//------------------------------//
// Chapter 6 - Power and Consequence 
// Story: Sisters in All but Blood 
// by scifipony 
//------------------------------//

Injured ponies littered the wooden auditorium floor.  All except one were limping, or at least moving.  The shock of the living nightmare left me numb as I got myself moving.  That brought me to no-longer-laughing Minuette first and I said, "Go outside and call for doctors or nurses."  I shouldered a tan stallion and a rone mare in my way, frozen by what they'd witnessed.  "Help the fellow on his knees.  You, lead those three foals under the table outside.  Now!"

I was no less stunned than they.  My brain kept insisting, wake up!  This is some sort of lucid nightmare!  The broken white lump laying there could not be Shiny.  Stuck by lightning.  Not moving.

Shiny d—

My gallop returned and I landed in a sliding skid beside him.  Feathery red lines—like someone outlining a stick of a myriad branches using a red quill—inked his side, right leg, and neck.  It radiated from a melt hole in his armor at the tip of his shoulder.  His chest did not rise at all.  I lifted his head in my magic, "Shiny."  His eyes stayed closed.  "Shiny!"

Moon Dancer slid in beside me as I screamed, "Somepony, get a doctor!"

She pushed me aside, tossing away his helmet and withers plate.  She proceeded to roll him on his back.  After putting an ear to his chest, she put both front hooves on his sternum and pushed down, hard.

"No!" I said, but betraying Lemon Hearts caught me in her aura and pushed me helplessly aside.  

As I tried to get up, Lyra tackled me, keeping me down.  "She's magic pre-med, Twilight," she said, arms around my neck as I struggled.

My big brother.  Dead.  Because of me.

After a dozen pumps, Moon Dancer looked around.  "Get me a pegasus.  Get a storm cloud in here.  Electricity stopped it.  It'll start it, too."

Hearts hugged me on the other side and whispered in my ear, as if she were reading my mind, "It's not your fault."  That she could think so generously of me astonished me. 

"I brought him here, didn't I?  Celestia certainly made getting anybody in the line of fire difficult, but that didn't stop me."

Lyra Heartstrings' magic wrenched my head away, breaking my horrified stare at Shining, making me look into her eyes.  It was a kindness that infuriated me, and she compounded it by saying, "You had to save the princess."

"Some good that did!" 

"Twi!" Lyra began crying, then hugged me hard, placing her head so I could not see my brother.  "No."

Moon Dancer said, "What do you mean, no weather pegasi?"

Right, I'd sent them in pursuit of Nightmare Moon.   

And then I realized what I was doing and my whole body went cold.  Celestia had lectured me, how many times, about freezing up when things went out of my control?  She told me, hysteria and fear of failure would prevent me from finding solutions and would guarantee failure.  Like the time I froze when I had tipped the vulcanization cauldron in my room as a foal.  Had I righted it, even if I'd burnt myself, I would have avoided the explosion that by all rights ought to have killed me. 

If there were a way to make a spark of electricity, there might be a way to save my brother. 

I encased myself with a levitation spell and shoved out so hard it made a bang.  Both friends slid away.  Lyra had made the point that if I looked at my brother, I'd falter, so I simply concentrated on the numbers that would bring raw magic to my horn, then refined it with the equations used to produce fireworks-type effects.  I knew such things made ponies' manes stand on end, thus it was related to lightning.  

Twinkleshine moved into my field of vision, blinking at my horn.  "I see what you're doing.  Talk it out while you work it up.  You know it's something I'm good at."  She was good with spell technique, and had often worked with the each of us upon difficult homework and projects, sometimes to the point of not completing her own assignments.  She'd once stood up for me with our Metaology teacher, Linkages, and gotten herself sent to the dean before the teacher admitted the error in his equations.  She thought in equations; I thought in numbers. 

By this point, my horn felt hot.  I was sweating, but I did as instructed and she followed along.  An aura blossomed above her head as we began refining each other's reality equations in a back and forth chant.

Suddenly, in response to our last phrase, Lunettes said, "Yes, right.  Of course!"

I turned to face her just as she lifted her hooves from Shining's chest.  A spark cracked from her horn down between his ribs.

He spasmed, then yelled as if he'd been bucked square on, launching himself in the air with a hindquarters kick that would have knocked Lunettes out cold had she not jumped back.  He thrashed twice more and rolled to his feet, toddering.  He yelled again, "Horse apples!  Did somepony throw me off the roof?"  He groaned as we dashed to hold him from falling over.  "Celestia, that hurts.  My ribs feel broken."  He shook himself.

"Shiny," I said, getting in front of him, getting him to look at me.  

His eyes began clearing and through tears he focused.  "I really hurt, Twily."

"Thank goodness."

"What happened?  I'm burnt!" He looked at the lightning strike on his right shoulder, which looked like somepony had branded him with a hot poker.  His right hoof was charred where the lightning had exited.  "The princess!?"  He looked around, seeing the destruction left by the stampede and watched ponies tossing water on a huge burning fabric bow.  "W-What happened?"

I'd failed.  But at least I had my big brother.

"Right, right, she arrived.  She landed."  He closed his eyes tightly in pain and shook his head.  "My ears are ringing.  Right.  Her chariot landed, but when she stepped off, a beam of rainbow colors struck the ground in front of her, throwing aside her carriage guards.  The magic wrapped around her like, like, rainbow frosting being squeezed from a pastry bag around her, encasing her in a tornado of bright light.  Twin Forks discharged Minuette's spell disabler, but it did nothing.  Crystalline fired off the generic counter-spell you suggested, but it backfired and set her on fire.  Then something exploded.  When I got up, where Celestia had stood, stood that blue alicorn.  She flew inside and transformed the door into bricks."

Talking helped.  Shiny seemed clearer; he'd stopped shaking.  He opened his eyes when Twinkie levitated a bowl of water to his lips.  My school friends were all there, pushing against Shining, supporting him.  I realized that Harps and Bon Bon were on either side of me, performing the same service.  I, too, had been shaking.

My friends.  I began blinking, trying to keep away tears.  

Then a new thought struck me.  "Princess Celestia transformed into Nightmare Moon?"

"Uh…" Shining angled his head, unsure.

I turned to the other royal guard who had formed around me.  The water brigade had put out the flames.  Some nurses from the local hospital tended the other hurt ponies.  The mayor, the Apples, Rarity, and Pinkamena surrounded me in the next circle, themselves surrounded by a few dozen townsfolk who had overcome their fear.  Hovering near the chandelier was Fluttershy and her flock of circling birds.    

"Did she?" I asked.

"I think so," a carriage guard said, fluffing his white feathers at the memory.  

Night Flyer, a pure black pegasus with charcoal eyes said, "But the explosion knocked us all down.  I never saw both together, but…"

I looked beyond the wrecked auditorium, through the windows.  It was still pre-dawn, but something had changed.  I looked again and noticed the moon moving slowly upwards.  

A cursed Celestia taken over by dark magic?

That conflicted with everything we had learned from the books.  But the books were still the only hope: a castle of the "Royal Pony Sisters" somewhere in the Everfree Forest, and a mysterious rainbow collection of powerful magical gems.  Though it differed from what we expected, some it had come true; the prophesy, for example, had triggered off like clockwork.  Celestia had trained me.  We all agreed my analysis—our analysis—was correct.  It was a plan.  Time for the next steps.

"Does everypony agree that Celestia is gone?" I asked.

I received a collective chorus of reluctant, unhappy yeses and nods.  Many ears laid back.

"In that case, that makes me responsible for fixing this as Celestia wanted me to."

Mayor Mare gasped, then curtseyed deeply.  Shocked, I looked behind, thinking for one happy hopeful moment Celestia had appeared. 

The other ponies started imitating Mare.  In a single wave, as if caught in a collective bout of hysteria, everypony  cried, "Princess!"

But there wasn't one.  Celestia was gone, maybe gone for good.  Tears streamed from my eyes as an indescribable weight of shame washed over me.  I'd failed my most important test.  "Not a princess!" I screamed. 

Lunettes was up and leaning into my side, again, comfortingly.  Then Harps, and Hearts, and the rest of my friends all around me.  

Lunettes said, "The honest truth is that 'Princess' is indeed incorrect.  You're actually Equestria's Crown Regent, now." 

"I am a complete failure, don't you see that?!"

"And you believe that?" Shining said, wobbling around and standing before me.  His magenta eyes captured mine.  "Really?  It was your finest moment, my sister.  But no plan survives contact with the enemy.  My academy instructors taught me that, so trust me when I say, what you arranged here could have worked.  It did not.  Now we try again."

Tears continued to stream, but I said, "Okay."  

Shining saluted me and might have stumbled, but for Mayor Mare stabilizing him.  "In the service of the princess!"  The other royal guard followed suit.

I sniffled, took a deep breath, and swallowed hard.  "Right, right, of course, in the service of the princess, enough already!" I said and Shining let go of the salute, but kept his eyes focused on me.  

Celestia had commissioned me.  She had seen that I had this tool and my friends.  

I could do this.

To keep my emotions at bay, I launched right into my train of logic that the most logical thing to do was find Nightmare Moon and restrain her somehow.  Until we could, the best lead would be the one Celestia had given us.  "Find the castle.  Find the elements.  Find a way."

Pinkamena Pie piped up.  "Did you find that map of the Everfree Forest?"

I rolled my eyes, but said, "Actually, I did.  Spike?"

"I'm here," my assistant said sleepily, but holding his eyes unnaturally wide as if that could help him stay more awake.  He was a baby dragon—a slightly pickled drunk baby dragon.  He took out a quill and pen, but after wetting the nib with spit, I grabbed it in my magic.

"My first order as Crown Regent is to name Cadance as my successor.  What's her full name?"

Shining supplied, "Mi Amore Cadenza," and I wrote, concentrating on legibility with my tongue sticking out to the side.

Under my breath, I murmured, "I'm not ever going to be a princess.  Not ever.  Second order: send the royal guard to reinforce us.  Who should we ask for?" I asked Shining, who listed guards and unicorns, and added the paramilitary Wonderbolts, also.

I then reared and crushed the nib of the quill between my hooves, rubbing the expelled ink into the frog and edge of my hoof.  Ponies used wax seals these days, but I didn't have one.  I dropped the open scroll on the floor and stomped the one mark that would be unique to me alone below my signature.

"Night Flyer?"

He grabbed the scroll in his mouth and dropped it into a messenger bag.  "Your Highness!" he said, and shot into the air, leaving through Nightmare Moon's exit.  I did not feel like a "highness" but stopped my retort about titles when Lady Moon Dancer nodded.  It was the correct title, apparently, and if it reassured everypony else but me, it would be ineffective to contradict their feelings.  My friends had my back in ways I would have to work to comprehend.

"Okay, my little ponies, let's go find that monster."