“Stop squirming!”
“I’m not squirming! I’m just trying to get a better grip. Why are you going so fast?”
“Because I’m not supposed to be flying over Canterlot like this,” Rainbow Dash complained. “But I’m not about to spend the next two hours walking through the stupid maze of streets just to get to the castle.” Twilight looked down at the aforementioned streets. From above, it really did look like a maze. It also looked like they were attracting a lot of attention, which meant that at least one of them was going to get a stern talking to by the Royal Guard, assuming they weren’t intercepted and knocked out of the sky.
“You’re coming in too fast!” Twilight squeaked, as she looked up and saw the white marble wall of the palace flying towards them at a breakneck pace.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got this,” Rainbow Dash said, and Twilight screamed and latched her hooves tightly around the reckless pegasus’s neck as she flared her wings and tilted back, slamming into the palace window with all four hooves.
The latch snapped, the window flew open, and the two of them landed in a heap in the corridor outside Celestia’s chambers, where they were immediately surrounded by armored unicorns pointing halberds at them. Several pegasus guards flew in through the open window a few seconds later, joining the circle.
“Take me to your leader!” Rainbow Dash said, leaping to her feet and grinning at the guards, ignoring the sharp metal implements poking at her throat and side. “Actually, take her to your leader,” she amended, nodding to Twilight, who was in the middle of getting shakily to her feet when a razor-sharp spear pointed at her forehead made her sit down instead. “Take me to your kitchens.”
“Are you sure we can’t arrest them?” one of the guards muttered under his breath. Twilight didn’t recognize him, which surprised her; she was no Pinkie Pie, but she’d spent years in the castle growing up, and knew most of the guards by name. Maybe he was new.
“You could, but it wouldn’t be good for your career,” another unicorn replied. That one she recognized – it was one of her brother’s lieutenants. Shifty… shifty… Shifting something. “Lucky, take your fillyfriend to see the captain, would you?”
Twilight looked back at the spear, and up the shaft to the pegasus holding it. Yep, it was Lucky. One of her best friends in the guard, or at least he had been when she was younger. Their last meeting hadn’t been quite as friendly. He motioned her to her hooves, and they headed down the hall while the rest of the guards questioned Rainbow Dash.
“Fillyfriend?” Twilight asked as soon as they were out of earshot.
Lucky laughed, and shouldered his spear. “They gave us all a thorough examination when we got back from the moon. Found a memory spell on me, and peeled it back to see what it was replacing.” He grinned at her.
“Oh,” Twilight said, blushing a bit. “You weren’t supposed to – nopony was supposed to remember that!” she said, cringing as she thought of her ridiculous attempt at seducing him out of his armor, which had only worked because the want-it-need-it spell had already clouded his mind.
“And that’s why you thought it was safe to let out your true feelings, right?” Lucky replied. “It’s okay, Twily. I can call you Twily, right? I thought it was cute, and... well… I’m not seeing anypony at the moment. If you wanted to go catch dinner sometime…“
Twilight laughed. Lucky trailed off, and she looked at him and giggled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was worried you’d be mad. If you’re calm enough to joke about it, then I guess we’re still friends?”
“Who’s joking?” Lucky asked, then sighed. “Oh well, Shining Armor would probably have my helmet if he caught me dating his sister anyway.”
Before long, they arrived at a small, unremarkable door flanked by a pair of guards. “Intruder to see the captain,” Lucky said.
One of the guards reached for a secure abacus fastened to the wall next to him. “We’ll have to verify this change in orders.“
“No,” Lucky said.
The guard looked uncertain. “But the procedure…”
Lucky scowled. “I am not going to spend the next fifteen minutes multiplying forty-digit numbers just to drop Twilight Sparkle off to see her brother. If you don’t want to let her in, that’s up to you. I’m heading back to my post.”
The door guards looked at each other as Twilight’s escort trotted off. One of them opened the door, but before he could get a word out, Shining Armor said, “Send her in.”
Twilight headed into the cluttered office, glancing back at the door as it slammed shut behind her, locking itself magically. She looked over the neatly stacked piles of paperwork, stepped around a box full of cold-weather gear, and took a seat in front of the desk. “Are you okay?” she asked, because her brother certainly didn’t look okay. She hadn’t seen him so worn out since the changeling queen had drained him nearly dry during the invasion.
“You set off the wards on our parents’ house. You didn’t set off the wards on the castle,” he said, rubbing at his temple with a hoof. “Does that mean you’ve already found a way to defeat them, or does it mean that you’re actually my sister?”
“I –“ Twilight said, then found it impossible to hold back as she felt herself bristling. “And what if I was a changeling?”
“Then you’d be confined to the changeling containment wing of the Canterlot dungeon for your own protection, as ordered by Princess Celestia,” he replied. “Do you consent to a secondary test of your changeling nature?”
Twilight sighed. “Fine. Mom stunned me, so you might as well –“ Her body suddenly froze, as Shining Armor’s horn flared with strange, cloudy green and purple light. She tried to speak, but she couldn’t draw breath – tickly tendrils of magic wormed their way through her aura, and through her body, but strain as she might she couldn’t even giggle. Just as she thought she was about to go insane, they reached her brain, and the senseless confusion she’d been expecting finally hit.
Her next coherent experience was Shining Armor feeding her water out of a small glass. “Significant changeling contamination indicating prolonged exposure to at least two changelings, evidence of moderate life energy drain characteristic of changeling feeding behavior, and a complex memory spell,” he said to her. “I’m sorry, Twily. When mom told me you brought changelings into her house I was so angry. I should have known you were being manipulated. How did you get free?”
“What?” Twilight asked. “I wasn’t –“ she stopped short, as her brain spun up. Shining Armor was offering her an out. Was it on purpose? Did he already know the truth, but needed plausible deniability? Or did he honestly think that the changelings had been mind-controlling her?
It didn’t matter. He wasn’t the one she needed to convince that they meant no harm, and there was nothing to be gained by defending their honor. On the other hand, “What sun-forsaken hole did you pull that spell from? That wasn’t the normal changeling detection spell!”
“No,” Shining Armor said. “It wasn’t. It was the one that actually works against a changeling determined to keep its disguise up. It’s restricted magic, for obvious reasons.”
Twilight sat up, and took another sip of water, holding the cup in her hooves. “It felt like I was being tickled to death by rotting kelp,” she grumbled.
Her brother nodded. “Even I am not allowed to use it on anypony without their consent. Thank you for consenting, by the way. When mom complained about you inviting changelings into our house I was angry – when she told me that you’d mentioned converting I was terrified! I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you, Twily.”
Twilight looked up at him, and smiled. “You wouldn’t lose me. I’d be down in the dungeons where you could see me every day.”
“Good point. Maybe I should lock you up anyway,” he said.
Twilight perked her ears and smirked. “With the changelings?”
After a short pause, he grimaced. “Nevermind.”
===
Eventually, after being thoroughly searched, scanned for active magic, and stripped of absolutely everything she was carrying, Twilight Sparkle was allowed to see Princess Celestia. She got the impression that if she’d still been a unicorn, she might have been held back regardless. Somehow, she managed to avoid antagonizing the guards by reminding them that if she’d walked in the front gate normally, she would have been allowed to see the princess with no questions asked. Instead, she kept her mouth shut except to politely answer their questions, and found herself ushered into the small lounge where the princess took her afternoon tea.
“Hello, Twilight,” Celestia said, pouring out a second cup of tea for her guest as Twilight took a seat on a small cushion opposite the princess. “I’m sorry for all the trouble you had to go through; the Royal Guard has been rather rambunctious lately. You know how colts can get.”
“It was no trouble, princess,” Twilight said, placing her hoof over the top of her teacup and swirling it around to help it steep. “And it was really my own fault; I shouldn’t have asked Rainbow Dash for a shortcut down from Luna’s secret lair. After that mistake, the rest was inevitable.”
Celestia laughed politely. “And how is my sister faring? We’ve been a bit distant of late.”
“She’s… fine,” Twilight said, frowning. “As long as nopony mentions your name, or anything about the arguments you’ve been having. Then she’s not quite as fine.”
Celestia sighed, and sipped her tea. “I hope that’s not why you wanted to see me. It’s been so long since we took the time to enjoy each other’s company.”
Twilight looked down. “Yeah…” She nudged her tea with a hoof, then pinned the cup carefully between her front hooves and lifted it to sip. It tasted a bit off; probably her earth pony magic working to sabotage everything that happened in her vicinity. “Princess,” she said, looking up from the cup. “Am I still your student?”
Princess Celestia didn’t answer right away, which chilled Twilight to the bone. But she didn’t look angry at the question, or even sad – she looked thoughtful. “There are only two things that would make you stop being my student, Twilight Sparkle,” she said, at last. “The first is if you committed a crime so serious that I was forced to banish you from Equestria, or imprison you in stone, or otherwise remove you permanently from my presence.”
Twilight winced. “And have I?”
“Not yet,” Princess Celestia replied, with a melancholy smile. “You’ve made mistakes, to be sure, and I do wish you’d show a little more concern for the well-being of your fellow ponies in stressful situations. But I understand all too well how easy it is for those with power to cause harm even without meaning to, and I could never bring myself to judge you, or anypony, too harshly on that account. There are those that consider that a fatal weakness of my reign; I consider it instead a worthwhile place to spend my strength.
“But if you were to become a danger, and could not be reasoned with…” Celestia said, closing her eyes. Twilight thought of the times Celestia had been forced to harshly sanction those too dangerous to leave to their own devices, and felt tears coming to her eyes.
“I promise,” Twilight said, wiping at her eye with a fetlock. “I promise, with -- with you as my witness, that no matter the situation, I will always be willing to listen to you, princess.” She sighed. “As long as you promise to listen to my side of the story before you judge.”
Celestia nodded. “Then the only reason that you would cease to be my student is if you felt that you had nothing further to learn from me,” she said. She added, with a laugh, “I do expect that day to come at some point – you have to grow up eventually, my dear.”
“I don’t know that even a lifetime would be enough time to learn everything that there is,” Twilight Sparkle replied. Her ears flattened. “I’m glad to hear you say it, though. I’ve been worried – you haven’t given me a new assignment in months!”
“You seemed to have quite enough on your plate,” Celestia replied, “and I’m afraid ‘earth pony magic’ is as much a mystery to me as it is to you. Perhaps more so, since you’ve had some time to study it by now. I would be very interested to hear anything that you’ve learned.”
“I’m not sure my findings are really ready for publication,” Twilight said, taking another sip of her tea, which was now, somehow, weaker than the first sip? One of her ears twitched. Just when she thought she was figuring it out – “I suppose I can give you an abstract of my findings so far, although there is still confounding data,” she said, setting her teacup down and glaring at it. Celestia leaned over and looked at the cup, then at Twilight, confused. “The basic mechanism by which earth pony magic expresses itself seems to be a ‘meddling’ factor on physical processes that happen in the vicinity of the earth pony. Processes like diffusion.” Twilight motioned to the cup as an example. “I’ve learned a few parlor tricks involving heat – do you have a candle?”
The princess levitated a fat candle out of a drawer, and set it on the table. “You’ll need to light it,” Twilight said, and once she’d done that, demonstrated her ability to snuff out the flame by concentrating on it. “There,” she said. “A more blatant display of magic than 99% of earth ponies are capable of. Apparently, my raw magical ability carried over.”
Princess Celestia stared at the candle, then at Twilight. “I can honestly say that I have never seen an earth pony put out a candle like that before,” she said, “at least, not with magic; there is always sleight of hoof. Their work with plants is often rather ‘blatant’, however.”
“Well, yes,” Twilight said, “but they cheat.”
The princess laughed.
“At any rate, the next step is to learn to control the expression of earth pony magic in situations that don’t call for brute force,” Twilight said. “Such as baking. When I can bake a muffin without burning it, I’ll know that I’m ready to move on to the next step. I expect this to take anywhere from a few weeks to a few years.”
Celestia nodded. “I’d appreciate it if you could send me regular reports on your progress,” she said. “I also haven’t received a friendship report from you in a while, and I find it hard to believe that after everything that happened, you haven’t learned anything about friendship.”
“I have!“ Twilight said, eagerly, then looked down, embarrassed. “I didn’t send you a letter because I was afraid that I wasn’t your student anymore,” she said. “I’ll need to check my notes and do a more rigorous analysis of the situation, but I’m learning a lot about the way in which friendships survive a period of enforced absence, as well as the way that adding and removing ponies from the equation changes the dynamic among a group of friends. And…” she trailed off.
Yeah, it was time to move on to the uncomfortable part of the conversation. “And I’ve also learned something about being friends with deeply flawed individuals, that your family and peers have difficulty accepting for perfectly valid reasons.”
Celestia said nothing, but waited politely for Twilight to elaborate.
“For the last week or so I’ve been conspiring with a pair of changelings, to keep them out of prison,” Twilight said. “My entire reason for being here in Canterlot was to try to convince Luna to take them under her wings, and protect them. That… fell through.”
“I imagine it did,” Celestia said with a faint smile. “Where are they now?”
“I don’t know,” Twilight replied. “And I don’t want to know – it’s better for them if nopony knows who they are. They can make new identities, and blend in with society again, and… and I’ll never see them again,” Twilight said, scrunching up her face a bit. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.
“I wish it were that simple,” Princess Celestia replied. “You should have brought them to me.”
“Why?” Twilight asked. “So that you could lock them up? I – I’m sorry, princess,” Twilight said, cringing at her own tone of voice. “I don’t mean to say that you’re wrong, but – this can’t be a permanent solution. We can’t just keep them locked up forever.”
Princess Celestia sighed, and looked pained. “Believe me,” she said. “I wish it was as simple as just letting them go. I had a plan drawn up to register all the changelings that claimed to be loyal to Equestria – their names, their typical forms and those forms’ names, and an impression of their spirit if they needed to be tracked magically.”
“That sounds…” Twilight contemplated it. “Well, honestly, it sounds like a recipe for disaster. Not only are changelings completely incapable of staying out of trouble even when ponies don’t know who they are, the ponies that lived near them would blame anything wrong that anypony did on the changelings, whether or not they were involved.”
“Exactly,” Princess Celestia said.
“You’d need to have the Changelings keep a magically verifiable record of their transformations,” Twilight said, thinking through the problem. “Most of them could probably be satisfied by playing relatively harmless pranks with their shapeshifting capability, and if they could prove that they weren’t responsible for things they didn’t do, ponies would eventually stop trying to scapegoat them. But to accomplish that you’d need either constant surveillance, or an awful lot of truth magic. Perhaps some sort of enchanted paper on which only the truth could be written? That seems like it should be possible, although I’d have to work out the spell to be sure. And of course, producing enchanted objects in bulk is always problematic.”
“Of course,” Celestia said, chuckling to herself. “I should write those ideas down, in case I decide to resurrect that plan. Unfortunately, even with safeguards in place, there isn’t anywhere in Equestria where their release wouldn’t cause an unacceptable level of disharmony.”
“Oh,” Twilight said, frowning.
“So, for the moment, I’ve been concentrating on making their imprisonment more bearable. We’ve done quite a bit to improve conditions in the castle dungeons, but for long-term containment we’d want a more open facility – one where open-minded ponies could go to connect with the changelings, and certainly one where the changelings could live a full life.”
Twilight looked at Celestia. “A changeling grove in your garden, where these rare specimens could be put on display during formal events, like your monkeys and kangaroo.”
“No, Twilight,” Celestia said. “More of a neighborhood that ponies and changelings both lived in, but the changelings were not allowed to leave, except under guard.”
“They would try,” Twilight said, with certainty. “They would have help. The ponies that lived with them would become their friends. They’d take the changelings’ side, and push for their release – and that’s your real long-term plan, isn’t it.” She laughed. “It would take a long time, though.”
“Anything we try would take time,” Celestia replied. “A necessary prerequisite is for the ponies of Equestria to accept changelings among them without fear, and the attack on Canterlot rattled everypony. Everypony except…”
“Hmm?” Twilight asked, as the princess trailed off.
“It’s probably a foal’s dream,” Celestia said. “But there was once a magical kingdom, remote and isolationist, but a beacon of love and hope across all Equestria nevertheless. It was… lost. Sealed away from the world. But between Nightmare Moon, the elements of harmony, Discord, the moon ponies, and for that matter the changelings themselves, this seems to be an age where seals are broken and the lost are found.”
“And if this place returned, you could banish the changelings there,” Twilight said.
“Yes, in the sense that they’d be sent beyond the borders of Equestria, perhaps against their will,” Celestia said, in an even voice, as she sipped her tea. “No, in that they wouldn’t be abandoned in the wilderness and left to fend for themselves, without the company of others.”
Twilight blushed. “I’m sorry, Princess. I’ve been awfully rude – I suppose I just hoped for more. For some magical plan that solved everything in a way that I hadn’t even thought of.”
“It’s only natural,” Celestia replied. “You’re comparing current events to historical records. When the history of this age is written, I’m sure whatever plan we eventually come up with will seem obvious in retrospect.”
“Unless we fail, and plunge Equestria into a new dark age,” Twilight noted.
Celestia lowered her head until her horn rested against Twilight’s forehead, and met the earth pony’s gaze. “We won’t let that happen,” she said.
Twilight nodded weakly, unable to speak.
“Now,” Celestia said, sitting back up. “Unless you have any other disasters to report, I’d appreciate hearing more about what you’ve been up to lately. How have things been going in Ponyville? Trixie’s been sending me ‘friendship reports’ but they tend to be all about Trixie.”
“Well…” Twilight said, trying to think of where to start. “I guess I could start with a visit Trixie made to my library about a week ago,” she said. “I was sick of finding books of unicorn magic everywhere I looked, so I was trying to re-shelve it all by hoof…”
===
Twilight Sparkle stood near the entrance to the castle hedge maze, watching the sky change colors as the sun drifted towards the horizon. Next to her stood a twisted statue of a hodgepodge creature made up of pony, dragon, eagle, lion, and perhaps not even Celestia knew what other parts – Discord, the spirit of chaos and disharmony, whom Twilight herself had sealed in stone. After her talk with the princess, in which she’d related all the troubles she’d had in the last few days, she’d felt her lack of unicorn magic weigh on her shoulders like a yoke. She knew how to cope. She even knew which direction she had to drag the weight in order to turn this curse into, ultimately, a new learning experience that no unicorn before her had ever been offered. But it would be a long, hard pull.
So she’d found herself drawn to the statue. When he’d been free, Discord had added and removed pegasus wings and unicorn horns with a snap of his fingers, and that wasn’t even close to the limits of his powers. He could solve the changeling problem just as quickly – by making them into ponies, or giving everypony their powers of shapeshifting, or just turning them into lawn chairs or, really, quite literally, anything at all that he could imagine. Of course, solving problems was hardly in his idiom, but that didn’t stop her from fantasizing about it.
It did make her fantasies end badly, however.
There was a rustle as Rainbow Dash landed next to her. “Found you!” she said. “And just in time, I see. I know that you’re sick of being an earth pony, Twilight, but is it really worth unleashing a storm of chaos just to get turned into a pegasus?”
Twilight laughed. “I wasn’t going to – wait, a pegasus?”
“Well, yeah,” Rainbow Dash said, grinning. “I mean, given the choice, who wouldn’t want a pair of these babies?” She waggled her wings.
Twilight giggled. “I don’t know, Rainbow Dash. It seems redundant to acquire a pair of wings of my own, when I can always just borrow yours.” She crouched down and wiggled her tail, and Rainbow Dash took a nervous step back, then turned to fly away. Twilight leaped and bit down on her tail, stopping her short, then as the pegasus protested and made a show of struggling, Twilight clambered onto her friend’s back. “Come on, let’s go home.”
“Only for you, Twilight,” Rainbow Dash said, hovering in midair as she looked around to get her bearings. “I’m not sure I can find my way back to your mom’s place in the dark, though. The streets here are all crazy, it’s hard to make heads or tails of anything from the air.”
“Not there,” Twilight said, resting her weary head on Rainbow Dash’s mane. She was so tired – she’d been up all day, and most of the night. “I think it’s time to go back to Ponyville.”
“Ponyville, right,” Rainbow Dash said. “Train station it is.”