Familiar, but Different.
“My dearest, most faithful student, Twilight. You know that I value your diligence and that I trust you completely.”
“But you simply must stop reading those dusty old books!”
Twilight gasped. It had taken her ages to find all the reference material for that prophecy!
“I know that you helped solve a long-standing question about the Chaos plague, but you are digging into things that are restricted for a reason.”
Each word was hitting her like a hammer to her chest.
Doesn’t she see that something bad’s going to happen?
Wait.
Twilight paused as she made her way to the Canterlot docks to hear the rest of the letter Spike was refusing to read until she was on her way to….somewhere.``It made sense, Celestia often didn’t say what she truly wanted, and thinking about it logically she’d be more familiar with a millennia-old prophecy than Twilight would.
After all, she lived through it.
When her view of Canterlot quickly receded behind her Spike opened the scroll and began reading again.
“My dear Twilight. There’s more to somepony’s life than studying.”
“So I’m sending you to supervise the preparations for the summer sun celebration in this year's location, Ponyville.”
This was harder to decode than usual, what answer couldn’t be found in books?
Twilight Hadn’t made any progress when Spike read her the following line.
“And, I have an even more essential task…”
This was it, right here was the crux of the issue.
“Make some friends!”
Or not.
“Look alive Twilight, the princess arranged for you to stay in a library. Doesn’t that make you happy?”
Wait, that was it. It’s not that the answers wouldn’t be found in books. She meant that the archives in Canterlot weren’t sufficient!
“Yes, yes it does. Because I know that I’m right. I’ll check on the preparations as fast as I can, then get to the library to find some proof of Nightmare Moon's return.”
“Then when will you make friends like the princess said?”
“The princess said to check on the preparations. I am her student and I’ll do my royal duty.”
Twilight landed on solid ground for the first time in several minutes. “The fate of Equestria does not rest on me making friends.”
After another quick back and forth she decided to speak to a pink pony, only for her to gasp and run away faster than eyes could follow.
“That was…”
Twilight was about to say ‘interesting’ when something caught her eye. The effect of a ‘notice me not’ charm fizzled out against her horn with a small clash of magic and her eyes met…
Herself?
A lavender Alicorn with purple eyes and a two-toned mane. Before she could even wonder about what she was seeing the crowded street blocked her view and when the view cleared the alicorn was gone, not even leaving behind the telltale aftereffects of teleportation.
Which was impossible.
Not as impossible as seeing herself as an Alicorn, but still…
Imagine the hubris of thinking of yourself as a Deity.
“Equestria to Twilight? You there?”
Twilight blinked, filing the odd encounter away for further study. “Yeah, yeah. What’s first on the list?”
~~~~~
That was dumb.
Time peeked out at the much younger version of herself when she knew her focus wasn’t on her anymore.
She’d forgotten to add herself to the Notice Me Not charm. It’d been so long since she’d interacted with alternate versions of herself that she’s mostly forgotten the procedure. This also wasn’t a…normal cycle, to begin with, Chaos’s tampering was evident everywhere.
Ponyville was half as populous as it should have been for one. Hopefully, her student did her job and the key players to history are about.
Speaking of the key players of history, her mind went back to what she said...
The fate of Equestria does not rest on me making friends, huh.
She’d not seen them for quite some time. Her experiments involving them were long since finished. It was one of the first things she did, alas none of them had the spark needed to ascend as she had.
Even after extensive testing on the matter. Body modifications, possession, and even soul magic didn’t seem to do the trick, some underlying force was preventing her from doing what Celestia did for her aeons ago.
There was of course Nightmare Rarity, but she wasn’t satisfied by such half measures.
Time spent the rest of the day wandering aimlessly. At first, she’d roamed the central square to have the biggest line of sight in the whole town.
After that she took to the sky, hovering on a soft cushion of magic. No matter what she tried to catalog she found herself drawn to her old hoofsteps. Giving it up as hopeless she spent the remainder of the day keeping track of herself.
She couldn’t just jump to the confrontation with Nightmare Moon because she might miss some of Chaos’s tampering, she was in uncharted waters now.
So she had to wait and watch herself.
While noting the differences down on a scroll, of course, no reason not to add to the archives.
The Apple family was missing a few members, they were still friendly but you could tell it was wearing on them.
Rarity had lost both her parents to the Chaos Plague, leaving her to raise Sweetie Belle alone.
Rainbow Dash was also an orphan and raised by a militant orphanage. Good to see her drive to join the wonderbolts intact, even if her personality was a bit rougher than before.
Fluttershy seemed the least affected, perhaps Chaos still had a soft spot for the pegasus? Maybe that could become useful in the future if a hostage became necessary.
“Don’t even think about it.”
Time swore she just heard Chaos’s voice over her shoulder, the threat hanging in the air gone like the wind.
What was she doing again? Ah, right. Fluttershy seemed almost normal.
A countermeasure suddenly activated, a small sound playing next to her head. She looked and saw a blue orb.
Someone just used mind magic on her! She spent the next hour searching for who could have done such a thing, Her efforts becoming more overt the longer whatever it was that did that eluded her.
She would not be controlled!
~~~~~
Twilight’s day was going terribly. Gone were her aspirations of getting this done in a reasonable timeframe.
“And that’s the story of my whole life. Up until today, wanna hear about that too?”
“Oh yes please.”
For someone named fluttershy she got over her shyness really quickly.
To top it all off, her horn was aching from an abundance of Celestial magic. She was trying to narrow down which Alicorn it could be and was getting nowhere.
She was aware of Love, Hate, Life, Death, Light, Darkness, and Time. But the last two Celestia was unusually circumspect on. She was also hesitant to mention Darkness, that name being little more than a whisper.
Even that little bit of Information was hard-won from Celestia, on the pretense she wouldn’t repeat it to anypony. That left one unaccounted for.
To make matters worse, the magic seemed achingly familiar, it was definitely not Celestia’s, her magic felt warm and soothing, like the sun on a cool afternoon, soft and gentle..even motherly.
Shaking her head she continued down that train of thought. she’d read recounts about how her magic once felt like a poorly restrained inferno during a war almost 1000 years ago.
Though picturing Celestia as a warrior didn’t seem to fit with what she knew of her.
Anyway, she’s getting sidetracked. One could only distract themselves so much, and her irritation was beginning to show.
“We really have to go, it’s time for this little guy to go to bed.”
Slamming the door shut into the darkened library she sighed in relief.
“Surprise!”
Twilight’s groan was swallowed up by the cheering ponies all around her.
It took some doing, but eventually, she made her way to the sleeping area above the library proper. The place was quaint, but poorly insulated, she could clearly hear the party going on in full swing, not seeming to have noticed its namesake leaving.
“Libraries are supposed to be quiet” was what she muttered to herself as she dealt with the headache induced by an abundance of Celestial magic suffusing the area.
Absently rubbing her horn she wondered briefly if she should attempt to pierce the notice me not charm.
Speaking of hubris, if it really was an alicorn, the only way she’d break through is if the deity let her, and considering the fact that she’d already ‘fixed’ it when it failed before that clearly wasn’t on the table.
Twilight found herself staring up at the moon, seeing several stars slowly drifting toward it.
“The stars will set me free.”
This was bad, she’d gotten nothing done, and even worse, she couldn’t even look up a solution seeing as a bunch of crazy ponies were still dancing the night away like crazy.
When She asked Spike about it he just gave the typical child answer of “It’s the summer sun celebration, everypony has to stay up late or they’ll miss the sunrise.”
Several hours passed like this.
As she got ready to follow the townsponies to the location of the festival, she saw that they were heading to the town hall Rarity decorated earlier. Usually, these ceremonies were done outside, but today they picked an indoor venue.
Twilight couldn’t help looking up at the moon as the four stars joined with it, the face plastered upon its surface vanishing from sight. What’s worse is that Alicorn she was feeling seemed to have vanished quite suddenly as well.
An intense feeling of dread hit her, only getting worse as Celestia didn’t make her planned appearance.
“She’s gone!”
Panicked voices filled the air as swirling blue/black mist slowly coalesced into the form of an Alicorn.
A dark and hate-fueled voice filled the air. “A party just for me? You shouldn’t have! Throwing a farewell ceremony for the sun. such a novel idea, I shoulda done it myself.”
Some guards charged her, only to be flung back by a burst of mana followed by a lightning strike, likely used to disguise the magic usage.
“Really? Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with? Has my Sister really erased me from history?”
“You’re Nightmare moon.”
Twilight herself is shocked at her own voice, her senses were screaming at her that this was a dangerous situation, the magic flowing from this Dark Alicorn was overflowing with spite, hatred, and resentment. Twilight would be surprised if she even cared about leveling the entire city.
“Oh my, I had heard my sister found an apprentice, and such an odd choice as well. Don’t think I don’t feel you nearby, Time.”
Time?
As in the Goddess of Time?
Seemed one mystery was solved, and three more took its place.
From Celestia’s scant few times she spoke about the deity, she said she mostly lived like a hermit, in a tower surrounded by magic tomes.
Honestly, it sounded fantastic, but a more pressing issue reared its ugly head.
Why did Time look like her?
~~~~~
It was fruitless. Whatever just used mind magic on her was nowhere to be seen, and she’d already given away her presence with her unrestrained use of magic.
She was floundering too much in the dark here, so she decided to summon the protocol scroll to figure out what she was doing wrong.
It took several minutes before she realized something was wrong.
Her scroll hadn’t shown up.
“What is my observer doing?” With a sigh, she stepped to the left to attempt to return out of the timeline, only for the world to go…weird.
It looked like she entered a funhouse, to her left and right countless versions of herself showed up, looking up she saw the same happening on the vertical plane, looking like an infinite grid of herself looking up. She raised a hoof, and countless other purple hooves raised as well.
Attempting to move forward made them do the same, blocking her as if she was trying to walk into a mirror.
Resynchronizing herself to the timeline she noticed something for the first time.
Her event horizon was gone. The barrier that wrapped around her when she entered the timeline was missing. Any being from the timeline touching the barrier found itself ripped apart and scattered across all of time, she often had to make preparations to stop such a thing from happening.
Time Jumped when a bird landed on her shoulder, the last being to touch her had been Chaos.
For the first time since her ascension, she was fully aligned with the timeline.
This was bad. Being Immune to everything inside the timeline was her main trump card. Her training with Clover showed that she wasn’t any slouch in combat, but she just lost her biggest shield.
She didn’t age anymore, so that wasn’t a concern, but if she couldn’t leave the timeline, even if she did attempt to go back in time to change an outcome, it would fail. Previously she’d have to do some prep work to avoid a paradox. But now even that wasn’t an option anymore.
The next experiment was to go forward in time a little bit, which worked.
Kinda. Even though she wasn’t outside the timeline anymore, she should still be able to move forward at least.
The problem was it looked like a solid barrier of rainbow energy was stopping her. As she probed the barrier she noticed it wasn’t a complete one, there were various ‘holes’ in the barrier, sections of the future that weren’t locked out completely.
She decided to test the ‘solid’ parts of the barrier to see if she could brute force her way through.
Her horn started to ache, the same feeling she’s been dealing with for some time now.
The magic seemed familiar. Analyzing it for a moment she felt the magic for the first time. It was Soothing, reminding her of hours spent simply reading books on a soft bed.
It was Harmony.
One more time she tried to leave the timeline, the infinite versions of herself showed up right on cue. Bracing herself she walked forward, into the mirror image of herself right in front.
She passed right through and wound up back where she started, facing the opposite direction.
She was locked into this timeline.
What new form of Harmony backlash was this? Harmony hadn’t ever done something like this before.
Something occurred to her, and she cast several spells in quick succession.
She had forgotten to reset the mind magic alert, and now she was expending some magic to shield her mind. This wasn’t overly taxing, but it did take a bit of focus. Which was the main reason she left one of various magical countermeasures in place instead, they just needed to be fed magic every once in a while to keep them active.
Which was why she didn’t usually do this constantly, few beings could affect the mind of an Alicorn, to begin with, but that number was never zero.
Especially now that she was synced with time, she’d not felt this vulnerable in Millenia
The next experiment was to see where those ‘holes’ in the barrier led.
Harmony wanted her to do something here. Stepping through the hole she found herself right at an encounter with Nightmare Moon.
Well, only one of the encounters. This one seemed to be almost finished, Nightmare Moon was raving about honesty. There was the familiar collapsed cliff, but at the bottom was a…poker table?
It was only then that Time noticed the playing cards slowly drifting down, Applejack was giving Twilight the ‘trust fall’ scenario, but behind them Nightmare was furious, she was already casting a spell to kill them.
Normally Time would have let it happen, but a familiar pain reared its ugly head once again.
The Harmony backlash headache started again, but this time it seemed to guide her. Her magic flowed into a spell pattern she’d never seen before. Which was being added to the growing list of ‘impossible’ things happening this Cycle.
She didn’t have enough time to memorize the spell pattern, one moment she was watching Nightmare charge up a blast, and the next she was dispersed into blue mist and fleeing the scene.
While she absently floated above the chasm trying to make sense of it all she noticed eyes on her.
Two sets of eyes, one from her younger self, and another from Rainbow Dash.
Needing time to think she vanished, pulled along the timestream like a fish caught on a lure.
~~~~~
“What the buck was that?!” Rainbow Dash was in her face once again. “You really are a spy aren’t ya?”
Twilight pushed her away. “No, of course, I’m not. I don’t know what’s happening either. But I swear I saw a glimpse of her once before, in town.”
“You did? Was it before or after I left to plan your party?”
“Before…no, wait. Right afterward.”
“Oooooooh! I knew my Pinkie Sense was telling me something! But the message was weird. ‘An old friend will stop by to visit’ doesn’t happen very often. And I’ve counted everypony in town no less than four separate times. So that means my friend must be invisible!”
It took Twilight several seconds to try to decipher what Pinkie just said, a few moments later she failed and could only ask one question dumbly.
“Pinkie Sense?”
“Don’t worry about it, it’s just one o’ the things ya just accept about Pinkie. Tell me, yer tail’s not twitchin’ is it?”
“Noperoonie!”
“Good, being this close to ah unstable cliff is bad news. Let’s get this show on tha road, we’ve got ah castle ta find.”
~~~~~
The next thing she knew Time was floating above the six ponies as they made their way deeper into the forest.
From what she knew, Applejack’s test wasn’t until much later, however it wasn’t the only thing to change because of Chaos’s tampering. Now it seemed like Pinkie’s test was next.
Below she could see the fear enchantment twisting the trees into horrific shapes.
Time was rather impressed. When she encountered this, it wasn’t nearly as strong, affecting the Everfree with magic was always a tough prospect, but this time Nightmare Moon really wanted to kill them.
This new enchantment wouldn’t be broken by simple laughter, even from the bearer of the Laughter herself.
Time decided now was a good time to analyze Nightmare Moon’s soul, whenever a being casts a spell, an imprint of the soul is left behind if you knew how to look.
She had a bit of time before the group arrived, so she decided to see what changes had occurred due to Chaos’s tampering.
With a small pulse of magic, her spell was complete, She fused the readout into a scroll and began reading through the various aspects.
Ice: 15%
Darkness: 20%
Disharmony: 64%
Miscellaneous (Luna) 1%
The buck?
Usually, Luna’s soul was much stronger.
And 64% disharmony? That’d drive anypony insane. Chaos must have given her the Grimoire.
Absently Time sent a request to her observer to pull Luna’s soul makeup from the archives.
It took two minutes to realize the request wasn’t being fulfilled. This was the second time her Observer hadn’t answered a command, which was unheard of.
That left two possibilities. Either her Observer was ignoring her orders, which was impossible.
Or her Observer was incapacitated in some way.
Which was less impossible.
She attempted once again to exit the timeline, only for the mirror world to return to her perception.
She was stuck, and now she was without assistance.
Could this day get any worse?
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That was a good chapter. Goodluck with the next one.
11289174
was honestly worried my description of the mirror world wasn't up to snuff.
I am still intrigued by this entire premise and I am excited to see that this fic is still active and seems to not have lost anything in its positioning and feel from the long hiatus.