This was bad.
Very bad.
It was the day before the Coronation, and Princess Cadance wanted to check in on things.
Any hope of not disappointing the Princess had long been lost. It was all about damage control now.
Cadance walked forwards. Sunset walked backwards – in front of her, trying to obscure Cadance’s vision with her body – but, even as early into the alicorn growth spurt as she was, Cadance still had a foot over Sunset.
“Are you really sure you want to spoil yourself? You can just wait for tomorrow, can’t you?”, Sunset pleaded.
“If my Coronation even has to be a spectacle in the first place, I’d want it to be something my little ponies can take inspiration from.”
“And it will be!”, scoffed Sunset.
“I’m sure you’re doing your best, Sunset, but…” She sighed. “It’s just, we’ve heard things. The event staff have been talking, and we just need to see for ourselves. We can’t afford to demoralize the public at a time like this. If I have to, this is the last possible minute to pull the plug and go back to the original low-key plan.”
Sunset feigned an indignation her heart just couldn’t drum up. “Don’t you trust me with this?”
Shining fielded that for his marefriend, saving her the choice between truth and kindness. “Honestly? Less and less, the more you try to send us away.”
But that played into a trap Sunset had set. “And here I thought you wanted to bury any hatchet that was between us and start over.”
Unfortunately, the trap did nothing to catch him at all. “Stop giving me a reason to make another hatchet, then.”
Ugh, this was hopeless.
Just like the whole Coronation.
“Fine, fine, fine,” Sunset grumbled. “If you wanna see so bad, come and see.”
The three of them emerged into the Break of Dawn not long after, whereupon both the Princess’s and her bodyguard’s jaws dropped.
It was not a good jaw-drop.
“I thought there would be decorations,” Shining remarked.
“I thought there would be weather control,” Cadance added.
The courtyard was completely undecorated. Sunny Flare stared in silence at a pile of undraped draperies.
As to the weather, Indigo Zap had complied with Sunset’s “nopony gets rained on” order. Very technically complied. The blanketing raincloud overhead parted for the exact dimensions of the courtyard, while it hammered the roofs around it with driving, icy rain.
Sunset has also, she supposed, neglected to ever say anything about not letting dust devils roam free throughout the courtyard.
“Yeah, I thought so too,” agreed Sunset. “So, fine. I’ll admit, it’s not going great, but I swear, I just need one more day to turn this around–”
Cadance and Shining started making their way towards Miss Flare. That could not be permitted. Sunset was already losing ground with the Crown, and…
Well, they didn’t need to hear from Flare.
It was as Sunset was figuring out how she could possibly check in with Flare last when an idea sprang into Sunset’s head: if the Princess wanted to know just how bad things were, why not present such a bleak picture of the preparations that she didn’t even bother to finish the tour? Pin as much of the blame as possible on these abysmal candidates, the rest of it on only having a week to throw something together, and hopefully make it out of this catastrophe in okay standing.
And Sunset knew just who to throw under the bus to help her make the worst of first impressions.
“Hey, are either of you hungry? Let’s go see what Sour Sweet’s cooked up!”
A dozen or so wooden booths had been set up across the courtyard by Sour Sweet’s family. The Cranberries had mobilized with shocking alacrity, catching trains from all across Maresachusetts County to Canterlot, each bearing their own distinct recipe for making cranberries somewhat tolerable.
Of course, most of them were out on the town, seeing the city, because they wouldn’t really be needed until tomorrow. Likewise, all of the food that would be served tomorrow still lay locked away in crates and iceboxes: baking supplies, a single type of produce, and… other ingredients.
However, catering, of course, did also entail feeding the event crew while they worked so hard to set the Coronation up, for which a kitchen tent was posted near the center of the court. The fare which the event crew were foddered with was no less cranberried than that which was planned for the feast. Sunset was getting so, so sick of scones.
Picnic tables (covered in baskets upon baskets of cranberry pastries) ringed the tent, at which three ponies hung around: there was Indigo Zap, looking sick to her stomach on one of the benches; and the Sweet Twins’ parents. Bearberry – their aptly-named father, a fat and towering brown stallion with a bushy, carmine beard – peeked into the kitchen tent like his scavenging namesake. Meanwhile, Bitter Sweet (who looked just like if, twenty years down the line, Sour dyed her mane and tail completely mint-green, and tied them up in braids) comforted Indigo on the other side of the table, hooves in hooves.
“You’ll be alright, kid,” Bitter urged, a trace of Sirish ancestry in her lilt. “The Princess may be here, but it is not too late.”
“That’s. Not. Why I’m trying not to hurl.” A greenish tint overtook her before she could elaborate, however, and her fight to keep it in took her full attention.
Vomiting was one of those disgusting pegasus things that Sunset was thankful was not in her blood. Unicorns simply neutralized any ingested toxins with their magic or a potion, and earth ponies… ate charcoal or something, but pegasi (and, often, those of other tribes with immediate pegasus heritage) just puked it right back up in a display as painful-looking as it was hideous.
Sunset hoped alicorns didn’t inherit the ability from their wings.
Cadance opened her mouth to say something, but a sudden uproar of sizzling from inside the tent cut her off, and the smell of peanuts and grease slithered out between the tent flaps where Bear held them open.
“What on Equus are they cooking in there?”, asked Shining Armor.
Bracing herself, Sunset cheerfully answered (in an imitation as disingenuous as Sour’s saccharinity), “Why don’t we find out?”
Bearberry made way for the Royal retinue to enter the tent, offering a short warning: “Careful, Highness – fryer’s bubbly.”
Cadance gasped in horror and disgust as she took in the scene. Even Shining, despite his composure, looked uneasy.
In the center of the tent was a steel vat of boiling oil, from which steam billowed like from a witch’s cauldron. The witch in question stood on a stepladder and was clad, shoulder to tail, in a suit of foil, and instead of a pointy, wide-brimmed hat, she wore what looked like a welder’s mask to protect her face, and fit her bunned-up mane under a hairnet.
She was in the process of lowering a large, maimed bird carcass into the vat by the hook on its skewer. Behind her, many more butchered birds, of all shapes and sizes, hung out to thaw on wicked, hooked racks. None of these bodies, thankfully, belonged to a pegasus, but could you blame Sunset for checking that herself, the first time she saw this gruesome collection?
The wisps of steam made it impossible to tell if she had Sour’s mint streak or not, but Sunset was confident that the Cranberries had put their most depraved daughter in charge of this unnatural task.
“Hey, Sour! How’s it going?”
The pony at the frying vat turned to Sunset.
–And then the pony off in the corner, which Sunset had not noticed, removed her two front hooves from the birds they were buried in (with a clatter of semi-frozen offal spilling out). She wiped them on her blood-smeared apron, and split her face with a smile just like the stripe of mint splitting her mane.
“For what do I owe the pleasure of having a Princess and her entourage barge into my kitchen unannounced?”
Removing her mask and climbing down from her stepladder, Syrupy corrected, “Our kitchen. Hi there, Your Highness!”
Cadance and Shining were still too stunned to speak, so Sunset picked up the slack. “Princess Cadance wanted to see how the preparations are coming along.”
“We’re trucking along just fine, if nopony else is. Thank you for asking. Now, if you’re after dinner, I’m afraid you’re two whole hours early. There are snacks outside.”
“I baked a fresh batch of scones, just for you, Sunset!”, added Syrupy.
“Uh, thanks. But what gives? I thought you were saving all the birds for tomorrow?” Sunset had, in fact, tried to veto the poultry outright, wielding her authority over which expenses the Crown would cover, but Sour Sweet responded by declaring that the Cranberries would shoulder that expense. Apparently hens past their laying prime were dirt cheap if you knew the right farmer.
And when a shipment of a couple hundred dead, frozen birds gets dropped on your doorstep, it’s hard to say whether it’s better to refuse to cook them and let them rot, or to cook them and then watch them rot because nopony in their right mind wants to eat a bird.
And there were all kinds of birds. Turkey, chicken, duck, pheasant, quail, rock dove… That’s what the manifest listed. Sour had certainly taken Sunset seriously when she stressed variety.
Sour gestured her snout towards her sister. “Ask her. It was her idea.”
Syrupy smiled and trot-marched a chipper little circle around the pot of boiling bird. “I thought we’d treat the event crew to a nice little mini-feast, since so many of us are going to be busy working the booths and stuff during the actual feast.”
“I’d invite you three to join us,” Sour said, “but something tells me none of you have the required taste.”
“Appreciated,” Cadance replied, very politely, “but… indeed, I think it’s time we moved on.”
As the three of them ducked out of the tent, they passed by a snippet of an argument between Bearberry and Indigo. Bear was asking, “But you eat fish, don’t you?”
To which Indigo, throwing her hooves in the air, shouted, “That’s different!”
The trio did not stick around to hear why. They just quietly moved toward the stage built beneath the Astral Eyrie.
Still trying to process what atrocities she had seen in that tent, Cadance ask, “She knows, doesn’t she?”
“Knows what? That nopony in Canterlot eats meat? I definitely told her.”
“No, that’s not it…”
Cadance seemed to tuck her wings in closer to her body, like she was trying to hide them.
Oh. “Oh! You think it’s a big joke at your expense about how you used to be a pegasus, don’t you? Is that what it is?” Sunset smothered the chuckle she could not afford to let out right now.
“I don’t want to assume it is, but…”
“Nah, Sour’s just… creepy and weird. I don’t think she or any other member of her carnivore coven thought about the implications or… anything, for a single second.”
Cadance sighed. “But those attending the feast certainly will.”
“I’ll see if I can convince her to keep the menu vegetarian,” Sunset lied. That ship had long sailed. “C’mon, let’s check in with Lemon Zest.”
The musician was found – where else but – lazily reclined atop a massive speaker box, taller than most single-story houses, cradling her electric guitar between her many limbs. Sunset recalled seeing a few different guitars hanging on the wall of her pad, but this was the one she had that day: the shape of the body was actually kinda like an hourglass drawn at a slant, but it was much easier to parse it as Z-shaped due to the big, hot-pink ‘Z’ emblazoned right on top of the lime-green body and the lemon-yellow pickguard.
Kind of eye-searing, if Sunset was being honest. The only part that wasn’t was the neck, which was the same dark plum as everything else associated with Crystal Prep.
Lemon was the first to speak, giving a broad wave. “Heya, dudettes! –and dude! You’re just in time!”
“In time for what?”, Cadance asked, while Sunset packed conjured cotton into her ears.
“I just got everything hooked up! Check this out!”
She raised a wing to the heavens, the little yellow pick between her pinions glinting in the sunlight. Then she brought it down across the strings, and all was sound. To call it a gale would do disservice to its bone-stripping ferocity and to call it a hurricane would fall short of its flattening breadth. Windows shattered up to a block away. Those speakers would never speak again.
Sunset, embarrassingly, got tossed back a good three yards, landing flat on her back. Shining tried to fight it, but he staggered back for a few feet before unceremoniously stumbling onto his hindquarters. Cadance stood her ground, inasfar as she remained standing, but her hooves dug divots an inch deep into the grass where the unrelenting sound-waves pushed her back undeterred.
After the sound came a ringing. While Cadance and Shining jumped through the hoops of establishing that nopony could hear a single thing anymore, Sunset knew from a week’s worth of experience by that point that it wouldn’t go away too soon, so she composed a message to Lemon in glowing aqua letters: |You know how I said volume wasn’t an issue? It’s an issue now.|
Lemon shrugged and tried to bow her head demurely, but the joy and satisfaction she had taken in making noise crept through into a smile that completely undermined her earnest effort to frown.
Hearing came back a few minutes later: for the alicorn Princess, first; then, Lemon, conditioned to the volume; Sunset, whose cotton earplugs barely did anything, third; and, lagging along in last place, Shining Armor.
As such, Sunset missed the start of the discussion between the Princess and her music coordinator. The words stopped being vague rumbles about partway through Lemon saying, “–just figured I’d shred out some epic covers once I ran out of my own stuff.”
Cadance’s eyes narrowed, skeptically. “Uh-huh…”
“And if I gotta go do something else off-stage, I got these!” She reached a wing behind a nearby table of audio doodads and pulled out a trio of vinyl records in their protective envelopes. Sunset couldn’t even read two of the names on the album covers, and the third one was Equine Anthrax, which just didn’t sound like the kind of band that plays at a traditional Royal celebration.
“I’m assuming you’ve licensed those, at least?”
“What’s that?”
Hesitantly, Cadance clarified. “We’re not going to run into any copyright issues with the record labels, are we?”
“Oh, haha. Yeah, nah, I don’t believe in copyright. It’s like the tooth breezie.”
Cadance mouthed the words, “It’s like the tooth breezie,” back to herself, and stared up in wonderment, like she was witnessing the last member of an endangered species give birth.
Shining was less amazed. He said what Sunset was thinking: “How did P.A.C.M.P.A. even let you in?” Was ‘Crystal Prep’ too vulgar for Captain Armor, or did he just have terminal officer-brain and the love of acronyms that was symptomatic of it?
Lemon giggled. “It’s not hard when your parents are wicked rich!” Utterly shameless.
“Maybe I should take my degree off the wall,” Shining muttered. So he was indeed an alumnus, too. That tracked with the rumor that he and Cadance started dating in school. “Can we move on?”
Still somewhat dazed, Cadance nodded. “I’ve heard enough.”
Now that they were between check-ins, it was probably time to nudge Cadance toward calling things off. “So, 0 for 2, huh?”
Cadance shook her head. “I’m not happy with what I’ve seen so far, no.”
“Well, it doesn’t get any better from here.”
“I’m excited to find out,” Cadance deadpanned.
Drat. She ignored the off-ramp. “Then let’s move on to the next disaster, shall we?”
However, that disaster came to them.
Sunset only had the time to process the words, “Get! Back! Here!”, hollered by Indigo, when she found herself thrown for the second time in the last half hour (though in a more vertical direction, this time) – by an errant whirlwind, far larger than its brethren wandering the field, bowling into the trio.
She was not alone, either, though Shining was too heavy to get lifted more than a couple feet.
Before either could crash back to Equus, however, each found themselves on somepony’s back. Indigo, flying low to the ground, had apparently collided with Shining as she dashed the whirlwind apart, flipping him onto his back and her back like some kind of large, white, helpless turtle. That meant Sunset now lay on top of Cadance, whose broad wings let her bob on the breeze.
She was very soft.
Softer than Celestia, though not as uncomfortably-warm.
“That didn’t go how I wanted,” Indigo grunted, as she dropped onto her hooves.
Cadance followed suit, allowing Sunset to scramble off of her and shake her windblown mane back into shape.
Cleared her throat, Cadance addressed Indigo: “Thank you for the warning,” (Though it was kind of a stretch to call that a warning). “Now, would you mind letting go of my beloved?”
If there was any jealous animosity behind the request, Cadance was very good at hiding it. Not a single feather ruffled, not a single muscle tensed. The only thing unusual about her request was the cold matter-of-factness of its delivery, and that could be attributed to the tour of misery Sunset and her crew were taking her on.
But even still, face flushing with the rosy hues of embarrassment and the greenish gills of dread, Indigo very carefully flipped Shining back onto his hooves and took a very large and deliberate step away from him, smiling up at the Princess.
“Thank you.” Cadance strode up to her disoriented coltfriend and nuzzled him back to reality before turning back to Indigo. “You’re the weather coordinator, right?”
“Right! You! Are! Your Highness. I’m Indigo Zap;” – at that moment, a bolt of lightning chose to strike a weathervane – “pleasure to meetcha.” She stuck a wing into her saddlebag and handed a slip of sand-colored paper to Cadance. “Here’s my business card. Happy to be working for a fellow PAPA grad.” PAPA, of course, was Indigo’s way of eliding the ‘Crystal Memorial’ part out of Crystal Prep’s full acronym so she could just say it as a word instead of saying each letter individually, like Shining did earlier.
Sunset couldn’t fault the climber for shooting her shot, but she could for laying it on so thick.
“Uh, thank you…” Cadance very politely tucked Indigo’s card in her mane, to be disintegrated in her next shower. “Now, I appreciate that you’re trying to deal with the dust devil situation, but I have to know how it got so bad.”
“Bad? I don’t do anything bad. These are some of my best work.”
“You made them on purpose? Why?”
Indigo slacked her jaw, squinted one eye, and flicked her wing back in apparent bafflement. “Because they’re fun? Foals love dust devils. My baby sister, she couldn’t get enough of them. Back when she was little little, she had me spin them up for her all the time, so she could ride them up and figure out how to fly on the way down. Took her fifty-something tries, but she got there in the end.”
Cadance smiled for the first time since stepping into the Break of Dawn. It was public knowledge that the “Foalsitter Princess” was highly susceptible to the “wouldn’t you rather talk about this cute kid” distraction. They might be on this subject for a while. “You have a sister?”, she asked, eyes wide. “How old is she? What’s her name?”
“Lightning Dust!” From her bag, she plucked a photograph and passed it to Cadance. The filly looked just like a tiny Indigo, if you swapped her mane and fur colors around. “Just turned ten. She’s the top flyer in her age bracket; placed first three years in a row at the Best Young Flyer Competition. Kinda had a hiccup this year and wound up second, behind that Rainbow kid, but this spring, I’m telling you, she’s gonna Take! It! Back!”
What Indigo left out of her glowing praise for Lightning Dust was the fact that her little sister was apparently very much involved in the incident (lowercase-i) for which Indigo was under investigation as to whether her actions on the day of the Incident (capital-I) constituted negligence and foal endangerment or not. Sunset knew this, because Indigo would start griping about the incident (and that gremlin she was related to) to anypony that would listen – and then realize she was sharing too much before she got to the juicy bits.
Shining was the one to wrestle the conversation back on track. “I’m sure pegasus foals love playing in whirlwinds, but they’re a danger to everypony else. As the Captain of the Royal Guard and Palace Chief of Security, I’m gonna have to ask you to get rid of them.”
Indigo looked to Sunset, skepticism on her brow. “Do I have to, boss?”
While it felt nice for somepony to rank her opinion higher than Shining’s, he had a point. And also authority in the matter. “Yeah, whatever gets him off our backs.”
Snatching the photo back from Cadance’s aura, Indigo grumbled out an “Ugh, yes ma’am,” and darted off to do just that. She couldn’t be accused of not following orders.
“I believe you were showing us to the ‘next disaster’, Sunset?”, reminded Cadance. There went another opportunity to get the Princess to cancel.
“Let’s go see how Sugarcoat’s coming along with the entertainment,” Sunset muttered.
“I’d been meaning to ask where the entertainers were. I would have thought they’d be using this time for setup, or practice, or dress rehearsal.”
“You’ll see.”
To get to the earth mare in question, they had to go back inside the palace. Dust devils weren’t conducive to paperwork. They found her in a sitting room overlooking the Break of Dawn, sweeping the shards of glass that used to be the windows into a corner for the palace servants to deal with. One of her pigtails lay on the floor, and a very large glass plate was embedded in the wall.
She greeted the trio with an unprompted “I’d like to claim hazard pay. I’m risking life and limb just being in the same building as my coworkers,” instead of an actual greeting.
“Well, with all the bits you’ve saved us on entertainment, I’m sure there’s room in the budget,” Sunset snarked.
Cadance grew concerned, a flicker of suspicion in the way her eyes darted between Sunset and Sugarcoat. “What do you mean by that?”
“It’s simple,” Sugarcoat confidently answered, in that rapid clip that she still somehow perfectly enunciated. She must have had a vocal tutor or something. “Expecting my former classmates to go grossly over budget, between excessive expenditures and incurred damages, I decided to be the responsible one and optimize my use of the allotted budget.”
“Which meant doing absolutely nothing with it,” revealed Sunset. “No entertainers. No performers. No festival games. Nada. Everypony would just stand around doing nothing, bored out of their rutting minds until it was time to put on the crown.” Cadance frowned at her foul language, but who gave a scat? Sunset was stressed out of her rutting mind and Sugarcoat, of all of these ponies, was so easy to get mad at.
“‘Nothing’ is free,” Sugarcoat insisted. “In fact, ‘nothing’ would even turn a profit if we were to charge an entrance fee, which would also mitigate crowding. You’re going to cause a crush incident if you just let anypony in.”
Shining hummed, thoughtfully, evidently taking Sugarcoat’s ridiculous safety concerns seriously.
Apparently Sunset needed to spell out why that wasn’t a problem, for both Shining and Sugarcoat. She yelled, “We aren’t going to have crowds if there’s nothing to keep ponies there!”
Sugarcoat didn’t flinch. She just took off her glasses, wiped them on her coat, and slid them back on. “You need to work on your spit control,” she admonished, before continuing without so much as a pause for Sunset to respond, “But there will be some activities, because you ordered a mandatory minimum budgetary use requirement the last time we talked about this.”
“Oh yeah? What’d you do with it?”
The earth mare reached under a table and pulled out a folded sheet, dotted in a grid of colors and wrapped up in clear prismaplastic. It was a game of Hadsis-brand Coiler™, suitable for up to six players.
“You went to a toy store and bought a game of Coiler,” Sunset deduced.
“No, I went to a party wholesaler and bought one-hundred games of Coiler. That didn’t quite bring me above the budget minimum, so I also purchased fifty sets of Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Sun-Princess that were on heavy markdown. They’re all in a cart in the south tunnel.”
Cadance and Shining winced, because they and apparently everypony except for Sugarcoat understood why those games were on markdown, and also because their ability to wince in the first place so somehow hadn’t been squeezed dry from overexertion yet. Sunset just growled, “You managed to do something even worse than literally doing nothing. You couldn’t just buy foalish birthday party games for a Royal Coronation; you bought distasteful birthday party games! You might as well have robbed a speciesism museum for the original Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey! I don’t know if I should be impressed or furious!”
“I kept the receipt. I can just return them.”
“No. I really need to set something on fire.”
“Burning prismaplastic emits toxic fumes. You really shouldn’t do that.”
“You shouldn’t have wasted our time and budget!”
“Look, what do you even want me to do. They don’t throw parties in Rockville so I genuinely don’t know what you want.”
“I would’ve thought it’d be obvious to anypony, no matter what backwater hicktown you come from!”
“Sunset…”, interjected Cadance, sounding deeply… concerned?
No, that wasn’t it. Sunset remembered that tone of voice now, right as the Princess summoned the words to confirm it.
“Is this how you’ve been treating everypony on your crew?”
It was the Celestial tone of gentle admonishment. How Sunset loathed it.
It was never just going to stop at the question. If Sunset lied, she’d inevitably be caught in her lie (usually after Celestia had played along just long enough to give Sunset plenty of opportunities to back out). If Sunset told the truth, it would spiral into a tiresome lecture about being nice to ponies.
Sunset was nice to ponies! When they deserved it! And sometimes, even when they didn’t but they had something she wanted! That had to count for something, didn’t it?
Sure, this was Cadance, not Celestia. But why would it be any different with Celestia’s favorite student? Why did Sunset ever think it would be any different?
Whatever. If this was going to blow up in Sunset’s face, it could at least blow up extravagantly.
“I’m sure you already know the answer to that one, Your Highness.”
Of course, Sugarcoat went ahead and volunteered, “The answer is ‘yes’,” anyways.
Sunset turned towards the doorway, mentally flicking every self-destruct switch on the control panel. “You think that’s shocking? Just wait until you hear what Sunny Flare has to say about me.”
Was Sunset throwing away her last chance to end the tour early? No. She threw that away when she decided to show them around in the first place. She was lashed to this burning, runaway carriage, and the only thing left to do was enjoy the ride as it rolled into the canyon.
The Princess and her Bodyguard followed Sunset in silence back to the center of the Break of Dawn.
To Indigo’s credit, there weren’t any dust devils anymore. However, they’d been replaced with a thick, low blanket of fog that went over everypony’s heads, so the weathermare wasn’t scoring any points there.
For Cadance, being one-third pegasus, it was like walking face-first into a twelve-foot-tall heap of snow, but, admittedly, she was doing so as the pony equivalent of a snowplow. Using her wings as snowshoes, she clambered up to the top of the fog layer, where her hooves did what pegasus (and therefore alicorn) hooves do so effortlessly in contact with clouds: she walked.
Sunset had to remember how the cloudwalking spell went to get herself on the same level, her hooves shimmering in fire-blue as she sprang to the top like oil under water.
As a convenient courtesy, she cast the same spell on Captain Shining, who, as soon as he met the others above the fog, almost immediately turned green.
“Amazing. You aren’t five yards off the ground and you’re airsick,” Sunset commented. The key to avoiding airsickness as a non-pegasus was to avoid looking at the ground, and different ponies had different tolerances, but Shining Armor’s seemed to be so low that Sunset had to wonder if he couldn’t look out a second-story window without getting ill.
“I’m not,” he argued, in between fights with his own body not to fruitlessly retch. “But let’s just make this quick, anyways.”
They did not have to look hard for Miss Flare. For some reason, the patch of the courtyard where she stood, still staring at that same pile of unworked fabric, was completely fog-free in a five-yard radius around her.
As the trio hopped into the circle, Sunset caught Shining, out the corner of her eye, kissing the solid ground.
“Flare!”, hollered Sunset, “You’re up! Tell the nice Princess why you haven’t put up a single rutting decoration the entire week!”
Flare didn’t so much as turn her head away from the cloth, so when she muttered something, it was utterly unintelligible.
“I’m sorry,” Cadance said, “I didn’t catch that, Miss Flare.”
“Yeah, speak up, Misfire!”, egged Sunset. That got her a cold look from both Cadance and Shining, but Sunset didn’t expect anything kinder from them ever again, so what did she care?
Another mumble.
“Here, let me get closer.” Cadance strode over to Sunny’s side and lowered her head to the unicorn’s level. “I’m listening.”
Sunset crept up behind. She wasn’t just gonna miss this conversation, even though she knew exactly how it’d go.
“…Not good enough…” The words oozed like tar out of Flare’s mouth.
“The decorations?”
“…No, Your Highness. Yes, but no.”
It didn’t need to be said. Cadance figured it out right away, and so had Sunset, the first time Flare got like this, though that hadn’t stopped Sunset from needling the confession out of her that the thing which was not good enough was Sunny Flare. She left for home early that day.
A wing was draped around the mopey unicorn’s back, seeming to rouse her from her spiral, just a little. “I’m sure you did what you could with what you were given.”
“It wasn’t good enough,” Sunny repeated. “The wreck is strewn in the Shroud of Dusk. I can show you. Then you will know.”
Flare didn’t wait for a response before she started ambling west. A gentle lilac glow enveloped her horn, projecting a twirling eight-spoked fanblade ahead of her that actually dispelled the fog in front of it.
Sunset blinked. Other tribes’ latent magics were a bit harder to emulate than they had any reason to be, for reasons that the scholars still couldn’t agree upon, and Sunny Flare wasn’t even breaking a sweat with her janky unicorn weather-magic.
She led them to the Shroud of Dusk, through the castle’s gilded halls, past scurrying servants and beleaguered bureaucrats.
The Shroud of Dusk was the sister courtyard to the Break of Dawn, situated to the west of the Astral Eyrie. It was almost an exact copy, except that the paving stones were moonstone and black marble, arranged to resemble a crescent moon surrounded by erratic splotches of a starless night sky.
Since there wasn’t a lunar equivalent to the Summer Sun Celebration, it didn’t really see too many big events. Sunny Flare tossing all her discarded decorations into it was probably the most use anypony got out of it since the Celestial Palace was built.
And it was a hoarder’s nest because of it. Miss Flare had exhausted and exceeded all of her allocated budget, with nothing to show for it but a tangle of junk. Banners that came out lopsided, garlands of braided silken rope with frayed ends and nicked middles, streams of pennants with the patterned flags in the wrong order, tables and chairs that rocked on uneven legs, braziers and sconces with bubbling welds un-grounded-down, painted signposts and stage backdrops marred where the paint dribbled and drooled… There was more, but describing all of it was like trying to sort a bathtub full of soil into clay, silt, and sand by telekinesis alone.
“Here, dearies, rest my follies. May they soon be forgotten.”
You couldn’t pretend that they were salvageable. Sunset hadn’t bothered. Cadance clearly wanted to, but the assurance never left her mouth. Instead, she fell into concerted contemplation.
She was thinking of something to say. Celestia wouldn’t have needed a moment. The moment Miss Flare had said her piece, Celestia would know just what to say to lead Sunny Flare on, to get her believing the lie she wasn’t hopeless.
“I understand what you mean, now. Please believe me, however, when I tell you that you have not disappointed me, Sunny Flare.”
Sunset raised a brow, but the Princess still had more to say.
The wing went back around Sunny’s withers. “The expectations placed on your shoulders were impossible to fulfill. You had one week, and yet you gave it your best effort all the same. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.”
The magically-stunted unicorn at first did not seem to respond. Then she started shaking. Then she threw herself against Cadance, bawling her eyes out. Pathetic.
The payoff for a week’s hard bullying. It was almost worth it.
There was a silent command relayed from the eyes of Princess to Bodyguard and Student, causing both Sunset and Shining to step back and give the two of them a moment. Shining took a post by the nearest entrance from which to watch for any intrusion or threat, while Sunset found a nice, soft pile of cast-aside fabric to lie on, far enough away from her underling’s disgusting sobs that she could relax.
Well, she could try, at least. Hard to relax when you know you’ve blown your second chance, and lost any hope you had of achieving your true potential, and you’re going to get kicked out of the lavish lifestyle you’ve been living, to move back in with your horrible aunt.
She wasn’t gonna cry about it, though. Sunset was stronger than that.
But, in the quiet and distance, Sunset did heave a slow, steady, heavy sigh, and then a few more. And maybe a few stomps into the fabric. And some screaming, growling, snarling screams, muffled into the cloth to save face.
But really, she was so much better at handling failure than Flare, she thought.
The cue to rejoin the Princess came when Cadance told Sunny, “I’m afraid we have to have a meeting with everypony, including Sunset Shimmer. Is that going to be a problem?” Sunset must have missed some of the conversation.
Sunny’s answer was too quiet to make out.
“Is there anypony else you’d like to have present, for emotional support?”
“…I don’t know,” Sunny confided. She wasn’t weeping anymore, but her voice still quaked and scratched.
“Any friends?”
“There’s… Indigo Zap, I suppose. And the others… we used to be… almost friends. They seem to still have… something there.”
That was another thing Sunset somehow rutted up. How do you try to single out somepony who’s already burnt all her bridges and determine to remain isolated, and instead only manage to get her started on rebuilding those bridges, instead?
They made getting revenge on Sunny a lot harder than it needed to be. If they’d just minded her business instead of stepping in whenever Sunset really started to lay into Miss Flare…
Sunny continued to mumble, “Maybe…”, but that’s all she got out before clamming up again.
Cadance waited for Sunny to finish her thought, but when no more was forthcoming, she said, “They’ll be there, too. Let’s head back to the Break of Dawn.”
The four departed in silence, though as Sunset left the Shroud, she could swear she smelled… smoke. She looked over her shoulder, but none of Flare’s garbage had spontaneously ignited like it ought to, so she had no idea where it was coming from.
Maybe Smolder or that ‘Garble’ brother of hers were receiving dragonmail. It had a certain acrid tinge to it.