Twilight's magical knowledge is put to the test when Celestia transforms into a predator from Equestria's prehistoric past
Transformation magic is a powerful, dangerous tool, a lesson Princess Celestia has taught time and time again. But when a miscalculation of her own warps her body into a new and terrible form, an avian form her oldest enemies held millennia ago, Celestia learns these dangers from an entirely new perspective. Now she must find a way to reclaim her old body and manage the killer instincts of her new one. Of course, in order to do that, she'll have to climb off her dusty old throne and make some friends with the knowledge to help her, with some prompting from the more-than-friend who sent her the spell to begin with.
“Perfect!” Twilight’s insectile wings fluttered, the glow of the horn sitting atop her head starting to fade. She buzzed toward the mirror in a rush of excitement, curiosity overwhelming her. She only had time to make note of the fact that she had indeed turned herself into a parasprite before a burning hunger overtook her. However, her horn was still with her, and she pulled the plug on the experiment before she could begin the omnivorous rampage that the species was so known for. With a pulse of magic, she grew in size, her body expanding out into a fluffy, cuddly pony’s form once more. Once she had gathered her bearings, she levitated her quill towards a list of races of Equestria and ticked the box labelled “parasprites”.
“Next!” The unicorn closed her eyes, focusing on the magical signature she remembered from Gilda’s ill fated visit to Ponyville. She let the spell overwhelm her, griffon magic flowing from the tips of her forearms and wings into her barrel and withers. Her hooves became claws and paws, her wings grew wide and sharp-tipped and her mouth became a feathery beak. Twilight noted that her temperament was mostly unchanged, something she had not found to be the case when transforming to mules or minotaurs but had found to be so in Saddle Arabians and zebra. Her horn, still following her across each transformation, gathered the feathery pen in her magic and levitated the writing implement towards the checklist recording her experiment results. She quickly scrawled a checkmark a box labelled “no” under a column labelled “mood changes”, following this up with an answer of “yes” to the column “successful transformation”. Upon review, she noted with satisfaction that her list showed that there had yet to be a “no” for that particular column.
With nothing but success showing up on the page, her thoughts turned to her plans for the future and her motives for casting the spell she did. The thought of the look on her friend’s face when she saw a spell letting her transform into those tiny ponies she was so dedicated to helping overwhelmed Twilight with excitement.
“Fluttershy is going to love this!” Twilight exclaimed to herself. “I only hope it works for everypony else as well as it worked for me. I’d hate for Fluttershy to miss a chance to fly with the breezies just because I didn’t make the spell work for her. Maybe I should get a second opinion...” Twilight scratched a hoof to her chin, weighing her options.
Experience with Pinkie’s surprise birthday party suggested that letting her friends in on the secret would be a very poor idea for all ponies involved, while Spikes natural draconic immunity to magic made him a poor candidate. A letter to the Crystal Empire would make Spike suspicious, meaning Cadance and Shining were out of the picture. She needed somepony capable of secrecy, somepony she talked to frequently enough that suspicion would not be aroused. She needed somepony who was far removed enough from the situation that their involvement would not potentially tip Fluttershy off and capable enough in magic that they could cast the spell themselves. Her thoughts turned to her mentor. Hesitant though she was to pressure The Princess for anything, Twilight was also eager to get feedback for her work and maybe even improvements. Moreover, The Princess matched all of her criteria. And, of course, the thought of earning Celestia’s good will always made Twilight simmer with the private joy that only the appreciation of a loved one could bring her. More than that, the kind of joy that only impressing Celestia could bring her. There was something about that peaceful smile growing just a bit brighter, a bit more real that always—She cut the thoughts off before she could drift off into fantasy, reminding herself of her plans for Fluttershy and the need for work to be done.
Her lingering desire for a good friend’s approval—and absolutely nothing more, she reminded herself—was the push she needed. To Celestia the letter would go. She withdrew a fresh sheet of paper from her bedside cabinet, happily settling upon her star-studded bedsheets with an energetic flop. Since her ascension and Celestia’s confession that she thought of her as more than a student, Twilight had been working on suppressing the joy that Celestia’s smiles brought to her lest she embarass them both. In private, however, she was happy to let it out as the free, open expression of precisely what she felt for that awe-inspiring mage, loving ruler and close companion that she held so dear.
The letter practically wrote itself, following down the pathway of dozens of others like it. The words “Dear Princess Celestia” were practically second nature to her, and her description of the new spell flew from her pen to the page with a familiar fervor. She paused only at the request. As always, she was loathe to ask The Princess for anything. Her quill tip tapped at her chin, a rhythmic motion that did nothing to bring forth the courage needed for this moment. It was not that Twilight wanted to curry favour or gain further approval—Celestia’s approval was something she earned, not something she wanted to try to manipulate and wheedle for. It was not, either, that Twilight felt it was beneath her place to ask Celestia for anything, because while she certainly felt she was Celestia’s inferior, Celestia had made it abundantly clear that the feeling was not at all mutual.
Rather, it was because she lov—because she was deeply attached to—because she respected Celestia so deeply that she knew what asking her a favour would actually entail. The mare was a hopeless workaholic, a fact that her friends and family were all too painfully familiar with. Luna and Twilight in particular experienced this trait (flaw, perhaps?) by virtue of the lion’s share of paperwork and court time that Celestia took from them. Luna, of course, took the brunt of it and was more irked by it than Twilight herself, but for her part it meant Twilight was loathe to add to this stash of work. Court, decrees, meetings, taxes and treaties defined Celestia’s life, and the thought of cutting into her rare moments of personal time was a bane to Twilight.
Which, of course, proved that she was not, contrary to the beliefs of palace staff and gossipy local fashionistas, suffering from a puppy dog crush. She knew Celestia and her very real flaws far too well for her to be in love with some figment of her imagination.
This particularly random thought was enough to snap Twilight out of her stupor. “Where did that come from?” She looked down at the letter, which was still frustratingly incomplete. She sighed, pinching her forehead between her two forehooves. “Maybe I just...I need to convince her it’s not urgent and she should leave it to a convenient time. If I don't, the minute she finds it in her study she'll drop everything to help out. And just saying I don't want her to push herself to look after it won’t help, either. She’ll only think I’m trying to deflect ‘my true importance’ again.”
The scholarly princess made a few half-hearted attempts. “Lastly, I have a minor request.”, “Finally, I was hoping you might give the spell a try when you have a free moment”, “Please, don’t feel pressured to do this, but—”
Just as frustration threatened to overwhelm her, she managed at last to find a phrase. “I hope that you might take some time to practice the spell at your leisure. Friendly advice is always appreciated.” She looked down at her work. “Perfect! She won’t try it right away if I make it just something to try between friends.”
At last, she signed off the page with a usual “your devoted friend, Twilight Sparkle.” and rolled the letter into the one of the scrolls she used so religiously.
She approached the heart-studded stairwell, knowing her assistant would be sleeping at this time of the day with almost absolute certainty. “Spike! Spiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike!” She called down the flight, waving her letter in her magical grasp. A loud groan greeted her, which served as Twilight’s confirmation that her postulation had been fully correct.
The steps echoed with the trudging of a freshly awakened dragon. At last, the drake reached the top, rubbing sleep out of his eyes and holding his mouth open in a yawn. Twilight noticed ink stains on his hands and immediately knew what the cause of his late nights had been this time. “I told you comics would ruin your sleep cycle, Spike.” Twilight scolded, earning her a glare from the grouchy little dragon. “That’s why you’re so tired all the time. It wouldn’t be so bad if you read them during the day, but you need your sleep. It stunts your growth.” Spike looked like he was about to retort with nothing but sarcasm, so Twilight interjected with “And if your growth is stunted, you won’t be the handsome drake you’ve always wanted to stand by Rarity’s side.” She knew that would get his attention, and sure enough he snapped out of his sleep-addled stupor immediately.
“It would?!” Spike gasped in horror.
“Yep!” Twilight happily confirmed. “And with your life cycle, it might be years of Rarity dating other stallions before she sees any shot with you if you don’t try sleeping at the right times. They do call it beauty sleep, after all.”
“So why don’t you sleep at the right times, then?”
Twilight giggled. “I’m the homeliest unicorn anypony’s ever seen and we both know it.”
Spike raised an eyebrow. “Umm...Twi? You know you’re not a unicorn, right?”
Twilight blushed. “Oh, that.” She snuck a glance to her wings. “Right. I’m still not pretty. No need to try when I have so much work to do anyway!” She waved her scroll meaningfully, and Spike’s eyes widened.
“You want me to send that?”
“Please and thank you! And after that we can talk about what fixing your sleeping habits will do for your chances with the mares.” Twilight trotted up the stairs to her vanity, seating herself beside the mirror and scarcely used makeup.
Spike set the scroll ablaze without another thought, joining Twilight on the second floor of her bedroom with due haste. He attempted to examine himself in the mirror from his current height. When that failed, Twilight boosted him to the surface of the drawers that overlaid the vanity with a push of her magic, allowing him to use the mirror as a full-body looking glass. He squinted at himself, looking hard at the body he currently held. He pinched his belly scales between two claws, revealing an alarming amount of baby fat. This caused the little dragon to slump.
“Guess it could use a little work, huh?”
Twilight poked her head into the mirror frame’s field of view, scrutinizing the image before her. “Exercise.” She prescribed. Spike groaned in agony. “And less chocolate.”
“Guess that’s that plan flopped, then. So what’s this about growing and beauty sleep? If I grow, I won’t have to worry about exercise anyway, right?”
Twilight sighed, rolling her eyes. “Until you reach adulthood, that is.”
“Right, and once I’m married I can let myself go and eat all the sweets and chocolate I want and still have an awesome wife like Mrs. Cake did with Mr. Cake!!” Spike proclaimed. “See, Twilight.” He tapped his head proudly. “I got it all figured out.”
“Spike, that’s not very nice…” Twilight protested.
“What, you don’t think Rarity would want a good sta—err, dragon over a handsome one?” Spike looked confused.
Twilight did not dignify the proclamation—and its blatant disregard for evidence to the contrary—with a response, instead focusing on Spike’s willingness to fix his sleep schedule. “Right, well, if we’re gonna even get you to the ‘growing skinnier and bigger’ stage we’re gonna need to fix your sleep schedule.” Twilight said. “And I think those comics are the thing wrong with it. If you want to read before bed, you can’t choose anything exciting like advanced linear algebra. You have to go for something more peaceful, like fables or ancient tragedies.” Twilight noticed her number one assistant was looking less than impressed at her reading list, so she switched gears. “Fairy tales and foal novels might be more your style.” She said more quietly, a blush pooling around her cheeks.
Spike scratched his chin, glancing around the room. “So what are you reading right now, then, Einstallion?”
Twilight flushed. “I’m reading up on races of Equestria. I have some ideas on some spells I want to cast, and to do it I need to know more about the ponies who live in our world and the creatures besides them. But I was thinking we might try something like The Boxcar Fillies or The Two Sisters and The Dragon and—”
“That...actually sounds pretty cool.” Spike said, hopping down from the top of the vanity to investigate the books around Twilight’s bed. “An ancient history of races of Equestria.”
“You really think that sounds cool?” Twilight said, her face scrunching into a brilliant smile.
“Yeah, why not? I mean, I know your books don’t say much about them, but I still wanna know what they had to say about dra—”
“YAY!” Twilight squealed from behind him, pouncing into the air like a predator finding unexpected prey below her. “Oh, Spike, this is going to be so great!” Twilight swooped from her vanity to the centre of her bedroom, sweeping her books up from the floor and telekinetically sorting them into a pile by her bedside. Spike was tripped by one skimming past his legs, so she added him to the cloud of magic and wheeled him over to set him down at the head of the bed. Not skipping a beat, she added to Spike’s rising feeling of having made a terrible mistake by diving off the landing to scoop books from the level below. Her wings allowed her to make her clumsy way back to her bed with yet more books, and at last she flopped down beside Spike. “So where do you want to start, oh number one assistant?”
Spike, not expecting the question, actually had to pause for thought. He eventually turned to the alicorn beside him with a tilt of his head. “I was thinking maybe with something about how we interacted with the world around us." Spike flexed his scales from emphasis. "Y’know, stories about the wars we fought and stuff.” Spike made a jabbing motion, as if he had a spear.
“Boys will be boys.” Twilight said more to herself than to Spike. She opened up the book Spike had been looking at, opening it to the index with a push of well-practiced magic. “Let’s look for war…” She said, tucking a wing around Spike and pulling him toward her chest.
Spike buried himself into the fur, enjoying a rare chance at contact with the pony who had hatched him so many years ago. He once again found himself musing that this might not be so bad, but one thing still nagged at him. “Uh, Twilight, you know it’s still daytime, yeah?”
Twilight checked the window outside. “Wha? OH!” She shut the book in her surprise, scootching across the bed to get a better look. “I guess it is a little early for bedtime reading. How about we do something fun while we wait?”
Spike crossed his arms, giving Twilight a suspicious glance. “Like, real-fun or Twilight-fun?”
Twilight giggled at this. “How about you beat me at Ponopoly a couple of times?”
“It’s not my fault you don’t know how to hoard…” Spike blushed, looking away and smiling.
“I’ll go get the board.” Twilight smiled. As she made her way to the stairs, she couldn’t help but wonder how Celestia was finding the spell. She decided to focus on Spike, trusting that with her expertise in magic Celestia would be able to sort the spell in due time with little issue.
／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼
“The minotaurs and equines, while competitors for food supplies, have lived in mutual harmony ever since the Thesian War of 2300 BNMM.” Twilight read out proudly, the dragon beside her lounging on a pillow next to her. Six losses in Ponopoly later, the two of them had gathered atop Twilight’s bed to read by the light of the setting sun. “Our next species, however, was not nearly so peaceful or so fortunate.” Spike made a grunt, his eyes flickering to the image of the pony in plate armour charging a lance at a battle axe-wielding minotaur with only moderate interest. Twilight sighed at the sight. “Spike, you were the one who wanted to read about the races of Equestria, not me.”
Spike stretched, pawing idly at a Daring Do Tales comic he had hidden under the bed covers. He had been considering breaking down and reading it ever since the passage on griffons had turned out to be a bust. “Yeah, but these books only say things about ponies and other races. I want to know more about other races and dragons.”
Twilight opened her mouth, eyes widening. She broke off the look of surprise with a brief nod. “Of course, Spike! You should have just said something to begin with.”
“I tried to.” He deadpanned, folding his arms across his chest and looking off to one side. “It’s hard to get a word in edgewise when one of us is zooming around the room looking for every single book related to something I had mentioned like two seconds ago.”
Twilight blushed. “...Oh. Well, okay then. Yes, I should have listened better. Sorry.”
“Yeah, yeah, I forgive you.” Spike nodded, managing to prop himself up on his front arms. “I guess I probably coulda said something before we started reading, anyway. So what are you gonna do about the whole ‘no dragons mentioned’ thing? I don’t really feel up to another grand tour through the library’s History of Equestria section.”
“That’s what a glossary is for, Spike.” Twilight giggled. “Let me just look up ‘dragons’ and…” Twilight’s eyes widened. “Oh wow. Something about ‘dragon-terror bird mutualism’. What’s a terror bird?”
“What do you mean, ‘what’s a terror bird’?” Spike looked at her skeptically.
“What?”
“You really don’t know?” Spike raised an eyebrow.
“What is it, then?” Twilight looked at him with the pleading look of a scientist caught with a gap in her knowledge.
“I dunno.” Spike shrugged. “But I thought you knew about like every race in Equestria anyway. Didn’t Princess Celestia give you that big book on the history of diplomacy you read for like five days straight when you went alicorn?”
“So why don’t I know about it…” Twilight nodded. Spike was absolutely correct. “Only one way to find out.” Twilight flipped through the book to the page mentioned. Greeting her there was an image taken out of those horror movies she was forever having to pull Spike out of when he tried sneaking into them. An exhausted mare had her back against a tree, hooves rearing, eyes wide and mouth agape in pure terror. Dirt and bruises crusted her body, and her coat was flowing with unkempt fur from her tangled mat of a mane to her unshorn fetlocks. Menacing her was a creature out of some kind of surrealist nightmare.
Legs as tall as a pony’s entire body and coated in jagged scales propped up a massive creature easily two and a half times the size of the pony below it. Somehow, as if it were a sick idea of a joke, the monster was a bird, with a crest of spiked feathers that would not have looked out of place on one of Fluttershy’s bluejays. But this was not simply a peaceful, seed-crushing songbird. Like some sort of mockery of common sense the bird had elongated arms in place of wings. The scaly, feather-dotted limbs ended in hands armed with bladed claws as long as Twilight’s nose, and were stretched out to grasp as if they were some sort of dark parallel to a monkey’s. The feet of the lengthy legs had talons edged with cruel hooks, one of which was blocking the retreat of the screaming pony. And where the beak of a bird of Fluttershy’s would be armed to crush fruits and insects, the elongated blade wielded by the horror on the page was clearly meant for crushing bones.
“What in the…?” Twilight trailed off, transfixed by the image of the scene unfolding. Spike peered over her shoulder, similarly stunned.
“That right there. That is messed up.” Spiked poked a claw at the image. Twilight read more carefully.
Twilight began reading1, though Spike knew from experience that when it came to her dry textbooks it was oft best to just tune her out. Instead, he focused on how dragons could be related to giant monsters, theories, anxieties and suspicions echoing through his head.
“Spike, they’re talking about the evolution of the first unicorns!” Twilight’s excitement managed to break Spike from his thoughts.
“Does it say anything about dragons?” Spike pressed.
Twilight traced down the page. “On occasion dragons and terror birds were known to nest together in a mutualistic relationship, with the dragons warming terror bird eggs and the terror birds guarding and raising the dragon eggs when the reptiles fell into one of their famous slumbers, or rearing the young if the parents were otherwise incapable. These practices would later be adopted by equines after the extinction of terror birds as part of the Smokey Mountain Treaty. An example of one such egg adopted from indisposed parents and protected by equines can be found in the form of—” Twilight swallowed. The words “Princess Celestia’s pupil and her dragon hatchling” stared up at her. Spike, of course, was waiting on the words printed in the text before them. Twilight faced a dilemma. She could not lie. While she was able to keep projects under wrap quite happily, as Rarity, Fluttershy and their secrets about Fluttershy’s model career demonstrated, she was abominable at keeping personal secrets quiet.
So, naturally, the moment Spike asked—“Uh, in the form of what, exactly?”—she was going to be stuck with her back against a wall.
She cracked an overwide smile at this, flipping the pages of the book as quickly as possible. “Uhhhhhh, lemme just check the sources really quickly. I don’t trust what’s presented here as factually accurate.”
“Oooo...kay?” Spike raised an eyebrow. “But you’re doing that thing you always do when you don’t want me to know something either way.”
“What thing?” Twilight’s pupils shot from one side of her eyes to the other in their dance to avoid Spike’s own gaze.
“Your wings are twitchy, your hooves are shifty and you aren’t looking me in the eyes. You’re hiding something fro—” Spike’s line of reasoning was cut off by a ball of gas rising from his stomach to his throat. He clutched his belly in discomfort, tilting his mouth away from Twilight and her precious books in knowledge of what was about to come. Fire jettisoned from his mouth in a heavy belch, the stench of brimstone filling the air around them. A scroll materialized in the air above, bonking Twilight on its way to the bedsheets. Twilight snatched it up in a heartbeat, using the distraction to duck away from having to answer some very awkward questions the book would no doubt bring up otherwise. With a flourish of magic, she pulled open the scroll and scanned down the page.
“Is it from Princess Celestia?” Spike looked ready to press his questions about Twilight’s terrible attempts at holding secrecy, but Twilight’s growing look of concern was enough to silence him.
“No, it’s...Princess Luna?”
The two of them shared a look. Spike managed to wriggle up into Twilight’s lap in order to better get a look at the page in front of him. Unfortunately for him, Twilight held it above eye level, her eyes growing wider and wider as they trailed down the page. While the writing itself was no different from a letter sent by Twilight’s beloved mentor, Twilight soon discovered the content was different in both tone and proclamation, and much more alarming than most letters from Celestia.
Twilight bolted from the bed once she’d finished reading. She gathered up some hasty supplies in the form of books on magic and notes from around the room, humming to herself in panic. Spike opened his mouth to question Twilight, but before he could get in a single word she had vanished in a blink of salmon magic. Left with nothing but the letter to explain what was going on, the dragon grabbed the scroll and made a second attempt at reading it.
Princess Twilight Sparkle, your help is immediately requested at Castle Canterlot. Gather any aid you may have for fighting anti-magic and writings on transformations. My sister has made a dire mistake, and your expertise on the subject may be her only saving grace.
Princess Luna.
Footnotes: 1“While no longer relevant to the cultures found across Equestria, the ancient race known as the terror birds is notable in part for its role in shaping Equestrian history. Infamous amongst historians of the equine tribes, these highly specialized predators evolved to hunt fast-moving granivores, and especially ungulates of the horse and pony family, starting in the Eocene Epoch. The most modern example of the terror birds, Titanis xenosapius, was a ruthless, intelligent and organized predator that formed primitive hunter-gatherer societies. These species formed a long-standing and frantic evolutionary arms race with ponies that the equines of Equestria can still trace many elements of the modern heritage to. The tendency for ponies to scatter into uneven lines, for instance, was a deterring tactic expressly adopted for evading these plains-based predators. Some ponies were selected for long, potent horns that could tap into the magical leylines of the world and sense the presence of these predators long before arriva—
Celestia looked at the body in the mirror in horror. While she was always used to being gigantic, now she was hunching to avoid the ceiling. Her neck cramped awkwardly, her head pressing against the formerly comfortably small study in a flush of feathers. Long yellow claws flexed where her front hooves should have been, clenching and unclenching in discomfort. Her slender, scaly legs terminated in savagely clawed feet that had to make an effort not to shred any of the myriad spell books she had pulled off the walls in her panic.
It had been only once she realized that she was not only immune to magic but also incapable of casting it that she had calmed to a resignation with her current lot in life. Now staring into the face of an alpha predator with her usual quiet and calm, she wasted no time reassuring herself that her current transformation was not by any means the most alarming threat to her rule she had faced even in the past four months, let alone her lengthy history as diarch of Equestria. Then she remembered that there had not been a threat she had personally handled in over a decade, and her attempts to rouse her spirits died like a dust devil robbed of its winds.
She turned back to the creature in the mirror. Long, beautifully shimmering plumes recreated the tones of her mane and tail in wide, fanning crests at her rear and head. Each one could flex for emoting when she wished it to, which was very much worth noting to her. To her relief her eyes—despite holding slitted black pupils—were still a friendly pink colour and still seemed to carry across the warmth and intelligence she attempted to project to all the world whenever she could. Of course, all of that fell by the wayside when one looked at the front half of her head, and therein lay the problem. There was a battle axe of keratin and bone not unlike those used by the Buffalo resting where her face should be. As if that were not enough, the end of the axe was not merely a blade. Rather, a slender, savagely pointed hook served as the edge to the beak. Celestia shuddered at the memory of what precisely the hook was used for, her warm and intelligent eyes shutting against the thought.
Nevertheless, she composed herself and rallied her courage, reminding herself that no solution to a long term problem was ever found in the throes of terror or despair. With an effort, she managed to squeeze the tall, sinuous body towards the door of her study, her head bobbing in time with her feet and scraping the ceiling as she walked. Her feet, being only two where before she had four, swayed awkwardly with every step. She was briefly reminded of an intoxicated minotaur, narrowly avoiding staggering into her lectern, fireplace and scattered stray books like she was. Her foot caught on the plush purple couch at the centre of the room midway to the door, and with a squawk the dignified ruler of all Equestria found herself crashing into the floral patterned floor with the sort of “thump” a cushion makes upon hitting carpeting. Celestia sat in a pile of fluffed feathers and tangled limbs, forcing herself not to give in to cynicism and frustration.
In that moment, Celestia wondered how, exactly, the terror bird race had posed the threat to ponies that it had been so infamous for. She attempted to use her arms to engage in a pushup, only to find they could not bend that way. Rather, she had to use them as a prop while her back legs righted herself, and in her rush to stand she banged her head against the ceiling. Miraculously, her steps to the door were erratic but uneventful. Now the task ahead changed, and her analytic mind found itself working towards a framework of a strategy. She knew she had to avoid her guards. Not only would being confronted result in an encounter she could only see resulting in an arrest for her, but even if she could restrain herself from attacking her ponies, even the chance of such a thing was something she wished from the bottom of her heart to never be confronted with. Composing herself once again, she leaned down and reached out her claws towards the portal. Hooked hands with a measly single finger and thumb worked at the knob with a rough gracelessness. Scratches in the woodwork formed when she missed the golden instrument, and during her attempt to wrap a talon around it she punched a hole in the deep purple panelling. At last, she managed to secure her hold on the door, pushing open the wooden structure and leading herself out into the hallways of Canterlot Castle. She only prayed the guards were as—she attempted to summon a euphemism—ceremonially-minded tonight as they were whenever anything else went wrong.
Her bedchambers lay down the hallway, where she at least would have enough room for her now much larger body. When she had remembered the terror bird race during her ill-fated spell casting session, she had not remembered them as being quite so enormous. It was difficult for her to squeeze into shapes that might hide herself from her little ponies, but to her surprise and vague discomfort she found that her brain was naturally picking out places between suits of armor and towering white columns ideal for avoiding the searching eyes of equines. There was also, much more troublingly, a ghost of a desire to ambush them and chase them down running through her mind. She stopped the thought as quickly as she could, reminding herself of what exactly terror birds did to the creatures they ambushed and chased down and adamantly resolving she would sooner starve than imitate them in any respect. The very thought of doing so to her ponies was like poison to her being, and she fought it with every fibre of what she truly was. The name of the species she had selected from the book flashed through her mind with these thoughts, as did the translation for those ancient tongues she had once spoken that now served as the language of scholars. Titanis xenosapiens, they had named it. “The alien-minded giant”.
In her musings, she grew distant, not noticing the faint sound of hoofsteps pricking at her ears. However, Celestia’s eagle eyes nonetheless spotted a guard turning the corner at the end of the hallway the moment his hoof had hit the floor in front of her. In an instant, her eyes focused in on the sign of movement, the plate glass windows and royal tapestries of the hall blurring into the background. Her eyes were so strong now that she could see even the individual tufts of fur against his flesh and the flow of the muscles around his wrist bone. Fear flashed through her mind, and her body ached to disarm the guard and knock him cold with a kick rather than face his judgement. She suppressed the instinct like she did all her baser ones, opting instead to make for a set of smaller chambers she had often used for private transportation from her study to her chambers. She had already begun moving by the time her potential antagonist had turned the corner. Almost immediately she realized the problem with this plan, but her hesitation only caused her to catch the leg she was raising to walk with on her ankle joint, and she found herself careening toward the hallway anyway.
The world slowed to a crawl, the frame of the door rushing towards her in slow motion. She knew exactly what was going to happen to the giant body making its way towards the small hole well before she hit it. With another loud “pompf” noise, Celestia wedged herself so far into the hallway that her chest lodged against the frame halfway down its feathery length. She struggled to push herself through the rest of the way with several heaves of her sickle-clawed forearms, but digits meant for savaging the hides of prey attempting to escape were never to win the battle for purchase that the climbing limbs of other races with hands would allow her. The sound of approaching hooves silenced her efforts, causing her to shut her eyes against her inevitable fate.
Her feathery bottom was still fluffing out into the hallway, and the guard on duty gave the protruding posterior a scrutinizing glance. “Excuse me, ma’am? Those chambers are for use of her majesty Princess Celestia only, Mrs...Griffon?” Celestia gave a muffled protest. The guard managed to move past the hiccup of not being able to identify his intruder’s species. Undaunted by Celestia’s protests, he continued to list legal proceedings with a robotic efficiency.
“Per section seventeen, verse five of the palace conduct legal manual, I request you join me on escort to the nearest official palace office, where you will be fined thirty six bits and forcibly ejected from the palace.” Celestia’s mind reeled at how the stallion was able to so easily force the proverbial round shape presented by her current species and dilemma into the square slot that was the standard protocol of guard duties.
“I would be happy to cooperate,” She said as loudly and clearly as she could, “but, as you can likely see, I am rather stuck at the moment.” Although she knew the stallion could not see her face, Celestia attempted to give the same motherly, reassuring smile she was famous for across the entire Equestrian nation. Rather unfortunately for the Princess of the Sun, the guard on duty could not see the reassuring beam of a beatific alicorn. He could only hear the infernal squawking of the giant creature before him. He raised his spear, and Celestia felt a pointed tip of metal touch to the curve between her thigh and her still quite-too-feathery-bottom.
“Simmer down, ma’am. We need to escort you to the authorities.”
Celestia made her best attempt to shrink down and appear unintimidating, a task she was finding perfectly impossible in her current form. Even if she were to lie prostrate, she could not hide the fact that half of her body was an ideal tool for mayhem and mauling, and her hooked claws would still be visible. She did try, to her credit, to avoid sounding like a giant, murderous bird of prey when she next spoke. “I’m trying to cooperate, sir. This is still all very new to me.”
Sadly, the quiet, predatory hiss that came from her throat only earned her a jab to her bulging birdy behind from the blunt of the spear, and she found herself being forced further down the hole with an indignant screech. Her fortunes turned, however, when she found that she now had enough room for her to slink, and she seized the opportunity with a push from her clumsy legs. The guard gave an order of “halt”, but by that point the two-legged creature was tripping and charging its way down the chamber. The guard’s eyes widened when he realized the creature was heading for Celestia’s chambers. Rather like when flying, Celestia was finding that it was much easier to run in this body than to walk. Even with her steps being as uneven and poorly spaced as they were, the velocity of her body alone seemed to keep her propelled along. By the time the guard had managed to rework his spear to the appropriate position and prepared charging stance, Celestia had already crashed into the wall next to the doorway. His cries of “halt” fell on deaf ears, her beak shattering the lock on the doors and allowing her to simply throw them open. The soldier had only managed to hike halfway down the passageway by the time the prehistoric predator had closed the doors on him. Halting mid-stride, the unfortunate guard was not quick enough to stop himself from smashing into the door. Wood and metal pushed open, and by the time he had arrived to a halt, he was in a pile at the feet of the creature he had tried to arrest earlier.
He gulped, looking up at the monster before him. What he had thought might have been an oddly deformed griffon before showed itself to be far worse than he could have ever imagined. The long claws and savage blade at the end of the creature’s face swam within his vision, and he knew the creature would strike long before he had a chance to prepare some kind of defense. “I have a wife.” He said quietly to himself. He squeezed his eyes shut and awaited what would come. The creature reached out a sickly claw towards him, talons giving a click once they had unfurled. He cringed. It came as a surprise, then, when the claw delicately grabbed his chin, bringing his eyes up slowly to face her.
“I hope this experience helps remind you to treasure her, my little pony.” The monster said in a halting croon. The words were hard to distinguish amidst the clacks of beak and the harsh rush of air, but the way the creature spoke with delicate care made him raise an eye in curiosity. The monster removed his helmet with a clumsy click of its second claw, fumbling several times and pinching his throat a few times. Nonetheless, it removed the armor with great delicacy, setting it to the floor quietly. Once the metal box had slid off, he cringed again, expecting once more for the worst to happen. Instead, he found his mane being stroked by a slow, rough, but nonetheless caring hand. He looked at the creature in confusion. It was only now that he noticed the colour of the creature, quills and all. He looked into the eyes, and though they had cruel slits and were ringed with crimson skin, he could see a gentle smile hidden through them. The creature lowered its head down to his own level in the same way he had seen another giant, white and benevolent creature do a thousand times, and suddenly he knew exactly who he was talking to.
“Are you...related to Her Majesty?” He ventured, looking at the creature before him in confusion. The creature tried several times to force a hiss or squawk from her throat that would sound like comprehensible Equestrian. At last she managed to give a sound like nails on a chalkboard that nevertheless conveyed what she wished to say.
“IT’S ME,” She managed to force out. She tried to say the words “bad spell” in explanation, but the words came out as useless clucks and hisses.
“It’s...you?” The guard scrutinized, piecing together the information he had been given. His eyes widened at last, horror at his prior actions overtaking him. “Y-your Majesty,” he stammered, averting his gaze. Had he not already been lying on his belly, he doubtlessly would have bowed. “I must beg apology for my conduct earlier. I was merely following protocol, and—” Celestia pinched his lips shut with those firm talons, forcing him to look at her again. She gave a gentle nod, and the soft, warm expression of her eyes showed that all was forgiven. The guard, now far outside protocol, had neither rules to fall back on nor standard procedures to enact. He gave an awkward “is there something I can do for you?” in an effort to help her.
Celestia tried opening her mouth again, but realized she was getting nowhere with attempts to speak. She looked to her room for other options. Her eyes tracked the plush, gigantic bed, myriad bookshelves, artifacts and mementos on display and writing desk for options. Almost immediately her now-fantastic vision found a solution. However, with this solution came yet another problem. Once again she found the delicacy of walking was well beyond her, with her legs criss-crossing and knocking into furniture clumsily at every step. Several times she found herself near to the ground, only to then notice the guard had caught her before she could fall upon her face again. She did her best to express her gratitude by giving a warble each time. Eventually, after a series of false starts and near disasters, she made it to a writing desk, and with less effort than before she managed to navigate her front talons to tear open the drawers containing the writing supplies. The predator’s weapon she wrote with was capable of only producing chickenscratch (a pun she would have enjoyed were it not for her situation), but she did manage to spell out a rough “GEt LunA” for the poor stallion looking to her for orders.
The guard parsed the script far more easily than he had her attempts at speech, giving a salute and a “yes, ma’am!” to go with his workings. While the stallion went to his business, Celestia worked on the next stage of her plan. She knew that only the pony who had crafted the spell that had trapped her in her current body could help her escape it, but she also knew that to summon her here she would need a magic user to send a message to her former student. Her claws pressed for purchase and slashed awkwardly, the longer message she had to prepare this time giving her more trouble than before. In the monotony of trying to steady the giant’s talons enough to write with, her thoughts turned to her ill-fated transformation testing she had engaged in earlier that day. It had been guilt that had won her her current body. Guilt and forgetfulness. Perhaps age had softened her, but Celestia preferred to imagine it was her charitability that had produced a desire to learn more about the perspective and minds of her old, long-defeated enemies. She turned her thoughts back to the day she had ended them, her eyes growing misty and distant. Perhaps she was growing old, she mused. She had enough memories of darker times to be so. Ponies marvelled at how she could be so cheerful all the time, and she could only respond that living in an age of love, prosperity and friendship, it was difficult to find reasons not to be. She remembered the ages of Sombra, of Discord, of Tirek and of the Terror Bird Tribes of old, and she knew no reason not to love the world she lived in.
It was amongst these reassuring thoughts that Celestia found the inner peace to move her pen across the page without tearing it or flooding it with ink. The short, sharp letters started to cautiously form from the tip of her quill. She sagged once she had finished the last of the symbols, relief flooding into her. Having time to wait until Luna arrived, she knew she could at least attempt practicing her walking while she was waitin—
“Sister?” Celestia’s thoughts were abruptly cut off. She looked up, seeing Luna cautiously look through the doors of the ruined study. Luna took one look at the form her flesh and blood was currently in ownership of and let out a mortified hiss. “What mockery is this?”
Celestia gave what she hoped was a sheepish smile in response, but ceased doing so upon seeing the grimace of revulsion Luna reacted with. She opened her mouth, then cut herself off midway through a horrifying squawk. Remembering the notes and pen beside her, she scrawled a quick message on the page. The unfortunate paper was tattered and wrinkled by the time she was done, but it nevertheless held a barely-legible message for Luna to read. “BAD SpEll”. Luna’s eyes squinted at the message, pupils flicking back and forth between the words.
“Was this...something done to you? Or did you attempt this spell and obtain this result?” Luna took a tentative step forward. Celestia pointed to herself with a claw, her head bowing away from her sister’s judging eyes. Luna only sighed at this, putting a hoof to her temples.
“Sister, you may be oft taken by a naive optimism,” Celestia tilted her head, put off by Luna’s bluntness, “but you are never rash. What could possibly have driven you to do such a thing?” Celestia swallowed, raising her head to face her sister and the consequences of her actions. Of course, in this form she couldn’t explain the motives that had driven her to test a transformation into her ancient, long-defeated enemies, but even in her normal state she would be hard-pressed to do so. She sidestepped the centuries of emotional growth and shortcoming, family history and personal failure that her response would need to convey by simply shaking her head and giving what she hoped was a smile.
This time, Luna searched Celestia’s eyes and face with scrutiny to see if the horrible mockery of her sister’s proud form could communicate anything of the pony she loved that was housed within. Her searching eyes noticed some of Celestia’s emotions in the shine of the ancient predator’s eyes, and the tension from before began to slowly seep out of the room. Of course, once Luna’s eyes had flashed with recognition, her expression shifted. Luna flicked her tail.
“Do you have any idea of how to fix this particular disaster, then?” Her pony counterpart’s exasperation was thinly veiled, and by it Celestia knew her sister had picked up on her desire to evade the subject of her motives.
Celestia walked to her chest of drawers, knowing precisely how to communicate this particular thought. A long, scaly claw tenderly unfolded to point meaningfully to one of several photos sitting amongst ones showing Spike, Cadance, Luna and Sunset Shimmer. The photo showed Celestia standing with a radiant smile next to a dusty, unkempt and exhausted pony wearing a beautiful blue Gala dress. Despite her state, the shorter pony was beaming at the camera.
Luna only rolled her eyes at this. “‘Tis your solution for everything, sister.”
Celestia turned back to Luna with a snort. What should have been a smirk came out as a predatory sneer, so she shook her head, returned her expression to neutral and pushed her clumsy way back to her writing desk. “HEr SPEll” was the giant bird’s retort.
“Fair.” Luna confessed, turning to stare towards the stars of the evening sky. She pursed her lips. “Do you think she will be able to reverse her magic within the span of the next day?”
Celestia followed her gaze, then turned to look at Luna. She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. Luna sighed.
“We will have to make some arrangements for your current state, then. I presume you will not be taking court. Perhaps...yes, that might work.” Celestia wished to voice a set of her own suggestions and plans, but Luna pressed on, her face firm and unwilling to waste time parsing deeper meanings from Celestia’s limited means of communication. “We will say you have fallen ill by magical means and are consulting Princess Twilight on ways to get better.”
Celestia nodded, looking over at Luna in appreciation. The thought that perhaps she would do better to trust her sister’s judgement more often in the future flashed through her mind.
“In that time, Twilight and I will share your petitioners.” Celestia shook her head firmly at this. She scribbled the words as best she could, tearing the paper in her rush. A very ragged “SCrIbE” sat shakily upon the page not long after she had begun. Luna put a hoof to her chin, stroking it. Celestia added the words “FOR ME” to a second sheet of paper.
Luna blinked, understanding washing over her all at once. Her voice lowered to match the change in pace. “Very well. Twilight and I will take some time away from our own duties to stand court, while you will allow a scribe to aid you in judging written petitions for duties we feel we are unable to handle or petitioners who request you directly.”
Celestia nodded once again, giving Luna her best attempt at a look of appreciation. To her relief, Luna took this in stride, nodding. It was this particular allowance that Luna took as a chance to segway into the rebuke that had been building within her since she had first arrived.
“I expect—nay, I believe it fair that to say I deserve an explanation on why and how this terrible lapse in judgement came about. The thought of my own flesh and blood imitating such a horrible race of creatures sits poorly with me even with evidence right before mine eyes.”
Celestia laid a talon on Luna’s shoulder, making a point of keeping eye contact. The elder sister gave her sister a warm look, pink, slitted eyes shining and staring deep into their teal counterparts. Luna slowly and gingerly wrapped a wing around Celestia, feathers falling into place only after Celestia did not react. “Thank you.” Luna said at last. “We trust you will settle this matter in due time.”
Celestia nodded in agreement. The moment stretched out. Celestia leaned into the warmth of her sister’s wing, an experience that she noted she almost never had the chance to go through with. Luna, for her part, stared ahead, but nonetheless her smile turned from one of appreciation to one of tenderness with the way Celestia held against her. At last, Celestia noticed that the stars had started to come out in full force, and she reluctantly broke off the moment by sliding out of Luna’s embrace.
She gave a cluck, pointing to Twilight’s photo again. Luna sighed the sigh of one who has started their morning to find their sister has accidentally turned herself into a giant prehistoric carnivore.
“Yes, we will send her a message immediately. Is there any particular meaning you wish to convey for her?” Luna looked over Celestia’s form. The bird handed Luna the letter she had written not thirty minutes before. Luna’s eyes scanned over it. She blinked out of her thoughts at last. “Is there any more you would like to mention? Supplies she may need?” Celestia shook her head. Luna clicked her tongue. “We suppose you know what she will and will not do better than I. Very well, I will prepare a message for her.” Luna stood up to leave
Celestia put her talon to Luna’s shoulder in thanks once again, and the two sisters shared an embrace. After a moment of tenderness and appreciation had passed between the two, Luna trailed away and made for her study, leaving Celestia to reflect amongst the chaos of paper shreds and wood splinters she had wrought in her new form.
Celestia stalked over to the window, looking out over her kingdom. Dozens of thoughts swirled through her head, and none of them were comfortable. One thought, however, fought its wretched way to the forefront of her mind. It was this thought, unlike any other before it, that struck Celestia at her core and made her truly fear herself and what she might be capable of. For in that moment, Celestia realized:
Twilight arrived in Celestia’s study to find an alarming ruin of the usually comforting retreat. Used to many a crisis in Canterlot by this time, she readied herself for an ambush or battle. She considered asking her friends for help, but noted Luna had requested her and only her. She reminded herself that Luna had said her magic expertise was needed, not her defense, and so the sight in front of her left her wary of what precisely had gone wrong. The door had been roughly thrown open, and was still slowly swinging in the wind. Books lay scattered, the claw marks of some…thing that had made its clumsy way through the study riddling them. Twilight peered at them, already musing on what could have made them.
Bad summon? A magical creatures class gone wrong? But that wouldn’t lead to Celestia’s study… Whatever the creature was, it was obviously not used to confined spaces. Feathers were scattered amidst the debris, and the disturbed and crumbled books (Twilight vowed to mourn them later) were knocked about in a pattern of two gangly feet. Almost as if the creature, whatever it was, had not wanted to disturb them.
It sure doesn’t look like it was on a rampage. What it looks like is clumsy. Maybe somepony turned into this thing. Maybe it was a transformation spell gone wro— Realization struck Twilight. Her mouth dropped in horror, and all the blood drained from her cheeks. Oh no. Oh no no no no no no no no. She raced from the study, leaping over the damaged books with a spread of her wings.
“Luna!” she hollered, flying past a discarded feather the size of her hoof. “Luna?!” She flew through the hallways, seeking out the courtroom. She considered taking Celestia’s ‘secret’ passages straight to the solar regent’s chambers, but ruled that to start with she should know what exactly was going to be waiting for her when she got there. So to Luna she went. Thoughts raced through her mind as quickly as she raced through the hallways.
She turned corners, weaved through staircases and passages and made at least one cut through a set of hidden doors she’d found when playing hide and seek with Shining Armor years ago. All the while, her thoughts echoed with horrible transformation results all tying back to her incompetent spell formation. Blobbish lumps of living flesh, half-breed versions of multiple animals and mindless creatures stalking the hallways for tasty ponies all filled up her mind, making her shudder in horror and guilt with each awful fantasy.
She reached the court at last, breathing a sigh of relief at having reached the familiar golden doors, supportive (if unhelpful) guards and sanctuary from her anxieties that the location was sure to provide. Her heart plummeted when she noticed that those same golden doors were closed. She skidded to a halt, spreading her wings to slow herself to a stop. She reminded herself that she had to scan the situation before she could jump to any kind of conclusion. To that end, she trotted towards the guards, her shoulders hunched and her upper lip working at her lower one. “Excuse me, sirs, but is Luna holding court today?”
“No, ma’am.” One of them said as rigidly as possible. At her questioning look, he broke his formation to say. “She seemed to be looking for you, your majesty. Seems Princess Celestia has taken ill, and she wanted your opinion.” With that confirmation, Twilight could only bow her head in shame at the evidence of the havok her selfish request was wrecking.
“Oh...sorry, then.” She slunk away, her apology directed as much at all the ponies who would never have their requests heard by Luna’s ears than at the guards themselves. In her slump, she did not notice the pony standing in front of her, and so her head bumped into Princess Luna’s chest with a soft ‘thump’.
“Twilight Sparkle!” Luna’s voice carried warmth and relief, earning her an uncertain glance from the young alicorn below her. “Thank the stars you have arrived. Please, follow as quick as you can. Our time is precious.” Luna pivoted into a rigid stride and beckoned Twilight towards Celestia’s quarters with a solemn sweep of her wing. The little alicorn obliged, cantering to keep up with Luna’s urgent pace.
Hallways came and went, Luna weaved across carpet, cobblestone and even open air to make her way from the court doors to her sister’s study as quickly as she possibly could. At last she turned to wait, allowing Twilight to catch up with her elder. Twilight let out a sigh of relief, taking the opportunity the pause presented to stare up at Luna’s face and try to read her expression. “My sister has made a terrible error, Twilight Sparkle. And so, as is so oft the case, it has fallen to you to clean up her mess and correct her failings.” Luna’s eyes shined with mirth for a moment, though they stared forward in unwavering focus all the same.
“Mistake? The Princess?” Luna’s ears pricked at the sound of her sister’s formal title, a title that Twilight had stopped using with Luna months before. The other Princess’s amusement grew shadowed with exasperation, but still Twilight ploughed through the conversation like a neurotic bulldozer. “Oh, no no no. I asked her to test the spell I created, and that’s what got her into...well, you haven’t really told me what happened yet. But it’s still my fault that whatever has happened happened. My spell, my request, my fault.”
Twilight sagged, a bittersweet smile overtaking her lips. The sting of dragging herself through the mud was outweighed by her having saved Celestia’s good name, or so she had hoped. The pair of them turned a corner to find the last leg of their destination ahead, the notable length of the hallway giving ample time for the discussion the two were starting.
“Not so.” Luna contradicted, her voice stressing each syllable with slow, steady purpose. “Your spell was the catalyst, ‘tis true, but it was Celestia’s own oversight that caused the crisis at hoof.” She saw Twilight’s eyes light up with defiance, and so she silenced her companion preemptively by launching into her explanation.
“The race my sister selected when testing your spell was—for reasons that I cannot discern and she refuses to share—a beast that is as ferocious as it is forgotten. She cannot speak, she can barely walk and she of course cannot do magic, and all of this is her own doing, thanks to her own decisions in casting the spell. ‘Tis not my fault if I am to craft a carriage and its driver then steers it into a lake.”
Twilight brushed past the dated metaphor, focusing on the ways in which her blame could trump her dearest friend’s. “Even then, she should still be able to turn back, and therefore, it’s my oversight for not properly describing the spell and its range of species to her when I sent it to her. And therefore,” Twilight concluded happily, “it is my fault.”
Luna’s smile was strained, but still patient, and she spoke softly and slowly. “Wrong again, Twilight Sparkle. You continue to jump to conclusions despite my assurance I have reasons to showcase the contrary. Matters concerning our sister, it seems, dull that brilliant brain she is so often fawning over.” Twilight blushed, but Luna pressed on, her teasing smile growing more grave and flattened to match her changing tone. “The beast my sister morphed into was a predator of our ancestors, Twilight Sparkle. We suffered under its terrors as foals, and as such remember its most dangerous trait. She currently finds herself in the body of an animal immune to magic, as many of those animals who preyed upon our species were.”
Twilight grew pale at the words, feeling the blood drain from her face. ”She what?” She came to a stop between two suits of battle armor, her brain barely registering that the doors to Celestia’s study were visible in the distance.
Luna gave a bittersweet smile. “Such was my reaction.”
Twilight just slowly shook her head, panic rising higher and higher into her throat with every word she produced. “I don’t think you understand, Luna. If she’s immune to magic, that means there’s nothing I can do to change her back. I won’t be able to scan her to see what she did, I won’t be able to cast an anti-spell and I won’t be able to reverse the spell she cast. You don’t need a mage, you need a biologist. Until we can figure out how to counteract her immunity somehow—and that could take months!—We’ll be completely powerless to change her back!”
Luna’s brow grew more and more furrowed at Twilight’s continuing description. Twilight looked ahead for a moment, and almost jumped out of her skin when she at last noticed the state of one of the castle’s most familiar sites. Celestia’s lovely, cozy and beautiful bedroom was a mangled ruin of its former self. Those welcoming, kindly shining gates of embroidered gold and wood were nothing more than twisted metal and shattered splinters hanging limply from their straining hinges. Feathers and papers scattered across the floor, Twilight’s wide eyes searching in horror.
A pit was starting to form in her stomach, the sight of the truly gigantic feathers invoking a sneaking suspicion in her mind. She let her pupils quiver for but a moment, her face soon changing to the determined stare she had levelled at so many other threats to Her Princess in her time as Celestia’s student. “What exactly is the creature she changed herself into, Luna?”
“‘Tis an ancient creature, and it has long since gone extinct.” Twilight’s thoughts ran down the list of extinct feathered pony predators that were immune to magic that she had learned of, and given it was a list of one, what had once been a mere hypothesis soon turned to a certainty at what Luna was about to say. “I am not certain you would know them, for they are seldom mentioned in history. We called them—”
“The terror birds?” Twilight’s voice was hardened, but still not devoid of panic.
“You encountered them in your readings, we presume?” Luna raised an eyebrow, the faintest of knowing smiles gracing her inky blue lips.
“Just this afternoon, actually. I was reading about the history of races of Equestria because Spike asked me to teach him about the books I had in my room for my spell.” Twilight looked at the monstrous maw with splintered teeth resting where her mentor’s open book of a study should have rested. “Let’s just hope that what I read stuck.” She said more to herself than to Luna.
Luna opened her mouth to reply, but Twilight was already on the move by the time the nocturnal alicorn had begun to curl her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Luna completed the motion by clicking said tongue instead. “Perhaps ‘tis best to let those two well enough alone.” She mused, giving a long-suffering sigh.
Twilight poked her head through the door with trepidation, taking in the scenery as quickly and carefully as she could. “Princess?” Her voice was unsteady, but she did her best to make it as comforting and heartfelt as she could. She noticed the scattered furniture and shredded paper scraps almost immediately, while the mess of discarded objects surrounding the claw-scratched vanity came to her attention not long after. A warble came from behind the bed, bring Twilight’s eyes to the silhouette of the giant monster that housed the mind of the love of—of her oldest and most trusted friend.
The creature revealed itself by walking a few slow, shaky footsteps away from the silk curtain that framed the bed it had been hiding behind. The thump of a giant’s feet echoed out through the doorway with enough force to shake Twilight’s chest. What surprised Twilight the most about the disturbing mesh of feather and blades that pulled into view was not that Celestia now stood another full pony’s height taller than her, nor that she had a set of ruthlessly curved, sharpened and pointed killing instruments where her muzzle and hooves should have been.
No, what struck Twilight first was how uncannily the spell had reproduced Celestia’s colour scheme. Green, pink and blue feathers radiated in a pair of smooth and rigid crests from her tail and head. Bright white feathers, by contrast, covered the bulk of her body, with the naked skin of her legs striking up the same light beige tones that Twilight knew rested beneath Celestia’s coat. The eyes that stared out at her were the same inviting pink as Celestia’s own, though they were slitted with daggerlike jet black pupils. This, of course, repelled Twilight more than anything else, as if she was looking at some cruel mockery of the pony she loved.
The creature’s stomach rumbled, setting both it and Twilight on edge. The room stood completely still for a few moments, giving Twilight’s mind plenty of time to conjure a plethora of scenarios and fears. Is the Princess aware of her actions right now? Could Celestia really lose so much control as to try to eat me? Maybe I’m just not important enough for her to remember me. Twilight’s heart sunk, the next thought bubbling up against her will. She’ll eat me, then barely remember me when somepony else finally changes her back.
She shook her head, defiance building up inside her. Luna seemed fine, she reasoned, granting herself a respite from her fears. Her anxieties, however, had more to say on the matter. Even if I mean as much to her as Luna, I didn’t think to check if Luna was actually able to cooperate with Celestia or if she just held her in place. Twilight fought the urge to bolt from the room.
Stupid! Stupid! Always check the facts always check the facts always check the facts! Twilight squeezed her eyes shut, praying an ambush was not awaiting her. After several tense moments of utter silence, she cracked open her eyes, focusing immediately upon Celestia’s warped body. The first thing she noticed was that the monster was still staring at her, its crest raised and its body leaning away from her.
This managed to relax her just a little, which was enough. If she really was dangerous, Luna wouldn’t have left her to roam free like this. And she sure wouldn’t have let me go in without so much as a warning. Twilight took a few steps forward, and the monstrous animal’s crest fell back. It gave a mournful warble, bowing its head away from Twilight.
“Princess, I’m so sorry—Oh, this is all my fault…” Twilight tilted her head. “Can you even understand me?” Celestia nodded her head, prompting Twilight to bridge the gap between them. Twilight stretched her wings, flapping up to Celestia’s eye level with awkward wing beats in what she hoped would be a gesture not unlike Celestia’s lowering of her head to reach Twilight’s gaze. Celestia’s stomach protested once again, making her cringe away from Twilight and turn her beak as far from her pupil as possible.
Twilight placed a hoof against her shoulder, shakily at first, but firmly once she had made contact. She gave the Princess her best smile, a smile she usually reserved for a trembling Fluttershy. A scaly claw rested itself against Twilight’s hoof, a gesture that at once frightened and reassured her. “Princess Luna said you asked for me, but she also said you’re immune to magic. Is that true?” The bird gave a glum nod. Twilight looked down. “Guess that means I’m not gonna be much help in the changing you back department.”
Celestia tilted her head at this, but before Twilight could elaborate her crest rose and her eyes widened. Her mouth fell open, and she then closed it with a quiet warble. Twilight let her process her thoughts. Celestia stayed silent for a moment, her claws folding together while she thought. Twilight took the pause to study Celestia’s new body in greater detail. Streaks of ink stained the arm feathers and paper shreds clung to the scales on the claws, while the chest’s feathers were of a fluffier composition than the flanks and shoulders. She also noticed that her ex-mentor’s feathers were of two types—the upper feathers being strong, slender shafts of rigid fibres and the ones beneath a weave of fluffy plumes.
Celestia’s movement broke her from her study of the strange, alien body before her, shifting her focus to the pony she so loved and what she needed. Celestia stalked towards her desk with stumbling movements, faltering here and there. Twilight watched the feet move their ponderous way along the floor, noting with a sort of morbid fascination that the deadly implements that she had seen stopping a pony in its tracks in terror hours before were now making a drunkard’s walk across a floor fluffed over with papers and feathers. Celestia began writing at her desk, her arms controlling a quill with jerky, erratic infrequency. The sounds of tearing paper and the writing implement’s scrawling tip filled the silent bedroom for a moment.
At last, Celestia held up a paper with a simple sentence made up of oversized words (if Twilight was to be honest, referring to the abominations of weaving spidery lines on the page “words” was generous) placed erratically across its span. With some effort, the scholar was able to parse the chickenscratch phrase in front of her. “Help me to walk?” It said. Twilight’s reply was cut off by a rumble from her companion’s stomach, giving them both pause. Celestia turned to her desk and set back to writing with a doubled vigor. A much larger, much clearer single word took up the next page. “Hungry”, it read out.
Twilight gave a weak smile. “Yeah, I think I can probably do something about both those problems.” She dropped down from her flapping position to the cluttered floor, deciding to tackle movement first. She put a hoof to her chin, thinking on how best to teach Celestia to walk. Walking on her hind legs was an action she had only ever seen that minty green pony with the lyre cutie mark try, and she was pretty sure that doing so would throw one of her hip sockets out of place, so that option was out of the question.
She thought of simply trying to analyze how Celestia was walking and go from there, which seemed like it was thus far the most appealing option. She needed time for such a method to work, however, and Celestia’s hunger pangs gave her very little of that. This left teaching by example, but Twilight found herself at a loss as to how she would do so.
Celestia’s stomach growled again, and Twilight’s gaze hardened into her game face once again. She raced through any thoughts she had on the awkwardness of walking upright, and immediately a memory of what was by far the strangest species she had ever transformed into came to mind. A transformation process she had, at least in part, based the transformation spell itself upon.
She closed her eyes and tried to capture that distant magical aura, letting her memories of that other world she had visited months before flow over her. Celestia looked over at the shining of Twilight’s horn, her beak opening to give a squawk of concern. Twilight, however, was already in the beginning stages of her transformation, magic flowing across her body like water over a fish. With every gust of magic, her body morphed a little bit more, not unlike watching a caterpillar’s chrysalis subjected to an accelerated aging spell.
Her figure was stretching, becoming more slender and curving like a bell in places. She could feel her breasts moving up to rest between her armpits, something that she had always found to be by far the most disturbing part about this particular species. Her body began to lose the fur that clothed it most of the time, being replaced with a sweater, dress and boots that inexplicably followed her wherever she went in this form. Her hooves expanded out into spidery limbs not unlike Celestia’s talons, but thinner and blunted at the tips. Her shoulder bones expanded like miniature wings of their own, and her clavicles formed a collar framing over her chest to make it more impressive and sturdy.
Lastly, her head changed shape in what Twilight considered by far the most appealing aspect of the new body. Her face smoothed down, softened, and took on a tiny, scrunched up nose. Her lips flattened out, and her eyes widened and grew circular. Her forehead expanded, rounding her face out into a shape somewhere between a heart and an oval. The most important part about this form, however, was that her body was now angled in a vertical direction, where before it had been horizontal.
“There. This should help.” Twilight said, flexing out her new vocal chords. She stretched out a hand, making sure each of the fingers was as separately articulate as they had been in the mirror world. Next, she paced a few steps forward and backward across the study, and then at last she turned around to look at Celestia.
The bird in front of her had its beak dropped open, the slitted pupils widening to sizes Twilight had not thought possible. The crest, too, raised in a fluff of feathers. Ultimately, this made Celestia look less menacing and more lopsided than before, making Twilight let out a nervous giggle. Celestia only tilted her head, beak still hanging in a numb gape. “What?” Twilight looked at her in concern.
Celestia grabbed another set of paper, scribbling out more of those messy, uncontrolled lines. She held up the resulting page, this one inscribed with the words “What is this?” Twilight looked down at her new body, hands idly tugging at the dress.
“Oh, this. Well, uh, remember what I told you about those weird creatures from the mirror world? I thought, since they have hands and they walk on two legs, it might be easier if I teach you how to walk on two legs by showing you. And maybe help you with your writing, too. Though I’m not that great at mine anyway, unless I’m forgetting.” Twilight gave a sheepish blush, walking slowly and purposefully to the other side of the room.
Her memory of the movement was not as strong as she remembered it being, as she found out when she drove her knee painfully into the side of Celestia’s bed. She groaned, grabbing the offending limb with both hands and pulling it out of harm’s way with a wince. After a moment of fumbling with her leg, however, she was back on track and making her way across the room smoothly, if not quickly. “See?”
Celestia was watching carefully, her head tilting to one side to follow the strange shape around the room. In particular, she found herself staring at the sway of Twilight’s hips, something that made her crest raise itself in a stiff display of multicoloured feathers. She paid it little mind, instead worrying about how the rotating socket of bone and muscle beneath that purple dress worked.
She was, of course, inconvenienced by the obscuring nature of said dress, and so she found herself following the place where the dress was tightest around Twilight’s hips. From what she could see, one leg stood still while the other one pivoted in a small arc in front of her, then the other leg followed up to rest slightly in front of its partner. This cycle served to get Twilight across the room with relatively even steps, though she did make mistakes here and there.
Once she had seen a few cycles from one corner of the room to the other, Celestia decided to give it a try herself, pushing one foot forward while the other stayed in place. Her head bobbed with every step, something she noticed Twilight’s didn’t do, but rather than muse on this she instead made to press forward. She was finding, to her annoyance, that she had more and more questions about her current form building up in her mind. She pushed forward, fighting back the feelings of powerlessness that were building up with every question she had to push away. Unfortunately, her focus on simply walking with a steady gait meant she didn’t notice she was changing her direction until Twilight was shouting “Princess!”
The hard wood of her vanity collided with her chest like a sucker punch, knocking the wind from her lungs and making her fight to breathe amidst coughing, undignified squawks. She clutched her chest with both scaly claws, trying and failing to force her diaphragm to pump air in even beats with every breath. At last she gave a long, low, raspy growl, letting her lungs expend their air contents in a gradual exhale. Twilight was, she noticed with some gratitude, holding her in place while she coughed and wheezed.
“Princess! Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry! I didn’t notice you had started walking until it was too late, and I should have been paying more attention, and—” Celestia silenced Twilight by placing a claw on her shoulder. Twilight looked uncertain, so Celestia leaned in and gave her a nuzzle. This did not appear to exactly comfort Twilight, but at the least she had stopped offering up apologies for things that were very barely her fault. It was at this point that Celestia’s stomach decided to return to grumbling with a vengeance, making them both stop to stare down at it.
It rumbled again, this time giving a cramp that made Celestia’s eyes squint and muscles tense. She hissed at the pain, the sound crawling from her throat to slither its way into Twilight’s darkest, most instinctual fears. Twilight reacted almost instantly. She broke away from the reassuring embrace with a quick step to the door, making sure she was safely within escape distance. “I...think maybe you’re hungrier than we—well, mostly I—thought.” She said the words as slowly and carefully as she could, eyes searching Celestia’s own for any sign of killer intent.
Celestia opened her mouth to reassure her, but the soothing words came out as a barking squawk that made Twilight take yet another step back. Her body glowed with energy, shrinking back down to the four-legged shape that was so familiar to Celestia with a burst of magic. “I’ll be back soon. I promise I will.” She said these words forcefully, though her head pointed away from Celestia and towards herself.
“I just need to be sure, I—I’ll find you something to eat, I promise! But until I do, please, please stay here. Just try to stay out of trouble. No, I have a better idea.” Twilight’s horn flashed with magic, and at once the walls that had once housed the doorway grew together into a single, solid unit. Celestia stared at the sight of her student locking her away with a sinking heart. “I’m sorry.” Twilight said, once again more to herself than to her mentor. “I have to make sure. I just have to, Princess. I’ll be back. I promise!” With that final plea for understanding, the panicky alicorn vanished in a flash of salmon magic, leaving Celestia locked within the wreck of her bedchambers.
The protests that had been on the tip of her beak died with the last flashes of Twilight’s magic, her beak closing quietly. Celestia looked round at the shredded papers and broken furniture from before, which took on a much darker meaning now that Twilight had fled her presence. The feelings of powerlessness that she had forced back earlier overtaking her at last. Worse, she was a danger. A clumsy, powerless danger, both to herself and to the others around her. Especially to the others around her.
She felt like a mix between criminal and child. On one end, completely dependent, hopelessly incompetent in even the most basic of life processes and host to emotions and behaviours she barely understood. On the other, an enemy to her hosts, a threat to their survival and a leader of a lifestyle neither they nor she desired or fully understood. She gave a quiet, defeated warble, knowing that her only solace was the hope that her loved ones would once again stoop to carry her.
Twilight materialized within her bedroom, her mind still reeling from what had just happened. She stumbled over to her bedside, trying to keep from shaking at what she was certain was an impending panic attack. She forced the thoughts to the back of her mind, centering her twitching legs and pulling herself up to her full height. She took a calm, steady breath and prepared herself for the clearing her mind, just as Cadance had shown her. All of the thoughts of guilt and animal fear and pathos for her spell’s victim drained away from her, leaving her spirit blank and calm as a summer’s day.
And that was when the darkest and ugliest of her thoughts chose to crawl back into her brain and scream itself at her: Princess Celestia could have eaten her alive. The pony she loved most could have made her into mince meat and eaten her for dinner. A single spell was all it took to turn her from loved one to lunch, so little was she to the pony she had loved since before the day she had found her cutie mark. And why not? She was the one responsible, after all. It was her failure, her petty request turned sour that had chained the Princess to the waking nightmare of living life as that pony-eating monster.
The dam broke, her steady pose and logic being overtaken by quivering horror. She sank down to the floor, her breaths coming in short, sharp gasps. Her hooves wrapped around her forehead, forming a token attempt to protect her from what strange demons lurked around the edges of her mind. She pressed her limbs down against her braincase, making a token attempt to massage the fears away. You’re nothing but a snack to her. “Stop,” Twilight pleaded. You made her a monster. “Stop.” You took away her kingdom. You took away her freedom. “Stop stop stop!”
“Twilight Sparkle?” A voice broke through the darkness, pulling Twilight away from her vicious cycle and back towards rationality. She looked up, her hooves parting to allow her eyes to view the approaching pony. Princess Luna took gentle steps toward her, looking grave. “You are troubled. Are you hurt?” Luna scanned the prostate scholar, eyes picking up an injury on the back of her leg. She gestured to the bruised kneecap. “Was that Celestia?”
“This?” Twilight stared back at her leg. “No, I just banged into a bedframe. But the Princess, she—” Twilight shook her head, shuddering again.
“She…?” Luna was patient, if distant.
“I can’t do anything for her, Luna. The terror birds, they’re immune to magic. We need an archaeologist who knows something about their biology more than we need me. And the Princess herself. She’s hungry. Her stomach kept growling, and when I tried to get close to her she hissed at me. She started hissing, and so I knew I had to get her some food. And now I’m just trying to…” Twilight swallowed. “Trying to get my head around what all just happened, I guess.”
Luna pursed her lips. “That did not seem like ‘getting one’s head around’ things to mine own eyes.”
Twilight responded to this by taking a sudden interest in the room around her, noting almost immediately that a) she had inadvertently teleported to her bedroom and b) said bedroom was no longer hers. The room was filled with scrolls, charts and missives. Pens sat proudly in inkpots along polished desks. Where telescopes once sat there were now shelves stacked with letters. Books on magical theory, applied sciences, maths and astronomy had been replaced by ones on politics, manners and leadership and style. The shelf filled with Daring Do and mediocre romance novels, however, had if anything expanded in size since the room had been under her control. But the feature of the room that struck Twilight as most notable was Celestia’s insignia. The mark was over the desk, upon the letters and scrolls and on either side of the door.
“Twilight?” Luna cut off Twilight’s impromptu inspection with a look of concern. “Am I troubling you?” Luna’s voice said she was angry and disappointed, but Twilight’s quick glance at her eyes revealed that the other pony was filled with concern.
“I’m fine. I just need to get to the kitchens and then I can go back, apologize to the Princess for freaking out and get back to work on fixing my screw up.” Twilight attempted to walk forward, but Luna held out a wing and levelled her gaze at Twilight.
“‘Fine’ does not describe you, Twilight Sparkle. We found you quivering like a foal over what appears to be—from your very own description—nought but a growling stomach and some noises you had not heard before. A guard pursuing her reported her to have done as much and came away from her with a pat on the head for his troubles, and yet with a few strange sounds my sister has bested the saviour of Equestria five times over.” Luna concluded her thoughts by raising an eyebrow, her look changing from stern to expectant.
“Luna, uhm,” Twilight thought of how to politely withhold what little tact she had. She opted for lowering her voice and dropping her mask with all the subtlety of a bag of bricks falling onto a percussion orchestra. “These days, when somebody says ‘I’m fine’ in response to you saying ‘what’s wrong’ they mean ‘I’m not comfortable talking about it’.” She gave a sheepish grin.
Luna tilted her head. “Seems a silly practice to me. Wounds not dressed only fester with time.” Twilight looked like she was going to disagree, so Luna cut her off shortly and sharply. “A fact my very own history should make abundantly clear. This is especially true with my sister, who is happy enough to hide a conflict until it absolutely cannot be ignored. And it seems to me, Twilight Sparkle, that my sister is the root of thine ills, and this conflict can no longer be ignored.” Her eyes softened. “Will you not let me help?”
Twilight stood up, shakily at first, but at the very least with a degree of control over herself. Her wings dropped to the floor, and she drew a circle with one hoof along the ground. “I… I do want your help, Luna. Of course I do. I mean, you’re my friend, and I’d love some help in all of this anyway. It’s obvious I’m not really qualified for the whole ‘dealing with terror birds’ thing, so I’ll take whatever I can get. But I do know a lot about Princess Celestia. But I do want you to stop asking me about how I feel about the Princess.” Twilight looked directly into the centre of Luna’s gaze. The lunar diarch noted that there was a peculiar mix of commandment and pleading in the other mare’s tone. “You don’t really know anything about me, Luna. Not about this, at least. I-in fact, you don’t really know anything about us, either. And because you don’t know anything about us, you don’t know anything about how to fix what’s wrong between us right now. So please, just help me with things I want you to help me with. Alright?”
Luna sighed, throwing out her wings in exasperation. “What, then, do you propose we do, Twilight Sparkle?”
Twilight herself also sighed, looking at her hooves. She shook her head, then turned to look over Luna’s shoulder towards the hallway nearby. “We need to find something Celestia can eat, and I’m guessing for that we’ll need some of the food we usually save for the carnivore nations Equestria is allies with. The griffons, in particular, I’m going to assume are the people we need to talk to. After that, I’ll have to talk to a friend of mine about finding a way to help Celestia come to grips with her new form and body. Okay?”
Luna gave a terse nod. “And what do you need us to do?”
“Just—just take over for Celestia for a little while, basically. I think,” Twilight’s brow creased, and her pupils narrowed in determination, “the best way we can manage this mess is to have Celestia take over dreams for a while so that you can work in the day. She’ll still have her own body in her mind, and you’ll be able to take her place in the day court. Does that sound alright?”
“We suppose ‘tis another burden we must bear for our sister’s folly, but bear it we shall.”
Twilight’s eyes narrowed, but she smiled and nodded afterward. “Good. Hopefully you’ll like it as much as you’ve said you would in the past. I may not be able to do much with magic, but I’ve learned from past experience that I can still do organizing well even when I’d normally be useless. So I’ll find a way to get her a consistent food supply and then I’ll go find somepony who’s better qualified to look after her.” Twilight stood up, straightened herself and walked past Luna as if nothing had happened.
She only made it to the door before Luna’s voice reached her ears. “Remember this well, Twilight Sparkle: My sister needs not another worshipper denying her faults. Such reverence only brings misery to her and her admirers. If you love her as much as your acts suggest, you will curb your naked idolization of her and replace your fantasy of her with reality.”
Twilight forced herself to smile, turning to face her vexing friend. “Thank you for your concern, Luna.” With that, the alicorn disappeared in a flash of purple light.
---／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼---
Celestia was sitting atop her bed when Twilight returned, a pen and paper once again in her claws. The rays of setting sun that had been shining through the windows of Celestia’s balcony had been replaced by the cool darkness of sundown, which draped the room in shadow. Despite this, Celestia seemed to be an ocean of calm at the moment, her eyes focused upon the sheet of paper in her claws. The study’s floor was clean, the pages that had once been scattered upon it now resting in an orderly pile. The feathers, splinters of wood and fragments of gold had been removed, though where they had gone Twilight couldn’t say. Celestia herself was settled upon the bed. Calculated movements and clicks of Celestia’s talons worked the paper, and where before they had been jerky and erratic now the movement of her claws was focused and patient, if not graceful. Celestia raised her head to look at Twilight, giving a quiet warble and raising the whisker-like feathers around her muzzle. The younger alicorn abruptly connected the expression with a sensation of deja vu, though she could not rightly place where the face was familiar to her.
Twilight set down an elegant, creamy white bag emblazoned with the logo of the Griffonian Empire, looking sheepish. “Sorry I took so long, Princess. I just had to think on what I was going to do about all of the...this.” She gestured towards Celestia’s current body with a shaky hoof. Celestia remained quiet, keeping her gaze solidly upon her work. Twilight felt the silence radiating from the bed. She pursed her lips. “I mean, I know I wasn’t very reasonable, panicking like I did. But, I mean, I panic when somebody doesn’t spread the icing on cupcakes right.” She gave a nervous chuckle, and the skin around Celestia’s beak tightened in response. Twilight wasn’t sure what that meant, so she pressed on. “It’s not that I’m scared of you, I promise. It’s just the situation.” Celestia gave a quiet nod at this, continuing on writing. Twilight winced, but pushed forward in her thinking anyway.
“I’m not, I—” Twilight sighed, knowing this was going nowhere in a hurry. “Never mind. I did come up with a plan, if you’d like to hear it.” Celestia at last looked up from her writing, and Twilight internally breathed a sigh of relief. “First, I got you some food from the Griffon Emissary’s place. I made sure it was fish, so it’s not like you’re eating pigs and sheep or anything.” Twilight pursed her lips. “I’m not sure if you can eat that, but it’s worth a try, right?” She levitated the bag over to the bed. Celestia set down her pen, opening up the bag with a flick of her claws. Though she still shredded the lining, Celestia appeared to have a good deal more control and dexterity than she had had at Twilight’s departure.
Celestia opened the bag and peered inside, her tiny avian nostrils flaring. She pulled her head back, making a noise deep within her throat that came across as a guttural mixture of laughter and groaning. She shook her head, shutting her eyes and wrinkling her face at what she had found within. “I know, I know, it smells awful. But at this point it’s...it’s the best thing I can do.” The tone of Twilight’s voice dragged Celestia from her thoughts, for it was not judgement or weariness that reached her ears, but guilt and apology.
Celestia looked up from the bag. Her face twitched, the whisker-like bristles around her mouth and eyes once spreading out. This expression, however, was one that Twilight was not completely clueless regarding the nature of. It was an expression she dimly registered she had seen countless times on the face of a bird she knew from somewhere. It was also, her memory was now telling her, the avian equivalent of a smile. Twilight responded in kind by smiling back. Bristle feathers still spread, the terror bird looked down into the bag again and gave a sniff. Her avian nostrils flared, and she slowly lowered her head down to look at the food. It was then that Twilight’s memory jogged, and she knew exactly which bird she had seen pull that face so often in her presence. This also reminded her about the eating habits of her feathered friend, and how they would apply to Celestia now. Twilight cleared her throat. “Um, Princess, there’s something you should know about birds. I’ve seen Owlowiscious eat before, and it’s not like the way that ponies do. Birds can’t swallow things with their beaks. You’ll need to use your beak to position the food so that it will fall down your throat when you let go. Also, if what you break off is too big, you can’t just chew it into pieces. They use their beak-tips to pull big food apart, but I’m sure cutlery would work fine.”
Celestia looked uncertain, but gave Twilight another shaky smile. Twilight, for her part, took this as a sign to approach. Fear still reigned her in, however, and she stopped just short of the bed. She noted, absently, that lying in an orderly pile just beneath the covers of the bed was a pile of discarded papers. “Umm, Princess? Can I ask you something?” Celestia nodded, looking back down into the bag at the cold slices of salmon. “When you—err—hissed at me—and when you squawked. What was that about?” Celestia gripped the pen without skipping a beat. Quick motions of her wrist showed a confidence Twilight hadn’t seen when she had last visited the polymorphed princess. The bird gripped the paper in its two talons, then slowly turned it to face Twilight. The words “worried about you” stood out much more visibly than they had before.
Twilight pulled back in disbelief, her eyes flicking away to stare at the pile of paper stacked beside the bed. For the first time she noticed just how many discarded and shredded papers Celestia had assembled. The pile was nearly up to her ankle. Twilight frowned, then looked back to her Princess. “Worried about me? I’m the one who got you in this mess. You shouldn’t have to go to all this effort when I should be able to fix what’s happened to you anyway.” Celestia smiled again, flipping the paper back around to write once more. She then stood up, walking slowly and carefully towards her dresser. Twilight stopped to help her this time, making sure to reach a wing around the giant’s back and keep her fully balanced. Celestia, in turn, made her ponderous way over to her dresser, quickly grabbing up something from amongst makeup and a collection of photos. The solar diarch handed Twilight the paper and the object, which was concealed within.
Twilight unraveled the paper, which simply had a picture of Celestia and Twilight together at the Gala, smiling together for one of several cameraponies. Celestia’s smile was as gentle and patient as always, and Twilight’s was wide and enthusiastic. The paper the photo rested upon contained Celestia’s “worried about you” still, but also had a single word added at the bottom and underlined: Faithful. Twilight froze up. “But... but you have so many guards and scholars and, and all of them are faithful to you, same as me.”
Celestia only shook her head, giving what sounded like quick, sharp caws in succession. She quickly covered her beak, crest feathers flaring wide. She shook her head once more, grabbing Twilight’s hoof in a claw and guiding it to the word. Then she took the hoof and moved it over her own chest, and then back to the word she had written below. Celestia’s bristle feathers flared out again. Twilight’s eyes widened in comprehension, and her mouth fell open. “I… thank you, Princess.” Her voice grew small and distant. “Thank you.” She whispered again, this time down towards her muzzle. Celestia lifted up her chin with a claw, then let go of Twilight’s hoof and grabbed the paper and photo from Twilight. Celestia set the photo down gently and moved the paper out from under it. The claw under Twilight’s chin trailed away to grab a pen, and soon Twilight was faced with a new message. “Help me eat?” it read.
Twilight looked up at the creature in front of her. The creature that could have swallowed half her body several times over. The creature that every one of her fears was telling her was an instinct-driven ambush predator willing to tear her limb from limb at the slightest touch. The creature with claws on its legs long enough to slice her to pieces with a flick of their toe claws. Twilight walked up to the towering creature and grabbed the paper from it with her mouth, then used a hoof to move its talon over top of the page. While external appearances and her most primal emotions would tell her it was a monster acting inexplicably gentle around her, her heart instantly leapt to stand by the belief that it was all Celestia inside that mountain of bird, and the evidence continued to suggest that was the case. Celestia warbled softly at the word her talon was now pointing at, and gently ran her other claw along the side of Twilight’s face.
Spike paced back and forth, his tail swinging while he walked. He took a few breaths, hoping they would calm him down. They did not. It had only been four hours, he reasoned. Twilight had been gone longer than that before. Part of his mind dimly registered that there was something problematic about him being used to this kind of situation. He kept walking rather than thinking about it. Spike kept his hands occupied by squeezing them together periodically, eyes flickering from one wall to another. He sighed, looking over at the book on races of Equestria that Twilight had left behind. With a sigh of resignation, he sat down heavily upon Twilight’s bed, searching around for something, anything to keep himself preoccupied. A comic immediately piqued his interest, and he forced himself to maintain a semblance of calmness while he skimmed through the pages. Like with so many other things in Twilight’s life, the only thing he could do now was to wait until everything was over and she finally remembered to come back for him.
By the time the sun had started to go down (in a more wobbly arc than Celestia would set it with on any day with a semblance of normal involved, at that), Spike had turned to sending messages asking after Celestia’s health. When he blew on these messages, however, the familiar green fire did not consume them in a whirl of smoke. Instead, they burned themselves to a crisp in his scaly purple hands. It was at this point that Spike began to well and truly panic. With a push from his shaking hands, Spike launched himself from the bed. He proceeded to pace upon landing, eyes searching for anything that could preoccupy him while he waited. Something that made him feel like he was useful. With a huff, he cast his eyes around the room. Maybe Twilight needed some chores to be done? He noticed with a rush of almost-joy that dust bunnies were lurking in the dark corners of Twilight’s room. Twilight might be mopping up a crisis in Canterlot, but at least he could mop up the kitchen until she got back. The thought was almost hollow to him, but he grabbed the dustpan and broom with a sort of clinging fervor nonetheless.
---／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼---
Twilight’s hoof was tightly clinging to Celestia’s talon, making sure to be there for her throughout the entirety of the ordeal. Fried slices of fish flesh slithered down Celestia’s throat, piece by horrible piece. But while her entire being wretched at the idea of eating another animal, the cramps that had been rocking her body for the past hour were at least fading. She looked over at Twilight and smiled, a smile which Twilight returned with a surprising amount of enthusiasm. Celestia squeezed a talon around Twilight’s hoof, which made the little alicorn tense up. Celestia relaxed the talon’s grip, but still held onto Twilight for support. Tension hung in the air, but Twilight and the atmosphere eventually followed Celestia’s talon in gradually relaxing. Once the room had returned to a semblance of calm, Celestia went back to the slow, agonizing process of eating the body of a once-living being killed so she might live. The gravity of her actions did not escape her. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw a terrified fish in horrible pain, struggling to free itself of the hook wrenched into its gasping lips as it was lifted from its world by a giant monster it couldn’t hope to understand. She swallowed another lump of meat like it was a lump of bile that had welled up in her throat, her neck shuddering all the while. Life faded from the eyes of the fish, its terror and pain being replaced by a cold void of nothingness. All for her. That she might live.
Her vision of the cold reality of the carnivore’s life was broken by a shift in the way Twilight was holding her hoof. What had once been a simple rigid support for Celestia’s own tension was now a tender cradle. The hoof softly wrapped itself around the gnarled talon, and Celestia looked at the delicate limb in surprise. She paused a moment, attempting to process the sensation. Eventually, she simply closed her talon around Twilight’s hoof and squeezed in turn. Celestia looked up to search Twilight’s face, hoping to see the kindness she knew her student was so often devoted to showing her. The poor little alicorn seemed to be completely unaware of what Celestia’s intentions were, for she looked down the moment Celestia looked up. Celestia noticed with no small amount of confusion that the most radiant of blushes was striking up on her ex-student’s face. Twilight pulled her hoof back bashfully not long afterwards, curling away from Celestia’s inquisitive stare with that same luminous red tint upon her cheeks. The scholar’s eyes were fixed solidly upon the floor. Celestia opened her mouth to ask about what the issue at hoof was. It was only when she felt the scraping of keratin upon keratin that she remembered that she had a beak and not a mouth, and could not produce words as she knew them. Instead, she let the moment hang in the air, hoping that Twilight would explain her actions.
Twilight, for her part, simply hugged her wings around herself and stared firmly down at the covers to Celestia’s bed. With every moment she seemed more and more and uncomfortable, until at last she sighed and hung her head. “I’m sorry, I just--I’m enjoying this more than I should. I know it’s hard for you. I should be--” She didn’t get a chance to finish the rest of her sentence, because by the time she had vocalized part of the thought, Celestia had already taken her hoof in her talon once more. She gave Twilight a squeeze, prompting the smaller alicorn to look away once more. This time, however, Celestia caught a glimpse of a warm smile from her ex-student before she hid her face away.
She looked about for her pen and paper, but was cut off by a flash of green light appearing in her peripheral vision. Her saurian eyes flickered to the source of the blur of green energy.A scroll landed at Twilight’s hooves with a pop of energy, a diversion which the young princess wholeheartedly dove upon in order to better avoid any awkward questions about why holding her crush’s hoof--or, rather, claw--might cause her cheeks to flush. With a flourish of salmon magic, she unfurled the scroll and began to read.
---／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼---
“Come on, Twilight. Come on.” Spike continued to wander, his little claws folding in on themselves in anticipation. He rolled his eyes and placed his hands on his hips, inspecting the house. “Maybe I could dust again. Or I could do some baking? No, I can’t do proportions right whenever I’m waiting for her.” He found himself walking towards the kitchen as he talked to himself, instinct propelling his little dragon feet to the nearest source of comfort he could find. “I guess I could go to Rarity, but what if Twilight doesn’t want me bringing anypony else into whatever’s going on? She said it was urgent royal business. If she wanted help, she’d have come back to town for it. Of course, it’s not like she’d come to me if she wanted any help. Maybe I better ask the girls.” He kicked at a speck of dirt. “But then I’d be breaking the promise I made to not tell anypony. Agh, whatever.” He stalked down the stairs and to the familiar hoard he had managed to earn from work with Rarity earlier in the month. “It’s not like this is the first time she’s ever been away a full night. Nightmare Moon, Discord, planning for the Equestria Games.” As he said this, he wandered into the kitchen and counted his way past the counter, the oven and over to the refrigerator. “Guess I’ll just have to tuck in for the night.” Sure enough, a pile of gems tucked safely behind the broom and dustpan--the last place Twilight would ever think to touch--awaited him. “And she wonders why I’m fat.” Spike said as he let himself take in the sweet, brief release of delicious food.
---／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼---
“It’s from Luna.” Twilight sighed, the tension in her wings and shoulders instantly dissipating. “She has a list of spells for controlling yourself in the dreamscape ready for you. Do you think you’re ready for investigating dreams?”
Celestia paused, then gave a shaky nod. She looked back at the bag that had once contained fish meat still lying upon her bed like some dark accusation. Celestia repressed a shudder, vowing that she would never let the sensation of eating another animal become routine. Twilight touched her side, her hoof oddly tender again. “What’s the matter?” The gentle, nasally voice of her most loyal friend inquired.
She pointed a hooked and vicious claw at the bag of fried fish, bowing her head in remorse. “Was the fish not good enough? I could always--oh. No, no I think I get it.” Twilight sighed. “I know. I can’t imagine what it’s like right now. But, I mean, it’s not the worst magical disaster either of us has made, right?” Twilight gave a nervous laugh. Celestia shook her head again, making sure not to break the facade of calm she had about her. Rather than tell Twilight how she felt about the meat, she motioned for a piece of paper, and Twilight made sure to provide.
“Worried about you,” it read.
“Me?” Twilight suddenly felt a sinking feeling in her gut. “I’m fine. I mean, the fish was hard to find, and I--” She caught sight of Celestia’s look and knew, even through the veil of harsh predatory avian biology, that her mentor could still see through her as always. “Yes, it was hard adapting. It’s hard seeing you like this. You’re so strong and kind and important and I--well, I don’t think anything bad should ever happen to you.”
“It’s my duty.” The words came fluidly and naturally from talons that were otherwise still awkward and unwieldy, a far cry from what they had been hours ago. Twilight had even gotten used to not cringing at the ugly, ugly scratches that served as letters when she read them. “Nopony should suffer under me.”
“But you shouldn’t have to suffer for m--I--argh!” Twilight flopped her wings out in exasperation, her hooves flying above her head for a moment.
Celestia’s eyes flickered for a moment. She knew that what she was about to say might make Twilight even more frustrated. It might be false, and she might be accusing a friend when they needed support more than accusations. But if she was right--and Twilight’s past behaviour in similar situations gave her every reason to believe she was--she would be able to confront a problem she knew Twilight would never willingly bring before her. A problem that, now and many times prior, had bred catastrophes from the smallest of issues. A problem that only Celestia herself could catalyze, and thus, logically, only Celestia herself could resolve. “You blame yourself,” she wrote.
“I…” Twilight’s ears folded back, and she sagged a little under the weight of her own thoughts. “It’s my spell. I didn’t check every species, and I didn’t make any emergency plans, and I asked it of you, on top of everything else I’ve ever pushed on you, and it shouldn’t have ever left my lab. I should have gone to Rarity. I--”
“You trust me enough to ask to test spells for you. I knew the risks when I got the missive.” Celestia wrote the words as quickly as she could, but they came out harsh and near-illegible in her rush. She took the time to write the message out again, this time adding “I’m always glad to get correspondence from you. I miss adventures like yours. I’m touched whenever you share them with me.” She didn’t write ‘I miss you’, for she hoped Twilight at least knew that much in her heart of hearts.
“But you shouldn’t have to suffer.” Twilight said more firmly. “Not when it’s me. You always want to put yourself before everyone. Please, Princess. Don’t do that for me. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand seeing you suffer, ever. I know you feel like you have to for everyone else, but, I just--” Twilight took a deep gasp of air, knowing that she would need as much oxygen as she could get if she were to overcome the wall of tension between herself and the mare she so cared for. “Whatever you want to save me from or stop me from feeling, it’ll never, ever hurt as much as seeing it happen to you.” She looked down at Celestia’s alien, monstrous body and the remains of the grisly meal before her. She thought back to the scar on Celestia’s horn from where Chrysalis had burnt it. She thought back to how she’d felt when Celestia had been taken by Nightmare Moon or the plunderseeds. “It doesn’t matter what it is. I don’t want you to suffer it on my behalf.”
“It’s my choice.” Came Celestia’s answer. “And I choose it for you.”
Twilight read the words slowly, once again, and then took a very, very deep breath. “It’s the wrong choice! And it’s not because I don’t deserve a martyr, though I can tell you I don’t. It’s because I--” Twilight’s voice suddenly dropped. “I lo--” She shook her head, pressed through and soldiered on. As always, her Princess needed her, and that trumped any obstacle. Even her deepest fear. “I love you, Princess Celestia.” She glared out at the rest of the universe, silently daring it to deny the truth of her words. “And I never, ever want to see you suffering on my behalf because you think it will ‘make my life better’. It won’t. Period.”
Celestia looked taken aback at this. She closed her eyes, a pensive look overtaking her for a moment, and then she took the pen to paper with a slow, reluctant pace. She set down the next sheet with a heavy talon. Her note read: “I’m not the pony you think I am.”
Twilight’s ears folded back, her gaze hitting the bed once again. “I…” She sagged, letting her wings droop at this. “I know. I know what I think of you is unrealistic. I know I smooth over your flaws, play up your good points, ignore some of the real you for what I want you to be. I know it and I know it’s weak--But can you blame me? It’s just the natural reaction in my position. It’s--” Twilight saw the look of concern that Celestia was giving her and noted that if she did not find a way to prevent herself from talking she would soon reveal her most treasured and humiliating secret. Thus, she stopped herself from uttering the words that were dangerous and sweet as candy fugu by shoving the proverbial hoof into her mouth. She didn’t fight to hide the blush that was coming so much as dive faceforward into the covers of the bed to obstruct it from Celestia’s undoubtedly curious observation. It came as a surprise, then, when Celestia passed over a note saying “That wasn’t what I meant.” Then came a much more dreaded one. “But tell me more about this.”
Twilight swallowed. “I-I just. No, I can’t.” Twilight shrank away. “Maybe I shouldn’t be here right now.” Celestia pressed her advantage,
“But you want to be.”
“I want you to stop asking me questions.”
“I’m trying to help.”
“It’s not helping.”
“You are hurting yourself. Tell me how to make you stop.”
“Oh, for crying out loud!” Twilight’s wings raised in frustration. Celestia sensed the reaction was more born of fear than of anger, but still the words came out hard and aggressive. “Even when I try talking about your personal problems it has to be about me! We can’t go two seconds without something hammering home just how inadequate I am! Can’t I just help you once without needing some sort of correction or assistance or…” Twilight became quiet for a moment. “Maybe that’s what Luna meant.”
Celestia tilted her head.
“She’s said there are things about you that would frustrate me. Well,” Twilight sighed, “she was right. Please, stop sacrificing yourself for me. Stop worrying about me. I’m not worth all this, and, more importantly, we have bigger problems. Problems of yours that trump something silly like what I feel for you. Please.”
Celestia looked like she was going to resist for a minute, then wrote. “Alright. When you’re more comfortable.” She paused. There was something her heart wished for her to add, but her mind pleaded caution. She decided, after a quick look to Twilight’s face and the fear that was in Twilight’s eyes, that caution could be hanged in this case. “You will never make me stop caring about you.”
Twilight looked down at the paper and swallowed. She put her hoof on the cover of Celestia’s writings for the second time that day, this time emphasizing a very different set of words. Instead, Twilight’s hoof hovered over the words. “I’m not the pony you think I am”, and the faithful princess simply shook her head at the idea of Celestia reassuring her this time.
---／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼---
Sweeping was excellent, Spike thought to himself in his mind. When he was sweeping, it felt like he was really part of something for once. He had a home to clean. He had a place that he belonged. His brush ran underneath photos of himself and Twilight, and along the place where Peewee’s nest used to be, and behind bookshelves that held the same tomes he had learned everything he knew about Equestria from. The silent house didn’t seem so empty when his claws were working on holding it together. He picked up Twilight’s discarded books and blueprints and nestled them back into her bookshelf and chest of drawers. He cleaned around the plastic bottles holding vitamins he’d been told to never touch on her counter top and made sure to dust the perfectly symmetrical assortments of ancient texts and writing utensils found along her work desk. He soaked what clothes Twilight had (for he had only one little suit that Rarity had made him the once) despite her keeping them immaculately clean and well-preserved. Years of practice had made him a capable cleaner, and so he made his way to through the assembled chores more quickly than he had imagined. “There.” Spike said to the empty house. “Now we won’t have to listen to that annoying squeaky floorboard ever again.” He smacked his claws together to dislodge the dust and some of the grease from them, then looked around at the state of his house. The places where Twilight would usually be reading or Dash selecting the latest foal’s novel stared out at him, daring him to talk to one of his “friends” about how Twilight wasn’t back yet. The only pony who might even go so far as to call him a friend was the pony he loved, and he wouldn’t be caught dead asking for her to take pity on him if he could help it. Stopping him from destroying the town once was more than he could ever repay her for as it was.
So he looked at the darkening evening sky outside and lit a lamp for himself. He could escape to the world where he was a Power Pony amongst a group of six companions if he wanted to, but instead he chose to read that book of races Twilight had to better himself like she’d told him to. So, with thoughts of a different group of seven materializing in his head, the little dragon set to reading about the relationships between dragons and ponies Twilight had been describing to him before her emergency call. With a lazy slump, the little dragon began to work his way through stories of captured princesses and the long road to peace Princess Celestia had forged with bribes, threats and compromises in the early days of dragon kind. The little drake had no idea, of course, that he was about to uncover the circumstances of his birth, but uncover the circumstances of his birth he soon would.
---／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼---
Twilight sighed. “I’m sorry I interrupted you before. Please, continue.” She settled her wings by her side, folded over her hooves and turned to stare into her mentor’s raptorial eyes.
Celestia grabbed down the paper again, writing out her words in the same rugged lines that she had used before. “You know nothing about my history. Everything I have given you to this point has been mere crumbs, and even then you know much of it was spent fighting cruel despots.” She paused, waiting for Twilight to protest, but it seemed Twilight was willing to carry herself with the patience she had held when the two of them had been student and teacher for the time being. “My life was not so charmed as it is now, and I was not always so quick to forgive.” She wrote at last with a halting, haunted talon. “I am blessed to live in a time when creatures like you are everywhere. I savor it. It was my dream from the start.” She reached out for Twilight for a moment, then pulled the claw back. “Peace did not come easy to Equestria. I ended many tyrannies and atrocities to build the land we have today, and in the process left behind many orphans.” She looked down at the sheets of her bed, then looked into Twilight’s eyes. “The book of races that you own covers many of my transgressions, and lets the reader decide whether they were justified or not. When I saw that you were reading it it sparked my memory of the darker times. So I chose to remind myself of how far I’ve come and what I’ve surrendered for this blessed life. I chose to see through the eyes of one of those lost to time who once stood as my greatest enemies.”
“But why specifically the terror birds? What about them was worth the risk? Why did you need to get inside their minds and not the minotaurs, or the dragons, or any of those old equine species from before our time that are still around?”
Celestia wrote a simple phrase, her eyes casting down in what Twilight could only surmise was some kind of sorrow. She’d never seen such a look on pony Celestia, and terror bird Celestia wore the foreign expression in a way that Twilight could only loosely connect to equine Celestia’s face. Celestia wrote the words slowly, and with purpose. Twilight noticed with a jolt that it was not unlike the way she had looked when eating the fish she had brought to them earlier. She could only imagine, then, that whatever Celestia was writing filled her with some kind of shame and disgust, and perhaps a sense of powerlessness. So Twilight steeled herself, silently vowing that no matter what the words Celestia put into her hooves said she would not think of her any differently.
When she received the words Celestia had written with such shame upon that simple slip of paper, Twilight almost dropped the sheet. Instead, with a set of hooves she had to force not to shake, she set it down and looked away. Celestia did not bother to attempt to touch Twilight, nor comfort her in any way. She knew that in both their eyes she did not deserve such a pleasure at that moment. Twilight at last let the paper fall to the floor, and its words stared out at Celestia with a damning glare from their position so near her dearest companion. To Celestia’s surprise, Twilight reached out a hoof and touched it to her side, the young alicorn’s hooftip pressing down tenderly against her former mentor’s tense and tired body. Still Celestia could not shake the damning sight of the note lying beneath her predator’s body.
“Princess…” Twilight began. “I know you’d never hurt anypony without good reason. I mean, I’ve done some pretty terrible things and you’ve never done more than raise your voice at me. The same goes for Trixie, and Sunset. I don’t see you banishing them for what they did, and you certainly didn’t punish me for any of my mistakes. If you did something in the past to hurt somepony, they probably weren’t capable of learning or changing. The pony I know didn’t banish Nightmare Moon or seal away Discord because it was the easy way or the way she wanted—she did it because it was the only way. Because she’s kind and wants others to prosper, not because she wants to control everyone or trample over whoever opposes her.”
There was a proud smile across the younger mare’s face. And then the winds of introspection took her. Twilight looked down, holding a hoof to her heart and creasing her brow. The shadow of one of her inner demons fell upon her face for a moment, and she gave a guilty frown. “You’re a lot stronger than me, that’s for sure. I sure wish I wasn’t too weak to take the hard choices and too selfish to make those kinds of sacrifices.”
Celestia let a claw side along Twilight’s face, then drew it back to her pen and paper. “How can you say that about yourself, after all you’ve done?” That perplexing blush was back again, accompanied by that piercing frown and those darting, haunted eyes. Celestia put her claw back under Twilight’s chin, her gnarled and gigantic digits forming a tender cradle. She stared deep into Twilight’s eyes with her own slitted pupils, searching for the truth of what really tore at her heart. But all she could see looking back at her was that same soul so haunted and tormented, doing its best to put up a defense against anypony that hoped to repay the kindness it was so quick to bestow upon others. A creature that damned herself with unbridled hate as much as she blessed everyone around her with naked love. Celestia nuzzled her younger companion, letting her great head bow to Twilight in a salute to how much she weathered from her thoughts. For a moment, brief though it was, Twilight’s tension slacked.
And then Twilight let go and pushed her love away. “I can’t,” she breathed out a heavy sigh, “I can’t do this. It isn’t fair to you.”
“Isn’t fair?” Celestia let the words flow naturally.
“I feel so...so...dishonest!” Twilight groaned. “Like I’m lying to you a little more every time we get closer.”
“You aren’t lying where it matters.” Celestia slid the paper under Twilight’s nose.
“You don’t know that.” Twilight sagged herself into the bed, grabbing one hoof with the other.
“I know you.”
“You trust me, you mean. “
“Now you’re lying.” Celestia wrote out another note, making sure she wrote these words carefully and spanned them across the entirety of the page. “To me and to yourself.”
“Alright, I…” Twilight looked down. “You don’t understand how deep my feelings run. You don’t understand how much I need it. It’s not right.”
“And you don’t know how much I need it, either.” Celestia wrote the words quickly and easily now. “More than I ever knew.” Twilight opened her mouth, looking to challenge, to take comfort in the safety of her unimportance, expendability, inferiority. But there was this courageous giant, sharing her very heart with her, and all at once her desperate clawing for safety was replaced with something much braver. She saw the way Celestia looked at her, felt the coals of this wonderful being stoking the furnace of her heart, and suddenly she swelled with a bold, simple thought.
She sat down and poured out her heart to Celestia. “You’ll never know how much—” Twilight stopped, then started again. “When I first met you, all I could think of was how amazing what you were doing for us was. I studied magic because of you. But not because of how incredible your skill was. It was the faces of the ponies in the crowd. I saw how they looked at you and I knew, I just knew our lives were so much better because of you and what you did. I didn’t want to be like you because of power, but because in that moment I saw how much they loved you and why. I saw how much you deserved it.” She put her hoof on Celestia’s arm, then looked up at her and gave an earnest, shining smile. “Even more so for everything you had to give up to reach this wonderful world we have today.”
Twilight swallowed a ball of scrap metal that was eating away at her throat. Her eyes turned inward and searched the churning fog of emotion Celestia evoked within her soul. Though she risked being snatched up by the jaws of cowardice, shame or self-loathing, still she took her first shaky step into that dangerous mist. Then, with a tremble in her lips and in her heart, she opened herself up to Celestia in full for a single terrifying moment. “I realized in that moment that I loved you. For everything you did to make our world so much better, I loved you.” She concluded the quick and life-risking speech with a whispered sentence more powerful than even the words that had come before. “And I hope I’ll never stop.”
The giant bird before her tilted its head, then gave a tender cooing. Celestia swooped down like a giant dove and embraced her closest friend as tenderly as she could. The terror bird squeezed into Twilight, feeling that fear-born tension grow stronger and then, ever so slowly, melt away with a long sigh. Twilight pressed her face into the feathers offered up to her, then began to stroke her hoof along Celestia’s gigantic back. Celestia looked at Twilight’s guilt-wracked form, her mind wrestling with what she did and didn’t want to say to her. For a moment they weren’t princesses, or alicorns, or liars, or saviours or heroes or tyrants or villains.
They were two souls clinging to each other in the harsh windstorm of time. They were two broken halves shattered by past tragedy and demons of the mind. They were two broken halves hugging together into one greater whole, hoping to snatch the joyous fire they could see in their better’s heart and share it with the world. Celestia closed her eyes and remembered. Twilight let the words fade between them, allowing her own eyelids to obscure her vision and sharing Celestia’s moment in silence. And then Celestia was worlds away and centuries ago, during the dying days of the terror bird.
Towers of gold and obsidian burned with a fire even their owners, the magnificent dragons, had never faced before. The skies above were choked with angry black clouds of ash and smoke, and behind those dark clouds the sun burned with savage violet light. Rings of runes orbited around the astral body, and wherever its rays focused the very earth erupted into molten, tortured streams of fire and light. Tornadoes that stunk of pegasus design ripped through buildings that had once been intricate art of platinum and pearl.
Reptiles the size of mountains winged through the skies, picking up ponies in their massive talons or unleashing burning streams of fire from their maws. Their flames were met with artillery shots powered by unicorn horns or earth pony ingenuity. Some were battered by the chunks of stone and forced to take further to the skies, but just as surely other drakes would swoop down upon the sources of the lobbed boulders and burn them into submission. Magic hung heavy in the air, dancing unnatural spirals through the air surrounding the fire drakes and their citadels, but the dragons paid it no heed. Spells bounced off their armor, and when they touched telekinetic vortexes they dissipated. To those ponies caught on the ground, it looked to be the end of the world. Then, one by one, the dragons began to plummet from the sky. The magical fires that burned their city were nothing to the old rulers of the world, but the byproducts of that same magic were a different story. Their magical immunities did not extend to the after-effects of the spells being cast—the natural results of an unnatural phenomena—and so they tumbled from the skies they once dominated.
Burning rays focused from the sun through magical lenses felled them, as did the smoke and raw heat rising up from the magic flames set below. One by one, the dragons either fled or succumbed, and soon the skies that had once rained destruction down upon the ponies below were cleared. Only the wisest among the giant creatures dove to the cover of the city itself, where the rising heat was more bearable than in the choked and burning skies above and where the platoons of ponies protected them from the rays of the deadly sun. But even there was a poor refuge, for there they found a sight worthy of shattering their morale.
The streets were clogged with rubble and broken weapons. Screams of terror and ragged battle cries rang out in and amongst the last and largest of the great draconic cities. The once-great civilization had its back to the wall, its emergency capital a twisted warzone of panicked civilians and clashing armies. Here, the real battle was being fought. The great drakes could always flee the city and scatter into their mountain refuges, but their many one-time allies could not.
Earth pony and pegasi warriors clad in heavy, rigidly ordered bronze armor were interrupted from their march towards the city center by an ambush. Out from the rubble rushed a giant, carnivorous bird, a creature that triggered primal fear even in the disciplined mares and stallions of the Royal Army. A beak swung like a heavy axe, battering through shield and pony alike, but the lances of the ponies brought it down. When another rushed them from behind, they were more prepared. Then more of them came, and the army truly began to dig itself in. Despite being surrounded and outmatched for natural weapons by a wide margin, the ponies managed to hold firm even against assaults of hordes of their blazingly fast opponents. Technology had never been the strong suit of the gigantic animals and their unwieldy, two-fingered hands, and so stone axes and simple spears were all they had to meet the bronze pikes, swords and pilum of the pony armies.
They slowly backed towards a ruined building, hoping to rob the birds of their cover advantage. Even then, the birds harassed them and forced them to slow and dig in where before they had been taking outpost after outpost from the small, young and unarmed drakes that had been stationed before. And then Celestia arrived. In place of her usual mane of rainbow auroras was replaced with winds of solar flame. Her eyes glowed a volcanic red, body coated in runes and petryl replaced with a talisman of intricate and arcane design. The ground surrounding her ponies split and fractured, the supernatural heat of her radiant body turning pyroxene to shards of obsidian and churning up the black and tortured earth. The twisted sun above her vaporized rubble and left terror birds seared by the ash and heat in its wake. Fires lit by her unnatural magic set natural fires of their own, and soon what had been a guerilla war became a route.
Her eyes flickered upon one of the few buildings remaining, a familiar sigil catching her burning gaze. A flag bearing the coat of arms of the terror bird leaders flew proudly from the tallest structure on display, the proud creatures having raised a banner even in this darkest day of the war. Celestia immediately blasted her way into the building, a ball of fire expanding in her wake. She arrived to find only one creature in the room, seated calmly behind a broken piece of obsidian. The gaunt form of an especially thin terror bird rose up to meet her, his predator’s eyes twinkling with a wild and dangerous intelligence. Plumes of feathers more like a coat of shaggy white fur coated his entire body, save his raptorial legs, which instead bore claws that were the same off-yellow colour as his beak. They were no less deadly, either, for powerful muscles propelled him towards Celestia with a slow, purposeful and unsettlingly un-equine gait. The wily glimmer in his eye and his familiar half-smile greeted her as if she were still an old friend. Celestia would have none of it.
“Ya’rla The Betrayer. To what do I owe the pleasure?” She stood her ground, ignoring the sound of gigantic claws scraping against the smoothed glass floor around her as best she could. Instead, she stared deep into his eyes, challenging him to justify himself to her. His bony, faded yellow beak was as wide as Celestia’s head, and half again as long. A hook like that of a jagged pickaxe terminated the beak on one end, while slitted, cat-like pupils finished the opposite side.
“I take it this means our last attempt at negotiations has failed.” Two giants amongst their own kinds stood over the burning city. Molten metal ran down the sides of the tower, but the two paid the absurd heat no mind. “The dragons decided to grant us some of their limited fire resistance for this final battle, knowing that you were coming as they did. The crucial word there is, heh, limited.” Ya’rla wagged one of the savagely clawed fingers on his prehensile, elongate hands. The other claw rested against his side, folded rigidly like the wings his ancestors had once used. “I did mention, to my credit, that charging directly into a firestorm just to lobby artillery strikes at you was a poor tactic.” He shrugged his arms at the elbows, his shoulder muscles being rigid like those of any other bird. “Which is why I have decided to negotiate terms of surrender on behalf of my people.”
“Unacceptable. We speak to the dragons and the dragons only.” Celestia moved forward, allowing herself to join her companion in a predatory prowl of her own. “You had your chance to join us when the war began, we offered you second chances all along the way—you responded with ambushes. You aren’t a slave race, Ya’rla, and until the dragons release those who are—the minotaurs, the sea monsters, the mules—we will accept no conditions of surrender. Now bring me Ancalagon and end this farce.”
Ya’rla’s good cheer flickered for a moment. “In hindsight, we chose poorly. But we are a people mired in tradition. Our clutch-brothers were our first choice in a total war, not our one-time pets. I regret the decision more than you know. We should have taken your kindness, but I put too much faith in draconic good-will.”
“Pets?” Celestia scoffed. “We may have once been primitives, and our peoples closer, but you ate us just as readily as you gave us technology. Your kind ate us, Ya’rla, and no amount of good faith will change that.”
“Yes, pets. From our perspective, five hundred years of diplomacy have been us taming former meals. Your kind were barely sentient during those early formative years and you know it. Transitions are never orderly and never clean. Look at us now. Your kind is a race of giants, overturning world order and bringing freedom and peace to the world, whether we like it or not. How many do you think have been trampled beneath your hooves in your stampede towards the top? And us? Barely a mob, hunted by dragon and pony alike.” Ya’rla turned whimsical again. “Is it really so hard to believe we thought you were an amusement at first?”
“At first, perhaps. But we held an alliance. An age of prosperity for our peoples forged upon good faith. Five hundred years, Ya’rla. Five hundred years we have worked together. You argued alongside me. Fought with me to stop this war. And now you stand here speaking to me of pets.” Celestia stood to her full height, though Ya’rla was easily taller. He dwarfed her six feet with a menacing twelve of his own, though her body itself was about twice that of his in length. Her wings flared and she let her horn point towards Ya’rla’s head, to which the bird raised his arms in surrender.
“Well met, little pony. But that is our history together from your perspective.” He took a step back from Celestia, then walked over to the hole in the tower’s wall through which Celestia had flown. “My father told me why we were so quick to take you into our ranks when I ascended to his throne. It was an exchange based on survival, little one. Your crops attracted prey, your pegasi brought water. Your magic was amusing. You were amusing. And if we were starved, and we had no other food source to find? Why, we had an emergency supply living under our noses. It was mutual benefit, with a side of predator’s pragmatism, that brought us together, little Princess. That is all it has ever been. And now our roles have reversed. When this is over, my people will become curios; relics of a bygone age. You will use us as easy labor, if indeed you find any use for us at all. Look at how the cows and the pigs live under you. Herbivore’s pragmatism, yes?”
“And what of us? Of the others among our people who lived together? Friends? Adoptive family? Lovers? Do they mean less to you than ‘draconic goodwill’? Were we less than the goodwill of a bunch of slavers?”
“In my eyes, come what may, you will always be my friend.” The cheer left Ya’rla’s face entirely, and with it the last bit of whimsy he held died. “They have our eggs.” The taller of the two creatures shook its head, looking down at the anarchy below with regret in its eyes. “We did not know they were so desperate to have our kind under their control. Rumor is they expected us to turn against them. I cannot help but think that if we had not been so close, they—”
“No. The dragons are to blame for their own sins. No other creature. I always treasured your friendship, Ya’rla.” Princess Celestia looked on the dark spectacle with no brighter an expression than her enormous comrade. Even her gigantic form was dwarfed by the creature beside her.
A bitter laugh came from the depths of Ya’rla’s overlong throat. “I was a fool to trust them. You were right—I did choose the dragons over you to begin with. We thought we could talk sense into them, end the war on a bittersweet peace, at least. By that time, it would be my successor’s problem, and perhaps he would be less conflicted than I. Was that selfish of me?” He shook his head again. “Regardless, once we saw the depth of their cruelty, every terror bird regretted my choice. I more than any other. But by that time, clutch-brothers became clutch captors, and there was nothing more we could do.”
Celestia searched the terror’s reptilian eyes for the spark of genius and humor they’d once held, but she found in their place something dull, resigned and quiet. Something full of predator’s pragmatism, where before there had been a creature quite the opposite. “Then you’ve truly forsaken hope in its entirety?”
Ya’rla shook his mighty head, then closed his eyes and whispered. “My troops are to fight to the last bird. They have taken our eggs to the nursery, along with those of all drakes who have not sworn loyalty to the king. They are to smash them if even one among our ranks does not fight to the death. ‘Like taming phoenixes,’ the guard dragon said.” He laughed another empty laugh, darker than the pyroclastic clouds that hung above them. “Now we’re the pets.”
“And your civilians?”
“We are a race of carnivores, and have no room to protest. In the eyes of Lord Ancalagon and his people, we have no civilians.”
“And what of you?” Celestia searched the aging giant’s face. “Why were you not called to the battle?” And then it clicked. Celestia’s eyes widened, and a look of pure hurt and naked disbelief ghosted across her face.
Ya’rla gave a laugh like a dying wind. “Predator’s pragmatism. You always were a smart little pony. I can only hope our last discussion has kept your sun from my people long enough that they can use yours as shields.” Ya’rla stepped forward to tower over her, his giant claws unfurling and hanging before him like a butcher’s knife set. He stretched a beak the size of a battle axe well above Celestia’s head, and his elongate toes stabbed into the ground until the heavy rock cracked beneath them.
Celestia, for her part, looked troubled for only a minute. Her gaze hardened, and her body crouched low, horn pointing at her aggressor’s chest. The horn lit, and she let out a silent prayer that she could buy herself enough time to escape. There was no safe place to teleport, and allowing Ya’rla to join his troops would be a fatal error of the gravest sort regardless. So she vowed to hold him here, however she might have to. She held her wings out at her sides, ready to spread and unleash a powerful blow if given a moment’s notice. “I never thought to see you so weak, old friend.”
“It is not weakness to make a sacrifice in the name of those you love.” And then he was upon her, claws slashing and beak stabbing in a whirlwind of bladed limbs. Celestia’s instincts screamed for her to break and run, shouting warnings of the nightmare that was this towering giant that would surely devour her like the prey she was. But Celestia was not an animal. She was a leader, and her mind defined her, not her body. She ducked under Ya’rla’s head, catching his wickedly curved claws in a slash across her midsection in the process. Then she pushed with all her might, legs meant for running turning her into a battering ram and a weight meant for processing grass lending her strength against her lithe and athletic foe. Her old friend toppled over, claws still scoring across her barrel. Her wings and legs formed a barrier to protect her weaker belly and the precious organs held within. Abruptly, a pair of jaws backed by layers of brutal keratin wrapped themselves around her head. Her hooves crashed down on the neck of Ya’rla before he could snap her own, but in the process she let herself suffer a cruel and long rake across her exposed belly. She responded by beating her own hardened keratin hooves against Ya’rla’s prone form, attempting to beat him into submission where he lay. Blow after blow struck his body and neck with a potent smacking noise, her golden shoes hitting against him with brutal blunt force.
She stood to a towering height, poising to bring both hooves down upon the prone form of her fallen friend. Ya’rla reacted with a crushing blow of his own. He raised a heavily taloned leg against her, sending it forward to deliver a punch to her chest that nearly shattered her ribcage. She flew across the room, landing with a resounding crunch against the obsidian floor and sliding to hit a window with enough force to spider its surface with fine cracks. If she had not been bolstered by the strength of an earth pony, she felt certain that either the impact itself or the damage she sustained from the landing would have twisted her spine into an unworkable shape. Instead, she raised herself to her feet, if shakily. In front of her, Ya’rla was propping himself back up using his smaller forelimbs. She could see that he was leaning to the right, and that there were patches in his feather coat where her hooves had collided heavily with animal skin. She could only imagine what she looked like.
“You were always my favourite, Celestia. You had a spark like no other. Intelligence made the slave of kindness. A beautiful arrangement if ever there was one.” Both creatures paused to draw breath, one trying to suck the wind that had been knocked out of her back into her body and the other attempting to gather his bearings after multiple blows to the head. Celestia’s horn shone again, her spell from before still preparing. She only prayed it would be ready in time. “If I am to battle any creature today, I should be honored it is you.” She saw a glimpse of her old friend for a moment, a sad smile upon his face. “I would die by your hoof before a dragon’s claw any day.” And then the glimpse was buried, the killer gleam of a predator back in his reptilian pupils once more. “I only regret that you will die by mine.” He flexed his killing claws for emphasis, hurtling forwards at her with the unreal speed all his kind possessed. Celestia rolled out the way, waiting for the impact against the window that her one-time ally would inevitably suffer. She was instead doubled over by a bird ramming her up against the wall, his own legs having propelled him in a leap at her at the last minute. A claw seized around her throat, lifting her high above the ground. Then a feathery body pressed up against hers, preventing her legs from kicking out against the giant standing before her. Terrible digits wrapped around her horn, and the bird closed in for a killing blow. But the bird before her hesitated, and for a moment, it looked as though he might stop. His eyes flickered, searching down to the battlefield below. Ponies fought birds with spear against beak, talon against shield, and though casualties were great on both sides, he could see that the birds were breaking against the greater positioning of the ponies. Crumpled birds littered the warpath the ponies were forging towards the town hall. The mighty nation he had once led was now a warband, and a dwindling one, at that. Then the bird clenched his grip again, and the life began to drain away from the helpless creature before him.
