Sunset was far off in the desert now. Principal Celestia lent her a car and a staff, as well as all the food and gasoline she’d need to keep traveling.
For ten days straight she traveled east out into the desert. These cars weren’t as fast as pegasi, but they did go much faster than Sunset could have galloped as a pony. She was thousands of miles away from the city of Canterlot now, not just the two hundred marked on the map.
But still, it was an endless desert in every direction. She couldn’t see the city from here and she couldn’t see the end of the horizon. Nothing but sand in every direction. If it weren’t for the dunes and cacti it’d feel like Sunset wasn’t moving at all.
One hour before sunset. Celestia appeared in the seat next to Sunset Shimmer, smiling and looking out into the desert. As per their agreement for her ‘helping’ with this escape attempt, Celestia would get to appear and talk to Sunset for one hour a day.
“Maybe you’re starting to trust what I said? You’re moving along on a horizontal asymptote.” Celestia traced one in the air with her finger. “You constantly approach the X-axis of the outside world but will never reach it no matter how far you go. Interestingly, the longer you travel the less distance you go.”
“Yeah, I know.” Two different versions of Celestia had explained this aspect of pocket dimensions to her now. “I just want to be sure.”
Sunset couldn’t take anything for granted right now, not even that she was really in a pocket dimension. Her endless journey all but confirmed it was the case at this point.
How many more days should she keep doing this? Part of Sunset felt like she had no choice but to keep going east endlessly, getting less and less ahead. Maybe she could hold off swallowing her pride and giving up a bit longer had it not been a desert.
“Can’t you make the temperature a bit milder?” Sunset asked.
For the last few days, Sunset was bouncing back and forth between sweltering and freezing. Deserts got cold at night. Right now she was sweating badly.
“That might be a bit much to ask,” said Celestia. “There’s a limit to what I’ll do for nothing in return. You know, I wouldn’t even humor a normal intruder this much. I just happen to like you.”
Sunset gripped the wheel tighter. She knew it was technically another person, but she’d heard that exact voice say almost the same thing plenty of times before. She’d heard Princess Celestia telling her how she loved Sunset. That was a lie.
“You don’t know me at all.” Sunset kept her eyes ahead.
“I think I’m starting to,” said Celestia. “But you’re right, not by very much. I just like the way you smell. I don’t mind giving you a few gifts if it means you stay closer.”
“The way I smell? Are you trying to be creepy now?” Sunset asked.
“I don’t mean your literal smell of course.” Celestia laughed. “It was a metaphor. Just being near your unfulfilled potential is nice in its own way.”
Sunset kept driving into the setting sun without speaking for a time. For the first five days she refused to talk to Principal Celestia during these visits but the longer she spent out here, alone in the desert, the harder it became to resist the urge to chat.
She knew she'd eventually go crazy without other ponies around, but she’d honestly believed she could hold out longer than ten days. Apparently, that wasn’t the case.
“What are the other adults?” Sunset asked, mostly just to say something, though she was sincerely curious about it as well. “Are they illusions? Or robots? Are the other teachers elves too?”
Celestia smiled, clearly happy that Sunset was finally desperate enough to start conversing with her.
“They’re all fae of different types and all of them my servants,” said Celestia. “Elves are about as diverse a group as animals. The ones that appear less intelligent to you are simply several bodies controlled by one of my servants. They’re more cognizant than you might guess from their behavior. They just sincerely don’t understand you at all because animal life is completely alien to us. Believe it or not, talking intelligibly to a human takes a great deal of practice and skill for a fae.”
They really were alien creatures. The more she heard about these fae the stranger they sounded.
“I don’t suppose you have any books about your kind? Or a course on them if I get desperate enough?” Sunset asked.
“There are, actually. Maybe if you had seen them you would have solved your mystery a bit sooner,” Celestia teased, “but I don’t blame you for missing them. There are very few in such a large list. But I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Why not?”
“There is some risk in understanding my kind. Few humans are brave enough to even try to study us scientifically and when they do -“
Celestia stopped to think for a minute.
“Well, I believe you met Pinkie Pie, yes? She used to be a very logical, scientific, and reserved individual. She set out to study us and we allowed her. It’s not impossible to understand the fae, you see, but by the time she finished, she began to think like we do. The other humans became too strange for her to understand anymore. She couldn’t explain her findings to them in any way they understood. In the end, she came back and asked to live with us, and I allowed it because she was a friend. It was fifty years before she learned to speak to humans again.”
With her limited interactions with Pinkie, she could believe something like that had happened to Pinkie Pie. She wondered how much Pinkie remembered of her old life now.
Though it was worrying that Sunset essentially couldn’t study Celestia on any deep level without turning out the same.
“Can I ask what happened out there?” Sunset asked. “That made planet Earth suck so much, I mean. Did a monster destroy the world? Is there an eternal winter?”
“Empires rise and fall.” Celestia made a little circle in the air with her finger. “Now and then human civilization will start down a path that ultimately leads to a nightmare, and then will be too proud to get off that road. That’s all that happened. They created a society and a planet that is completely toxic to themselves. It’s happened before, to a lesser extent, though I’m sure they’ll find a way out someday.”
“Was it your fault?” Sunset asked. “Either you specifically or just elves in general?”
“I take no responsibility for their fate,” said Celestia. “I even warned them a few times that the path they were on would take them to this, but they still fear me. It’s always been hard for fae and animals to understand one another.”
Celestia watched Sunset quietly, noting that she wasn’t reassured that Celestia was innocent here.
“As I said, humans have always feared the dark forests where the fae live.” Celestia looked out her window. “It’s difficult for them to understand us and we’re so far from what they want to be the truth. But there’s also always been people who fear other humans more than they fear us.”
“Around the year 800,” Celestia explained. “Rarity was the first such human that I consumed when I was younger and smaller. I could only fit a single person inside this place then. She had such amazing potential, she could have been one of the greatest artists who ever lived, had she been born into the right family. But instead, she was a slave girl and the other humans she knew only ever tried to beat that creativity out of her. She ran into the forest and found me.”
“Do you understand?” Celestia asked. “Making people fear me won’t do any good. They already fear themselves. That’s all I need.”
“Well if you’re so powerful and you want me to believe you’re benevolent then why aren’t you helping fix it?” Sunset asked.
Celestia paused for a minute, thinking of the best way to answer that question before deciding on another story.
“In the 14th century,” said Celestia, “there was a horrible plague that killed half the world’s population. My sister Luna, near the beginning of this, tried to help the humans. She planted a tree that would feed on disease and pollution. It would grow to be two thousand feet tall and protect the land from plagues and corruption for a thousand years.”
“In just a few days, the plague had vanished for a hundred miles around it. But the tree grew much larger than any ordinary tree and it grew ugly from absorbing the sickness. It was black and knotted with pustules and a purple ichor oozed out of cracks in its wood. The humans who saw it were certain it couldn’t be anything but evil, and despite my sister imploring them to leave it be, they cut it down and burned it. The plague soon returned and killed them all.
“Of course, there’s also a few examples of the fae’s lack of understanding actually causing problems when we try to help as well. That’s usually how it happens. I honestly feel no great love for humans, save the ones I feed off of. I don’t feel the need to help them overly much. They chose their fate and maybe I’ll extend my hand to them in another hundred years or so but until then I only help those who offer me something in return.”
Sunset tapped her finger on the wheel, half hanging out her window as she kept barreling down the endless desert. She couldn’t help herself from feeling angry at this version of Celestia, even if she hadn’t done anything to Sunset yet. She thought for a moment, trying to figure out the most damning way Principal Celestia’s world view was bull.
“Even if you don’t create it yourself, you still take advantage of other people’s suffering. If someone’s only choice is to give you whatever you want or die is that really a choice?” Sunset asked. “The fact that you have all the cards doesn’t mean you have the right to just do whatever you want and use every desperate person you bump into. I know how you work.”
“Oh? Is that what the other Celestia did?” Celestia, to Sunset’s annoyance, saw straight through the question. “I know you said you were an orphan.”
“It was worse than that,” said Sunset. “I was on the streets when she noticed my magic powers. My options were living in a trash can or going with her. If I could have done anything else, I was too young at the time to think of it. That’s not really a choice, is it? I don’t even get why she had to lie to me, there was literally nothing else I could have done back then except to follow her. If she told me to risk my life for her I would have done it. I had nothing but her.”
“You poor, wounded child,” said Celestia. “But, so I’m not avoiding your criticism any longer, I find there are two types of people I can divide the world into for my purpose. Some want to be happy and some want to accomplish something even if it destroys them, or brings misery. It would only be a cruel offer to the latter. Is there something you want to accomplish?”
“Yes,” Sunset answered easily. “I want to become powerful, more powerful than you or Princess Celestia. And I want revenge. If Princess Celestia doesn’t want to respect me then I’ll force her to. I’ll show everyone I’m not just some puppet to be manipulated.”
“Are you sure that’s what you want?” Celestia asked.
“Okay, fine.” Sunset rolled her eyes. “You’re some ancient god. You tell me what I want. If you say something vague and meaningless like ‘inner peace’ this conversation is over.”
“From what little I know of you; I’d say you want control and safety. You had your life torn away from you, making you realize at a young age that you have no real safety in life or control over the world. You crave power and push yourself so hard to get it just to feel in control, to feel safe. I’d suppose that for a while you relied on your princess to give you stability, to be a safe space to retreat to. When instead she took control and stability away from you, it must have felt like such a horrid betrayal to you.”
Sunset slowed the car to a stop.
It wasn’t like the fairy was wrong. Sunset had been completely dependent on Princess Celestia. The princess told Sunset she loved her, that it would be alright even if she failed. Sunset remembered late nights when she would lay under Celestia’s wings, crying herself to sleep.
Yet Celestia still pushed Sunset hard enough to give her panic attacks, still gave her ridiculous tests, still told her to make friends so Sunset could be a weapon, still tried to trick her into casting mysterious spells. It was all a lie. It was a betrayal of her trust, her love.
The only person who’d ever even pretended to love her and it was all just a lie. How the heck could she feel safe after that? Who could blame her for wanting control for once in her life, if that really was what she wanted?
Sunset put her head against the wheel and closed her eyes. It was hard to keep herself from crying. She felt so lonely right now. In a desert that went on forever with no one and nothing to see - that was exactly how she felt.
She glanced up at Principal Celestia who was still calmly watching her.
She said she loved her students and they said they loved her… it felt unfair at the moment.
“Do you love me?” Sunset asked Principal Celestia.
Celestia tilted her head slightly and waited, making sure that was all Sunset would say.
“No,” Celestia admitted. “I only feel an emotional attachment to people I feed off of. If you died right now, I’d be a bit disappointed but I wouldn’t feel sad. You’re like a valuable work of art. I don’t want you to be damaged in any way, but I don’t care about you in the same way one cares about another person.”
Sunset tapped her finger on the wheel a few times before getting up. She wasn’t sure what she wanted the answer to that question to be but still felt disappointed.
“You’re more honest than Princess Celestia.” Sunset got out of the car. “But I used to think she was honest too.”
Sunset grabbed her staff. She closed her eyes, clutching the staff with both hands, raising it high.
Then she swung down, trying to create a dimensional tear.
It was no good! Without a horn, it was too difficult a spell.
Celestia came out of the car and offered her service. She merely pointed in the right direction and a portal appeared in front of Sunset. But what was on the other side of the portal was nothing, a true void.
It wasn’t empty space or even a vacuum, but truly nothing. That was what surrounded this place, Sunset realized, what you’d have to get through if you wanted to break out by force. No matter how good her ability to create portals became she’d never be able to get through this stuff. At least, Sunset couldn’t think of a way through it.
Which was worrying because then the portal still couldn’t take her back when it recharged. But it did raise the question of how the portal even brought her here in the first place.
“I don’t understand how anything can get in here if this is the case,” said Sunset. “This place should be impenetrable, like an absolutely safe capsule.”
“Fae magic is a bit different from what you’re used to. I could teach you all about how these things work,” Celestia offered with another smile. “I have plenty of courses on these subjects.”
“Can’t you just teach me here?” Sunset asked. “I kind of burned my bridge with the other students in the heat of the moment back there.”
“Oh, I’m sure they’ve forgotten all about it by now,” said Celestia. “Besides, I’m still not willing to give you something for nothing. I’ll teach you whatever you want, but only if you come back to the school where I can admire your beauty a bit better.”
What else even was Sunset going to do? She knew it had to be some kind of trap or attempt to manipulate her. But it’d be faster than practicing on her own. It’d be less likely she’d go insane from isolation and only talking to Celestia too. Not to mention she wasn’t sure if she could get the portal without her help.
“Fine.”
Celestia snapped her fingers and they teleported back to the city. The trip that took days now took only a second.