• Published 26th Aug 2022
  • 1,714 Views, 112 Comments

The Last Princess - bookhorse125



Amidst the chaos and confusion that caused Equestria to fall apart, one pony in the midst of it all knows what they could have been… and what has been taken away from her.

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Mysterious Ways

Sunny Starscout stopped for a moment, gasping for air, her hoof holding a stitch in her side. She sat down on the rocky ground, just wanting to catch her breath. The mysterious orb she had been following for days hovered in front of her, pulsing impatiently.

“I know, I know,” Sunny said miserably. “Geez, what do you have to show me all the way out here?”

She was in a part of Equestria she had never seen before, further south than most maps went. There was nothing around her but rocks and jagged spires and dust, but apparently the glowing ball of light that had appeared three days ago was intent on bringing her here.

Sunny had been returning to her lighthouse after a long day traveling back home from Zephyr Heights, the pegasus city, where Queen Haven had been holding a celebration to mark one whole month since magic had returned, and insisted that Sunny and her friends be present for the event and parade that followed. Sunny had been up on the balcony, like she was every night, mouthing the words to her father’s story while looking up at the stars. It was one of the times she felt closest to him. She had no sooner finished her story when the three unity crystals that had brought magic back began to glow. The glow soon shaped itself into an orb, which had tugged Sunny along for three days out into the middle of nowhere. And Sunny had no idea why. But she had a feeling she was about to find out.

She stood up and continued to follow the glowing light as it led her around another rocky spire… and started to drift upwards.

Sunny stopped. “Up there?” she asked uncertainly.

The orb paused, and she could imagine it retorting, “Yes, obviously, now just stop asking questions and just follow me!”

She sighed and reached down inside herself so that her golden wings and horn appeared, shining a golden light on the surrounding landscape. She spread her wings and flapped hard to catch up with the glowing orb, which was getting further and further away. She swooped around as it suddenly dove into a space between a slab of stone and the side of a small mountain, disappearing into the yawning opening of a cave.

“Woah.” Sunny gently touched down on the cold stone floor, looking around. The cave was scattered with books, shoved into every nook and corner, as if somepony had raced through here and was in too big of a rush to care about the tomes skidding across the floor as their hooves pushed them out of the way. Over in the corner was a stone bookshelf, practically empty, with a spot on the rocky wall above it that was perfectly square and about twenty shades paler than the stone around it. On the floor in front of the bookshelf were scattered shards of broken glass and splintered wood, the paint long faded over time.

Clearly, somepony lived in this cave - or did live in this cave. It seemed quite empty now.

“Why did you bring me here?” Sunny asked the orb, turning around to find it, but it was gone. She turned around in a complete circle looking for it, but it was nowhere to be seen.

A voice suddenly rang out across the empty cave: “What are you doing here?”


Sunny barely had time to turn her head before she got hit by a massive magical blast that sent her flying backwards. She slammed into the stone wall and slid to the floor, groaning. Her alicorn form flickered as she struggled to maintain consciousness. She saw the blurry form of a tall unicorn standing some distance away, a massive pink blob at the tip of her horn seeming to snap Sunny out of her trance. She staggered to her hooves and threw up a golden shield from her own horn just in time to shield the blast, but it still sent her hooves skidding across the floor.

Gasping, Sunny looked up, sweat pouring down her face from the stress of keeping the shield up. There wasn’t anypony this powerful in all of Equestria! At least, not that she knew of…

The blast suddenly cut off, but Sunny kept her shield up. She blinked back the blurriness in her eyes and tried to study her attacker through the golden shield as the unicorn stepped forward into the light leaking from the cave opening combined with Sunny’s shield.

The mare was tall, taller than anypony Sunny had ever seen, with a purple coat and matching horn, which was strange because most unicorn horns were a pearly white, like a geode, instead of matching their coats. Even though she wasn’t firing any magic at Sunny, a glowing magenta aura surrounded the pony’s horn. She had purple eyes that looked red from crying and underlined with dark circles from exhaustion, though they glittered with a kind of anger-fueled hatred that Sunny had only ever seen once. Her mane was long and waving, a dark indigo with a streak of lighter purple and pink in her mane and bangs, as well as her tail, and if Sunny didn’t know any better, she would say that it glittered.

Under any normal circumstances, Sunny would have thought that the unicorn mare looked familiar, but her brain was throbbing too painfully to work out who she was seeing. But then the unicorn spread her wings - huge, swooping purple wings that stretched longer from tip to tip than the room at the top of Sunny’s old lighthouse - and Sunny could see the mare’s cutie mark: a pink six-pointed star surrounded by five smaller white stars.

Sunny felt like she was going to faint. Her eyes went wide and her jaw dropped, and she swore her heart stopped beating. Her shield flickered and disappeared from her shock.

Because that mark was so familiar to her that it might as well have been her own cutie mark. It was the same mark that hung around her father’s neck, it was the same mark that was posted on a flag in her old house, it was the same mark that belonged to a legendary pony, one she had always wanted to meet… but never thought she would be like this.

“Y-you’re Twilight Sparkle?”

The purple alicorn snarled, her eyes flashing. “And what is it to you? After all, everypony’s forgotten about me, haven't they? Nopony cares anymore!”

She shot a blast straight at Sunny, and she stumbled to the side as it shattered the rocks behind where she had been standing just moments ago.

“N-no, you don’t understand!” Sunny stammered. “I - we - my friends and I - we didn’t-”

With a yelp, she leaped out of the way as Twilight Sparkle launched herself at Sunny, rebounding off the wall and landing on her hooves. Sunny ran to the other side of the cave and hid behind the bookshelf, trying to calm her pounding heart.

“Okay, Sunny, just calm down,” she whispered to herself, taking a deep breath. “The pony you’ve idolized most in the world turns up in a cave in the most desolate part of Equestria and is apparently very angry. Just think! You can figure this out! How do you get her to calm down without zapping you to bits?”

Sunny sneaked a peak around the bookshelf to see where Twilight was, only to find her inches from her own muzzle, horn blazing. “Yeep!

She spread her wings and tried to leap away, but Twilight Sparkle slammed her hoof on Sunny’s tail, pinning her to the ground and preventing her from escaping. Flipping the smaller alicorn around so that the two ponies were staring at each other, Twilight snarled at her, baring her teeth. Sunny gulped and kept her eyes on the alicorn’s horn, which was showing no signs of dying down, the pink light reflected in her eyes.

“Tell me,” Twilight Sparkle growled, her voice low and dangerous, “what’s going on out there.”

Sunny swallowed. “Well-”

Twilight’s scowl deepened, her horn sparked and hissed dangerously, arches of energy crackling haphazardly from one end to the other, and Sunny decided that it would be best to do what she said.

“E-everypony’s been divided,” she thought would be a good place to start. “Ever since - well, ever since you disappeared, ponykind has separated and divided, and told each other lies about each other. Nopony remembers the old days anymore - not like it was when you were in charge. And because they didn’t trust each other - because they weren’t friends - magic disappeared, and nopony knew where it went. But recently, I-I made some friends, friends with other ponies, from other tribes, and we’ve brought magic back, and everypony’s started to become friends again-” She stopped, because Twilight was staring over her head, her eyes wide with shock and something that looked like guilt and shame. Sunny glanced behind her to see what the older alicorn might be staring at, but there was nothing, but when she quickly looked back, Twilight’s eyes were welling with tears.

“It’s all my fault,” she whispered, in a voice almost too soft to even hear. “I failed them all. It’s all… none of it mattered… I have to fix it…” Her face contorted with anger, and the ancient lines in her face might as well have been etched into stone with the certainty that she said, “No. They brought this upon themselves… they destroyed everything… this is their fault… let them… no… I was supposed to protect them… I failed them… this is my fault… this is their fault…” Her horn grew brighter with each thought, her anxiety mounting.

“It’s better now!” Sunny tried to say, stepping back nervously as Twilight, unsure of what to think, decided that the one thing she did know was that she was angry - very, very angry, and somepony deserved to pay. She whirled around to glare at the younger alicorn, very slowly backing away from her. “Please, we’ve tried to fix it-”

“Only I can fix it!” Twilight suddenly screamed, a stray beam shattering a part of the roof of the cave. Rocks rained down, cracks splintered across the ceiling, and Sunny looked up fearfully, but Twilight apparently didn’t care. The dust surrounding her made her look all the more dangerous and menacing. “I was supposed to keep this from happening… that was my job… and I failed at it…” She narrowed her eyes at Sunny. “But you did this. You… you did this. You destroyed everything!”

The tip of her horn glowed brighter than ever, and she sent a blinding beam straight at Sunny, who countered it with a golden beam of her own. She dug her hooves into the ground and struggled to keep it going. Twilight Sparkle’s eyes narrowed as her pink magic beam crept closer and closer to the tip of Sunny’s horn, until she could feel it, white-hot against the gold. Twilight stepped closer, rising to her full intimidating height. Sunny opened her eyes and, for just a moment, looked into those of Twilight Sparkles, and she gasped.

All of a sudden, Sunny was yanked back into a memory - one she had long visited whenever she felt lonely. She was standing on the balcony ringing her lighthouse, watching a tiny lantern drifting away into the night, its precious cargo safely secured, slowly fading away into one of many lights in the starry night sky. She smiled contentedly as she watched, and she leaned against the pony next to her, feeling how real he was and how safe she felt when she was with him, because he kept saying that everything would be okay, because his stories gave her hope for a brighter future, one that she wanted to see someday…

Sunny now stared into Twilight Sparkle’s eyes, not daring to blink, not daring to break the connection.

Because she knew those eyes - and she had never expected to see them again.

“D-dad?”

Sunny’s beam faltered as she lost concentration. Twilight Sparkle roared, and everything went black.

Author's Note:

The queen is dead. I feel like that hits a little too close to this story. History is being made, and we are living through it... It's crazy when you think about it.

Art by me!

Constructive criticism is appreciated. Thank you for reading!