After her meeting with Celestia, Cicada couldn't stop thinking about what the princess had said. The queen just kept looking at the book, trying to figure out the secret Celestia was keeping. What exactly could it have been that helped cause the Luna here to become evil?
Instead of going straight home, Cicada had gone back to Moon Dancers to tell her what happened and to get a few books which could help her find out what Celestia was trying to hide. So far, she wasn’t finding much that she didn’t already know.
“Lila, do you have any ideas.” Cicada finally asked her phoenix. The bird replied by flying over and close the books she was looking at. “Fine I’ll take a break, but not for too long. In fact, I’ll work on what I was researching before!”
The changeling picked up a different book which was about confirmed history in Equestria. Flipping randomly, she found a chapter about the forming of Equestria. It talked about the three pony races and how they fought with each other, almost causing a wipeout of their race.
Cicada could remember a similar part of history where two royal changeling siblings would not agree on what exactly could be done to advance the kingdom. Slowly, all the other changelings took sides getting close to an all out war. In the end, the child of each royal changeling revealed there was a third answer to the whole problem. The cousins helped fix the kingdom and it became the area now known as Equestria. The original problem had been lost in time, but changeling’s still speculated what it really was.
The date chosen to celebrate the historical event was also different by a couple of days. But it didn’t matter to Cicada as much. The changelings had been in Equestria the whole time, they had only expanded their territory.
Flipping through the next few pages, she could see history on the princesses gaining power, history about that one creature, Discord, and something small about a place called The Crystal Empire.
The story about the empire caught her eye, and she started to read it to see what it had to say. Apparently there had been a unicorn kind there who enslaved the entire empire. Celestia and Luna had gone to defeat him but the entire empire disappeared as they were able to do so.
The story ended there, but it also had a notation to look on a different page of the book. Flipping to the page that was listed, Cicada found herself in the ‘Recent History’ chapter of the book. It started off with the return of Nightmare Moon, and then on to Discord’s return. Right after that was a story about a royal wedding and changeling attack. Finally, Cicada found a page entitled ‘Return of the Crystal Empire’.
The queen was more interested in the story before and quickly turned back to the royal wedding. It talked about how a princess name Mi Amore Cadenza was marrying a stallion of the name Shining Armor. The princess had been replaced by a changeling queen from this world and Twilight had been able to figure it out. She found the real princess and they returned to the wedding before it could finish. The queen revealed herself and her changeling subjects came in causing an invasion. The two lovers had been able to create a shield, blasting the changelings away.
Reading through the story again, Cicada tried to find a name for the queen, but there was none listed. “What if that were me? What’s the other me like?”
Looking at one of the artist’s renderings of the queen, Cicada thought it didn’t look too much like her, but then again, Luna looked different from Selena. Besides, this wasn’t an actual picture, who knew what she actually looked like. She moved the book over and grabbed her scroll to take a few more notes.
Cicada closed her eyes for a few seconds to think, but when she opened them again, she had a different scroll in front of her. At first, she was a little shocked and didn’t even fully read the scroll, just looked at it. But as she started to calm down a little bit, She noticed a word she recognized and also caught her attention.
One the paper was her sister’s name. Cicada quickly tried to read the sentence. Before she could finish, the queen blinked again and found herself back in her house.
“Ow! Hey! Lila, stop!” Cicada ordered her pet who was scratching her. “What’s wrong? Why are you doing that.”
The blue phoenix glared at Cicada before giving a quick nod of her head and flying away to the bedroom.
“What was that all about?!” The changeling called out to Lila.
After no response, Cicada gave up and started to think about what she had read. “The changeling called Nymph will open a portal…” The queen murmured to herself. “Open a portal what? Is Nymph trying to find me?”
“That stupid bird!” Twilight yelled. “If it weren’t for her I might actually try to go back, even if it did give me a headache!”
Sunset Shimmer walked in the Empress’ room to check on her. “Is everything alright?”
“You know how at the last meeting I mentioned the mix of the spell I used on that changeling queen mixed with her being in another world meant we sometimes randomly change our viewpoints?”
“Yes Empress. I remember that.”
“Well, it happened again, and she happened to have some information in front of her about the world. The problem is, Somehow her bird seemed to know it wasn’t her owner and attacked me. I didn’t get to read most of it, though I did get to see one thing.”
That got the unicorn a little curious. “What would that be?”
“There was a picture of a crystalline looking tree. It labeled it ‘The Tree of Harmony’ but there was another note that said ‘Elements of Harmony = Gems of Accord?’ Since this tree and the elements seem to go hoof in hoof with each other, I’m guessing that these gems are somewhere in this world.”
“Is there something you’d like to do with that information.” Sunset asked, since usually when something like this happened, the alicorn took action.
“Yes,” Twilight replied. “I want you to alert the guard and start asking every changeling they can about it. I want it found either before or while I’m away trying to find that pesky royal changeling.”
“I’ll tell them right away.” Sunset said, quickly leaving the room.
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