//------------------------------// // Chapter 1 - The Incident // Story: Empathy is Magic, Pt. 1 // by SisterHorseteeth //------------------------------// A ball of blue fire clung to the tip of her horn like a dewdrop on a stalk of grass. Blistering, angry dew on spiteful, furious grass. Her mentor taught her how to shape her spellfire, just-so – to cultivate it, to nurture it like the first  embers in a cozy campfire – but owing this much to her just fanned its heat with every resentment the unicorn charging the fireball held against that very same mare. The bonfire blazing at hornpoint command ran sweat down her face. She would burn this entire gaudy heap of marble down if she had to. She swore she wanted to – but she had other matters to attend to. Instead, she had kindled this flame to blast away anypony who spotted her, all the way to the Dragonlands That spark fizzled out in shock when Sunset Shimmer found the first body. She skidded to a stop beside the fallen royal guard, nearly crashing into him when her cannon struck an errant, headless helmet and sent her stumbling, fumbling for traction in the socks she’d slid on to pad her hooves. She had questions – so many questions! – and no one to ask them to except for this… not a corpse, she determined. He was still breathing. There was no time to investigate further; she had to keep going. As of earlier that afternoon, Sunset wasn’t legally permitted to be seen within a hundred and fifty hooves of the Celestial Palace anymore, let alone hovering over an unconscious royal guard whose injury she wasn’t even responsible for. The mystery wouldn’t matter, soon enough, anyway. She’d be leaving it all behind for something much greater. At least, that was what she had hoped, for a few fleeting seconds, right until she found his buddy five paces down the hall – the only hall that led to her destination. So much for the faint hope that this was a random hit-and-run that wouldn’t interfere with her plan. Then the lingering ozone hit her nostrils, just as she spotted the scorch marks on his armor and the lichtenpferd figure branching across his bare foreleg. Sunset paused. His chest did not fall and rise like his compatriot’s. She knew she had to keep going. Heck, she had been prepared to strike him – and any other guardsponies in her way – down with a hail of firebolts, herself. But it was one thing to rile herself, in the burning heat of fresh indignation. into thinking she was ready to kill if she had to – to convince herself she was willing to sacrifice others’ lives in the pursuit of her agenda. It was another thing entirely to be tested on that conviction. It should have been such an easy choice, too! She didn’t zap this guy. Not her victim, not her problem! Right? So why was her mouth so dry? She held a hoof to his neck, and his pulse weakly and arhythmically nuzzled her frog. He wasn’t all the way gone just yet. It would have done Sunset good to be heartless, to be apathetic. Things like conscience and empathy held nobleponies back. She had to learn to suppress those if she wanted to get ahead. And yet… A stubbornly-irrepressible part of her brain – one which ponies like to mislabel as the heart – antsy from lack of work, sprung to its duty: begging, kicking, and screaming at Sunset to do something for this stallion. What, it dreaded, if this guard had friends, or closer relationships, or even foals? Her throat tightened. Who else, it demanded, could save him? His life was in her hooves. To walk away would be to kill him just as much as his electrokinetic assailant had. What, it posited, if Sunset had been lying here, wounded, and it was Celestia debating whether to move on without lifting a hoof? That did the trick. So. The earth ponies had their own technique, pounding their hooves on the breathless barrel and bellowing air into their chest, and pegasi conjured a breeze from their wings instead of doing mouth-to-mouth, but Sunset Shimmer was a unicorn – and not just that, but the best of the best when it came to magic. Where not a minute prior, her horn was alight with pyrokinetic intent, now, a cooler but no less intense rhythm resonated from her sky-blue aura, rousing the guardstallion’s heart and lungs back into action, to the tune of the Brothers Giblets’ Groove of Continued Life. He would live. Her conscience would go unstained. Her work here was done, and she continued down the hall, the socks on her hooves doing little to muffle her anxious trot. But now that her mind was free of that ethical quibble, the questions were back in full force. The most demanding of them forced itself, muttered, out of her mouth: “Just what am I going to find at the end of this hall?” Well, for starters, two more royal guards lay jolted on the marble tile near the end. If the guard assignments hadn’t been amended, following the termination of Sunset’s tutelage earlier, then these were most likely the two guards stationed in the room she sought, and which she had known she would have to deal with head-on if she couldn’t bolt past them. Both of them were still breathing, hearts still beating, but they smelt of burnt fur and more ozone. Sunset, on the other hand, was not breathing. Her heart stopped and her breath hitched in her throat as she entered a forbidden room. The Mirror Room. Sans a mirror. Sans the Mirror. You know, the mirror that revealed to Sunset her fate: to become an alicorn, resplendent and mighty, her copper fur glowing with the light of dusk, and the golden and scarlet tones of her fiery mane literalized into a billowing inferno, cooled only by the penetrating, commanding stare of her turquoise eyes. The flaring, swirling sun on her side marked all the banners in the hall behind her, where in reality, Celestia’s own sun had been embroidered. You know, the mirror Celestia had instructed her – warned her – not to mess with and to banish from her mind. Doing so anyways, researching it behind her back in forbidden archives, had led Celestia to completely dispose of Sunset like a used rag. You know, the mirror that was apparently secretly also a portal to… somewhere or other, that surely must have held the secret to Sunset’s ascension. That was the whole reason she came back to the palace at all. That mirror. Sunset had just about remembered to breathe again when– When somepony crashed directly into her from behind, knocking the both of them to the floor. The adrenaline helped a lot to scramble her back onto her hooves, her horn primed for combat. But, instead of the intruder having come back to remove any witnesses, or a veteran guardspony having followed her with legcuffs and a nullifier ring with intent to arrest, she was instead met with a friendly face. It was a member of the Royal Guard, but he wore an approachable, kinda-dopey smile on his face as he shouted, “Whoah! Sunset!” – and he was far too green to stand a chance of taking a mage like Sunset down. Not chromatically greener – he was decidedly tan, kinda like Sunset herself – and both his mane and eyes were blue. Rather, he was green because he had not worked for the Crown long enough for Sunset to bother learning his name. Under previously-normal circumstances, she would have called him ‘Greenhorn’ or ‘Greenie’ to get under his skin. Well, probably not ‘Greenhorn’. He was a pegasus, not a unicorn. In the moment, however, Sunset had some damage control to do. “Guh– Hi! You! Uh–” Suddenly, the entire building shook, as though a small earthquake or rockslide wracked the Canterhorn, but that was impossible. The finest earth pony geotechnicians were in charge of making sure that sort of thing never happened to the mountain they built Canterlot on. It sounded more like a boom of thunder, anyways. Flash spoke first, refocusing on the concern at hand: “Did you see anything?” Sunset blinked. Interesting. He wasn’t accusing her. He didn’t even seem to be aware she wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near the palace. Instinctively, she replied with a “No…”, but then realized she might still need to explain her presence. “I heard a bunch of… lighting bursts, so I came to see what was going on,” she lied, then supported her lies with the truth: “The guards were all unconscious when I got here – I actually had to do CPR on the second one I saw. I didn’t see anypony who could have done this.” And maybe her diversion into cardiopulmonary resuscitation had prevented her from doing so, she realized. “Well, this room is a dead end on the floor plans, so they gotta still be in here.” “Unless they teleported,” Sunset noted, pretending she wasn’t aware of the wards on the room which prevented just that, “or turned invisible and snuck around me.” He didn’t appear to know about the mirror, so she left out the third possibility, which admittedly wouldn’t have explained how the mirror had completely vanished as well. “You were chasing whoever did this?” His ears flattened sheepishly. He didn’t do the stoic guard thing very well, did he? “Not exactly… but I was chasing somepony until they shook me off – an impostor in royal guard’s armor. I didn’t pick up the trail until I found Vambrace lying out in the hallway.” He shook his head. “And, anyways, they couldn’t have done any of those things to escape.” Sunset was about to ask why not, when a third pony burst into the mirror room. An imposing young stallion, clad in armor his rank permitted him to paint in the purple hue of (as rumor had it) his little sister’s coat. His fur, an ice-cold white; his mane, imitated by streaks of azure and cerulean in the bristles on his helmet-plume. “Flash Sentry! Repor– Oh. Sunset Shimmer.” Guard-Captain Shining Armor leveled an accusatory pair of eyes at Sunset as he unsheathed the sparkling fuchsia-and-sapphire glare of his magic. He, unlike Flash, very much knew that Sunset was equina non grata. He was the one to escort Sunset out of the palace. He did not take those eyes off of her as he obstructed the lone exit with his bulky form and repeated himself: “Flash Sentry, report.” “Captain! I was tailing an impostor in the guise of a royal guard after spotting them on patrol in the Photonic Hall.” “Sunset, I’m assuming.” Flash gave his superior officer a befuddled look, then restrained his unprofessionalism. “Fortunately not, Captain. Sunset couldn’t be the impostor,” – Flash turned to Sunset – “for the same reason the impostor couldn’t have teleported out or gone invisible or used any sort of magic to leave this room.” “And that reason is?”, Shining asked. “Because the impostor was an earth pony, sir. They didn’t have wing holes in their armor while I was chasing them, and I found their stolen helmet discarded on the ground, not far from Vambrace, fitted for a non-unicorn.” “Uh-huh…”, Shining noted, oozing with skepticism, before pressing a hoof to his badge of office and speaking into it: “This is Cobalt Knight. Still no sign of Mother Phoenix but we do have a crime scene and a suspect or two over at Looking Glass 9-1-13. Requesting backup. Over.” Sunset blinked. These codenames weren’t that hard to parse, so she had a pretty good idea who ‘Mother Phoenix’ was supposed to be. “Whoah, whoah. Wait. What was that about the Princess?” … [chime of the classic tune] My Little Pony, My Little Pony Ah-ah-ah-ah…~ [shift into poppy synthwave] (My Little Pony) I used to ask what friends could do for me (My Little Pony) What a funny question, now that I’ve seen - Second chances - - Rockin’ out! - - It is what it is. - - For better or worse - - All for the Team - - We make it work - And empathy makes it like… clockwork? (That was bad.) You have my little ponies How did we all make such unlikely friends?