white filly could claim. "What should we do?"
Pinkie despaired for a moment, shocked at what her son had done to his nieces. Well, at least that had an easy fix. "You were made to guide and protect the mortal ponies. Find them. Help them rebuild. Teach them and learn from them in turn."
A warmth filled each sister's breast. They felt, they knew this was right. They cantered off, slowed only by encounters with nearly forgotten wonders like trees, unflavored clouds, and long-term ontological stability.
Pinkie smiled, gladdened by the sight. Then she returned to business and a steady ascent. She couldn't just make a new incarnation of entropy any more than she could one of its absence. Discord and Lauren might be unable to do their jobs, but they still were. However, she could add something to stabilize the plane.
No. Better idea. Some things. Five of them, for preference. If it was good enough for the Multiverse, it was good enough for her.
Pinkie grinned as she left the planet's atmosphere. Yes, that was the ticket. The plane knew what it needed. It felt the gaps left by the twins who'd given it life and form. All Pinkie had to do was offer something to fill that void and Ungula would take care of the rest.
The planeswalker came to rest at the Lagrangian point between the sun and the planet. From here, she could see the gradual return of sanity to the world as a whole. Oh, Discord. Trying to fill the hole in his heart with endless chaos when what he wanted more than anything was someone to tell him, "No." No wonder the sisters won. He'd probably let them.
Pinkie pushed away the thought, closed her eyes, and concentrated. She drew upon millennia of wandering the planes, memories of the people she'd met, the places she'd seen, the things she'd done. Mana flowed across the Multiverse and into her hooves. She gave it almost no shape, only sorting the energy by color.
A chromatic constellation formed around the mare, five orbs of magic glowing and growing. With extra care, she forged tiny nuggets of energy, each with a different blend of four colors of mana, and deposited each at the center of the sphere that complimented it. That was a lesson from her daughter; the impurities would keep the sunlets stable and self-sustaining. Finally, Pinkie released her creations, giving them a push to get them going in their orbits around Celestia's sun.
Then, too exhausted even to maintain her physical form, the planeswalker's disembodied awareness drifted back to the planet and waited. Almost anywhere else, Pinkie would've feared for her life; she was so weak that another planeswalker could snuff out her existence with little more than a thought. However, this was her personal universe, one known only to her and two people who she knew she could trust. Here, she could recuperate without fear.
The new planets added life to the night sky as Luna relearned how to control and ornament it. The introduction of so much magical energy shifted the world's leylines, still pliable from Discord's careless reign. Like supernatural tectonic drift, the planet's geomancy shifted into a new, more auspicious arrangement. Pinkie followed these shifts as she regained her strength, watching and waiting.
A year and a day later, her patience paid off. Five lines of force converged at a single point. The site erupted as it failed to contain the sheer power of the new arcane nexus. An incandescent pillar of light rose from the cataclysm. Waves of mystic power rippled across the land, the seismic equivalent of a sonic rainboom. The air echoed with the songs of angels and the screams of demons, both of which show up in even the most agnostically designed universes.
When the sound and fury finally faded, there stood a mountain that was nearly a world in and of itself. The peak's sheer mass caused the crust of the planet to dimple slightly, creating a ring of wetland around its foot. Forests crawled up the slopes like moss on a rock, refusing to hold truck with any "timber line" nonsense. Above them waved fields of hardy grass, advance scouts for the trees, turning barren stone into rich soil. Further up were the young, barren crags that had not yet known erosion and were still tall and jagged and proud. And at the peak was a stranded iceberg, shimmering in the sunlight.
And, on the very top of that glacial capstone, there stood a pink mare and five horned, winged foals.
"Well," said Pinkie, clearly pleased with herself, "that's one way to make an entrance." She shaded her eyes and surveyed the horizon. "Now, they should be about... there!"
It was the work of a moment to transpose herself from the top of the newly raised Canterhorn to her granddaughters' flight paths. A year and a day spent discorporate did wonders for the mana reserves. "Hi, girls!"
Doing a double take in midair always carries an element of risk. When moving at near-sonic speeds, it can be fatal. Fortunately, the alicorn body is more than capable of shrugging off forces that would pulverize mortal bones, so Celestia and Luna were able to stop and boggle at the incongruous earth pony without killing themselves. Luna spoke first. "Who—"
"Not important!" cried Pinkie. She produced the five still-sleeping bundles of deific joy seemingly out of nowhere. "They are."
The younger sister gasped as she took in the infants' horns and wings. Celestia remained outwardly calm. "And who are they?"
The party pony parodied the princess's poker face. "Your cousins," she answered in a voice so flat it could take the bubbles out of champagne from a hundred yards.
That broke the elder alicorn's composure. "What? How?"
"Why should we believe you?" demanded Luna.
"Well, I guess you don't have to," admitted Pinkie. "At least, if you want to refuse the only actual family you have." She knew it was a low blow, but they needed to accept the newborns. She couldn't risk the alternative.
Luna glared at her. "And how would you know that?"
Pinkie decided to try a different tack. Well, more of a nail. Stuck in a club. "Did you know you're immortal? That's really gonna suck in the long run without somepony else to provide continuity."
The blue alicorn brought herself muzzle-to-muzzle with the impossible mare. "You seem to know an awful lot about us for somepony whose identity isn't important. Give me one good reason why I shouldn't—"
"Luna." With one word, Celestia brought her sister to heel. "Whoever she is, she knows more about our kind than we do. She comes bearing foals that would more than triple our number. Our ponies need a symbol of hope, of plenty. We have no reason to distrust her."
"We have every reason to distrust her!" Luna shouted. "She refuses to answer any question that she dislikes! She has all the answers we've been looking for and she won't give them to us!"
"What's the point if you don't find out for yourself?" asked Pinkie.
The sisters' argument stopped almost before it got started. The mystery mare, they realized, was still right in front of them. She could hear every word they were saying. Luna idly kicked a forehoof. "My apologies."
"And mine," added Celestia. "We... That is, at times..." She sighed. "Discord leaves scars on us all, the worst hidden from sight."
Pinkie nodded. "I understand. I swear I'm telling you as much of the truth as I can."
Luna cast a skeptical eye on her. "And on what do you swear?"
The planeswalker considered this for a moment. A Pinkie Pie Promise probably wouldn't fly with Little Miss Moonbutt McSkepticpants... unless it was a Pinkie Pie Promise Classic. "My heart and my hooves, my spells and my soul. I swear on my friends, every colt, mare, and foal. I swear on my sisters, my father, my mother, on all I hold dear, in this world and others."
Luna took this in for a moment. Her answer was carefully scrubbed of emotion. "Go on."
Pinkie did so. "You know those things around the sun that showed up just after you stoned Discord?"
The sisters nodded. Luna blinked, then squinted, analyzing Pinkie even more closely than before.
"They're acting to help maintain the balance of the universe and make sure the whole kit and caboodle doesn't go kaput."
"Then why did they only show up a year ago?" asked Celestia.
"The universe seemed pretty damn imbalanced before then," Luna noted.
Pinkie nodded. "It was. Discord was supposed to act as one end of that balance, but his opposite number... well, it's complicated."
"Try us," said Luna.
The planeswalker vacillated. How much should she say? How much could she say? "Well kids, you basically used your mom's comatose body to petrify your grief-stricken uncle. Great job!" Yeah, not happening. She decided to take it step by step. "She was your mother."
Celestia's expression would make kicked puppies feel guilty. "Was?"
"She's not gone for good," Pinkie added hastily, "no more than Discord is. She's just... resting."
"Where?" demanded Luna.
"I don't know." Technically true. She didn't know where they'd put the Elements.
"If Mother isn't gone," said Celestia, dread building in her voice, "then could Discord return as well?"
Pinkie shook her head. "As long as you two stay attuned to the Elements of Harmony, the seal will be maintained." And really, she thought, what could disrupt that connection?
"If these are our cousins," said Luna, "then our mother had siblings, didn't she?" She frowned. "Come to think of it, what about our father?"
"Your cousins are avatars of the new planets," Pinkie explained. "Those, in turn, were created by the same entity who created your mother. As for your father..." She shrugged. "I wasn't exactly there for the conception."
Celestia smiled knowingly. "Were you there for the birth, Grandmother?"
In the time before the Mending, a planeswalker's body was an extension of her will, a physical pretension adopted by a transcendent being to condescend to organic life's level. As such, Pinkie's expression showed no involuntary twitches or tells, no autonomic betrayals. She just smiled and shook her head as her heart broke anew. "Good guess, kid, but you're off the mark."
"Oh?" Luna frowned in concentration. "Just after we beat Discord, I... It's hazy, but I definitely remember... pink."
The pink pony hesitated for a split second. In a decade, it would be as obvious as an exploding polygraph to the sisters. Now, they lacked the political acumen to pick up on it. "I didn't say you weren't close," said Pinkie, hastily assembling a new story. "Think of me as your godmother."
"Uh huh." Celestia clearly didn't buy it for a second. Still, she had the grace to let the matter rest. Her attention turned back to the infants. "What are their names?"
"Dunno," Pinkie admitted. "You two knew yours by the time I met you."
"But they'll keep the universe stable?" asked Luna.
Pinkie nodded. "Them, and their parents."
"And they'll live forever?" Celestia shivered as eternity loomed before her. "As will we?"
"You two? Definitely. As for them, well, they'll live until they die."
Luna smirked. "That's generally the case, yes."
Pinkie shook her head. "I mean they won't die of old age or hunger or just about any disease, but they will if they get hurt enough."
"Then we'll have to keep them safe, for the sake of everything," declared Celestia.
"Well, yes and no," answered Pinkie. "As long as at least one's still okay, the uneven balance will cause the rest to reincarnate." She frowned. "Er, I think."
Luna gave her an incredulous look. "You think?"
"Well, you never know. Semistable equilibria might form with fewer than all five, the mechanism of power transfer might work differently, there's ambiguity if some go rogue while others don't..." Pinkie shrugged. "When dealing with magic of this magnitude, it's a crapshoot at best."
"Not that you would know," snarked the moon pony.
"Oh, I deal with this kind of stuff on a regular basis," answered Pinkie, "I just didn't do this one." Not directly, anyway.
Celestia took the foals in magical tow. "Well, I suppose we'll just have to see what happens." She nodded to Pinkie. "Thank you... Godmother."
"Oh, by the way," added Luna, "just an afterthought, idle curiosity, really, but what's the story with the enormous mountain that wasn't there an hour ago?"
Celestia looked at the peak in question. "Oh, right. That."
"Yeah, the reason we came here in the first place." Luna glared a challenge at Pinkie. "Care to explain that one, 'Godmother'?"
"Side effect of your cousins coming into existence," the party pony said nonchalantly. "Looks nice, though. Might be a good site for a city."
Before either sister could respond, she enveloped them in a wide hug. "Thank you, girls. I know you'll do a great job."
"With what, exactly?" asked Celestia.
"Being you." Before either alicorn could ask for clarification, Pinkie 'walked away.
"When I hugged them, I slipped a little mind bug into each of their heads," said Pinkie. "It worked slowly, blurring their memories of me and encouraging them to make up new ones." She sighed. "It had to be done. No way Celestia would let her Granny Pie grow up on some dull ol' rock farm. If they remembered me, it would change history."
"And the Five Sisters?" prompted Ditzy.
"Well, turns out I was wrong about the reincarnation. When Cadence I gave—"
Ditzy frowned. "'Cadence eye'?"
Pinkie rolled her eyes. "When Cadence the First gave birth to a daughter – huge scandal at the time, they were supposed to be celibate, but Princess of Love, what're ya gonna do? Anyway, when she gave birth, it was to an alicorn. One that looked exactly like her. The others were... let's say 'encouraged' to have kids of their own, because more alicorns could only be a good thing, right?"
"Possibly," allowed the pegasus.
"Well, when all was said and done, they all had sons, there were one horn and four wings between them, and nopony had both. They'd go on to found the various noble houses, which would eventually lead to the likes of Prince Blueblood." Pinkie smirked. "So you can see how good an idea that turned out to be."
Ditzy held back a grin of her own. "Why was Cadence different?"
"Well, that didn't become clear until Cadence II came of age. Her cutie mark turned out to be identical to her mother's, and her mother started feeling her age."
The pegasus gulped. "How old was she by then?"
Pinkie bowed her head. "About three hundred. She passed on a few days later. They say that the moment she died, she crumbled to dust."
Ditzy frowned as realization struck. "Wait. How do you know this anyway?"
The party pony gave her a quizzical look. "What do you mean? I thought you came to me because I'd been there."
"Well, yeah," admitted Ditzy, "for the big dramatic world-building stuff, not for the courtly history. Three hundred years after Discord would be about five and a half thousand years ago." She frowned. "Which... actually doesn't mesh at all with the chronology of your life, thinking about it."
Pinkie shrugged. "Like I said, Discy used spacetime as his own personal trampoline. The plane's temporal flow was wonky until the Mending, and that was only about a decade ago."
"Fair enough," Ditzy conceded, "but that still doesn't explain how you know about this stuff. I think the princesses would notice a pink courtier who never seemed to age."
"Oh, that." Pinkie smiled. "Somepony had to take care of Commodore Guff's library after he got eaten by Yawgmoth."
"Oh." Ditzy considered this. "So you own a library the size of a small universe."
"Uh huh."
"One that contains every book that was ever written, ever will be written, and ever might be written."
"Yuppy-duppy!"
Suppressed giggles began to leak through the pegasus's demeanor. "A-and you *snrk* never told Twilight?"
Pinkie looked from side to side, looking for any possible spies or probes. Satisfied with the room's secrecy, she whispered, "I told her she'd be getting a really great birthday present this year."
After a bout of laughter, Ditzy admitted, "It's probably better you haven't told her. We might never see her again."
"Oh, don't worry," Pinkie said confidently. "There's an orangutan who owes me a favor. He'll keep an eye on her."
Ditzy's better judgement shifted her train of thought away from this track and the penny lying thereon. "I think we've gotten a bit off-topic."
"Right. Anyway, shortly after they found a suitably tasteful urn, Cadence II said her mom had told her she was glad that she'd be taking her place." Pinkie paused, perceiving pluripotent perplexing pronoun potential. "Er, the mom told her daughter that—"
"I think I got it," Ditzy assured her. "So?"
"So, that was the key. For the Five Sisters, succession and abdication are inseparable. Only when they're tired of ruling will they produce their heirs. Er, heiresses."
"Huh." Ditzy pondered this for a moment. "So, which Cadence married Captain Armor?"
"Well, they don't use the generation thing officially, 'cause, y'know, royalty. They like to project that image of unchanging, eternal stability. Serious reaction formation from Discord's behavior, if you ask me." Pinkie nodded to herself, then paused and looked at the cigar in her hoof. "How'd that get there?"
"It formed out of your aura of ambient laughter magic," answered Ditzy.
"Oh. Okay, then. Anyway, the Cadences have kept up the tradition of high turnover. I think we're up to Cadence XL, give or take a few."
"'Cadence ecks-el' meaning 'Cadence the Fourtieth?'"
Pinkie nodded. "Precisely!"
Ditzy thought for a moment. "So who are the others? And where, for that matter?"
Pinkie gave a nervous chuckle. "Well, remember that Celestia's not very good at delegating, so there's never really been a lot for the Five Sisters to do, officially. Each has a role, but it's left to her how she defines it and what she does with it. So, they're kind of, well, scattered."
"So you don't know."
Pinkie grinned sheepishly. "More or less."
Ditzy wingshrugged. "Well, your freaky knowledge had to run out somewhere. Can you at least tell me their names?"
The baker smiled. "Now what fun would that be?" She patted her friend on the back. "If you really want to know, go check your local library. Or local librarian."
The pegasus considered this. Eventually, she nodded. "I think I will, actually. Among others."
Chromatic Convergence 3GWU
Sorcery
For each color, each player may put a permanent card of that color from his or her hand onto the battlefield.
The rainbow is a symbol of great power in Equestria, and for good reason.