Celestia
When Princess Celestia awoke that morning, the last thing she expected to see was Luna standing above her, looking down at her intensely. She closed her eyes and fell back to sleep.
Poke.
"Tia."
Poke.
"Tia."
Poke.
"Tia, your former student sent a letter."
She cracked open her eyelids and gave Luna her best glare. "And why did you find it necessary to come into my bedroom, wake me up at..." She checked her connection to the sun. "six in the morning just to tell me that - wait, Twilight sent a letter?" Like fog under the sun her sleepiness evaporated and she sat up in her bed, with Luna smoothly flying off to give her room. "Let me see that." She took the scroll out of Luna's blue aura into her own golden one and began to read.
Her eyes widened comically as she read through it, trying to process the letter's contents. It occurred to her it may have been fabricated, but the horn writing was perfectly identical to Twilight's. The scale of what was written was staggering, the implications it had were profound.
Nightmare Moon was her own pony. She hadn't intended to possess Luna and drive her to darkness. The other Equestria was a well functioning diarchy under 'Solar Flare' and Nightmare Moon, Twilight was being treated well... it was all so much to take in.
She looked over to her sister. "Lulu, do you know what this mean?" she whispered.
The Nightbringer nodded and stepped aside, letting Celestia get out of bed. "Indeed, Tia. That the Nightmare has such a different nature than we have been lead to believe, that it has a sister... it confuses me. I do not know what to do. Do we go ourselves to see?"
Celestia, levitating her royal trappings over, shook her head. "No, I don't think that would be a good idea; what if we fuse with them, like last time?"
"We'll need to figure out just how Nightmare Moon came here in the first place," Luna said. "If it's true, then I believe she arrived sometime after we banished Sombra into the ice. Tia, do you think that his time-lock spell on what remained of the Empire had any... side effects?"
"Maybe," Celestia pondered. "Though we've never been able to figure out the dark spell he used to do so, so we can't exactly look at the formula."
"Either way," Luna said. "We should probably discuss this over dinner." Breakfast. "Come, let us be off!" Luna's horn lit up dark blue, and a teleportation matrix engulfed Celestia and the letter.
She hardly even blinked when the teleport tugged her through the space between spaces, landing her in her seat. The letter remained in her telekinesis. In addition to that, she took her fork in her magic and began to eat the already-prepared plate of pasta, while Luna dove into a stack of moon-pies. Dessert for dinner... Celestia had no ground on which to argue against that, so she let Lulu be and continued to eat, rereading the letter over and over.
Twilight had apparently met this 'Solar Flare' and her supposed sister Nightmare Moon. While she knew Twilight was smart enough to look past deceptions, she was worried she would not even think to do so and believe Solar Flare out of hoof. Unless of course what was in the letter was indeed the truth, which came with a whole host of other problems. Technically speaking, if Nightmare Moon was really a queen of another nation, then she had assaulted a whole host of other nations without declaration of war, and Celestia had imprisoned a foreign ruler without due process for generations.
It was a whole mess of a situation, so Celestia resolved to ignore it and eat until she could better organize her thoughts.
They continued to 'feast' for a while, occasionally taking a sip of their orange juice to wash it down. Celestia set the letter down, contemplating whether or not she should - or even could - send a message in return. Twilight's 'I'm okay' pulse had arrived yesterday at night, so she was confident Twilight was fine, especially if the letter spoke true. Anything more than that was paranoia. But she dearly wanted to send a letter. Let her know they got her messages. Maybe if she -
FLASH!
With a burst of white light Discord appeared standing on top of the table, rotating on an invisible pedestal. "WOOOO!" he shouted, holding a crate of what looked like bottles of watermelon juice under his lion arm, holding up a glass made of snowflake obsidian in his griffon talons. "Woooo!" he shouted again, continuing to spin, a sombrero on his head and glasses over his asymmetrical eyes. "Woo... woo," he said tiredly, stopping his spinning to face them.
Discord let go of his glass - it remained floating - and brought his talons to push down the glasses. "Hey there Sunbutt!" Leaving his case, glass and hat to continue floating in mid air, Discord slid over to Celestia's side and crossed his lizard and donkey leg, much too close for comfort. "You too, Woona." Luna growled at her nickname. "So, what's going on over here?"
"Why don't you tell us, Discord?" Celestia asked coldly, still hurt over having her cake mysteriously turned into a cake-shaped piece of plastic a couple days back. "You're usually not over here so early in the morning." Speaking of which, Celestia lit up her horn with magic, as did, Luna, and the night cycled to day.
"You're right, I'm not!" he said, flapping higher above them. "You see, I was just in the neighborhood of Ponyville, and a little birdy told me that everyone's favorite Sparklebutt came here for something important-y, and that little birdy maaay have been oh-so worried about her, so naturally being the good friend that I am I came to ask."
"A little birdy?" Luna asked with a raised brow, before turning to Celestia. "Tia, is this one of those modern phrases I've yet to hear?"
"Possibly," Celestia said.
Discord, having reached the ceiling, let himself fall down, sinking into the fabric of the table and reforming as a moving pattern on it. The fabric's weave gave him a stranger than normal look. "So, tell me, where is the purple little thing? Researching the growing patterns of corn? Pouring over tome upon tome of how snowflakes are made?" Discord laid down facing Celestia, as if the cloth was a three dimensional plane, resting his chin in his paw.
Celestia frowned. She could tell Discord the truth and hope he'd leave it at that, or she could lie and hope he believed her - she really didn't like to lie, even when she had to - or she could just remain quiet and he'd find out anyways.
An idea occurred to her; maybe Discord finding out wouldn't be that bad. But before Celestia could open her mouth, Luna apparently had the same idea and beat her to the punch. "Twilight's investigating Nightmare Moon," she said. "I found a strand of magic in my moon link leading presumably to her world, and Twilight Sparkle volunteered to go through as reconnaissance. Since then, she's sent a letter that... undermines a lot of my beliefs about Nightmare." She levitated the letter over to Discord's image, to which he stuck his paw 'out' of the cloth, grabbed the paper, and pulled it 'in'.
Discord's eyes scanned over it a few times, then he tossed the paper back 'out', where it landed and folded itself into an origami Fluttershy. "So, the little lavender zap-zap's gone universe hopping?" He reclined back in a seat in the fabric, nodding sagely. "I've taught her well."
"You can travel between universes?" Celestia asked, intrigued. Had he always known about the real nature of Nightmare Moon?
He scoffed and snapped a talon; his snowflake obsidian glass stopped floating and fell down, into the table, where Discord grabbed it and drank the entire thing like water. "I can, but it's not much fun. Most of the universes out there, pah! Boooring! Either gravity's set too high, or electrons are too light, or antimatter and matter annihilated perfectly in the beginning. Nothing out there! I like it here, home's nice." He nodded sagely, then rubbed his chin. Slowly, like an ice sculpture melting in reverse, he began to rise out of the table. "Hmm, if Woona here's got a link to one that's got life in it, I might just have to go take a look! Fluttershy's worried about Twilight, too... I could knock out two stones with one bird!"
He finished rising pressing his horns back into the sombrero, and Celestia nodded. "If you could go check on Twilight and let her know we've been getting her letters, I would really appreciate that Discord."
Suddenly wearing an unfamiliar military uniform - the sombrero was gone - Discord saluted. "Aye aye, ma'am!" He leaned over to Luna and tapped her horn, grabbed the tip with a talon and then pulled out a thin black string. "So long and thanks for all the fish!" he shouted, before the string pulled back into Luna's horn, Discord shrinking and going with it, before vanishing.
Luna blinked and raised a hoof to tap her own horn a few times, as if afraid that Discord was going to spontaneously pop out of it.
"Well," Celestia said. "Now that that's somewhat taken care of, why don't we finish up here?" She eyed the crate of juice bottles Discord had left floating in mid air, and shrugged. Taking it in her telekinesis - which somehow destroyed its natural levitation - and lowering it, Celestia opened up one of the bottles.
Though the juice was pink, it tasted like honey.
***-_***_-***-_***_-***-_***_-***
Twilight Sparkle
It was weird to go to bed at high noon, fall asleep at high noon, and then wake up at high noon. A calendar hanging on the walls informed her that it was October, which was weird because back home it was March. Twilight assumed that was another thing starting long ago; Solar and Nightmare's world had probably experienced Discord's reign for a different length of time than back home, so when the calendars reasserted themselves there'd be deviation.
Today, the two Queens were going to 'announce' her existence to Everfree and, by extension, the rest of the planet. Twilight felt like she was going to throw up just thinking about it.
The maid from before, Plush Pillow, has brought her breakfast and a letter from Queen Solar Flare. While Twilight ate the eggs and hay bacon, she read it over. It summarized how the revealing of her and her home Equestria would proceed: Nightmare Moon and Solar Flare would call a large portion of Everfree's population to right outside the castle and go give a speech summarizing her situation.
Then she would be escorted there, greet them, speak a little about why she'd come and how much she hoped that they could be friends - Twilight found it slightly odd that the queens would suggest that to her - and then answer some questions, before being led back inside by Solar Flare while Nightmare Moon went incognito to see what everypony thought.
She couldn't stall; there wasn't enough time to stall. She finished up her breakfast and put it on a table for the servants to take care of, put on her saddlebags, then stepped outside of her room. The two Coronal Guards there looked her way with almost mechanical precision, and the one on her right spoke up. "Princess Twilight, follow us to the ceremony."
She dipped her head. "Of course, thank you." Before she knew it, Twilight was being led through Everfree Castle, following the two guardponies as they took turn after turn. Before long she was in a hallway outside the main castle, elevated above the city proper, trotting towards the balcony on the end of it.
Alright, calling it a hallway was a bit much. It was open air, and the walls barely went up past her withers. Ahead of her - way ahead - she could see the balcony, and the contrasting orange and black spots of Solar Flare and Nightmare Moon, who took turns booming words to the crowd in the 'Royal Everfree Voice' that Twilight still wasn't able to make heads or tails of.
She swallowed nervously as the guards continued to lead her forward. What would this be like? From what she'd seen, the ponies of this Equestria really weren't that different from back home; Solar Flare and Nightmare Moon seemed to be the main difference.
She was closer now. She could hear Solar Flare speaking. "So now, I present the stage to Princess Twilight Sparkle of the other Equestria, to address any concerns you may have."
Twilight took a deep breath to steady herself and stepped forward. Solar Flare moved to her left, and Nightmare Moon was to her right. She walked forward until she was right in between them, and looked out at the sea of multicolored bodies. There were a few ponies holding notepads and pencils, scribbling furiously.
"Hello, everypony," she said, pulling her words more or less right out of her flank. "It is great to be here. I'm going to speak candidly; when I first came to your country, your world, I expected it to be a dark realm of fear, mist, and demons." She gave a smile. "I've been happily surprised." A few laughs in the crowd, and Twilight had to remind her that they were laughing with her, not at her. "Equestria - the one I come from, that is - prides itself on friendship and harmony, and I hope that before long our two nations will be able to see each other as just that. I'm happy to be here, and I extend to you all greetings from my home."
She took a deep breath. "Now, I understand many of you will have questions about this, so I'll be taking some." A smattering of hooves shot up. Twilight looked around. "Um... you, green pegasus mare with the notepad."
"Hot Start, reporting for EFN. Princess Sparkle, we have heard about Princess Celestia and Princess Luna in your nation, but who is the queen?"
She blinked. That sort of question was actually very common in history classes. "We actually don't have a queen; the title of princess is considered the highest authority in accordance with the Platinum Pact. Next question?"
The inquiries began to flow, and Twilight slowly eased up as the answers came to her unbidden. What was her hometown? Easy. How many alicorns were there back home? Not even a challenge, though her answer of four made Nightmare and Solar both cock their brows. Eventually, Solar motioned for Twilight to wrap it up.
"Alright, last question... yes, you! Earth pony in the blue vest."
He didn't give his name, instead the news paper he was working for. "Princess Sparkle, what is your association with the return of Nightmare Moon four years ago?"
"Oh, um, well it's a long story, but long and short my friends and I rediscovered artifacts known as - "
"And we're done here," Solar Flare ordered, stepping forward. "Disperse," she commanded the crowd, and so they dispersed. The two alicorns turned to Twilight, and Solar continued. "We're done here," she repeated.
Nightmare Moon nodded. "I'll go undercover, see what they're talking about her. Oh, before I forget, Solar. Our friend won't be able to make it with the other nations' ambassadors, and she won't be sending a representative, but she'll be coming herself a few days later."
"Oh, excellent!" Solar Flare said happily. Then Nightmare's horn lit up and, with a soundless burst of purple light, she vanished.
"Undercover?" she asked. And who was their 'friend'?
Solar nodded. "Indeed. Follow me, Twilight." Solar Flare trotted at a brisk pace back into the castle, forcing Twilight to nearly gallop in order to keep up with her. "Try not to reveal any information about the Elements," she explained once they were back inside, no guards with them. "I'd like to keep knowledge of them out of the public's mind."
"Why?" she asked. "I mean, only me and my friends can use the Elements of Harmony, and we don't have them anymore so - "
Solar Flare stopped abruptly. "What do you mean you don't have them anymore?" she asked, looking down at Twilight curiously.
"Well, we had to give them up to the Tree of Harmony - their origin as far as we can tell - to stop a... mostly natural disaster.
Solar looked off into the distance, humming. "Interesting," the queen mused. She shook her head and began to walk again, though slow enough that Twilight could keep up without too much diffic -
The flash of light before them was as sudden as it was unexpected. Before Twilight could quite piece it together, Discord was there, his face next to hers. "Hey there, Purplesmart! Been looking for you; Flutters is really worried and - " He seemed to notice Solar Flare, because his eyes widened and he pulled back, standing on two legs. "Whoa! Fire!"
Discord pulled his arms back and a bucket filled with water materialized in them. He threw his arms forward and a surprising amount of water flew out from the bucket, soaking Solar from head to tail and turning her orange fur dark. Much to Twilight's surprise, her fiery mane and tail actually went out, the individual fire streams coalescing into long strands of white hair, hanging down limply under the weight of the water while Solar Flare gasped and sputtered in surprise, dripping wet.
Discord nodded to himself sagely. "Well, that takes care of that! So Twily, how are you, how's the alternate universe life been treating you?"
Twilight smiled slightly. Despite their past... misgivings, she was making a dedicated effort to see Discord as a friend, and she knew that he was doing the same, in his own way. "It's okay. Discord, what are you doing here?"
"Well Fluttershy was worried about you, so I went to ol' Sunbutt and Woona, asked them about the whosewhatsit, and here I am!" he said, floating in the air and throwing his arms to the side. "Gotta say, I'm loving the - "
Solar Flare growled and, with a flash of magic, dried her coat. Her painfully white mane and tail lifted themselves, smoked, and then burst into flames once more. Her horn lit up, the orange glow brightening until it was painful to look at. "Demon!" she shrieked, fixing Discord with a death glare. Then the solar alicorn fired a narrow beam of blue fire at Discord's chest, which he twisted away from, leaving it to melt a hole in the wall.
"Whoa there!" he said. He dodged another fire blast. "Easy there, hot stuff!" Solar Flare shot a duo of fireballs with a thread of flame between them. They wrapped around Discord and pinned his arms to his sides. "Ooh, ow, that's actually kinda hot." The fireballs turned into hayballs and the thread into pasta, which Discord easily freed himself from... in time to be nailed in the head with a ray of magic. "Hey now!" he shouted, snapping his paw and erecting a transparent barrier around himself. "Enough of that, that stuff actually hurts!"
"Deceiver!" Solar roared, blasting away freely with what looked like a narrow stream of lava. "I thought we were rid of you!"
Twilight, in spite of the rising heat, ran over to Solar Flare's side. "What are you doing?! That's Discord, he's my - " Suddenly she understood what was going on. Alternate universe. Discord was never reformed. Twilight's Discord showing up made Solar Flare think that her Discord had escaped.
Much to Twilight - and Discord's - surprise, orange magic flickered around his barrier and dispelled the construct, forcing him to sink down into the floor as a moving image before the lava could blast him. "What's her problem, Twilight?"
"I don't know!" she said, backing off as the fires of the queen's mane and tail grew. "She must not know you're - "
"RrrrraAAH!" A portal appeared in the air above Discord and a column of solar plasma shot down directly from the sun, vaporizing the given area of the floor and forcing Twilight to put cooling wards around herself right after Discord flash-teleported to a wall. Another portal opened and blasted it, only for Discord - looking rather nervous - to slide away. He snapped his talons and Solar Flare began to shrink... but then an aura of orange magic around her reversed the changes. She responded by tearing out the section of wall housing Discord, him with it, and shattering it to pieces.
Twilight ran up to her as Discord reformed from the pieces, seemingly winded. "Stop it! Stop it!"
She snapped her head over to her, snarling. "Why? Do you know who that is?!"
"Yes! He's the Discord from my world and he's friendly!"
Her magic went out and Solar Flare's fury vanished in a moment. "... friendly?" she whispered, looking over to Discord, then back to Twilight. "He's... friendly?"
"Yes!" Twilight said, moving back to give Solar some personal space. She paused. "Okay, he is now, but you should give him - "
"I think," Solar interrupted. "It'd be best if we related our respective stories with Discord. Begin."
"Alright, so some twenty-five hundred years in the past Discord appeared and took over both Equestria and the world, sending every species back to the stone age with his reign. Celestia and Luna found the Elements of Harmony and used them to petrify him, before becoming the rulers of Equestria. When Celestia used the Elements on, well, your sister, she and Luna lost their bonds to them so recently my friends and I bonded to them instead."
"I see," she said dispassionately.
"And because they were unbound from the Elements, Discord's prison weakened and not long after we took up the Elements of Harmony, he escaped and tried to repeat what he did before. It was really harrowing, but in the end we turned him back into a statue." Relating the tale to somepony else made Twilight remember just what Discord had been like before. Vile, jovially cruel. It made her remember watching her friends being corrupted, the horrible sickening dread that came with having been tainted herself...
"And he's running around freely?!"
"A year or so later," she continued hastily. "Princess Celestia decided to let him out on... on sort of parole to be reformed, to use his powers for the benefit of the country instead. And he did, and he's our friend now." Where was Discord anyway?
She and Solar looked to find Discord off to the taller alicorn's side, reclining in a camping chair made for bipeds. In his talons he held a long stick with marshmallows stuck on the end, roasting them in Solar Flare's mane. Solar gave a wordless shout of anger and stepped away.
Discord flashed away and reappeared next to Twilight, a marshmallow in his lion paw. "Want one?"
Twilight shrugged and took it, inspecting it in her hoof. It was perfectly browned all around. Squishy, but not sticky. She wondered...
Ignoring the way Discord swallowed his stick and marshmallows whole, she leaned in and took a bite. It crunched and she recoiled in surprise at the taste of apples. Inside the marshmallow were what resembled smooth, glass blueberries melted together.
"Reformed," Solar said weakly, looking at the draconequus. "Reformed." She seemed rather pale. "He's aiding your nation?" she breathed. Before either of them could answer, the orange alicorn growled. "Well, that's not at all what happened. We didn't have any Elements of Harmony. Discord appeared just around the time Nightmare and I had become grown mares. We saw what he could do, so for five years we trained and sparred in combat, building up our muscle, magic, and reflexes." Meanwhile, Twilight finished up the marshmallow.
Discord teleported over to Twilight and reclined on a red and green sofa. "Go on," he said, tossing a pawful of blue popcorn into his mouth.
"We confronted him, battled him, and he smacked us down, laughing himself away," Solar Flare said with a sneer. "So we tried harder. For another fifteen years we worked to better ourselves in the havoc he wrought. We came across some of his chaotic constructs and reverse engineered them, so we had some idea of how to dispel his influence." She shivered. "We challenged him a second time, did combat, and after a harrowing day of battle we broke his power," she said with a growing grin. ", and then we killed him."
Discord blinked. "As in... killed him?" he squeaked, his red irises turning into red X-es.
"Oh yes. It was challenging and painful, but we outmaneuvered your counterpart, tired him, and executed him before taking our rightful place as Queens of Equestria."
"Right," Discord said nervously as his eyes changed back, rubbing his talons and paw together. He leaned over to Twilight. "Welp Twilight, the princesses just wanted to let you know they've been getting your letters, are happy you're okay and..." He turned to Solar Flare. "BYE!" He vanished in a flash of white light.
She looked at Solar. "You two didn't... actually kill Discord, did you?" she asked, worried. "I mean, he's Discord! Short of the Elements of Harmony, he just has too much power for anypony to fight against."
"Actually, Discord himself doesn't have that much raw power. It's the nature of his chaos magic that makes him so dangerous; he can do a lot more with a lot less. But that's beside the point; Nighty and I - " Nighty? " - lived in his playground for two decades. Chaos is many predictable events intertwined so as to be unpredictable, but it's not random. We could make ourselves stronger while increasing our knowledge of his tricks, how to counter them," she explained.
"But why murder him? Why not reform him, or petrify him?"
She scoffed. "As if we'd have the means. No, our battle with Discord was too intense to do so, nothing we had short of death could contain him. Especially once he started to take us seriously, and realized we could follow through." She shuddered. "Things got really painful then."
Twilight could scarcely believe what she was hearing. They had... they had murdered Discord! Her throat went dry and her legs shook in nervousness, stepping back from Solar. Twilight could hardly believe it but... it made sense, didn't it? Discord wasn't omnipotent, he'd never have become a statue in the first place if he was. And it was obvious that Solar Flare and Nightmare Moon were very warlike. In a world with no Elements of Harmony to provide an easy fix, how else would they have overthrown Discord, and what influence would that have on their psyches? The horseshoe fit.
"I see. I'm just... just going to go to the history archives before anything else distracts me."
At Solar's nod, she lit up her horn and teleported away, reappearing before the door that led to the historical archives.
Approaching the two Coronal Guards posted there, she levitated the card that 'Nighty' had given to her. They inspected it, then nodded to her wordlessly and let her open the door to enter. They sealed it behind her, and Twilight heard her inner librarian squee in delight. Books. So many books. Organized onto wooden shelves by eternal candlelight. Each of the dozens of shelves covering a certain time range, divided into sections of smaller time ranges, which were organized via author name, with thousands of books total.
Twilight found a series of books under 'Pre-Discord', an unsurprisingly empty shelf. Even back home, the times before Discord had arrived - erasing virtually all historical records in the process - was a time of much speculation, with only folk tales such as Hearth's Warming Eve, or the limited memories of Celestia and Luna, to go by. It wasn't much of a surprise to find that virtually all the books here were the same as back home; evidently, the split had not been Discord. Twilight had a suspicion what it was, but she had to make sure.
Moving further on in the timeline, there were quite a few poems and ballads written about the reign of Discord. Some of them she recognized, such as The Serpent, or The Day that Lasted a Minute. Giving them a read, they were identical to the ones back home, which shouldn't have been eerie but all the same made her coat hairs stand on end.
There were, however, others such as Cosmic and Chaos, and The Two Who Stood, that she did not recognize at all. The latter was a poem, filled with flowery language that, with her talk with Solar Flare, she recognized as describing the two sisters' struggle to overthrow - murder - Discord. The first was an account of the two's rise to power, apparently written after Discord's rule was over. And pouring over it, she soon reached what she was looking for.
Celestia had never made her origins a secret; why would she? She and Luna had been born to two earth pony parents nearly two decades before Discord emerged from wherever draconequi come from, named Tough Heart and Fiery Heart. And apparently, Nightmare and Solar held a similar view about their origins, and their parents were named...
Tough Heart and Fiery Heart.
That went a long way towards confirming things for Twilight. There was a chance that something had occurred beforehoof to make Fiery Heart give birth to Nightmare and Solar instead of Celestia and later Luna, but she couldn't find it. Clearly, the reign of Discord in this alternate Equestria had lasted longer than back home, so less texts had survived; the odds of finding any divergence back before Solar Flare and Nightmare Moon were born was slim to none.
And more likely than not, the birth itself was the divergence. It wouldn't even take that much; conceiving on a different day, or just one sperm as opposed to another reaching the egg. Such a small, tiny, unnoticeable change brought forth by the subtly-unpredictable paths of subatomic magical particles varying from each other, and the change that had built up over twenty five hundred years was staggering.
"Wow," she breathed. Looking at a nearby clock, Twilight was startled to realize she'd been reading for seven hours. It didn't even feel like five.
She... she needed to write a paper! A scientific letter, more than that. Equestria, both Equestrias, both worlds needed to know. She could picture the title already. 'Variations between Different Realities from a Minor Divergence with respect to Time'. And now that she knew where their worlds had split, she could - !
Grrrr.
- she could go eat lunch.
But even as she left and bid the stoic Coronal Guards a good day, Twilight's mind was ablaze. Maybe she could meet up with Discord, hear what he thought. Maybe calm him down after Solar Flare had confessed to murdering him once before, a fact that still boggled her mind. Having enough skill to not just challenge Discord in combat, but to defeat him and kill him. It was unreal, it was absurd! But the facts were all there before her.
Remembering Cadance's breathing exercises, Twilight took a minute or two to relax. Good. She was going to go to lunch, then - if her schedule was right - Nightmare Moon was going to show her around Everfree under disguise.
She was looking forward to it.
