The Canterlot Royal Gardens.
Rewinding time once again…
“Come along, fillies!” Tabula Rasa declared, leading the group of fillies into the Royal Gardens.
The Gardens were a magical-looking place, dimly lit by fairy lights. Low hedges created a sense of order, but simultaneously there were bushes and trees planted seemingly randomly. The sounds of all kinds of wondrous animals could be heard, but always behind some cover or another: close enough to entice, but far enough away so not to threaten.
As such the colts and fillies found themselves separated into groups of various sizes, from lone explorers to large stationary groups. The foliage seemed to absorb any overly loud utterances, leaving a pleasant buzz of conversation.
Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon walked through this landscape, looking for the most-influential group of Canterlot fillies to integrate with. Diamond walked slowly, her eyes darting from one natural spot to another, unable to look any pony in the eye, a hoof before her mouth in perpetual uncertainty. Silver kept her eyes constantly on the prize of which ponies were the best ponies to befriend.
This was the complete opposite of their personalities at the start of the term. And Silver was very unhappy with this change.
Silver Spoon was a member of the ancient and respected Silver Clan, a clan noted for their loyal service to whoever was the current center of power in Equestria. Silvers had occasionally served Princess Celestia herself, but mostly they served Celestia’s “instruments”, the ponies who had to carry out the dirty work in her name. Silver Spoon, like the other Silvers, had big dreams of what she wanted to do in her life, in how she wanted to transform Equestria in the time allotted to her. But like most Silvers she lacked the larger-than-life personality to accomplish this herself. She needed an instrument of her own.
Diamond Tiara was supposed to be that instrument, the perfect combination of a naturally strong leader who had no idea what to do with her power. The CMC were not an obstacle to that rise; rather they were the stepping stone. For if an Apple cowered before Diamond Tiara without consequence, surely that meant that Diamond was meant to supplant the Apples as the pre-eminent power in Ponyville.
In the eyes of the fillies and colts of Ponyville, the fact of Diamond’s power in the present day was undeniable. But the present was not the past, and Diamond did a good job of hiding the current truth from them. She did not hide her weakness from her best friend. After all, Silver had gone through the same horror that she did.
A horror by the name of Babs Seed.
For a week the tables had been turned. For a week Diamond and Silver were the willing lackeys of a pony who should have been their victim. They had done every humiliating thing that Babs told them to do. Did each thing and begged for more. If it wasn’t for the fact that Babs did not (yet) wish these humiliations to be public, the carefully built reputations of both Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon would have been destroyed forever.
And then the week ended. Babs Seed returned to Manehattan, and Diamond and Silver were once again in control of their own opinions.
It was Diamond who demanded that neither of them ever speak of what had happened to anypony else. Because regardless of what would be revealed in the aftermath, one thing would be clear to everypony: they had been victims. And that was a state that Diamond would never admit to.
But this decision had consequences. Since she had no idea how Babs had accomplished her takeover, there was no way for Diamond to be able to tell when it might not happen again. Or indeed, no way to tell that it wasn’t happening right now. After all, Diamond had no sense while she worshiped at the hooves of Babs that there was anything wrong with her. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for her to feel that Babs was the universe’s most-perfect being. Until it had stopped being true.
Silver on the other hoof had shaken the whole thing off with ease. Unlike Diamond, she had no desire to have complete control of her own life. Equestria was full of strange forces. It was natural to expect that you won’t always be in control of yourself. What Silver believed in was the thing she did have control over: her reaction. And she chose not to react, not to allow Babs Seed to have any power over her in the present whatsoever.
And so, if Diamond was paralyzed and had spent the last six months unable to do anything other than keep up the appearance of power without any of the practice, then it was up to Silver to take up the slack. The first Grand Galloping Gala after both of them had gained their cutie marks was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And they were not going to screw this up.
Silver Spoon spotted her quarry: the most-powerful filly at the Gala, and therefore most-certainly the most-powerful filly in Canterlot. Silver walked with supreme confidence through the ring of fawning admirers to stop right in front of the Countess-in-Waiting of Bellweather, Golden Peytral. She curtseyed, then turned slightly to display the appliqued cutie mark on her dress. The style of the dress and the exact form of the curtsey communicated her status as newly-cutied, a status that demanded acknowledgement from one it was delivered to.
And she did this with Diamond Tiara a step ahead of her, performing the exact maneuver in blind synchrony. Knowing Diamond’s mental state, Silver knew that it was done automatically. But it had the desired effect.
Peytral was a unicorn, a taller filly than most, with a build that resembled a miniature Princess Celestia. She had a golden coat with a luxurious pure white mane, both visible through a pink taffeta dress. Her cutie mark was the grand blue bell of the Bellweather dynasty. Peytral looked Diamond over with a weary glance. Another filly ran in to tell her who these two ponies were. “Diamond Tiara,” she said. “It is good to meet my counterpart from Ponyville.”
Silver Spoon did not expect acknowledgement, and she did not receive it.
Diamond lowered her head slightly. “It is an honor to meet my Illustrious Lady from Canterlot,” she said, fully at attention. Her doubts, at least for now, were in abeyance.
Golden Peytral looked around her at her obsequious court and sighed. “Come walk with me, Diamond,” she said. She turned and marched further into the Gardens without a word, and without a glance back to see if her instruction had been obeyed.
Diamond meanwhile had looked back at Silver, who had shooed her to follow Golden with a shaken hoof and a desperate smile.
Diamond followed Golden around the hedge, and out of sight of the other fillies and colts.
Fluttershy flew overhead at that moment, quietly calling out for the animals to reveal themselves. They failed to do so.
Golden stopped beneath an apple tree and turned to face Diamond. “I hear that the ponies of Ponyville are more blunt than in the rest of Equestria. Is that true?” she asked.
Diamond stopped, and at Golden’s direction sat down. “Only when we need to, Your Excellency.”
“Which, with the monster attacks, is constantly,” Golden noted. “We are grateful for that, by the way. Saves us a great deal of trouble.”
Diamond wasn’t sure if the “we” in question was royal or not. “Well…you’re welcome,” she finally settled on saying.
“I wish to be blunt with you, Diamond Tiara. The day has been a tiring one for me, and I have much wisdom to communicate in the little time I’m willing to grant you.
“My sources inform me that you rule the fillies of Ponyville. Is that true?”
Diamond remembered Silver Spoon’s advice for how to handle this meeting: be deferential, but whenever possible, be bold. “It is, My Lady.”
“And you are here for advice, perhaps leave open space for a future alliance?”
“Yes, on both counts.”
“You don’t have an entourage,” Golden observed bluntly.
“Not at the Gala,” Diamond responded.
“You are not the only fillies from Ponyville present at the Gala,” Golden countered. “Where are they?”
“Well, they are bluntly beneath my notice,” Diamond replied, feeling just a little bit lost at the question.
“So you haven’t broken them yet.”
This produced a brief moment of shock from Diamond Tiara. “…No, My Lady.”
“Well, get on that,” Golden said, her voice as cold as ice. “My power over my entourage is absolute. That should be your goal.” She walked over to be beside Diamond’s ear before continuing in a soft but compelling voice. “These are my two lessons for you tonight: Power is a thing unto itself, divorced from any cause. And the only power worth possessing is absolute power.”
Golden sat down beside Diamond, shocking her further. She put her hoof around the earth pony’s withers. “You haven’t grown up in the vicious arena of Canterlot, so I’m not surprised that you haven’t learned these lessons already, but you need to do so quickly. Because if you don’t, I’ll order one of my lieutenants to move her family down to Ponyville to add it to my domains.”
She continued on in a pleasant conversational tone, as if her last sentence hadn’t been a dire threat. “Power is—rather simply—fear. You could see it in every pony around me, couldn’t you? They are all terrified of what I could do to them. Because they know: I could do anything to them, and no pony short of a Princess would dare contradict me. And they know that I could do something awful to any of them at any time. Because I have. Multiple times. Do I actually possess this power? Well, I have those ponies too terrified to ever challenge me. So therefore I do possess that power. That’s all you need to cement your control over Ponyville. It’s easy! You just have to…throw away your conscience.” She gestured with a hoof, as if waving goodbye to her own conscience.
Diamond had recognized that the pony beside her was clearly a sociopath. But she was held in a death grip by that same pony, so she kept the increasingly fake smile on her lips and nodded along with Golden’s points of instruction. She even “waved away her own conscience” when Golden instructed her to.
“There, much better! Ponyville is yours already. Now the next thing you need to learn is self-defense. Because on top of everypony fearing you, everypony will now want to kill you.”
Diamond Tiara began to quietly shake.
“That’s what I dream about nowadays. Not the guilt over what I’ve done to my fellow ponies—I ditched that along with my conscience. No, I dream about how they will kill me. Or what might happen if they ever lose their pony frailties.”
“You sound like a monster to me,” Diamond said, then immediately covered her mouth in horror.
Golden Peytral nodded solemnly instead of zapping Diamond into her component molecules. “I hold King Sombra up as my role model,” she said. “There was a pony who became a monster without wasting the opportunity in self-pity, unlike a certain Princess I could name. Sombra enslaved his ponies—I wish I could do that. And he found a way to convert their desire to kill him into raw magical energy, which he used to conquer more ponies that he could then enslave. Imagine a world where he ruled!”
A very uncomfortable silence settled in as Golden had a Perfect Moment while imagining that perfect world of a Sombra eternal dictatorship. (A very good thing that Rarity was nowhere around to have that memory permanently implanted in her brain.)
Diamond Tiara managed to disengage herself from Golden Peytral’s grip.
That was when the magic drain hit. Golden instantly concluded that it was an attack directed against her: while crying “You can’t topple me that easily!” she ran back towards her entourage.
Diamond followed more slowly.