- - -
(39)
Blueblood: Press Ever Forward
- - -
“Hello. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Welcome to our home.”
Those were the first words spoken by the pony that became her step-brother: that it was a pleasure to make her acquaintance. The fifty-second Blueblood was close to her age, just a little older really, with a compass rose cutie mark that he had gotten just the day before her arrival. He was big for a colt, tall and barrel-chested, just like his father was big for a stallion. Where the elder Blueblood wore a serious-looking overcoat, the son was dressed in a little tuxedo with a blue waistcloth. His blond mane had been styled into a very soft wave and curl, and it partly obscured his right eye. Cadance felt a nudge and held out her hoof.
“Princess Mi Amore Cadenza,” she said, and he kissed her hoof gently but quickly. Too quickly, given the frown it earned from the middle-aged mare behind him who could only be his mother.
“Blueblood,” he introduced himself without title. “The fifty-second.”
The reigning Prince gestured his son away, and soon Cadenza’s world was taken up by the Duchess of Canterlot, Vernal Equinox. Lady Equinox was noble-looking but fairly plain mare. She made up for it with great poise and an air of a refinement. Her coat was a soft but clear pink, her mane and eyes both ocean blue. Cadance remembered her smiling warmly and pulling the filly into an embrace.
“My daughter,” she said with a squeeze. “My new daughter! Under our roof, you will want for nothing!”
Lady Equinox had been true to her word.
- - -
“You never spoke much about your mother or father,” Sweetie said, an observer to the nebulous memory, conjured in dream around them. It was a dream within a dream, almost.
In-between memory and nightmare, she stood by Blueblood, Luna, and Cadance. The four observers hovered near a fireplace in the manor house as the filly-Cadance met her new family. They were Celestia’s nephews and nieces, all: Equestria’s royal family, embodying all that was best of its noble unicorn heritage and great thousand year history. From a distance, they looked like a happy, little family, except, as Sweetie had said, Blueblood never seemed to find reason to talk about them. Any of them.
Blueblood grunted but seemed unwilling to explain his reluctance.
“He did once say that it was the duty of the Bluebloods to adopt alicorns,” Sweetie continued and turned this time to Cadance and Princess Luna.
“It is one of their most sacred duties,” Luna answered, taking in the scene before her with a neutral expression. “Celestia and I were likewise taken in by Princess Platinum’s family, a thousand years and more before you were born. Though, in our case, they were also our only living relatives at the time.”
“You met Princess Platinum?!” Sweetie’s eyes went wide. “That’s amazing!”
“We would not be here today if not for her,” Luna replied, but said no more.
“You had wonderful parents, Blueblood,” Cadance said, trying to coax the stallion out of his shell. “Your father was a true noble and gentlestallion, and your mother--”
“Must we prattle on about dead ponies?” Blueblood snapped. “I thought we were here to talk about--”
“Blueblood!” Sweetie whispered, cutting the irate stallion off. “They’re your parents!”
He grimaced and she saw his teeth clench. “Yes, they were.” He pointedly stressed that last word. “As you can see, we did our duty. We accepted the new Princess into our home. She was treated as well as anypony could imagine… the finest food…”
- - -
Another memory flashed by of a young filly Cadance sitting at a long table, her new father and mother seated a good distance away at the head. She was boggling at the vast array of foods and sweets that had been divided into courses and compliments before her. She reached with both hooves for a stuffed biscuit of raisins and roasted herbs, steaming and hot and filling the air with an irresistible fragrance. A faint magical aura stopped her, however.
“The Celestine prayer comes first,” Blueblood whispered from his seat next to her. Then, more loudly, he recited with head bowed, “Blessed as we by the bounty of peace. We thank you, Princess, for the harmony of Equestria and for those we are honored to share it with. We break bread, always with you in our hearts. Agimus tibi gratias, dilectissima Celestia.”
Cadance tried to join the three nobles in muttering the final verse and looked down shyly when it became painfully clear she had no idea what to say or even what the verse meant. Servants began to tend to the family, sitting primly before their plates. The lord and lady of the house spoke softly to one another while they waited. Cadance only looked up when she saw the roasted and stuffed biscuit she had wanted placed on her plate. She glanced to the serving maid and then to Blueblood, who had directed the food to be placed before her.
“You will learn, soon,” he promised and smiled warmly. “Don’t worry. I’ll help.”
- - -
“The finest tutors.”
- - -
Cadance glanced up at the stern governess her new family had hired. Blueblood sat at perfect attention next to her, and the withered old donkey jennet introduced a second pony, a tall and shapely pegasus mare with a flowing mane of seagreen and ocean blue. Next to her was another tutor, a stuffy and bookish-looking unicorn mare with thick, red glasses. They were to be her flight and basic magic instructors. When she was older, they said, she would be ready to enter the school for gifted unicorns.
Last, but certainly not the least, Princess Celestia stood behind the hoof-picked mares. She, too, would be a tutor, to teach the young Princess in what it meant to be an alicorn. As one, all the governesses and tutors bowed deeply to their new charge. Even Blueblood’s old crone of a governess lowered her head in respect. Blueblood, however, did not.
“You are Her Serene Highness,” Celestia announced and beamed at the filly. “Congratulations, my little pony, and welcome to our family.”
“Congratulations!” The other adults chorused as one, their heads still bowed. “Your Serene Highness!”
“Congratulations,” Blueblood said, a second later.
- - -
“You were taken care of like nopony but a royal could imagine,” Blueblood finished.
“I was given everything,” Cadance agreed. “A new home. A new future, a new...”
After the tutors in Blueblood’s memory vanished, they left only Cadance behind. The little filly trotted across the stately salon towards a voluminous painting of the royal family. In it, the great Duke of Canterlot stood proudly alongside his beautiful wife. The younger Blueblood was dressed in a tiny blue guard uniform, sitting next to his father. An empty cradle lay conspicuously off to the side, having been painted over at least twice. As yet, nopony had made plans to include her in the portrait.
Cadance turned away from the memory as the younger her tried to stand in front of the picture, finding a place where she fit in. “A new family.”
- - -
A knocking drew Blueblood across his immaculate, reneighsance-style bedroom. Clearly upset at being disturbed, he used his magic to throw open the great hardwood door. A tiny pink alicorn was standing there, staring at him with wide eyes.
“Not again,” the colt grumbled, but eventually gave in. “Very well. Come on.”
He channeled a hoof-full of magical sparks to pluck a record out of a drawer. It floated, like a flying saucer, through the air and over to a gramophone. A soft orchestral melody began to play, and Cadance quickly scurried up and onto her new brother’s bed. Blueblood followed with markedly less enthusiasm.
“If you kick me, I’ll knock you onto the floor,” he warned, climbing up onto his bed with a bit more grace and the benefit of both a few years and a couple extra inches of reach.
“You never did before,” the little Cadance commented, grabbing one of his pillows. She seemed to need something to cling to before she slept.
“This time I will,” he promised, turning his back to her and magically snuffing out the lights.
- - -
“Daaaaaaw!” Sweetie melted. “See? I told you you were a good brother!” She nudged Blueblood, prompting a roll of his eyes.
Luna nodded, somberly, suspicions already forming in her head as to what happened next. “There must be more, nephew.”
“As I said,” Blueblood replied asked and gestured to Cadance with a tilt of his head. “They treated her wonderfully. Do you know why?”
- - -
“Blueblood, you highland goat!”
“Cruciger, you old dog!”
The two stallions laughed and clasped hooves at the center of the waiting room. Lord Cruciger was a bay-colored stallion, large enough to dwarf the little colts and fillies standing near him. He even dwarfed Lady Equinox when he kissed her hoof in greeting. Cadance had stood next to Blueblood, groomed and dressed to receive important company. Her new brother had watched the whole affair with a bored expression.
The two fathers, Cadance had learned, were old friends, and Cruciger had visited to discuss family matters. From a present-day perspective, that could only mean the matter of the Blueblood succession and the arrangement of a marriage for the young Prince.
“Why don’t you children go upstairs and play?” Lady Equinox suggested, gesturing to a pair of servants.
“Come with me, young Princes,” a stallion majordomo had said, taking Blueblood and a young Alpha Brass away.
“Why don’t we work on a puzzle, girls?” One of the house governesses, a young one, gathered up the four fillies. They retreated upstairs while the adults talked in a study.
Cruciger had come to Canterlot with his wife and three daughters: Polished Jewel, Chalice, and Antimony. It was the first time Cadance had met any of them, and while she and Chalice worked dutifully on a large picture puzzle with the governess, Polished Jewel – being older and more easily bored – anxiously milled around. The youngest daughter, Antimony, still without her cutie mark, watched with half-lidded eyes as Chalice and Cadance assembled the puzzle. The younger filly’s eyes seemed to be red, like a pegasus pony’s, or an albino’s, but there was something unnerving about them, and whenever Cadance tried to get a closer look the little filly had shied away or covered her eyes with her hooves.
Eventually, Polished Jewel grew too bored to be content watching her sisters. She snuck off, much to the distress of the governess. Cadance had remained in the room with Antimony and Chalice, finishing off the puzzle and trying to entertain her guests. She had even gathered them around her for a little tea party, just like Vernal Equinox and the adult noblemares always had. Chalice had started out shy but she seemed very nice and even eager to play along. Antimony had mostly kept quiet and watched her sister. Finally, after how long, Cadance couldn’t say, Polished Jewel returned with their visibly shaken Governess.
The oldest daughter had then announced, “Father and Lord Blueblood are to duel.”
Three days later, on a cold, drizzly morning, Lady Equinox had returned with her shocked-silent son but not her husband. It was a full day before Cadance learned that her adopted father, the only father she had ever known, was dead.
- - -
“Oh…” Sweetie looked down. “I’m sorry.”
Princess Luna nodded her head in understanding, and her sympathy was sincere though less obviously articulated. “We have heard of this sad dispute… a duel of honor taken too far.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” Cadance said, though it was something they all understood. Mi Amore Cadenza becoming a Princess of the realm must have thrown into question the previously established arrangement between the estranged Terre Rare and their distant Blueblood cousins. What might have been a request to push back the engagement a generation turned, tragically, into a duel. But nopony could blame the Princess herself for this, surely.
Blueblood took his time in responding, and when he did, it was with a shrug.
“Nephew,” Luna said. “You must know…”
“‘Don’t blame her.’ Don’t you think I’ve told myself that?” he asked, and by the pained look on his face, he clearly wished he could say the opposite. He shook his head in dismay. “Can you really tell a pony how to feel? I’ve told myself a thousand times not to blame you. I didn’t really even figure it all out until the funeral… when mother told me. But how could I not think: if only she hadn’t come to us, maybe none of it would have happened?”
Blueblood let out a shuddering breath and turned away from the three mares. “It doesn’t matter. I want to put all that behind me.”
“Yet you cannot,” Luna stated, bluntly.
“Isn’t wanting to enough?” he turned and yelled, causing Cadance and Sweetie to flinch. Luna merely stared hard at him, and an instant later, he regretted the loss of control. “Auntie, Sweetie… Cadenza… isn’t it enough that I want to just move on? What happened in the past doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter anymore.”
Cadance lowered her eyes, but Sweetie reached out to touch his leg.
“You can’t just say ‘I want to forget it’ and trust in it to go away,” she said, trying to be encouraging. “You need to let it go if you want to leave it behind for real… you really, really have to forgive her.” Sweetie looked at his eyes, her own a bit watery. He had never spoken much about his foalhood, even in all their loops together, and now Sweetie started to understand why. “If you could stop being Bullyblood… I know you can do this too!”
Blueblood looked down at her, only to glance away, his brows knitted together. “It isn’t as if I don’t want to…”
“Wanting it is not enough, nephew,” Princess Luna insisted. “Nor is this the only issue before us.”
- - -
It was snowing heavily when Cadance saw her step-brother leave Canterlot. Domed umbrellas floated overhead, shielding her from most of the downfall, but a layer of fluffy white had already accumulated all around the skyport. It trickled from where it lay on top of mooring lines every time the royal airship swayed in the wind. It was beautiful, but so cold. Winters of this severity, whether approved by the Pegasus Weather Bureau or not, were still alien to the young Princess from Bitaly.
Duchess Equinox held Cadance close as Blueblood saw his luggage moved onboard for his trip.
“You shouldn’t have to go,” she objected, and turned to her stepmother. “He shouldn’t have to go. I don’t want him to go!”
“A Princess is the country. Nothing else comes first,” Vernal Equinox told her. “That is as true of Princes as it is of Princesses.”
“But I don’t want him to go,” Cadance insisted and stomped her little hooves. “You said I could have whatever I want, and I don’t want him to go!”
Blueblood stood, facing the airship, his back to his mother and step-sister.
“I don’t want him to go!” Cadance repeated, her voice rising in pitch as she started to whine, and Duchess Equinox frowned helplessly at her new daughter’s behavior. “I don’t--”
“Stop crying.”
It was Blueblood’s voice, a colt’s voice and not a stallion’s, but it was as cold as the snow-covered docks around them.
“I want to go,” he said, still facing the ship and not his family. “I want to go, so stop crying.”
Cadance shook her head. “No you don’t!”
Blueblood seemed to glance upward at the falling snow and the cloudy sky. He was Duke of Canterlot now, technically, but his mother would continue to rule in his name while he was away. The city of lights and magic could be seen past the airship between the envelope of the balloon and the wooden bow of the ship itself. It was just around the bend of the mountain, and like the skyport, it sparkled underneath a layer of snow. There were fillies and colts playing in courtyards, building snowponies and defending snowforts, back in Canterlot.
“Goodbye, mother,” Blueblood finally said over his shoulder, his face still out of sight. His voice was tight and forced. “I will see you in four years.”
“Four years,” Vernal Equinox agreed. She said nothing more to her only son.
Still not looking back, Blueblood ran up the plank of the ship.
“Write us!” Cadance cried to him. “I’ll write you! Write me back!”
“Sssh.” Legs draped over Cadance’s shoulders and pulled her into a hug. Lady Equinox hummed a soft tune, and the two ponies remained in the snow until the airship finally left for Crown Roc, taking Blueblood with it. Cadance felt a kiss on the crown of her head, and heard her new mother whisper, “Just us now, my little pony. My little daughter. My daughter.”
- - -
“My Prince, are you--”
“Keep out of my way,” Blueblood hissed, pushing past the royal guard and into his cabin. The tears had frozen to his face; it hurt to try and rub them away with his hooves. Four years. Four years, he would be gone.
Maybe it was for the best.
- - -
“I said my mother told me about how your arrival caused the duel,” Blueblood growled, but fixed his eyes down at his hooves and not at any of the ponies sharing in that painful memory. “I thought she’d blame you, like I did, Cadenza. But she blamed me… for not being a daughter like the family needed.” He finally looked up and pointed at his step-sister. “Do you know why she treated you so well? Because you were the daughter she wished me to be.”
“How,” he asked, shaking his head in defeat and dismay, “how could I go back to being your brother after that?”
- - -
“Why isn’t he writing?” Cadance asked, holding up another letter for her mother to proofread and send to Crown Roc. “He’s using enough… um… postage, right? Maybe he’s forgetting? Should I remind him? I could write it on the back of this letter!”
Vernal Equinox smiled comfortingly at her adopted daughter, placing a hoof on the filly’s head.
“I am sure he’ll write when he gets the chance to,” she assured the little Princess.
- - -
“Three years, and you never wrote me,” Cadance said, her delicate features pulled tight into a frown. “Did you even get my letters?”
“I did,” Blueblood replied, stonily.
“Did you read them?” she accused. “You didn’t, did you?”
It was a long, heavy couple heartbeats before the Prince answered the question. “…No. I didn’t.”
“Why didn’t you write back?” Sweetie asked. “I’m sure you missed them… if I could write to Rarity… or you… I’d want to hear back!” She shook her head. “Blueblood… I don’t think it’s Cadance that you have to forgive… It’s your parents.”
“Your mother loved you,” Cadance said, trying to be supportive. It had the opposite effect, and Blueblood bowled right past Sweetie to glare into his step-sister’s eyes. She was an alicorn, but Blueblood was a large pony, even by stallion standards. He still had enough height to manage to look down on her.
“My mother replaced me the first chance she got,” he hissed and shook his head at Sweetie. “And my father, my stupid, noble, ‘heroic’ father… threw his life away in a pointless honor duel. You’d think my parents were dysfunctional? But our entire line is just one long legacy of buck-ups and betrayals!”
He pointed at Luna, who had been watching and listening with a straight face. “Sisters turn on sisters. Daughters turn on fathers. Sons depose mothers! Mothers manipulate their foals! Fathers march off and die! From that very first generation right up to the present! We persist, Princes and Princesses, and for what? For what?” He whirled on Cadance. “What? What justified us taking you from your real family? Do you even remember what your mother looked like? Your real one?”
Then he turned to Sweetie, heedless of the hurt look on Cadance’s face. “You remember Blue Belle? That - that is the true face of what we are!”
“For what?” he repeated and finally returned to Luna. “You’ll forgive me for holding a few grudges, Auntie. At least I didn’t turn on my own kin. Twice.”
Princess Luna’s wings flared and, without so much as a word of warning, her head surged forward to connect with Blueblood’s own. She turned slightly, so the impact didn’t involve either pony’s horn, but the sound of two thick royal skulls colliding proved wince-worthy. Blueblood yelped and fell to the side with the impact, hooves flying reflexively up to his face. Cadance gasped, a hoof covering her mouth, but only Sweetie really ran over to make sure he was alright.
“Blasted, bloody--!” his cursing, at least, indicated there was no brain damage. “That hurt!”
“Nephew, you know little of which you speak,” Princess Luna announced. Her voice seemed to be both soft with concern and bellowing with anger. The dark alicorn reached down and bodily picked the stallion up by his formerly immaculate suit collar. A bruise had formed over the dark Princess’s eye, but she hadn’t seemed to feel or notice the impact.
“We have never claimed to be perfect nor even the best role model,” she reminded him, pulling the Prince closer to her angry countenance. “We have the weight of many wrongs on our conscience, and we have regrets to spare! We have things left unsaid, worries, fears, insecurities… We let those things rule us once. It will never happen again. You, too, nephew…” She saw him start to stubbornly turn away and yanked him closer. “You are our kin, with all the potential for greatness… and all the potential for abuse. You know what we want of you. You know what is expected of you.”
“To endure,” he replied and slumped in her physical and magical grip.
“And press ever forward,” Luna insisted, releasing him to fall to all fours. “Nephew,” she began again, and there was a note of pleading to her voice. “Please. You are among ponies you can trust. Ponies who love you. Speak honestly… truly… openly… and endure. You are not and never will be alone.”
“Please,” Cadance spoke up, and for the first time, she tentatively touched his side. “I have things I need to say, too. Just please, I know you want to try, but you also have to believe you can succeed. If we cannot be at peace with one another here… I fear we won’t ever be.”
“Think about how you kept me sane and helped me escape the loops,” Sweetie said softly, leaning against his foreleg. “Without your belief in me, I would have been lost a long time ago. You had the strength to help me… to make the perfect Gala… to win my sister… and to let me call you brother… and you know I’ll always, always be your little sister and be here for you.”
“Sweetie,” she heard him say as he held her to his leg. He lowered his eyes and sucked in a ragged, distasteful breath. “Auntie… alright…”
Behind him, the image of the Blueblood monument from the center of the palace garden maze appeared. A young colt, perfect white coat and groomed golden mane, trotted slowly up to the edifice. It was dusk, and he was the only pony around.
“A sister,” the young colt lamented. “A Princess…”
At last, he came to the monument itself. It took only moments for him to read the names. There were fifty deceased Bluebloods recorded, one after the other in a neat line. At the very bottom, Blueblood saw his father’s name, then his, and then his replacement. A tiny hoof brushed against his own name, and with hardly a whimper of protest or a cry of surprise, a compass rose began to materialize over his flanks.
“My place in the world was made crystal clear that night,” the adult Prince said, head still hung low. He didn’t need to see to know what memories his mind had dredged up. “It was made clear when we adopted you, Cadenza… and when I left for Crown Roc. I was always meant to be just a name. I… I can’t even say I hated it. I was resigned to it. I accepted it. It made sense. It made sense like you count from one, to two, to three. There’s nothing wrong with just being the ‘two’ is there? I was a stepping stone, and… and I accepted that.”
The monument and the little colt vanished back into dreams.
“It all seems so pointless looking back,” he said, angry and confused and hurt. “Brother or sister, husband or wife… my parents and that stupid obelisk…”
He looked up at Cadance and steadied himself to say what he needed to. “I looked at you, and I never forgot how my mother held onto you and let me go. How she loved you, even on her deathbed. And how I…” He choked back his anger, but he couldn’t suppress his tears as they rolled down his cheeks. “How I… resented her for it. How, when she died, I felt… empty.”
The three mares listened as he mixed laughter into his crying.
“I paid for her funeral, and I gave her eulogy, and I felt like I was talking about a stranger,” he admitted, and it was more painful than any physical torture the loops had inflicted on him. He stared at Cadance, not just angry or hurt, but terribly, deeply conflicted. “I think… I think I wanted to take your place. I wanted to be somepony else.”
“You became somepony else,” Sweetie said softly, giving his leg a little shake for emphasis. “And you did it yourself. I saw it with my own eyes.”
“We would be most put-out if our nephew ceased to be the pony we know,” Luna added, beaming with a rare smile. It was only slightly marred by the welt over her left eye where she had viciously headbutted that same nephew. Jealousy, after all, was a sin she understood all too well.
“I never meant to--” Cadance began.
“I know,” Blueblood interrupted before she could explain. “I always knew it here,” he said, pointing to his head. “But never really here.” He pointed to his heart.
The thoughts, spoken aloud, conjured up a memory then, of the Prince and his oldest Aunt, the Princess of the Sun. He and Celestia sat in silence after he had made that first, impassioned plea for her to help explain his Gala time-loops.
- - -
"Nephew," Celesia finally said, placing a compassionate hoof on his shoulder. "You are free to search the Royal Libraries for an answer, but I think the problem isn't with magic. The problem…" she tapped his chest. "Is in here."
"Or maybe here," she added, gently rapping her hoof against his forehead. "Perhaps you should see a specialist?"
"Auntie!" the memory of the Prince protested, even as the dream turned to wisps around them.
- - -
“In here, huh?” he asked, still pointing to his chest. He took a deep breath and turned to Cadance.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I am sorry, Cadenza.”
The youngest Princess in the realm remained tall as nodded in acceptance. “You said terrible things to me,” she reminded him. “Worse than that… the brother who made my new life bearable turned his back on me. Even when he came back, he was still gone.”
- - -
Cadance wept when they laid her second mother to rest. Equinox was beside her husband again, seen off by her friends, family, and a throng of well-wishers. The Grand Duchess of Equestria and Canterlot. A chorus of colts and fillies sang, their dulcet tones juxtaposed with the sea of black that everypony wore. It was a great state funeral and even the Princess herself had made an appearance, her golden regalia draped with onyx cloth. Even her aurora mane seemed to have subdued colors. The sky itself was dark, with only a faint light shining through.
Gradually, as the service came to an end and the earth ponies began to fill in the grave, a long line of ponies appeared before her and before her brother. All offered their condolences. A few quietly affirmed their loyalties. Blueblood had sat next to her, as the family heir, as the true Duke in both name and power. He remained by the headstone, thanking visitors, accepting commiserations, all into the night. Even when Cadance felt the last of her tears for the day begin to dry.
Until, finally, there were only the two of them left.
“Blueblood,” she finally said, knowing that she was the last. Knowing that all they had now were each other.
What he said next hit her like a kick to the stomach.
“I have nothing to say to you.”
- - -
Blueblood grimaced.
“Before you say anything else,” Cadance quickly interrupted as he opened his mouth to speak. “I… I always knew how you felt about your parents,” she admitted, and this time she turned her eyes down to the floor. “When your mother held me… and whispered to me and…”
She shook her head and sniffed before building up the resolve to continue.
“It was like I had a new mother. One that loved me.” She glanced up and there was a glisten of tears in her eyes. “I - I honestly don’t know if I wanted to share it. I’m supposed to spread love, and I could have… but I didn’t where it would… where it might have… if she loved you more than me, what family would I have? I…”
“I think I understand,” Blueblood said and held out his hoof. “I’m willing to forgive all if you are similarly amenable. Well, everything except you marrying that obdurate buffon of a royal guard--”
Cadance frowned through her tears and glared at his hoof.
“You’d best get used to your new brother-in-law,” she stated.
“He’d best get used to me, you mean,” Blueblood corrected her.
“It’s my fault you were captured by the changelings, too,” Cadance admitted, all too quickly. It was as if a little unburdening had unleashed a deluge. “It was part of my plan to escape and attack them from inside.”
“Really?” he asked, and stroked his chin. “From what I’ve heard, that’s not a bad plan!”
Cadance boggled at him and at the apparent lack of concern. “You – You’re not mad?”
Blueblood’s confident mask of a grin faded slightly, but he shook his head. “I am quite angry, and I would be lying if I said I held you blameless. But I meant it when I told you I want us to forgive all. Anger comes and goes, doesn’t it?”
The two royal siblings inched closer, hesitant, unsure, shy even. Cadance finally took a long stride forward and wrapped her forelegs around her one-time step-brother. The hug was a little awkward at first, but then the Princess and finally the Prince relaxed and laughed a little. Cadance tightened her embrace and Blueblood lifted one leg up to tentatively return the gesture.
“NEPHEW!”
Everypony turned to the only source of such a magically enhanced bellow, but Princess Luna merely stared back, her mouth closed. Those same eyes then turned skyward as the Sugarcube Corner cafe shook in its foundations. The ceiling trembled and bolts exploded from out of wooden supports before, with a creaking, groaning snapping of wood and plaster, the roof peeled away and off the lower floor, like the top of a can being removed.
A rush of heat and light blasted down into the store as the roof came free and flew through the air. At the center of the tumult was the source of the bellow from before. A white-gold figure hovered in midair, radiating magic and waves of flame. The heat alone was oppressive, melting wax candles on Sweetie’s birthday cakes and sending rivulets of dribbling marzipan off tables and onto the floor.
“Do not fear our sister,” Princess Luna declared, reaching a hoof up to her horn. “She is only as powerful here as you imagine her to be, nephew!”
“The problem being that I imagine her to be absurdly powerful!” Blueblood yelled, having swiftly hidden behind his alicorn sister. “Ugh! And to top it off, cake is flying everywhere!”
“She’s so bright! I can barely see her! I’ve never seen such a powerful Luminescence spell!” Cadance yelled, shielding her eyes from the inferno in the sky. She did, however, find the time to turn to glare at her would-be brother. “And why are you hiding behind me?”
“You’re big, and you have wings!” Blueblood explained, extending one of her wings with his hoof for emphasis. “I’m safe from the cake behind you.”
“He does that,” Sweetie told the alicorn.
“Well, he’ll learn to stop it!” Cadance bodily wrestled with her brother, “I’m the Princess! You’re supposed to be my shield!”
“Never!”
“Nephew! Traitor! Enemies!” Celestia roared from on high. “Seize him, my little ponies! Seize them all!”
“Battle calls! Night Shade reveals herself!” Luna instantly took to the air, surging towards her dream-sister. A single beat from her wings sent everypony present flying and tumbling off their hooves. “HAVE AT THEE, IMPOSTER!”
“Auntie!” Blueblood yelled, reaching for her even as she took off, barreling into her evil sister like a bat out of Hell. The pair of alicorns grappled and tumbled away from the peeled-back roof of Sugarcube Corner, and the threat appeared to pass--
Except for the suddenly dark look in the eyes of everypony else at the party.
“Monsters!” Diamond Tiara screamed, and threw both plate and slice of cake at the three remaining ponies. Blueblood defly snagged Sweetie, ever alert for incoming pastry attacks, and ultimately used his magic to snag a table as a shield. At least inanimate objects didn’t object when you hid behind them.
“You heard the Princess!” another pony yelled.
“Traitors?” a hysterical sounding mare cried before fainting. “Ohhh!”
“Get ‘em!” yet another pony said, surging forward while others found yet more cake to hurl.
“S-stay away!” Cadance warned, holding up her hooves as one stallion made a grab for her. Blueblood snagged the offender when he made another lunge for the Princess, this time using him to absorb a barrage of cake slices.
“This may be where we make our exit!” Blueblood yelled. He threw the sticky and twitching cake-shield away without a care, much to Cadance’s disgust and chagrin. “How… exactly… do we make our exit again?”
Cadance muttered a reply as she ducked another slice of pie.
“What was that now?”
“I’m not entirely sure!” the Princess cried, smiling weakly. “I’m sort of winging it here!”
“Oh, wonderful. She’s winging it.”
“Well, if she can ‘wing’ it and we really control what’s happening here to an extent, then maybe I can dream I’m a lot more powerful than I really am!” Sweetie grinned, jumping from Blueblood’s back and releasing her glamour spell.
The advancing ponies stopped in their tracks at the sight of her, and she couldn’t help but wince slightly at their reaction, before remembering that it was really only one pony that controlled them all. Leaning down, she whispered quickly to the ground under her and for a moment the whole area was eerily calm… before the ground parted, separating them from the advancing ponies.
It was an impressive magical feat, but Cadance’s eyes were not on the tear in the earth, but on the filly that had caused it. She pointed at Sweetie and backed away frightfully.
“W-what…?” she gasped. “You aren’t a…? A pony? What are you?!”
Blueblood noticed Sweetie glance back over her shoulder at the Princess and sighed.
“My poor little sister… puberty hit her like a ton of rocks, you see,” he explained, earning a glare from both mares. “That is, what I meant to say,” he amended himself, waving a hoof to placate the female ire, “is that she’s had to walk down a rocky road… er, she took her time as a filly for granite? Metamorphically speaking, she’s been under a lot of pressure, you know… and she hit rock bottom before she came here, so I told her schist happens and fortune favors the boulder…”
“Blueblood,” Sweetie hissed. “Please. Stop.”
“So many puns,” Cadance gagged. “So many bad puns!”
“Point is, she’s still my Sweetie Belle,” he concluded, “Frankly, I think it would be strange for my sisters not to be odd. One being an alicorn and the other being…” his grin widened teasingly “…other.”
Sweetie could not hold her glare for long and finally giggled, recasting her glamour spell. Soon her coat was white and pristine, her mane wavy, and her horn looking exactly as the local Sweetie’s did. “There, big sis, is that better?”
“Y-yes,” Cadance replied after a moment of the new appearance sinking in, “but… I still don’t really understand…” Another thrown cake prompted her to turn her attention back to the angry crowd now separated from them by a rift in the floor.
“I still can’t believe that I was able to do that,” Sweetie said, dodging a slice of banana pudding. “Do you think it’ll buy us some time?”
“Oh! Wow! You can buy time?!” a voice asked, and Sweetie yelped in surprise, launching straight up into the air.
“I gotcha now!” Pinkie Pie announced, giggling and jumping forward with net-in-hoof. Said net, more suited to catching butterflies than escaping ponies, ended up snagged around Blueblood’s nose and ears.
“The Princess will reward me for catching you!” Pinkie announced with a lopsided grin. “I’ll ask for my own holiday! Pinkie Day! It’ll be the best, super-funnest--”
It was around that moment when Sweetie landed soundly on the pink one’s head, sending her sprawling with an audible ‘bonk.’
“Don’t let them escape!” a pony yelled from the other side of the fissure Sweetie had carved straight down the middle of Sugarcube Corner. They began to throw more pastries from the counters nearby and the conveniently located array of birthday cakes that had been ordered for Sweetie’s multiple birthdays. Though nopony wanted to get smeared, the real threat came from the pegasus ponies who took to the air, easily able to fly over the gap, and the hoof-full of unicorns who began to power up their magic.
A dark look passed over Blueblood’s face as he turned towards them. “As if a gaggle of common ponies could…”
A slice of lemon meringue cut the Prince off, splattering against his left eye.
“I’ll destroy you down to the last magical atom,” he announced, deadpan, only to yell right across the room in the full power of the Royal Canterlot Voice. “I despise flying cake!!”
The sheer volume of the magical bellow sent ponies staggering and clutching their ears.
Sweetie had to sit down. “Blueblood,” she stage-whispered, “you have got to teach me that spell. I will never have to get out of bed again for food.” Her horn lit up and the legs of the table holding the pastries were ripped away from it, covering the nearest unfortunate ponies with several pounds of cake.
“Haha!” Blueblood cheered her on. “Yes! How do you plebeians like the taste of cake, mm?”
“Fighting them does no good!” Cadance yelled, her own ears still flat against her head. “All that matters is syncing up our power and… and working out however we get out!”
Blueblood shook the head and spun around, following his step-sister as she bolted for the door. Almost comically, Pinkie Pie seemed to still be holding onto him, this time wearing a hoof-ball pads and jersey with the ‘number’ 00 on it. He tried to shake her off, but she was basically latched on like an octopus. A crazy, giggling octopus. “And how do we do that?”
“Positive thoughts!” Cadance replied as she threw open the door to the store. “I’m sure of it! Positive thoughts and feelings of love will--”
Before them, a hundred ponies lined the streets of Ponyville. Every single one had a glower on their face and narrowed eyes firmly set on Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, Prince Blueblood the fifty-second, and one time and dimension displaced Sweetie Belle. A rather muscular stallion even brandished a pitch fork. They blocked the road through and out of town with sheer mass, and the skies buzzed with angry pegasi, flittering about like enraged bees. Altogether, the entire populace of the town seemed to be forming a living shell around the three objects of their ire.
“I’m not really thinking positive thoughts right now.” Blueblood was the first to speak. He reached a hoof up to his face to wipe away the cake, leaving a streak of lemon filling from his cheek to his forehead. “So maybe I’ll just…”
Without warning, he touched his hoof to Cadance’s side, and tagged Sweetie with his tail.
At the same time his horn glowed, in preparation to teleport--
Only to have the spell fizzle.
“It… it didn’t work?” he mumbled, dumbstruck. “My magic…”
“What didn’t work?” Cadance asked, confused and glancing down at his hoof, still touching her just behind the tip of her folded wing.
“You could always fight your way out!” Pinkie suggested, still holding tight to her prize even as Blueblood tried to free her with a kick of his leg. Clearly the promise of getting her own national holiday had magnified her already super-equine tenacity.
The suggestion, timely as it was, came only moments before the crack of a unicorn teleport spell split the air. A second later, and four lavender hooves landed on the street. As one, the entire crowd of angry Ponyvillains took a collective step backwards. The lavender hooves were followed by cyan, tawny gold, alabaster white, and finally butter yellow.
“Hiya, girls!” Pinkie cheerfully waved a hoof, still clutching onto Blueblood’s backside. “Don’t worry! I got this one! He’s all mine!”
“Twilight?” Cadance gasped, but narrowed her eyes at the hate-filled expression on the unicorn’s face. Celestia’s prize student, like all her friends, had only a glower of a welcome for her former foalsitter.
“You aren’t real,” Cadance repeated to herself, shaking her head and closing her eyes. “Come on, Cadance, get yourself together, now.”
“Alright, girls! You heard the Princess!” Twilight announced, pointing at the three of them. “Since Pinkie’s taken care of Blueblood, focus on Cadance and Sweetie Belle! Time to save Equestria! AGAIN!”
“How is this--” Blueblood drolly gestured to the pink mare trying in vain to tackle his rather substantial mass. “--being taken care of?”
“You just aren’t having enough fun!” Pinkie declared, and suddenly her legs were around his neck and she dragged him down with a shocked gurgle.
“Twilight! Stop this!” Cadance backpedaled, a blast of purple light narrowly missing her only to punch a hole in the side of Sugarcube Corner. “Stop this instant, young lady!” she yelled and squeaked as a rainbow-colored blur shot down and made a grab for her.
“What in the name of Celestia was that?” she gasped and tried to gather magic to protect herself. Sparks danced down the length of her horn and, just like Blueblood’s earlier attempt to teleport, her magic fizzled and failed.
“Oh! … OH! Blast!” Cadance cursed – what passed for a curse anyway – and dove for cover as another purple energy beam shot from Twilight’s horn. It was a simple telekinetic shock spell, basically a magical push amplified.
It also wasn’t strictly real. All of this was part of Blueblood’s nightmare. Just like she had said before: fighting anything in here was pointless! Luna needed to counter that version of Celestia, she supposed, but their focus had to be in breaking out of the dream. Princess Luna wasn’t physically present to wake anypony up, regardless.
“Blueblood! Can’t you…?” Cadance stopped, mid-sentence, upon noticing how the esteemed Prince currently had a pegasus holding him down. A rather timid-looking pegasus at that! The crazy pink mare from before was bouncing happily on his stomach and giggling, all while Blueblood just lay there.
“Oh. My. Celestia. Are you enjoying yourself?!” Cadance roared, already growing exasperated with her step-brother. “You are, aren’t you!”
“Oh, yes, this is truly my dream!” Blueblood yelled right back, even as Pinkie’s next bounce knocked the wind out of him with an ‘oof.’ “Alert the presses! My secret fetish and fantasy is to be double-teamed by an animal lover afraid of her own shadow and a hyperactive mare who smells like molasses and acts like a pixie!”
“You certainly aren’t fighting back!” Cadance’s hoof was not shaking with anger. Well, it was, but it was also trying to shake off a violent, Rainbow colored pegasus. “You’re just lying there!”
“I can’t help it,” he whimpered, pathetically. “Fluttershy… she’s… she’s really strong…”
Cadance’s next response was rudely interrupted by a blast of raw, unstoppable lavender that sent her flying. It would probably have launched a normal pony right into the side of Sugarcube Corner. In fact, it probably would have knocked that same pony right through the wall, into and through the counter by the register, through the pantry, and then out through the back wall to boot. Cadance set her hooves into the ground, flexed her wings, and dispersed the majority of the magic around her with a loud snap.
“Do you mind?” The Princess of Love asked, turning her indignation towards a new target. “We were having a conversation here!”
“Rainbow Dash!” Twilight yelled, pointing a hoof at the Princess. “She’s using earth pony magic! Get her airborne!”
Cadance glanced down at her hooves, momentarily stunned that Twilight had put together what had happened so quickly. She, herself, had mostly just acted on instinct. It had been earth pony magic, but it wasn’t as if she had really put any thought into countering Twilight’s magical blast. Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, as most of her friends knew, had never fought a duel nor felt the need to train herself for any sort of combat. She was the Princess of Love, after all.
Momentarily lost in her thoughts, Cadance was far too slow to react when that rainbow missile from before came in and plowed right into her side. Inertia and vertigo briefly turned her vision into an incomprehensible swirl, and then she felt the air rushing past around her. This was a feeling she knew… as an alicorn, yes, but first and foremost as a pegasus! Somepony was carrying her upwards.
She was reminded, for a second, of the old griffin game…
Rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, paper beats rock. Just the same, unicorn beat pegasus, pegasus beat earth pony, earth pony beat unicorn. And an alicorn? Well. An alicorn cheated.
“I will not be mare-handled again!” Cadance cried, “Unhoof me, rainbow-colored mare! Or I will be forced to--”
A cyan hoof clamped painfully over her snout.
“Forced to what?” Rainbow Dash asked, mockingly. Her wings flapped as she reached her desired height, one hoof around Cadance’s mouth and the other holding firmly onto her left wing, keeping it from holding her aloft. She dangled in the smaller mare’s grip.
“This,” Cadance said, her voice muffled. With her free front hooves, she grabbed onto Dash’s outstretched leg. The very same one with the hoof clamped over the Princess’s mouth. Her horn then lit up with magic… fizzled… and discharged the chaotic magic right out of her body and into that of the cyan mare with the rainbow mane and tail.
“Aaaa-a-aaa-aaa!” Dash’s body shook and spasmed from the magical discharge, that same rainbow mane and tail turning frizzy and black as soot. For just a second, the pegasus pony’s wings continued to flap and hold her in midair, even though she more resembled a zapped bug than a weatherpony.
“Ow,” Dash said, in monotone.
She let go and fell away from Cadance, and the Princess also pushed off and angled herself towards the ground. Twilight was glaring up, a veritable tornado of purple magic swirling violently around her horn. Bits of debris had been whipped up in the little maelstrom. It was in that moment that Cadance understood.
She understood not just how powerful she always suspected Twilight Sparkle to be.
She understood that Blueblood – somehow – also knew just how powerful Twilight Sparkle could be. This Twilight was exactly as strong as he imagined her to be, and her stupid stallion of a brother seemed to have a very vivid imagination. With a howl, the purple magic around Twilight’s horn tightened and turned into a slender, drill-like spear of pure magic.
“Oh. Oh dear,” Cadance could feel her alicorn instincts reaching for an earth pony’s defense, but this high in the air… it was gone. There was nothing. And she didn’t know a single barrier or defensive unicorn spell. Right now, she was just a pegasus. A metaphorical scissor. And glaring up at her was the Queen Mother of all Scissor-Smashing Rocks.
“This – this is dangerous…!” she realized, almost dumbly. If she couldn’t avoid that magical spear, it would go right through her like a power drill through a stick of butter. She wasn’t like Blueblood, or even this strange Sweetie Belle pony. If she died in the nightmare…
Panic crept into her thoughts and she started to jerk and zag, wings frantically flapping.
“Somepony! A little help?” she called, and used a bit of the Canterlot Voice herself. “A little help! Please!”
A pony heard her. He was just in little position to do anything about it.
- - -
“Um, Mister Blueblood, could you please stop struggling?” Fluttershy had her front hooves pressed down firmly on his own, pinning him on his back like a helpless babe. What, did this crazy mare wrestle bears for a living or…?
Oh, actually, she did.
“Please?” Fluttershy asked again, looking down on him down big, turquoise eyes that seemed just short of tears. “I really don’t want to hurt you any more than I have to.”
“That’s right!” Pinkie Pie agreed, still straddling his midsection and helping to hold him down. She crossed her front legs and smirked, triumphantly. “We’ve got you trapped! Fluttershy and me are the ultimate tag team! Just be glad she didn’t have to use the steel chair on you!”
“Oh,” Fluttershy meekly objected. “I’d never use the steel chair, not unless they deserved it.”
Pinkie Pie seemed about to say something more when a flicker passed through the giddy mare, and her eyes lost a bit of their blue.
“That’s right,” she repeated, more to herself than to him. Though when she looked down at the Prince, there was no doubt who was on her mind. “That’s right. And you can feel it, can’t you? That’s Princess Cadance up there. Fighting. Do you really think she’ll win? Won’t she die for real if something bad happens? What are you going to do about that?”
Pinkie leaned in closer, close enough to tickle his nose with her breath.
“Isn’t Twilight Sparkle’s power something amazing?” She grabbed him by the chin and directed his eyes upwards as Cadance desperately tried to fend off her two assailants. “Since you’re as useless as ever, why don’t you just relax and watch her die?”
Blueblood crushed his eyes closed, but Pinkie’s words never left his mind. There was something entrancing about them. They were the truth. He knew it, just like Cadance did. If he died in here, like he had so many times, he’d just reset. Even Sweetie seemed to be safe, because she was connected to his memories of the Gala time-loops.
But Auntie Luna and Cadance? Cadance was a visitor to his nightmare. If she died here… who knew what would happen to her body? If everything she had said before was true – and he had no reason to doubt her – she needed to live. She needed to escape, but all his other magic fizzled.
Which only left…
A faint green light began to form around him, pooling into a circle.
“So,” he continued, “I won’t let her…”
The circle contracted.
Pinkie Pie continued to stare down at him, her grin widening. She was whispering something to herself, but Blueblood could hardly hear it over the pounding in his ears. It was his heartbeat. Two stellar circles and two reaping triangles. It was so simple, this one spell. The hard part was converting the soul into fire. None of these mares were real. He hated having to harm them… but…
“What is this spell?” Pinkie asked, looking around her as the air began to crackle with jade energy.
It was almost there. It was Almost Fire. He had used this spell, once, hoping it would kill him, body and soul. Before he had burned away himself, he had seen the results. It had destroyed much of Canterlot, and just to add insult to injury, it hadn’t even earned him an escape from the loops. This time, though, maybe it could do some good.
“Ow. Ow. Ow!!” Fluttershy cried, finally releasing him. She stumbled back, looking at her hooves with astonishment. There was no physical mark on them, but she had felt for just a moment what he felt coursing through his entire body. It was the opposite of the Fire to Life spell.
Life to Fire.
“I have to see it!” Pinkie declared, still with that dark look in her eyes. She jumped off him and scrambled away. “Do it! Do it! Do it!”
Not far away, he could see Twilight Sparkle. Her attention was fixed entirely upward, trying to pin down her target. The surging lance of magic coiled around her horn was enough to warp the air around her, giving the impression of a lavender mirage. Blueblood reached for her, feeling his soul begin to ebb out, bleeding and converting into the rawest, most elemental fire.
“Oh! This must be… Potassium's Propitiatory Phlogiston,” Pinkie’s voice came from behind him. “Do it, Blueblood. Do it! Kill her. Kill her!”
And that was when he heard a scream.
“No!” The party pony snarled, whirling on the interruption. It was Rarity.
Blueblood saw it, too, and in that moment he made a decision. He winced as the burgeoning Phlogiston – the almost fully conjured fire – bored back into his body. It flowed through the veins and crevasses of his soul like liquid agony, but it was nothing he hadn’t felt before. He had been fully consumed by Phlogiston once. He knew that pain, and it didn’t matter one lick of salt.
All that mattered in that moment was the sight of Rarity, screaming in panic and fear, as something cut through her fabric shield. It didn’t matter that the rational part of his mind knew she wasn’t even the real Rarity. It didn’t even matter that, last he had seen, she had been chasing after Sweetie Belle. He had imagined her fighting for her life before, against Antimony, and losing. That one thought had driven him to race halfway across Equestria.
His horn burned, and even though his magic fizzled, he still teleported.
And then she was in his embrace, tumbling through the air.
“You!” Rarity all but spat in disgust. “Unhoof me! Villain! Cretin!”
The pair of white unicorns rolled across the Ponyville street, ending in a tumble.
“I said, unhoof me!” Rarity yelled from under him, not caring that he was trying to shield her. She looked at him with anger and disgust. It was the only thing she had shown him in… in a long time. She pressed two hooves flat against his chest and pushed. “Unhoof me at once!”
“You Stupid. Annoying. Mare,” he growled, and smirked, heedless of the insults and the anger. “I love you, you know. No matter how much this version of you says you hate me.” She glared up at him, momentarily speechless. One of his own hooves ran through his blond mane and he glanced over his shoulder to where a small diamond hovered in midair. “Being a bachelor was so much safer. Sweetie… are you alright?”
Sweetie Belle had tears marring her face, the bladed diamond still hovering firmly under her control. She slowly shook her head no, not trusting her voice not to crack. Slowly, she pulled back the diamond until it was hovering protectively next to her head.
“Even this version of her, you…” Her throat constricted before she could say ‘love.’ “And I could only try to kill her.” She closed her eyes and sent her diamond away through another portal. “I have a lot to learn from you, big brother.”
“Well, I am pretty great,” Blueblood admitted, stroking his chin.
Just as Rarity kicked him squarely in said chin.
Blueblood rolled back and ended up standing next to Sweetie. Together, the two stared down Rarity as she struggled back onto her hooves. The dressmaker was trembling, her indigo fabric torn but slowly, defensively circling around her. A dark shadow moved around her, almost like an outline around her body.
“You can’t…!” she cried, yelling into the ground at her hooves. “That doesn’t make any sense! How can… how could… you can’t!”
“A hundred kicks to the face wouldn’t change my mind,” Blueblood said, smiling despite the purpling welt on his cheek where she had hit him. “You saved me from the Gala loops. Even just that once. Even it wasn’t the same you standing in front of me. You saved me.”
Rarity still trembled, even as she locked eyes with him, blue and blue.
“Now,” he said with a smirk, turning his attention upwards. “Cadance! Stop playing around, would you?”
Sweetie turned, too, just as Twilight finally released her spell to swat Cadance from the sky. Except, she, too, had started to convulse. The huge violet lance she had magicked into existence ripped apart under its own power and what did manage to surge upward into the sky was batted away, almost contemptuously, by the empowered alicorn Princess. Alone of the Elements of Harmony, only Pinkie Pie remained unfazed. Even Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash began to violently tremble, as if they were on the verge of flying apart.
And, in the sky…
Cadance shined like Celestia herself in all her fiery glory.
Sweetie sighed and looked down at the destroyed street outside Sugarcube Corner, drawing Blueblood’s attention. He raised an eyebrow, when he noticed her glance at Rarity and wince. He approached his adoptive sister and nudged her. “Sweetie… what happened back there?”
Sweetie pursed her lips and closed her eyes. “It was… back when I escaped the loops,” she explained, stomping a hoof angrily. “I went to another world, where I was taken under my so-called father’s wing. He was… a psychopath… but…”
Glaring down at her hooves, a small diamond flew protectively around her side to float in front of her horn. Sweetie snorted, her mood still sour. “But he… manipulated me. He made me fear and hate my sister… he trained me to kill her, and when she came and saw me… Blueblood, she didn’t try to talk to me, she didn’t try and see if I had been misled… she…”
Sweetie trailed off for a second, looking up at Blueblood in naked disbelief, even so many adventures later.
“She killed ponies, Blueblood.” Sweetie trembled at recalling that one particular dimension. That one place. “She killed ponies in cold blood, and she attacked me. She was going to kill me, too.”
She looked up at Blueblood and at the commiserating expression on his face, his eyebrows drawn together in sympathy, and tears began welling up in her eyes. “Sweetie.”
“Rarity was the one that was always, always, there for me in any world where she was still living!. Even in the one where she was a stallion, she was there for me. But… she destroyed that. I - I haven’t been able to – to…”
She struggled, trying to say more, to put into words just how that one terrible meeting had cost her the ability to trust the pony she loved as both a sister and a mother. Sweetie opened her mouth, knowing what she wanted to say, to explain, but still no words came out. Blueblood could only smile, comfortingly, and rest his horn gently against hers. She didn’t need to say it. He knew.
Sweetie sat back and batted away a piece of rubble that had once been part of Sugarcube Corner’s candycorn-like roof tile. “Maybe what I went through to become… this… maybe I deserve--”
A rather sizable hoof flicked her horn, and the sudden jolt disrupted both her magic and her dark introspection. Next thing she knew, Blueblood was leaning close. He even ruffled her mane playfully, like she was still the little filly he had first met during the time-loops.
“Don’t think silly things like that, Sweetie,” he said, and somehow, he made her feel like she was when they had pranked the Gala or gone on a milkshake binge, or even that one wonderful night when he and Soarin and Spitfire had taken her out on the town. It was still the first and only taste of nightlife – of a scrap of semi-adult normalcy – she had experienced, amid one trial after another. Her adopted brother didn’t say anything else; he just sat in front of her, one hoof on the top of her head.
“Remember the version of her waiting for you at home,” he suggested and turned slightly to glance back at the Rarity she had been fighting. The same Rarity that he had protected, impulsively, instinctively. “That’s what I do. Remember her. All the other ones will come and go.”
Sweetie sniffled and nodded.
“After all, I’m sure you’ve probably met half a dozen absolutely unbearable versions of me since you left!”
That earned a quick chuckle from her. “Usually you’re dead by the time I arrive, but yes, most of the time, if you exist, you are unbearable to say the least.” She stood up and hugged him tight. “Which is why you are so much more special than any other Blueblood in the Multiverse.”
He hugged her back, laughing triumphantly at his apparent superiority over his alternate selves. “I should’ve expected they couldn’t hold a candle to me!”
“If Cadance up there is the Princess of Love, you’re probably the Prince of Ego,” Sweetie remarked, bopping him on the nose.
“Hm,” he didn’t disagree, but he did consider, “So, not even one was…”
“Not even one,” Sweetie confirmed. “All jerks.”
“The Prince of Ego suits you, Blueblood,” Cadance added, landing with a serene halo behind her majestically flapping wings. She had grown in size, and her new appearance immediately evoked a certain comparison.
“And you resemble a bright pink Auntie Celestia,” Blueblood said, pointing at her. “How disturbing.”
“Not to steal a phrase, but it feels like your heart just grew three sizes today,” Cadance said, drinking in the wellspring of emotion only she could see and feel. “At least it did when you focused on Sweetie and… that other pony.” She turned to stare at the now frozen fashionista. “Rarity, was it? I never thought you’d have so much love in your heart, brother.”
She smirked, taking in her own up-sized form. “And, for the first time since we were little, I’m not closed off from it. Our hearts are open to one another again… It feels wonderful! Like I could move the sun itself!”
“As long as you don’t cover the sun and moon with a huge crystal heart and declare that ‘the love… will last… forever!’” Sweetie spoke up, air-quoting the last part. “I think we’re all glad you feel that way.”
“That explains the Big Princess look, atrocious though it is,” Blueblood replied, and Cadance pouted at him, clearly a little upset he didn’t appreciate her powered-up dream form. Maybe it was the mane? Too much flowing-Celestia look? Inhaling and slowly exhaling, she forced herself back to normal. As she shrunk down, the halo of magic around her grew even more brilliant.
“It was just a mirror of your own feelings as they coursed through us both,” she explained and coughed into one bronze-gilded hoof. “And, um, maybe a little imagination on my part.”
“So we got that we wanted, then?” Sweetie asked, and releasing Blueblood from her hug she quickly trotted back to take him in. “You’re the same size as ever.”
“Do you feel any different?” Cadance pressed, walking to stand next to Sweetie Belle. “The only one who can break us all out of this nightmare is you, Blueblood. How do you feel?”
“Like I’ve talked about my feelings enough for one day, or one hundred,” he answered and cupped his chin with a pearl white hoof. “But it feels like something’s missing.”
“Something missing?” Cadance asked, tilting her head slightly.
Blueblood nodded. “Something big and loud and destructive.”
Sweetie and Cadance both exchanged a curious look.
Then, a second after the words had been spoken, a thunderous shock rocked the town and very nearly tossed all three ponies off their hooves. A blast wave of dust shot out from the center of the street, and a wave of magic and air bowled over very nearly the entire populace of the town, assembled to corner the nightmare interlopers. Ponies were sent flying and rolling like tumbleweeds in a hurricane, crashing into walls and buildings that soon turned hazy and indistinct.
In a crater in the center of the town, Princess Luna held a now trembling and convulsing dream-Celestia by one hoof. A contemptuous huff later and Luna released the shocked Princess to fly effortlessly over to her nephew and niece.
“Twast mine arrival inopportune?” she asked, noting their gobsmacked expressions.
“Not at all, Auntie,” Blueblood said with a bow of his head. “We were just waiting for you.”
Cadance blinked, sucking in a breath. “Luna, too,” she muttered softly. “When did all this happen…?”
Sweetie leaned onto Cadance. “Remember what I told you about the loops? Blueblood is not the same… he really learned to love.”
“All that remains is to root out the source of this corrupt world. Night Shade. I had thought her to reside in that version of mine sister, but…” Luna took in a deep breath, no doubt to bellow out a challenge to the other dream-shaper.
“Auntie,” Blueblood interrupted, pointing back at a pink form that had stubbornly resisted both the Princess’s explosive entrance and the earlier emotional disruption. “There.”
“Damn you ponies,” Pinkie Pie hissed, stumbling towards them. It looked like her, but the voice was all wrong. A crackle of magic emerged from her forehead, briefly revealing a dark horn.
“Thy scheme lies revealed, Night Shade!” Luna thundered. “Mine niece and her accomplice have thee in chains in the real world, and you have been overpowered in the dream-time as well. Surrender thyself!”
Pinkie Pie continued to shamble towards them, laughing in both her normal voice and the foreign one.
“Surrender? Me?” she asked in both voices. “That has to be a joke! How can I surrender? I am… I am…”
Night Shade’s eyes, even in the nightmare she controlled, even in her guise of Pinkamena Diane Pie, glowed with the telltale green of changeling mind control.
“I am a servant of the ONE TRUE QUEEN!!” she screamed, spittle flying from her lips. “You should be begging! On your knees! To surrender to ME!”
“Really?” Sweetie asked, tilting her head. “Did she ever sing to you?”
“Sweetie?” Blueblood asked and she avoided the urge to turn her head and meet him face to face.
“Sing?” Night Shade asked, glowing green eyes settling on Sweetie Belle. “What…?”
“Queen Chrysalis only sings to her true servants… her changelings,” Sweetie explained. “The only creatures in this world she genuinely cares for…”
“Potassium's Phlogiston!” Pinkie-Shade hissed, and Luna gasped in recognition. “You know how to use it, my Prince. I know you do. I couldn’t get you to open the deepest archives for me, but I saw how you did it. All but the last part. Tell me.”
She threw back her head, half of her pink mane and coat melting away, leaving behind a unicorn with a black and white mane and deathly pale coat. “TELL ME!!”
“Thou art insane!” Luna roared, “You cannot begin to comprehend what you wish to unleash! Potassium's Phlogiston is among the blackest of all magics! What madness would even compel a pony to…”
The Lunar Princess paused, mid-declaration, and one eye shot over to her nephew.
Blueblood shook his head. “It hardly matters now,” he explained, his own eyes never leaving the half-Pinkie half-Night Shade abomination before them. “I will take Potassium's Phlogiston to the grave with me. Most certainly, I will not share such secrets with a madmare in thrall to a swarm of insects.”
“You say that with such conviction,” Night Shade replied with a laugh. “But I’ve had your mind in my hooves for so long. The seed has already planted and taken root. No matter what happens to my physical body, I can make your every night a literal Hell of fevered nightmares. Do you understand yet, you puffed-up, self-important bastard? I’ve only just begun to torture you, Blueblood!” A fleck of drool dribbled down Night Shade’s lip as she howled at the remaining quartet. “TELL ME! Or I will haunt your dreams until the day you die!”
“Not while we draw breath!” Luna snarled, wings flaring out threateningly behind her.
Night Shade’s sneer was nasty and cruel. “You’d be surprised what enough alchemy and magic can do, even in the face of your powers, Princess.”
“That’s true,” Sweetie spoke up, her voice little more than a mutter, just loud enough to draw everypony’s attention. “But there’s always other ways to solve things than violence. Even Queen Chrysalis knows that… not that she acts on it.”
The dream-mage’s eyes bored into her. “What do you know?”
Sweetie closed her eyes and began to hum. It was an innocuous sound, harmless, yet Night Shade felt herself grow still. It was as if her very mind and body began to grow numb. Her ears twitched, one pale, the other pink. Cadance, Blueblood and Princess Luna heard it, too – the melody – though they clearly didn’t suffer the same effects from it that Night Shade did.
“Wake up, little spider
the web grows tout
Wake up, little spider
there's a way out.”
Sweetie walked towards Night Shade as she sang, the dreamweaver frozen in place. All she could do was watch, mesmerized. The green in her eyes began to dim and spark.
“Wake up, the prey is gone
Wake up, the call is over
Little spider, the job is done…”
“Ugg,” was all Night Shade could say at first. Her throat constricted, and she fell forward onto her forelegs and knees. Green magic dribbled and pooled out of her eyes, running down her cheeks like fat, slimy tears. The half of her still wearing the guise of Pinkie Pie rippled and flared and spiked before finally, gradually, dissolving.
“What… are you… doing to me?” Night Shade cried, green magic leaking from her eyes and ears. “What is this magic?”
“Not magic,” Sweetie said, hoof touching Night Shade’s shoulder. “Just a song. The Queen’s song. Your mission is over. It’s okay… you can go to sleep.”
“But… but it’s so dark. I…. I can’t see… anything…” Night Shade reached for Sweetie Belle, her hoof trembling. “Whose dream is this?” she asked, and when she looked up, her eyes were violet behind all the suffocating ivy-green. “Is it… mine?”
Those same eyes closed as she fell forward in a slump.
Sweetie caught the mare and slowly settled her down on the floor, painfully aware of the gazes of three ponies behind her. She hesitated for just a second, before turning around to look at the three royals. “I don’t know how many times I heard that song…” she said, unable to look up at the one stallion standing in front of her.
“That really wasn’t magic?” Cadance asked, looking to the unicorn and alicorn whose esoteric knowledge surpassed her own. “What just happened?” One in particular she singled out for answers. “Aunt Luna, what was that?”
“Twas a pass phrase of some sort,” Luna surmised. “A deeply embedded one.”
Blueblood just stared at Sweetie Belle.
“That just raises more questions!” Cadance objected, glancing around her as the dream world began to fade away, taking Ponyville and all its residents with it.
“I’m so sorry, Blueblood,” Sweetie said, finally meeting his eyes with her own, scared ones. “At first… I thought it would be like in my world… that Chrysalis would be quickly defeated… it never crossed my mind how different things were here… how early it was… I thought I shouldn’t tell you or that I might change the future and – and you would die or my sister or any of the others…”
“I thought I could just learn what I needed… and she taught me to sing… but she also cast a spell on me, just like Night Shade… but deeper… she trained me to do things… to not make sounds, to stand in shadows… after a while she didn’t even need to cast the spell; she would say something and I would be hers… and then she would sing to me…” Sweetie’s voice lowered to a whisper. “I would wake up to singing lessons with Cadance… I forgot, I completely forgot about who she really was… I even talked to her at the Gala and then forgot she was Chrysalis… I just remembered the whole thing not too long ago, when I was… when I was a prisoner and this strange magic changed my soul and mind.”
She looked down. “I - I couldn’t carry on watching this whole nightmare continue and see you suffer even more… I wish I could have never told you… and never lose you.” She gave him a sad smile. “But I guess we can’t wish for everything.”
Sweetie took a deep breath and looked at the collapsing dream. “You should go… big br— Blueblood. I’m sorry… I know I don’t deserve it, but I’ll always still think of you as my big brother.”
The stallion opened his mouth, but just as quickly shut it.
Instead of saying anything, he turned his eyes skyward, hiding his face from view. Luna and Cadance both looked to him worriedly, but he stubbornly ignored them. If anything, the lack of a response seemed to hurt Sweetie more, though she had dreaded hearing any number of well-deserved invectives from his mouth. “How could you?” he should have been yelling. “You KNEW?” he could have spat in her face. “I trusted you,” he could even have whispered, and that one would have been the worst of all.
“Cadenza…” he finally spoke, and the half-melted dreamscape remained murky all around them, like a painting splashed with water. “Cadenza, you said you’d been replaced months ago so… so I should have known… I should – should’ve put that together. Of course, the Cadenza I sent Sweetie to… wrong one, wrong… one.”
“Oh, no.” Sweetie growled, marching up to him and poking him in the chest. “Don’t you dare blame yourself for this! I should have known better than to keep it from you when I could do something about it! You didn’t know! It most certainly is not your fault!” She hugged him, as tight as she could, just in case this was the one time when he finally – rightfully – pushed her away. “Please. Just… be happy. Get out of this nightmare. Go get my sister. My local self should learn to foalsit, anyway. Maybe Cadance can teach her.”
“Blueblood,” Cadance spoke up, sensing his emotional turmoil. “Who is to say what would have happened, even with forewarning? Chrysalis still had me… She may have killed me if her plans in Equestria unraveled. She may have found a way to kill you.”
“She speaks the truth,” Luna agreed. Even without her connection to his dream, she could read all she had to from his posture, inside or outside of a dream. She saw him tense and then relax a fraction, in resignation. “Nephew…”
“Sweetie,” he finally said and held the filly at leg’s length to look her eye to eye. “No more secrets after this, alright? I really do love you, but what you just said really, really made me want to throw you out of a window. And I have a feeling that if I actually tried, you’d kick my flank.”
Sweetie’s lips trembled, and all she could do was nod very fast before she jumped forward and hugged him again, burying her face in his chest, crying mumbled apologies and promises to never keep another secret from him. He sighed, and this time truly relaxed, the tension and emotion ebbing out of him. The runny colors of the dream world softened, but still continued to steadily dissolve.
“Hold,” Luna commanded, and a hemispherical bubble expanded from her, surrounding the four ponies – plus the unconscious Night Shade – and halting the end of the nightmare. “Before we return to the waking world, nephew, niece, we may wish to delve into this new font of inside knowledge. Our enemy is most devious and insidious. We would be wise to use every resource in combatting her.”
“That’s right,” Cadance said, only seeming to realize it that moment herself. “Chrysalis was smart enough never to share anything vital with me… All she did was torment me, but, Sweetie Belle, if she taught you to sing…?”
“You can help us defeat her,” Blueblood finished, Sweetie still buried in his chest. “Did you hear that, Sweetie? Now, this Queen Chrysalis, she wouldn’t happen to have a dramatic physical weakness we could take advantage of?” He punched with a free hoof. “Or, better yet, a sweet spot I could charm?”
Cadance made a very clear, choking ‘bleegh’ at that last suggestion.
Sweetie chuckled a bit, pulling herself from Blueblood’s embrace and standing on her own, looking at the others. “I know I can't come with you, but I’ll help any way I can!”