Judgement (Prologue)
Normally the throne room of Canterlot’s Castle was alight with sunlight, beautiful banners of the ruling diarchs, and filled with various nobles waiting to parade their personal issues before the crown to either get something genuinely needed for the country done or more likely to get a leg up on their personal rivals. Today the only thing it held in common with a typical day was the amount of nobles in attendance.
Another change was the chair containing a bound Princess Twilight Sparkle chained down with several thick lengths of orichalcum. An entire cone of the substance was locked into place on her horn by five seals that required alicorn level magic to operate and bearing dozens of antimagic bindings and wards. She was set before Celestia who was before her ponies in her most official and important capacity as final judge of dangerous criminals.
The rest of the elements hung nearer to the crowd except Applejack who was seated near Twilight. Spike, unlike Twilight’s friends, was in the back of the room being held back by Princess Luna. The princess and dragon both were visibly upset by the proceedings taking place here today while Twilight’s other friends looked only off put by being there. Neither Shining Armor nor Princess Cadence was present as they were officially foreign dignitaries and as such had no say in how Equestria handled its internal affairs. Twilight noted that might be a good thing though as Shining would probably wind up being the next one on trial after assaulting Celestia if he was present.
“Twilight Sparkle, how do you plea to the crime of genocide?” Celestia’s gaze was the harshest it had ever been in Twilight’s memory as the princess gazed down upon her from her throne.
“Repentantly guilty.” Twilight hung her head in shame as she answered. She could not talk herself out of this situation and trying to deny what happened would only make it worse. “I did what I am accused of but I did not mean to wipe out the entire changeling species.”
“So you do not deny your guilt? Very well that will make this a bit more direct. We will now hear your account of the events in the hive on the day in question. Depending on your testimony your punishment might be lessened. Know that we will know if you speak a falsehood. Applejack will let me know if you lie.” Unsaid by Celestia was what Twilight knew to be a truth, that Celestia could read Twilight’s face enough that she could not lie in her presence even if the Element of Honesty was not there to see this.
“Very well. I woke up to find myself in a black chamber surrounded by green light…“
Twilight looked around the dark chamber she had awoken to find herself in trying to notice anything distinct enough to tell her where she was and who had her. The upside to her scan was that she at least knew who had her. The downside was that it meant she was rather screwed. The black colored organic chamber lit in green could only mean one perpetrator. A resin like substance held her immobilized to a wall where she observed these things through mostly closed eyes. This almost caused Twilight to sigh in annoyance but she held it in. If she had learned anything from her youth as a political bargaining chip, as the Princess’s student, it was to avoid drawing your captor’s attention until you were ready to make a move to escape.
Apparently that advice did not help when your captor could sense emotions. At Twilight’s initial feeling of both aggravation and worry Chrysalis had already stepped before her somewhat closed eyes. “No need to pretend to still be asleep. I can tell you are already awake.”
Twilight knew it would be pointless to continue to act as if she was still merely sleeping and looked up into the face of the changeling queen. For some reason at this point she merely rolled her eyes as she had been in this face off with the queen too many times before. “Really? Still going for the dramatic confrontation? When are you going to leave me alone?”
“Why my dear, you wound me so. I thought we had a good rapport really. I show up and threaten all you’ve ever known and love and you fight me, rinse and repeat. According to the hive’s projections we’ll be doing this for at least the next several decades and I found that unacceptable. Luckily for the both of us I have a solution that is not only efficient but gets both of us out of our little war.”
Twilight watched as Chrysalis moved her head away from her own and watched the queen wave her hoof around at the resin that bound Twilight to the wall. As she observed her bindings she noticed small vaguely orange veins running through the resin to her coat. “Oh? And what is your solution to this rather tedious dance we’ve found ourselves in?”
“I’m going to turn you into a changeling drone.” The bug queen smiled in her usual predatory fashion as she looked onto her victim. “It won’t be easy to accomplish now that you are an alicorn but we will succeed in making you into a convert to my hive. No more of you standing in my way but rather paving it ahead of me. It really is the best solution and keeps us from escalating until we are destroying either of our people.” Chrysalis looked rather happy about her solution.
“That is ridiculous. I understood that you had to have a more or less broken will in order to be converted. I am still healthy and very much upset rather than cowed at the moment.”
“Ah, but for how long? Do you hear them yet? The sounds of your soon to be brothers and sisters as their thoughts crawl in the background of your mind assaulting you with various questions and sensations?” Chrysalis asked the pony princess even as she began to fiddle with some sort of organic knob on the wall just out of Twilight’s field of view.
“What do you mea…?” Twilight cut off as she felt an assault of information lash into her mind. It was nothing like anything she had ever experienced even when joined with the others in the middle of using the Elements of Harmony. Thousands of other minds dumping stray thoughts into her own in a single moment with the most overwhelming sensation being that of smug victory coming from the most active thread of thoughts jabbing away at her.
“You see? I have already successfully linked your mind into our collective. I felt this was the more efficient way. Bodily torture I already know you can somewhat resist given what my spies have told me and my own observations. On the other hand I think we both know the truth to your reaction to when you are harried and can’t think straight for any length of time.”
Twilight was trying to keep a calm façade even as she could feel her own panic begin to set in. It was starting to get hard to tell which thoughts were hers and which where those of others outside herself. “This will never work,” she managed to stutter out even as she worked to keep herself from realizing she was hearing Chrysalis as much in her head as she was with her ears.
“Cliché lines already? My dear this will work perfectly. Eventually the cacophony will break your little pony mind and then you will be a more than willing conscript. Once that happens turning your body into that of a changeling will be a mere formality. You will break and we both know it. And you know we both know it because I can now hear your thoughts as assuredly as you can hear the ones I want you to.” The queen’s sense of victory grew. “I hope you do appreciate the trouble I had to go through for this. We won’t be able to try this approach again for another ten years at least but it will be worth it. You alone keep interfering with my plans and this will put a stop to it.”
“But how?” Twilight managed to ask around thoughts about how Appleloosa was a good place to strike for some food before she could be caught and how to create a new venom compound that would immobilize prey faster. She was fairly certain those thoughts were not her own and felt some distress at the fact that a part of her mind actually weighed in on both questions with helpful answers.
“A good question my dear future minion. An interesting fact that you seem to know is that the ritual to turn a pony into a changeling requires they either be willing or so broken to the point that it doesn’t matter. Luckily my changelings are rather gifted in fields besides magic most notably science is one in which they excel. We found an interesting compound that would activate a portion of a pony’s mind that would open them up to our hive mind. The downside is that we can only make a limited supply due to the reagents needed. The upside, I can now convert even the most strong willed of ponies to my side cleanly without the usual mess of beating them insensate over and over.”
Twilight strained to use her magic in an attempt to escape having realized that those little veins in the resin are probably the vehicle for the mentioned compound. Chrysalis seeing her start to concentrate taps the unseen dial once more increasing the mental strain on the alicorn and disrupting her attempts at escape. “Now now, no more of that. This set up allows me to control how strong of a dose you get and thus how much of the hive you can sense. Keep struggling and I’ll dial it all the way up to the maximum just to watch you squirm.”
Twilight looked down to her bindings seeing a visible increase in the amount of veins she can see. She began to rack the ever more distracted and busy mind to find a solution. She had already decided that simply escaping wouldn’t be enough because it would seem that the changelings could just make more of this chemical and perhaps capture an even more important figure to bring to their side.
“… and I had also come to the conclusion that I couldn’t just let Chrysalis continue to pose a threat. I had to think of something, anything, to deal with this situation.” Twilight looks up to Celestia with somewhat saddened eyes though there are no tears there. Something that Celestia personally found somewhat disturbing as in spite of Twilight’s obvious remorse she doesn’t display the normal emotional range of her student anymore.
“So you are maintaining that the changeling queen was experimenting on you with a drug that would have eventually allowed her to bind your mind into her hive and let her control you?”
“Yes. It was a rather desperate situation with no easy solutions that I could see. As all of you present know I’m no stranger to being held prisoner but when one is under such duress one grasps at straws to save not only themselves but everything they hold dear. I knew that if I didn’t get free I would be used to cause harm to my home so I had to fight back. The only tool I had that I could use at that moment was my mind and it was busy being distracted. Naturally I decided to try and get it back in line the only way I could. By solving the life or death puzzle I was in.”
Twilight was desperately trying to get her thoughts in line before they got swept up into the hive or more of her concentration was lost on solving problems for her enemies. As she scrambled to get her mind under control she began to notice an interesting side effect. Her answers to the thoughts coming into her head were being accepted and used which meant that the communication went both ways. This could be the solution to her problem. Perhaps she could use this to find a way to escape and so she set to test that theory. She first thought hard about wanting to know how much of the chemical that was being used on her there was. She got back a response by one of what she got the impression was a technical drone that it was just enough to keep her under its sway for a day. She next tried to think quietly about what to do if she was captured. The almost unanimous response the hive gave back was to fight fang and horn for escape. It would seem as if the collective were not aware she wasn’t one of their own as things stood. As she did this she tuned back into the real world to notice that Chrysalis was staring at her intently once again.
“I see you are already trying to adjust. Why fight it anyway? I can assure you that there is more harmony and unity in our collective hive mind than there ever was amongst you ponies. Join me my dear and I will convert your friends so they can join you. Surely this would be a better choice than to have to be driven mad first.”
Twilight mentally scraped together a few thoughts and directed them at the changeling queen telling her what she could do with her offer. She could however have done without knowing that the queen literally could do that if she wanted to. The look she got in response for her thought roused her attention though and almost made her laugh.
“I see we are going to have to clean that dirty mind of yours out with soap when this is finished. You don’t think such things to your queen.” Chrysalis was not happy at the offense nor pleased with the thread of thoughts she felt coming from her victim. Those kinds of thoughts meant Twilight had likely realized something.
Forgoing mental communication and in an effort to keep Chrysalis minutely distracted, Twilight opted for a verbal comment instead. “Oh Chryssy, this was one step too far you know. This communication thing works both ways as you yourself just definitively confirmed for me. While you are slowing down my ability to process thought and distracting me can work nothing prevents me from doing the same in return to you.”
“What can a single mind come up with that a collective of them can’t easily handle?” was the queen’s response.
“How about every magical theorem ever postulated at once? Perhaps the rules by which Pinkie and physics interact? Or maybe, just maybe, some of my own specialized theories in the many fields I hold degrees?”
Already Chrysalis could feel it as several of her lesser drones began to slow down and stop. She froze up in a realization so horrifying that she didn’t broadcast it to the rest of the hive which would turn out to be a mistake. The realization that Twilight had just overloaded a few hundred drones to the point their minds completely shut down. She had put in safe guards to keep the link from killing Twilight with its impact but had not thought to put any in for the reverse.
Twilight could feel her mind speed up a bit from where it had devolved into during her session. As such she was able to recall, partially between herself and partially through the collective mind she was now tapping into, that Chrysalis could step in and put a stop to what Twilight was doing. Without stopping to consider why the queen wasn’t doing anything she set her drones, as she had come to think of the ones that were aiding her, to work on inundating the changeling queen with distracting thoughts and sensations. Chrysalis might be more used to handling a hive mind as its dominant factor but she wasn’t used to so many simultaneous requests for information and help in a single moment.
As Chrysalis got bogged down in both horror and mental dead weight Twilight freed up her mind to target other key supports of the hive mind structure. She could now tap into some of her knowledge of mind magic to aid in her assaults which made her much more dangerous. As she began to tear into them on this now psychic crusade she was not aware of the fact that the minds she was attacking were actually part of the physical hive itself. Once she was finished with tearing apart the mind she had targeted, telling herself that all she was doing was possibly knocking them into a coma parts of the hive were giving up the ghost and collapsing in on themselves. Those minds she had assaulted set to shutting themselves off and down in order to save themselves thus robbing the changelings connected to them of a large portion of their mental network. As a result they completely collapsed into either insanity or simply mentally shut down resulting in scores of casualties for each mind Twilight assaulted.
Chrysalis could only watch in horror as Twilight set about killing her citizens. She might have been doing it unknowingly but she was doing more harm to changelings than the queen ever intended to do to ponies. She began to move to destroy the machine keeping her connected but realized she could not move a single hoof. Terror set in as she turned to look at her bound captive and most likely her soon to be executioner. All the changeling minds that were still even vaguely operable had latched onto her for support to keep from going completely feral or mad and as such were taking up enough of her mind that she could not concentrate on motor control.
“Oh Chrysalis, I am sorry about all this but I can’t let you do what you were planning on doing to me. Also, I find myself loathe to deal with you for the next several decades of repeat battles. I’m not my mentor and I have no intention of constantly fighting the same enemies over and over. I’m afraid I’m going to have to just put you down now.” Twilight prepared a spell she was sure she would never need to use. It was designed to induce brain death in its targets. The only problem with the spell normally was that it only targeted the castor but in this situation Twilight had enough of an opening to hijack Chrysalis and her magic which meant that it was Chrysalis casting the spell on herself. In moments the changeling queen fell to the floor as her spirit departed onto its next life.
After a few moments in which Twilight reveled in her now free mind she began to realize something somewhat worrying. She somewhat expected to feel a return of the strain as the now possibly only dominant mind in the collective but felt no thoughts alien to her own point of view. This was not a good thing and she desperately searched throughout the mental landscape to find any one else using it. She found nothing save a few lingering sensations of hunger before they too ceased to register.
Leaving out her last few lines of conversation with the changeling queen, Twilight reported all that she could recall of those final moments. She went on to detail using her magic to break free of the wall once she had realized there was no longer a mental storm preventing her from doing so and stepping out to see what had happened. She also went on to detail how she had found only a small scattering of changelings still moving about and how they had attacked her much like a mad animal would and how she had to defend herself from the aggression. This almost always ended in another dead changeling before Twilight could stop them most disturbingly in them splattering themselves against her personal shield before she could grab them out of the air and stop them.
“So you see it would appear that I did indeed kill off the entire changeling race but I did not do so with malicious intent. I did not realize I was doing that much harm to them.”
Applejack nods her head in verification of Twilight’s story so far. Celestia rakes her gaze across the rest of the Elements for a moment before turning her focus back to Twilight. “And then what happened?”
“Well at that point my friends arrived intent on saving me only to find a hive of corpses and my self stained in changeling viscera. I asked them to help me find any that survived and at first they were hesitant but I eventually persuaded them to help.” Twilight told her former mentor. “I was hoping that with the lot of us we could at least save a few of them from my accidental genocide. Unfortunately we couldn’t find a single one.”
“We have testimonies already on hand from the others as to what they saw and heard. Is it true you drove at least three of the remaining changelings to suicide in front of the others?” Celestia asked.
“Not intentionally no. I merely found them and requested they come with me. Upon looking at me they turned and rammed their heads into the wall snapping their necks. I’m unsure if it was some sort of fear that caused it or if they were just that lost without direction.”
“Rarity reported seeing sparks of your magic surrounding them.”
“I was trying to use some of my magic to synthesize a psychic connection to them to calm them down not drive them to their deaths.”
“Twilight, ignorance of a crime is no defense. Even if you did not mean to kill all the changelings you still did it. As much as the court would normally trust your word we can not in good coconscious do so here. There is no evidence to confirm or deny your motivations than your testimony and some of what others witnessed seems somewhat contrary to what you maintain.” Celestia closed her eyes as she thought of how to handle this situation.
Spike and Luna both struggled with themselves to keep from leaping to Twilight’s defense. As they both started to move to stop the proceedings they felt a small nudge in their minds. Twilight’s voice flowed through their minds. “Stop, don’t interfere. I am sure I know what will happen and I need friends here in this country. Spike, please stay with Luna. Luna, please keep Spike safe and with you when you can. The other girls are going to be angry at me and resentful and I don’t want them taking it out on you, Spike.”
Luna’s eyes somewhat widened in shock for a moment before she nods her head. “I will look after your drakeling, Twilight.” She sent the thoughts to the alicorn having got over her surprise at Twilight being able to use a telepathy spell even under all the antimagic warding.
Spike simply sends a plea down the mental connection to Twilight to fight this situation. “Please Twilight surely there is a way you can get out of this?”
“No Spike. I did the crime I stand accused of even if it was by accident. I must pay the price for it or else I’m not setting a good example for you, my son, or the ponies. Do not worry though; I know we will be in touch. Please stay with Luna as she is one of the few ponies I can trust in this situation,” was Twilight’s response to the dragon’s plea.
Celestia’s eyes snap open as she has come to her decision so all conversations in the room, mental or otherwise, cease. “Twilight Sparkle, heir to House Star and my former student, you are to be exiled from Equestria and its lands. If you set hoof in them again you will be sealed in stone. Your titles and properties are to be stripped from you before you are to be transported out of the country. You will only be allowed a single pannier’s worth of supplies before we will be leaving you in the Badlands on the doorstep to the mass grave you created. What you do from there we have washed our hooves of.” The crowd that was in attendance seemed to almost be ready to celebrate which was unsurprising giving their natural hate of Twilight even before her act of genocide. All the nobles and politicians felt it was time that thorn in their side was dealt with and best of all they didn’t have to dirty their hooves to do so.
Twilight, Luna, and Spike had been expecting this punishment as execution was not possible for an alicorn and had not been in times before even Discord’s reign. Twilight’s friends, the other Element Bearers, seemed upset about the situation but it was obvious they felt Twilight was more likely intentionally guilty than not. Even Twilight knew she had intentionally killed Chrysalis and that it was the start of a potentially slippery slope that would end with her being more like Sombra than she had ever feared she would be. Perhaps being away from pony lands and some of the stress of her title would help her avoid that descent.
“You are allowed to make a final statement before the guards here will escort you back to your home so you may prepare and then they will escort you to your exile.”
“I accept this punishment as I am guilty even if I did this act ignorant of what it would cause. I do, however, object to having been treated like such a threat. These bindings were silly as is the antimagic cone you’ve had put on my head. I think its time to remove them, don’t you?” In one act, perhaps the first real act of defiance to Celestia in her life, Twilight stood up as the chains that had been holding her to the chair sloughed off as if they were merely water and the cone over her horn simply shattered into small particles.
“Good day to you all.” Twilight turned and walked from the room. She looked over her supposed friends considering this just yet another betrayal by them once again. As she walked up to the guard that awaited her in the front, which were still standing stock still in shock to Twilight freeing herself, she sent one more message to Luna and Spike. “I’ll get in contact with you two as soon as I can. Luna, see if you can’t find me in the dreamscape tonight and if you can bring Spike. We are going to need to plan for what comes next.”
Celestia continued to keep her steely glare upon Twilight as she was finally escorted from the throne room. It had hurt her to do this to her most favored pupil but she could not allow such a crime to go unpunished. It would not only hurt her position and upset her subjects, nobles and commoners alike, if she had been lenient but it would have also set Twilight down a dark path. At least it had with Sombra when she had pardoned some of his crimes in his youth and Twilight had been the most powerful unicorn she had seen since his time and as an alicorn was only more of a potential threat than a mere mad unicorn ever was. Tonight she would weep as she had not done since banishing Luna. Perhaps, in a few hundred years, she could allow Twilight to return once more.
Stats
Page generated in 0.024 seconds
Total duration
1,041 users online
1,419,705 hits today, 1,822,946 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Excellent start, looking forward to more.
It was an accident! So it's not genocide, it's speciesslaughter.
very well written, although i saw a couple of punctuation errors in there when she was recapping what happened during her capture. all in all, i can't wait for more! i just hope this isn't going to be one of those stories where it takes months for it to update, only to ultimately be abandoned. i love exiled twilight fics, since they always incorporate my favorite themes all into one story.
4148860
4148908
4148950
Heh, thanks you all for reading and commenting. I'll see about fixing those mistakes when I have a bit more time. I almost didn't get this out today as it was given how many distractions kept popping up while writing it and trying to get it posted.
Hopefully it will not suffer from that kind of delay but I can't guarantee it'll be finished by the end of the week like my other stories mostly have been, if for no other reason that I expect to be rather busy the next few days.
Nice start. One thing I feel that should have been brought up in the trial is that twilight was effectively backed into a wall with no way out and had she not done what she did, they would not even be having said trial. Even with celestia feeling terrible about doing that to twilight, the fact they all ignored it is only proof of THEIR innocent arrogance. If twilight had been turned, as celestia said, she is already a threat in power so even with Lunas help it may have been a downhill sloped battle.
Oh wow someone added a story, makes me feel bad for pulling out of the contest. Maybe I should post what I have so far.
the combination of the tile and the still existing mind link......im guessing the changelings arent gone yet and twilight will lead them or better yet raise them (would make sense if she found some hidden eggs)
Im looking forward to the next chapter^^
Not the greatest writing in the world, but not bad at all. Really really good premise though, so I'm definitely interested.
I really don't buy this. She's hopeless at lying, so it just makes sense that she'd be hopeless at detecting lies too. Yes, she's the "Element of Honesty", but we've never seen any indication that any of the elements have given any of their bearers any special abilities that they didn't have before.
You could have just had Celestia cast a lie detector spell, as many other unicorns have done in many other fics.
i like it.
And clestia, why would she come back when she has nothing to come back to at that point except spike?
Uhm... in the interest of my curiosity, anyone good with writing lines for Zecora?
4149252
4150936
4153255
4158519
Thanks for reading and I hope you are enjoying the story and will enjoy where it goes.
4149844
Yeah, well I would like to say its for the contest but I don't think this will be ready by the second deadline. I'm just going to go ahead and write it because I spent months planning the thing anyway at this point. Admittedly, with how long chapter one was I might make it long enough for the third one.
4158507
I also have no reason not to assume that the Elements confer powers to their bearers either. We have never been explicitly told they did not that I am aware of and as usual this is an alternate universe story so some things in the world might work differently.
4152188
Shhh! You'll spoil the story.... oops.
4158624 , don't worry I will like if it turns out anything like the prologue
and I am sorta good at ponies like zicora but I can not make something NOT confusing. read my stories if you want prove.
.....
More...
4159189
Don't worry, I intend to have the next chapter up by tomorrow night barring accidents, alien abduction, and brain washing.
Well, the story is promising, and I do like me some badass Twilight. There's a lack of that, I think.
The only irritating bit was how quickly Twi's friends threw her under the bus. Not entirely unprecedet, but it's still kinda OC I think. And frankly, it just makes for a worse story if they're just wrong.
This story wasn't badly written, but I just couldn't buy the premise. There is enough leeway in what Twilight did that anyone with two brain cells could probably successfully defend her, and you'd think of all ponies Celestia would be the most willing to forgive Twilight for a crime she didn't mean to commit. I'm not going to down-vote but I won't be reading on
The imitation of justice in this chapter is just sad. Ignorance of an action's consequences is an entirely adequate defense; it's ignorance of the law that's traditionally no excuse. That is, if one has no way to know that pushing a button will (say) override safety measures leading to death or injury, pushing the button is not murder or manslaughter; if there were some way to discern the button's function, it might be negligence or similar, but even that clearly does not apply here. Add to that the mitigating factors of "self-defense", "defending the Crowns" (she's a head of state, seriously), and "magical supervillain trap gone horribly wrong", and, as presented, only a kangaroo court could ever find Twilight guilty. And Twilight should know this.
Reading the other two chapters, it seems that her former friends know there's more to the events than she's aware of, but that just makes the trial scene worse. They're falsely condemning her on insufficient evidence in order to compensate for some perceived guilt in evidence they can't reveal? Great. Awesome. It's wonderfully fair to banish someone for secret charges they can't defend against because they literally don't even remember them and which you aren't going to mention. Nobody expects the Equestrian Inquisition!
And mind you, these are not minor details of some particular court system that can reasonably vary; these are fundamental principles of justice that cannot be violated without severe problems. Such as we see here. (The note by another poster that there's allegedly magical lie detection in place, but that Celestia then ignores this verification in order to dismiss some of Twilight's defense as unfounded, is just the icing on the cake.)
There might be the germ of an interesting story here, but I don't think it's worth continuing to read. The premise is too wrapped within layers of idiot balls and betrayal to be tolerable.
Very good intro, nice work.
So basically Twilight used the hivemind like a botnet to DDOS Chrysalis, bricking most of the involved changelings in the process, and then made Chrysalis do the equivalent of executing a "killer poke" instruction. I guess that's certainly one way of dealing with her situation.
4947959
I was about to reply but it seems for some reason you replied to this chapter with the contents of the next few chapters into the story, and that ain't fly.
But yes, I do agree with that first paragraph. This feels like a scripted court where both parties are slipping into OOC territories to make it happen. Celestia might be convinced by the nobles to do this because fuck em sniveling bastards, but Twilight is just too calm during the whole ordeal (especially the flashbacks), and her friends should've unconditionally went to her defense. Plus, the only ignorance punishable is ignorance of the law. Unintentional genocide is still unintentional, and while the punishment might be as severe as possible, the most Twilight could've gotten is multiple accounts of accidental man(pony? 'ling?)slaughter.
Then again, Equestrian court of law is not the same as what generally applies here on Earth.