The citizens of Ponyville were proving to be very resilient. In under an hour after the shadow wolves had been defeated, they were already roaming the streets, returning to their homes and resuming life as usual. Twilight had gathered them all and given them a brief explanation that left out most of the finer details. She told them that all of the shadow wolves had been defeated, and that there was nothing more to worry about. She didn’t mention the rip in the sky, only that she would talk to Celestia and Luna and Starswirl the bearded, and that they would find a way to close it. She left the rest in Starlight’s hooves as she joined her friends in the map room.
All of her friends were sitting in their respective thrones, staring at Sunny and Sprout, who both looked equally uncomfortable and nervous.
I’m not sure what we should tell them, Sunny told Sprout in her head.
Fair point. We could completely destroy the timeline of the universe, Sprout said back.
Especially with these ponies, Sunny added ruefully. Half of it we probably shouldn’t tell them, and the other half we definitely shouldn’t tell them because it’ll influence their decisions and change the future, and then we might not even exist.
But if we don’t exist, then how will we go back in time to tell them about the future so that they change their choices so that we don’t exist?
Please, stop, Sunny moaned, you’re making my head hurt just thinking about it.
The doors opened, and Twilight trotted in with Spike fluttering along behind her. Once she had settled on her throne, she took a deep breath and put her hooves on the table.
“Alright,” she said in a trying-to-be-calm voice. “If we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do it neatly and in an orderly fashion. We’ll go around the table one at a time, ask one question, and then we’ll listen to the answer. Everypony understand?” There were nods all around the table. “Okay then. Who wants to go first?”
Five hooves shot into the air, each expression looking more desperate than the last.
Twilight sighed and rubbed her forehead with her hoof. “That really doesn’t help, guys.”
“Um, actually,” Fluttershy piped up, “I was going to say that you should go first, Twilight. You were the one who found Sunny, right?” She looked around the table; most everypony else was nodding in agreement.
“Fine.” Twilight sat up straight and rolled her shoulders back. “I’ll go first.”
She looked across the table at Sunny, and Sunny gulped nervously.
Please don’t say it, please don’t say it, please don’t say it-
“How can you turn into an alicorn?”
Sunny’s heart sank. Of course that was her first question, and it was one of the many that Sunny didn’t think she would be able to answer.
“I mean, that was what happened, right? With the glowing wings and horn and everything?”
Sunny nodded miserably. “That’s… a very long story…” She bit her lip and looked at the ground, but the room remained deathly silent, all eyes focused on her. She glanced sideways at Sprout, mentally pleading, Help me.
He just shrugged. I don’t know what a good answer would be, either.
Well, that is not helpful.
She took a deep breath. “Well, you see… we’re not exactly… from around here, and…”
“Didn’t you say you were from Manehattan?” Twilight asked, tilting her head suspiciously at Sunny.
Sunny took a deep breath. “Kiiinda?”
“Okay, back it up. Where exactly are you from?”
This is not really going well, Sprout said unhelpfully in her head.
Not. Helping!
Sunny glanced out a window. Through it, she could see the very tops of the many houses in Ponyville and the edge of the Everfree Forest, and the clear blue sky above it. And twisting through the sky…
Sunny sighed and pointed out the window. “From there.”
Everyone’s heads swiveled to look at where Sunny was pointing and then back to her, all wearing matching expressions of disbelief.
“I fell out of the rip in the sky,” Sunny said truthfully. She stared at the table, unwilling to look anyone in the eye, even though she could feel all of them staring at her. For some reason, she had the strangest urge to cry. “It’s actually some kind of portal. I swear I had no idea where it went - I didn’t even know it went anywhere. I ended up in the Castle of the Two Sisters, and that’s where you found me.” She looked up and met Twilight’s eyes, which were wide with surprise. “And you all know the rest.”
Silence. Sunny felt so nervous she thought she might throw up.
“...Okay,” Twilight said, slowly and carefully. “And… where does the portal go?”
“It… it goes to… it goes to the future.”
If Sunny thought that the first silence was heavy and oppressive, this one was worse. Each of the six ponies (and the one dragon) all looked like they wanted to shout a thousand things, but they couldn’t remember how to speak. But despite all that, Sunny felt a massive weight lift off her shoulders. Her secret was finally out; the hardest part was over. She could feel herself breathing freely for the first time since she entered this room.
“You’re… from the future?” Pinkie Pie stood up in her chair, her eyes impossibly wide. She suddenly gasped and started speaking so fast that it sent Sunny’s mind reeling. “Is there an evil villain that’s destroying your home with the evil shadow wolf things like here, and you tried to stop him only you got chased into this portal and fell into the past and have to get back through the portal because your friends are all back there and they need your help?”
Well. That was easy, Sprout told Sunny, and she almost snorted with laughter.
“Pinkie, I’m… sure that’s not it,” Twilight said weakly.
“Nope, she’s right.”
“Yeah, actually, that was a lot faster than explaining it ourselves.”
And then the shocked silence finally broke, and a thousand questions burst from everypony’s mouths, and Sunny couldn’t even understand one of them because there were so many, and everyone was talking over everyone else and it was all complete chaos-
Spike suddenly took a huge breath and let loose a torrent of green flame that roared over their heads and shocked everypony back into silence.
“Okay,” Twilight said, standing up and flapping her wings so that she hovered over her chair. “Everypony calm down-”
“Calm down? They just said they’re from the future!” Rainbow Dash burst out. Twilight sent her a glare so severe that the rainbow-maned pegasus actually shrank in her seat and shut her mouth, averting her gaze.
“Yes,” Twilight continued in a strained voice. “And we agreed to do this in an orderly fashion, remember? Now, we’re going to pick up where we left off and continue. Sunny, Sprout - if there’s anything that you… can’t tell us, then don’t tell us, and we won’t badger you for more details. Everypony understand?” Synchronized nods from the entire group. “Right. AJ, it’s your turn.” Twilight returned to her chair and nodded at the orange earth pony.
“My question’s for you.” She pointed at Sprout. “How do you make those plants grow?”
Sprout shrugged. “In the future, earth ponies have a kind of magic. I’m not really sure how it works, or why we didn’t have it before, but…” He shrugged.
Twilight looked to Rarity, who asked her question: “How were you able to defeat those shadow wolves? We’ve been trying for days and never got it to work - we even tried our whole magic-rainbows on them, and it didn’t even faze them.”
Sunny shook her head. “I’ve got no more idea than you do. All I knew was that I needed to do something, and, well, it seemed like the right thing to do.”
“But how did you get your magic?” the unicorn pressed. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“...Right. So. We… might have lost magic for a little bit?” Sunny waited until the initial exclamations died down before she continued. “Don’t worry, we got it back - my friends and I, we figured it out - and when it came back, I… it just kind of happened.” She looked around the table and saw that everyone had matching expressions of longing, but were too afraid to ask the question on their minds. Sunny sighed and closed her eyes, feeling the magic surge up inside of her and take its usual form around her. Golden light shined through her closed eyelids, and she spread her wings, feeling a faint smile come to her face at the gasps of wonder and awe. Sunny opened her eyes.
“I don’t quite understand it,” she said, looking at her golden wings. “I don’t know how it happens, or why it’s me, but… I do know that there has to be a reason for it. I just… wish I knew what it was.” She looked around. “Any more questions?”
Fluttershy timidly raised her hoof. “Can all earth ponies grow plants?”
“Yep.” Sprout nodded.
“Well, Hitch can also talk to animals-”
“Wait, Hitch can talk to animals?”
“Oh, that’s right, you wouldn’t know - yeah, my friend Hitch can grow plants and understand animals, but he’s the only one, I think.”
Pinkie Pie was next: “What’s it like in the future?”
Sunny and Sprout exchanged a look. “Um…”
“Like, are there parties every day? And streets made of chocolate and fences made of candy canes and the snow is ice cream with sprinkles and hot fudge-”
“It’s the future, Pinkie,” Twilight interrupted her, holding up a hoof to stop her, “not another dimension.”
“Aw.” Pinkie slumped in her chair, looking temporarily sad, but within a few moments she had forgotten all about it and was looking as excitable as ever.
“My turn,” Rainbow Dash huffed, in a bit of a bad mood because she had to wait until last. She turned to look at Sunny with a bit of a hard look in her rose pink eyes. “You said that you ‘lost magic’,” she said, making quotation marks around the words with her hooves. “How did that happen, and why? And how did you get it back?”
“Oh…” Sunny took a deep breath and glanced at Sprout. I think we can tell them, she said to him. Just… just as long as we keep it vague.
He gave her a slight nod. Just… maybe don’t talk about me as much?
“A… a long time ago,” Sunny began, telling the story slowly as she worked out what to say, “ponies started fighting. They split up. All three pony kinds divided and separated, so that when I was born, nopony had seen a unicorn or a pegasus in generations, but we were terrified of them. We had been told stories about how dangerous they are, but… I didn’t believe them. My dad would tell me stories every night about you guys, and how, once, all ponies had been friends, and that he hoped that, maybe one day, they could be like that again.
“Then, one day, a unicorn turned up in Maretime Bay - that’s where I’m really from, that’s what it’s called. Anyway, ponies started freaking out, but I helped her escape, and I learned that the unicorns had no magic. So Izzy and I - her name’s Izzy - decided to go to Zephyr Heights, the pegasus city, to try and figure out what happened to magic. But the pegasi had no magic either, but we learned that there were two crystals that had been separated, and we thought that if we put them back together, then magic would come back. But we had to steal the pegasus crystal, and we became friends with the two pegasus princesses, Pipp and Zipp, and then my friend Hitch turned up, and we had to run away, and then we went to Bridlewood, where the unicorns lived, to find the unicorn crystal, but when we put them together, it didn’t work, so I went back home. But then I discovered that there was a third crystal, so my friends and I were trying to put all three of them together, but then all the ponies that we’d run into were fighting, and everything fell apart… but we realized that we had to come together. And then… well, magic came back, and…” She shrugged, gesturing to her own wings. “This happened.”
There was something in Twilight’s expression that made Sunny a bit nervous, like the other alicorn knew that something wasn’t quite right about the story, or that something was missing, and she was determined to find out what it was.
“But what about dragons?” Spike asked, speaking up for the first time. “And every other creature? What happened to them?”
“They withdrew into their kingdoms,” Sprout said quietly, and all the attention was suddenly redirected to him. Sunny felt a sense of relief that no one was looking at her so intensely anymore. “And we hadn’t heard of them in generations.”
“Wow,” Pinkie Pie said softly. “The future suddenly doesn’t sound so great.”
“It’s better now,” Sprout said earnestly. He gently nudged the pony beside him. “Sunny fixed most of it.”
“Well,” Sunny grumbled, “it was great. Until Grogar showed up and started kidnapping all our friends and building a giant shadow army to take over the world-”
“Wait, who?” Rainbow Dash interrupted, standing up.
“Did you say Grogar?” Twilight added. There was a look on each of their faces - the look of recognition and terror, but at the same time, all of them were already racking their brains for any kind of solution. Sprout, on the other hoof, had a look of complete shock on his face, and Sunny remembered that she hadn’t had a chance to fill him in on all of the happenings of late, and how and why she ended up in Ancient Equestria in the first place.
“Did I forget to mention that part?” said Sunny sheepishly. “I mean, I could be totally wrong - it could be another giant blue magic ram who commands an army of shadow wolves who go around kidnapping ponies…”
“How did Grogar get into the future?” Fluttershy wondered aloud. “I thought he was defeated thousands of years ago.”
“I’m not sure,” Twilight said, quickly taking command of the situation. “But he isn’t just focused on the future. He clearly sent wolves here as well, through that rip in the sky, and there must have been a reason for that. I’m going to find out what it is.”
“But what exactly are we going to do?” Rarity asked.
Sunny looked up and found that Twilight was looking at her.
“Sunny,” she said, “you saved all of us. It’s time that we return the favor.”
As if on cue, a voice appeared in Sunny’s head.
Sunny!
It was staticky and faint, as if whoever was speaking was yelling from the other side of a canyon on a windy day, but there was no mistaking the voice. Cozy Glow?
Sunny, where are you?
That’s… kind of a long story…
You have to come back, Sunny. You have to!
Panic rose in her chest. Why? What’s wrong? What happened?
It’s Zephyr Heights. The city’s overrun. There are shadow wolves everywhere!