Sunset Shimmer Goes to Hell

by scifipony

"Sunset Shimmer."

Around dawn, I woke up with Crinkle Paper's head in the crease of my haunch. Her stomach growled and she smiled as she moved her head back and forth to shake me awake. As she'd predicted, the broken skin on her head had sealed. She'd pealed off the scab. Except that the resultant area, a hoof-length pink line, was hairless there was little clue she'd been in an altercation.

She hummed a bit and smiled at me. "You sell yourself short with the mares. You do know how to distract a filly."

My face heated up.

"And he blushes, too. So cute!"

Between my receding mane-line, the sprinkling of white hairs in the brown fur around my eyes, and the wrinkles of a fifty-year old lacing my muzzle, her words held implied meanings. I blushed more.

"You saved my life."

"So you keep saying."

"Sunset Shimmer."

I tensed and narrowed my eyes at her non sequitur. I judged her look. Not jealousy. Contrition, maybe. Confession.

Her violet eyes studied the sooty hearth, then the weathered pine table as she inhaled sharply. "Yeah, that night I gave you the application... Sharp Beak told me some old news, but instructed me not to share any of it with you, or any of the other staff. He said to say no more than I said. That griffon 'is a cruel one / no nice pony, he,'" she finished, quoting some obscure piece of literature that for obvious reasons went by me. She looked me in the eye. "But he's on the way out, thanks to the fire."

I felt my eyebrow go up.

"I figure I can tell you more."

"Okay. I wasn't going to ask until you volunteered. Nice that you explained what happened to keep you from sharing."

"I do like my apples," she whispered. "Wasn't going to cross him, but then I found something better than apples." She grinned at me.

I coughed. "Go on, go on."

She snuggled her muzzle against my flank. "Really, there isn't much to tell, much that he shared anyhow. Sunset Shimmer really did lose her cool. It was the day that Twilight Sparkle blew a rift from Canterlot Castle through Canterlot, all the way to Tartarus."

"When Twilight Sparkle passed her entrance exam for Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns?"

"Yeah. That day."

"I had heard that she and the princess had had a 'public spat.'"

"More than that, White Stockings. Mostly only the royal guard saw what really happened and the princess admonished them not to speak about it. The constablulary had been clearing the hall when it began; the public didn't see the actual 'spat.' After Celestia had cleaned up Twilight Sparkle's mess, she had just finished a public announcement that still left everypony in Canterlot half-panicked. Then in teleports Sunset Shimmer, spouting nonesense. She challenged the princess and they came to blows. Kicking like earth ponies, mostly; it's what Sharp Beak said, anyway. The two held their own. Guess they were evenly matched, unlike Pear Brandy and I. What was interesting or plain weird, Sharp Beak told me, was that Sunset Shimmer was babbling something about Cerberus. It was remarkable at that moment because it was the same day that a unicorn foal had touched Tartarus through the physical world. I think eventually Sharp Beak might have asked you to explain if her babbling meant anything since you know so much about Sunset Shimmer."

"What specifically did she say?" I asked, very intrigued. I'd been obsessed with the filly; I saw that now. I had to know more.

Crinkle Paper smiled. "She babbled, 'Cerberus is running in the grim glimmering starlight toward Ponyville,' over and over and over again. Sharp Beak insists that's an exact quote, notable because she mentioned Cerberus. But Ponyville? Just a bunch of barns with a couple of houses!"

The words went round and round in my brain, spiraling and spiraling like moths about to immolate themselves in the candle's flickering flame. My mouth, oddly disengaged, said, "That was a century ago. It's now a big town—"

And... I started shaking. My skin went ice cold. The fur on my spine rose.

My intuition screamed at me and it made no sense. I mean, Starlight Glimmer, a refugee from the Hooflyn Gang War that claimed Doña Carne Asada's life, arrived in Canterlot years after Twilight Sparkle's so-called magic storm. But there it was, a stilted phrase with the words 'glimmering starlight,' essentially naming Starlight Glimmer. To certify the authenticity of the origin of the message it included the word grim, as in Grimoire. These are three words that have no reason to be together. They were no cliché, no common phrase. They had but one coded meaning that probably only I, a few EBI agents, and the princess would recognize, namely that Starlight Glimmer, failed body guard and former enforcer, was known "professionally" as Grimoire.

Cerberus is running in the grim glimmering starlight toward Ponyville.

I grunted as a shock of pain shot through my horn from the magic damper ring. It prevented the calculation that led to magic warping reality or any advanced math. Tortured, I still estimated the the statistical probability of that combination being random.

Zero.

Forget Starlight Glimmer. Celestia's orders.

What the hay?

Crinkle paper physically shook me. "White Stockings! White Stockings! You're starting to scare me. Are you ill?"

I shook my head to clear it, blinking rapidly. The headache subsided. I said, and meant it, "Reality just shattered."

Cerberus is running in the grim glimmering starlight toward Ponyville.

Were I to encode a message to ensure that nopony but me would notice Starlight Glimmer's name when it was blurted repeatedly in front of a thousand ponies, but would be repeated as news through out Equestria, to filter eventually to the ears of the staff of Tartarus and then inmates, to get to my ear, I would have done exactly what I had done to craft this phrase.

Had done? Would do? Would already have done in the future?

Maybe I was going crazy. The day Sunset Shimmer had uttered that phrase I had known nothing about Tartarus—other than mentioning it made a good way to cus—nor certainly Starlight Glimmer. Which meant...

I hadn't said it yet, but I could see that I would say it were I to know I faced the need to communicate back in time.

Which meant... I smiled. Maybe I might do the one thing nopony had ever done: "Escape from Tartarus."

"What?" Crinkle Paper said. She'd jumped out of bed and now held my head between her hooves, squishing my muzzle, looking into my eyes, actually crying.

I began to laugh. I kissed her. "Oh, I am very much okay." I kissed her harder this time, wiped her tears from her flaxen cheeks, then said, "I'm hungry. Are you hungry? I heard your tummy. My blood sugar is low. I could eat— How does that phrase go?"

It took me a few days to work it out in my head, after getting Crinkle Paper to clarify everything she had been told as best as she could remember, which meant until she started growling at me. It took me that long to really believe my conclusion, even if I might eventually prove delusional. It made sense. And I shared it with nopony.

That rift that Twilight Sparkle caused between Canterlot and Tartarus—it must have contained more than just the air between the two separated sides of the crevasse. Whatever it was, it would —had sent Sunset Shimmer to hell.

Twilight Sparkle had broken space and time, broken cause and effect. It all meant that one day I would meet Sunset Shimmer again in Tartarus when she traveled to meet future me. When that happened, I would send a message to past-me to arrive a few days ago.

When Sunset Shimmer showed up, I would send Cerberus from the gates of Tartarus to Ponyville, possibly with her assistance, leaving the only direct access to Equestria unguarded.