A lot can happen in eight minutes and twenty seconds. Light can travel from the sun to Equestria in that time. Pinkie Pie could set up four and a half parties. If she could ever maintain it, Rainbow Dash could cover one hundred and seventy three thousand kilometres while in the aftereffects of the Sonic Rainboom. And eight minutes and twenty seconds was all Twilight Sparkle needed to take over Equestria. So, at exactly eight minutes and twenty seconds before the sun was due to rise, Princess Twilight Sparkle put her plan into motion.
The first thing, and the one that took the longest, was dealing with the princesses. Twilight was no fool-going into horn to horn combat with the two princesses, even as powerful as she was, would prove to be suicide. A warping spell took care of Princess Luna while she was in her chambers, as it twisted the space beyond the door into something completely unrecognisable, and then it vanished. To where, Twilight didn’t know, and didn’t care. It was away from here. One Princess and two minutes down. Celestia would be a bit more challenging, as she was almost constantly in the public eye, and thus luring her away would be difficult.
Or not, reflected Twilight Sparkle, as the space around Celestia folded in on itself, and banished the oldest alicorn to somewhere outside of space and time. All it had taken to get her away from her guards was Twilight asking to see her in private, and when Celestia had turned around to lock the door at Twilight’s request, the youngest alicorn had cast the same warp spell that she had used on Luna. Four minutes down, four minutes and twenty seconds to go. Next stop, the Royal Mail Hub, to deliver the notices that she had prepared the night before. A quick teleport whisked her away.
Once the notices declaring that Princess Celestia and Princess Luna had been tragically lost to an eldritch abomination, and that Princess Twilight would be governing Equestria from now on were being reprinted, Twilight teleported over to Parliament, where she submitted all the correct forms, filled out in triplicate, that declared her to be the new ruler of the nation of Equestria. After all of that had been taken care of, Twilight only had one minute and thirty seconds to complete the final thing that would cement her as Equestria’s new ruler. A final teleport took her straight from the Parliament building to the balcony in Canterlot Castle where Celestia and Luna had raised and lowered their respective cosmological bodies.
[time]
She concentrated, and reached out with her magic. Across the void it stretched, and grasped the moon first. It was a slippery thing, unaccustomed to anypony’s magic but Luna’s, but Twilight eventually got a hold of it, and slipped it below the horizon with minimal complications. And then Twilight turned her attentions to the sun. This would arguably be the more difficult of the two. It was much bigger, much further away and much, much hotter. One wrong tweak, and she could destroy all life. Thirty seconds remained. Twilight’s magic reached over to the sun, and gingerly wrapped around it. Twilight wiped the sweat from her brow. She hadn’t used this much magic for this length of time since the Ursa Minor incident. Then, she lifted her head, and the sun lifted with it, eventually emerging over the horizon with barely a second to spare, and then it was on its track across the sky.
The sun shone down on a new age in Equestria.