//------------------------------//
// Chapter 10 - On Immortality 
// Story: Empathy is Magic, Pt. 1 
// by SisterHorseteeth 
//------------------------------//

The Princess and her brilliant student were breakfasting in a quiet, empty banquet hall, whose privacy was gained by Guard-Captain Armor’s standing orders that nopony enter the room.
Sunset didn’t really remember anything from after she came back to the palace last night, but the tears she definitely didn’t shed had left her with a splitting headache called ‘dehydration’. She was on her third glass of ice-cold water, though she’d barely touched the strawberry pancakes Cadance had insisted on making herself (instead of letting the palace cooks do their job). Was she afraid they’d poison her or something?
It was hard not to take notice of the marks on Princess Cadance’s appearance. After yesterday’s confirmation that she hadn’t had a night of sleep since Celestia was foalnapped, it looked like she’d kept that waking streak going through one more – fifth – night. The bags under her eyes were a darker purple than her irises, and all the stray tricolor hairs undercut any youthful energy suggested by the blue bows tied around her dock and disheveled ponytail – a thread of carnation askew here, a slanting buttercup there, and a violet filament curling crooked underneath.
She looked like butt. Or like one of those prismaplastic dolls they made of her after spending half a decade buried in some filly’s backyard, only to be rediscovered when the parents excavated the old playsite to plant some roses.
Shining Armor was there, too, reviewing guard postings and patrol routes and schedules while picking at his meal every now and then. He was… frankly very deeply absorbed into it. The papers and scrolls covered a mattress-sized span of the banquet table. It was, perhaps, a point in his favor against the idea that he only got his position because he was smooching the Princess-in-Training.
But it was just the three of them. Smolder was not present, though she had taken the coach back to the palace, checked in with her brother, and been given a guest room of her own to stay in.
It was probably for the best. So far, Sunset had successfully avoided her (and the subjects of their little bet and the whole “being abandoned in a Canterlot suburb” thing), but she imagined it was a matter of time before the bored little drake crossed her path again.
In any case, Cadance had been relieved to hear that Sunset successfully recruited all five Harmony-Bearer candidates – though Sunset did not go into any deeper detail about them than the dossier provided. The Princess didn’t need to know how deeply underwhelming those candidates were. Hopefully, Harmony would sort them out in the end.
The Princess’s relief turned to displeasure when Sunset explained just how she’d played Headmare Cinch into levving her the dossier.
“Sunset.”
“Cadance?”
“What, exactly, am I going to tell the event crew managers when five new mares who aren’t even out of college yet show up to take over their jobs?”
Sunset shrugged. “Assign your crew to something else. It’ll make me more honest, retroactively.”
“I don’t think that’s how honesty works.”
Sunset scoffed. “If I was lying at the time, but the lie becomes the truth by the time anypony who heard the lie can find out, what’s the actual harm?”
“You’re making a lot of ponies scramble to prop you up, for one. Me, included.”
“Huh?”
“I’d hoped to keep my temporary coronation rather… low-key.”
Sunset looked at Cadance like she’d just announced plans to revert back into a pegasus. “Why on Equus would you want that?”
“So that when Celestia gets back, she can crown me for real, once she decides it’s time. Then we can go all out and spare no expense.”
Waving a dismissive hoof, Sunset looked down to actually consider eating her breakfast. “Eh, that just means we’ll have to find a way to one-up your first when that time comes. If it comes.”
“Sunset! Don’t say that!”
“What?” Sunset looked up, legitimately confused, to see shock and offence on Princess Cadance’s face. The student almost jumped out of her seat.
“We cannot give up hope that Celestia will return to us soon,” implored Cadance.
“Oh!” Backhoof time! “Wait, hold on! That’s not what I was trying to say at all. I just meant, once we do find her, she just might… keep you in training forever. Like she was planning with me.”
The apparent disgust faded into mere frustration. “That was not what she was planning for you.”
Sunset pointed her magehoofed fork at Cadance (causing Shining to tense up protectively). “How can you be so sure of that?”
Cadance sighed. “Because it’s what she always wants from her students. An equal. A peer. A companion. A friend. I know you’ve probably heard this plenty of times throughout your school years, but Equestria’s a Principality instead of a Queendom for a reason. No single pony was ever meant to rule the entire nation alone.”
“Well, you’re right that I’ve heard it before. And every time I did, I clocked it as the bullscat it was.” Sunset artfully refused to acknowledge the amount of time she spent ardently believing that bullscat as it pertained to her own possible ascension. “Do you seriously expect me to believe she wanted somepony to be her equal, despite ruling Equestria on her own for an entire millennium after giving her sister the boot?” Sunset stuffed a wad of pancake in her mouth and continued speaking through it. “Frankly, I think she found out she likes being an absolute monarch, but she won’t admit it because it goes against her image.”
Cadance heaved another, wearier sigh and leaned back in her chair, seeming to drop the subject in order to stare at the spot where she’d most recently parked the sun. After half a minute of quiet contemplation, she muttered, “She’s gonna kill me when she gets back,” and before Sunset could ask what she meant, the Princess explained:
“Okay, so, this is kind of a super big secret. It’s one that Celestia deemed necessary to let me in on, but… she really doesn’t want this to become common knowledge.” Cadance looked over her shoulder, as though Princess Celestia might have decided to make her return at the most dramatically-inconvenient time, even though there wasn’t anything there but the morning sunlight streaming in from the balcony.
 Still, she insisted on lowering her voice to say, “She had a plan for when Luna… comes back.”
Setting down her fork, Sunset asked, “What do you mean, ‘comes back’? Wasn’t she banished forever?” The sinking feeling in Sunset’s stomach gave her the answer before Cadance would.
Cadance winced and tapped her hooves together. “Not… exactly. That’s just what the history books say.” She took a couple moments to think. “You know how all the myths about how the Mare in the Moon got there came about, right?”
“Vaguely. The only people who actually knew why there was a horse’s face on the moon all of a sudden were the Equestrians who were there for the Ecliptic Crisis. Everybody else had to guess.”
“Right, which is why the variations from way outside of Equestria’s borders often get the species and nationality of the Mare in the Moon completely wrong. In a lot of Donkasian countries, she’s the Jenny in the Moon, for example, who hailed from whichever neighbor they had a rivalry with at the time.”
“You’re stalling,” Sunset pointed out.
“I am…” Cadance shut her eyes and took a steadying breath. “Look, some of those myths (particularly the ones that developed in territories that would later be incorporated into Equestria: places like New Yoke, Califoalnia, the Bittish Isles) – They got… something right that they shouldn’t have been able to get right. Maybe Nightmare Moon’s final cry of vengeance carried on the wind, or maybe they just got lucky assigning numbers. I mean, a thousand is a pretty even number for a storyteller to come up with on the spot.”
“She’s only stuck up there for a thousand years. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Yes. At the end of which, supposedly, the stars themselves will somehow play a role in her escape.” Cadance scanned the room (again) for eavesdroppers. “…I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.”
Sunset didn’t either, but that wasn’t where her mind was. Instead, she did some very quick math. The Ecliptic Crisis happened in 1010 SE, and the current year was, of course, Y2K.
“Nightmare Moon’s gonna be back in ten years?!”, Sunset shouted.
The Princess flinched, and urged Sunset, “Please don’t say it so loud! But… yes, Sunset, she will, and we don’t expect her to have cooled off in all that time. Auntie knew her little ponies wouldn’t be able to sleep at night, knowing that Luna’s banishment was temporary (even if old age would take them long before it came to pass), so she kinda… well, lied,” – she said the word with a conflicted frown, and (once again) scanned the room for eavesdroppers – “and assured everypony that Nightmare Moon would never, ever return.”
Sunset was about to snark about another of Celestia’s bad habits coming back to bite everypony, but she found her mouth unbearably dry. The moment to sass passed silently in the sipping of her water.
The implications demanded questions, but all her spiralling extrapolations could wait just another second. There was a precaution which apparently neither other pony in the room thought to take. It was odd that Shining hadn’t done it first, but he seemed pretty engrossed in his work. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed the sensitive nature of the conversation.
A sound-proof dome of shining aquamarine bubbled out of Sunset’s horn, surrounding herself, Cadance, and Shining Armor – the last of whom at first shot up from his seat with his own horn halfway-charged to shoot, before reassessing the situation, giving Sunset an ‘I’m watching you but go ahead’ glare-nod, and returning to his schedules.
Her voice recovered, Sunset asked, “So, lemme get this straight: Celestia wanted to keep the eventuality of her sister’s return hush-hush, dooming everypony to be completely blindsided when it happens a decade from now.”
As Cadance nodded, Sunset rubbed her temples.
“I can only assume she had a plan, because she has those out the butt. She didn’t happen to let you in on it, did she?”
Cadance smiled. “It’s the same one I trusted you with, if I understood all her hints correctly. She intended to find some virtuous Element-Bearers, so that Equestria would be ready for her return.”
Right. Virtuous. Well, they probably had enough time to find some more virtuous ponies than the candidates they had, and, worst case scenario, they still had an alicorn who could wield the Elements herself if need be – but banish her if a ten-year deadline didn’t feel as nigh as ten days when an alicorn’s vengeance was on the line.
Sunset cleared the ticking clock from her head with a vigorous shake. She’d have plenty of time to dwell on it later that night. “Okay, so, these ponies I recruited yesterday – if they get the job, they’re going to be the Bearers that come together with the Elements and kick her flanks back to the moon?”
“Well, we’re hoping she’s learned her lesson after all that time…–”
–“Yeah, fat chance.”–
“–But if it comes to violence, then… they’ll have to be prepared for that, too.” The words came out like a bandage, peeled off slow.
And the wound beneath was ugly. Sunset wouldn’t trust those bozos to successfully band together and take down a mildly-corrupt bureaucrat, by carrot or by stick – let alone a lunatic alicorn ex-Princess. It would take lifetimes for them to get over their heaping piles of issues, and they had one decade to prepare for what would pretty much be the apocalypse if they couldn’t bring back Celestia or alicornify Sunset in that time.
Like, okay, Sunset was good, but even she had to admit, she’d probably need the alicorn power-up to go hoof-to-hoof with somepony as ancient as Luna.
Sunset took a deep, heavy breath. “I almost wish you hadn’t told me.”
“Hence the secrecy.”
In that case, Sunset was slightly gladder to know. She’d make herself be gladder just to keep Celestia from being right about one more thing.
But besides that… “I just don’t get why that’s her plan. Not that it helps us now (unless we manage to restore Celestia before her sister’s parole hearing), but couldn’t she just… use the Elements herself like she did last time? She doesn’t like endangering her subjects’ lives, so why does she need six mortal Bearers to do the blasting for her?”
Cadance bit her lips, hesitating to answer.. “If I had to guess… She doesn’t think she has it in her.”	
“Huh? Like, she can only use the Elements so many times? Or do they drain your strength every time you use them?” –In which case, Sunset’s desire not to be on that team was increasing.
“No, nothing like that.” As the Princess softly shook her head, mixed emotions took over her face. Frustration with Sunset and/or Celestia was a given, but there was just as much sympathy and just as much despair. “It’s… She just… She misses Luna, and she regrets what happened. I’m sure you’ve picked up on that.”
“I have. Still, you’d think the Perfect Princess,” Sunset spat, “would choke it down and do what’s right for her ponies.”
“You and I both know she isn’t perfect.”
“Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to hear somepony else say it.”
When Cadance didn’t dignify that with more than a frown, Sunset took a minute, ruminating on a cold pancake, to contemplate the ever-spreading cracks in Celestia’s image.
She wanted to launder her guilt. To make other ponies do the dirty work so she didn’t have to stain her conscience with another act of pseudo-sororicide. Fine. That made sense to Sunset. She was satisfied with that motive.
She didn’t speak it aloud, though. Sunset got the sense that she’d pushed the envelope enough with her Celestia-bashing. Her position on Cadance’s court was very nice and she did not want to jeopardize it.	
Still, the answer wasn’t complete. Gulping down the fruity mush (and casting a quick food-heating spell), she instead doubled back to earlier. “You never answered my first question, though. Let’s pretend I’m completely convinced Celestia’s lonely at the top and wants somepony to replace Luna.”
Cadance winced. “She’s not trying to replace her sister, Sunset. That’s not how grief works.”
“Fine. Phrase it how you want. Regardless, she’s had almost a thousand years to do that. Why start now, with you and (supposedly) me?”
When Princess Cadance did not respond for several seconds, Sunset began to worry she’d crossed the line.
When the Princess then wordlessly rose from her seat with her brows knit, that worry transformed into certainty.
But instead of marching up to Sunset and kicking her rear, or having her Shining Armor do it for her, she just bowed her head, turned once more to the streaming light through the balcony window, and started pacing – not a lecturer paces, but as an anxious and many-times-burned conspiracy nut struts about after successfully suckering you into asking about their theory.
Except, there was no smile on her face. What she knew, or thought she knew, was a burden.
“Two things: one, yes, you are correct that there was a time when she wasn’t taking students. There’s a reason historians call the eleventh century the Despondency Period.
“–But two: we aren’t the first. Before Luna turned on her, they both tried to teach Equestria’s future Princesses together; and once the… the loneliness got to Celestia, and she started taking students again, she was only that much more desperate to have somepony ruling by her side.”
“What, are you gonna tell me those students of hers who gave their names to the universities I hit up when I went to meet Sugarcoat– that they were on the track to Princesshood, too?”
“Yes, actually!” Cadance did her best to smile in warming praise, but it was a cold light in her eyes. “Those two, and dozens of others. Who do we have here, again…?” The pacing stopped as the dossier flew from the table to Cadance, jerking to a stop before her eyes in her powerful yet artless cornflower-blue magegrip. Brushing aside her bang, she opened the folder to the relevant entry. “De Facto and Rosegold.”
“Neither of whom actually became alicorns,” Sunset noted.
“No, they did not…”
In the corner of her eye, Sunset spotted movement. It was Shining Armor, shaking his head and waving his forehoof in front of his throat. He seemed to be signalling her to shut up, or at least change the subject.
But Sunset carried on, despite Shining’s intensifying glare. “But I haven’t heard about anypony else making it to the end of the track, either, even though the Princesses had tons of students. What’s your explanation for that?”
There was a silence. It spanned what felt like many minutes. Both sets of eyes were on Cadance as she took several deep breaths… and started pacing about the bubble again, circling the table.
Halfway through her first rotation, she began, softly, “Quite a few of my lessons revolved around the beautiful lives of these students – my predecessors – and the lessons they taught their mentor in turn. She remembers ever so much. For each and every student she taught, Aunt Tia was bursting with charming little anecdotes she never really got to share with anypony else.
“Those were some of my favorite lessons. They didn’t even feel like lessons – more like Storytime with Auntie Tia. These moments where she opened up about herself were the ones where she felt most like she was genuinely my aunt, and not just the imposing monolith that was The Princess who’d adopted me as her ward for entirely political reasons.”
“She never opened up with me,” Sunset grumbled. Admittedly, Sunset had made it clear that her interest was in magic and nothing else, but that didn’t make her feel any less shorted.
Cadance dipped her head in what felt like sympathy. “She’s a very guarded mare.” Then, her tone took a turn for the… haunted. “Even the vulnerability she allowed me to see had its limits.”
Sunset spotted Shining packing up his charts and rosters, clearing a space for his marefriend to sit by his side… but she just continued her slow, steady pace around the table, even as he gestured for her to sit down.
She didn’t seem to notice.
Cadance just continued. “She never actually told me she meant to make these apprentices into fellow Princesses. That was something I figured out on my own, much later. At the time… I simply thought they were the lucky mares and stallions of their generations who got to study under her. 
“She had so many things to say about them as students – enough to get Mr. Kibitz on her case about losing track of her schedule – but… she never really had anything to say about their post-academic lives. 
“Not for lack of asking on my part. When I noticed this pattern in my teens, I tried to take a more active role in these particular lessons, but the answers she gave were brief, if I got one at all. Most of the time, she’d realize we’d gone over our time on the lesson and ask me to table it, or get sidetracked in another little story, causing us both to forget my question. On the occasions I did remember, afterwards, it was just never the right time or place to ask. She was always busy contemplating some matter of state, or we’d be shoulders-deep in a new lesson.
“I… eventually was able to take the hint that she didn’t want to talk about it, and assumed it was grief, or just the mundane fact that she stopped being such a big part of their lives once they graduated, but… it still nagged at me.”
Sunset could relate.
“Enough to go looking for other sources. Sometimes, I could track down a biography, but nowhere near as often as you’d think, and with nowhere near as many details as you’d hope. Too many of these texts cut off at the same point as our lessons, with maybe a passing reference to an unstated cause of early death.
“It just didn’t make sense. Surely, if not all the equinal students of Princess Celestia herself, then at least most of them, would go on to do great things and have a lot of books written about them, wouldn’t they? So why wasn’t that the case?”
At that moment, Cadance chose to look Sunset in the eye. “You might, um… One might say we’re both… a bit inquisitive for our own good, Sunset.”
The narrowly-unbanished mage raised a doubtful brow. “Really?”
The Princess fidgeted with her ponytail as she worked up either the words or the nerve to reply.
And when she did, it was a hay of a thing to drop: “You’re not the only one who went researching things behind Princess Celestia’s back.”
That had the mage’s full attention. “Wait, what?”
“If Aunt Tia and the public record wouldn’t tell me what I wanted to know, I’d just have to find out on my own.”
Well.
Well!
Here was some juicy lore to digest. Sunset wasn’t prepared for anything like that. “That’s… kinda cool, actually. I can’t believe there was a little bit of a rebel under that perfect pink Princess shell this whole time! –But how’d you get away with breaking into the forbidden archives?”
Cadance shook her head. “This knowledge wasn’t forbidden; just… not very easy to find, and I think it was encouraged to be that way. References in obsolete history books to incompletely-archived newspaper articles, citing footnotes in out-of-print biographies that weren’t even about the pony I was researching, quoting interviews that hadn’t survived the passage of time. It was in these scant excerpts I found the occasional reference to their future Princesshood that didn’t come to pass.
“I spent a lot of nights I should have spent sleeping, and a lot of silent reading sessions with Shining’s sister that I could have spent on something more pleasant to discuss with her afterwards, instead following these trails of ancient paper. It’d all be worth it in the end, I thought. It would bring me closure.”
“…But it sounds like it didn’t. More dead ends?”
A dry chuckle rattled from the Princess’s lips. “If only. So often, I wish that their fates were expressly forbidden for me to learn.”
Before Sunset could ask what that was supposed to mean, Cadance held up the dossier again. The spectre haunting her diction took on a hard, objective edge as she began to recite. “Rosegold… She was a diligent young mare, honest to a fault – but by her own admission, a little bit greedy, too. Her tutelage was cut tragically short when the freshly-discovered trove of the Celestial Sea pirate In-for-a-Penny was erroneously placed in the palace treasury, instead of the cursed artifact vault. To this day, they are still finding ‘counterfeit’ bits with Rosegold’s anguished face stamped on them.”
Sunset winced, but was afforded no opportunity to follow up. Cadance continued, “De Facto actually got off a little easier. You know, her university was founded in spite of her, not because of her.”
Sunset tilted her head.
“After Celestia found out she was using her station as Royal Student to make a mockery of thirteenth-century Equestria’s legal codes, exploiting every loophole and gap in regulation to get away with whatever petty whims she wanted, De Facto was reassigned to Tartarus for two-hundred years. Legally, it couldn’t be called imprisonment, or else De Facto would be entitled to total amnesty for her many, many not-quite-crimes.”
“So she died in prison? Or not-prison?”
“Oh, no, you don’t age in Tartarus. When her assignment was up, she emerged into a world she barely recognized, where the only living pony who knew her equinally was the mare who put her in Tartarus in the first place. When she saw that they’d dedicated an entire school of legal philosophy to preventing anypony like her from ever wreaking legal havoc again, she decided to quietly step down as Royal Student. She then disappeared on a retirement journey out west, which is where my research into her hit a dead end.”
“Okay…? I’m guessing these aren’t the only stories that don’t end well?”
Cadance’s pacing quickened, and she stopped looking at Sunset as she spoke. “Disappearances, betrayals, eternal slumbers, memory losses, experiments gone wrong… It’s like Celestia’s favor marks you for obscene, horrific misfortune.”
“She is Equestria’s first and strongest line of defense,” Shining acknowledged, speaking for the first time in the entire meal. “It puts everypony in Equestria in danger, especially those closest to her. We’re really hoping Operation Bearer changes that.”
“You’re right, my love. And it will.” Princess Cadance turned to smile almost expectantly at Sunset. “And you’re going to make that happen, for which I can’t find the words to express how grateful I am.”
If Sunset didn’t want to admit her progress on this ‘Operation Bearer’ was a bust before, she really didn’t want to, now. “Uh, yeah, you’re welcome! I’ll make it work.”
Cadance beamed even wider, but Sunset could not discern whether the reason it didn’t make it to her eyes was because Cadance didn’t believe her, or because Cadance didn’t believe herself. “Great! Great… Forgive me; I’m just getting worked up over my worst fears again. It’ll pass.”
Shining spoke first, in warning tone: “Don’t–”
But he was too slow. “What are those?”
“–ask.” His eyes practically bulged out of his head. “Really?!”
Shining tried to put a muzzle spell on Sunset, and it might have even stuck if Sunset hadn’t counterspelled it before it could lock shut around her snout.
Cadance, for her part, didn’t seem to notice. Her voice grew quiet as she answered Sunset’s prying question with a song:

—


“It’s happening again,


As it has always gone before:


A being without end


Meets an end she can’t ignore.”

That’s where the… marimba(?) started plinking its somber accompaniment. Some something-phone or other, whose notes resonated not from the crispness of wood or peal of metal, but the haunted vibrations of glass.
Whatever it was, Sunset was entirely confident it didn’t physically exist, which could only mean one thing:
They had a heartsong on their hooves.

“It’s happening again


As it will forever more.


This is what happens when


Fate comes back to settle scores…”

Sunset settled in, as did Shining Armor. They knew they were along for the ride.

—

The half-filled drinking glasses on the table chimed in with stringlike harpistry. There were more of them than Sunset remembered, and far more than were necessary for the three of them.
Cadance’s horn sparked up in cornflower blue to illustrate a scene, above the table, in shards of solidified magic like stained glass. The artistry was foalishly simple, but the power she had was undeniable, to operate so many moving parts at once.
All of it was formed from that same pale blue, but Sunset had seen Celestia paint her magic in all the color of the rainbow before. That was yet another alicorn ability she envied – the way an alicorn can just reattune her coronal chroma whenever she wants. Cyan was a piercing, powerful color for eyes, but if she had a choice, Sunset’s magic would burn with the hottest reds and oranges.
The diorama was of the throne room – usually a stronghold of solar warmth and the carefully-cultivated image of joy; but here, reconstructed entirely in cold blue, it felt more like a place of hostile, wintry isolation. There, a little effigy of Celestia (her paper-cutout mane waving in the still air just like the real deal) slowly traversed the runner-rug up to her throne, while scattered courtiers silently watched from the sidelines.
A little pegasus foal was there, too, her eyes glowing like no other’s, as she closely tailed the Princess. This scene must have been set before Celestia took Sunset in.

“One day, when I was small,


At Auntie Tia’s side,


I learned a lesson, accidentally:”

Just then, a chandelier plummeted from the ceiling. The art style was simplistic and monotone enough that none of the gory details came across, but it was patently obvious that Princess Celestia was impaled clear through the barrel and her neck was broken.
Shining frowned, deeply uncomfortable, and Sunset… couldn’t summon up the schadenfreude to enjoy it, herself. It mostly just made her feel ill.

“That a Princess Triune cannot die.”

On shaking legs, Celestia got up, her neck snapping back into place, her magic pulling the broken shaft of the chandelier from her heart like a sword from stone and setting it gently aside.
This, on the other hoof, was two parts amazing, one part terrifying – ‘awesome’ would be apt at any point in the history of the Equestrian language. Among so many other powers, this deathlessness was what Sunset longed for. All her limitless brilliance wouldn’t amount to much if her life and work were cut short by one stray explosion, one toxic fume, one invisible miscalculation.

—

Celestia’s image exchanged silent words of comfort to the figure of her quaking niece, who would have been crushed to death if the light fixture had fallen even a second later. Here began some kind of bell-instrument, played like a piano, accompanied by cymbals, softly clattering with gentle reverence. Finally, instruments that weren’t made of glass.

“That we, where our cards fall,


Take mortal blows in stride.”

It was then that Sunset noticed another figure, the likes of which she seldom gave any notice to: a palace servant, standing by a winch, her eyes bugging out of her head in fright. Couldn’t blame her; Sunset would freak out, too, if she accidentally committed an act of regicide that didn’t even work.

“She’d pass this gift on, incidentally,


After my Ascension, coming nigh.“


—


“And she would mete out mercy,


Where mercy she saw fit.”

The diorama cut away to a circle cut into sixths, each featuring Celestia in a different scene:

“For poison, knives, or burning,”

Choking on a cup of tea. The glint of a hooded figure’s blade in her sleeping chambers. Dragonfire on the castle walls. Not mentioned were decapitation (a guillotine and an angry mob), strangulation (dragged over Canterlite cobbles by the noose around her neck), and explosion (opening a present with a fuse and a splash radius).
Sunset was very grateful for the lack of realism at this point.

“So much would she forgive.”

Piecing back together the shards off the floor. Passing the dagger back to him, bloodied blade between her teeth. A bandage-mummy signing a treaty. Her head, nestled on a pillow, while she broke bread with the revolution’s representative and her body stood guard. Comforting a weeping behemoth of a stallion, rope still fastened around his barrel, beneath her broken wings. Wobbling like gelatin while she shopped for a safer thank-you gift.

“But when ponies, in their course,


Were harmed in the attempt,”

The scene cut back to the throne room, where a wardrobe, which had seemed out of place, popped open on its own, dumping out two (hopefully) unconscious ponies – one garbed in a maid’s dress and one naked. Cadance was probably taking some narrative license, abridging an entire plot of intrigue and investigation that would eventually prove that the chandelier accident was actually an assassination plot.

“They would learn, she hoped, remorse,


Through jail or banishment.”

The failed infiltrator was unceremoniously scene-transitioned into the castle dungeon.

—

Though the next scene also took place in the throne room, time had passed, and Cadance was now a full-grown pegasus, her eyes no longer so bright. Celestia was there too, of course, sat upon her throne, but the room was no less icy for the smile on her face.
That probably had most to do with the orderly rows of stonefaced ponies on either side of the approach, each wearing a uniform that clicked into place as soon as Sunset saw the familiar stick-bug figure of Headmare Abacus Cinch.
Cadance had sculpted her effigy taller than Celestia’s.
Nevertheless, the musical glasses began on the path to a swelling, triumphant crescendo that sent ripples through the drinks inside.

“When my eighteenth came, at last,”

– In a great periwinkle flash, Cadance and Celestia disappeared. Nopony reacted…
Except for a young teenage filly Sunset hadn’t even noticed, sitting beside the throne where Celestia’s size had obscured her. Sunset barely recognized her past self, who seemed – well, no, not seemed; Sunset remembered.
The then-student of Celestia, who had mentally checked-out the moment the Princess had told her it was a celebration for Cadance, was startled out of her book and her disinterest by her mentor’s disappearance. She was, at that moment, starting to get the idea that this wasn’t a typical throneside achievement ceremony.

“So too did I Ascend.”

When they both reappeared, Cadance sported a new horn on her head. Her classmates politely stomped their applause without so much as turning to face her, and only at Cinch’s nodded approval.
Likewise, at that moment, after picking her jaw up off the ground, little Sunset herself blinked away to the royal library.
That was where Sunset’s recollection of this scene ended… but they were only two lines into the stanza.
What did she miss?

“And before I let my hour pass,


New magic, I’d extend.“

Her horn lit up.
The glasses were at their peak.

“All I wanted was to wink,


to check reality.”

Oh no. Sunset didn’t have to have seen this to know where it was going. And from the way Shining turned away, his muzzle going green… he had personally borne witness.

“Not a second did I think”

The glass harp trilled a shrill, sour note, and several of its constituent vessels shattered, soddening the tablecloth.

“I’d taste mortality.”

Half of Cadance teleported to the other end of the throne room. The other half did not.
To their credit, the statues of Crystal Prep reacted, that time.

—

The gruesome diorama flickered out as Cadance repeated her chorus, accompanied only by the crystal marimba and the surviving water-glasses, whose tone hummed lower than their broken kin:

“It’s happening again,


As it has always gone before:


A being without end


Meets an end she can’t ignore.


It’s happening again


As it will forever more.


This is what happens when


Fate comes back to settle scores…”

A cold sweat beaded on her brow, and several more hairs had slid loose from her pearlescent mane. Sunset and Shining exchanged glances, silently asking each other if they should try to intervene, or if the heartsong would make them join in if they dared.
Before either of them could settle on a course of action, however, it was time for the next section of the song.

—

This one was not accompanied by any coronal puppetshow: just Cadance’s plaintive, weary face.

“An alicorn can’t die,


So what must our foes do?


Listen to me, please, on our history,


And you’ll learn to cherish ev’ry breath.”

And she took a deep one, but instead of powering the next verse, it just crept back out as a sigh.

—


“Forever is no lie,


But not exactly true.


Read between the lines, past the sophistry:


There are fates on Equus worse than death.“

Cadance’s horn began to glow again.

—

A full, blue moon hung over the dining table, above the spires of… some blocky stone castle looming over its crude city, all of which lay nestled between tight-packed pines on all sides. It all had a certain stylization to it, lacking perspective, scale, or any successfully-straight lines; like it was cobbled together from half-remembered illustrations found moldering in medieval manuscripts.
This couldn’t be Canterlot, yet all the statues and pillars and domes screamed ‘capital’, and it resembled no city that Sunset had ever heard of. She assumed the Diurnal Throne had always been on the Canterhorn, but apparently not. Where was this, then?
Regardless, two alicorn Princesses stood atop the highest battlement of the unfamiliar castle, at opposite ends, facing each other.
One’s face was twisted in rage. The other’s straddled a very familiar threshold, where concern gives way to frustration. Celestia looked upon her sister the same way she looked down at Sunset, right before banishing her.
The bell-piano was back, tolling a distant alarm, while the cymbals tapped out an impatient argument against the lowest notes of a harp (stringy harp, not glass harp), and the stomping of a big, bassy war-drum.

“We all know of Luna’s fate,


her sentence ending soon.


Resentments boil’d into hate,


voiced through Nightmare Moon.”

If the harp was growling before, now it roared, as the Luna doll slipped into plated boots and donned her helmet with her hooves.
This was absolutely not how Sunset was taught the Ecliptic Crisis, nor how the myth of the Mare in the Moon told it. If they were to be believed, the Mare was corrupted by some power she tampered with, hidden on the dark side of what ironically became her prison, that clad her in the armor of darkness before Celestia’s sun and the Elements of Harmony did her in.
Cadance’s rendition of events (learned from Celestia herself, whether that made them more or less trustworthy) seemed to suggest that Nightmare Moon was a persona, and there was no corruption at all: just a grown mare taking her future into her own hooves.

“But in spite of all her scorn,”

The sisters’ pitched instruments dropped off – leaving just the cymbals Sunset couldn’t help imagine in gleaming brass, and the white-faced drum – as they took to the skies, in a dogfight litigated as much by the kicking of hooves and slashing of wing-blades as by the beams of solar and umbral energies they exchanged. Both sisters casually shrugged off injuries that would have killed a mortal pony.

“And all her wicked might,”

Celestia was always on the defensive, always fleeing, but wherever she flew, Luna followed, smashing and shearing chunks off the masonry with every stray attack.

“She was but an alicorn,”

Ducking behind their castle, Celestia emerged back into view surrounded by six orbs that orbited around her barrel, spinning faster and faster, glowing brighter and brighter. The bell-piano returned, not to gloat in victory, but to deliver a sentence.

“As fragile as the night.”

Six swirling beams shot out from what Sunset was forced to conclude were the Elements of Harmony. The scouring light ripped Luna (and her unseen harpist and drummer) apart, into inky flecks of darkness that splattered across the moon like so many drops of black paint, leaving craters that weren’t there before in the pattern of a mare’s head. A single equine and her consciousness, thinly spread across miles and miles of moonrock like a skin on a griffin tanner’s rack.
And not for too much longer, in the grand scheme of things. Sunset was never going to be able to look at the moon the same again, was she?
Celestia’s instruments faded out as the now-monarch collapsed on the castle’s roof.

—

The aquamarine moon exploded into countless flakes of magic snow that smothered and buried the old city-in-the-wood. The blizzard did not abate, even well after the last shaving of magic should have fluttered down.
It wasn’t until the jagged spires started rising from beneath the blanket that Sunset realized this wasn’t an explanation of how that ancient settlement fell, but a transition to a scene much further north.
The craft took a massive step up, here. Cadance, of course, knew well the points and facets of Crystal-Imperial architecture. The city-state that was grown – not built – in this wasteland of ice… was probably anachronistic, but that could be excused. No artistic depiction survived of the place, and very little of Imperial culture made it into the history books; Cadance based her model on the works of the foals and grandfoals of crystal ponies who found themselves stranded in Canterlot with no home to go back to.

“And what about Amore?”

To a fanfare of glassy chimes, a towering, royal unicorn mare emerged from the hollow beneath a mountainous central palace, so massive and steep as to rival the Canterhorn’s peers in the Michicanter branch of the Gallopallachians. Admittedly, most of them were just jumped-up hills, but still: Canterlot could have been built on the Crystal Citadel’s side. 
But in any case: what about Amore? She wasn’t even an alicorn.

“Though yet to reach Ascent,”

A dark mist had crept into the flurrying snow, which Sunset only now noticed at the same time as the deep rumblings of a lithophone carved from columnar basalt. Though the shade could not pass through the invisible dome over the city-state that kept it dry and warm, that didn’t stop the smog from blotting out Sunset’s view of the place and, presumably, the sun’s as well.
This must have been the self-titled King Sombra.

“Her tale echoed all the way


down her line of descent.”

Yeah, yeah. This one was equinal. Still not an alicorn. Still shouldn’t count.
Suddenly, Celestia and Luna dove, from out-of-scene, into the inky fog. Beams of light broke through the clouds, and glows like hidden lightning cast silhouettes of the alicorns pursuing the long, distorted shadows of a wraithly unicorn stallion.
Then, just as abruptly, six twirling beams of light punctuated Cadance’s story and punctured the clouds. If there had been any sound other than Cadance’s singing and the various sovereigns’ motif percussions, Sunset was sure she would have heard the dark king howl in pain as his lithophone and corporeal form broke, seeping into the permafrost below as so much inky dew.

“She thought Sombra nullified,


But vanishing, he cursed”

The brume did not fade with its master. Instead, it imploded into the heart of the onyx-wracked city. Sombra’s fate already sealed, he had no more need of a throne or subjects. Before his strength left him, the sore loser would use what remained to burst the victor’ bubble. Sunset had scorched enough earth in school to recognize it from somepony else.
And her history lessons had taught her how the Empire’s story ended. Princess Cadance’s birthright was stolen into the void of time that exists between two nights of a winter so far north the sun cannot reach. It took the entire royal family with it… or so it was believed at the time.

“Her hale body petrified,


Shattered, and dispersed.”

The crystal chimes were cut from their cords. Splinters of Cadance’s grand ancestor volleyed the world in all directions. Sunset instinctively shut her eyes, but the gouging never came; her fragments evaporated into ambient magic as they crossed the threshold of the dining table.
The smoke was still clearing as she opened her eyes. When it was all gone, there remained only a field of snow, a whistling gale, and two alicorns who refused to look each other in the eye.
They had failed their ally. Amore would never be put back together again. Only the sisters survived to take the blame.
And blame they did.

—

Another chorus, another exchange of uncomfortable Looks between Sunset and Shining Armor. Sunset was resigned to wait until Cadance was done, but Shining…
He looked so helpless. He clearly wanted to do anything at all to comfort his marefriend, but the only option afforded to him was to let the heartsong run its course. You did not interfere with Harmony unless you wanted to get swept up in its inscrutable design.

“It’s happening again,


As it has always gone before:


A being without end


Meets an end she can’t ignore.


It’s happening again


As it will forever more.


This is what happens when


Fate comes back to settle scores…”


—

The snow melted into a sea of blue grass (though the music thankfully didn’t change genres to reflect that). It was just the marimboid now, playing a simplified version of the verses’ melody.
In the middle of a great prairie, hemmed in by azure mountains, was a lonely farm. It was the least blurry object in the diorama, or perhaps the most clearly-remembered. It dwarfed the markless pegasus filly that fluttered above the shifting alfalfa fields, but so did the two adult earth ponies doing… some kind of farm work or other. What kind, Sunset didn’t know, nor really care.
Cadance hadn’t placed any recognizable landmarks on the horizon, but Sunset knew where it was supposed to be: far to the west, in rural Bittish Coltlumbia County, somewhere among the foothills outside of Vanhoover.
Of all places, these sticks are where they just happened to find the last living descendant of the Amore bloodline – maybe two or three years after Sunset was born, with plenty of time left to prepare her to sit on her ancestral throne – being raised by nopony farmers who adopted her as a foundling.
How ridiculously fortunate.
Contrived, even.
Sunset didn’t have any proof, but she certainly suspected that Celestia had planned things to happen this way. Something, something, she set it all up to make sure the heiress was raised with humility, instead of any expectations of the birthright she was owed.

“I was nothing special;


A filly with no fate.


Then my whole life changed, irrevocably,


When the Solar Princess sought me out.“

The Celestia effigy touched down on the one road to little Cadance’s homestead and began wading through the grain to meet her soon-to-be niece. Whatever she said made the little pegasus drop out of the sky mid-wingbeat and into the windswept grain.

—

The fields gave way to a familiar hall of the Celestia Palace, where Celestia led a teenaged Cadance, still a blank-flanked pegasus, to a certain fateful chamber.
The mirror room.
The scene zoomed in until it was just that accursed mirror, framing an older, taller Cadance – the alicorn she would become. A simple and unfamiliar crown sat upon Cadance’s head, complimenting the contented smile on her slender face.

“I would be the vessel


For all love, incarnate;”

She was not alone. The Princess of Love was flanked by her coltfriend, whose plated laminar was far more regally-decorated here than even that of a Royal guard-captain’s.
And, upon his back, a foal slumbered. Her front half was hidden by her apparent father’s thick neck, but the tips of wings peeked out, tucked against her body.

“By my Beloved, inseparably,


I beheld our future without doubt.“

The view peeled back to show the effigy of Cadance, grappling with awe and joy.

—

All the instruments went mute at once. Sunset had a sinking feeling she knew where this was going, and her fears were confirmed when the bell-piano took over the crystallophones’ melody.

“What I saw in the mirror


Should put my heart at peace,


But I felt even clearer


A cause for deep unease.”

In a library dimly lit, the stacked books built a prison of knowledge for a Princess whose curiosity burnt her almost as bad as Sunset’s own had singed herself.

“My Aunt shall live forever;


This, I am still certain.


But all her grace, however,


Could not–”

The diorama flickered out. The bell-piano cut off in the middle of the line, and her voice hitched, but she – or the spirit of Harmony possessing her vocal chords – powered through it. The bells did not.

“–Could not stay the curtain.


—

When the illusion came back, it was just the likeness of Cadance herself, hovering above the table, her expression as distraught as the one on her real face. Likewise, the only instruments still playing were those musical glasses.

“Only I remain unharmed,


But who can say how long?


Tutorless, I am unarmed


For when it all goes wrong.”

A shadowy mass formed on the periphery, looking kinda like an amalgam of Sombra and Nightmare Moon, but which crackled with electricity like whoever was involved in Celestia’s disappearance.

“I fret for myself little,


Instead, for my belov’d.”

Effigies of ponies popped into existence – plural; not just her Shining Armor – orbiting around Cadance. The earth ponies who raised her, throneside aides like Kibitz and Raven, and several assorted ponies Sunset just did not recognize. It made a certain sense that the Princess of Love considered anypony even slightly close to her to be among her beloved.
That still didn’t take away the shock of Sunset herself being there, too.

“Whose lives are oh-so brittle,


And shatter with a shove.”

That dark figure darted from doll to doll, dusting each along its path into thousands of glasslike shards as it worked its way closer and closer to Cadance at the center. Sunset winced as she saw her own figurine obliterated, the azurified flame that was her mane winking out last, like a ghostly candle.
When the assailant, done destroying all her loved ones, finally reached Cadance, the projection and instrumentation ceased at once.

—

Once last chorus, whose second meanings crept into Sunset’s understanding.

“It’s happening again,


As it has always gone before:


A being without end


Meets an end she can’t ignore.


It’s happening again


As it will forever more.


This is what happens when


Fate comes back to settle scores…”

And then the heartsong was over. No more music, no more lyrics, no more dancing visions of despair.

—

Cadance needed a minute to catch her breath, during which Shining Armor practically ejected from his seat (the chair’s feet scraping against the tile with a groan) to trot to the side of his marefriend and… fish for words for a few seconds before settling on a silent nuzzle, swiftly reciprocated.
It looked like Sunset would be the first one to speak. She had a very pressing question. “You consider me… close to you?”
A smile returned to the Princess’s muzzle. “Of course! Why wouldn’t I?”
“We only really started talking like four days ago.”
“But you’ve done so much for me in those four days! Plenty of ponies have stepped up to help me through this catastrophe, but your aid has been as much of a blessing as it’s been a surprise. I am so, so unbelievably thankful to you. I… know you have your own, self-interested reasons, but that doesn’t change the material good you’ve done by my side. I’d like to consider us friends – if not now, if you think it’s too soon; then someday soon, once all this foalnapping, and coronation, and dragon business is behind us.”
Oh. That actually kind of touched Sunset’s heart a little, which was annoying because it totally disarmed her. “Uh, yeah, I guess I’d like that, too.”
“For what it’s worth,” Shining interjected, as he threw a foreleg around his lover’s back, “if we’re going to keep working this closely as courtiers in the future, I’d rather you and I were on good terms, too. Even if you do make that really difficult sometimes.”
Well, fine. She could apologize – and kind of mean it, too. “Sorry. To both of you. I didn’t intend to make you pour out your heart in song like that, Cadance.”
Cadance shook her head. “No, it’s fine; I needed to let that out here. If I didn’t, I’d just have that breakdown in front of somebody whom I can’t trust not to use it against me.” She took an unsteady breath. “Best to get it over with in the last moment I’ll have sorta to myself that I’ll have before nightfall. Did you know Cetus has taken it on himself to pay our court a personal visit?”
“…Who?”
“…Prince Cetus, Sultan of Zanzebra? One of the three zebra Princes?” Not immortal, just ageless, from what Sunset recalled from her very brief reading about them, since there were four until they had to put down Abraxas – and not all that impressive on the power front, either. “Despite the name, Cetus is a zin zebra, not a whale – but he’s here on behalf of them. Every cetacean in the Leviathan Ocean would really like to know why the tides have stopped.”
“So how are you gonna tell him that the moon won’t listen to you?”
“I have no idea.” Cadance set about retying her mane to try and make herself look a bit more presentable. Her alar dexterity was a lot better than her coronal. “I can’t imagine he’d be too happy to hear he’s going to have to make the waves himself if he wants to help his neighbors, but I don’t see any other solution.”
Sunset didn’t really have any better ideas. “It seems like there aren’t very many of those right now.”
“Nope. Not with Cetus, not with the Dragonlord. I hope I can keep Garble from blowing his lid at me again.”
“Oh, yeah, Smolder blabbed about that to me. I take it Garble doesn’t believe us when we tell him we don’t have the scepter?”
Another shake of the head, with a frown. “Oh, I got him to believe me about that around yesterday afternoon, but that doesn’t really change anything. He says he can’t really go back to the Dragonlord empty-clawed, and the way he talks about Dragonlord Torch, I’m inclined to believe him.”
Smolder’s descriptions of dragons being ‘smashed flat’ sprung to mind. “So what do we do? Give him a fake to take to Torch and tell him to fly like Tartartus the moment it’s out of his hands?”
Cadance looked thoughtful. “…I’ll note that as a possible backup plan, but I’d really rather we just found the Sceptre. Somehow. The thief was a pony seen to be travelling into Equestria, so… hopefully it’s still here?”
“Is anypony even looking for it?”
Captain Shining fielded this one. “As soon as the dragons told us why they were here, I had the Royal aides write to and telegraph all of Equestria’s major police and guard offices. That’s about the best we can do without any more specific info on where it went or who stole it.”
“Okay…” That sure didn’t inspire confidence, given these were the same agencies that wouldn’t take orders from Cadance until she was crowned.
But that was only one of many crises Sunset wanted an update on. “What about Celestia’s abduction? Any news there?”
Shining opened his mouth – then hesitated for a moment with a wary scowl – but ultimately decided to tell Sunset, anyways. “Some reports have come in from Everfree County that we’d normally let the locals handle–”
“–But?”
“Patience! You’re as bad as my sister.”
“Twilight’s not that bad,” protested Cadance. Then she sighed, either mournfully or wistfully. The two could be hard to distinguish sometimes.
“Anyways,” Shining continued, reasserting control over the conversation, “these reports listed a scattering of occurrences that took place in the Everfree Forest around the morning of the Incident. Normally, this wouldn’t mean anything, since there’s never a time when Ponyville doesn’t have some trouble to report, but given the Everfree Forest has been pretty well-behaved all summer until the storm that enveloped the entire Provincial airspace that afternoon rose from it…”
Sunset kicked herself for not prying a little deeper into Indigo Zap’s account of that day.
“Many ponies heard thunder coming out of the forest while the skies were still completely clear. There was also a fire between the hours of four and five, which the storm thankfully doused before it got out of hoof, but the cause is still unknown.”
“Seems pretty obvious to me. Somepony was playing with lightning.”
“That’s our suspicion, and I think it might just have been our electric earth pony.”
“Really? Seems like kind of a stretch. It’s not like it’s that hard for any teenage unicorn to zap a tree for the hay of it.”
“The Everfree Forest has its ways of making sure that teenagers don’t make it that deep, if the deer don’t escort them out, first.” Shining projected several figurines onto his laid-out plans, like pawns on a war map: a cluster of deer, of course, but also manticores, basilisks, puck-wudgies, flories, and all sorts of other little monsters. “While I can’t say you’re not wrong that it might be a false lead, it’s the only one we have. As such, I’m sending Flash Sentry down to check it out.”
“Why him?”
“He’s seen the perp and their work. Maybe he’ll recognize something familiar about the situation.”
“I also saw them, and I can actually trust myself to tell the difference between cloud lightning and electromancy. You should’ve asked me if I wanted to go on a vacation to the woods. Princess knows I could handle anything it throws at me.”
“Right,” Shining deadpanned. “Rest assured that Sentry has not been sent alone. He’ll be accompanied by two of his fellow guardsponies, whom I’ve seen him work well with: one unicorn and one earth pony. Between the three of them, and their guides from the local deer enclave, I trust there to be a safe and thorough investigation.”
Hm. Sunset hadn’t seen that one sleazebag unicorn on her way to breakfast this morning, and he was usually stationed between her quarters and here. “I’m guessing, what’s-his-name – Dingo?”, she ventured, “And that big guy he’s always hanging out with. Brawly Something-or-Other.”
“Ringo and Brawly Beats,” Shining grumblingly corrected. “But that’s beside the point. Don’t you have your own project to get back to?”
“Huh? I already did my part. I’m waiting on you and Cadance to tell me when this coronation’s gonna be so I can drag these girls to the palace.”
Cadance flinched. “Oh, I suppose I got sidetracked before I could tell you…”
Ah, shoot. More bad news. “Tell me what?”
“Well, the thing is… The other reason what you promised the Headmare and these girls really throws a wrench in the works is, well… I do kinda need to get coronated soon if I’m going to give Equestria’s law-enforcement and intelligence agencies orders to focus their efforts on the search for Celestia, instead of just suggestions.”
“…How soon are we talking?”
“It’s already on the schedule for the 26th.”
A week from then.
Sunset burst from her chair, its heavy gold feet scraping the polished marble terribly, and announced, “I’ve got some letters to write. Where’s Smolder?” Then, not waiting for an answer and eschewing any sort of table manners, she rolled up her remaining pancakes like a stack of rugs, stuffed them in her mouth, and bolted horn-first through the shell of her soundproof bubble, popping it instantly.