The Sun Never Sets on Equestria

by Y483

Chapter 1: Portal Problems

The Sun Never Sets on Equestria

Chapter 1: Portal Problems

Sunset Shimmer didn’t remember the portal being so painful.

Perhaps it always was, and her conviction in the past made her ignore the pain. Maybe she had become too used to her body in the other world, and now her home was rejecting her in some way. Maybe, when she comes out, she wouldn’t even be a unicorn, and would instead be either another type of pony, or, Celestia forbid, a centaur.

If nothing else from her past got her in trouble, that would.

Luckily, her contemplation was halted when she got violently ousted from the mirror, landing on her face and skidding a few feet on the crystal floor. The numb feeling that she was getting from her horn was probably not a good thing, and the scratches that she gained on her face were irritating, but she would survive this. Probably.

The groan that came from on top of her immediately focused her attention away from her pain and towards the uncomfortable weight on her back. Shifting the weight off elicited an actual response as its body hit the ground with a thud.

“Bloody hell, that was weird,” the body said. “And I think I got something stuck in my back.”

Scarcely a second past after he had said the words was Sunset on top of him, checking his back for any damages. It wasn’t long before she found it: a small hole offset from the spine that had freshly began to bleed, staining his overcast gray coat red, hidden by the straps of his saddlebags and weapon. “You got hit with shrapnel,” she noted, “and I think it’s still in there. I’ll need to remove it before I bandage you up.” Luckily, her medical supplies had come with her, and she was able to find the necessary iodine swab to clean the wound first before she sent a tentative tendril of magic towards the hole in question. The brief sense of vertigo that occured when she flared her horn told her that she shouldn’t be too overzealous with her magic use at the moment.

The instant her magic went into the hole, her patient’s body spasmed. “Oh, that’s weird.”

“Stop squirming,” Sunset muttered, eyes closed in concentration. “If you squirm, something bad might happen, so stop squirming.” A few seconds passed before her magic receded, bringing with it a small chunk of iron. Sunset let out a sigh she didn’t realise she was holding, and the bloodied piece of metal was placed onto the crystal floor. A few seconds passed as she pulled out one of her bandages and began to wrap it around his midsection, cutting off the extraneous parts, and taping it all together with an adhesive. A second of looking at her handiwork resulted in a nod. “Alright, you’re good, and, as usual, extremely lucky. Managed to miss all your vital inners. Now, time to get you back through the portal.”

“What?” he said, trying to scamper to his hooves. “I followed you for a reason!”

“Because you tackled me into the portal,” she deadpanned.

“I was saving your life!” he argued, finally getting into a wobbly upright position. “That’s a good reason.”

“You’re right, it is,” Sunset replied, “but you’re not supposed to be here, Charles. Just like I wasn’t supposed to be in your world.”

The silence lasted for a few moments before Charles broke it. “Fine,” he replied, a little sullen. “I’ll go.”

“Don’t worry, it’ll be just as weird going back.” At the very least, the joke got a small smile on Charles’ face.

Charles, using Sunset’s body as a support, was able to maneuver back to the mirror. Still with shaky steps, he placed a front hoof on one of the steps the mirror was on.

And that is when everything went wrong.

Charles’ hoof collapsed from under him, sending him sprawling to the floor. Sunset, bracing herself against his weight, attempted to steady herself but only succeeded in tripping over Charles as his body raced backwards down the step, causing her to pitch forwards into the mirror, horn first. With a shunk, her horn broke through the glass and appeared on the other side, unseen by the two, but felt by one. Sunset looked up at her stuck horn, knew what it meant, and could only say one thing.

“Uh oh.”

Magical artefacts are notoriously difficult to destroy, the magic inherit in them transferring into physical hardiness that most metals would be envious of. However, not all artefacts were created equally; artefacts with weaker overall powers were able to continuously exert their presence upon their encasements, making them nigh invulnerable, while more powerful artefacts would be weaker after use, though still plenty hardy in their own rights. All artefacts had a common weakness, though: any disruption in its magic would, invariably, cause the materials holding the enchantments to revert to their natural hardiness. Artefacts made out of metals would generally be fine; artefacts made out of glass, not so much.

And so, with the mirror poked through, and untold amounts of magical energies that had been trapped inside enchantments upon wards that had been broken, Sunset remembered one last thing on magical artefacts; when one gets broken, the resulting expulsion of the magic would be explosive, causing sizeable damage for even a small artefact.

Starswirl’s Mirror was not a small artefact. It had been functioning for the past millennium, and had enough magic packed into it to connect to another dimension, a magic-poor one at that. Simply draining the mirror would’ve taken years, and that was at a controlled pace. The light that was beginning to shine around the hole that her horn was stuck in told her that this was most definitely not a controlled situation. And so, in a panic, she tore her horn from the mirror, causing the disintegration of the holding wards to quicken as the light brightened considerably from the hairline fractures that had begun to appear on its surface, ran over to the still-recovering Charles, bodily shoved him away from the mirror, and, with the little magic that she had regained, set up a paltry one-sided shield.

The mirror, lit up like a star, glowed even brighter for a second before something changed. The glass fell inwards, and the metal frame buckled towards the sudden force in the middle of it. A moment later, the point of no return passed, and the implosion reversed course, detonating in a surge of magic and glass and crystal and metal that threatened to break the shield and crush the two who resided behind it. Moments later, the shield fizzled out, and the debris that had been caught in it fell to the floor, leaving a very little amount of safe space for the two.

Charles, clutching his head in pain, moaned, “What the fuck was that?”

“Alright, new plan,” Sunset began, ignoring her companion’s questioning. “We leave here, wherever here is, find some small place to lie low, and live a long and peaceful life without anypony coming to arrest us.”

“What about heading back to Earth?” Charles asked, still a bit groggy from being thrown. “Can’t we just do that?”

“Only way to Earth has been completely obliterated,” she said, pointing towards the remains of Starswirl’s Mirror, where only the very bottom of the metal support still retained its shape. “Now, we’ve probably got less than a minute before the guards burst in here looking for the cause of the magical surge, so we’ve got to make ourselves scarce.” Her trademark confident smirk appeared on her face. “Good news, though; the surge seems to have gotten rid of my magic fatigue, so making our escape shouldn’t be that difficult. All I would ask is that you follow my directions.”

“As if I haven’t been doing enough of that already,” came the remark.

“Good, so you’ll do just fine. Now, hold on tight.” Before Charles could respond, her horn lit up, a second later becoming even brighter, and, in a cyan blip, the two disappeared from the room.

A few moments later, two guards burst into the room, only to find an empty room, riddled with debris, and a broken mirror.

---

With the moon high in the sky, the denizens of the Crystal Empire had long since fallen asleep. Around a certain park, however, a few were briefly woken to the short but distinct screaming of a stallion. His companion landed softly next to the mess of limbs, trying to contain her laughter for his situation.

“Very funny,” Charles snarked. “Now, a little help here?”

“In a second, Open Doors, I need to make sure we won’t be thought of as suspicious.”

“Who’s opening doors around here?”

“You are. It’s your name now. A name like Charles would be seen as odd, and with your insignia as your cutie mark, something like Open Doors would work fine,” Sunset explained. “We can say that you’re from the River Federation or something, and that your name is to escape the connotations of your previous name.”

“Like being a noble or something?” Charles asked, untangling his limbs and attempting to get his bags and weapon situated.

“Yeah, something like that. Minor nobles in Wittenland or something like that, bastard Earth pony would make everypony think twice about asking for your past, even if they did care about anything past the River Fed.”

“‘Everypony,’ ‘cutie marks,’ the fact that I’m a small, oddly shaped horse,” Charles muttered. “Why is it that my entire world seems to get flipped around you? For that matter, why do I follow you to everything?”

“And then we have to explain why we’re together,” Sunset contemplated, seemingly ignoring Charles, before a burst of magic emitted a snapping sound through the empty park, and she turned to him, a smile upon her face. “I got it! We eloped. Ran away from whatever we were doing and now we’re on our honeymoon here!”

“And suddenly, I remember why I stay with you,” Charles replied, slowly getting to his hooves. “Because, for whatever ungodly reason, you are terribly smitten with me, and you say things without thinking that I think are terribly adorable, and-” The rest of his statement was cut off as he was bodily shoved back to the ground.

“Sometimes you talk too much,” Sunset said through her bright red blush.

“Was anything I said wrong?” Charles retorted, returning to his shaky hooves. The lack of a reply caused him to smirk. “Besides, from what I’ve heard, eloping is much less expensive than a stodgy wedding ceremony, and I doubt we have the money to afford one.”

“We are a bit young to be husband and wife, aren’t we?” Sunset asked, a shaky smile easily visible in the moonlight.

“It’s a fine time as any. We could die tomorrow.”

“Not anymore we can’t,” Sunset replied, smile becoming flat. “We’re in the land of sunshine, rainbows, and friendship. Very little can kill us here.”

“For some odd reason, that does little to ease me from my worry,” Charles contemplated. “Probably something about how you said ‘very little’ and not ‘nothing.’”

“Relax, I’ve already got a plan for that. Some little town in the middle of Equestria, and the last place that Celestia would look for me; that’s our destination.” With that, she began to walk away, with Charles struggling to catch up.

“Are you gonna tell me the name?” Charles struggled to ask, a large amount of his brain power going to putting one hoof in front of the other. “And what you’re gonna do with your identity? If you really were the leader’s student, you should come up with a pseudonym yourself.”

“Look at you, using fancy words like pseudonym.” Before he could respond to her teasing, she continued. “Besides, I already have a plan for that.” In a flash of light, her cutie mark changed from the yin-yang sun symbol to the Red Cross. Her smile returned as she began. “Say hello to Sunny Days, an orphaned filly who found her talent after volunteering at one of the Manehatten hospitals. A little later, she found her one true love, and the two ran away to a better life, and now here we are. We’re leaving during the night because we’re running out of bits and need to find somewhere to settle down, and the Crystal Empire isn’t quite right for us. We’re looking for someplace smaller, with a tighter community.”

“You’re really good at fibbing, you know that? If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were a politician.”

“It’s a good thing you do know better, though politicians here aren’t nearly as bad as they were on Earth, with the possible exception of the Griffonian Empire.”

“And what happened with the Griffonian Empire, if I may ask?”

“Well, the thing that was keeping the emperor in power was stolen,” Sunset began as the two trotted out of the city center and towards the outskirts, “and now the continent-wide empire has been all but destroyed, with most griffons living under no actual ruler.”

“Ah,” Charles ‘ah’-ed. “To some extent, sounds better than the situation America was in when you popped out of a statue.”

“Yeah,” Sunset replied, ice in her voice, before falling silent. Charles fell silent as both had felt the conversation led to unpleasant thoughts.

Silence reigned before, half an hour later, Sunset finally piped up. “There’s the train station.”

“Good,” Charles responded, tired. “It feels like we’ve been walking in circles for a bit.”

“Uh.” Sunset looked abashed, biting on the inside of her cheek. “Well, you see, I’ve never been in this city ever, so at least we found it so quickly! That’s the good in this situation, right?” The smile she flashed was as wide as it was fake, something that Charles noted.

“We’ve been lost this entire time, yet you’ve been confidently surging ahead anyways.” He chuckled. “I’ve gotta admit, that does sound like you.”

“I could still deck you, you know,” Sunset muttered.

Charles, hearing her muttered words, laughed even louder. “You could, but you won’t. After all, you’d probably have to redo the bandages.”

Sunset sighed at that. “You’re right, because you can get it right every once in a while. Besides, we’re here.”

Sunset walked up to the single still-open ticket counter, who blinked his eyes at the two approaching the station. “Well, if it isn’t two young wipper-snappers out and about,” he scrawled, absentmindedly tugging on his beard. “If you wanted to leave immediately, you’re out of luck; we got no trains until the morn’.”

“That’s alright,” Sunset said. “We’re in no hurry, just didn’t necessarily have the bits for both another night and a train ride south.”

“Short on bits, eh?” the craggley stallion questioned, looking at them with one eye. “Tell you what, if you don’t tell my boss, I’ll float you two tickets wherever you want. Where you goin’?”

Sunset’s smirk returned to her face as she answered with one simple destination. “Ponyville.”