Twilight Sparkle and Spike stared up at the spot that Starlight Glimmer had been only moments ago, mouths agape at what they just saw. It had taken less than a minute. Starlight was relaxing in one of the thrones, made a vague threat, and then activated an unknown spell before disappearing into a portal.
“Where’d she go?” Spike said as they approached the Cutie Map.
“I don’t know, Spike,” Twilight said, still in shock. “But I think we’d better find out.”
“Guess we could start with this,” Spike said. Twilight turned to see him reaching down to Starlight’s crumpled spell scroll.
“Spike, no! Don’t touch that!” she shouted. His hand was less than an inch from the paper when Twilight grabbed him with her magic, pulling him back.
“Hey! What gives?” Spike asked as Twilight set him down.
“The first rule when dealing with an unknown magical artifact, Spike. Never touch something until you’re sure it’s safe.” She stepped forward and cast a series of spells. A moment later, she nodded in satisfaction. “See? Starlight trapped it. If anypony had touched it without proper protection, it would have activated again.”
Spike let out a whistle. “Thanks, Twilight. Sorry about that.”
Twilight smiled. “It’s okay, Spike. We all make mistakes. Just don’t let it happen again.”
The door slammed open, and Pinkie Pie walked in, pushing a very large cake.
“Special delivery!” she called out.
Twilight and Spike looked at each other questioningly, and upon seeing that they both didn’t expect this, Twilight said, “Pinkie, we didn’t order a cake.”
“Of course you didn’t, silly! Somepony had an order but had to cancel it at the last minute. Rather than let it go to waste, the Cakes said I could have it. Soooooo, I thought I could share it with my super bestest friends!”
Twilight opened her mouth to say that this was no time for cake, but Spike’s growling stomach interrupted her. He gave her an apologetic smile before she rolled her eyes and smirked.
“Actually, I think that’s a good idea,” she said. “We have a maybe emergency going on, so we can get the girls together and have a snack while we discuss it. Can you get Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy? I’ll find Rarity and Applejack.”
Pinkie gave a stiff salute before zipping away.
===
Fifteen minutes later, everyone was sitting around the Cutie Map as Twilight finished her tale. Cake was all around, satisfying many sweet tooths and hungry bellies.
“...and then we came to get all of you,” Twilight finished.
“Ugh, I can’t believe that Starlight’s back,” Rainbow growled. “I thought she learned her lesson the last time!”
“Apparently not,” Applejack said. “It sounds like she needs another whoopin.”
“Um, do we know what she did?” Fluttershy asked.
Twilight shook her head, carefully manipulating the crumpled spell scroll. “No, not yet. I had Spike send warning letters to Canterlot and the Crystal Empire to be on the lookout, but they haven’t sent anything back yet other than to say that all is quiet.”
“Could her spell have failed?” Rarity asked.
“It’s possible,” Twilight said. “We know that Starlight is powerful, but not her level of education. I looked into her after our last encounter, and she’s never been enrolled in any of the major universities. It’s possible she was apprenticed, or even self taught, though.” With her spells finished, she smiled as the crumpled scroll straightened out.
“Ah! There we go, one moment.” She brought over a quill and notepad, and immediately set to work. For a few minutes everyone watched her, nibbling on cake or making light conversation.
“Oh no!” Twilight froze at what she found out, setting everything down. “This is bad, really really- wait.” She paused, looking over the scroll again.
“What is it, sugarcube?” Applejack asked.
“One second.” In a flash, she disappeared, only to reappear again a few moments later, books surrounding her. They passed in front of her over and over as she skimmed the pages, murmuring to herself. Everyone else knew better than to interrupt her during one of her ‘moments.’
With a smile, Twilight shut all the books and banished them back to her library.
“Okay, there is no cause for alarm,” she said.
Everyone looked at each other warily for a moment, and Rarity said, “Well, I wouldn’t say Starlight Glimmer being free to take her vengeance is not cause for alarm.”
“Ordinarily I’d agree with you,” Twilight said with a nod. “But the thing is, the moment she disappeared into the portal, she either won or lost.”
Everyone looked at her to explain, and she brought out the scroll.
“This is a modified version of Starswirl’s time travel spell. The same one I used a few years ago.”
Pinkie asked, “You mean that time you showed up in that black catsuit, trying to warn yourself not to worry about Tuesday, but future-you didn’t have time to explain so you ended up worrying about Tuesday and got so super worried that you ended up breaking into the Canterlot library and took the spell, only to find out there was nothing to worry about, so you travelled back in time to warn yourself not to worry about it starting the whole cycle?”
“Exactly,” Twilight said without a beat.
“So now Starlight’s running around messing up time? Why aren’t we stopping her?” Applejack asked.
“Simple,” Twilight said. She brought out a blackboard and began illustrating her explanation. “Time travel isn’t a very well studied branch of magic, and for very good reason. It’s dangerous. Nonetheless, everypony that has looked into it has come to an agreement. That travelling to the past can do one of three things.
“One: it can complete a logical loop, and was always going to happen. Say one day I fell down the stairs, and was caught by a net, thus preventing me from breaking my neck. I don’t know why the net was there, and upon investigating I realize that nopony I knew put it there. Eventually I end up travelling to the past and put up the net, thus saving myself, so I can eventually travel to the past and save myself.”
She got a number of nods, some more confident than others.
“Two: travelling to the past creates changes to the present. Let’s say that normally, I break my neck. Everypony is understandably sad, but Rarity doesn’t accept this. She travels to the past and puts up the net, thus saving my life. She then travels back to the present, where I’m alive and well. Nopony but she remembers my death, and everypony is happy.
“Three: travelling to the past creates a new reality. This time, when Rarity saves my life, there are two realities. Reality A, where I die, and Reality B, where I live. Both still exist. Where Rarity ends up after travelling to the present is up for debate. She may end up in the old reality where I died, or she may end up in the new reality, and there are two Raritys.”
Twilight turned and looked to the group, who was mostly confused. Pinkie Pie seemed to be the only one who completely understood, so there was that.
“All of this glosses over a number of paradoxes and situations involving duplicate Raritys and where the information to save me came from in the first place, but that’s not important now.”
“Then, what is?” Rainbow asked.
Twilight held the spell out. “The moment Starlight went through the portal, she ended up in the past. We already missed her, so she’s either already completed her objective, or has already failed. Because it happened in the past.
“If we live in a world of example one, she was always going to go to the past and meddle with it, so nothing’s changed. We treat it like a regular plan and just prepare for some kind of attack in the future.
“If we live in a world of example two, then our past has already changed, and we will never know what it should have been, outside interrogating her. So let me ask this, does anypony have some kind of traumatizing event in their past that seems outside the norm?”
Everyone looked at each other, asked questions, and came to the conclusion that their childhoods and lives seemed fine.
“Okay. Now, option three. Nothing has changed for us, but Starlight made a branching path. While I feel bad for the us that’s currently her victims, we can’t even be sure if she succeeded in this case. Outside of heavily modifying this spell, something that I would never do unless reality is at stake, we could never travel there to help them anyway.”
“So, what do we do?” Rarity asked.
“And how are we gonna catch Starlight?” Rainbow added.
“The original spell and-” she looked over the scroll once again, “-this spell both have the return point set to about a minute after departure. Spike’s been here the whole time, and she’s never come back. So either her modifications destabilized the spell and she’s trapped between time, or she’s off where we can’t get to her.” She tapped her chin. “Or she took the long way around. Either way, there’s really only one option. We just keep an eye out for her and any of her plans.”
“So...we don’t do anything?” Rainbow asked.
“We don’t do anything aside from maintaining vigilance.” Twilight summoned a chest, and put the scroll in it before wrapping it in several chains and warding it against intrusion. “I am going to return this to Canterlot and make sure it’s never stolen again.” She blinked. “Unless somepony wants to come with me?”
Rarity smiled. “I’m always up for a trip to Canterlot, darling.”
Pinkie bounced from her chair. “Ooh! Me too! I’m running low on my premium fancy party supplies.”
As the ponies cleared from the room and spoke of their plans, Spike turned and looked at the spot on the floor where the scroll once laid. He didn’t quite understand all of Twilight’s explanation, but understood that had she not stopped him, they would have been pulled into this whole time travel mess themselves.
He shuddered on considering what the future held for that Spike.
===
Starlight Glimmer stared blankly out onto the dusty wasteland. Behind her sat the Cutie Map, the centerpiece of her dirt and mud hovel. Torn and damaged scrolls of notes and failed experiments covered the damaged artifact, a testament to her failures.
She leaned over onto the stone table and grabbed the cup of dirty water, sipping at it and stopping herself from retching from the vile taste.
Two months. Two months of trying to retrigger her spell and return to the past. She didn’t know why. She didn’t know how. All she knew was that somehow, her changes had caused this apocalypse to happen.
With a sigh, she turned from the broken window and headed to her kitchen, or what passed for it. Opening the pantry didn’t change what she had, or rather didn’t have. With a sigh she took the roots she had managed to dig from the ground and threw them in the pot, added water, and set it on the fire.
She liked staring at the fire during her downtimes. The fire moved, the fire changed, the fire was alive, unlike everything else around her.
She sighed, and looked around at her hovel. Broken and burnt furniture held together by her spells, broken and burnt paperwork with her scrawlings…
Broken and burnt world, caused by her actions.
She returned to staring at the fire. She didn’t know how long she did that, watching the water slowly come to a boil, but she must have zoned out, because she heard something that was completely and utterly alien to her, and screamed.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
She whirled at the source, the door, in confusion and with a spell on the tip of her horn. She knew that anything beyond basic telekinesis was for emergencies only; she didn’t have enough food to fuel it. Still, she didn’t know what was going on. Why did the door-
Thump. Thump. Thump.
“We know you’re in there! We don’t want to hurt you!”
Starlight was hyperventilating. There were still ponies around? She hadn’t seen anything living except for dust caked grasses and shrubs ever since she got here. No animals, no ponies, nothing.
A part of her was suspicious about the visitor’s true intentions. Logically, if they were in this wasteland, they were just as poor off as she was, and thus might be here to steal what little she had. However her need to have some kind of social contact drowned out logic’s protests, and she frantically ran to the door, throwing it open.
Before here were six mares. Six very familiar mares. A very old and ingrained part of her immediately cried out for vengeance, and in a fit of anger she shot a beam attack at them.
The shield that absorbed it was up before the attack even left her horn.
The shock that she felt was immediately eclipsed by absolute fatigue. She promptly collapsed, her legs barely able to move. Instead she looked up, and met the unimpressed gaze of Twilight Sparkle. There was no softness to it. No pity. Just a slight frown and the impression that the mare wasn’t surprised in the slightest. Surrounding her, her friends had similar expressions, though they varied from Rainbow Dash’s snarl to Fluttershy’s minute shaking of her head.
“That was stupid,” Twilight said. “We were going to help you, but…” She didn’t even finish her sentence, and just turned away. The rest of them followed suit.
She had it. She had a way out. Even if it was with her most hated enemies, she had found some manner of social contact and possibly even a way to get home.
And she just threw it away.
Something broke within Starlight as she realized that for all her magic, for all her knowledge, because of her actions she would die as she lived: alone.
“I’m sorry!” she shouted, trying to get them to return. They kept walking away.
“I didn’t mean to!” Her cries fell on deaf ears, and she watched as they disappeared into the perpetual dust storm. As the last sight of them vanished, she wrenched her eyes shut and began to sob.
“Stop crying.”
Starlight looked up to find the six had returned. She didn’t know how long she had laid there. Minutes, probably. Maybe even an hour. She looked up at Twilight with something akin to hope, but the other mare held her only in contempt.
“Th-thank you, I-”
“Don’t thank me,” Twilight interrupted. She gestured to the others. “Thank them. It’s not often I give a second chance. So start explaining.”
And so Starlight did. Not the whole truth, of course. She left out a lot of the details. Details that, once glossed over, Applejack frowned at her for, yet said nothing. Twilight was as still as a statue as she explained, and was silent for a moment at the end.
“You’re going to die out here,” she said. “There’s nothing to eat, and no clean water. All of the remaining towns are near the coasts. The way I see it, you have two options. Either stay here and hope you find enough roots and old food to keep you going, or come with us to Vanhoover. You can come back here later with supplies if you want.”
Starlight, who had been helped up and given some clean water and rations, nodded meekly. “I understand. But...why were you out here in the first place?”
“We were on a trade mission when I felt your magic,” Twilight explained. “Which, since there’s nothing here but ruins, was surprising. I thought that somepony got lost.” She smirked. “I was right, but not how I thought. Still, we don’t leave somepony behind without cause. Equestria’s gone, but that’s no reason we should turn our backs on friendship.”
She held out a hoof. “Come with us.”
Starlight looked at the offered hoof, then to Twilight’s eyes. Gone was the hard and cold expression of a seasoned wastelander. She still saw the scars, the stress, and the shadows under her eyes, but underneath it all was a look that promised forgiveness and, if she sought it, perhaps something more.
Despite the fact that this mare was her enemy, at least in another world, the thought of slowly starving, surrounded by nothing by her work, was too much to bear. Pride and anger, two of her oldest friends, looked at the writing on the wall and sighed.
She reached out and tearfully took Twilight’s hoof.