I snap out of my thoughts. I smile and hug Spike close. “You’re right, I ought to just have a little more faith in my friends. Honestly, what would I do without you, Spike?”

He lifts up a finger. “Worry yourself into an anxiety-induced coma?”

I snort. “That’s silly Spike. You can’t worry yourself into a coma.”

“If anypony is going to be the first, it’ll be you.”

Totally Spike!

My chest tightens up and I take two steps away from her. “Celestia, you don’t regret saving your sister do you?”

There’s something like horror in my voice and I turn my head away from her almost ashamed for having asked the question.

I hear her sigh again, dejectedly. “If you asked me that question before her return I would’ve said ‘no’ without a moment of hesitation, but now… There is one detail that genuinely makes me question myself, and that’s the fact that if the roles had been reversed, and it was I who betrayed Luna and she forced to stop me, she would’ve killed me without a second thought.”

“How do you know that?”

I turn my head back and see her staring at me dead on with the gravest of looks in her eye. “Because she told me so. She said I would have been dead before I could draw my sword.”

I totally believe that! Nopony messes with Lua!!!

Luna clears her throat. “Princess Twilight, I would like you to meet the commander of Arch Company, and the most highly decorated field officer in the entire organization. Captain Octavia.”

The mare pulls her hood back, the darkness inside evaporates to unveil a fall of neat black hair down the back of her neck and a grey coat like the color of a rain cloud. She places a hoof to her chest and bows low to me. “It is an honor to make your acquaintance your majesty.”

OCTAVIA?!?!?!

“I know it might not make sense to you now. Give yourself a few years in your new title. You’ll understand my frustration with rigid formality and may even come to appreciate these small antics I allow.”

I'd probably feel the same way.

“Seeing the demons themselves is the main priority. I know you’ve already read what they’re capable of, but you also know there’s a vast difference between a scene on paper and an actual event that affects real lives. I know you’re scared to go near these demons, and rightly so, but it’s a risk I fully believe is necessary just so there’s no room for doubt when you decide what must be done in order to protect your subjects.”

Give it time Twilight..give it time.

“These statues weren’t up for three days before a string of disappearances started occurring. First, it was individuals, lone business ponies on their way home from work, mother’s on a morning stroll with their children, then entire families started vanishing, and foals were snatched right out of their classrooms. Names disappeared faster than the press could print them and the country was in a panic. Our defense force scrambled to investigate, to find a link between all these disappearances, and eventually, they found one. That’s when I got that horrific report, all the victims in the recent disappearances, every single one of them, shared a direct lineage with one of the three ponies you see before you.”

I get a cold sweat. “The kidnappers were targeting their descendants?”

Celestia nods. “Once we were made aware of that fact we laid a trap for them with their next target. They were successfully captured and brought in for interrogation. I was livid at this time, to the point of allowing some interrogation methods I’m not proud of, but we got them to spill everything. How they did it, why they did it, how many of them were left, and the location of their victims.”

Damn, that must've been a crazy time!

“There was so little left of them they couldn’t be identified. The stallions had been castrated, the mares impaled, all of them had been raped, skinned, and mutilated beyond description. Not even the foals were given mercy if anything they were even more sadistic with them. It was cruel even by the standards of demons.”

I guess even the demons have their limits...

She looks at me with a soft but serious expression. “You are a Princess now Twilight. Soon you’ll be governing your own part of Equestria and my input over your decisions will lessen over time. That growing independence, however, will come with a heavy responsibility. You must think carefully about the choices set before you and weigh the outcomes and the consequence of each carefully. Rushing to a decision out of emotion or carelessness will only lead to disaster.”

Wise words from a wise ruler.

“Princess Celestia, what an honor it is to meet you.”

It bows to my mentor casting a massive shadow over us in the process. My eyes snap to my mentor and I see her shaking. “You… No… That’s impossible. How are you here?”

“So you recognize me. That simplifies things.” The creature leans down and extends its wings of pure fire casting a massive heated shadow that encloses the section of the garden like an oven. “I’m going to offer you one chance to hear me out without resisting and spare this city a couple thousand lives. Come with me right now. I have a proposition you will be very interested in hearing.”

Oh boy, here we go!

This has a better start than the old one. Will continue to track.
From a grammar enthusiastic: Celestia and I, not Me and Celestia.

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Fixed.
I'm glad you liked it so much.
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Damn, this must be one of the most extensive comments I've ever received. Thank you so much. Oh, and just so you know, Octavia is going to have a big role in this version. You're going to get a decent picture of that next chapter.

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Can't wait to see it! By the way, I read your other story of Sweetie Devil, and it was gloriously and devilishly brilliant!!!

Nice work so far, keep it up.

Hmm, while I prefer this over what I vaguely remember of the original start, I think it has some big flaws:

1. It's bloated. You could probably cut out a third of this without losing anything of value. Too much time is spent in the first scene and chastising Twilight's priorities primarily.
2. There being an alternate way to get to this secret, extremely sensitive and strategic location is...very foolish, regardless of laws. That's a lot of extra work with traps and (hopefully, if they're not completely stupid) guards.
3. Octavia's tone was way too far...and really different from how she is in the show. I'd expect at the very least some builtup/prefacing to her statement (e.g. "Princess, I must make it clear that that's retarded.").
4. Even if cleaned up to make Octavia less anvilicious, the argument itself is dumb. With multiple rulers, the point is redundancy and specialization, and demanding Twilight devote herself to the order like Luna and Celestia do means there's no specialization. Additionally, practical experience and strategic concerns are worlds apart, and having read on something can help you be prepared for what to think of when seeing it; Twilight being rushed into practical experience makes little sense. Octavia should be stressing only that Twilight needs to know about this stuff, not that it has to be absolutely her very first priority with practical experience immediately. Also, Twilight shouldn't reference the thing with the sleepover like that, cause in the actual episode, it was clear to her in the end that the book was only a small part of making the sleepover work.
5. It completely shreds the canon of NMM battling Celestia, seemingly solely so Celestia has an example to use to get Twilight to think.
6. Killing every single descendant of some heroes for retribution is highly illogical, even for demons, because it wouldn't be expected to change Celestia's behavior. Sure, they're demons and are perverse, but that's a huge resource expenditure to go after potentially thousands of ponies before getting caught. It would make more sense if they only went after ponies going around saying (even if it wasn't true) "yeah, that hero was my great great great great...", as a message that joining the order not only won't get you glory while alive, but won't leave glory for future generations.
7. Similar to Octavia, Celestia's tone is off, being too blunt and out of character. Even if she has no feelings on the horrible stuff that happened, she would try to lessen the blow for Twilight, but instead she just spews out a paragraph. Might help to add some emphasis with italics or pauses with ellipses.
8. Further, and compounding the previous issue, the punctuation is wrong, with a comma splice and soon after missing a piece of punctuation; both could be semicolons if Celestia isn't pausing: "The stallions had been castrated, the mares impaled; all of them had been raped, skinned, and mutilated beyond description. Not even the foals were given mercy; if anything they were even more sadistic with them."
9. I also think that the first sentence is very odd, as "had been" is an odd construction (could be "were") repeated, "impaled" is rather vague, and in terms of meaning, the sentence flip-flops between talking about non-fatal, sexual-related things and more fatal things. It would probably be better to say what was done to them while alive as torture (rape, castration for the stallions, skinning, some mutilation), then how they were killed (further mutilation, impalement for the mares unless it was only partial) and how their corpses were treated in a second sentence.

Now, as to why I say diverging from canon is a flaw in general, it's because your fic doesn't really start by jarring people out of canon, it starts with the very familiar show events and characters, but then it suddenly has them different partway through the chapter. This subversion of expectations is grating when it has no emotional payoff involved, and its purpose of tweaking things to fit the fic seems unnecessary. Ask yourself, does specifically Octavia need to be specifically a hardass? I don't say this sentence or anything resembling it often, but I think Prince Blueblood would've been better for that role in this chapter.

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Firstly, thank you for leaving such in depth criticism, I really appreciate readers who take the time out to do this. Now to address your points.

1. Yeah, I agree with this. Over writing has always been one of my biggest flaws as a writer and I sort of need to get a sense of when enough is enough.

2. Agreed, I'll tweak this part a bit to make it seem less risky and foolish on the Princesses' parts.

3. Okay this one confuses me a bit. In the show, we really only get a slight glimpse of Octavia's character in episode 100, and any other information about her can only be speculated from her background appearances. We don't know enough about her to definitively say what her personality is like, even less so to start speculating on how her personality would change if she were placed into a high stress combat scenario as she is in this fic. Honestly, a big reason why I chose to use the background ponies as Order Agents is because their loosely defined character traits give me some wiggle room to spin my own interpretations

4. I would argue that any leader should at least be familiar with these kinds of things even if they're not going to make it a focus. Octavia's argument in this scene is less that Twilight needs to devote herself to the Order and more that she should at least be prepared incase a situation ever does arise where Celestia and Luna are unable to lead and she needs to take the reigns. You might have a point on her insistence on practical experience however, I'll think that one over.

5. I feel that some events from the main show had to have gone down differently in this universe due to the presence of demons. Luna was explicitly stated in this chapter to have devoted a significant amount of time to fighting the hordes of hell, founding the Order, and otherwise dealing with demons on a regular basis. Picture those descriptions of the ponies slaughtered by demons at the end of the chapter. Now picture dealing with shit like that every day, for years on end. Yeah, that's going to effect you after awhile. It would make less sense if Nightmare Moon's takeover attempt wasn't more bloody in this version.

6. I think this one is less of a plot hole and more of a failure on my part to clearly define how demons operate in this world. They're not some unified force out to burn down Equestria. (Not until Asmodeus shows up at least). They don't have the power to face Celestia, Luna, The Elements, and the Order head on. None of their attacks are focused towards a particular goal in anyway, rather it's solely for the purpose of satisfying their most perverse desires. They have no larger ideology which they fight for, no sense of kinship or nationality with which to defend. They simply hurt others because they want to. These are creatures that will skin your entire family right in front of you and force you to rape their dead corpses because they think it's funny. In the case of the descendants of the Order which they slaughtered, they simply saw an opportunity to hurt the Order and hurt Celestia. They didn't care about changing Celestia's behavior, they didn't care about causing any lasting damage to the Order, some of them probably didn't even care that Celestia killed them in the end. They only cared about hurting her, and inflicting pain on as many others as they could. Because in the grand scheme of things, that's all they will ever be capable of doing.

7. I'd say this one is debatable. Yes, Celestia tends toward a gentle guiding hand style of leadership, but I think she's more than capable of being blunt if the situation is serious enough. She certainly doesn't mince words when briefing Twilight on the latest threats to Equestria like Discord or Sombra, in the later case she casually uses dark magic just prove a point. In this context, she's making a damn important point. Twilight is in a position where one wrong move on her part can and will result in the deaths of innocent ponies, and she wants this to be crystal clear at the front of her mind before making any sudden decisions. Celestia is kind ruler, but I'd like to believe she gets a little more strict when lives are on the line.

8 & 9. Grammar mistakes and syntax errors, nothing to disagree with here. I'll get them fixed.

Now, as to why I say diverging from canon is a flaw in general, it's because your fic doesn't really start by jarring people out of canon, it starts with the very familiar show events and characters, but then it suddenly has them different partway through the chapter.

Um, familiar show characters, yes. Familiar show events, no, I don't really think so. You have Twilight stressing out about her new found Princess role sure, but then it goes straight into secret demon hunting Order, and studying really fucked up books on occult ritual and murder. Hell, the opening paragraph heavily implies that Christianity was once a thing in this world. That in and of itself wildly diverges from cannon, to the point where I'm not quite sure what more I could do to shock you out of the cannon mindset.

Now I've already explained my confusion with Octavia, so instead I'll just say, Blueblood? Really? I know he's dick, but if you're concerned about cannon authenticity then I don't see how that character could ever in a million years be seen as a demon hunter type. He's more like a snobby, narcissistic aristocrat, who would sooner fiddle as Rome burned than risk his own neck.

Thanks again for leaving such awesome criticism. I really appreciate it.

“The good majority of them,” Luna says. “Bare in mind, only the best of the best are even offered positions in the Order.”

Should be "bear in mind", not "bare".