Sunset Shimmer was a shadow of her former self. Her own grieving breathing filled her ears. Reedy. Gasping. She couldn’t see ahead of her, only as far as she could reach. Sunset staggered forward. She grabbed blindly. Reaching. Until she found the handle of the door to run, to stop King Sombra, to leave this dimension through the portal for the last time and to never look back.
She opened it.
Sunset tried to run to the portal and tumbled off the edge.
Plummeting, her mind raced to explain the wind whipping around her. Her vision cleared to see the counselling office door frame suspended in isolation above her dress shoes and shrinking up and away. Screaming in someone else’s voice, Sunset anticipated a crushing splatting pain unlike any she’d ever survived.
She twisted and grasped at empty air.
The fall lasted so much longer than she could stand and happened so much faster than she could think.
Her body hit the ground and the sound echoed in the high chambers around her. The closest comparison she could make was the sound of someone slamming the dumpster door in the alley outside her apartment.
Sunset felt... a dreamlike lack of pain. Where was the earth-shattering ka-boom? She wondered if she was too in shock to feel the pain upon impact. Or, if she wouldn’t feel any pain ever again after that fall.
She sat up and examined her body to check for any sign of life or injury. Had she just killed Solstice by accident? Oddly, she saw her own body, unharmed, but a strange unbalanced weight on her back startled her.
Standing, Sunset screamed when she found two large, leathery, batlike wings extending from new holes in her leather jacket. Red, like they’d been badly burned.
Sunset staggered back, noticing the markings carved into the stone at her feet. Candles laid to rest in procession encircling a pattern, and the flickering flames gave off just enough light for her to see what the design really was: her cutie mark.
“What the hell?” she murmured, heart pulling double-shift.
Don’t be scared. You’re playing right into his trap, she thought. King Sombra deals in fear magic. If this is some kind of smoke and mirrors horror-show—it has to be—he’s feeding off you. Get it together.
A sense of doom pressed down on her. Equestria… my friends… they’re all in danger now. I put them in danger. I’m dangerous—No, stop it, that isn’t helping. I have to… I have to create a counter-spell to whatever fear magic he cursed on me. How do I do that from inside the curse?
Looking around, she was met with great rocky chambers. The cool, sealed-in air this far under the earth made her lungs feel snug in her chest, as if they’d gotten stuck in a narrow passageway. The most she could hear was the dripping of water from great hanging stalactites to their stalagmite brethren below: drool off the chops of a snaggle-toothed beast immortalized mid-bite.
Only the occasional far off echo reached her, and by the time it got to her, she couldn’t tell who or what could have made those noises.
All else was lost to darkness.
“Sunset Celestial Shimmer.”
The voice boomed, reverberated through stone and up her spine alike. Ahead of her, twin stars burned into existence and a larger-than-life figure surfaced from shadow: Princess Celestia, cloaked in white robes and her eyes aglow in a supernatural celestial dawn.
Sunset’s eyebrows lifted and she took a step towards her. “Princess?”
Her foot snagged. She looked down to find heavy chains clamped around her ankles. Her hands had likewise been handcuffed by a wooden board. She struggled, claustrophobia setting in. Don’t be scared! Stop! You’re letting him win!
“There is no escape,” a new voice told her. “No solace or new worlds. No refuge. Nowhere left to run.”
Princess Luna emerged in deep blue robes, just as much of a giantess as her sister beside her. Her eyes burned, too: a pale moonbeam glow. Sunset could hear inversions of the younger princess’s laugh bouncing from far-off rock, a nightmarish sound that haunted her dreams as a foal.
My friends are in more danger the longer I’m here. Sunset gripped her hands into fists and assumed a battle-ready stance. “I know you’re not real. You can’t scare me. I’m not weak.”
“Your strength has no bearing here. You have no fights left to win or lose, runaway,” Princess Twilight’s voice apologized. She, too, came out of the darkness with eyes lit by harmonic light, but unlike the others, she stood in mourning by a large hourglass engraved with Sunset’s full name. The sand had long since stopped its fall, still. At rest. “Your destiny ran its course. This is your destination. You’ve reached your Time’s End.”
Shaking her head took more effort than she thought it should. The energy she’d normally have in excess, renewed each night by sleep and each day by the joys of life with her friends, was running low. Rigor mortis stiffened her cold body. “No…”
Would her friends be worried about her? Would they come looking for her? Would they even be able to find her? Sunset realized she couldn’t rely on her friends to save her from this terrible curse. No more burdens on them.
Despite her trembling, Sunset tried to push more strength into her voice. “No, I haven’t. You’re specters, magical projections—you aren’t real. You can’t be, you... You’re not the princesses!”
“We have no true faces. We shift. We take shapes your mind can understand,” Luna told her. A volley of her warped laughter ricocheted around. “Our names change by different tongues: Norns. Parcae. Fates.”
… Fates? Sunset’s eyebrows raised as a ghastly fog crept in, low to the ground, not unlike the mist crawling over the grounds of a graveyard.
The Fate stealing Princess Celestia’s body nodded, as if she could hear into Sunset’s mind. “This is your final Judgement. Your heart will be weighed and your soul sentenced to eternity. The life you knew is gone.”
“N-no, my body’s still up there,” Sunset said, choking, shivering. The heat in her bones drained. “A demon stole my body, he’s using it to—”
“Shhh…” Princess Celestia bent a wing down to cup Sunset’s cheek, almost cooing. “What you want to go back to doesn’t belong to you anymore. Your body is an instrument now, just not yours. The ruined coronation? The lost lives? The prison sentence in the castle dungeons? That, too, is destined.”
As she spoke, Sunset saw flares in the darkness behind her, bright then fading like fireworks: images of King Sombra’s acts of terrorism. Sentencing in the high court. What looked like Sunset in the Canterlot Castle dungeons, cell bars clanking shut in front of her at long last.
Straightening, Princess Celestia smiled down at her. “Oh, little sun, no. Bodies are earthly things. Your soul’s time has ended.”
Shaking her head, Sunset trembled in her refrigerated body. “... take me back. I want to go back.”
“There is no turning back, it’s over now,” the Fate Luna said. “No return.”
“No restart,” Fate Twilight said.
“I want my life back. I’m not done yet,” Sunset said, voice pinching her throat. The air was harder to draw.
“Life’s already gone on without you,” the Fate Twilight told her. “Why wouldn’t it? The universe has no use for you.”
Don’t be scared, she thought, everybody dies eventually.
But then, Sunset Shimmer would never graduate with her friends. She’d never shake the principals’ and the counsellor’s hands at the podium, and dammit, what if she never got that second tattoo? What if she never made love to her girlfriend, or watched her win awards and go to college, and what if they would’ve gotten married?
She’d never get to meet who her friends would become.
She’d never see the world or find her purpose in it. Or make a family. Or go back home, and call it that, and tell Princess Celestia everything that went without saying between them because what if it didn’t go without saying? What if she could’ve had a mom?
What if she had a family?
The Fate Princess Celestia raised her chin. “Sunset Shimmer: Are you righteous or wicked?”
Sunset watched as reflections of her life played in their eyes. They saw everything. At first, slow and in order, then at a terrible speed, the noises blaring all at once in the caverns around her. The sound of it reminded her of every voice she’d heard when Flash projected her feelings onto the school, and in return, she heard everyone’s thoughts. Loud, complex, and incomprehensible.
The only noise she could pick out beneath it all was a steady booming thud. A heartbeat.
Then, a final memory: collapsing onto the floor of the counselling office in the body of Solstice Shiver, the snow and cold avalanching onto her until she shut her eyes and—
Darkness.
Quiet.
Luna’s nightmare laugh echoed around her and Sunset trembled out in the open.
“Interesting...” the Fate Princess Celestia hummed, like a counsellor writing notes. “This was not the End designed for you.”
The Fate masked as Princess Luna angled her head strangely. “Disturbing,” she agreed. “Unseen. Unknown.”
“I see... many unknowns,” the Fate Princess Twilight gasped. “No future! No path! A destiny forsaken!”
“No matter,” Princess Celestia told them, a wing raised. “Judgement has been passed. Sunset Shimmer, for your cruelty, pride, wrath, hunger for power and desire to rule the world, and the burdens wrought on those around you by your hand, your true nature is… wicked. You are sentenced to the Pits of Tartarus.”
Cinders floated up from the ground around Sunset’s demonic wings. Flames ate at her, rising from her cutie mark and Sunset struggled with all the energy she had left. “No! No, you know me! I’m good! I’ve changed!”
Princess Luna bent her neck the other way, summoning more of that laughter. “I sense… an empathetic heart. Kindness, humility, understanding. Relinquished power. Burdens lifted. Intentions good and true. Love for others and self-sacrifice. Hero.” She righted her head. “Your true nature is… righteous. Elysium awaits your arrival.”
Above Sunset, a heavenly light opened up like clouds parting after a storm. She stared up at it in wonder—a peaceful content overcoming her that felt… so, so nice—and found herself floating upwards until she slowed to a stop mid-air, her chains still holding on tight. One of her wings transformed, growing long white plumes.
“So… which is it?” Sunset looked above and below her, at clouds and flames, her mind racing. “What am I?”
All eyes cast towards Princess Twilight.
The Fate stalked the ground, pacing. Her hoofsteps clacked and the caverns’ echoic acoustics spoke legends of their importance. Princess Twilight paced in one direction, then the other. “I see fear and... complexity. I sense a fate escaped, a mark forgotten. I see suffering caused, but also reform and healing. I see a world of undiscovered purpose. Young powder kegs, fuses lit by otherworldly magic. And I see… a world never meant for this. No fates written! No Sunset Shimmer! Invented portals! Invented lives!” Princess Twilight buried her head in her hooves. “I sense… no resolution.”
Sunset stared. “... What?”
Princess Twilight hung her head apologetically. “I sense no—”
“No, what do you mean ‘no resolution’? Aren’t you some… all-knowing weavers of fate??? You’re supposed to know who I really am at my core! You designed my destiny! But none of you know the real me—all of me.” Sunset Shimmer’s eyes widened. “Only I do.”
The Fate Princess Celestia leaned forward. “Sunset Celestial Shimmer—”
“I’m righteous and wicked. I’ve got the potential for both!” Sunset laughed in her chains. She let the sound of it fill the chambers at Time’s End. “I am both. An angel, a demon, a bad girl, a best friend—and I fuck up. A lot. I’m stubborn, I’m scared of the dark inside myself and people knowing it's there, and I don’t know how to deal with my feelings even after helping everyone else with theirs. And I also do a lot of good! I’m a little kinder, more empathetic, and more loving every day.” A smile pushed upon her lips. “But, my friends know all that already.”
The Fate acting as Princess Luna bent her neck to a quizzical angle. “Paradox!”
Sunset smirked. “Yeah, but... that’s the life I chose. I’m not the pony destined to save Equestria and maybe... that’s… maybe that’s okay.” Floating in a chamber at the end of time never felt so wide open. Scarily empty, but also free. One of those maybe things. “I can go my own way. I’m a regular old unicorn not destined for anything anymore. I’m a mess of contradictions and accidents and choices I get to make! That’s what makes me so cool,” she said, letting them in on a secret. Her secret weapon. “I’m human, too.”
Rebelling against the Fates, Sunset broke the chains holding her back. She flipped them off while she was at it. A very human thing to do, she decided.
The Fates did not appreciate that very human gesture.
Flying on her uneven wings, Sunset hovered at their unnatural height. “I’m not done up there. I have friends to help. When I die—”
“Which will be soon,” Luna told her, and Sunset thought that was a petty thing to say.
“When my time’s really up, you can judge my choices and paradoxes then.” Sunset grinned, shaken to the core with fear and… Celestia damned excitement. “Not before.”
Before Sunset found herself in total darkness and left that timeless place, she thought she saw the princesses smile. Maybe that was her imagination.
Then, her vision began to clear, and gasping for air, she could see the counselling office she’d been so afraid of materializing around her. The purple couch, the frozen clock, and tickets and their promise left unfulfilled on the desk. She also found that she’d returned to Solstice Shiver’s body and it took her way too long to realize she’d never left it.
Sunset gasped. “The girls! The guys! Solstice! Oh shit! Why the hell did that take me so long?!”
Hesitating only to handle the door handle through her sleeve, Sunset Shimmer ran toward her friends.
The other side of the door, thankfully, wasn’t a steep drop to the underworld. But it did lead her to a hauntingly empty hall. Her friends' chairs had long been abandoned, Timber’s overturned.
“No, no, no…” she murmured, and Sunset raced through the halls.
Every classroom on the main level froze shut. The cafeteria, the gym—all of it empty during class time and filled with snow. She could see her own breath as she panted. A cold she couldn’t feel the way she normally would, she noticed. Rounding the corner, she slid and skidded on ice but didn’t slow until she saw it: the front entrance.
Sunset blasted her way through the double doors at the school’s front entrance to find Sunset Shimmer about to start a new life in another dimension under a new name to avoid her feelings. Again.
All eight of her friends gathered around the portal. The demon who stole Sunset’s face wasn’t listening to their pleas, steps away from Equestria. Steps away from closing the portal. All he was missing was a sledgehammer and a crown.
Fighting against the biting cold, Sunset barreled through the tundra of a schoolyard, pushed past her crowding friends, bursting through, and latched onto the demon’s popped collar before it could sink through the rippling depths of the portal.
“No, you goddamn don’t!” Sunset wrenched her possessed form back into the human world by force, scowling. “Girls, listen to me, this jackass isn’t Sunset Shimmer!” she said, yanking the glaring demon up by the collar, who hissed at her, then pressed a hand to her chest earnestly: “This jackass is. Long story short, Solstice went full demon and tricked me into swapping with him. Quick, pony up! Maybe we can switch back! Help me hold him down!”
When none of them rushed to her side, Sunset looked up. “Girls?”
Her heart ached, engorged like frost-bitten fingers. Her friends stared back at her, their faces streaked with tears and flushed red, and it only just now occurred to Sunset that her friends hadn’t been racing to stop who they thought was Sunset Shimmer from leaving.
Face drawn and flush, Fluttershy held her heart like the thing attacked her from the inside. “Oh, thank goodness,” she sniffled. “If that’s not you, does that mean you weren’t planning on leaving us forever without saying goodbye?”
Sunset’s stomach plummeted back down to the depths of the underworld.
The air froze the moment, so still it couldn’t be breathed. Applejack waited like an oak, hands on her hips, but the vulnerability in her face destroyed any hope of strength. Pinkie became so small, so quiet, cheeks shining. Flash’s eyebrows seized together over his watery eyes. Timber just wouldn’t look at her.
Sunset glowered back at the grinning demon, who seemed to be savouring every second, wrenching him toward her. Her fist clenched at her side. “What did you tell my friends?”
“I told our friends,” Twilight spoke up, her tone like a storm thundering through a forest.
Sunset looked up, rage slipping.
Flush pink brought out the green in her girlfriend’s eyes. All the colour in her face had pooled around those eyes and across her nose to the tips of her ears. She’d never seen a crying person look so much like Timber Spruce.
Holding herself in the cold, Twilight stepped toward Sunset and her demon. “I’ve been so worried about you. You sound so stressed and fatalistic. All your cute little jokes are just digs at yourself now.”
Sunset’s grimace felt heavy on her face.
“I knew you weren’t doing well, a-and I wanted to be there for you like you’ve been there for me! But then, nothing seemed to work and you started talking about exiling yourself like you deserved to be alone.” Her voice snagged in her throat, but she kept rambling, kept babbling, “And I knew what you were going to do because I’ve isolated myself before too but I didn’t know how to help—I couldn’t know, I couldn’t ask you, you weren’t yourself—”
“Yeah, I know, because I’m me.” Sunset twisted the demon’s hands behind his back and painfully.
Twilight stared. “Sunset, you haven’t been yourself since before your road trip.” She wiped underneath her eye before the cold could freeze the tears to her cheeks. Despite that, Twilight pushed her chest out, her chin up, and stood firm. “Your friends at least deserved a goodbye. And you deserved a chance to change your mind. So I got help. Pinkie and the girls painted a banner, I think it’s still hanging in the band room; you kind of ran into the middle of your own intervention.”
“You… planned an intervention for me?”
Sunset was reminded, then, that she’d thought about potentially marrying this girl on a far off someday. That she’d been worried that she’d never live to see their wedding.
Not right away. Celestia, no, not right away. There was too much Sunset wanted to experience together first to just skip ahead like the everyday moments didn’t matter (they were, in her estimation, the whole point).
Towards the end of their twenties, maybe—if they lived that far, if it made sense, if they both wanted that—she wasn’t in a rush. But she found herself thinking about the ifs. Even now that she wasn’t terrified for the fate of her soul, the ifs held sway. Surrounded by friends and family, vowing hand to whoever would listen to do the hard work of loving each other every day. And then, a messy life of everydays ever after, together.
She’d never taken those daydreams seriously before now. She just assumed that imagining how to propose some years down the road, making jokes about Twilight being her missus to make her girlfriend blush, or dreaming about spending their lives working together as more than just lab partners was the honeymoon stage of their puppy love high school sweethearts relationship, and hell, maybe it was. Maybe she was being ridiculous, and too young to know better, but dammit.
Dammit.
The demon in Sunset’s grasp cackled along to his own mania at her, in her own voice, stealing the hint of a dumb smile on Sunset’s face. “Yes, your little intervention was adorable! Pathetically pointless and pointlessly pathetic, but adorable. Truly, sentimentality at its finest!” Sunset got the sense that he would have literally applauded them if he had his hands, the dick. He also spoke too loud, as though projecting his voice to the back of a theatre.
“Everything’s okay now, girls, I’m here.” Sunset looked to the boys. “Come on, we can still fix this, please. Help me swap everyone back.”
There was a pause, a hesitancy, as the boys exchanged some look Sunset couldn’t decipher, but they came over all the same. The chuckling demon underscored their footsteps in the snow. Sunset offered out her free hand to Timber, who looked at it like he was being offered a deal by the devil. “Ready for things to go back to normal?” Her eyebrows tightened over her eyes. “... please.”
Timber answered by taking her hand. He still wouldn’t meet her eyes. Sunset decided she’d kick the demon’s ass into the snow when this was over.
Judging by that laugh, the demon must have had similar intentions for her. The demon leered at her with fangs poking past his lips and black swallowing the whites of his eyes. Sunset got the sense Sunset Shimmer felt delighted for anyone who would have to deal with her emotions. A primal urge to run stoked the fire in Sunset’s stomach, but she held on as tight as she could manage.
Much like before, Sunset could feel the warmth of her magic spreading down the veins of her arm, like blood rushing toward a wound. She kept looking for Timber’s eyes, for that undeniable smirk, something, but all she found was resignation and icy winds playing with his hair.
Thanks to Flash, the magic exploded outwards, blowing back a flurry of snow.
But Sunset didn’t feel vertigo. Nothing spun. The same cold wind hit her back.
A flashbang of fear shot up in her chest. After everything, how could it not work? Her friends needed her to fix what she broke, they needed their normal back. She felt uniquely disgusted with herself thinking about paying them back for all their warmth and sweetness by keeping them prisoner in each other’s bodies. They didn’t deserve prison sentences the way Sunset did—or used to think she did. Positive self-talk, Solstice would want me to have positive self-talk.
Moments later, she saw her friends clutching at their heads, or rubbing their eyes. Checking their hands, feeling their faces. A cold breath froze solid in her chest.
The person in Twilight’s body next to her, holding her hand, finally met her eyes and Sunset knew that wasn’t Timber Spruce anymore. Worry and love waited there. “Sunset…”
Sunset laughed, tearing up but keeping it together as much as possible. “You’re you. Thank Celestia, you’re you!” She so desperately wanted to at least hug her girlfriend that she almost let go of the demon in her arms.
Flash, on the other hand, had no demons holding him back. As soon as he realized he and his boyfriend were themselves again, at long, long last themselves, he couldn’t get there fast enough. And Sunset wasn’t a bashful person in the slightest, but even she got the sense she should turn away when Flash and Timber kissed for the first time in weeks. Deeply and passionately enough that magical sparks lit up around them: fireflies in stage-lights.
Flash even managed to pull a smile from Timber’s lips when he parted to say, “Unpause?”
Not that Sunset was violently jealous that she couldn’t do the same with her girlfriend. Nope. She pushed that aside like so many other emotions before it. Instead, Sunset beamed to the rest of her friends (only partly to avoid snooping on the sweet nothings the boys were whispering to each other). “We did it! Is everyone else back, too?”
Her friends nodded, muttering affirmations. Fluttershy rubbed her arm. Dash re-messed up her own hair after Rarity had brushed it that morning. Applejack kicked at the snowy ground with her cowboy boot.
Sunset frowned, gripping the demon her closer. “C’mon, where’s the party, huh? Nothing?”
The fact that they celebrated more when they heard about Princess Twilight’s second coronation made logical sense—Sunset’s friends were certifiable sweethearts—but she didn’t think they were that selfless that they wouldn’t be happy for themselves. They deserved to be! She tried to elbow Pinkie in a look even though her arms were otherwise occupied. “No party senses?”
Pinkie Pie’s big blue eyes teared up, and after a pause, in a quiet voice she said, “You didn’t even let me throw you a goodbye party.”
The demon laughed in Sunset’s voice. “Oh, this is too perfect. I, your greatest rival, have usurped your precious Shimmer! But my brand of evil is nothing compared to hers! The real Sunset Shimmer planned to break your hearts all along! How deliciously maniacal!”
“I—” Sunset cursed internally. And externally: “You dick.”
Still just barely holding back a wracking sob, Pinkie Pie hugged herself against the cold. “Sunset Shimmer!”
“Present and accounted for,” the demon in her grasp murmured as though it was terribly difficult to hold in a laugh.
“Please, talk to us,” Fluttershy begged.
“What’s gotten into you?” Applejack demanded. “You don’t run out on family!”
“That was your solution?” Rarity unfolded herself from the safety of Applejack’s arms. “To leave us behind without so much as a word of goodbye? Sunset, you must understand how much that hurt us to hear. We love you. Apparently more dearly than you know.” Rarity’s eyes filled again. “But how much could we possibly mean to you if that’s how you planned to exit our lives?”
That started Flash crying again. Timber put an arm around him, glaring at a snowbank by the sidewalk.
“You mean everything to me.” Sunset saw her friends blur, but forced herself to keep composure. “That’s why I thought I had to go.”
Even though the voice she had now was much deeper than her own, it bottomed out and got raspy when things threatened to get emotional like hers. She huffed pathetically. “I wanted to keep you safe from all the magic I brought here and let you have normal teenage lives again.”
The response to that was seething breath. Rainbow Dash’s eyes stung with tears as she glared down one of her best friends. “Fuck. You.”
Sunset blanched. “I’m… I’m so sorry, I—”
“No, shut up! Fuck you for thinking you couldn’t rely on your friends! We love you, shit-for-brains! We’ve been right here the whole damn time! We kept trying to see what your deal was and ask what’s up, and you kept shoving us off, saying you’d figure out this swap junk solo but you were just ditching to beat yourself up! That’s messed up enough but then you think I’d let you leave forever with no goodbye? Fuck that!”
Her voice cracks echoed on the empty streets.
“If you think I’m gonna let you do that to yourself, it’s a damn good thing I know which one of you feels what ‘cause—” She swiped her own eyes in a harsh movement and rose a fist. “I’m gonna kick your ass, Shimmer!”
Rainbow Dash rushed in.
Sunset didn’t have time. Her mind had only just started to grapple with which one of them Dash was going in to punch when the demon’s hands turned to shadow, evaporating from her grasp.
He moved faster than she could scream, faster than Dash’s eyes widened, and when those hands solidified in a blink, they’d turned to red, demonic claws. Rainbow Dash howled as the demon’s claws raked into her.
“Rainbow Dash!”
In quick succession, Sunset’s friends rushed toward Rainbow and the demon, but the demon disappeared into the thin air—the shadow cast from the base of the Wondercolt statue. Sunset realized he’d only ever been letting her hold him back to charge his power. She cursed herself for not realizing it when she saw the change in his eyes.
Sunset shot down to her knees next to Dash on the icy pavement, paling. Feeling sick and holding it back, she couldn’t tell what to be more scared of. The depths of multi-pronged rip through the lightning design on Rainbow’s shirt or the tear across Dash’s left eye that she might never see out of again.
“Twi!” Sunset called. “Twilight!”
She didn’t need to explain. Her girlfriend grabbed Sunset’s hand over their friend’s body and placed it on Rainbow’s eye, who screamed. Applejack and Fluttershy each grabbed one of her hands and Dash mewled appreciatively.
Despite the sound of their friend suffering, despite not knowing where the demon would be next, Sunset heard her girlfriend say, “Sunny, look at me.”
Sunset did. She saw the person who understood her better than anyone. She saw her best friend. I’m going to marry that girl someday. She pressed her forehead to Twilight’s, focusing all she could on her and how they wanted to understand Rainbow’s pain.
In seconds after the warmth of the magic bled through her arm, Sunset heard her girlfriend wince and Sunset bit down on her tongue to avoid whimpering, too. A searing pain over her left eye nearly shattered her concentration. She gripped Twilight’s hand harder. She felt Twilight’s hand tremble in her own.
And then, Sunset felt the burning pain cool off. She hazarded a look. Both of Dash’s bright pink eyes stared up at her as the gash over her left eye sealed itself and formed a scar.
Sunset’s eyes reached Twilight’s. Judging by the look, Twilight had come to the same conclusion she had: there were limits to what their healing could do. If one of their friends was on the edge of death, trying to heal them would only bring both of them there, too.
“There!” Flash shouted to the remaining girls.
The form of the Sunset Shimmer swung back around from the depths of the shadow cast by the school’s left wing, right by the front entrance. Right where Sunset herself transformed over a year ago.
“Sunset,” Twilight said. “One more, we need to stop the bleeding. Don’t look at him, the others can do that. Focus on me.”
“The first step of first aid is to not panic,” Timber instructed, kneeling down in the snow next to them. “I think that still applies when there are demons.”
While her other friends raced toward Sunset Shimmer’s cackling voice, Sunset paled at the job still ahead of her. She felt her stomach already bracing for the impending pain, like she was sucking in to get her jeans on. Twilight bit her lip while eying the gashes, too. Dash’s little seething breath was minimal, likely to move as little as possible, and her wet, dull eyes flashed up at both of them. “Do it.”
The second healing process was so much harder than the first.
Sunset swore—Twilight swore, which Sunset couldn’t remember hearing before—and she nearly passed out from the slicing in her stomach, but they had to close the wound.
By the time they were done, they’d sapped so much of their energy, too much, and scars on Dash’s abdomen looked permanent. Sunset hoped not but she didn’t see those fading any time soon.
Sunset wanted to collapse back against the cold stone statue and rest a little (fainting all the way to Equestria didn’t sound so bad…), but they didn’t have time for that. Instead, she and Twilight brought Rainbow Dash shakily to her feet. Who helped who up was up for debate.
Regardless of how, holding each other up, they watched Sunset Shimmer transform. Ascending, a horribly familiar cackling rippled through the blizzarding air. Powerful wings ripped from his back. Flames flourished bright, and ate away at his flesh until it was red-meat raw. Sunset was horrified to find out that her demon form looked just as undeniably like her as it had in Juniper’s video, as the smirk she’d seen for years in the mirror overflowed with slicing teeth.
Sunset watched Sunset Shimmer rise to power in the courtyard of Canterlot High. Sunset Shimmer would never rule the world, but she could destroy this piece of it.
Her knees trembled as she stumbled backwards, panting. “No… no…”
Dash numbly grasped at the claw marked torn through her shirt to find a healed, but likely still tender torso. “We… we still have to fight that guy…”
“Not fight,” Sunset said, almost too fast, too urgently. She grimaced up at her demon self. It took everything she had just to tear her eyes away from the train wreck she used to be, the sound of her own laugh brutalizing the air, drawing the attention of terrified students from the windows of the classrooms. Sombra made good on his promise: Everyone would see who she really was. “Solstice is in there somewhere. We just have to keep him away from the portal. He can’t get through.”
“Okay, so. Defend Equestria from evil magic…” Rainbow Dash grunted through a pained smile. “Sounds like a good Thursday.”
Sunset smiled back as her friends gathered around her. The winter winds whipped, but they faced the cold, together.
The girls reached for their geodes, and Sunset did the same, expecting a surge of good feelings. The kind of good feelings like when she and the girls stayed up late at Pinkie’s house on a Friday night, three pizzas deep into a binge-watch where nothing mattered more than whatever dumb commentary they made and whatever late night conversations came out of it. That good.
And looking around at her superpowered friends, ready for anything with their little pony ears and powers, Sunset knew she could win if she had them. If they had each other.
That was, of course, assuming they could all power up.
But Sunset didn’t have her geode. Sunset Shimmer did.
Not only that, but Rainbow Dash gawked at the demon in the sky, clutching her geode, but nothing happened. No ears, wings, or tails. No magical flourish and strangely fashionable accessories. She just stared.
Applejack nudged her. “Uh, Rainbow Dash? You still with us, hon?”
“O-oh, yeah, totally!” Rainbow palmed her geode, turning from the demon and shielding her eyes. “Just gimme a minute…”
This unfortunately pleased the demon king greatly. Sombra snarled a chuckle. “I must admit, this has been quaint, but I’ve really got somewhere to be. A King deserves a throne! Unless you’d prefer to be part of my royal procession, your best chance of survival is to run. As the current Sunset Shimmer, I’m an expert on the subject!”
Sunset gritted her teeth, still shaking off the dizziness of using that much magic.
When they didn’t move, the demon king hummed. “Oh, that’s right. You fancy yourselves heroes here, don’t you? Bravery won’t guarantee you shinier tombstones, children.” He powered up his claws with a sickly teal and black magic and held the slowly swelling projectile over his head, a sensation Sunset remembered so well her fingers twitched at her sides. “I’ll kill you where you stand.”
If this demon was anything like she had been at the Fall Formal, Sunset knew it wasn’t a bluff. She could remember the moment she herself decided on killing Princess Twilight and her little friends for getting in her way. Something Sunset had never told anyone before or since.
Twilight held out her arm in front of Timber and Flash while she kept her eyes on the demonic form of her girlfriend. “Don’t worry about us,” she told them, “The magic of friendship always wins in the end! Get yourselves to safety!”
The boys balked at her, not that Twilight saw.
“Flash, get Timber out of here. There isn’t a clear path back into the school, but if you get around to the staff parking lot, you can still take Timber’s jeep and get distance!”
Flash faltered. “But…”
If asked, Sunset could have pinpointed the second when something snapped in Timber like kindling. A huff of air could be seen escaping his mouth in the cold. “... The magic of friendship?”
Twilight chanced a look over her shoulder to them. “Really, I’m serious, you need to go now! Sunset and I can only heal so much and you don’t know how much damage King Sombra can do! It’s okay, you can leave. We’ll be alright. We’ve got magic.”
“So do we.” Timber tried to laugh, but it stuttered to a stop like a dying engine in the dead of winter, stranded in the middle of the backroads. He massaged the migraine building behind his brow. “You don’t think we’re a part of this, too?”
Twilight waved her hands. “I didn’t say you’re not a part of this! You’re a part of this! The safe part! If you want, you can use your magic and teleport your part away!”
The demon roared, a sound so loud the glass vibrated in the windows. The dark magic in his hands ballooned. “Flee now or I will devour your souls, children!”
Twilight blanched and pushed Timber and Flash backwards by the chests. “I need you to go now! Flash, get him out of here!”
Flash looked between Twilight and Timber, as if he couldn’t decide who needed his help more.
Sunset knew the girls didn’t have time. The school didn’t. The sight of the demon’s claws raking the third floor windows knowing those were her hands pressed down on her chest. “Girls, go!”
Her friends raced ahead to fight the body of their best friend. Sunset and Twilight would have joined them if the boys weren’t disobeying direct orders.
Timber stamped his foot into the snow and pushed out his chest. “That doesn’t make sense. I can teleport, Flash can boost all our powers—we have every right to help here! You’re contradicting yourself again and I know what that means!” Tears spiked the sides of his eyes, and he stared, shivering breath hanging in the air, before firing up to shout, “Don’t treat me like I’m an idiot!”
Twilight looked at him like she knew she had a bomb to defuse in her lab and had to consider the wires colour-blind. “I… I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be hurtful, but magic is emotional, and I don’t know what our magic is going to do if—”
“Oh magic? You’re going to blame it on magic again? That’s why you’re not going to talk to me like a person?” His eyebrows squeezed together. The forest green of his eyes misted over like a torrential downpour. He swayed there a moment, glaring to the side, then back at her as the tears rained quietly. “Who made you the princess of anything?”
Twilight intook air without a sound, chest rising. Her eyes filled without breaking eye contact as her grimace fought to change into a glare.
Timber swayed, breath on the air.
Flash tugged on Timber’s arm, mumbling, “We should go.”
“Who hasn’t?!” Twilight threw her hands out. Sunset flinched beside her. She couldn’t remember hearing Twilight’s voice break apart that loudly. “Everyone wants me to be her! Everyone’s wanted that since I transferred here from Crystal Prep! You were the only one who didn’t!”
Sunset put a hand on her girlfriend’s shoulder. “Twilight—”
“The universe wants me to become Princess Supreme of the Magic in this world so I’m sorry if trying to keep you safe from me is so inconvenient for you, but yes, evidently I am.” Twilight leaned forward, stabbing a hand into her chest. “You want magic? Fine! Good! But maybe I actually do know better and maybe I was doing the best I could to help you and maybe if you just let me and talked to me we wouldn’t have broken up!”
When Sunset looked back she saw smoke billowing out from her girlfriend’s glasses. And up from the sides of Timber’s eyes. Their heaving breath hung in the frigid air between them. Timber and Twilight stopped talking.
“Okay, no, you two have to stop,” Sunset said, her mouth drying out. She could see Flash looking to her for any kind of guidance on how to help them, nodding with her. “Everybody just… take… a breath.”
King Sombra didn’t give them the time. With the ball of growing magical energy in hand, the demon in the school courtyard dive-bombed toward them. Sunset screamed, “Look out!”
The four of them rushed to get out of the way, the others scrambling to stage any kind of defense to save the open, waiting portal.
Quick as ever, shouting, Rarity brandished a shield and Applejack launched her with enough momentum to block him from getting near the portal.
At least, Sunset thought they would block his attack.
Instead, Sombra angled his wings and dove even lower, aiming himself at the pavement, and disappeared into Rarity’s shadow.
Sunset lost the wind in her lungs, whipping around to try to see where the demon would unearth. She’d lost so much visibility in the blizzard. The school stood defenseless against a lost and void-like skyline.
The schoolyard had all but become a tundra around them. Windswept snow swirled in dervishes off of rooftops and mounds on the ground. Weighty tree branches across the street bent and swung in brutal winds. The flag raised on the school’s lone clocktower beat itself in a wild, inconsolable fashion.
Then, emerging from the shadow of the long-broken Wondercolt statue, King Sombra bared his teeth in a beastly smile and struck his two victims with a burst of dark magic.
Sunset never hated seeing Sunset Shimmer next to her girlfriend and best friend so intensely.
The pitch black shadows from depths unknown swallowed her friends, imploding on them. Their bodies could be seen in an uncanny silhouette, shadows brought to the third dimension, screaming. Flash, likely not knowing what else to do, latched onto his boyfriend. “Timber! I’m here!”
The first, a horrible memory, came to light. Bright teal eyes flared with purple pupils, ringed in blue Bunsen burner flames.
Midnight Sparkle flourished her wings, bursting forth from the darkness to fly in a cackling ascent in the snowstorm.
“Twilight!” The word ripped out of Sunset’s throat, joining her friends’ voices who shouted the same.
The demon goddess cracked a crick in her neck, arms over head, and grinned. “Finally! That great mind of hers has been a playground compared to this!”
Around then—which was hard to gauge because Sunset had been focused on Midnight—Timber’s silhouette disappeared entirely, turning to smoke in Flash’s arms. The raw horror settled over Flash’s face.
King Sombra barked a laugh at Midnight Sparkle. “There she is! At last! I’ve heard ever so much about you!” He leapt into the air on his batlike wings to extend a clawed hand and a cloying smile. “Join me, Midnight Sparkle. Together, we can destroy the nation of Equestria and reap the power of its fear for our own! Think of it! A new magic unlike any you’ve ever seen before…”
Midnight dodged the hand skillfully and aimed a cruel smirk back. “Join you? Ha! The failed megalomaniac? The daydream angel? The girlfriend? I know exactly who you are, Sunset Shimmer, and this time, I won’t let you distract me! I’m not here for you.” She lost her smile, glaring ahead with narrowed eyes. “I’m here for him.”
Sunset frowned and followed her gaze to the roof of the school and screamed as the clocktower came crashing through the sky at Midnight. Backing up, she could finally get a look at who Midnight was glaring down: a trickster figure she’d never seen before. Elven ears that stuck out past his curls, a false smile, and an ashen complexion broken by a crack across his chest revealing a wildfire flickering inside like a lightning-struck tree, burning from the inside out.
Cinder Spruce snickered on the roof of the school. “Time’s up,” he said, and somewhere below Rainbow Dash groaned. “Look who has some of your precious magic now.” His smile dropped into a grimace. “I want to hear you say it.”
He took a running leap from the roof of the school and before he could hit the ground disappeared into a burst of flame. Moments later, another burst propelled him and all his fire and momentum colliding into her. Midnight screamed and shot him away with a burst of projectile magic, but not without singeing her skin. “Magic is mine to understand! You’ll just get hurt!”
Cinder impacted the bricks of the school by the second floor windows. Sunset could see Scootaloo and the other junior students fleeing back from the windows. She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Twilight, you have to stop!”
Flash took the chance to agree. “Timber! Listen to me! It’s going to be okay!”
“Stay out of this, hot stuff,” Cinder seethed, the fire in his chest flaring, and let himself fall again. This time he reappeared in a burst of flames above Midnight Sparkle, tackling her into another fiery portal below both of them. Next thing Sunset saw, the two of them reappeared in the sky behind the school.
Sunset looked at Flash, their short hair whipping in the bitter wind. “We have to get through to them! They’re going to tear each other apart!”
“What about King Sombra?” Flash panted, eyeing the girls narrowly dodge his attacks ahead and the whole student body watching in the school’s windows. He looked back at Sunset. “Solstice is in there.”
Sunset grimaced. “We’ll come back for him.” The words tasted bitter as grapefruit on her tongue, but she knew it had to be true. “The girls are going to have to hold down the fort.” She started a run towards the school. “Come on!”
Sunset and Flash rushed in.
Sunset knew the fastest way back to Cinder and Midnight would be over the school, so thinking literally on her feet as she led her best bro towards an active demon battle, Sunset called out, “Dash! I need a lift!”
Still struggling with her geode, Rainbow Dash made eye contact with her. Whatever she saw there made her smirk. In a dash, Rainbow finally managed to power up by speeding alongside them. “On it, boss!”
She raced ahead of them to recruit Fluttershy for the job, grabbing her just before a magical blast from the demon could hit.
Up ahead, King Sombra bellowed a long, over-dramatic laugh, calling more attention to himself than entirely necessary. Because of course. What looked like the twisted vision of Sunset Shimmer who once mind controlled the entire staff and student body of CHS monologued to them through the windows where, if Sunset looked, she could see so many of her friends had gathered. Her heart picked up speed. Get away from the windows!
“Fools! All of you, fools! I’ve waited so long for this moment and you handed it to me on a silver platter! I, the brilliant tactician, and you, the naïve sheep lining up for the slaughter! My ruse, too clever, my disguise impenetrable!” Sunset suspected he was improvising on the spot just to soak in their applause and adulation. She hated that she’d given this douchebag a stage. “How stupidly trusting can you possibly be?”
A slab of sugary icing whacked into his cheek. The demon turned to glare, growl, and bare his teeth at whoever tossed the cupcake to find Pinkie blowing a raspberry at him. At which point, the sugar on his face exploded. “GAH! Yoouuuu butter-fingered pink thing! Why would you have cake now anyway?!”
While the demon was distracted trying to kill the bouncing girl, Applejack tossed Rarity up towards him and Rarity snatched the geode off Sunset Shimmer’s neck. Applejack rushed forward and caught Rarity bridal-style. “Thank you, darling dearest.” Rarity said, gifting the geode to Applejack who lined up and baseball-pitched it to Rainbow Dash.
“Rainbow!”
“On it!” Dash caught the geode out of the air and tossed it to Sunset. “Ready to fly? Hot tip: don’t look down. It helps.”
Sunset placed the geode around her neck. It stung, just a bit, to think Solstice Shiver might have actually been able to use this geode properly. “Get us up to the roof. We’ll take it from there.”
Rainbow and Fluttershy grabbed hold of Sunset and Flash by the arms and air-lifted them up. Leaving the ground, Flash nearly lost his sneaker, transitioning from a run. Dash’s grip was bruisingly firm on Sunset’s arms but Sunset held tighter onto the girl that carried her through the high, frigid winds as her full weight swung over empty air. Sunset had never done many pull-ups in gym class. She chanced a look down at the now three storey drop.
Dash kneed her in the back, puffing. “I said don’t look down!”
The sight ahead of them wasn’t all that rosier. The higher up they got, the more the roof revealed the battle between Midnight and Cinder. Flames roasting the crack in the winter sky.
Pale, Flash grunted what was left of his breath. The seas in his eyes grew wild and turbulent in the weather conditions this high off the ground. He had to call out over the winds. “You don’t think they’d actually kill each other…”
Sunset thankfully didn’t have to answer as they touched down on the left-wing’s roof. In all her life, Sunset hadn’t ever been afraid of heights, but maybe it was Solstice’s influence because her feet were grateful to touch back on some semblance of ground.
Sunset panted to Rainbow and Fluttershy, who were still airborne. “Thanks. Keep King Sombra away from the portal and please for the love of Celestia stay safe while we’re busy with these two.”
Dash saluted. “You got it, chief.”
Despite the chaos of everything around them, Fluttershy smiled and held her hands in front of herself as if she’d just been asked to lend some brown sugar and cinnamon for Solstice’s cookies. “You stay safe, too, okay?”
Flash nodded, offering, “I’ll try to keep her out of trouble.”
“Hold up, I wanna try something to pay that assmonkey back.” As if expecting payment for the valet service, Rainbow Dash held her hand out for a high-five from Flash, who hesitated, looking to Sunset, then offered a walloping smack that sent Rainbow Dash running so fast that Sunset almost thought she’d been given the power to teleport. The only evidence she’d moved at all was a boom that echoed across the courtyard and a fiery rainbow circle.
Not even noticing thanks to his renewed monologue, the demon was in for a world of hurt because, as Sunset had confirmed countless times, the universe had it out for Sunset Shimmer.
Boom. Dash blasted into King Sombra’s back, right on the spine towards the tailbone. Sunset could only imagine the high-octane back pain he’d be feeling tomorrow (or she would be, if she got her body back). It made the demon roar in some hideous rage, but Sunset was decently sure Dash was shouting, “Told you I’d kick your ass!”
Sunset cheered alongside Flash and it felt, if only for a second, like they were back at the soccer game. “Yeah!” Sunset whooped, shaking Flash by the shoulder. “Kick my ass!”
Fluttershy clapped next to Flash on the roof. “Oh yay! Woo! Go, Dashie!”
Sunset grinned, if only for the moment. “Keep it up, Flutters. You girls are gonna need to work together, alright? You got this.”
Fluttershy nodded, lifting Sunset’s spirits as she lifted herself back onto the air in a graceful twirl. “It’s what we do best.”
While the Rainbooms focused their energy on blocking Demon Shimmer’s attempts to run into the portal to Equestria, Cinder teleported himself to the roof of the school’s left wing in front of Flash and Sunset only to jump off, muttering about “getting some air.” In the time it would take King Sombra to cackle broodingly to himself, Cinder had lodged three nonconsecutive sneak attacks on Midnight, each more clever than the last.
But, like Sunset, Midnight Sparkle was no slouch. She’d set up traps for Cinder’s gravity-based attacks: opening up portals to Equestria in his path when it was too late to have any way of redirecting his trajectory. And when he re-emerged, she’d be ready to blast his ass with projectile magic.
When one of her explosive blasts delivered a car-bomb blow to the Camp Everfree Jeep, melting the camp’s logo on the side, Cinder howled.
At that point, he picked up whatever he could to throw at her. Trees, the flaming tires of his late truck—whatever he had on hand. In one instance, Cinder teleported himself elsewhere, but where that else might have been eluded Midnight.
She jerked her head around, searching every possible angle and keeping her magic at the ready. As clever as she was, she was wholly unprepared for when Cinder teleported back, screaming, with an actual bell-covered sleigh complete with deer at the reins to hurl at her.
Midnight barely dodged it, watching the wood smash into the school’s back entrance and the deer scatter free from their shackles into the wilds of the mid-sized city. She gaped at him. “... What?! What was that?!”
Cinder flipped over a sedan as he growled his way up to a furious scream. “Northway has a beautiful countryside!”
“Oh my god! You can’t stop being ridiculous for a single iota of a second?!” Midnight Sparkle shrieked in logical pain and lost it on him.
A particularly brutal blast drove Cinder backwards, his body digging a rut in the neat, freshly painted lines of the staff parking lot, to slam against the base of an oak tree on the far side of the parking lot.
“Timber!” Flash and Sunset ran to the other side of the roof, wading through the snow that had collected there.
The boy who used to be Timber Spruce roared, the flames in his chest and hair flaring. As he did, the tree behind him sparked and caught fire shockingly fast. Cinder stood, aflame, and growled as the tree behind him collapsed in a fiery mass in the snow.
“Say it!” Cinder howled at Midnight Sparkle as he walked toward her through the parking lot, his fists burning brighter. “Tell me with your big girl words, princess! You want to burn bridges?” Molten fire straight from the flaming rivers of hell dripped from his hands. “Just fucking tell me!”
Midnight’s heaven-piercing horn powered up as magic built up in her hands, laughing deliriously. “Oh, you want to talk now? Now!? When you shut me out of every uncomfortable emotion you’ve ever had? What a waste of a great mind! You could never understand magic like I do! Magic isn’t comfortable, you moron of a genius, magic is pure power and everything that creates it: Magic is isolation and decades of loneliness. Magic is anxiety attacks. Magic is every dark impulse you’re terrified will come to light.” She levelled her chin, taking aim for her shot. “And I have to understand it all.”
“Twilight, listen to me!” Sunset shouted up from the rooftop to her Muliet. She held out her hand. “Take my hand!”
Midnight turned toward her. “Silence, Shiver! None of your little counselling sessions can stop me now!”
Flash shook his head, stumbling back. “They’re not even willing to listen! H-how do we get their attention? Music? Like the battle of the bands?”
Sunset shook her head. Her heart ate at her throat, beat after beat, bite after bite. “Getting our instruments would take way too long, they’d kill each other. We need something now, but I can’t just turn into an angel on command.”
Flash looked at her earnestly. “Have you tried?”
Sunset shrugged. “Without the girls? I wouldn’t have that much magic. I don’t even have the right body.” She wondered if Solstice Shiver even had an angel form, but she supposed it wouldn’t do them any good at the moment. She doubted the angelic form of their guidance counsellor would get through to Twilight and Timber, as much as they had seemed to get along with him. Would they even listen to her?
Should they? The fact that Sunset now had to watch two of her best friends tear each other apart with godlike power that she’d allowed into this dimension made her tremblingly sick to her stomach.
She’d caused this to happen.
If they died, if they had to face their own Time’s Ends, it would be because of her. And who knew who else would have to suffer?
“Damn it! We have to do something.” Flash got this look in his eye like he’d be willing to jump off the roof himself to get to them. He held his hands up behind his head and for a heartbeat-less moment, she was genuinely scared he was considering it. A blue glow emanated off him. “They need help!”
Sunset’s eyes widened like he’d stumbled across a power-up in one of the video games they played together. “Dude, your magic. Use it!”
Flash stared down at his glowing hands, the light so pure it lit the falling snow around him, then back up at her. “But who do I boost up?”
Sunset came around behind him and patted him on the shoulders. “Yourself.”
The glow around him cranked up to eleven. Sunset staggered back to give him some room as his sneakers left the rooftop, laces dangling. She could swear she heard a blistering guitar riff as the magic swirled around him before an explosion of light burned so bright she had to shield her eyes. In the aftermath, her eyes readjusted to find feathered wings unfurling from Flash Sentry’s back and another set of arms from his sides.
Sunset thought he must’ve had a really good therapy session that morning.
This heaven-sent version of Flash wore his jacket open, even though it exposed the chub on his stomach. Even as a demigod he wasn’t granted insta-abs. Out of all the people she’d met on this earth or any other, Sunset Shimmer thought Flash Sentry deserved some damn body positivity.
But unlike Sunset’s angel form, Flash hadn’t been given a horn from his head. He held a double necked guitar aloft like a sword he’d ripped from stone. Flash giggled giddily down at the frets. “Oh man, I’ve always wanted to play one of these!”
Like a godly band manager, Sunset grinned and flashed him the devil-horns. “Play it loud.”
Luckily, loud seemed to be the only setting this rock god version of Flash had. His guitar solo boomed out across the staff parking lot as if Flash had a wall of amplifiers behind him. Sunset wouldn’t be surprised if the whole block could hear him. He started by playing the top twelve-string, a sprinkling of almost acoustic sounds, before ripping into a metal guitar solo on the bottom neck.
Out on the tarmac, Cinder’s fire faltered as he gaped up at his boyfriend. “Angel...”
Midnight whipped around to blast him but Sunset could see her struggling to keep control. “Flash,” she seethed, behind the growing bursts of magic in her hands. “It’s not safe here.”
Magic exploded from her hands at him.
Flash dodged, not even missing a note. Even when Cinder joined in. Through the fire and flames, he carried on. Sunset knew Flash wasn’t coordinated enough to manage many more lucky misses like that—she’d seen the guy in gym class (or even just walking down a hallway where he had no logical reason to bump into as many things as he did)—but thankfully, his fingers were fast enough on the frets to make up for his lack of dexterity.
The heads of his guitar built up power the more he played and when he reached the end of his solo with a flourish of his guitar pick, lightning shot forward to the people Flash most wanted to help over to the light.
Unfortunately, pyrotechnics were just that. Pyrotechnics. And now Midnight and Cinder were furious to be interrupted as Midnight hurled an unholy amount of magic at him.
Magic seared into his fleshy torso. The angel hit the rooftop as hard as Sunset feared she’d slammed into the depths of the underworld, and Flash rolled until his head slammed into the brick with all the force of a car crash. And he laid there as the snow drifted down on his body.
“Flash!” Sunset scrambled over to him through snow as high as her kneecaps.
When she got over to him, he held his head. The guitar had taken most of the damage, strings melted onto the fretboards together, but that didn’t mean Flash himself wasn’t badly hurt in the process. “Oh fuck, are you okay?!”
He grimaced, clutching his shoulder and Sunset suspected it would’ve been dislocated in the hit. She knelt next to him. “Well… I got their attention, at least…”
Sunset turned to see both demons on the rooftop in front of them.
Midnight covered her mouth. “Oh nonono, Flash…”
Cinder had teleported himself on the roof behind her. The fire from his entrance was blindingly bright, burning blue. He glowered at Midnight and Sunset guessed if he hadn’t before, he decided then to end her life.
Sunset turned back to Flash, kneeling down to talk at his level. “Flash, you have to boost my powers, please.”
Flash stared at her, wide-eyed and hopefully not just because his head must have been spinning with the pain. “I-I don’t know if I can control it. The whole school could hear whatever you’re projecting out to them, and even if I get it right, you said you felt what they feel too when you do that, right? What if all their anger and hurt just passes off to you and then we have four demons?”
“They’re worth the risk, dude.” She held up a fist for him to bump.
As soon as Flash touched his fist to hers, Sunset’s head exploded with thoughts. Unlike last time when she was assaulted by hundreds of voices, Sunset now had only two battling for supremacy in her mind. However Flash had focused his magic, it worked. She whimpered, holding her forehead.
But the thoughts weren’t what drew tears to her eyes, that made her feel so weak and unable to speak without crying. She held back a sob. The overwhelm that hit her then narrowed the world down to this, down to the certainty that she would always turn out too broken to fix. No matter how good things started out, no matter how many renewed efforts she made, no matter how many new friends she finally managed to make, none of it mattered.
All her new best friends would see the brokenness she was too close to see.
And she’d always feel this alone, because if she could lose someone who she would’ve built her whole life around if they let her, who couldn’t she lose?
Sunset pushed through that feeling, stumbling blindly in the blizzarding night. She heard her own grieving breath in her ears. She had the sense that she could stumble into it for all her life. All she could do, all she knew how to focus on, was how much she loved her two new best friends.
And that got her through.
Through the storm of thoughts and emotions too much for her to handle, Sunset all but screamed one thought above all: I’m not giving up on either of you without a fight.
Sunset felt it before she saw it. Partly because it was hard to focus on anything with her head so out of sorts and all over the place, but still, she could swear she felt them. When she focused her eyes back on them, Sunset held the rapt attention of two crying demons.
Flash laughed through sobs of his own. “We got through.”
Midnight turned back towards Cinder, the two of them exchanging a look that could have been murderous or healing. It was so hard to tell.
Then, Midnight landed on the roof next to them, folding her powerful wings behind her. The fire in Cinder’s chest crackled. The purple of Twilight’s eyes and the green of Timber’s stood out against their supernatural forms.
Flash groaned as he stood up. The magic left his body almost too abruptly, and Sunset had to catch him. She found herself holding the boy she played video games with instead of Slash Sentry, rock god. He thanked her quietly.
He strode towards them on unsteady feet, hands out like he was approaching a lion’s den but with a smile that could light the bowels of the underworld. “We’re right here for you, okay?” Sunset nodded, switching her gaze between the pin-pricks drowning in magic in her girlfriend’s eyes and the rings of fire surrounded by blackened, burnt out death in her best friend’s. “Whatever you need to do or say. We’ll be right here for you.”
Snow fell on the roof of Canterlot High. The top of a world of their own making, the rest lost to the storm.
Sunset watched the two of them frozen there, pausing, pushing off. They kept their eyes ahead like it was a kindness. But she had to wonder how long those two knew this conversation was coming. How long had they gone without breathing?
Cinder shook his head. “Fuck,” he said, and, “I’m sorry.” and “It’s not your fault. I’m just so tired of everyone saying they’ll be there and then disappearing out of my life, but this really isn’t your fault.” His chest flared, but his eyes reached for hers. He shook his head. “I don’t blame you. I still think you’re a great person.”
Tears streaked down Midnight’s cheeks. “I know,” she told him, so quietly she almost didn’t say it at all. She almost didn’t have to. She wrung her hands.
“C’mon, Twi... if you cry, I cry.” Cinder pushed a hand into his eye, smearing the tears away. He tried to smile at her, wiping away the tears off her face. “Taking care of yourself is good.”
“I know, but… I’m sorry,” she said like she’d never meant anything more. Like it would kill her if she didn’t take care of his feelings one last time. “I’m so, so sorry. You deserve everything you have with Flash, and I’m so excited that you’ll both finally get to have that. Please let him take you to the mall.”
“Your girlfriend rocks,” he laughed, empty, too busy drying her tears to care about his own. “You’re lucky to have each other.”
Sunset saw Flash wipe his eyes beside her.
Midnight nodded, finally smiling like Cinder wanted. “Thanks.” She stood with him a moment longer. “It was good while it lasted, right? When we broke up, I tried really hard to focus on that. I wanted so desperately to be at peace with it all, in a wise beyond my years sort of way, I guess. I wanted my friends to be proud of me for moving on so well. I don’t know why I thought grieving properly was some life accomplishment I needed to check off. But I didn’t know how to just move on. I’ve never lost someone before.
“Sunset helped so much—more than I can ever say, honestly. I really don’t want to know where I’d be now without her, so I guess that’s why it was so comforting to see you and Flash together. I need you to be okay without me,” Midnight told him, changing back into the girl he lost before his eyes. The magic swirled around her, fading into the stormy sky above until she was just Twilight. “Please, please promise you’ll try. I think it’s the best chance we have at being okay with each other again.”
Cinder’s eyebrows lifted as snow drifted down to blot the flames.
“We stopped talking in our relationship, and more than anything, I really think that’s what drove us apart. It scared me. I didn’t feel like I could talk to you about anything anymore. So I didn’t.” Twilight wiped fumblingly underneath her glasses and tried to smirk. “But I don’t need us to talk about everything. I think space is healthy, boundaries are good. They don’t mean goodbye. Sometimes they just mean see you later.”
Snowflakes steamed on his shoulders. Cinder’s eyes dropped and his brow pulled together. The tears falling off his face sizzled in the fire in his chest. “Nobody wants to admit it’ll end up meaning goodbye.”
“Timber…”
“Please just say goodbye if that’s what this is. I get it.” He grasped at the gaping scar in his chest. The flames ate at him. “This is me. It’s always going to be me. And anybody who gets close enough is bound to see it. Nobody else should have to deal with that, especially when they can’t. I don’t blame you for needing to go.”
Twilight took his hands in hers. She considered the knuckles, passing a thumb over them before squeezing. And, even as tears stung at her eyes, she smiled. “Timber? I need to let you go. I do. And I will. That’s what space and time are for when you lose a boyfriend or girlfriend, if we communicate honestly.
“But then, eventually, maybe in a few months from now, when I can start to look at you and not see the boy I kissed at the observatory… I’d really like to see who you are as a friend. I’ve heard good things. I’ve gotta admit, you’ve got me curious.” She shrugged, laughing through her sniffles. “Absolutely tell me if it wouldn’t be okay for you, but for me, I think by then it’d be nice to see an old friend.”
Timber’s eyes rose to meet his old best friend.
The dark magic drained from his body in a swirling, skyward whirlwind. As soon as it was safe to do so, and he wouldn’t burn her alive, Timber collapsed into Twilight’s hug. Her hand sunk into his curls. His quiet sobs made her hold on tighter. Sunset never thought she’d be so glad to see Timber Spruce hugging her girlfriend.
Sunset and Flash staggered forward to hug them, too. Sunset laid her head on one of Timber’s shoulders. She narrowly avoided a breakdown when she told him, “Welcome to the family.”
“... Is there a club handshake?” Timber managed to ask, albeit muffled through Twilight’s shoulder.
A laugh attacked Sunset’s chest. “No... around here, we’re more about making new best friends. Like, a lot. It’s kind of our thing.”
The delirious giggling could’ve convinced Sunset they were back in the band room making stupid jokes about nothing at all.
When the four of them parted, panic seeped back in hearing the sounds of the battle still ongoing just on the other side of the school. After using so much magic, Sunset felt seasick-level nauseous at the idea of expending more—and she wasn’t the one who’d turned into an actual demigod.
As it was, Timber, Twilight, and Flash looked demonstrably battered. Cuts and bruises abound. Flash’s shoulder might have reset, but he still clung to it like he needed a splint. Timber’s clothes were all toasted and he’d lost his beanie. Or burnt it to ash. Twilight didn’t even have her bow-tie tied.
Twilight seemed to notice Flash nursing his shoulder, startled. “Oh my goodness! Oh Flash, I really hurt you, I’m so sorry!”
He shrugged his one good shoulder. “S’okay. S’better now, mostly. Angel magic is pretty powerful stuff.”
Sunset bit her lip. “If you’re really okay, Twilight and I might need to save our magic. We don’t know what’s coming and we still have to help our friends end the fight with King Sombra.”
Twilight nodded, looking alarmingly sleepy. “That… that sounds smart.” Sunset put an arm around her to keep her upright.
For his part, Timber didn’t look much more alert. Sunset remembered that feeling. She’d slept for twenty whole hours when she finally hit the pillow after the Fall Formal. Her time as Daydream left her out of commission for a while, too, as energizing as it had been in the moment. She almost wanted to tell them to hit the benches and sit the rest of the fight out, but she couldn’t afford to lose their power.
It hurt Sunset to have to think of her friends that way. It hurt to see them on death’s door and still trying so desperately, so valiantly to come back for round two.
Sunset grimaced to Timber. “Hey... you think you have enough to get us down to our friends?”
“Our friends,” Timber burbled happily, nodding. At the very least, he appeared to be a contented tired, as if he’d eaten a whole plate of Applejack’s cooking for Harvest Moon dinner. “Gonna take a while for that to sink in. Got you covered as long as my angel’s the wind beneath my wings…”
Flash blushed hot enough that he could have melted the snow collecting on their shoulders. “You’re going to keep calling me that, aren’t you?”
“Yup,” said Timber, and brought them into a group hug that started with them on the roof of the school and ended with them on the front steps of Canterlot High. The world spun the wrong way while Sunset reoriented herself to her sudden new surroundings, but the lot of them prepared to fight.
Then Sunset paled looking at the scene before her.
“Oh my god,” Twilight muttered as Flash covered his own gasp.
The right wing of the school had been blasted clear open. Concrete and brick hung exposed over the wreckage. Since she could count to five out of the remaining fighters battling King Sombra, Sunset held on to the lone hope that they’d managed to get word to the staff to route the students there before that damage had been caused. Dear Celestia, please… please let everyone be okay…
The Demon Sunset chortled above, blocking blows from the others with relative ease. “Well, well, well! Glad you could finally re-join the class! I was just teaching your friends what true darkness looks like!”
Timber cupped his hands around his mouth. “Really? ‘Cause it’s looking pretty bright over here! Maybe you missed a spot?”
“Hey Timber?” Twilight hissed from the side of her mouth, “Why are you calling attention to yourself? You hardly have any magic left.”
Timber leaned over. “Lucky for you, my mouth has a magic of its own.”
Sunset had to admit, it seemed to at least momentarily give the girls a chance to rebound without any more attacks. And they dearly needed it, from the looks of it. Sunset’s pounding heart ached on every beat to see her friends so beat up; battered, dripping with sweat, and injured in more than a few places. Oh god, girls, I’m so sorry…
“Bright? Bright?!” Sunset Shimmer roared in the sky. King Sombra’s face twisted into a snide, prideful sneer, as if the word spat in his soup. Sunset had never hated her own face more. He ascended as he monologued, which only gave the girls a chance to limp over and regroup together with Sunset and the others. “I am the King of Demons, boy! Filler of graveyards! Slaughterer of hope! I am the darkest night you’ll ever know!” He laughed, as though he’d practiced it in the mirror beforehand. “Your brightest fate is to be my slave!”
He ascended toward the tear in space-time in the sky.
Sunset remembered how it felt to hold the weight of the sun on her shoulders. The strain too heavy to scream for fear of snapping her vocal cords. But more than any sickening weight, the certainty of her own death came back to her. How many people here had Sunset doomed to that certainty? As the students of Canterlot High watched on in horror and Sunset’s friends huddled together, Sunset covered her mouth with a shivering hand.
The girls chased after him into the sky. Fluttershy sent eagles through the sky. Pinkie and Applejack launched themselves up with explosive force. Rarity leapt from shield after shield, creating a staircase. Rainbow Dash soared at speeds unknown. All of them barreling upwards.
King Sombra smiled skyward at the tear in the planet’s atmosphere that he’d made before the girls managed to stop him. Distract him, really. Now his eyes shined in the rainbow light peeking through the crack, giggling like a school-girl. “All mine… all that power…”
Sunset Shimmer, after all, had no reason to exist, and thus no reason to resist the call of the void.
The girls latched onto the demon’s legs. But King Sombra had already clawed open the single hair-line fracture of the crack in the sky.
They managed to wrestle the demon back down to earth, but the demon Sunset Shimmer threw them off and landed squarely on the long-broken Wondercolt statue. Inches away from Equestria.
King Sombra raised a claw. The earth quaked with seismic ferocity. Sunset lost her footing. The walkway to the school blistered and cracked as the heavens showered down snow, and the rest of the girls stumbled back towards the entrance. They all huddled together, bracing each other up.
As the ground groaned and shivered, several of those screaming, uncanny silhouettes rose, as if from coffins or off slabs at the mortuary. One after another, filling the front lawn of Canterlot High. To Sunset’s awe, she recognized the faces of the damned: to the left, there was Wallflower. And there behind her, that was Bulk Biceps. Microchips, Trixie, Scootaloo—so many of the students of CHS frozen in silent screams.
The King of Demons stood above them all. “Yes! Rise for me! Rise for me! RISE FOR ME, MY TEENAGE ARMY!”
On the steps of the school, Sunset had no hope in hell of defending, Sunset grappled with the knowledge that she’d let her demon self win. Her friends watched on.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered into her trembling hand. Only the friends gathered around her could hear. “I’m so sorry…”
Fluttershy shook her head. “This isn’t your fault, Sunset. It’s okay.”
Sunset backed up, feeling the trembling burst to life in her legs and her lungs shrink in her chest. No, no, no, no, no, no… not again… please, not again… She clutched her head, trying not to pant. “This is why I have to close the portal. I have to go. It’s not safe when I’m here. You think I want to leave the only family I’ve ever known?”
From up above, Sunset could hear the screams of the student body. Much like when Flash projected her feelings onto them, Sunset heard hundreds of voices overlapping, reaching out through open windows. Declarations of love and support for the demon echoed through the courtyard all at once screaming variations on It’s okay and We believe in you to the creature who clearly wanted to kill them all with magic.
Wallflower whooped from the third floor. The crusaders cheered out from the hole in the right wing, held back from rushing to their sides only Cheerilee. Derpy leaned out the window as Bulk Biceps gave her a boost. “We love you!”
The whole school had heard Sunset’s thoughts and felt her feelings not that long ago, and Sunset never realized until now that she’d been figuratively projecting how she thought about those thoughts and feelings onto them, too. She never thought… she never even let herself consider they loved her even with the darkness inside of her. But she was loved so much more than she could ever know.
Sunset cried. She honest-to-Celestia cried in front of her friends and it felt so, so good.
She’d scared the absolute shit out of her friends, though, who hadn’t seen her cry in… maybe ever, depending on the person.
“Sunset, darling,” Rarity said softly at the end of the world. “Are you alright?”
“No,” she told them, laughing as the tears traced down her cheeks. “I’m really, really not.” She latched onto her friends as tightly as she could as the army of teenage shadows advanced.
“I’m so tired of running.” Not even bothering to wipe the tears from her eyes, Sunset turned to Timber and Flash. Her voice gave out. “I need your help.”
The boys understood.
Each of them took one of her hands, grappling with her tear-softened hands, and they stood there for a second letting her take the lead. She stared ahead at the stupid fucking demon cackling over her stupid fucking teenage army, swaying on her feet. But her friends were behind her, and they’d be there for her even knowing she was still every bit as capable of darkness as she once had been.
“... is this even going to work?” Sunset mumbled. “He’s so far away.”
“You’ve got this, SunShim.” Pinkie smiled, sniffling. “Just imagine giving her a big ol’ hug until you are.”
Still crying, Sunset focused everything she could on giving her demon self a big, dumb, stupid, Celestia-damned, existentially confusing hug. She was only a little mad that that was good advice.
The world spun on the wrong axis. One moment Sunset was with her friends, the next she staggered, trying not to fall, as she stood ten feet tall above the portal. Flames from her hands scorched her alive. And, true to the Fate’s word, Sunset Shimmer died.