“What?!?” Pipp and Zipp exclaimed in unison with all of their friends a heartbeat behind them.
Zoom spread her wings helplessly. “We don’t know anything. All we know is that she’s gone.”
“What should we do?” Thunder whispered desperately, looking at Sunny like he expected her to have all the answers.
Sunny’s mind felt blank and empty. The entire world seemed to have faded away, and there was a strange ringing sound in her ears. Queen Haven missing… this made no sense! They had defeated Opaline, Allura, Chrysalis, Termite, Sombra, Permafrost, everyone who had ever posed a threat to Equestria. Unless this was something new…
Why does it have to be something new? Sunny wondered brokenly. Why is there always something else that comes up that we have to fight and defeat?
“Oh my hoofness,” Pipp suddenly gasped, her hooves flying to her mouth. “The festival! Mom’s supposed to be starting it - everypony in Equestria’s going to know that she’s missing!”
“Don’t worry,” Zipp said, putting her hoof on her sister’s shoulder. She looked like she was wracking her mind for any possible solution that might help them. “We - we’ll get Alphabittle or Phyllis to cover for her, and that will give us enough time to find her-”
“That’s the other part of it,” Zoom continued, flinching a bit as all six ponies turned their gazes on her once again. “They’re missing, too.”
“What?” Sunny felt her voice failing her. “Alphabittle, Phyllis, and the queen are missing?”
Both guards nodded regretfully in unison.
Misty gasped, and tears filled her eyes. Izzy quickly put a hoof around her shoulder, and Misty buried her face in Izzy’s mane as she quietly sobbed.
“How could you let this happen?” Zipp demanded, her eyes flashing with anger again.
“Zipp,” Sunny said gently, putting her hoof on her friend, “it’s not their fault. I’m sure that there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this-”
Zipp suddenly lifted her head, a new, fierce look entering her eyes. “You’re right,” she said quietly. “And I’m going to find it.” She spun around to face her friends. “Sunny, you and Pipp get this festival started to distract everypony. Izzy, Misty, you help them keep things moving until we find them. Hitch, you’re with me. We’re gonna find out what happened to them.” All of them nodded. Hitch picked Sparky off of his back and passed him to Misty. Zipp spun around to face Zoom and Thunder. “Get a few more of you and begin scouring every inch of this city for them, you understand? Don’t act suspicious. Don’t let anypony figure out what you’re up to.”
Zoom and Thunder nodded. Zoom whispered something to Thunder, who nodded curtly, seeming to pull himself together. He turned and dashed out of the room, leaving Zoom to stand at full attention before Zipp.
“Why aren’t you going?” Zipp asked.
“My job has always been to protect the queen, Your Highness,” Zoom replied in the official voice that she used when she was on duty.
“But I’m not the-”
“Don’t you get it, Zipp?” Pipp said from behind her. Zipp turned to face her sister. “If Mom’s gone, then that means that you…”
Zipp’s eyes widened, and she took a few steps back, shaking her head. “Oh, no. No, no, no, not-”
“What?” Misty asked, looking back and forth between Pipp and Zipp, the guard standing at full attention, and all of her friends, whose eyes had all widened with recognition. “What does it mean?”
Zoom turned to glance at Misty, her expression unreadable. “It means that Zipp Storm is now the acting queen of Zephyr Heights,” she said before she sank into a bow.
Ponies had started to gather outside, and Sunny ducked behind the curtain once more. Pipp was anxiously pacing back and forth, fretting. The two guards standing at the back of the room probably wouldn’t have been there yesterday, but it seemed that security had been tightened around the few royals that they had left - and their heroes of Equestria.
“Oh, this is bad, this is bad, this is very, very bad!”
“Pipp, calm down, we can’t let those ponies know what’s going on!” Sunny reminded her. She stood in front of Pipp and firmly grasped her friend’s shoulders and gently shook her. “It’s going to be okay, Pipp. Zipp and Hitch are going to figure out what happened, and we’re going to get your mom back before anypony can realize she was gone. But in the meantime, we have to keep ponies occupied!” Sunny took a deep breath and let it out. “I know that you’re scared. I know what it’s like to lose your only parent that you have left, but…” Sunny glanced away, thinking of her father. She thought about how, only a few floors below their hooves, the ponies responsible for his death were locked away.
Sunny looked back at Pipp, a new fire in her eyes. “But we have to be strong,” Sunny said. A golden glow began to surround her that gradually took the form of a golden horn and a pair of wings. “For the rest of Equestria’s sake, we have to be strong. And we can’t give up hope just yet.”
Pipp wiped her eyes and took a deep breath. “I know, Sunny, it’s just… this is a lot,” she said, looking away. Fresh tears gathered in her eyes as she turned back to her friend. “What if this is someone new? Some new evil villain that we have to fight? What will we do?”
Sunny glanced at the curtain, behind which were hundreds of ponies who needed to be protected. “Then we’ll defeat them like we always have,” she said quietly.
She took a deep breath, forced a smile onto her face, pushed the curtain aside, and stepped out onto the stage.
“So,” Hitch said lightly as he and Zipp trotted down the hallway to Queen Haven’s private chambers, “how’s your first day as queen?”
Zipp was carrying her detective gear. Her sash was wrapped around her torso, and her visor was pushed up onto her forehead, exposing her eyes, which were boiling with turmoil so that they almost seemed to burn like blue flames. She was trotting stiffly and didn’t answer at first.
“I guess I always knew that it would have to happen someday,” she eventually replied. “I just thought it would be under… different circumstances.”
Hitch nodded.
The two ponies arrived at the door, which of course only opened when a pony scanned their hoof on the scanner next to the frame. Zipp immediately leaned close to the scanner and flipped her visor down. She scanned the surface and frowned for a moment before she groaned and pushed it up again.
“The last pony to use this thing was Zoom this morning, and my mom last night,” she said. “I can only find their hoofprints here. So nopony came in this way…”
“So what does that mean?” Hitch asked.
“I’m not sure yet,” she grumbled, slamming her hoof on to the scanner and waiting impatiently while it read her hoofprint and the doors opened.
The room looked like nothing out of the ordinary had happened there. Zipp immediately took to the air, flipping her visor back down and scanning the room in every way that she could for hoofprints, signs of a struggle, or anything unusual that could tell her where her mother might have mysteriously disappeared to. When she found nothing out of the ordinary, she nearly threw her visor across the room and landed next to Hitch.
“It’s so weird,” she said frustratedly. “It’s like Mom just… disappeared.”
“Do the windows open on their own?” Hitch asked, gesturing to the tall panes of glass that let in the morning sunlight. Through them, he could see the large crowds of ponies milling about through the streets, most of them gathering at the stage where the Cutie Blossom Bash had been held, where Sunny and Pipp were doubtlessly distracting them.
“They do,” Zipp said ruefully, “but only from inside. There’s no way to get inside from outside unless you leave the windows open or break the glass. And if that had happened, then whoever took her would have been caught by the guards outside-”
“Well, there’s nothing in here,” Hitch interrupted her. “Let’s go talk to those guards and see if they saw anything strange-” He frowned. “Do you hear someone calling for help?”
“Help?” Zipp immediately quieted, tilting her head this way and that, but she didn’t hear anything. She shook her head. “Where is it coming from?”
“Um…” Hitch turned to the adjacent door to the bedroom, and stepped forward to investigate. He knocked on the door before he pushed it open and stepped inside, looking around the large and spacious bathroom curiously. “It’s louder now…”
Zipp still didn’t hear a cry for help, but she did hear something else - a high-pitched whimpering sound coming from the towel closet. She dashed over there and opened the door, only to be attacked by a flurry of white-
“Cloudpuff?” she gasped, taking a step back as the flying Pomeranian spotted Hitch and started licking his face. “How - how are you here?”
Cloudpuff started barking, and Hitch leaned forward to listen. Zipp was just starting to think how ridiculous it was that their only lead was coming from a dog, and that she was wishing that Izzy had installed language transmitters in her spy gear, when Hitch nodded grimly and looked at Zipp with a look that made her blood freeze.
“What is it?” she demanded.
“Well, it’s… nothing good.”
Izzy knew that she was supposed to be helping Sunny and Pipp keep the Unity Festival moving so that ponies would be too busy to realize that their leaders were missing, but at the moment she was a bit busy consoling Misty, who had run to the Zephyr Heights gardens, made a beeline for her tree that she had grown on the day of the Cutie Blossom Bash, and broken down crying at its roots.
“Oh, Misty, don’t be sad,” Izzy said, putting her arm around Misty and cradling the other unicorn in her arms. “It’s going to be okay! Trust me, we’re going to find him-”
“It’s not that,” Misty said, her voice choking with tears. She sat up and wiped her eyes. “I mean, it is that - I’m really worried for my dad. I just found him, and now he’s gone-” She shuddered and choked back a sob. “It’s just, I can feel something wrong, can’t you? Like there’s something dark in the air-” She placed her hoof on her tree as if to steady herself, but she flinched and drew it back. “And now it’s in the together trees…”
“What are you talking about, Misty?” Izzy said softly.
When she turned to look at her, Misty’s eyes were rimmed with red and overflowing with tears, but there was a kind of deeper sorrow there, the kind of sorrow that was mourning something that was broken but could not be fixed. “Sunny told us that Opaline got trapped in her own together tree as it grew,” she said, “right? But I can still feel her-” She placed her hoof on her tree again “-in here. Like her magic is still doing evil. It’s grown stronger. But I feel like… it’s not exactly Opaline. It’s… darkness. Evil. Something terrible is coming, and… and I’m scared, Izzy. I’m worried that… we might not be enough.”
“You can’t think like that, Misty,” Izzy started to say, but the other unicorn stood up, her expression fierce.
“No. I can - I can feel it, Izzy. Whatever this is, it’s something ancient. Something powerful. Something greater than Opaline ever was. And it’s coming for us next.”
Izzy was reminded of something that happened a long time ago - when she and her friends were on board a flyin zeppelin in the clouds, with other creatures, on the run from the world while they tried to defeat a trio of the worst villains any of them had ever faced. Even Opaline stealing their cutie marks hadn’t quite gotten to the same level of paralyzing terror that Izzy had remembered feeling.
“There’s got to be something we can do,” Izzy tried to tell Misty with a reassurance that she didn’t feel. “We can’t give up hope, Misty. It might be hard, but I guess we can just get creative-”
Misty looked over at Sparky. The baby dragon was running in circles around the tree, occasionally pausing to spurt bursts of dragon fire.
What was strange was the fact that every spurt of flame curled into a scroll - a rolled up piece of paper that appeared out of nowhere and fell to the ground. There were at least a dozen of them, and Misty lit up her horn, levitating the closest one into her hoof.
“What are these?” she asked, frowning at the wax seal stamped onto the scroll. It was vaguely familiar to her, but it wasn’t of any crests that she recognized, either from modern Equestria or the ones that Opaline had taught her. Izzy made a strangled sound like she was choking on her own breath, but Misty ignored her and started to unroll the scroll. “I didn’t think that Sparky could send letters-” She halted. “Oh. It’s a letter for Sunny. Maybe Spike sent it?” That would make sense, if a dragon could send messages through other dragons. But before her eyes could move to the bottom of the page to see the signature, Izzy snatched it from her hooves.
“Oh, well, in that case, we’d better get it to Sunny then,” Izzy said, avoiding Misty’s gaze and hastily rolling up the scroll and sliding it under her crystal headband. “As a matter of fact, I’ll do that, and you can keep watching Sparky-”
“Sure.” Misty shrugged. “I’ll give any more letters that he may spew out to Sunny then-”
“On second thought,” Izzy said in a loud voice, scooping up the baby dragon in one swift move, “I’ll take Sparky with me - I’m sure you want a break-” Her horn sang, and all the strange scrolls levitated off the ground and followed Izzy as she hurriedly trotted back inside the palace.