Sunny moaned as she blinked her eyes open. Gritting her teeth, she eased herself into a sitting position, wincing as her muscles screamed out in protest. Ouch. Everything hurt…
Sunny looked around, blinking the grogginess and the fatigue from her eyes. Her hooves gently tapped the… metal floor? Sunny looked closer. Yes, she was sitting on a circle of metal, which meant that she - was she in a cage?
Ignoring her throbbing headache, Sunny leapt to her hooves, her heart racing, as she tried to piece together what was going on… and then she remembered. She remembered everything.
“Oh my stars,” she whispered to herself. “It was real - I’m not dreaming. I’m not going crazy. This is real.”
She shook her head and remembered how she had been led here by some weird glowing orb all the way out here to the literal edge of the world to a strange cave, which turned out to be the home of one of her childhood heroes, and the pony she looked up to more than anypony in the world besides her father. Said pony then proceeded to have complicated feelings (Sunny could only guess from what), and a massive fight had ensued. Sunny got distracted because she thought she saw her late father’s eyes as the same as the enraged pony trying to kill her, and she had blacked out, and then reawakened in a cage.
Sunny blinked and shook her head again. “Come on, Sunny. You can do this.” She bit her lip and closed her eyes, reaching for that alicorn magic that she had found so easily earlier that day - or was it several days ago? How much time had passed? A few hours? A day? A week? A month? Were her friends going crazy with worry by now? Sunny had hurriedly left a note, saying that they should only come find her if she was gone for more than a week… Who knew how long it would be until they started tearing up Equestria looking for her?
Focus, she told herself. You have to get out of here.
But as hard as she tried, her golden wings and horn stayed dormant, not even creating so much as a glimmer of golden light. Defeated, Sunny plopped onto the floor of the cage, trying desperately to find some other string of hope she could cling to.
“There has to be a way out of here,” she whispered to herself. “There has to be. I have to get back to my friends - I can’t lose hope-”
“Hoping is pointless,” snarled another voice, and Sunny gasped, whirling around to look at the speaker as she realized that she was not alone.
Twilight Sparkle was standing with her back facing Sunny, her head bent as she stared at something on the ground between her hooves. Now that she wasn’t in a blinding rage and trying to zap Sunny with lasers (she was beginning to understand where those earth pony stereotypes of unicorns had come from), Sunny was sensing a lot less anger and a lot more… sad.
“What did you say?” Sunny said slowly, standing up and cautiously approaching the bars of the cage, intrigued and excited by the older alicorn’s presence, but apprehensive because of their earlier fight.
Twilight winced as if Sunny’s voice reminded her of something and shook her head. “I said that hoping is pointless,”she said, her voice carrying a hard edge, like somepony who had gone to hell, never really came back, and was now being told to look on the bright side. “It just hurts you in the end.”
Sunny opened her mouth to contradict, then remembered her own feelings of hopelessness when she and her friends had gone on their first quest to find the pegasus and unicorn crystals, which she thought, when reunited with each other, would bring back magic and unity between the three pony tribes, only to find that the two crystals did nothing on their own, and her own hometown had been stirred up into a miniature army, intent on destroying the ponies she had just made friends with, and how alone she had felt in that moment… But then her friends had come, and by working together, they had worked things out in the end.
“Hope doesn’t hurt you,” Sunny whispered, “it keeps you going-”
“And then it shatters when it doesn’t come true, leaving you with nothing left!” Twilight stomped one of her hooves in an agitated manner and flicked her tail angrily.
Sunny thought for a moment before saying tentatively, “But that’s what your friends are for. Even when hope doesn’t get you all the way, your friends do-”
“Believe me, I know that,” Twilight said, her voice breaking before it hardened with anger. “But what do you do when they’re gone? You hope. And you either keep hoping forever, or your hopes get dashed and leave you with nothing. And then what do you do?”
“What are you talking about?” Sunny asked, frantically repeating the story her father had told her over and over again in her head. “My dad told me about you - you have friends - you, of anypony, should know-”
“I know more than more than ponies give me credit for,” Twilight interrupted. “Of course, ponies don’t give me any credit at all anymore. But I know that friendship, powerful as it is, doesn’t last forever - something always happens that tears everything apart! Even when that friendship is the most important thing in the world to you - even after everything you’ve done - it still doesn’t save you! It still doesn’t save what you did! Everything just goes back to how it was before - it’s like nothing had ever happened!”
Twilight took a deep breath. “I had everything. I had friends. I was a princess, I had more magic than just about anypony in Equestria, the whole land was truly at peace for the first time in Celestia only knows how many centuries, and everything was perfect.
“Then…” Her eyes narrowed, her face contorted into a snarl. “Then everything fell apart. My friends… I love them so much…” Her eyes filled with tears, and so did Sunny’s at seeing her so sad. One of Sunny’s best traits (or biggest flaws, depending on who you asked) was her ability to be empathetic towards others, including ponies who tried to zap her with horn lasers. She couldn’t help it! Her quest had taught her that there was a pony behind every face - that deep down inside, everypony had feelings, had things they cared about, had reasons for what they did. So where some of her other friends might be getting increasingly angry at Twilight, Sunny only felt pity… and a whole lot of empathy.
“They were gone. I… it was too fast… before I knew it I was alone…” Twilight swallowed, forcing the tears away. “I couldn’t do it on my own. I needed my friends, I needed the hope that they gave me, but there was none anymore… I hoped that Equestria might remember them and all that they had done, but it seemed like they were moving on, forgetting about them, and so I… I couldn’t take it anymore… I left.” She looked around the cave sadly. “I came here, with a tiny spark of hope, but it was all I had, so I clung to it, hung onto it, tried to find a solution, a fix, a way to undo everything that they had done, things that I needed to fix…
“I shouldn’t have left. Equestria was my responsibility, I needed to care for them, I needed to make sure they remembered me and my friends and what we did, I needed to make sure they remembered friendship. And I failed.
“I felt like… if I just had my friends back, then everything… everything would be okay. They would help me… help me fix this. So I tried… I tried to find a way to bring them back, but I… I failed them, too. I’m just a failure. I failed Equestria, I failed my friends, I failed to keep what I stood for alive…” She wiped at her eyes, seeming to forget that Sunny was there.
“I know what it feels like to lose somepony you love,” Sunny said in a quiet voice. “It feels like… you can’t keep going… because they’re what made you want to keep going. So sometimes you stay… stuck.”
Twilight said nothing, but Sunny could sense that the alicorn agreed with her.
“But maybe you have to keep going,” Sunny continued. “Because you know that they wouldn’t want you to stay like that, trapped in the past, mourning over something that can never be fixed. They would want you to keep going, to find your destiny, to achieve their dreams, to make sure their legacy lives on in somepony…” Twilight was still silent, so Sunny tried her final argument. “Maybe you could come out into the world, help us fix what we broke, bring everything back-”
“I can’t go out into the world again!” Twilight suddenly snapped, whirling around to glare at Sunny. “Can’t you see what they’ve done? They’ve taken me - they’ve taken my friends and all they had done, and forgotten about it! Made it like it never happened! How can I help them after they’ve done all of that? The world doesn’t deserve friendship anymore - they don’t deserve magic anymore! Maybe that’s why I got rid of it in the first place!”
Sunny gasped. “You… what? You got rid of magic? That was you?”
Twilight worked her jaw and grumbled, “Yes. That was me.”
“B-but how could you?” Sunny spluttered. “Magic is amazing - sure, we used to think that it was evil, but it’s not, it can do wonderous things - surely you know that - why would you get rid of it-”
“I was trying to get them to remember friendship!” Twilight’s voice broke and quieted to a whisper. “So many times, my friends and I fought villains with no magic of our own other than the magic of friendship, and that was always enough. It was the forces of evil that took magic away, but it was the magic of friendship that always brought it back. I thought… I thought that if magic disappeared, then everypony would remember that only by working together could they bring it back, and fix everything… but it didn’t work like that.” Twilight took a deep breath. “I would have brought it back, tried something else, but I put the magic in three crystals, and I only knew where the pegasus crystal was - I needed all of them. And even without magic, things were just getting worse and worse and worse… I needed magic back so I could try and… bring my friends back… I just had to hope that, one day, it would return…”
“And it did!” Sunny said spiritedly. “We brought it back! We united ponykind again! And now you can come back and tell everypony your story again, so we can remember it-”
“The world did this to me! It reduced me to what I am - you expect me to help them? They deserve all of this! They took everything!”
“There are good ponies, though, too,” Sunny whispered, “who just didn’t know what to fight for-”
“There’s nothing left to fight for!” Twilight approached the cage, her eyes flashing. “And I won’t help them! They don’t deserve it! Not after everything they took from me, after everything that I gave them!”
She slammed her hooves against the bars of the cage, and Sunny’s teary eyes widened. For a moment they stood like that, alicorn and earth pony, tears streaming down Sunny’s cheeks, Twilight’s chest heaving with anger.
“You’re nothing like I imagined,” Sunny whispered.