"You were right," came Trixie's voice through the dust and smoke. "It's most often the case that creatures are overtaken by greatness passed onto them. It certainly was the case for me the first time. You were right about how I hadn't noticed your trap, too. You were wrong in your assumption about me, however."
Stella turned, slowly. She had managed to shield herself once she'd realised she was trapped, but a shield cast so quickly against a spell that powerful could only stop so much. Patches of her coat had been completely burnt away, leaving blackened spots over her body and unnatural curved patterns on its surface. Her mane had shortened, burnt away from its ends. Her tail was hanging limp, the bone there broken, the hair on it half gone. Part of her lower jaw and the teeth on it were exposed, and a black scar like the path of a miniature lightning bolt climbed from her neck on the side of her face, through one of her eyes and onto her horn. Her feathers were smoking at their tips, many of them charred. Where part of her barrel should have been, beneath her, there was nothing left. Her spears lay shattered at her hooves. She took a step out of the smoke and her front leg gave out, bending inwards, but with a grunt she gripped the limb in her magic and forced it straight before continuing to walk.
Trixie came into view. The mare was badly bruised, burned, and otherwise injured. Missing portions of her coat showed glistening skin shrivelled up and oozing not quite blood, and one of her hind legs had its hoof raised above the ground not to put pressure on it, while hanging at an odd angle. There was a gash in Trixie's side, the contents of which were kept from spilling only by her telekinesis. Blood that hadn't had time to dry yet went from the corner of her mouth to her chin, and some still flowed down from her nose. Her eyes were working, but her pupils were shrunken, her eyelids trembling. Stella saw her for just a moment up ahead, then she disappeared. Gone in a blink like the Amulet a moment before.
Stella did not scream, whether because no one could hear her there or because of the wound in her neck no one would ever know. She left the desert with the intensity usually reserved for a spell's arrival, turning the sand on the surface to glass far enough to fit a town on it and collapsing the tunnels Twilight had dug.
She reappeared above Twilight's castle, holding herself aloft with magic, and all the windows in Ponyville shattered at her arrival. She blast off a chunk of the wall, and lowered herself into the building. A couple frightened guards looking around unable to see her were hurled outside the entrance she'd added, then the floor beneath her hooves broke under the next blow of her horn.