Chapter 7
— ✶ —
Twilight suddenly lifted her head off Luna’s side, having settled there in a two-pony pile on a cloud as Luna told Twilight about her day. “Hey, wait a second,” she said, staring out into the distance, thinking for a moment.
Luna used her wing to pull Twilight down beside her so they could see each other and cocked her head curiously. “Unraveling the secrets of the universe?”
Twilight made no reaction to being marehandled, instead taking advantage of her new position to thrust her hoof up under Luna’s nose accusingly. “Just because earth pony magic comes from me doesn’t mean I’m the only alicorn capable of it! Why am I stumbling through this when you could tell me how it’s done?”
Luna’s eyes turned downwards a hint and she shook her head. “Do you recall that first night on top of the palace tower when I told you the fillytale of Nightmare Moon and then discovered that you had been remiss in practicing your pegasus magic?” she asked.
Twilight sent her a flat look and responded dryly, “You mean after you chucked me off the palace tower?”
Luna smiled in fond recollection. “Yes, that would be the one. I believe that earth pony magic also came up,” she reminded Twilight, who frowned in thought.
“All you said was that it was boring,” Twilight countered, but Luna didn’t disagree. In fact, she seemed to think that was all there was to say on the subject. It took Twilight a moment to understand what Luna wasn’t saying, and when it clicked she let her head drop back onto the cloud with a light whuff. “Seriously?” she asked with a groan. “Two thousand years and you couldn’t be bothered to even try?”
“Oh, no, not at all,” Luna assured her quite avidly. “I did try. We both did.”
“But?” Twilight prompted.
Luna shrugged, unrepentant. “But it’s boring.”
“I literally blew myself out of a crater into another crater,” Twilight reminded her with a huff. “How is that boring? It’s not like it should be slow to show results with the power we have.”
Luna favored Twilight with an affectionate look. “You do have the uncanny ability to fail in the most interesting of ways,” she said, shaking her head with a wry smile.
“Hey!” Twilight objected, slapping Luna’s shoulder lightly with her hoof.
Luna shook her head and asked, “Do you really wish for me to explain?” with a little more seriousness. “It might or might not be conducive to what you are trying to do.”
Twilight hesitated, but only for a moment. “Yeah—you’re not my teacher, remember?”
“True enough, though that’s not precisely the right sentiment, since you are asking for a lesson on earth pony magic, is it?” she teased, though followed it up with something of a sigh. “Though there remains not much to say. Doing something with earth pony magic is easy; doing something useful with it is more difficult, and doing something specific with it is all but impossible.”
“So I’ve been wasting my time?” Twilight asked, growing annoyed. “I wish you’d told me before I injured myself trying.”
Luna bent closer, looked Twilight in the eyes… and booped her on the nose. “I am not in the business of telling anypony, least of all you, what is impossible. Not only am I often proven wrong, but it makes me look a fool for having done so. My intent is to explain why it is a feat that my sister and I abandoned, regardless of its potential—and it does have potential; you only need look to the things your friends have already done for proof of that.
“The feat that you asked of your friend Applejack, of encasing the palace in crystal or creating a blank to sculpt from? Though neither Tia nor I ever progressed past the ability to form small gemstones—the larger ones always fractured for some reason—such acts are, in fact, entirely possible, and if that is your goal, then I assure you, it is achievable.
“What it is not, is a whole solution. If you wished to grow a palace fully-formed, or that crystal tree that came from dame Rarity’s discarded designs… That is where you would run into problems. Earth pony magic is at its most efficient when it is merely supplementing a craft or skill, which is why that is what you see in most earth ponies. To use it more overtly not only requires a great amount of power, but requires that you let it free, reducing the control you have of the end result. Even were you to master the art to such an extent that you could grow a palace of crystal from a single carat of quartz, you would not be choosing the floorplan, and even so you would expect to have to practice, because—”
“It’s boring,” Twilight repeated, slumping deeper into the cloud. “Yeah, I got that.”
Luna tsked, looking out over the city. “I truly do not wish to dissuade you, Twilight. You should know better than to trust the word of a novice practitioner of an art, and need only look at the pink one to know that earth pony magic is not truly hamstrung or limited in any way. It simply has… not precisely a mind of its own, but a connection to the natural way of things that only grows more powerful with the more power you use. For my sister and I, who neither desired to learn every craft nor devote many hours to corralling our magic into useful action, earth pony magic has simply long since fallen out of mind.”
Twilight shot Luna a queer look.
“Did you seriously just suggest that what Pinkie Pie does is in any way natural?”
— ✒ —
“I don’t like this plan,” Spike protested as Ember dragged him back out of the ex-library. “This is a terrible plan.”
Ember shot him a glare without stopping. “You came up with this plan,” she reminded him, throwing her only free hand up in frustration and yanking Spike further on with a jolt.
“So I should know, right?” he insisted. He was trying to wiggle free of Ember’s grip, but as slim as she might be, she was still a head taller than him and in much better shape. “Em—” He had barely started to get her name out when she snapped back and clapped her hand over his mouth. She glared fire and sulfur at him and he stubbornly glared back. She pulled her lips back into a snarl and he rolled his eyes and sighed.
Slowly—warily—she began to pull her hand away.
“E—” he began again, but stopped before she could do anything. He fought with himself over it, but eventually gave in. “I can’t believe I’m going along with this,” he grumbled. “Look—Godzilla—you still don’t know where you’re even going. Just let—” He grunted, trying to pull his hand free of hers. “Me” Grunt. “Go.” Grunt. “And I’ll show you the way.”
She eyed him, probably judging if he was going to run off or try and use her name again. Eventually, though, she relented and released her grip. Spike spent a moment just rubbing and flexing his hand, but an impatient look from Ember got him moving, heading down the street in the direction of the site of the old Barnyard Bargains that had become the beginnings of Applejack’s tower.
“I don’t see why you’re so against this,” Ember said, pulling her hood down as much as she could to ensure her anonymity. “It’s like you don’t trust me to steal the Ring of Ashmund without you.”
Well, that was easy to explain. “I don’t.”
“See, Spike? You sounded like a normal dragon just then,” Ember told him, entirely serious as far as Spike could tell. “That’s completely unlike you, and it worries me!”
Spike resisted the urge to roll his eyes since she wouldn’t see it anyway. “It only worries you because you don’t like being told ‘no,’” he asserted, and she didn’t deny it.
The problem with having Ember living with him—as if there could ever be just one—was that he’d gotten much freer about what he dared to say since no jab or insult seemed to phase her at all. It’d probably have been fine if it had just been the insults—though sooner or later he was going to say something to Twilight that would get him in trouble—but he’d also taken to grumbling his thought process out loud on occasion, too, which was what had gotten him into this new mess.
He’d remarked that, ideally, they’d steal the ring on the night of the coronation when most eyes would be elsewhere. It hadn’t been a serious suggestion, let alone something that could be called an actual plan. In fact, he didn’t even know what the coronation schedule would be, since the invitation hadn’t gone into any great detail; it was entirely possible that the whole thing would be over and done with by noon, which would probably make this whole thing pointless… though admittedly, it was at least unlikely to be any worse than any other day if it came to that.
So yes, if they had to do it, that night would be the best choice.
Except for—you know—the fact that Spike would be attending the coronation.
There were just so many reasons that this was a terrible idea, chief among them that, yes, it would involve actually trusting Ember alone with the Ring of Ashmund, but also the fact that—again—she just was not as sneaky as she thought she was. Combine the two and Spike feared the worst. Ember probably wasn’t out of touch with reality enough to try and hide behind a mailbox after using the ring to make herself the size of a bear… but he could picture it, so he wasn’t going to consider it entirely out of the question either.
The bigger problem would be if she went completely off the script and decided to actually take the ring. He thought that he had impressed on her the importance of doing it in two stages, but he could never be entirely sure with her. The fact that she was still calling it ‘stealing the Ring of Ashmund’ and not ‘surreptitiously using the Ring of Ashmund in secret’ was kind of a bad sign.
She even had him doing it, but in his defense, the latter was a mouthful.
He supposed, if there was a bright side, it was that this way he wouldn’t actually be involved in doing anything illegal; he’d just show Ember to the two unfinished towers that the ring might be stored in and that would be that. It would mean that he himself wouldn’t actually get to use the ring, but… well, no, there was no ‘but’; it was actually a significant flaw in the plan that kind of made the whole thing pointless, since using the ring on him was the whole point of not stealing it the first time to begin with.
Again, this hadn’t been a plan; Ember had just latched onto the first thing he’d said.
“Is this it?” Ember asked, looking up at one of the old-style Ponyville houses that had yet to see any remodeling. “It smells like a distillery.”
Spike blinked, realizing he’d stopped in front of Berry Punch’s house. He shook his head and shushed Ember. “No, just… hold on a second, Em—Godzilla,” he told her, then continued walking a little more sedately anyway since there was no reason not to continue on while he tried to think of a way to solve this.
The simplest and most expedient solution would be to just use the ring tonight, coronation be damned. He doubted Ember would actually complain about accelerating their plans; in fact, her eagerness to wait another few days and go without him was more than a little suspect. That said, he’d have liked to have at least another day to prepare, but it wasn’t as if there was anything to actually prepare except himself.
Alternatively, he could let things keep going the way they were and Ember would probably just steal the ring while he was at the coronation—as in actually steal it. If she did that, then Spike would have an alibi, at least, and it wasn’t as if anypony knew that Ember was staying with him—or that she existed at all, for that matter.
Not for the first time, he wondered if stealing the ring was actually a good idea at all. He’d talked himself into it out of a desire to no longer be seen as a baby and the faintest sense of empathy for Ember over the same, but was this really how he wanted to solve that? Surely when Ember of all dragons had pointed out that he was being a hypocrite, he should have taken that as a sign.
If it were up to him, he’d at least leave out the whole theft aspect entirely, which had been the point of relegating it off to ‘sometime later’ in his original plans. For Ember, though… The ‘Primordial Ring of Ashmund’ was a fixture of the old dragon empire, so she needed it for the new one and that was that. He thought she should probably focus on basics like putting together an actual list of things she wanted to change before she went about performing covert operations against neighboring countries.
Really, though, there had to be some way simpler and more legal to do this if he could just think of it. Whatever it was, he’d change his plans in a heartbeat—even if it involved introducing Ember to Twilight as ‘Godzilla’.
Spike hesitated. Well, maybe not that. Ember’s horrifyingly accurate nickname really shouldn’t be a justification for committing crimes, but he was pretty sure he’d actually be less embarrassed if they just caught him trying to steal the damn ring.
Well, he’d better decide what he was going to do soon, because there’d be no going back if he actually led Ember to one of the unfinished towers. She wasn’t stu—well, she wasn’t… hrm. Okay, fine, she really wasn’t stupid, just… some combination of ignorant, naïve, prone to anger and—okay, none of that was actually the point. The point was, if he showed her one of the unfinished towers, she’d probably be able to spot the other one since they were pretty much identical and picking out matching pairs of objects was something even the Cake twins could do.
“You didn’t say this place was going to look so delicious.”
Spike blinked, realizing that he’d stopped walking again and expecting to find himself in front of Sugarcube Corner this time. To his significant dismay, however, nothing Ember would have called delicious would have appealed to a pony’s tastes.
It was too late; they were already there.
It was also under guard, no doubt on account of its deliciousness. He didn’t know what he had actually expected—that they could just walk in and use and/or steal the thing?
…Yeah, pretty much, actually. This was Equestria, after all and having grown up in Canterlot Castle, it hadn’t really occurred to him just how many royal guards there now were in Ponyville. He’d been so preoccupied with whether or not they should steal the Ring of Ashmund that he hadn’t stopped to think if they could steal the Ring of Ashmund.
Maybe this wasn’t so great of an idea after all. He’d managed to mostly skip over his second and third thoughts about stealing the ring, but his fourth thoughts on the matter were finally gaining some traction. He suddenly felt very exposed hanging around in plain sight of a place that they were intending to break into in the near future.
Oh, and Ember was drooling, which didn’t help.
Mirroring their earlier situation, Spike grabbed Ember by the hand and yanked her along. “Hey, come on, Godzilla. Don’t stop; you’re making the guards nervous,” he told her in his best mundane scolding tone, trying not to look guilty. He’d had a lot of practice in not looking guilty. Was he good at it? Not in the slightest—but he had practice, which should really count for something.
Ember, to his great relief, allowed herself to be led off, though she didn’t make it easy for him and it wasn’t long before they were out of sight of the guards. Once they were in the clear, Ember yanked her arm free and—self-conscious and unsure what to do with it—clutched it to her side as she followed him.
Okay, so, with the addition of guards that were specifically looking out for dragons to keep them from munching on the architecture, they weren’t going to be doing anything tonight, that was for sure. That… he wasn’t sure if that complicated things or if it simplified them. Well, obviously things were more complicated now because they were going to have to deal with the guards somehow, but unless he could convince Ember that the ring was too well guarded, it also didn’t leave him with a whole lot of choices. Now that she knew where one tower was and what the other would look like, he didn’t doubt that she’d try to steal the ring eventually with or without him.
He wasn’t sure which would be worse; if she got caught trying to steal the ring, or if she got caught succeeding at stealing the ring.
He had no desire for the name of Godzilla to prove prophetic.
Not seeing any point in keeping it from her at this point, Spike led Ember on and showed her the unfinished tower intended for Rainbow Dash before the two of them made their way back home, Spike keeping an eye on Ember the entire way to make sure she didn’t run off and do something he would regret.
Unfortunately, his preoccupation with her didn’t leave him much time to figure out what they were actually going to do.
— ✶ —
As unhelpful as Luna had been on the subject of earth pony magic, Twilight was still grateful for her support, even if it had been a little late in coming. Content, she snuggled deeper into the comfort of Luna’s warmth behind and around her as she waited for sleep to come.
It would be easy to just give up, she mused. She was no stranger to hard work, but she would be the first to admit that she heavily favored sciences over arts. Learning a subject by rote before she ever put magic to the task just appealed more to her than disciplines whose execution came primarily down to practice. Unicorn magic was a little of both, true, but it was definitely more science than art. Still, science or art, she wouldn’t let herself be dissuaded, because when it came right down to it… Err…
Raising mountains was just really impressive?
She was embarrassed to admit, that was kind of the long and short of it. Just a few hours after Twilight had made Applejack a demigoddess, her stubborn friend had turned around and used that power to change the entire countryside—just to give herself some privacy. Even more impressive in Twilight’s eyes was that she’d done so without damaging anything on the property. Sure, she might be able to create a mountain with unicorn magic in several ways if she really tried, but they would all be messy and few of them permanent.
Creating a palace out of transmuted crystal? Not a great idea. There was a reason that Unicorns had traditionally left building and growing things to the earth ponies and it wasn’t just the muscle.
Unfortunately for Twilight, neither of her earth pony demigoddess friends seemed actually inclined to use their demigoddesshood to their full potentials. Pinkie Pie, she couldn’t really blame since the party planner was at least doing what made her happy, but getting Applejack to do anything interesting or inventive was like pulling teeth even when there were things she was responsible for that were desperate for improvement. Sure, she hadn’t wanted demigoddesshood in the first place—nor had Twilight wanted to give it to her—but what was done was done, and to just ignore it was just… such a waste.
…Not that the others were doing so great either. Just about the only one of them who actually seemed interested in pushing her boundaries was Rainbow Dash, and they’d already seen how that had panned out. Rarity was more interested in the self-expression afforded by her immortal form than actually using any magic, and Fluttershy…
Twilight really needed to go actually talk to Fluttershy and see how she was doing. She doubted it was any coincidence that her immortality had manifested in a way that allowed her to be around ponies without the pressure of actually being capable of speech. There was no way that was healthy.
Maybe she should go ascend some ponies that would actually make use of her gifts, she thought not at all seriously. Wouldn’t that go over well? Would her friends get jealous…?
…
Idly, Twilight wondered what The Great and Powerful Trixie would do with demigoddesshood; it would balance out the number of demigoddesses she had of each tribe, at least.
Twilight wished she hadn’t thought of that; now she was going to have nightmares about it.
Trixie as a demigoddess, that is; not having an uneven representation of demigoddesses—though come to think of it… Hrm. It was a pity that Sunset Shimmer was fictional. Twilight really didn’t have any unicorn friends that would actually put demigoddesshood to use properly.
“Are you still awake?” came Luna’s quiet voice, her whisper from behind tickling Twilight’s ear and causing it to twitch as a shiver ran down her spine.
“Mmhm,” she murmured. “Just thinking.”
Luna squeezed Twilight tighter. “About?”
“Making Trixie a demigoddess,” Twilight told her, half asleep.
“Is she not the one who precipitated the matter with the ursa minor…?”
“Mmhm.”
“Twilight?”
“Yes?”
“I know that I said I would support you in anything, but… no.”
“No?”
“No.”
— ✶ —
Twilight dreamt.
She dreamt of a blue mare—not the midnight blue of her fellow alicorn of the night, but the blue of a clear sky, with a pale cerulean mane. She saw this mare wandering the countryside, rejected and dejected. Her possessions destroyed and her reputation in tatters, she had nothing.
That’s how She found her; destitute and desperate, ready to be remade in Her image. She had everything the mare had ever desired—power; prestige; immortality—and a drop of each the mare was granted, Her only command to use it and use it well.
Five minutes later, there was an ursa minor pulling an ornate golden litter with a cackling mare on top.
…
“This is stupid,” Twilight remarked and walked straight out of the dream.
It was only when she found herself back in the Desert of Dreams that she’d realized where she was, what had been going on and what she’d actually done, and for just a moment, ice ran down her spine as she feared that she might have cut herself off from the rest of her stars in her sleep. To her eternal relief, however, she found the rest of them right where they should be.
The Desert of Dreams was exactly like she’d remembered it; a shining desert of luminescent, sparkling stars canopied by an open, blank, black sky. It felt much less ominous now that it was an actual part of her, but even so it retained a certain eerie quality that was difficult to pin down. Part of it was seeing her stars acting under the weight of gravity when they were otherwise entirely immune to it, she supposed. Even when she’d been bringing them down to Equus to manifest from, they had drifted off in the wind and returned to the sky afterwards. Now that she knew what to look for, though, there was also a sense of… unreality to it that was not unlike the dreams that were transpiring beneath its surface.
It was also—strictly speaking—not a real place, which was why she hadn’t previously known how to access it. Much like the place where Twilight had had her final confrontation with Astri, it was more a representation or perhaps recontextualization of the parts of her that went beyond the physical. It would be simpler to claim that it was her inner mind or some such, but she was in the unique position that there was far more to her metaphysical self than just her mind.
Actually, that was an interesting distinction. Twilight had first recontextualized her stars as a library after coming here to the Desert of Dreams and losing herself in the stars below. At first glance, it seemed peculiar that the two had remained separate even then, but it actually made perfect sense, as that had been precisely the problem with her incorrect manifestation to begin with—that she had remained separate, even from stars that she had ostensibly ‘claimed.’
What was far more interesting than how they were separate was how the two might actually have been connected. Rather, she wondered if coming here to the Desert of Dreams had been the catalyst that had shown her on some subconscious level how to do the recontextualization that had saved her from losing herself to the memories contained therein? She would probably never know, but it was fascinating to consider.
…For about five minutes, then she got bored.
The sudden hissing of shifting sands made Twilight jump and turn when the stars behind her suddenly sank to fill in the void left by a pony-sized shape of one of the dreamers. Likely, it had been whoever’s dream she’d arrived from… though she wasn’t sure if that quite fit. Given the direction her thoughts had been going in before she’d fallen asleep, the dream couldn’t have been anything but her own, could it? Twilight shook her head, dismissing the correlation. It was more likely that the two were unrelated; the arrival and departure of dreamers was a constant thing that kept the stars shifting, so having one disappear from nearly right under her hardly meant anything.
Alternatively, though… it might have been both; she might have been dreaming for that pony as Somni and Fati had once dreamed for all ponykind. Curious, she approached one of the other shapes in the sand and looked closer. She was pretty sure this one was another pony. Like most of the shapes, it didn’t actually break the surface of the desert, remaining instead a suggestion of a form just beneath the surface. Carefully, she brushed some of the stars aside with her hoof to get a better look.
She had been right, it was a pony—a pale green earth pony with a rich orange mane. Twilight didn’t recognize her, of course, as the chances of her knowing a random dreaming pony selected from across all of Equus was slim to none. That was unfortunate, as she would have liked to compare the mare’s dreaming self to her physical body. As it was, her coat luminesced in a similar manner to the stars that covered her and Twilight suspected that her actual form and features were likely abstracted or idealized in some manner.
Never one to let the unknown stay unknown, Twilight decided to engage in the most basic of scientific discipline.
She poked it.
— ✶ —
Twilight was entirely unsurprised to find herself pulled into another dream as that had been her intent. The feeling was reminiscent of when she’d touched Astri’s star and found herself viewing the events as they happened in the real world, though the result in this case was quite different from the stark reality of armored alicorns fighting and dying in the sky over Ponyville.
It started, as many dreams do, of flying. Twilight had often argued with Spike before becoming an alicorn that dreams of flight were a natural part of pony psychology regardless of whether the pony in question was unicorn, earth pony or pegasus and she still maintained this even after her own experience had to be stricken from the record on account of her sudden onset of acute alicornification. The fact that that her first dreamwalk had the earth pony dreamer shooting through the air under her own power made her smile with vindication.
Her smile faltered. On second thought, how did she tell if she was dreaming this or if the other pony was? Was there a difference? Actually, would it invalidate her point or prove it if she was technically the one who was dreaming for everypony through their stars?
…
Wait—this mare was falling, not flying, so never mind all that.
The mare was also terrified, which was a strange thing for Twilight to feel through somepony else. She had called what she was doing dreamwalking after a popular idea in fiction, but that wasn’t accurate. She hadn’t entered this dream, exactly; she wasn’t walking around inside it looking around and talking to the dreamer. She just… was. She was sure now; she was the dream—or she was dreaming the dream, anyway. Looking at it that way, she was the dreamer and the green mare was the dreamee.
She was going to have to start writing down all these things in a book or she was going to start forgetting them.
Lost in trying to remember any other words or abnormal conjugations she’d come up with to explain how her alicornhood worked, Twilight was once again startled out of her reverie—this time by a piercing scream and an urban cityscape rushing up to meet the dreamee. In a blind panic with no idea what else to do, Twilight reached out to catch the mare, forgetting that she hadn’t manifested a body in the dream, if she even could.
The cobblestone road bent and gave to catch the dreamee. It was soft as a baby’s blanket and curled up around her making cooing noises.
Oh.
Oh no.
It was a coddlestone road now.
That was terrible.
Twilight yanked herself back out of the dream in horror.
— ✶ —
Twilight regretted everything, cursing her curious nature back in the Desert of Dreams. Out of all the mysteries that had remained unanswered, she’d had to stumble across the one that she hadn’t even acknowledged that she’d been avoiding—the hows and whys of Discord’s magic. Some might consider her to be jumping to conclusions, but turning a cobblestone road into a coddlestone road was just so… perennially Discord that she had little doubt—or hope—that it could be a sign of anything else.
Worse, she’d done it without even thinking.
She didn’t think that she was being unreasonable in not wanting to be connected in any way, shape or form with the so-called ‘spirit of disharmony.’ She hadn’t liked him as an ambassador in Somni and Fati’s memories of the days approaching the end of the world, she hadn’t liked him as an all-powerful megalomaniacal villain and she still hadn’t liked him as a feeble, impotent noodle whose last act in life had been to cause more problems for everypony involved—and even then, at least nopony knew the connection between Discord and the Celestias’ draconic features.
Alright, that was enough. Twilight took a deep breath of nonexistent air and attempted to calm down. Just because her control over the dreams she dreamt for other ponies resembled Discord’s magic didn’t mean she was even capable of doing it in the real world. If it was that easy, she would have run into it already. All she had to do was leave the Desert of Dreams and never come back. Everything looked like it was running fine without her input, so there should be no problem if she just ignored this aspect of her alicornhood and let it take care of itself.
Amazingly enough, as she held her breath and readied herself for anything, no great disaster sprouted into existence to prove her wrong.
Crisis averted, she was going to count that as a win.
…And yet, she still found herself standing there scratching at her jaw, not actually leaving the Desert of Dreams like she’d said she would.
It wasn’t that she was curious. Maybe there was a small part of her that itched to experiment, but that wasn’t what kept her here. Instead, it was the fact that she didn’t trust ignorance any more than she trusted Discord. There were so many things about her alicornhood that came down to feelings and interpretations that it would be foolish not to get a handle on this one when the opportunity arose, if only so she could ensure that it never reared its head at an inopportune moment.
She was going to have to learn how to do it anyway, wasn’t she?
Wonderful.
It didn’t escape her notice that there were additional layers to the irony of the situation, too, because for all she’d been having difficulty finding the time and place to practice with the aspects of herself that she was actually interested in mastering, like her earth pony and unicorn magics, she had all the time in the world for this one since she could do it literally in her sleep.
Sometimes there was no justice in the world.
— ✒ —
Sometimes there was no justice in the world, Spike thought to himself over a bowl of cinnabar and sulfur oatmeal. He’d hardly slept, his harried thoughts having kept him up as he tried to think of a way to either get his plans for the Ring of Ashmund back on track or somehow convince Ember to hold off on doing anything until he could do so.
Yeah, as if that was going to happen.
Ember, of course, hadn’t slept at all, having previously ruined her sleep schedule thoroughly reading The Book, but unlike him, she didn’t have to go to work in an hour.
It was times like this that Spike really felt like a… a sidekick. He had common sense and good handwriting and that was about it; he didn’t actually have any real capacity to do anything or even solve problems. He hadn’t often felt too badly about it with Twilight and her friends since they were all national heroes and now a goddess and demigoddesses, but it was more than a little depressing falling into the same routine with Ember, who he didn’t even like, let alone respect.
…Well, maybe he could respect her vision and drive just a little—the new Ember, anyway. It was really still too early to put any faith in her or her new outlook, but she was headed in a vaguely decent direction so far.
Still, improving or not, it wasn’t as if she was going to come up with a solution on her own, so he took another bite of his oatmeal and went back to trying to figure out what he could do to keep Ember from ending up in front of Luna’s court clad in chains by this time next week. He was so lost in thought that he fumbled his spoon when Ember shouted up from the basement.
“Hey, Spike! Come help me with all this magic fire tripe—I think I got it to work!”
Stats
Page generated in 0.039 seconds
Total duration
1,050 users online
1,895,416 hits today, 2,054,621 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.®
Haha. I was literally checking this story for an update about 5 mins before it did. ^^
Good to know that after everything that she has been through it’s puns that give Twi PTSD.
PUNS. Glorious PUNS. Give me ALL the PUNS.
Ahh, yes, more problems, just what we need...
9785992
Always
If it's only happening in dreams, maybe Twilight isn't manifesting Discord's powers but is just subconsciously convincing herself that she is while in dreams where she has absolute power? I'm not sure if that's better or worse though.
I for one approve of the Great and Powerful Demigodess
Nah, you just need to find something interesting with it that your elders didn't think of in thousands of years.
Sounds like a job for Twilight.
Spike really is so doomed.
Good process branding is important.
But think about how well it would set up events for later when she inevitably steps on part of the town while giant-sized.
Hey, Starlight might be out there somewhere, I bet she would do interesting things with the powers of a demigoddess.
I have concerns, primarily that this wasn't just a dream but definitely some others as well.
The most basic act of science.
Oh no.
Actively ignoring aspects of alicornhood has traditionally worked so well.
There we go.
That should be fun. For us, probably not Spike.
And Starlight Glimmer probably doesn't even exist as a concept in this timeline.
Hmm... No, Moondancer would just use the divine power to read multiple books at once.
In any case, glad I'm caught up. Looking forward to more, especially if Twilight tries to combine certain aspects of her powers. If earth pony magic is an eruption of the natural order and Discord's magic twists it...
Also, sorry if this has been addressed before, but what differences, if any, are there between Equestria kaiju movies and ours?
... I have a sudden and horrifying vision of a new celestial body made entirely out of fireworks rising in the sky.