Ice Queen

by Quillamore

Does It Almost Feel Like...

The first time Sunset heard the achingly familiar song, she had been in a music store just like any other, aimlessly searching through records in a place that seemed divorced from time itself. Nowadays, the store was mainly populated with posters, T-shirts, plushies, and practically every other piece of fan merchandise that wasn’t a CD or record, but something about going inside still made the former unicorn more than a little nostalgic. The actual music part of the store was little more than a relic of a lost time, but seeing all the records in front of her was probably the closest thing she had to Equestria, a way that she could escape from all the rapid technological changes of her new world.

Like Equestria itself, it was a peaceful, fragile thing. Every time she walked in, the music store fell into greater and greater disrepair, with clothes strewn across barely vacuumed floors, dim lightbulbs the managers couldn’t be arsed to replace, and even dimmer-looking minimum wage employees. It was a place with a countdown on its back, the way the portal to Equestria used to be. But, to Sunset, that was just another reason to appreciate it more. Sooner or later, it would be another empty mall store for amateur explorers to sneak into, but as long as she saw it as more than it was, she figured she could stave off that future for another year, another month, another week, another day.

She flipped through albums, trying to figure out which artist she would stave that future off with this time. Sapphire Shores? Songbird Serenade? No, their latest releases had been months ago, and to Sunset, an album was only worth buying shiny and new on its first week or well-loved and used years after the fact. She was about to give up on the Top 40 rack and go towards something more her speed--alt-rock, perhaps--when the music videos on the three elevated TVs began to change all at once.

The song that played was, at the same time, something that Sunset felt she’d heard before and something she’d missed out on for far too long. She’d heard plenty of times about how songs could hook people in from the first few words, but from the first note, she knew that the melody was one that’d been trapped in her subconscious for a very long time. An earworm, without a definite memory attached to it.

Sunset whipped her head towards the nearest TV as the music lured her in. As it played, an unmistakably beautiful girl with black hair swayed to a melancholy beat, crooning a heartbreaking chorus:

I wish I could forget the time our hands came together
I wish I could forget when you said forever
You saw my heart in shades of gray
And fought for me anyway
When all I wanted was for you to run away
To a time when you didn’t remember that day
You’re too good for me
And I know you’ll never agree
But now I’d like to be free
From the girl who’s too good for me
(You know you’re too good for me)

The lyrics captured a part of Sunset’s very soul that she’d almost forgotten she’d had, and as she listened, memories flashed through her mind of all the times she felt like she didn’t deserve the friends she had. But even then, that wasn’t the only part of the song that felt familiar--in short, everything did. The arrangement, the guitar solo, she knew them all, even the dance moves the idol made as she lamented her love.

Sunset barely even had to watch. She just knew, as if it were a hidden instinct locked inside of her.

Once she slipped out of the strangely hypnotic daze the music had given her, she first focused her attention towards the release date stamped on the video, then towards the singer herself. But then again, the voice was so familiar that Sunset barely even had to look to know who it was.

Rara, the newly rebranded Countess Coloratura, had just released her newest album. Her only album to date under her new identity. The entire school had been buzzing about it last week, and no matter how hard the teachers tried to quell it, everyone knew her music would shake the hallways themselves. Every student wanted to let everyone else know that they had bought the new album, blasting it loud enough for the next town over to hear.

That has to be it, Sunset thought to herself. I haven’t watched the video for this one online yet, but I bet I heard it before class. Probably Pinkie forgetting to put her headphones in again or something.

Whatever. She needed to get the new album anyway, and if that meant buying it from a place where no one at CHS even went to anymore, then that was just another bonus. Her fellow students didn’t need to know that the intimidating former bully listened to idol music like everyone else. Even if she’d changed, she still needed to keep up at least some street cred.

Or at least, that was what she told herself instead of facing the truth. That, deep down, there was a part of her that swore that the music store had been the first time she’d heard that song. That she’d listen to it at least ten times that night, taking it apart piece by piece and watching as a new mystery captured her heart.

By the time the eleventh repeat hit, she barely even questioned the familiarity of the song anymore. She’d faced enough weird magic in her life to let something like this slide, but she couldn’t ignore the stranger, more mundane aspect of it--the fact that every word rang true. This wasn’t a song written by some formless producer; this was as raw as Sunset had ever felt about herself. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that could only mean one thing.

Rara, the number one pop star in the whole country, thought that she was unworthy of love. That, in and of itself, was stranger than any magical occurrence that Sunset had ever faced.

And things would only get stranger from there...

****

The day after was nothing short of a blur, as if the song had really hypnotized her for good. The one thing that really stuck out, though, stuck out hard enough to shake Sunset from her illusion and left her wondering if she’d fallen straight into another one.

It was fifth period, in the middle of September, and there was already a new transfer student. That in and of itself wasn’t too weird, though Sunset questioned whatever logic her parents might have had in uprooting her from her old hometown less than a month after school started. No, it was the sheer fact that CHS had a transfer student that startled Sunset. Ever since she’d arrived, almost every new kid had some kind of weird magic ability--the Sirens had their songs, Twilight had her levitation, and while none of the others had quite that level of power, they at least had something. Sunset may have figured out most of the magical occurrences at Canterlot High, but that one was still an enigma. It was almost like the very title of “transfer student” bestowed some kind of latent power.

It’s like this school operates on goddamn anime logic, Sunset thought to herself after hearing Cheerilee announce the latest transfer student. It was the type of thing people joked about on the fan forums Rainbow and Twilight had roped her into joining, except at CHS, it was no joke. After a while, Sunset had even begun to forget that weird transfers didn’t happen at other schools.

But today’s wasn’t one she was about to forget, because her magic had a way of willing things into existence. Things she wanted, or even things she never knew she did.

As the elegant raven-haired girl strode into the room, Sunset thought that there was no way Cheerilee was about to introduce her like a regular person. From the very sound of her voice, everyone already knew exactly who she was, even though that same voice had been hidden behind Auto-Tune for years. Sunset could see that Cheerilee was already sweating bullets from the silent tension surrounding the room, trying her best to figure out how to defuse the ticking time bomb of celebrity-obsessed teenagers before it caused too much damage.

“I’m Coloratura, but I go by Rara,” the transfer student said, sensing Cheerilee’s discomfort with the instincts of a pro. “This is my first time at a public school, so I’d like you all to treat me like anyone else. I want this to be a place where I can forget my job and be a normal teenager, and I really look forward to meeting all of you.”

The first thing Sunset noticed was that her voice seemed clipped, inauthentic, more like she was giving an interview than introducing herself to a group of peers. Even her more cheerful moments seemed more like the staged excitement idols always seemed to have around their fans. Then again, considering that Coloratura was scouted when she was just nine, before Sunset had even come to this world, that was to be expected. She certainly knew what it was like to be that sheltered as a child.

The second thing Sunset noticed was that, holy shit, she had fifth period with a girl who broke Billboard records like kids broke glass windows. She’d heard about this sort of thing in the kinds of tabloids she was only desperate enough to read in the checkout line--celebrities wanting to take a break from their fame and live a normal life. Still, seeing it unfold in front of her at CHS, a humble school with a strangely magical history, was nothing short of unbelievable.

Sunset wasn’t sure exactly when Rara walked over towards her--she told herself she was too focused on the lesson, but really, she knew what she was focused on more--but sure enough, it was already lunchtime, and Rara was the only student left in the room.

“You’re on the welcoming committee, aren’t you?” Rara asked. “Would you mind giving me a tour?”

Still in that stilted voice, overly polite to the point of being cloying. If she was going to make any real friends here, rather than just her usual admirers, Sunset figured she’d have to teach Rara to loosen up. That is, assuming their paths would extend beyond this almost eerie chance meeting.

“Wouldn’t you rather eat first? New kids don’t normally like getting the tour before lunch. Plus, if we did it afterwards, you’d get to miss part of sixth period.”

Rara shrank back instead of answering, a gesture that looked all too wrong on someone as confident and collected as her. It was like watching her in her debut and only film, when the whole world had learned that there were, in fact, limits to her talents.

“Oh no, I couldn’t. Choir’s my next class. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Sunset wasn’t sure what was cuter about that--the fact that a diva like her took high school choir so seriously or the enraptured look on her face when she talked about it. Rara just kept going on about it, more than she had about anything all day, about how much she’d always wanted to be in a school choir, about how they got to perform for the elementary school, about the awards they’d won…

“Okay, okay, I get it,” Sunset interrupted. “You’re a choir nerd under all that glitz and glam. I’m cool with that. But if we don’t want to miss it, we should probably get going.”

Rara’s face instantly whipped towards the clock and blanched just as quickly. She’d already talked her way through a whopping ten minutes of lunch period.

“Right. Sorry.”

For once, nothing strange seemed to happen during the actual tour, which was only remarkable because of what had happened last time Sunset showed a bunch of singers around the school. After that, Sunset considered any school tour when no one revealed any secret evil plans a victory. Keeping the students’ attention away from Rara, however, would not be one.

Barely a minute into it, Rara had already been spotted by someone or another, a figure that didn’t arouse Sunset’s attention enough to investigate further. What mattered was that if the girl didn’t get peace and quiet now, there was no way she ever would here. Almost instinctively, Sunset latched onto Rara and took on a protective stance, letting every student in the hallways know that this chick was with CHS’s former bad girl, and she’d let a little bit of that bad girl out again if they hounded her too much.

High school kids might like the thrill of the chase, especially when it came to celebrities, but they sure didn’t like being chased. This was a fact that Sunset was intimately familiar with.

“Wow,” Rara said, in a voice that only sounded half-joking, “you ever thought about being a bodyguard? You seem pretty experienced with this sort of thing.”

“Not really. Being a superhero is a pretty good gig right now, but I might take you up on that offer someda--”

Shit.

For the first time all day, Sunset considered the possibility that Rara could very well be the most normal transfer student they’d had in a while. She hadn’t seemed to show any sort of magical ability, and usually, it didn’t take long for such things to manifest around her. And Sunset just wasn’t used to talking to normal people, not when CHS was in such a weirdness bubble.

She was almost afraid of looking towards the idol, already expecting the rest of the tour to be filled with odd glances--that is, assuming Rara didn’t run for the hills at the first opportunity. And sure enough, she got that vacant glare from the new student for a few seconds, until a flash of realization hit Rara’s face.

“That’s right!” she blurted out before Sunset could explain. “That’s why you look so familiar! AJ gave me tickets to your concert once.”

Now, it was Sunset’s turn to be confused.

“You’re not talkin’ about our AJ, are you? Blonde hair, country accent, could bench all of us if she wanted to?”

“Oh, she absolutely wants to. But yeah. My parents had a summer lake house close to the Apple farm, so we go way back. We weren’t really able to take trips once I made it big, but I still kept in contact with her a lot. She’s probably the only real friend I’ve ever had...for several reasons.”

For the slightest of moments, Sunset could hear the same vulnerability in Rara’s voice that had tinged her last song, one that couldn’t have been formed just out of simple loneliness. If Rara had decided to attend someplace as off-the-grid as Canterlot High in the height of her fame, something had to have happened. But such mysteries were hardly uncommon at CHS, and Sunset figured that if there was any place that could sort them out, it had to be--

“Actually, I’ve heard a lot of things about you,” Rara interrupted. “You deal with magical oddities and other worlds. AJ told me all about that, but there were some things I never told her.”

Alarm bells were already starting to ring in Sunset’s head, like she was a soldier being thrown into a new battlefield. Only then did she realize that the two hadn’t moved since Rara first brought the topic up, and the vulnerability in her was starting to bleed into more things than just her voice.

“What kinds of things?” Sunset asked, already anticipating the answer.

“You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Well, no one would, but especially not you. From what AJ’s told me...you probably think the threat I’m facing is already gone. It’s something you’ve been up against before, and thought you defeated.”

Even as the hallway clock inched closer to sixth period, everything around the two seemed frozen in time. Sunset’s thoughts, meanwhile, went a mile a minute--there was only one real possibility that made sense considering Rara’s background, but even that couldn’t be right. She may not have seen the Sirens since the Battle of the Bands, but surely, if they wanted to sabotage an actual pop star, they’d put themselves out there as a potential rival. People would be talking about them again, the same way they were talking about Rara.

“I-I think I might be able to believe you,” Sunset barely managed to say. “I don’t know how it’s possible for sirens to still be around, but--”

As the bell rang, Rara let go of her hand, as if she’d just now realized what Sunset could do. What sorts of memories she could pull out.

“They are still around,” Rara said as she began to inch towards the crowd. “They just aren’t the three you’re thinking of.”

Other enemies, or--

Just before Sunset got to thinking about it too hard, Rara approached her one last time, close enough to whisper in her ear.

“I know you didn’t get your magic from Earth. My voice didn’t come from there, either. I’ll be in the music room after school if you want to talk.”

It was abrupt, clipped, the sort of thing you would never expect to hear in an interview. But that was how Sunset knew it was real.

As it turned out, the one feeling Rara couldn’t hide behind the cameras was her desperation.

****

Every day with Rara brought new questions--should have brought new questions--but somehow, the more the girl talked, the more everything seemed right. If the usual magic students were unsolvable enigmas, Rara was a sudoku puzzle--a numerical sequence that didn’t make sense on its own, but seemed to follow all the established rules anyway.

Each day was a new question, a new investigation into just what exactly Rara was, how she differed from the Dazzlings, and how exactly she made her magic into a career. Even then, the first day had been the one that brought the biggest questions of all, the ones Sunset would turn around in her head for months to come.

“The original sirens were exiled from Equestria thousands of years ago,” Rara had told her on the first day. “Or that’s what the myths my parents told me say. But plenty of their descendants hadn’t done anything wrong, so they were allowed to stay until the rest of the land began to fear their abilities. No matter how hard we try to turn our powers off, a little bit of them still leeches through sometimes, and that was enough to scare ponies. All the sirens were finally exiled about a hundred years ago, and by then, many of them wanted to dilute their blood as much as possible. They didn’t want their children to suffer as they did.”

Rara’s voice always took on a mythological tone when she discussed her life as a siren, and Sunset wondered more than once if sirens were natural storytellers as well. Maybe, in the days before music was invented, that was how they enthralled their prey. If that was true, then Sunset figured that magic was every bit as strong today as it had been back then. Even in her initial fear, she was still thoroughly entranced.

“So if the sirens who came here were ancient, then you must be--”

“Seventeen, like you. I’m technically only a quarter siren. It’s kinda like being an immigrant’s child. It’s easier to say you’re a siren than it is to say you’re a third-generation siren. People tend to understand you better that way.”

Sunset had almost remarked on how being born to foreigners didn’t exactly give you powers, or make much of a difference beyond what intolerant idiots thought, but had been too caught up in another question to say anything.

If you’re one quarter siren, doesn’t that just make you three quarters human? Or do your powers keep you from reaching that point, even then?

“Anyway, there is a bit of a generational gap like that with us sirens, too. Our parents try not to tell us about our magic unless we want to go into work that would require us to use our voices. We only have to be careful with our mind control if we use them too much, enough to make a career out of it. Singing tends to be the stereotypical siren job, and our magic channels better through song, but it would still work if I did slam poetry, or became a motivational speaker. I’ve even heard of a couple who became drill sergeants.”

Sunset mulled for a few seconds over whether a mind-controlling drill sergeant would useful for maintaining control or utterly terrifying.

Both, she’d thought. Definitely both.

“You lost me at the last one,” she’d finally said. “I feel like you’d be good at the others.”

“Well, my original washed-up child star five-year plan was going to be a Bridleway residency, but you’re right. Even a D-list celebrity could probably make tons of money as a motivational speaker.”

She’d let out a little chuckle after saying this, which had soon bloomed into a round of raucous laughter between the two of them. From there, the topic soon changed to other, more frivolous matters--their favorite songs, their influences, what it must have been like to live as a celebrity, what it must have been like to live in another world. As it turned out, Rara had actually thought far more about the latter than Sunset had about the former, even with all her old delusions of grandeur.

They had talked about mythical beings that each world had that were similar to the type of siren Rara was--as soon as the singer brought up that all the sirens born after the Dazzlings fed off love, Sunset told her stories about the changelings, stories that she had once believed to be myths. Rara, in turn, told her fairy tales she’d heard about mermaids, ones that were far more tragic than the few childish ones Sunset had heard on Earth.

“They say mermaids turn into sea foam if they fall in love with humans, and sirens are too black-hearted to even consider such a possibility. No matter if you’re one or another, you’re doomed in love.”

Sunset, without thinking, had asked her if she felt the same. Maybe it had been the song tugging against her heart, or perhaps it was something else. Maybe she was just trying to mimic how a reporter would respond to that question in an interview.

Rara simply shrugged, as if she was expecting that same question all along.

“I think every girl’s thought that at some point. Love isn’t easy for any of us to find, and trust me--it’s a lot harder when tabloids are always breathing down your neck. But if I had to choose which fate I’d doom myself to, it definitely wouldn’t be the siren’s. Here’s the difference between mermaids and sirens--one’s a hopeless romantic, and the other is just hopeless. So I like to think that I’m a siren with a mermaid’s heart.”

Sunset broke out in another round of laughter after hearing this, only briefly glancing at the clock in the music room. It was already seven o'clock, three hours after both of them should have been home.

“Damn, do you always work this fast?” Sunset finally said. “Because it really sounds like you’re trying to come on to me right now.”

For the first time in the whole conversation, everything went silent, and Rara jumped back in her seat. Sunset had sworn that the only reason she didn’t fall off the chair then and there was because the universe was watching over her, making sure not even a single strand of hair fell out of place. What the universe didn’t do, though, was make her stop blushing like an old lady who’d heard somebody swear in public.

For a siren, she’s pretty innocent, Sunset had thought to herself. She wasn’t sure when she had stopped thinking of Rara as a pop star, and starting thinking of her as something more.

“That wasn’t what I meant at all! I--I mean, I wouldn’t mind getting to know you better, and you probably understand me better than anyone, and I’m sure anyone would be lucky to have you as your girlfriend, but--”

If this was a movie, Sunset would have leaned in towards Rara and kissed her to shut her up, watch her blush more. But Sunset was acutely aware of the reality at play here--this didn’t feel like a stranger she’d only seen on TV. This didn’t feel like a movie, or a play, or anything else.

It didn’t even feel like she’d just met Rara. It was like both she and her song had lodged themselves into some sort of extended premonition in Sunset’s mind, telling them that they were fated to meet somehow.

If Sunset would’ve had an ounce of logic left in her head that day, she would’ve dismissed all this as utter rubbish. “Insta-love,” as Twilight’s favorite book reviewers called it, yet another cliche that adorned almost every bad romance novel on the shelves. But somehow or another, her mind was allured by a multitude of possibilities--that she had predicted this meeting, or she had travelled through time to get to this very moment without even knowing it, or even that Rara was the mermaid from the old myths, reborn to see her again.

If Sunset would’ve been aware of the situation, she would have torn all those childish thoughts from her brain the minute they arrived, dismissed it as another siren song. The Dazzlings had seemed nice enough when she first met them, after all. But what mattered was that, in that moment, her mind was completely blank--either from genuine admiration or a latent celebrity crush.

If Sunset would have thought this through at all--at all--she would have heard alarm bells the minute Rara finished her sentence. Would have heard it as nothing short of an outright confession.

“I’ve made people fall in love with me before. Accidentally, but still. Please, just wait until tomorrow. Until the day after, and the day after that. Until I can know that it’s the real you speaking, and not my powers.”

Notes of regret pierced her voice, as if simply uttering those words was enough to make her relive a thousand tragedies. And that, more than her words, had been what Sunset had noticed.

“It’s okay,” Sunset had said, sensing a world of trauma behind those few sentences. “We can talk about it another time. Whenever you’re comfortable, I’m willing to hear. Then I’ll be able to tell you this feeling isn’t something you placed in my head.”

To this day, Sunset wasn’t even sure herself if it was or not. The only real evidence she had was Rara’s kindness, and even that could be faked. Even a siren’s song could be an accidental hit, both to the music charts and to the heart. But, if she had to really wrack her brain about it, she’d stopped thinking about it the minute Rara suggested it.

If she’d simply paid attention, Sunset would have seen the writing on the wall from the very beginning. But that was just it--love came, as it often did, in spite of the warning signs.