【Sharing the Night】 Chapter 13 Cut Ending

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Dear Princess Celestia,
Where to start? First, I have to apologize for what I would like to charitably describe as the ‘panicked retreat’ which I made from your chambers earlier this afternoon. Being with you, in your chambers and on your bed, as we were, stirred in me certain… feelings, which, quite frankly, my life thus far has not prepared me for. You’ll have to forgive me for being vague; it really is best if I start at the beginning.

Celestia reread the paragraph several times. Certain… feelings? With an ellipses and everything? Twilight did not write an ellipses unless she well and truly needed to, not in a report. Celestia frowned. It had started out as more of a letter, but glancing ahead, it appeared to be a more usual dry report—not that Celestia did not enjoy Twilight’s reports, but now she had gotten her hopes up.

That tease.

Well, there was only one thing for it. Celestia gulped down her cream, grabbed the report in her magic and dashed back off to her study. She had a report to read.

Last night, Luna and I visited you with the intent to discuss the gaping hole in the world which was, at the time, leaking night to the surface, as I am certain you had noticed prior. If this is not the case, then please refer to diagram A.1 in the attached appendix ‘A,’ and make an effort to look out the window more often. I suspect I know why you appeared to be sequestering yourself in your rooms that night, so I’ll simply move on.
It was our intent at the time to enter into the hole and investigate both the source of the night which was effusing from it, as well as the source of the instinctual fear that has been plaguing me, which we presumed to be one and the same. I understand that this malady was mentioned to you in passing on the night before last, so you may wish to consult the additional details on the subject provided in the attached appendix ‘B,’ along with the psychological and physiological records in fig. B.1 through B.12.
In these matters, we were successful, and our suspicions confirmed. Rather than proceed through the events of the previous night in a chronological order, I will instead summarize my findings. As with the event involving the ursæ major and minor, these findings are submitted to be irrefutable fact as witnessed by myself in memories contained within my stars. I repeat: they are fact and should not be entered into any juvenile fiction contests regardless of their entertainment qualities. It was funny once. To you. If you still do not wish to heed this request, I would also note that I quite doubt that the details of these events would be suitable for juvenile consumption, as the subject matter is at times both questionable and liable to lead to some very confused young minds, presuming they are not alicorns themselves.
Also, if they are alicorns, they should probably be hearing about these things from a parental figure they trust. Ideally, such a parental figure should also be an alicorn. I have written up some possible lines along which such a conversation might advance, and burned them. The resulting ashes were to be included as appendix ‘E’ for the sake of completeness until it was pointed out to me that ashes cannot be burned a second time and so, would not have been able to be sent via dragon mail. If you desire these ashes, I shall post them through pegasus mail instead.
Now, as to the matter at hoof. As implied by the above paragraphs, the events and information which I have uncovered as a result of investigation into the hole in the world do indeed relate to important information regarding the subjects of alicorns, alicorn physiology, alicorn coupling and alicorn death.

Celestia wasn’t certain what she had expected, but this was not it. She was tempted to check the appendices out of curiosity but she refused to let herself get distracted. More important was the tone of the last few paragraphs. No, more important was the last few paragraphs period. Twilight would normally never send her a report like this. Post the ashes? For completeness? A script for telling young alicorns about the facts of life? Alicorn… coupling?

Celestia leafed through the report, but didn’t see any notes or corrections. It was clearly not a draft sent by accident; was it some sort of joke? Filled with a strange morbid curiosity, she read on.

a. alicorns
The previous generation of alicorns was originally four in number, each with cutie marks depicting their celestial bodies with very little deviation. These alicorns had singular names formally followed by two aspects they represented as alicorns, even though they eschewed official titles of all kinds. These alicorns were as follows:
Luma, the light of day. A white alicorn with a rainbow mane, and mild disposition. Her celestial body was a rainbow ring that encircled the world and provided light for the day. As a modern alicorn exists who would fit this description (Ie. You), I will clarify using existing ponies close to me as reference. Her coat was indeed much like your own, however, her mane, while also ethereal, was possessed of more saturated colors as per the mane of the pegasus ‘Rainbow Dash,’ (See diagram C.1 in the attached appendix C). Additionally, while your own mien could be described as mild, it would be more correct to liken Luma to Fluttershy, presuming that Fluttershy was first placed under the influence of some form of anxiety medication, of course.
Vita, the fire of life. An excitable ochre alicorn with a mane of living fire. Her celestial body was a ball of fire similar to the modern sun, save for the fact that it burned with a nearly perfect clear flame ringed by only a hint of blue corona to mark its passing against the daylight sky. The exception to this is when it would pass in front of Luma’s rainbow ring, under which circumstances it would bend and scatter the light to spectacular effect.
Somni, the dream of night. Midnight-blue coat, aurora-green mane and a personality that is somewhat difficult for me to describe in short terms, as a large part of what I saw of her was colored by her unrequited love for the next alicorn in the list, Fati. The thesaurus suggests ‘whimsical’, which is accurate enough, as she was the alicorn of dreams. Her celestial body was a moon. Note that I write ‘a’ moon and not ‘the’ moon, as there were two at the time, and neither is precisely the modern specimen which is Luna’s. Somni’s moon was pure white the whole way around and unmarred by the craters and maria of the modern moon. Poets of the time likened it to a polished jewel that was a window into the dreams which she dreamed for ponies. These poets were clearly mistaken and possibly imbibing, as Somni’s moon was provably composed of luminescent, yet entirely opaque rock.
Fati, the fate of death. Fati had a violet coat, black mane and a dour personality. She was the only one of the previous alicorns who cared much for mortals, and this caused her to be somewhat estranged from the others. She did not return Somni’s feelings of romantic love. From what I saw, Fati provided the world with nightmares, many of which were prophetic or designed to teach restraint, and it is in this way she claimed to be metaphorically ‘guarding the gates of death’ lest ponies enter before their time. Like Somni, her Celestial body was also a moon, though hers was black and virtually invisible against the night sky.
Solaria. This is where it gets complicated. I mentioned that there were ‘originally’ four alicorns, and this was not an error. Luma and Vita were romantically involved and all that this implies. In the final years of the old world, they decided to consummate their love in a special way and join together to become a single alicorn via a process which I am not entirely clear on and may never know, as it was not part of the memories which I have recovered. This is not any great loss, as the event was, to put it mildly, a mistake.
The error was not in execution. It is my understanding that the process completed flawlessly, giving birth to the alicorn Solaria, who was gold from horn to hoof. Her mane was fire rimmed with rainbow, and her genesis resulted in the sun we have today. This alicorn, however, was immediately crushed by the perceived loss of the two ponies who had come together to make her, both of which she viewed as her true loves and whose companionship she was bereft of.

This passage, Celestia decided with some relief, was a reassuring return to form. The content itself was more than a little disturbing in what it suggested, but at the same time, it spoke of a Twilight Sparkle much more in control of her faculties. Still, it wasn’t as reassuring as she told herself. Twilight had still decided to send it in spite of the earlier sections and there was no shortage of ill implications written between the lines—or straight on the lines, as Celestia was capable of counting to three as well as any other pony. Surely enough, the next section did little to reassure her.

b. Alicorn Physiology
The alicorns of the previous generations lived for a very long time[citation needed]. Data collected at the end of their lives suggests that they continued to grow for this entire period with the rate of growth slowing over time and resulting in alicorns roughly three ponies tall. The exact rate and falloff of growth is not known at this time, but is observed to be similar for all specimens in the data set with one notable exception. See fig. D.1 through D.4 in the attached appendix ‘D’ for possible extrapolations of the growth data.
The exception in these matters is Solaria, whose genesis resulted in an alicorn roughly fifty percent taller than the others. This deviation from the norm suggests some catalyst for the growth beyond the purely physical. Whether the root cause of this aberration is an aggregation of soul, magical power, some other force or some or all of the above, the resulting alicorn was observed to be well formed and healthy in body.

Celestia had to reread the section several times. The actual information was fairly straightforward, cementing earlier implications that not only was this ‘Solaria’ her own counterpart, but that the events which Twilight had deemed a ‘mistake,’ had persisted to the current age. In essence, Twilight was telling Celestia that there was something wrong with her.

And yet… the comment about Solaria being ‘well formed’ stuck in her mind for some reason. She knew Twilight and she knew her writing. It was not the sort of thing she would normally write, and that only made Celestia wonder at the significance of it, if she could not bear to let it go unsaid.

Celestia shook her head and pressed a hoof into her temple. No, she was reading too much into it. She was just letting her own odd feelings for Twilight Sparkle paint pictures that weren’t there. There were far, far stranger things about the entire report to guess at the meaning of.

Like the next section.

c. Alicorn Coupling
The memories which I examined contained one case of alicorn coupling between Somni and Solaria. Please see diagrams F.1 through F.24 in attached appendix ‘F,’ for illustrations of what this entails. The entirety of appendix ‘F’ should be considered both explicit in nature and possibly confidential as it relates to the essential truth of alicorn existence.

Celestia barely read this section. As fascinating as it was that her faithful student had apparently sent her explicit materials, including diagrams—diagrams!—her eye was immediately drawn to the blank bottom half of the page where small yellow note had been affixed.

Celestia, I’m not really sure what I should do with this information. I’ve never been one for romance because there was always a piece missing from it for me. This is that piece, and I’m not entirely certain that I wanted it. I don’t know if you knew about this, but I have my suspicions. If you don’t want to know what I know, do not see attached appendix… whatever I wrote above.
Suffice it to say, this is why I was uncomfortable with you today. There are certain things that cannot be unseen. I don’t know what this will mean for our relationship. I’m sorry I ran away, this is really something I should talk to you about in pony, but it’s much easier for me to write. I’ll finish the report later. I don’t really feel like doing it now, but I want to send this. Spoiler alert: they all died.

Suddenly, the haphazard state of the report all made sense and she felt bad for thinking poorly of her student for it. No, Twilight Sparkle had been completely serious. She had seen something that well and truly bothered her, and it showed in her writing. Even still, it was hard for her to accept. The very idea that there was some secret alicorn… ritual that had gone unnoticed until now and could have this deep of an effect on a pony like Twilight, she didn’t want to believe it.

And yet, Celestia had only to look at herself. All of her confusion, the jealousy, even the fantasies involving cake, they all made perfect sense now. It was the most natural thing in the world. Regardless of what was contained in appendix ‘F’—regardless of the… messy details—there would be no going back from this.

For the two thousand years of their lives, Celestia and Luna had only ever had each other; eternal sisters. They had each sampled the world of mortals and found it wanting in their own ways. Now, the truth was out. Alicorn was meant to lay with alicorn, but there was a problem.

They only had one Twilight Sparkle.

Celestia was preparing herself to turn to appendix ‘F’ when she realized that the bottom of Twilight’s last note had been folded under. Curious, she unfolded it.

Postscript: I think I’m in love with Luna… and I might be okay with that.
Postpostscript: What do I do?

【Sharing the Night】 Epilogue (April Fools 2015)

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Sharing the Night: Epilogue

✶ ✶ ✶

The massive main doors of the Ponyville Palace were a sight to behold. Being over three hooves thick of clear crystal, they resembled most the floors of the palace. While the floors had white moonstone underneath the crystal, however, the doors were significantly more artistic, each possessing a two-tone, black-on-white or white-on-black profile of an alicorn. It was all very dignified, perhaps even more so than Celestia’s hall of stained glass, which is why it came as quite a shock when both massive doors slammed open with a crash that was likely to wake half of Ponyville, and in strode two much more realistically-sized alicorns exhibiting varying levels of inebriation between them.

Twilight squinted into the darkness before her. Were she a normal pony, she would be trying to mask out sources of undue brightness so that her eyes would dilate and she would be capable of seeing deeper into the shadows. In actuality, however, what she was actually doing was blocking out her visually-distracting ocular vision so that she could examine the situation with the starlight that was filtering in through the large open doorway.

So, you know, basically the same thing, but fancier, because ‘alicorn.’

“Luna, is it just me, or does the palace appear to be closed?” Twilight asked, taking confident, yet curious strides into the shadowed entryway. It actually wasn’t that dark, as the white moonstone was all but luminescent on its own, catching every stray photon and reflecting it in an ethereal shine.

Luna, whose moon was providing most of the reflected light, did not even have to squint. “On a point of technicality, I must observe that the door is most assuredly open, but as to the meaning of your statement, that does seem to be the case, yes,” she said, pondering that very fact as she scratched her chin.

“Now, correct me if I’m wrong,” Twilight said, partially pensive and, perhaps, particularly perturbed. “But I thought that the whole point of being an alicorn of the night was that our house would not be closed for business in the middle of it.”

“Well,” Luna said, considering this. “No, I don’t believe that is the whole point. Considering the general business volume and the fact that we do, as you say, work from home, I am personally far more concerned that the kitchens stay open into the night than for the office to do so, though, as far as points go, I must admit that you do have one.”

“Quite,” Twilight said as the sound of their hooves echoed through the cavernous hallway, interrupting the silence with a soft clacking. “Though, the kitchens? Really? You cannot possibly still be hungry. We just ate, and you, at least, have consumed a bottle and a half of wine. There is no need to be a glutton.”

Luna scoffed. “Twilight, you are a bright, spirited and wonderful mare, and so I refuse to believe that you are not aware that the kitchens at Canterlot castle fire the ovens all through the night just to sate my sister’s appetite for cake. The calories she consumes in scones alone are enough to feed a Zebrican village, and yet she remains the perfect picture of equestrian beauty. I say, if the greatest glutton of them all can live as such, then who are we to argue? We shall be as gods, and if that means that we shall eat cake, then by the moon, let us eat cake!”

“Fine, fine,” Twilight said, rolling her eyes. “I get it. Immortality comes with a great gym membership, but I still say the office staff is more important. I can much easier do without hot chocolate and a plate of cream puffs before bed than I’d appreciate the sight of a pile of paperwork when I get up. Now come on, help me figure out why the itty-bitty living space that comes with our phenomenal cosmic power has apparently been vacated.”

As they ventured further, they found neither hide nor hair of any of the ponies who were supposed to be busy at work. Twilight was just considering who, specifically, to address a sternly-worded letter to, when she realized that there was one detail which she had missed when she had passed through here earlier in the day on the way to court. Behind the main reception desk and about ten hooves up was, atop a dais with stairs around the back and space for viewing, a large display case.

“Oh stars, they totally did it,” Twilight said, slapping her hoof over her face. “They made a display case for the crown and scepter.”

Luna cocked her head. “Well, of course they did,” she said, as if the reasoning were obvious. “You did tell them to do so.”

Well, okay, in hindsight, the reasoning was obvious.

Twilight hrmed, considering the matter. “Okay, ascertaining the safety and/or slacking off of government employees is important, but right this moment I think I need to see this crown and scepter they made me. I mean, it’s right there. It won’t take more than a minute, will it?”

“Well, that’s entirely up to you, really,” Luna said without much care or conviction. “Though, I suspect you ought to take your time and do a proper job of it. I do believe that your so-called employees have been cutting corners. Why, just look at this, Twilight. The case is clearly used—broken, in fact! And the body; is that not one of your heralds, sleeping on the job?”

Twilight let out a gasp and rushed up the dais to get a closer look. She made the trip in just a few flaps of her wings and came to land over the sleeping figure. “Oh calumnious misfortune, Luna! I do believe that my crown has been stolen, and this mare—!”

“What?” Luna asked, her ears perking up. She rushed to Twilight’s side to get a better look. “Is she an accomplice, or injured in a valiant stand against villainy, perhaps? Should I rush out and gather a medical dispatch?”

“No, I believe her to simply be asleep,” Twilight explained, rolling the mare over onto her other side. “But laying on the ground as she is, you can clearly see that her pantsuit has padded shoulders. Why, herald three? I trusted you, and you lied to me. You lied to me with provocative clothing!”

“Curious, I do not believe I have ever actually witnessed your heralds wearing clothing before now,” Luna stated, wondering at the incongruity, no doubt.

Twilight shook her head, still saddened over the misrepresentational garment. “Oh, no, it’s actually quite normal for them. They are only naked when they are attending me.”

“Indeed?” Luna asked, thoughtful as she looked the mare up and down. “Twilight, I am going to ask you a question, and I would appreciate it if you would just it serious consideration before answering. Will you do that for me?”

Twilight nodded. “Of course, Luna,” she said, absently examining the scene of the crime.

“Twilight,” Luna began, her voice deepening slightly with grave seriousness. “Are you absolutely certain that you have heralds, and not a harem?”

Twilight blinked and looked up at Luna in surprise. “Can’t I have both?” she asked, though she was nitpicking at best. “I mean, no, of course not. That very misconception is why I asked them to remove their clothes in my presence in the first place. Such scandalous behavior, I thought, and here I see now that I was right. This clothing cannot be trusted.”

“Is that the way of it, then?” Luna asked, raising an eyebrow. “How very strange. As an alicorn princess, I do not pretend to understand such things as physical attraction or clothing, let alone how one combines the two, I shall take your word for it.”

“Wait, isn’t that how it works?” Twilight asked, somewhat uncertain. “I mean, I don’t get it either, but ponies are naked all the time and they don’t seem to be bothered about it.”

Luna considered this. “You don’t suppose…” she began, leaving her meaning for Twilight to intuit.

“That we rule a nation of perverts?” Twilight balked then shook her head. “Don’t be ridiculous, Luna. Celestia would never stand for such a thing.”

Luna was not so convinced, however. She grabbed Twilight by the shoulders and pulled her closer. “Would she know, though?” she asked, her voice tight with paranoia. “Is she not in the same situation that we are? Oh, moon, she could be presenting herself for their enjoyment at court every day and she wouldn’t even know it!”

Twilight’s jaw dropped. “Like we do, you mean?” she asked as a growing hysteria gripped her. “I don’t even have any regalia! I’m twice as naked!” Quickly, she bolted over to the display case and grabbed the velvet cloth that was draped around the case, wrapping it around herself like a purple toga.

“Wait, what about the regalia?” Luna asked then gasped. “It is clothing, yet it covers nothing! What if the design is some sort of fetish?” Without a thought, she tossed her peytral aside, where it tumbled down the stairs in a series of thumps, followed shortly after by her shoes and crown. No sooner was Luna free from what could possibly have been—but was likely not—interpreted as a full-on dominatrix outfit, when her mind registered that she was now just as naked as Twilight had been. With no other choice, she began yanking on Twilight’s velvet toga. “Quick, Twilight, give me half of that!” she cried.

Twilight blinked then pulled back in shock. “No!” she rebuked, puffing out her cheeks in obstinance. “Get your own!”

“Fine!” Luna shouted, turning back to the display case for materials. All that was left were two plush velvet pillows and a length of golden rope, which she then liberated and dashed behind the case to make herself presentable. It was only a moment before she re-emerged, wearing one of the pillows—its stuffing removed—like a shirt, and the other tied over her dock with golden rope.

Twilight could only gape at her.

“What?” Luna asked, getting rather defensive at the look the other alicorn was giving her. “Am I not fashionable?”

“Luna…!” Twilight said, pointing at the other alicorn’s midsection with her hoof. “What is that? It’s some kind of… golden rod.”

Luna blinked, lifting her leg to look at where Twilight was pointing. The movement dislodged the object, and it fell to the red carpet below with a heavy thud. Luna examined it for a moment. “Ah, I believe this must be the scepter that was mentioned.”

“Oh, wow, it is,” Twilight confirmed once she’d gotten a better look at it. “Wow, I hadn’t seen it before. Isn’t that kind of… phallic?”

Luna looked rather confused at this. “I believe that is your face, Twilight.”

Twilight’s eyes shot back up to Luna, her cheeks reddening in blush. “That is not what I meant!” she insisted hotly. Consciously averting her gaze in embarrassment, she went back to examining the scepter as a distraction. Frowning, she came to a realization. “We have to find the thief.”

Luna blinked, staring for a moment before understanding dawned on her. “Aha!” she shouted. “I knew we were forgetting something!”

Twilight nodded grimly before turning away from the display case. “Quick,” she prompted. “I think I have some idea where they went.” She took one, strong step forward onto the hem of her toga and fell flat on her face.

✶ ✶ ✶

After a series of incidents, occurrences and events which made Twilight envy Luna her dock-pillow, the pair of somewhat drunk alicorns finally managed to locate the vault which had been set aside for the numerous artifacts of power which arrived daily from the acquisition of the Canterlot Archives. Standing before the stately crystal door full of vim and purpose, Twilight yanked it open.

A pair of brooms toppled out onto her.

“Another broom closet,” Luna stated with a sigh.

Twilight knocked the assorted cleaning instruments off her with a hoof. “I know it’s a broom closet, Luna,” she snapped. “I knew what it was before I opened it!”

Luna rolled her eyes. “Then why, pray tell, did you open it with such vigor? Or at all, for that matter? Are we not supposed to be searching for this mirror that Tia wanted to get out of her closet?”

“We are!” Twilight shouted back over her shoulder as she dashed down the crystalline hallway. “It’s in one of these broom closets—I know it!” It wasn’t in the next one, though, or the one after that.

“Why on Equestria would someone put a doorway between worlds in a broom closet, though?” Luna asked, slightly out of breath after running all throughout the palace.

Twilight huffed and puffed, leaning on the next closet door as she rolled her eyes. “You’re the one who forgot to plan and build a proper vault!” she reminded Luna as she yanked yet another door open. This time, however, instead of receiving another faceful of brooms, a wave of magic blasted her back.

In a stunning feat of drunken acrobatics, Twilight caught herself on two hooves in time to see her assailant. “Stop, thief!” she cried out, pointing with one forehoof. It was, unfortunately, her forehooves upon which she was standing, and the action brought her crumpling down on her head.

The thief halted, looking back over her shoulder at the two alicorns chasing her. She was an amber-colored unicorn with a red and yellow mane. “Sorry it had to be this way… princess,” she said with a smirk and made to step through the mirror.

The silver glow of Luna’s magic stopped her.

“Oh, right,” the amber mare grumbled. “Two of them.”

Luna turned the thief around in her magic, looking at her curiously. “I do not understand,” she stated, sounding rather puzzled as she looked back to Twilight, who was still counting her hooves to make sure she had them all firmly on the ground. “How in the world did we actually catch up to her?”

The two alicorns looked back at the amber unicorn, who blushed. “I got lost, okay? Who in Equestria would put a doorway between worlds in a broom closet”

“See?” Luna said, giving Twilight a smug look of satisfaction.

Twilight gave a huff of indignation as she stepped forward, dusted herself off and gave their prisoner a look over. “So? Who are you?”

“My name is Sunset Shimmer,” the mare declared, proud and full of disdain. “And I was Princess Celestia’s student before you came in and stole my rightful place by her side!”

Twilight and Luna both looked at each other then Twilight looked back at Sunset. “You’re real?” she asked, somewhat bewildered.

“What do you mean?” Sunset Shimmer asked, adopting a wary posture as she floated there in Luna’s magic. “Of course I’m real.”

Luna was frowning. “I thought you told me that Sunset Shimmer did not exist—that those books were fiction?”

“She doesn’t!” Twilight insisted hotly. “They are!”

Luna considered this. “To be fair, you are in those books, and you are most certainly real.”

Twilight stopped and stared. She had no rebuttal for that. Her jaw, which had been hanging open, snapped shut, and she gave Sunset Shimmer another, closer inspection. She certainly fit the description. Twilight’s jaw clenched in anger. “I am disappointed in you, Sunset Shimmer,” she said. “I expected more from one of Celestia’s old students.”

Sunset Shimmer scoffed. “Not all of us can be handed our dreams on a silver platter, Twilight Sparkle. Some of us have to take it with our own two hooves!”

Twilight cocked her head. “That’s just the thing!” she insisted, incredulously. Levitating the scepter she’d been carrying, she shoved it into Sunset Shimmer’s hooves next to the crown. “You didn’t take it! You forgot the scepter! Did you even have a checklist? Crown—check! Scepter—not check! It’s not a difficult concept!”

“What?” Sunset was taken aback. She looked down at the scepter in her hooves with Twilight’s face on it. “I don’t want your stupid scepter!” she shouted, throwing it down onto the crystalline floor with a clatter. “What I came here for is your crown!” She held the crown aloft. “With the element of magic, I will finally have the power I deserve!”

She set the crown on her head. Nothing happened. A moment passed, and suddenly it dawned on her. “I needed to be in the human world for that to work,” she stated aloud to no one in particular.

Twilight looked up at the crown on Sunset Shimmer’s head and rose one eyebrow. “That’s not the element of magic,” she said.

“It’s not?” Sunset Shimmer asked, deflating a bit. Suddenly, she looked rather pitiable.

Shoot, now Twilight felt rather like a heel for dashing the poor girl’s hopes. “It does look good on you, though?” she offered.

Sunset Shimmer pulled the crown off her head to look at it, and hugged it to her chest. “Thanks,” she said with a whisper and a blush.

Twilight hmmed. “You know, the elements of harmony are in the custody of the Canterlot Archives, which I own now. If you’d like, we could all go together and get them for you.”

Sunset Shimmer, who was already on the brink of tears, gave a sniffle as they finally overflowed. “Really?” she asked. “You’d do that for me?”

✶ ✶ ✶

Sunset Shimmer looked up at the flashing neon sign with confusion. “Why are we stopping at a bar?”

“Remanifesting here in Canterlot has cleared the alcohol from my system, and in this brief moment of clarity—very brief, if I have my way—I have come to the realization that I can’t deal with this sober,” Twilight informed her in a prim and proper manner before she strode forward and kicked in the door.

Scampering in after Twilight, Sunset Shimmer lowered her voice. “Um, Princess Sparkle? I’m not sure if you know this, but time doesn’t work the same way in the human world. I’m not actually legal, here.”

“It’s fine,” Twilight grunted heavily. “It’s that kind of night.”

✶ ✶ ✶

“Well, this is different,” Twilight stated, saying what all three of them were likely thinking.

After reacquiring the frame of mind it took to make this whole thing sound like a good idea—which is to say, several drinks and an introduction for both Twilight and Sunset to hard liquor—they’d found the vault where the elements of harmony had been kept open and empty. Undaunted, Twilight had expected to find them instead packed away for the morning shipment to Ponyville.

The warm magic suffusing the palace, however, had led them somewhere else entirely—an alicorn made of gold and jewels sleeping in Celestia’s bedroom. In Celestia’s bed. With Celestia. It was kind of hot, actually.

Twilight shrugged. “I mean, it makes sense, when you think about it,” she reasoned.

“It does?” Luna and Sunset Shimmer asked in tandem.

Well, there was no getting around explaining it, Twilight supposed. “Okay, so it’s like this. Alicorns are… alicornsexual. We like alicorns. Sexually. There’s also only four of us. One, two, three,” she counted, pointing at herself, Luna and Celestia in turn. “And four,” she finished, pointing at the elements of harmony.

“Wait, the elements of harmony are an alicorn?” Sunset Shimmer asked, shuffling her hooves. “When did that happen? Just how long have I been gone?”

“Oh right,” Twilight said, realizing that she’d skipped over that part. “You know, it doesn’t really matter. Yeah, the elements of harmony are an alicorn, but only part of one. It’s why Celestia’s so much bigger than us—she’s, oh, eighty-five percent of their shared essence.

Luna grimaced. “That does not sound healthy. It’s no different than when I fused with the stars to become Nightmare Moon and grew to her size, is it?”

“Eh, I’m sure she’s fine,” Twilight said, shrugging. “I mean, it’s been, what? Two thousand years since you two were born? She’s not going to suddenly break down now.”

Sunset Shimmer let out a heavy sigh. “I guess that’s it, then. The elements of harmony are already taken.”

“What, this?” Twilight asked, gesturing at the filigree pony. “‘Harmony’ here had her chance. C’mere, Sunset.”

Cautious, yet curious, Sunset Shimmer stepped forward.

With any pomp or circumstance, Twilight shoved her hoof into Sunset Shimmer’s chest and pulled out her star. “Here, hold this,” she said and tossed it over to Luna, who fumbled to catch it. Before Sunset Shimmer could so much as stumble out of Twilight’s reach, however, she grabbed the pony-shaped elements of harmony out of Celestia’s bed and jammed them into the metaphysical gap left by the star.

For a moment, Sunset Shimmer looked to all the world as if Twilight had physically impaled her on a tangle of metal and rock, and for that moment, Twilight was a little worried. She was pretty sure this would work, though, and even if it didn’t she expected more out of it than plain old physical trauma—that would just be boring, and Celestia would probably be upset if she woke up to find Sunset Shimmer’s blood on her bedsheets.

Well, in most circumstances, anyway.

In any case, Twilight was vindicated as the physical representation of the elements of harmony quickly dissolved, suffusing Sunset Shimmer with a warm golden light that lifted her up off the ground and began to transform her. The whole thing was all really very grandiose, which led Twilight to glance over at the still-sleeping form of Celestia.

Twilight gave Luna a questioning look. “Does she always—”

“Sleep like a rock?” Luna finished for her. “Always. We all do, actually. The peace that comes with sleep maintains only a tenuous connection to the body, leaving it vacated on all but the most subconscious levels. Speaking of which.” Luna glanced at Sunset Shimmer’s ongoing transformation. “Since this seems to be taking some time, I have to ask… alicornsexual? Really?”

Twilight had to blush a little. “Uh, yeah,” she admitted. “It’s a thing.”

Luna’s breathing grew shallow as she looked deep into Twilight’s eyes for a certain truth. “Does than mean that you… feel that way about me?”

“I…” Twilight gulped, took a breath and ever so slightly nodded. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“Oh, thank the moon,” Luna said, letting out a heavy breath, as if a weight had been lifted off of her withers. “I feel less bad about molesting you in your sleep, now.”

Twilight’s heart soared as she heard Luna respond positively to her admission. It was only a moment later when her brain managed to actually process the words. “I—wait, what?”

“Like a rock,” Luna reminded her, glancing over at Celestia.

Twilight’s eyes widened, her throat tightened and she made a whinging sound not unlike a mewling kitten. “I’m… not sure how I feel about that.” Her gaze was still locked on Celestia as she felt a weight on her back and… oh, a gentle nibble on her ear.

“Well,” Luna said, her voice heavy and husky as she whispered into Twilight’s ear. “Perhaps I should tell you all about it, and then you can decide, hmm?”

Twilight stood there, breathing in and out as her heart raced and her face began to heat up again. In and out. In and out. It wasn’t helping. “I… think that would be the best course of action, yes. Yes, I need more… information.”

As the two alicorns of the night turned to leave, the shining golden bubble of light popped, and out dropped Sunset Shimmer, the shiny new alicorn on top of Celestia’s bed. Emphasis on shiny and new. Her coat glistened like a shimmering flame, and… hrmm… there was apparently only enough alicorn in the elements of harmony to make a filly.

Oh well.

“Are you sure that Tia will like her?” Luna asked as she led Twilight out of the room. “She seems rather abrasive. Also… underaged.”

Twilight leaned into Luna, nuzzling her happily. “I don’t think she’s so bad, and besides…” She looked back over to the two of them, already curling up together in bed.

“I’m pretty sure she’s into that.”

THE END

【Schrödinger's Dawn】Prologue - Beaten to the Punch

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Author's Notes:

This was, at one point, going to be the story I wrote after Sharing the Night, but I never was quite happy with the presentation. There's an awful lot of telling instead of showing at the start of the story, but rewrites just weren't nearly as funny. The intent was to have Teenaged Twilight going on a Divine Mission across Equestria to convince everyone that Eternal Night was just the right way to go about things. Questions about whether I could actually follow through with her convincing the world to adopt Eternal Night while continually maintaining the uncertainty (as per the title) about whether or not she actually succeeded, plus the fact that I already have a story about a Young Twilight (if I ever get back to A Sparkle-ling Perfection) means that this is so far on the back burner that I might as well just post it for some fun.

Warning:

Young Twilight is kind of crazy (And that's before her eyes are opened) (That will be funnier after you've read it)
There was going to be a goth Rainbow Dash and a stalker Fluttershy (Not actually a warning) (Just wanted to say it)
So very incomplete and unedited (Sorry) (Sorry)

❍

“So, the cat isn’t really undead?” Rainbow Dash asked. Her confusion clearly showed as she gestured with a cup of punch she was holding.

Twilight’s hoof met her face, knocking her glasses ajar as she groaned. “No, Rainbow, the entire point is that the idea is ridiculous. It’s supposed to point out the flaws and limitations in our accepted understanding of quantum magic.”

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes and took another drink of punch. “Did I ever tell you you’re lousy at telling jokes?” she asked rhetorically.

“Yes, Rainbow Dash, many ti—” Twilight had begun to say, before stopping herself. “Hey! It was not a joke!”

“No kidding!” Rainbow Dash said with a cheerful laugh.

“Aw shush you two,” Applejack said as she approached, followed by Pinkie Pie. “Rares is still working on some last minute decorations, but I ain’t seen hide nor hair of Fluttershy. If she don’t hurry, she’s gonna miss the thousandth summer sun celebration.”

Rainbow Dash and Twilight looked at each other meaningfully for a moment. With a smirk, the former gave the the punch table she was leaning on a few knocks with her hoof, eliciting a small “Eep!” from it which jiggled the punch bowl on top. Twilight’s horn gave off a glow as she raised the tablecloth with her magic, revealing the butter-yellow pegasus.

In spite of her momentary startlement, Fluttershy looked perfectly calm. “Oh. Hi girls,” she said, waving one hoof in greeting as Rainbow Dash hoofed her a cup of punch with the other. There was a not-inconsiderable stack of the cups already empty beside her.

“Wow, Fluttershy!” Pinkie Pie chimed in. “You’re really hitting the punch hard tonight, aren’t you?”

Fluttershy looked down at the pile of cups, the motion coincidentally hiding more of her face behind her mane. “Um, not really…” she claimed.

Rainbow Dash saw fit to explain. “Shy’s been here since before anypony else arrived.”

“You camped out?” Pinkie Pie asked with a big grin. “You must be super duper excited!”

Rainbow Dash gave a snicker, and Twilight gave her an unhappy nudge with her elbow. “Don’t be mean. You know how she is. It makes perfect sense.”

“Yes, thank you for suggesting it, Twilight,” Fluttershy added helpfully.

Twilight’s face colored as Rainbow Dash tried to contain her laughter and failed spectacularly.

Taking the antics of her friends in stride, Applejack just shook her head. “Yer not gonna stay there the entire night, are ya shy?” she asked, raising one eyebrow.

Pinkie Pie gasped. “You’ll miss the whole thing!”

“Oh no, of course not,” Fluttershy answered, full of confidence and empty of actual explanation.

“So…” Applejack said, leading the shy mare on, expecting more.

“Oh, well,” Fluttershy said, thoughtful. “The lights will dim during the ceremony,” she offered.

“Swell,” Applejack said with a sigh.

❍

Far above Equestria, the night stirred in anticipation and stars began to align as they had been foretold for a thousand years.

A thousand years it had been, sealed away in her own moon by none other than her traitorous sister. More than anything it was that betrayal that had rankled her all these years, twisting the knife in her heart for all these years of formless imprisonment.

Soon, though, soon she would be free and her sister would regret ever denying her night its due. The moments ticked by and she strained against her invisible bonds. They were weakening, she could feel it.

Her formless essence contracted in on itself, collected its strength, and exploded outward in one glorious flash. Her prison of magic and moonlight fractured and broke. Pools of black essence that had seeped deep into the surface now exploded into the night, a fine, sparkling black dust invisible in the night.

She was free.

Slowly, though not as slow as it seemed to her, the dusting of midnight magic coalesced, tracing the form of a tall alicorn mare with a pitch black coat and ethereal blue mane. With a deep breath, she drew moonlight around herself, shaping it into the form of armored barding.

She was whole.

Nightmare Moon surveyed the Equestria that stretched out beneath her. Its face had changed. Large cities speckled the continent, themselves dotted with shining lights to keep her night at bay. It was a strange, foreign place to her now, but that did not matter.

The era of whatever her sister had built in her absence was over. She would find Celestia, and when she did, the sun would never rise again.

Finding the alicorn of the sun would be the easy part; the sisters could not hide from each other. Indeed, no sooner did she tap into her celestial awareness than… nothing happened?

Nightmare Moon frowned. This was highly irregular. She could not feel her sister at all. No—wait—there was a hint of power near the old castle in what appeared to be a small farming town. Her foolish sister must have been trying to hide. With a mad grin, the queen of the night drew her the night into herself and manifested where she had sensed the trace of solar magic.

Forming out of a nebulous mass of stars, Nightmare Moon heard gasps of awe all around and opened her eyes. The room was filled with little ponies, but no Celestia.

No matter! Her sister had clearly abdicated in fear and she had an audience. All eyes were on her now—as it should be! Like a showmare, she taunted them, told them who she was and why she had come. Eventually, she finished her speech, declaring “From this moment forth—the night—will last—forever!” and finishing off with a mad cackle.

It wasn’t for a few moments when she realized everypony in the room to a mare were all laughing with her.

“B-be still!” she shouted. “Cease your revelry!”

“Is this mare fer real?” an orange earth pony with a hat and a country drawl asked, dubious.

“I am most certainly real, you ungrateful whelp!” Nightmare Moon declared, unsure quite what was going on. “The era of the night is nigh!”

“Nigh?” the orange pony whispered to a unicorn nearby.

“Near, Applejack,” the purple unicorn explained. “It means near.”

“Seriously?” the pony apparently named Applejack asked her friend, getting a nod, she turned back to Nightmare Moon. “Hoowee,” she exclaimed. “I ain’t sure how t’tell y’all this, so I’ll just out and say it,” she declared, glancing back at her friends for support. “I’ve got good news and bad news fer yer highness. The bad news is, ‘taint ‘nigh’ at all.”

Nightmare Moon narrowed her eyes in anger, ready to smite the mortal for such words. The only thing that stayed her hoof was the question. “What is the good news?”

A blue pegasus was snickering behind Applejack while the unicorn attempted to shush her. Applejack ignored them and gave the queen of the night a helpless, yet somewhat amused look. “That eternal night thing? Hate t’say it, but ya’ll are a mite late t’the party. We switched over, shoot gotta be five years ago now.”

“What.”

❍

Whatever Nightmare Moon had expected to find upon her return to Equestria, a utopian society living under the light of the moon was not it. Now, that wasn’t to say that she necessarily believed everything she was being told, but in light of a complete lack of any opposition to speak of, what was she to do?

The answer, apparently, was to allow herself to be led to a the town’s cozy little library for a cup of tea and some explanation. She was not exactly sure how this conclusion had been come to, as her part in the decision-making process had been minimal.

As the six ponies had walked her to the library, Nightmare Moon had been stunned silent at what she saw. Though ponies looked disappointed at the cancellation of their event, there was no panic, no rioting in the streets. Admittedly, some ponies were yawning and looked to be making their way home for bed, but others were breaking open their salescarts to replace them. It was madness.

Beautiful, wonderful, heartwarming madness.

The library seemed to have entire shelves dedicated to nocturnal subjects, including astronomy, astrology and a bevy of instructional books on dealing with aspects of eternal night which Nightmare Moon refused to acknowledge—even to herself—that she had never so much as considered.

“The art and science of nocturnal beekeeping?” she read vacantly as she was ushered to a small table. It was all just too much to accept. “This must be some sort of trick,” she insisted. “Where is Celestia? She would never allow this!”

“Vacationing in the Marribean this year, I think,” the white unicorn who had been introduced as Rarity offered.

“Impossible! Do not think that you can deceive me so easily, foal. I felt my sister here,” she said, hackles rising. “And your banners declared your celebration of the sun!”

“Hoo boy,” Applejack said with a grimace. “Ain’t this awkward.”

Twilight Sparkle scratched the back of her neck with one hoof, looking rather guilty. “It’s true it’s not exactly eternal night,” she admitted.

“A ha!” Nightmare Moon shouted, pointing a hoof out at the traitorous, bespectacled unicorn. Out of nowhere, a small dragon placed a cup of tea in her outstretched hoof.

“The summer sun celebration used to be the a celebration of the longest day of the year. Now it’s a celebration of the only day of the year. It wasn’t part of my original plan, but it seemed like a reasonable holiday.”

“Your plan?” Nightmare Moon asked, twisting her face in doubt.

“Aww yeah,” Rainbow Dash exclaimed with excessive pride. “You are looking at the mares that made it happen.”

“It was really all thanks to Twilight though,” said a small, shy voice which she hadn’t heard yet. It turned out to be the yellow pegasus named Fluttershy who was hiding behind Applejack.

“Yeah, it was probably me you felt,” Twilight added, looking a little embarrassed, but not denying anything either. “I was in the middle of manipulating the sun when you appeared.”

Nightmare Moon’s eyes widened in surprise at the statement. “You lie!” she declared. “A single mortal unicorn could never dream of such a thing!”

“Well yeah,” Rainbow Dash answered with a snort as she hovered casually about the library. “If you do it the stupid way.”

“Rainbow!” Twilight said by way of reprimand.

“What? It’s true!” the rude pegasus insisted.

Rarity gave a disgusted sigh. “Yes, but you can’t just say that, dear.”

The queen of the night stared dumbfoundedly at the exchange. She did not appreciate being taken so lightly, and yet… the unicorn with the star mark did feel like she had touched the sun. She could have been the source of solar magic which Nightmare Moon had detected.

Her head swam with the implications, and she collapsed into a chair that had been conveniently placed behind her. Giving a bemused look at the tea cup that had appeared in her hoof at some point, she took a sip and set it down with a sigh.

“Will somepony please just explain what is going on?” she asked, looking in turn to each of the six mares arrayed before her.

【Schrödinger's Dawn】Chapter 1 - Horns Are Magic

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❍

It all started years ago, when I was just a teenaged filly studying under Celestia.

Yes, Rainbow Dash, I’m telling the story. No, you can’t. Ugh, okay, fine, you can tell parts of it, but wait your turn; it’ll be confusing otherwise.

As I was saying, I was a teenaged filly, and I admit to being kind of… spoiled. The princess—yes, Princess Celestia—had taken me in as her student a few years before then, and I had my own tower and everything. If I’d had any idea that I’d have to leave all that behind, well, we’d all still be sucking sunshine.

Like I was saying, though; I was pretty spoiled. I had my own tower in the palace, and it was filled with books. Just, completely wall-to-wall books. That was the kind of filly I was, my metric for having everything I wanted was books. Still is really. I mean, friends are great and all, but they just can’t compare to having the whole set of encyclo—ow.

Anyway, it wasn’t unusual for me to stay up late into the night reading, which I suppose is how I got into stargazing. There was always something magical to me about the perfect silence that filled the world when everypony else had gone to sleep. For a lot of my fillyhood, the stars and moon were all the company I had or wanted.

Imagine the look on my face when I found out there were books about the stars.

Thank you Pinkie Pie; demonstration was not required, but it certainly is effective.

Now, I was a filly, and later a teenager. We all were, back then, and teenagers are known for nothing if not a tendency towards being a little… rebellious. There is a possibility that my growing fascination with the night might have had something to do with my mentor being the pony manifestation of the day. I honestly don’t remember. If it did, though, it failed completely.

Celestia didn’t mind it at all. In fact, she encouraged it. She even arranged for me to have all the best telescopes, sextants and astrolabes. One of the happiest moments of my fillyhood was when she surprised me one summer sun celebration with a Sextans DX5, and I was up until four in the morning setting it up.

No, it was a telescope, not a sextant—and stop giggling, you guys aren’t teenagers any more! It’s just a brand name based on the constellation. Yes, they sell astronomical sextants too.

I was the happiest filly in Canterlot that day… but there was just one problem.

Do you know when astronomical twilight starts during the summer solstice at Canterlot’s altitude? Yes, thank you, Nightmare Moon. Four freaking ante meridiam in the morning. By the time I had it all set up, the night was already over. I… I just about cried myself to sleep.

Okay, fine, I did cry myself to sleep.

I never really got over it, either, and I actually never even used that telescope all that much as a result. Celestia had no idea why I had suddenly became sullen during our lessons. It wasn’t her fault, and I didn’t really blame her, but it was hard not to resent her just a little once in awhile.

Really, our relationship didn’t turn sour or anything. I never sat outside her chambers swearing vengeance on all she held dear—I mean, other than that one time she stepped on Smarty Pants, but that was years before. It was a doll I have. Used to have, I mean. I might have overreacted, but I was like, ten, give me a break.

But no, I didn’t hate her. If anything, I just looked at the sun as a problem I had to solve.

That’s right, Pinkie Pie, solve it I did.

What? No, of course that isn’t the ending! And stop interrupting me, okay? I’m trying to tell the story!

❍

Years later, it was hearths warming eve and puberty had introduced its own brand of problems into my life, which is why I had a stallion tied to my bed and wasn't taking 'no' for an answer.

“Stop struggling!” I insisted hotly as I tied his leg to the bedpost. “Just relax and let it happen! It’ll all be over soon.”

The stallion’s name was Null Set. He’d been my personal guard for the past few years, and was… well, kind of a wet blanket. Trust me, when the reclusive unicorn nerd in the tower thinks you’re a downer, maybe you should rethink your life.

It wasn’t just his personality that gave me that opinion of him, though. Being a wet blanket wasn’t just his calling in life, it was also his special talent and his job, and I resented him for it. A lot.

Now, you might have guessed, but I’m not your average unicorn and I never have been. I got my cutie mark when I had a magical surge that turned my parents into potted plants and hatched a dragon egg. I was… I am powerful, but if you think I just waltzed into being this confident scholar of magic, you’d be disappointed.

No, my magic was actually something of a problem for me when I was younger, and for good reason. Like I said, I’d had a magic surge as a filly and princess Celestia took me in as her student to teach me to control my magic. What you wouldn’t know from looking at me today is that those magic surges got worse around the time my horn started to get more sensitive and I began to believe I knew everything. You know, the awkward years.

In my defense, I had actually read more books by then than some of my professors, so I was usually justified when I corrected them.

But yeah, with my magic surges, I was the kid in class with horn braces and a Celestia Wings™ backpack, and to top it off, my condition had gotten me saddled with mister personality here.

You see, the thing about Null Set was that he was a unicorn who couldn’t cast any spells. He was kind of like me, in a way, in that his magic was so good, it was a problem. Of course, I didn’t let little details like a shared disability ruin my rubbish opinion of him.

In his case, it was his horn that was special. He had a… well, it was a really, really great horn; magically superconductive. That horn alone advanced my knowledge of, um, a lot of things—magical things—by ten years. Its interesting properties were the problem, though, for the both of us. Like I said, of all the ways it was a magical marvel, it made it impossible for him to actually cast spells.

More importantly, it made it impossible for me to cast spells; at least, the kind of powerful, large-scale and overall delicate spells I was planning to cast that day. It was his job to ground my magical surges and prevent any repeats of the potted plant incident, but really, his horn didn’t discriminate and it wasn’t the sort of thing you could just turn off.

Which was why I was tying him to the bed.

Now, arguably, he wasn’t just there to satisfy magical safety regulations; he was also a member of the royal guard, but given that a thirteen-year-old filly was manhandling him with rope in hoof, I‘m guessing he hadn’t been hired for his physical fitness.

Issues of his physique aside, though, there was one bright side to having Null Set around, and it was mostly for this second reason that I’d risked getting caught with some very embarrassing books on knots.

“P-p-please get off me, miss Sparkle!” he whined, not exactly straining his bonds while trying to wiggle away from where I stood on the bed. “Little fillies shouldn’t be touching horns at your age!”

If I was right—and I was—he would make an excellent battery for the spell I wanted to cast.

You see, the pony body is largely unique in its ability to produce enough magic on its own to perform the various magical feats we do. Most other races have some magic, but they tend to use that magic to manipulate a second, external source such as with zebra shamanism and alchemy or griffin sorcery.

Regardless of the race, though, it’s the body that produces the magic, and the horn, wings, hooves or other specialized anatomy that we use to regulate and shape it. That was Null Set’s problem; he couldn’t regulate the flow of magic through his horn, and given the rate at which it passed through, there wasn’t much he could do to shape it either except to express it as light or heat.

Now, you might think ‘Hey, that isn’t so bad. Some less-scholastic ponies base their whole lives around spells like those,’ but he wasn’t so lucky. Any magic his body produced immediately left through his horn as a lukewarm effluence. It was probably why he was so scrawny for a guard.

I was going to change that, though. Well, I had devised a spell that would keep the magic from leaving his horn without my say-so for five minutes, anyway. He was going to stay scrawny; I couldn’t do anything about that.

The spell in question was harder to come up with than you’d think. It’s pretty easy to interrupt a spell a unicorn is casting; one good swat with a hoof and it all comes apart. It’s a more difficult skill to actually prevent magic from leaving the horn, but one royal guard unicorns do learn in their standard curriculum. None of that was any use when the horn in question kept absorbing the spell the moment it was cast.

My solution was a wicked looking black crystal that encased his horn; crystallized magic. Normally, even solid magic would have broken down from contact with his horn, but with a spell reinforcing its structure from the outside, it was the perfect way to plug his hole.

I never did understand why ponies get so heated up over ‘dark’ magic when it’s so useful.

Slowly, the room filled with a humming magic which left a tinny, metallic taste in the mouth thanks to my horn brace. “I said quit moving! You’re making me spill it all over!” I complained, the very process of doing so making it that much harder to hold our horns together.

The stallion beneath me whimpered in response.

Eventually, I got him all charged up, but it took a while. My own combination of exceptional magical reserves and pretty average horn meant that even going at it full bore, it took some doing for me to run dry. I wanted the spell to be as powerful as possible.

That was when I grabbed the hammer.

I’d left myself just enough magic to form the framework of the spell. The spell was complicated in its own right, but considering that it was wholly my own creation and the product of years of work, the only point of difficulty was making sure I remembered all the different corrections I’d made since… okay fine, I’m probably lucky I didn’t blow up Canterlot, but that’s not the point.

My horn glowed, and the spell formed—correctly, I might add. A tiny dot of darkness appeared at the tip of my horn like a doorway to the night. Sufficient magnification would have showed that it appeared to be exactly that; through it, you would see the world as a starlit wonderland.

Today’s experiment wasn’t going to require magnification.

I took a breath to brace myself, lifted my foreleg, gripped the haft of the hammer tightly in the crook of my hoof, and brought it down with all my filly strength.

Null Set’s head jerked to the side from the blow, and crystal shattered like glass. Magic exploded from the stallion’s horn, not in a stream or flow, but in a single bust as a burning ball like the sun itself that shot off in the direction of the blow. Suddenly, I had a smoking hole in the wall of my tower.

Panicking, I jumped off the bed and tried to rein in the ball of magic. Normally, it probably would have been impossible, but my prepared spell had latched onto it the instant it had appeared and it was through that connection that I fought to bring the errant sun in line.

I pulled as hard as I could, wishing I’d left myself more magic. I hadn’t been planning on having to play rodeo clown with the damn thing.

My struggling paid off. Though I couldn’t see the ball itself, I could feel it slowing in the grip of my magic. I redoubled my effort, growing light-headed from magic deprivation as I bottomed out my reserves just as it finally stopped.

I collapsed onto the floor of my bedroom, barely managing to hold onto the spell, let alone the ball of magic, but my work was done. Without any effort on my part, the ball sluggishly reversed its course, drawn back to the spell it was tethered to.

Since I no longer had a hold on it myself—and really, I was barely functioning mentally at all at that point—I gave a jump when a gout of molten stone spattered on top of my dresser, revealing it.

I was in awe. I had never seen anything like it before, and this from a filly who had an off-again-on-again relationship with magical surges. Almost absent-mindedly, I gave a nod of my head, releasing the spell from my horn.

The two motes of magic drifted together, one large and bright, the other tiny and dark. It was slow, at first, and I treasured every moment, burning the image into my eyes. Literally. We’ll get to that later, though. Regardless, it was worth it.

As the magic and spell drew together, they began to speed up. I swallowed, edging closer, holding my breath. Every time they halved the distance separating them, they doubled in speed, and so did I. I was a meter away when they finally snapped together.

Night exploded over Canterlot.

It was beautiful.

❍

“Twilight, you do realize you spent like, ten minutes of that talking about some dude’s horn, right?” Rainbow Dash said.

Twilight blushed a little and took a sip of her tea to cover it up. “I’m sorry Rainbow Dash, but this story is for Nightmare Moon’s benefit, not yours.”

“Yeah, sure,” Rainbow Dash said, waving a hoof in dismissal. “How do you even know she’s into horns?”

“Rainbow Dash!” Rarity exclaimed in affront, much to the obvious relief of Twilight Sparkle. “She has been imprisoned in the moon for a thousand years, my dear, I don’t think it really matters.”

“R—Rarity!” Twilight sputtered through her tea. She spared a moment to cough and clear her throat before resuming . “I’m talking about the magical theory that is the basis for everything we went through. That day changed my life!”

“There there,” Fluttershy said, consoling Twilight with a pat on the back and taking her teacup. “I’m sure you have good intentions, but I think you’re the only one who’s, um, ‘into’ that.”

The statement hung in the air as an awkward silence filled the room. As it stretched on, however, it seemed to change from an assertion to a question.

Slowly, in one synchronized motion, everypony turned to look at Nightmare Moon.

【Schrödinger's Dawn】Chapter 2 - Go For the Eyes, Boo

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❍

“Hah,” I laughed, falling back on the cold stone floor of my tower. “Haha.”

I was giddy, light-headed, and completely out of it. I didn’t even have the presence of mind to record the precise time for my records, but I knew it was close to two in the afternoon; Princess Celestia was holding court, and all of Canterlot had just been plunged into night. “Hahahahaha!”

I laughed.

And I laughed.

I’m told the royal guard had to break down the door to get in, but I don’t remember it. All I remember is laying there on the floor, looking at the stars through one of the holes in my wall, and laughing like a madmare.

Success was a wonderful, wonderful thing. I would never be the same again.

❍

I woke up in a dimly lit hospital room.

My parents were furious, both at me and at Princess Celestia for letting me ‘run wild,’ as they called it. The spell I’d developed was one thing, but when the guard breaks into your bedroom to find a traumatized stallion strapped to your bed, well, that’s the kind of thing they tell your parents about.

Shining Armor, my brother, took it especially badly. He was a lieutenant in the guard by then and I still don’t know what he must have thought when he read the report. His little sister; abusing the stallion who was assigned to protect her, causing panic in the streets of Canterlot, and unrest all across Equestria in wake of the news.

My spell had lasted for a full day, leaving Princess Celestia to lower and raise the sun again for Hearth’s Warming day completely blind; plenty of time for word to get around, though now things were mostly back to normal. A quick glance outside told me that it was already night again the day after I’d cast the spell.

The hospital wanted to keep me for another day to monitor my recovery from magical exhaustion, since I was so young. My parents weren’t happy about that. They were torn between wanting to baby me due to my condition, and wanting to have a long, stern talk about stallions and thirteen-year-old fillies, and the hospital wasn’t really the right venue for either one.

Eventually, they said their goodbyes, promising to be back first thing in the morning to pick me up… and promising to be back first thing in the morning for that talk. Shining Armor hesitated, staying behind for a moment just to look at me, but finally he too left, not having said a word the entire time.

In the wake of their departure, I lay in conflicted silence. Okay, maybe tying a stallion up, casting dark magic on his horn without his consent, filling him with more magic than his body could handle and then taking a hammer to his horn was… okay, it looked bad—it was bad, but couldn’t they see what I’d done? All I had to do was look out the window at the sparkling night outside my window to know that what I’d done… it was right.

It was my destiny.

I know, I know, at that age fillies tend to think that every third thing is their destiny, but I can’t explain it; I knew that I could never go back. I was changed.

I’d had no idea just how much.

Some time after my family had left, there was a simple, light knock at the door. I knew that knock, and swallowed nervously rather than answer. As always, the door opened anyway and Princess Celestia entered the room.

I hid my muzzle under the covers of my hospital bed as she calmly walked in, closed the door, and approached the bedside. She didn’t seem angry, but she was Princess Celestia. She’d sat court for longer than I’d been alive; you didn’t just know when she was angry, that wasn’t how it worked.

My heart sped up a little as she sat down next to the bed, looked me in the eyes, and asked one question.

“What did you do?”

Unbidden, a smile stretched itself across my face, and I couldn’t contain it. Of all the thing she could have asked, she asked the one question that nopony else had; the one question I desperately wanted to answer.

My smile faltered as I realized that it was being asked by the one pony I didn’t want to tell.

Princess Celestia noticed, of course, and attempted to reassure me. “Know that I will hold nothing you tell me against you, Twilight. I already know about the dark magic you used on Null Set, and we’ll talk about that. If this was more of the same, I will not be happy… and we will have a much longer talk… but I must know; what did you do?”

I was far from reassured. Ironically, having to tell Princess Celestia that it wasn’t dark magic made it harder somehow, because it meant telling her she was wrong.

In my conflict, I pulled the sheets back up to my mouth and mumbled something.

“What was that?” Princess Celestia asked, nothing but kindness in her voice as she leaned in.

“I made the sun invisible,” I managed to squeak out in the tiniest voice I could manage. “Sort of.”

Princess Celestia pulled her head back, blinking in surprise. “You what?” she asked, though she had clearly heard me.

Hesitating only the barest moment, I lit up my horn. Being that I was in the hospital for magic deprivation, I’d obviously been told not to cast anything, but I was a filly and this was Princess Celestia I was doing it for.

A thin, transparent sheet of magic appeared in between the two of us, flickering intermittently once in a while.

“Issa invisibility spell that goes between things instead of on things,” I explained, waving a hoof out the side of it. Knowing that Princess Celestia was seeing only an empty bed made me a little more comfortable, but no sooner had I thought that than the field flickered away, revealing me once more.

“It’s really hard to cast,” I said, looking away. “I made a bubble and cast it as big as I could… it was really big, I guess.”

Princess Celestia was, in a word, dumbstruck. She just sat there, processing the information for a good long while… and then she laughed.

It wasn’t much, just a chuckle, but it broke the tension in the room. “Oh, Twilight Sparkle…” she said, shaking her head. “What am I to do with you?”

Not realizing the question was rhetorical, I searched for an answer, but came up emptyhooved.

“Well,” she said, getting up, then pausing briefly to shake her head and chuckle once again. “That is a load off my mind. I shall let you rest, since I’m sure you aren’t supposed to be using magic right now. We will talk about the dark magic when I see you again, but for now, I have a sun to set.”

The timid smile I was wearing dropped off my face. “What?” I croaked, the word barely reaching beyond my lips. Princess Celestia hadn’t heard, and I began to panic. I glanced over to the window I’d been stargazing from earlier, but nothing had changed. I could see canis major clear as night. I felt goosebumps crawl up my back.

“What—what did you say?” I said, louder, but Princess Celestia was already halfway out of the room. “P-princess, stop!” I shouted after her, finally getting her attention. “What did you j-just say?” I asked, stuttering as my mind raced. No, surely I had just misheard her. She had to go raise the sun, right? Surely?

Princess Celestia glanced out the window, one eyebrow cocked in question. “It is nearly six in the evening,” she said. “After a short walk back to the palace, I shall set the sun and dine. I’m sure the hospital will have something prepared for y—is something wrong, Twilight?”

I reached one hoof up to my eyes.

“No… It can’t be…”

❍

‘Sun-blind’ they decided to call it, though I would have preferred ‘star-struck,’ I guess it’s better than something with my name in it like ‘Sparkle Syndrome.’ It was the spell I had cast, etched permanently into my eyes. The doctors were helpless to do anything but diagnose it, which came down to just reading back what I had said in a clinical tone with a few extra syllables—and that was the good doctors.

Some of the ponies we saw didn’t even believe me, claiming that it was clearly a trauma-induced delusion; they even had the gall to offer prescriptions to ‘fix’ the issue. Others suggested that the ‘darkness’ I described was a more usual kind of blindness; either macular degeneration as a result of retinal burns or simple photokeratitis that would go away in a few days’ time. These were harder to refute since there was some evidence that physical damage had played a part in what had happened, but my eyesight was fine—better than fine, if you asked me, but nopony did.

Regardless, neither type could explain my ability to unerringly point out stars in the afternoon sky, nor were they very receptive to that fact, being that they could hardly corroborate my observations themselves. Eventually, somepony would inevitably suggest that maybe I was just lying, and then we’d leave with a great deal of cursing from my father.

As shaken as I was the morning after the discovery, my parents had settled firmly on the doting end of the scale, though we still had that talk about what it was proper to do with—and to—weak-willed stallions.

Princess Celestia and I also had our talk about dark magic. She wasn’t pleased that I had gotten into some of the books I had without her guidance. Not only that, but I had misused the knowledge I’d found in them, which as it turned out was the only danger the so-called ‘dark’ magic posed. Being a teenaged filly, I had wanted to object, but there wasn’t much I could say; I’d pretty unambiguously failed that trial.

As for me, personally… I was in shock for weeks after the fact. I simply had no idea how to react. I well and truly liked what I saw, as I always had, but at the same time, there was no shortage of ponies telling me I was damaged. I already had to deal with my horn braces, which were a pretty rare thing to see, and now I had glasses on top of it to complete the image—all for a condition that most ponies wouldn’t even believe was real.

Right. The glasses.

It only took a few days for it to become clear that I was going to need glasses. Less than that, really, but I tried to pretend it wasn’t a problem. As I said, my vision was fine, but I hadn’t been endowed with any great supernatural sight, either. With no moon during the day and all the lights out because everypony else had sunlight to see by, I spent those days stumbling around, bumping into things and using light spells to read.

As it turned out, though, there were light-amplification glasses I could get—not the cool kind the guard has that makes other spectrums visible, just the garden variety light magnifiers they give to old ponies who have all the diseases that the doctors had tried to tell my parents I had.

To my dismay, this meant another round of trips to places that normal ponies never saw until they were old and gray; this time it was specialist medical suppliers that smelled like ointment and only reinforced the idea that I was defective. Buying glasses in a stamped brown box next to catheters and stomach pumps was not exactly my idea of back-to-school shopping, nor could any amount of actual back-to-school shopping make up for it.

For the first time in my life, I was less than enthused about the idea of going to Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns.

❍

My parents were reluctant to let me return to the Princess’ care, but they didn’t have much choice. Null Set was on indefinite medical leave, and I was no longer allowed near him anyway. With him out of the picture, it would fall to Princess Celestia to keep both my magic and my behavior in check.

They needn’t have worried. If my parents thought that there was any chance of a similar incident, they didn’t understand how profoundly I was affected.

That’s always the way of things, though, isn’t it? What we worry about is never what actually happens. My own fears of being mocked for my new condition never came to pass; not in the way that I’d imagined, anyway.

As it was, everypony already knew that the princess’ faithful student had ‘gone Nightmare Moon.’ Usually, we had laws that protected juveniles in cases like these, but enough ponies had seen the event start at my tower or realized where it was centered after the fact for that to be a lost cause. In fact, those laws probably did me more harm than good, because where fact ended, fiction began.

I never found out what exactly it was they were saying about me, but it must have been pretty horrific. Between the effect of the rumors and Princess Celestia taking over all my magical lessons—plus magical history and ethics—I became something of a ghost at the school grounds proper. I ended up with only one or two classes there at a time, and nopony spoke an entire sentence to me if they could help it.

What was worse is that I went along with it. I was scared, broken and ashamed. I didn’t speak up in class and didn’t stick around afterwards. If I had classes on both sides of lunch or a break, I found someplace where nopony else went, and I waited. Half the time, I didn’t even pull out a book to fill the time; I just stared out into space—the stars, sometimes, but a blank wall was fine too.

As much as a teenaged filly can be said to have a purpose, I’d lost mine. When you’re that young, years are lifetimes and I’d spent several on the spells I’d developed only to be met with both overwhelming success and absolutely no reason or desire to cast them ever again.

If my new schedule hadn’t meant being with Princess Celestia for most of the day, I’m not sure what I would have done with my life.

❍

“Wait, ya’ll knew about Nightmare Moon?” Applejack asked.

“I’m over here pouring my heart out about the absolute worst part of my childhood, and that’s your question?” Twilight said, a little hurt. “Really?”

“Aw shoot Twi, ah’m sorry, but you ain’t the one who made a gall dern fool of herself not half an hour ago,” Applejack said.

Twilight gave a sigh, barely mollified. “And no. Um, no offense, your majesty,” she said, giving Nightmare Moon a nod of her head, “but nopony thought that the old mare’s tale was actually true.”

Nightmare Moon was unconcerned with the petty details of her return. Reaching out with one black-shod hoof, she took hold of the lavender unicorn’s—Twilight Sparkle’s—chin and turned the mare’s head so she could see her eyes.

They looked like normal pony eyes, of course. They were surprised at first, but quickly softened into an emotion which Nightmare Moon couldn’t place.

She wasn’t sure what she had expected. Black pools of stars? No, in this world of eternal night, there would be nothing special about them.

Looking into those eyes, Nightmare Moon was struck by a certain feeling of nostalgia… and something else she couldn’t identify. Something she hadn’t felt in a long time. Removing her hoof from the mare’s chin, she said one word.

“Continue.”

【Schrödinger’s Dawn】Chapter 3 - Courting

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❍

With all this talk about how much of my education Princess Celestia had to take over, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to think that I was being a burden on her. I mean, can you imagine it? The ruler of Equestria, sitting down to teach a filly ethics every day? What princess has time for that?

But no, the real question was—what filly has time for that? When I got my new syllabus from the princess, I was confused to see ‘ethics’ completely absent from it. I triple-checked all twenty pages just to make sure, but there was no sign of it.

Most fillies might have been relieved, but I knew better. Princess Celestia was many things, but careless was not one of them. Given how big of a deal she’d made of it when she was scolding me about my use of dark magic, I knew I wasn’t going to get off that easily.

The answer, I found, was in the daily schedule rotation I’d received.

I squinted at the page to make sure I wasn’t mistaken. The page was one of many laying on the floor in between Princess Celestia and me in her private office.

“Ethics takes four hours in the afternoon?” I said in confusion. “That’s impossible!”

“What’s this?” Princess Celestia teased. “Twilight Sparkle thinks something is impossible?”

“No, look,” I said, stamping at the the sheet of paper with one hoof. “You scheduled it for all the times when you’re supposed to be holding court. You prolly thought it was free time ‘cause it’s so long.”

“Oh dear,” Princess Celestia said, placing one hoof over her mouth, which I’m pretty sure was concealing a grin. “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now. I suppose we shall just have to find some way to do both.”

I stared for a moment, then looked back down to the schedule for a moment when I made the connection.

The page crinkled when I dropped my face on it.

“Oh,” I said into it.

❍

Court was a new experience. It had always been something of a mystery to me. Princess Celestia talked about it, came from it and went to it, but I’d never seen it for myself. It was a place of nobility and adult business.

My nervousness lasted perhaps an hour into the first day; the novelty, half that.

Ironically, in spite of the fact that I was there to learn ethics as punishment for what I’d done, there were no rules about how I was supposed to conduct myself. Compared to my usual lessons, I had no seat, no desk, nor was I even required to pay attention.

By the two week mark, I’d become well and truly enured to the whole thing. Ponies would approach the throne, only to have to walk around a filly laying dead-center on the red carpet doing her homework while Princess Celestia pretended I didn’t exist.

She probably found it hilarious. When you’ve been close to Princess Celestia as long as I have, you get a feel for her sense of humor even when she doesn’t show it—and she didn’t show it. Not a single smile or smirk. Her act was flawless. She never addressed me, never shared a single insight in the wake of a frustrating petition, never so much as asked the guards to fetch me a glass of water.

It might sound like she was neglecting me, but this was only during court. The rest of my lessons were still actual lessons, the same as always. In hindsight, she was probably giving me a break from herself. I can’t imagine thirteen-year-old filly-me having to actually interact with the same pony for eight to ten hours a day.

I’ll be honest, interacting with ponies was never high on my list of things to do. Even now, you’d be hard-pressed to call me anything but a hardcore introvert. I love my friends… but I love them most of all in moderation. At the end of the day, I just need some time to myself.

I’ve already mentioned what school was like for me after the spell, and court was really just more of the same. I know that some ponies would have taken advantage of the situation to prank petitioners, guards or even Princess Celestia herself, but I wasn’t that kind of filly. My mischief always had a purpose, and right then, I was lacking in that regard.

Even so, as listless and sullen as I was, after two and a half months of the same thing day in and day out, I slipped up.

“What an idiot,” I mumbled under my breath. “Does he really think you’d ever reinstate feudalism?”

“I might,” Princess Celestia answered, plain as day.

“What?” I cried, incredulous. “You’d reverse five hundred years of societal progress just because some Blueblood asked nicely?”

“If I felt it was for the good of my ponies, yes.”

Suddenly, I bolted upright and pointed at her with one hoof. “You talked!”

“I talk all the time, Twilight.”

“I mean you talked during court!”

“Court would be rather difficult if I didn’t.”

“You talked to me!”

“I scolded you for not eating your brussel sprouts at lunch not twenty minutes ago at lunch.”

“You talked! To me! During court! That’s never happened before!”

“Ah, I suppose it hasn’t, at that,” she said, tapping her chin with her hoof. “Welcome to court, Twilight Sparkle.”

“‘Welcome to court?’ It’s been two and a half months!”

“I don’t mind. I’m patient.”

【If Wishes Were Horses】Chapter 1 - Never Drink and Contrive

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Author's Notes:

I'm a very strong believer that any subject matter can be written well. Everyone knows there's a lot of bad Human in Equestria stories out there, but there are good ones, too. This story snippet is the result of me asking myself how I would handle it; I never intended for it to see the light of day, but you might find it amusing.

Be warned, however, that this story snippet includes the following:

Humans in Equestria (Plural) (Plural like you wouldn't believe, but not that plural)
Transformation of a male human into a pony mare (Technically a lie) (Close enough)
Far more foul language and crude humor than any of my other stories (It's not that bad) (Innuendo is fun)
Bad, terrible and no-good rhyming (It's intentionally bad) (That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it)
100% Incomplete and almost certainly never will be (It's in this collection of snippets for a reason) (Sorry)

⁂

I don’t drink.

Now, this may seem like an odd way to start a story, but hear me out; it’s important. Picture, if you will, a rangy, long-shanked young irishman. Go ahead and pull out all the stops—use all of the stereotypes you’ve got.

Curly red hair, milky skin and freckles like the wallpaper at a murder scene? Check.

A name that substitute teachers and starbucks employees have nightmares about? Check.

Currently in a bar and in the middle of a fistfight? Check… although, if you wanted to be technical, I wasn’t actually engaged in the fistfight.

I was cowering behind the counter of the bar.

It was a nice counter, mind—all brass and dark-stained wood polished by years of heavy use—but at that moment all I really cared for was how the raucous crashing of the fight was being rendered into dull thuds by the reassuring solidness of oak behind my back. Not everyone properly appreciates the satisfying feel of a thick piece of wood.

“Hey, Ó Cochláin,” a rough, yet undeniably female voice called out. “You can come out now.”

Speak of the devil, and lo, he shall appear—not that I had anything against the woman or her lifestyle, of course. She was a nice enough gal for someone who could snap me like a twig if she so desired, both of which were things you’d expect to find in a bouncer, so who was I to complain?

Sure enough, poking my carrot top back up over the edge of the bar counter revealed that the altercation had indeed been settled, and the heavy thumping of chairs I’d been listening to for the last while had been coming from them actually being put back for once. The bouncer herself seemed to find a great deal of joy in making all the nearby patrons jump as she slammed a few back into place on her way over to the counter, if the grin on her face was any sign.

Seeing as the coast was clear and I no longer had any need to protect my poor bushy red noggin from flying glassware, I slowly drew myself back to my full six-foot-four height like some sort of animatronic bartender being reactivated. As I rose, I automatically began to clean up the mess that had been made, grabbing the spilled and empty glasses that had managed to remain on the countertop and taking them over to wash them in the sink.

“Come on, Beth, would it kill you to call me Caolán once in awhile?” I asked, craning my neck back around to look at her as she came to lean on the counter.

Her grin was a mile wide and lit up her sky-blue eyes, but the words that came out of her mouth were a different matter entirely. They were still undeniably joyful, however. “‘Ó Cochláin’ is more fun to yell from across the bar,” she informed me with great cheer. “Oh-cock-layn. Cock, cock, cock. It’s such a fun word.”

I shook my head and made a show of letting out a put-upon sigh, but the response was no surprise after four months of working with her. That was just Beth; rude, crass, and as happy as a clam at high tide. Her full name was Elizabeth Browning, but she’d only admit to it when the giggling started after ten shots, and she’d only let you use it after twenty—though if you wanted to be technical, ‘let’ was the wrong word for it, as unconsciousness was involved. Beth would, of course, deny that such a thing ever happened, but twenty shots was enough to take out pretty much anyone, let alone a blonde five-foot-two country girl, even if she was built like a tractor.

“Can I get you anything?” I asked as I grabbed a wet towel and started to wipe down the counter.

“I could go for a tall glass of Irish cream right about now,” she said with a sly smile, leaning closer over the bar and lowering her voice so no one else would hear her.

I put on my own wry smile and gave a little chuckle. “Something I can get you while you’re still on the clock, maybe?” I suggested, wondering if the last bartender on our shift actually let her drink on the job, or if she just thought she could get away with it because I was still pretty new.

Her head thumped onto the counter in exaggerated disappointment, but she quickly recovered. “Fine; just the cream, then, Irish.”

“You’ll do anything to avoid saying my name, won’t you?” I remarked as I bent down to fetch a pint of heavy cream out of the fridge underneath the counter. “I think you’re just mad you pronounced it wrong for a month before anyone told you.” My nametag says ‘KAY-lan’ in parenthesis, now.

“Yeah, more like it took you a month before you could say more than two words to correct me,” she snarked as I poured her a good thousand calories of dairy into one glass for her. Sometimes, I had to wonder if weightlifters and bodybuilders really were the same species as the rest of us. “How come a ‘handsome Irish lad’ like you is such a…”

“A pussy?” I finished for her with a raised eyebrow. “That’s rich, coming from the one who ordered the cream.”

That got a chuckle and another smile out of her as she brushed her ponytail back over her shoulder. “I was gonna say ‘chicken’ to go with the ‘cock’ theme, but that… that is actually way better,” she said, accepting her glass and bringing it to her lips. “I take it you’ve heard it before?”

“Grade school was such a wonderful time for me, yes,” I told her as I went back to cleaning up the bar. “I wish I had a tragic story of love and loss for you to explain my disposition, but there really isn’t one. You’ve seen my mother, right? She’s the one that comes in here every friday night to get an eyeful of all the young studs.”

Beth’s eyes widened, and she gave me an incredulous look. “No shit?” she said, and took another gulp of cream. “That pervy little Japanese lady it your mom? She’s like, old enough to be your grandmother!”

I looked her straight in the eyes—or at least, I tried to. She had a little dribble of cream on her chin, and I automatically passed her a napkin. “Beth, the point is, I’m adopted and we live in Idaho. Just about the only similarity between my life and the life of some theoretical, actually-Irish-raised me is the potatoes.”

She seemed to be finding it hard to believe. She stared at me for a moment, and then finally slapped her hand down on the napkin I’d given her and wiped her chin. Shaking her head, she tried another angle. “Okay, sure,” she said. “But your mom obviously isn’t meek.”

“No, she has no shame—there’s a difference,” I corrected her, only half serious. “Actually, I’m pretty sure she just likes to mother and embarrass me. I don’t mind it too much, though, since we’re not that different. We both like to watch.”

“Kinky,” she said with a wink. “That why a teetotaling Irishman is working his way through life as a bartender?”

I shrugged noncommittally. “Pretty much. People-watching is fun, and I’m fine with just being in the background until someone needs a drink or a little talk. Not drinking isn’t even a problem, since it’s not like I’d be able to drink on the job anyway. Lots of bartenders give it up, actually.”

“Yeah, but giving it up is different from never having done it in the first place,” she argued. “I don’t see how you can be as good a bartender as you are when you’ve never even tasted the stuff. What do you suggest when someone asks for a recommendation? It’s like the blind leading the blind!”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” I laughed and gave her a roguish smile. “I just show them the most expensive thing that’s in their budget.”

She opened her mouth to say something then snapped it shut. A moment later, she gave me a strange look and a frown, and said, “Bullshit.”

“Okay, not really,” I conceded with a shrug. “But you’d be surprised how often it works out that way in practice; the price is just another selling point for some people, especially when it’s being offered to the cute girl at table eighteen. Honestly, though? Pay enough attention and you get to know what goes with who, personal taste doesn’t really come up that much.” That much was true enough, but of course, we wouldn’t be friends if I were the type to leave it at that. “I never said I’d never tasted alcohol, though,” I added.

“Okay, now I know you’re shitting me,” she said, giving me a flat, unamused look. “You have not sampled enough drinks to know what you’re doing and spat out every single swig. That is not a thing a human being can do.”

Bringing a finger to my lips, I give her a sly ‘shh’ and say, “That’s my secret, I’m not actually human—I’m a magical space unicorn.”

She let out a single snort of laughter at that. “You would be something like that. The only other way to explain it is if you had a vagina in those tight pants of yours—but everyone knows that real girls swallow.”

“Ooh, ouch,” I said, placing my hand on my chest. “Denied my one true calling on account of a technicality.”

Beth rolled her eyes at my theatrics and decided to just chug the second half of her cream. “I swear, Caolán,” she said once she was done. “There’s a genie at the bottom of a bottle of jack that’d wake up that Irish ancestry of yours.”

“Absinthe, maybe—but that’s a fairy, not a genie,” I joked, gesturing over my shoulder to a bottle with a green fairy on it. “There might be something to that, though. I mean, it’s Swiss—not Irish—but it is green.”

⁂

Beth and I went our separate ways after work. As she disappeared around the corner, I could see her still nursing a proper Irish cream that, along with the straight cream from earlier, would have put a normal person over their daily caloric intake for the entire day and then some. With the burger she was probably going to get at the diner down the street, I figure she was eating double, or even triple what I do, but hey—she seems to know what works for her body, so it’s none of my business.

For my part, I was sipping a sports bottle of seltzer water with a lemon slice in it as I walked home.

That… was my life. It wasn’t a bad one, by any means, but Beth did have something of a point, even if she never really laid it out. It was kind of odd to make a living serving alcohol when you don’t even really like the stuff. Sure, I was happy doing what I did, but how and when did I actually decide to become a career bartender? And yeah, I’d made a career of it, apparently. This wasn’t my first job serving drinks, after all.

There I was, twenty eight years old and well on the road to being the local facilitator of drunken hook-ups for the rest of my life, and I wasn’t actually sure how I got there. What decision did I make that had brought me to that point?

Knowing me, it probably wasn’t a decision at all, but the lack of one.

I’ve been called indecisive, and I wouldn’t really dispute it if I could. I went to college straight out of high school with no real idea where I was headed and did what I could to work my way through it, but that was basically impossible in this day and age. I had started out waiting tables at a local bar and grill, and somehow ended up getting promoted to the bar rather than the grill when they needed a new barback. As the debt started to pile up and I began to run out of classes I could take without a major, I began working more and more hours at the bar, and taking fewer and fewer classes to balance it out. I guess the final piece fell into place when the bar and grill closed, and the next job I found required me to get my bartending licence.

It was a good job and I liked it, but I couldn’t deny that it really was an odd fit for me.

The route I took home was a nice walk. I felt an itch to break into a run, but a worm of self-consciousness in my gut stopped me. It was just after two in the morning, and if someone saw me, they’d probably think I’d been mugged. Muggings weren’t a huge thing out here in potato country, but you never knew.

I had my seltzer water to think about anyway, which I took the opportunity to take a swig of.

Home was a third floor apartment smaller than I could afford and bigger than I really needed, and I reached it after a rather lazy twenty minute walk. The door thunked shut behind me, latching automatically as I went through my daily ritual of divesting myself of keys, wallet, coat and vest. Dinner was something frozen, and sleep a welcome reprieve from the stiffness in my shoulders that came from slinging drinks all night.

Tomorrow was monday, and I would start the whole process over again, as I would the next day, and the day after that—or so I thought. Little did I know that my comfortable schedule was going to have to deal with two unfortunate occurrences.

Monday, Beth won the lottery.

Tuesday, my mother died.

⁂

Beth was almost as much of a mess as I was at the funeral. Honestly, I was surprised to even see her outside of work, but I guess she felt guilty that her fortune had coincided so closely with my misfortune; she even offered to pay for the funeral out of her winnings, but I declined. There’s something fundamentally personal about making and paying for funeral arrangements, and while I appreciated the gesture, taking charge of it myself was the least I could the woman who raised me.

The funeral itself was a small affair, consisting entirely of myself, Beth and a few close friends of my mother’s. If she had any surviving family back in Japan, they didn’t show, which says all there is to say about that. She never spoke about what had happened that led her to coming to America all alone, but she was apparently well enough off to adopt single, so who knows?

It’s just one of those mysteries you always think you’ll get an answer to, until one day the opportunity is gone.

In accordance with her will, the funeral was a traditional christian service. Whether this was a statement of her own divorce from her native country or simply for the sake of those who would be attending it, no one could say. None of mother’s friends and I were close, and no one chose to speak, so the funeral itself passed by fairly quickly. Eventually, everyone else left, and I stayed behind to watch in a numb sort of enchantment as the decorations were removed and the actual burial was carried out.

By the time dusk came around, even the funerary attendants were gone, leaving me sitting on the grass alone with my mother for the first time since it had happened. Usually in a situation like this, you’d expect a person to have something to say—to make their last goodbyes and find some closure—but nothing came to mind. It wasn’t that the loss hadn’t hit me yet, I guess there just wasn’t a whole lot that had gone unsaid between us. She’d adopted me, given me a home, loved and supported me as I grew into something of an independent adult.

What more could I ask for?

My reverie was broken by the sound of a car door being gently shut. I glanced over, expecting to see just another grieving family content to tend to their own business in peace and quiet, but what I actually found was… well, not that. I wasn’t sure if it was welcome or not, but it wasn’t going to leave me be.

“Hey,” Beth said as she sat herself down on the grass next to me. She looked like she’d been crying and smelled like she’d been drinking, but neither one for a few hours, I think. For a moment, I was impressed that her black dress was still in the shape it was before I realize it wasn’t the same one my vague recollection said she was wearing earlier. I took another glance back to the car she came in, and sure enough, it doesn’t even have plates yet. Someone was going to have to talk to her about that, or she was going to be back to bouncing—bouncering?—back to working in a year. It wasn’t any of my business, though, was it? Maybe it could be.

“Hey,” I belatedly respond, and the silence stretches out between us. “You look like shit.”

She looked away from me and said, “So do you.”

“I have an excuse,” I reminded her, successfully killing the mood.

We sat there for a while, and while I knew that she was trying to be there for me, the awkwardness clung to to us like a film. I wasn’t really used to the physical closeness, and there was an emotional gulf between us that wouldn’t be bridged in one evening.

Still, a step was a step, and she was trying to help. “How… is that going, anyway?” she finally ventured to ask. “You’ve been out here a while, now.”

Arms resting on my knees, I gave what resemblance of a shrug that I could. “I’m just at a loss, you know? I keep trying to think of something to say—a way to say goodbye; thank her; say that she did everything she needed to and shouldn’t have any regrets—but is that enough? It doesn’t feel like enough.”

“I don’t…” Beth began to say, but found herself hesitating. “I’ve never lost anyone like you have, so maybe I’m talking out of my ass, here, but it sounds like you have your answer, and you just need for your head to catch up to your heart.”

That sounded as good as anything else, I suppose. “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “But it doesn’t make it any easier to get up and move on.”

I heard a crinkle, and looked over to see Beth pulling a brown paper bag out of her purse, because of course she was. “Beth…” I whined, giving her a pained look that said she should know better than this. “Beth, come on. Give it up for one night, please?”

She set the bag down in between us with a slosh and left it there. “It’s the oldest remedy there is,” she said, matter-of-factly, and, well, she was right, but that didn’t excuse the smugness.

Was I being unreasonable? Maybe—though in my defense, it wasn’t just alcohol that I avoided. I never really liked the idea of anything that could change how a person felt and behaved. Yes, that means I wasn’t a fan of caffeine, either. Heck, I wasn’t even in the habit of taking pain medication if I could avoid it. It wasn’t that I thought there was anything particularly sinister about any of it. I wasn’t some tinfoil-hat fundie who thought doctors were all trying to poison us with toothpaste. I just… liked to think I didn’t need that kind of thing.

It was a point of pride.

There was a difference, of course, between alcohol and most of the other things like it, though. It wasn’t like I’d never had caffeine. It wasn’t like I’d refused morphine when I had my wisdom teeth removed. Why was it such a big deal if I shared a bottle of something with the only friend who seemed to give enough of a shit to come to my mother’s funeral?

I guess it really wasn’t.

With a resigned sigh, I reached down between us to grab the bottle. “What did you even bring?” I asked rhetorically as I shifted my weight so that I could use my other hand to pull the bottle out of the bag. I fully expected it to be something old and expensive, given the precedent so far with Beth’s purchasing decisions.

I was disappointed. Not wrong, mind, but so very disappointed. The green bottle sloshed as my head dropped between my knees. “Absinthe, Beth? Really?”

“What?” she asked, confused. “You said—”

Pulling my head back up, I took another look at the bottle, specifically the date. It was, indeed, over a hundred and fifty years old. “Beth, do you know anything at all about absinthe?”

“It’s got tits on the label?” she suggested jokingly, but I wasn’t laughing. “What’s the big deal?”

Right. Beth was a bouncer, not a bartender; there was no reason to get too upset. “You know how Coca-Cola used to have actual cocaine in it, but they took it out ten or fifteen years before cocaine was banned from over the counter sales?”

“Yeah, I guess?” she said warily and glanced nervously at the bottle I was holding. “You don’t mean—?”

I shook my head. “Apart from being completely illegal, thujone is a hallucinogen, Beth. Kind of not the substance of choice for a god damn funeral.”

“Shit,” she cursed under her breath with a wince. “Shit.” I honestly felt a little sorry for her. I mean, there was your regular, run-of-the-mill awkward, and then there was… this.

Imagine her surprise when she heard the telltale tinkling of me fishing the cheap corkscrew out of the bag.

“What are you doing?” she asked, confusion writ on her face. “You don’t have to—”

The cork popped open with a satisfying ‘poomph,’ followed by the mellow licorice smell of anise. “Relax,” I said, getting to my feet, bottle in hand. I offered her a hand up, and she took it. “When it comes to alcohol and funerals, it’s not always for the living.”

Beth watched as I lifted the green bottle in front of us… and began to pour it out over the grave. The act was called libation, if I remembered correctly, and was a part of lots of old religions that I knew nothing about, but hey, it’s the thought that counts, right? Also, the disposal of evidence, because like I said, the stuff was completely illegal. As the last drop of green liquid drained from the bottle, I let my arm down and tossed it gently in front of the headstone like you would a bouquet of flowers, and said goodbye one last time.

That’s when things started to get weird.

As I opened my eyes, I was surprised at how dark it was. What had been dusk when Beth had arrived was now clearly evening, with a bright full moon shining overhead. I might have dismissed it as the two of us losing track of time, if not for the thick veil of misty fog that seemed to be seeping up out of the ground all around us.

The fog built up rapidly, spilling out across the graveyard and building into a wall of unnatural white. Beth nudged me as I watched as the forest in the distance disappeared from sight, but I was fascinated by the sight and refused to look away.

“Caolán,” she said, prodding me again, “Caolán!”

I quickly glanced at her. “What?” I asked, somewhat annoyed, but she didn’t answer, her own gaze fixated at the ground in front of us. I turned to look at what had caught her eye, and jumped back as soon as I saw it.

The fog over the grave was a vivid green, and as we watched, it drew itself up into the indistinct figure of a naked woman. I was about to say something, when it’s eyes came to life with a powerful viridian light, and it opened its mouth to speak.

“Of tree and stone are lock and key;

I offer thee these wishes, three.

One I bring in hearth of fire;

burning with your heart’s desire.

One I gift in fields of gold;

of truest truth and oldest old.

One I grant in blood of life;

with purpose filled and wonder rife.

Wish thee thrice or not at all.

Wish all three, and fate forestall.”

The figure’s voice was haunting and hollow, and I stumbled backwards as it spoke, listening closely until the end. “Fuck, I don’t need this right now,” I said, covering my face with both hands. I could smell the anise and alcohol on my hands and hoped this was just some ridiculous hallucination, but of course, it couldn’t be. You don’t hallucinate from a few fumes. I’d have to have actually drunk the absinthe, and I didn’t do that.

Did I?

No. No, I didn’t, and confusing myself with stupid questions like that wasn’t helping. The ground was wet with alcohol—alcohol that had a gassy green tart evaporating out of it. Somehow, this was real.

Beth hadn’t moved from her spot and had to turn to look at me. “Caolán,” she said with her voice full of wonder. “You… you could ask for your mom back.”

Her reaction confused me. “What?” I asked, taking half a step forward to whisper to her before realizing I couldn’t do it without getting equally close to the apparition. “Beth, no—nothing good can come of this!”

Soon, she has the same look of confusion on her face. “What do you mean? I thought you weren’t religious?”

I just stared at her. Did she really now know? “I’m not. This has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with ‘you do not trust anything that offers you a wish—ever!’ I don’t care if it’s a faerie, a genie, a devil, a ring or a magical fucking fish that talks—it never goes well.”

“Oh come on,” she said, rolling her eyes at me, though from the look on her face, I think I was getting through to her more than she wanted to admit. “This isn’t some story that ends with a lesson about being happy with your lot in life. Just… just think it through, and you’ll be fine, right?”

I shook my head. “If it’s all the same, I’d rather not risk it,” I told her, and was about to say the same to the apparition directly, when Beth rushed forward and clapped her hand over my mouth.

“Wait!” she cried. “What about the last line? ‘Wish all three, and fate forestall?’ Not wishing could be just as bad. It could be worse!”

I stopped for a moment to consider that interpretation, but it was incredibly vague. “I don’t know, Beth…”

“Aren’t there stories where the genie just kills the shit out of whoever rubs the lamp?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.

I had honestly forgotten about that. “I—yeah, I guess. Shit.” I turned to the apparition, and risked asking it a question. “I don’t suppose you’d be able to clarify your… riddle?”

At first, I’m not sure if she’s even going to respond, but after an awkward pause, she cocked her head to the side and spoke in that same ghostly, reverberating voice from before. “A telling tale, a turn of rhyme. Lock and key; ticking time.”

“Wonderful,” I said with a groan. “Fine, have it your way. I’ll wish. Could you at least repeat the rules for me?”

Like a machine, the apparition repeated her opening statement word for word, and I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose, making an effort to concentrate on the three types of wishes. That was going to make this difficult. How well did the wishes have to match? Each one actually had several elements to them, and I was willing to bet that a little poetic license would go a long way.

Wait, poetic license? That gave me an idea. I fished my phone out of my pocket and turned it on for the first time that day. As I waited for it to boot up, I looked back up to the apparition. “How long, specifically, do I have?”

For the first time, the green woman did something other than stare directly at me—she looked up at the darkening sky. “Ere twilight wanes and thy final fate calls; the ticking clock rings at true night’s fall.”

“Great,” I said. “Alright, just… lemme think this through.” Assuming that meant I had until the light was completely gone from the sky, a quick check with Google as I walked out of earshot told me I had roughly a half an hour. Hopefully that would be enough given my… handicap—which is to say, of the two women in my company, the one granting wishes had the longer attention span.

“What’s up?” Beth asked, crowding in at my side to look at what I was doing. “Googling good wishes? Shit, I bet there are whole nerd groups who obsess over stuff like this.”

“Not exactly,” I say and nudge her away, trying to focus on what I’m doing. “You know how when you meet someone with a really strong accent, you find yourself unconsciously mimicking it?”

There was a pause, and I didn’t have to look at her to know the look she had on her face. “No?” she finally said, making a question out of the statement.

“Yeah, well, just trust me when I say it’s a thing,” I told her as my walking brought us to her car, which was parked right on the curb. “It’s a subconscious play for empathy, and it works the same way as hearing our own opinions paraphrased to us.”

Beth kept walking after I stopped and turned around to lean on her new car. “Okay, sure, makes sense, I guess, but why does that involve hunching over your phone instead of actually talking to her? Girls hate that shit.”

“That may be,” I said without looking at her. “But anyone can appreciate a man who has a way with words.”

⁂

Seeing as I was no poet, I wasn’t entirely happy with what I’d come up with, but there wasn’t much more I could do with five minutes on the clock. Beth had whined intermittently about wasting time for the first five minutes or so, but wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d expected. I guess you don’t get to be a bouncer without cultivating a little patience.

I read through what I’d written one last time and finally put my phone away. There were only three short lines and I couldn’t find any actual loopholes, but I was leaving a lot to luck, and with my life possibly on the line I didn’t want to say anything I’d regret.

The misty figure was sitting on my mother’s headstone, which was at once the most human thing I’d seen it do and the most off-putting. Not wanting to give the thing any more reason to screw me over, I let the matter go unsaid, but I couldn’t help a frown from weighing down my lips for just a moment.

The figure rose as Beth and I approached and looked at us questioningly. “The river of time narrows to little more than a stream; have you settled on the shape of your honest heart’s dream?”

Well, this was it. I took a deep breath, and I wished. “Grant me a wish of desires come due; act on my words with their meaning held true.”

“The fuck kind of wish is that?” Beth asked, incredulous, but I ignored her.

It was hard to tell, but I think the apparition smiled. “Master, my master, your will shall be done. In substance of speech, there shall be only one.”

Emboldened by my seeming success, I moved on to my second wish. “Grant me a wish of the most honest of gold; be as a friend when my wishes you mold.”

This time, Beth let out an audible groan. “Wishes?” she said. “What wishes? You’ve only got one left!”

“Master to friend and friend into master,” the apparition summarized happily. “To keep thy welfare at heart, and safeguard disaster.”

“Grant me a wish of life and hope unspoiled; of untroubled times and bitterness foiled; grant me this wish, though I’ve yet no guarantee; I believe in the worst, so I beg you—surprise me.”

The only sound that came from beth was her hand hitting her face. The figure, meanwhile, shied back and wilted. “The spirit of your words defies the meaning I hear; the mistrust that you wield wounds like a spear.”

“I think what she means is—way to live up to your name, dick,” Beth commented with sour reproach, not even commenting on the insane vagueness of my final wish. “That’s how you talk to your friends?”

I blinked. Crap, that was a pretty shitty thing to say, wasn’t it?

“Nevertheless,” the figure continued with a sigh. “My heart wishes you well; enjoy your new life in your harlot-friend’s hell.”

“…wait, what?”

【If Wishes Were Horses】Chapter 2 - Something something pony pony pony?

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⁂

There was a flash of light, and I saw infinity.

It was like being dumped into an endless ocean of possibility. No, not an ocean. Images of countless worlds rushed by as I tumbled through the rapids that fed innumerable rivers of time, yet—chaotic though it seemed—I wasn’t floating aimlessly. I was a lightning bolt thrown by a fairy, seeking out the path to the one place and time where my wish would take me.

My journey had a purpose that I wasn’t in control of; I could feel it. It wasn’t as simple as being drawn to peace and luxury. Lifetimes of simple bliss passed me by like so much mist on the wind, leaving me with little more than an impression of lilacs and morning dew. No, as I lanced around, about and sometimes straight through all the potential lives I could have had, I could see the strange and curious slowly replacing the comfortable and calm, and the cause was clear.

I had asked the creature to surprise me.

‘The creature,’ I say, as I doubted that this place was the mythical land of Tír na nÓg, or she, truly one of the fair folk—at least not in the way we think of them. It’s possible, even quite likely that she was that, and also a djinn, a monkey’s paw and a shooting star, because surely if there exists such a type of creature as improbable as one who talks in rhyme and grants wishes, it wouldn’t be limited to just one or two cultures of our tiny little dimension.

The sheer enormity of it was… well, I’d say it was humbling, but I’m not really the type of person that can really get much more humble. It was daunting, in any case, to think that there were creatures that existed outside of reality and so were able to pull the strings to suit their whims.

Is that not what you would call… a god?

Fortunately, I didn’t really have time for my faith—or lack thereof, really—to be shaken, as I could feel the end of my journey racing up to meet me with as much enthusiasm as the ground had for a clumsy skydiver.

At the last moment, I stopped with a lurch and found myself hanging over what looked like New York in the 1920’s, with horse-drawn carriages and everything. Actually, there were a lot of horses in all sorts of colors and not a whole lot of people—or any at all, actually—but my point of view was too high up and too queasy to tell anything more.

The sudden stop had been jarring, to say the least. The world that was to be my destination hovered just out of reach, but my journey was not yet complete. Some bit of me had hit a snag, and it felt as if I was hanging above the world from my soul.

The sensation was… almost familiar. It was the same feeling I’d had of racing through time, but in reverse. It was that part of me that was the lightning bolt seeking out the shape of my wish, but instead of funneling through it, it was pulling me apart. I felt myself stretch as it tried to fork, at first in a dozen different directions, then a mere half a dozen, and finally, only three. The feeling didn’t fade as the possibilities faded away, though. If anything, it got worse as each remaining fork grew stronger and stronger.

In the end, something had to give.

I felt something tear.

It was me.

⁂

There was something special about waking up next to someone that ran deeper than the usual mating instinct—or at least parallel to it in a wholly different way. It was an unconditional bond of trust and acceptance—the primal instinct of family brought out by a mess of tangled limbs and several hearts beating in concert.

It was completely alien to me, and I loved it.

Unfortunately, as fate would have it, the feeling was not long-lived. Curled up on my side as I was, I felt the body in front of me stir, which made me shift and disturb whoever was at my back. The next reaction traveled in the other direction, as the body behind me pulled away, letting a cool wave of air down my spine, which I, in turn, rolled onto my back to address, prompting the same reaction in the person to my right.

After the shifting was done, we all lay there for a moment in denial of the inevitable, but there would be no getting back to sleep. As one, we sat up.

I looked left, and saw what looked like a small horse with a mottled white and brown coat and a straight, copper-red mane wearing an adorable little suit and tie.

I looked right, and saw a nearly identical a small horse with the same mottled white and brown coat, the same straight, copper-red mane and the same adorable little suit and tie.

I looked down at myself, and… well, all I saw the suit and tie, but I had a pretty good idea—yep, there it is. That same hair hanging over one side of my field of vision like an orange waterfall. Oddly, it was the hair that really stood out as weird. As a human, my hair had always been curlier than a carrot-topped medusa, so I’d always kept it short. The feeling of having it move as I swayed in place felt distinctly alien to me.

Then, the movement tickled one of my ears and I felt it flick and… hoo boy. Okay, now the rest was hitting me. The feeling of a coat of fur under the suit that I’d worn to the funeral and then slept in was decidedly itchy. I shifted in place and tried to scratch an itch only to find I had blunt hooves, because of course I did. The hoof wasn’t enough, and I had resorted to rubbing myself down with my whole arm—leg?—when I felt something that was even more distinctly different and alien where my rump met the bed.

Oh. I guess that explained the mane.

I was a girl—a mare? Whatever, I was female. I looked to my right and saw a similar look of… curiosity? Wait, no, was that right? I mean, sure, I’d never really been all that invested in my masculinity, but was that really the look I had on my face? Without a mirror, I couldn’t be sure. No, wait, I could get a second opinion, I realized, and looked to my left.

Huh. Same look.

It was too early in the morning for this.

“Fuck me,” we all said in unison, and fell back down on the bed.

“No,” we all answered jokingly, followed by a moment of silence as we actually considered it. I craned my neck to look at the me next to me again. I mean… it was a girl, and kind of cute, I supposed. My head hit the pillow again and I stared at the ceiling.

“Well, maybe,” we amended, but just saying it felt awkward; I wasn’t that concerned with getting laid.

Oh, and the tiny horse thing.

“No,” we finally decided, and that was that.

For now.

With bluntly propositioning myself over and done with, I figured I was nowhere near done taking stock of my situation, and tried to say as much. Unfortunately, so did the others.

“I need to—” we all said at once, and stopped at once. When no one said anything, and the silence stretched on, we tried again with the same result. “We need—” Again, we all ended up interrupting each other and stopping. Okay, this was pointless. “Whatever.” We all knew what we were going to say anyway.

The me to my left got out on her side of the bed, as did the me on the right. As the one in the middle, I expected to have to wait until one of the two figured out how to work their hooves and make way for me, when I realized that we were all quadrupeds and I could just… lean forward and up onto my hooves and walk off the bed.

It worked—sort of. I felt like I was walking on stilts across a trampoline, but half of that was probably just the bed. From my wobbly vantage point, I got a better look at the room we were in.

It was kind of boring, to be honest.

Now, don’t get me wrong. It was… nice. Expensive, even. I wasn’t quite sure about the scale, but even so, it looked like the single bedroom was as large as my entire apartment back home. The floors were hardwood with strategically-placed throw-rugs that could have come straight off the boat from india, and the furniture definitely hadn’t come from Ikea. The bed was easily a king-size or larger, and my hooves sunk into the top layer almost like quicksand. I could easily imagine sinking blissfully into it after a long day’s work.

All the same, it still just looked like an apartment. My cheeky wish had sent me hurtling across time and space to a world full of ponies; you’d think that something would be different.

Eventually, I made it to the far edge of the bed. Checking my progress against the others, I was definitely at a disadvantage thanks to the fluffy handicap beneath my hooves. My counterparts had both made it twice as far as I had, though that still wasn’t saying much. One had made it to a large picture window, and the other looked like she was trying to figure out the order to use her hooves in as she attempted to pace across the room.

I, meanwhile, decided to do something stupid. The foot of the bed had a decorated wooden frame that prevented me from just rolling out of bed like the others, so, after testing my footing with a couple of bounces, I bent my legs and jumped off.

Then, instinct kicked in.

Much like when my ear had twitched without my express input, I felt another part of my anatomy react all on its own—and this time it was a part that I didn’t even know I had. Without warning, my wings spread wide to catch me, and I glode right into the me that was at the window.

“Aah!” I managed to yelp before crashing into her and sending us both tumbling ass over teakettle into the side of a solid oak dresser. “Ow,” we groaned in unison.

“Okay, public service announcement, here,” I said with a grunt as I tried and failed to right myself. “We have wings, and it hurts like a motherfucker when you twist them.”

“What?” said the pony tangled up with me. “You got wings? I didn’t get wings.”

I blinked at that. “Are you s—ow—what is poking me in my side?”

“I think that’s… my horn,” she said. Sure enough, if I twisted around, I could see a creamy white horn poking out of the middle of her forehead. Funny, I hadn’t noticed it before.

I crossed my eyes to look up, and then double checked with my hoof. “I didn’t get a horn,” I stated.

“Well,” the one I’d crashed into said, finally managing to untangle herself and scoot out from under me. “I guess now we know what that last minute holdup was. There must be at least three types of ponies here; unicorn, pegasus and—what’d you get?”

The last one of us was sitting on her haunches, looking herself over, but came up empty. “I got nothing.”

“Well, that sucks,” the one with the horn said. Okay, maybe that was kinda rude—and racist?—but we were all thinking it anyway; I’m pretty sure that excuse holds up when everyone present is technically the same person. “Not that I expect to have to gore anyone with this horn, if it was even sharp enough, which it’s not, really. I guess we both got screwed compared to little miss chicken wings here. I’d have said they were as vestigial as the horn, given their size, but I’d obviously lose that bet.”

I looked back at my wings and rolled my shoulder like I would to make my shoulder blade stick out; the limb sort of twitched, but it didn’t unfurl. Were they really that special, I wondered? “It can’t be that cut and dry, or there’d only be one of us,” I pointed out with a shrug that again seemed to just barely stir the new muscles.

“Point, I guess,” said the ordinary pony who was looking herself over again. She shook her head, still finding nothing out of the ordinary. “So, just to recap—we asked in verse for a green wish-granting fairy to surprise us, and she sent us to another world where we’re three adorable tiny horse girls.”

“Pony… mares?” the unicorn suggested, and gave a shrug. “Pragmatically speaking—we’re alive, healthy, sane and seem to have been given a place to live. From the view out the window, we’re in a pretty tall building, and the society looks reasonably clean and modern.”

“Shit, with mom gone…” I said, pausing sombrely as I remembered the funeral we’d come here from. “What is there to really miss back home? Wow, that’s kind of depressing. We’re out a job, obviously, but we may or may not be provided for here anyway.”

The three of us were silent for a bit as that sank in.

“You know, from the outside, pragmatism is kind of creepy,” the regular pony pointed out. “We should probably care a little more that we’ve lost everything we ever owned and everyone we’ve ever known.”

The unicorn scratched the back of her neck with one hoof, an uneasy look on her face. “Yeah, probably. Just… wishes from a creature beyond comprehension? It could have been worse.”

The sound of yelling from the next room caused six ears to swivel to face the door without their owner’s input, suggesting that not everyone shared our point of view.

“I guess we haven’t lost everyone we’ve ever known,” I reminded us.

⁂

I couldn’t make out any of the words, but I instantly recognized the sound of Beth’s voice, even as a pony. It sounded like she was arguing with someone, but she could have just been being vocal about the circumstances we’d found ourselves in. There was only one way to find out.

The three of us crowded around the door, and I reached for the handle, which thankfully had a lever design rather than a knob. Just as I was about to open the door, I hesitated and considered whether it was a good idea for all three of me to just walk into the room. No sooner had the thought crossed my mind than I found myself alone at the door. Swell. Somehow I had become our official spokespony. I gave it a fifty-fifty chance that it was either because I’d hit the genetic lottery in being the only one with a useful mutation, or just the sheer coincidence of being the one in the middle.

The door opened to reveal a single room that, predictably, followed the same design philosophy as the bedroom had—that is, if there was anyway to predict a room that had every feature and amenity that you could expect from a small, one bedroom apartment, stretched out over a space the size of a basketball court. Seriously; the room had to be taking up most of the floor we were on and featured a kitchenette on one side and an entire wall of window overlooking the city on the other, with the ocean visible in the distance.

The middle of the room was populated by a variety of sunken tables surrounding a large buffet of fresh fruit and baked goods that had been flipped, scattering its vegetarian bounty in a mess across the varnished wooden floor, among other things. Looking closer, I spotted a watermelon bobbing up and down in the jacuzzi. Speaking of which—there was a jacuzzi over by the pool. Also, there was a pool, because of course there was.

The source of the mess was obvious. Right in the middle of it, next to the table that had been flipped, were two ponies glaring daggers at each other.

Beth—because it had to be Beth—looked like she had retained her short stature and just about everything else you could have used to describe her. She was an ordinary pony like third me, lacking wings or horn, with a dun brown coat and flaxen mane that looked like she’d gone at it with a chainsaw. I’d thought my legs were stubby little things, but she was built like four knee-high telephone poles propping up a hummer.

As for the other pony… she was a unicorn. That was about all there was to say. She stood a head taller than Beth, though still a half a head shorter than me, and she was as clean and white as if she’d stepped straight out of a storybook. Unlike my mottled coloring that mimicked my freckled complexion, there wasn’t a speck of color anywhere on her. Her coat was white, her mane was white, her horn was white, and… that’s when I realized she was completely naked.

She looked at me and her eyes were a bright, vivid green.

Beth gave a quick glance to see what the naked unicorn was looking at and did a double take as she, too, saw me. Then, she did a triple take, and her eyes widened as she really saw me. “No… no… no!” she repeated to herself as she leapt to approach me and fell flat on her face. The unicorn, meanwhile, cantered over to me, hopping over a small coffee table in the process with a gait that was deerlike in grace.

At least one of us could traverse a room.

“Welcome to your new home, Caolán,” she said with a bending of her forelegs that I took for a bow. “I hope it meets your approval.”

I was dumbfounded. This was the apparition I’d been so afraid of? “You’re… unexpected,” I stated. “You can talk normally?”

“I seem to have been included in the wish, yes.” She cocked her head to the side in a way that I remembered the green apparition doing. “I hope I am not unwelcome. I believe your experience should have given you some idea how unpredictable the process can be.”

Thinking back to my experience as a lightning bolt… yes. Yes I did. “Did I… wish you free, then?” I asked, and then my mood turned sour. “Only to force you into a friendship you never asked for? Shit, I didn’t think this through as well as I thought, did I?”

She frowned. “I would have you know, Caolán, that I never wished you ill—nor was I trapped or beholden in any way. That I granted it at all should speak well enough that your wish for friendship, even were it permanent, would have been welcome.”

“It’s not permanent?” I asked.

She nodded. “It was not permanent. The wish only stipulated that I be your friend while granting your wishes, though I remember what it felt like, and such feelings do not simply fade without reason. I am well aware that you do not reciprocate them, however; if you desire it, then I shall leave you be.”

“And go back to granting wishes out of a bottle of alcohol?” I asked… and realized that I really did know nothing at all about her. I’ll admit, I was curious. “Far be it for me to turn down an offer of friendship, regardless of how it started. Getting to know you sounds good.”

The unicorn let out what seemed to be a sigh of relief. “Thank you. Truthfully, if you had rejected me, I do not believe anything would have changed. I appear in all ways to have become a simple unicorn possessing only the typical mortal magic which that entails. It is troubling, to say the least.”

“Magic?” I asked, along with two echoes from just inside the door to my bedroom that caused those green eyes to widen a bit in surprise. Unfortunately, both my spoken question and her unspoken one went unanswered as Beth finally managed to stumble her way across the massive room, finishing her journey with a leap off the back of a couch.

Beth’s hooves skidded across the hardwood floors until she finally came to a stop and—gawping at me like I’d kicked a puppy—fell to her knees in despair. “No…” she moaned and stomped her front hooves on the floorboards, leaving me thoroughly confused.

It wasn’t long until her despair turned to anger, and she rounded on our wish-granting friend. “You fucking bitch!” she snapped. “Not only do you turn us into ponies, you turned him into a goddamn girl?! This isn’t what I wished for!”

Wait, what? What?!

“Beth…” I said, drawing her attention as a number of possibilities bloomed in my head.

She froze and turned to look at me, and it seemed to dawn on her what she’d just admitted to. “Aw fuck,” she swore, deflating even more until she was all but laying on the ground, which seemed to be a more natural a position for a pony than it would have been for a human. “Caolán, I—”

“Wait,” I interrupted. I tried to pinch the bridge of my nose with the crook of my hoof, but only made it halfway before I had to slam it back down to regain my balance.

Beth cringed.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “Look, before this gets any more complicated, I need to get something out in the open. The wish didn’t turn me into a girl.”

Beth’s eyes brightened in a way that was far too creepy for someone that had just been on the floor in despair. A moment later, suspicion began to creep in, though. “Please tell me you mean you’re just a really… really girly boy under that suit,” she said and bit her lip nervously. “Because I could live with that.”

I shook my head and took a step back through the doorway. It didn’t exactly work, in that I fell on my rump, yet it wasn’t much of a failure, either. As close as the ground actually was, I might as well have fallen into a chair for all the discomfort it brought me. Nonetheless, I fought myself to not get distracted, and struggled back to my hooves.

“I didn’t get turned into a girl,” I repeated, stressing the singular article. Quickly I reared up to free my front hooves, which each went to one side of the doorway and wrapped around the pony standing there and pulled the other two of me into sight. “I got turned into three girls.”

“So whatever you want to say… you can say to all of me.”

⁂

I think I broke Beth; it was rather frustrating, as it caused her to clam up, abandoning her pending explanation in favor of clumsily banging around the kitchenette looking for alcohol. It wasn’t an unreasonable reaction, all things considered, but if this was my wish—and I was still pretty sure that it was, in spite of my Twilight Zone senses niggling at the back of my mind—her quest for liquid relief was most likely futile.

“So,” I said to our resident ex-faerie as the three of me helped each other over and into the selfsame couch which Beth had previously leapt from. The couch was upholstered in a fine black velvet material that felt magical against the fur on my face as a I flopped over the back of the sofa and onto the seat cushions.

There was an awkward silence as my conjunction was left dangling.

“Are you… rubbing your face on the couch?” normal-pony-me asked, sounding kind of embarrassed.

I didn’t much care. “Oh god yes; it’s like having a fresh buzzcut over your whole body! The rubbing!”

She blinked, lifting a hoof to consider her foreleg curiously. “Carry on, then?”

Distracted as I was by the upholstery, the unicorn took over for me. “Well, I was sure… surprised, I guess?” she said with a cheeky smile. “We were surprised, I mean. I guess I know better than to ask you if this kind of thing is normal?”

The unicorn stared blankly for a moment before seeming to realize that she should say something. “Ah… no. This and normal are… different things,” she said, struggling with the words. “Like… water flowing uphill. It violates entropy.”

“What?” Pony pony me remarked. “Wishes don’t normally?”

She shook her head quite seriously. “They don’t. Just the opposite; my kind—we feed on the myriad possibilities that are cut loose when such a change occurs. We prune the tree of time, and entire futures cease to be.”

“That’s not all you pruned!” Beth shouted from the kitchenette, slamming her hoof on the counter and making the glassware rattle.

The other two of me blushed at her crudeness. I, however, was already flushed from my encounter with the seat cushion, and had no shame. “Yeah, uh, about that?” I prompted, giving the naked white unicorn a questioning look without correcting my upside-down posture.

Don’t judge me.

“As you might have gathered, there were some extenuating circumstances involved in your wish,” she said, glancing away uncomfortably. “It should not have given you a form you would be uncomfortable with, however. I trust you are, individually… not inconvenienced? I have granted such wishes before, but you didn’t seem the type.”

The three of me all shared a glance, and I shrugged. “I’m not, but it doesn’t bother me, either,” I said, twisting around to right myself, managing to rub my wings on the back of the couch as I did so, almost losing myself to the distraction again. “I don’t know. For some people, it’s a huge part of who they are and how they interact with people, I guess?”

“That has been my experience,” she said with a modest nod.

Beth had her own opinion. That opinion was, “No fucking shit!”

“Your concern for me is touching, Beth,” snarked the ordinary pony, who had as yet been silent.

“My concern is some combination of those words, anyway,” she grumbled cryptically before going back to her as-yet fruitless search.

“Look,” unicorn me said, steering the conversation back on track. “It’s not like I feel nothing about being turned into a whole different creature, but the gender thing doesn’t really stand out?” She looked at the other two of us for confirmation, and we nodded.

“Kind of the opposite, really,” I added, taking over somewhat timidly. “Being female is… straightforward? The idea of it is, I mean. I guess it helps that I haven’t actually seen it yet, but so far it’s just… novel? The rest, though, where do I even start? I miss my hands more than my… dick. I was good with my hands.”

“Hah!” Beth shouted. “That’s what she sa—wait, does that work or not?”

All three of me groaned, but it was the ordinary pony me who snapped back. “Damn it, Beth! If you’re going to be a part of this conversation then quit half-assing it and get in here! You’re not going to find alcohol in my apartment anyway.” The ire in her voice surprised me… which, itself, also surprised me, considering the fact that we were supposed to be the same person. Pony? I guess that made it our apartment, too.

“Shows what you know—there’s a chest freezer in here that’s full of vodka! Shit, what’s a breakfast-y drink you can make with vodka and orange juice? I don’t mix drinks! This is why I have you!”

Unicorn-me’s eye twitched. “It’s I-don’t-know-what-time-it-is in the morning, Beth!”

Beth just ignored her. “Hey, Caolán-with-the-wings, Do you think the neighbors will give me a cup of grenadine if I ask nicely?”

“Yes, Beth,” I said with every ounce of dry sarcasm I could muster. “I’m sure that it’s a completely normal thing for ponies to go door to door asking for cocktail ingredients first thing in the morning—just like in the human world.”

“Great!” she said, and was out the door before any of me could stop her.

All of me shared a moment of stunned silence.

“You don’t think she actually used to—”

“Only as much as you do, which is—”

“Giving her too much credit.”

⁂

The presence of alcohol in the kitchen was disconcerting, but between the three of me, we managed to convince ourselves that if Beth was brought with us, it wasn’t unreasonable for her predilections to be taken into account. The layout of the apartment did suggest that we were all roommates in this cozy little one acre apartment—and yes, that was a literal acre, according to the brochure on the table.

Even on the other side of time and space, I couldn’t get away from the imperial system. I mean, don’t get me wrong; bartending is all about ratios anyway, so it doesn’t really complicate my job at all, but still.

My drifting train of thought was interrupted by the curiosity of the ex-faerie. “You are quiet,” she stated, draped over the side of the couch and cocking her head to the side.

“You’re naked,” unicorn-me blurted out.

“Ah.” She made a show of looking over herself. “This is quite normal in this world, I assure you.”

She stopped and blinked, appearing to be thinking about something. “Come to think of it… I guess that’s true, from what I saw on the street. Huh.”

“But you were naked back home, too,” I pointed out, rolling my eyes.

She just nodded. “Yes, I was.”

When no further answer seemed forthcoming, I prompted her. “And that was…”

“A different matter,” she said.

I let out a small chuckle and shook my head. “Alright, sure.”

“So, wait,” the ordinary pony-me interjected. “You mentioned magic before, and now this—you know about this world?”

“I have been to this side of infinity before,” she said, as if it were the grocery store across town that doesn’t have your brand of chips. “Not this world in particular, but—infinity being what it is—there are many like it.”

“Can you tell us about it, then?” she asked. “At least the basics of what we should know?”

The ex-faerie placed her hoof on her chin and thought for a moment. “We are in Manehattan, one of the more industrialized cities in the country of Equestria, which is ruled by a pair of immortal alicorns. Alicorns are those who embody the traits of all ponykind—that is, unicorn, pegasus and earth pony. Magic is commonplace and relatively benign here, but outliers exist, and so magical crime is punished harshly. Crimes involving memory magic in particular typically attract the attention of the full weight of the Equestrian legal system.”

“Um. Okay,” the ordinary pony-me said. “That got awfully specific at the end, there.”

Unicorn me agreed, looking uneasy. “Why… did we need to know that?”

Just then, the door opened back up, admitting Beth, and three other ponies. “Hey, Ó Cochláin!” she shouted. “You’re not gonna believe this—the neighbors swear up and down we’ve lived here longer than them! Some wish, huh?”

Slowly, all of me turned slowly to look at the green-eyed unicorn in dawning horror. “You didn’t,” one of us whispered.

“They’re cool, though,” Beth continued, oblivious. “They even had the grenadine! One of you come mix us some drinks; we’ve got friends to make!”

The first hint of a rebuke died on my lips as the great, wide wall of glass overlooking the city shattered inwards beneath the shod hooves of twenty golden-armored stallions and what could only be one of the immortal alicorns that the ex-faerie had mentioned. What she hadn’t mentioned is that the ruler stood literally twice as tall as everyone in the room and shone like the sun with a fury normally reserved for murderers, child molesters and running into your ex at the grocery store.

“Halt!” the alicorn shouted, the words shaking the building and making the ears of all present ring. The command was apparently rhetorical as, in the same moment, her horn lit up like a bonfire and froze everyone in place in a hazy golden glow that filled the room.

The magic—or whatever it was—didn’t seem to have any effect on the alicorn herself, of course, and she stepped slowly further into the room, taking note of everything. Her eyes lingered on me… and me and me for a long while before moving on to the others.

“At six o’clock this morning,” she stated as if by rote, “daily scans of the Equestrian Bureau of Records detected evidence of tampering in six different wings. Further investigation revealed what can only be classified as felony grand magical abuse on a scale unseen since the Crystal Empire suffered the rule of Sombra himself. Documents, minds, bits, buildings and infrastructure, all changed without consent or discrimination, down to the smallest detail. Fillies, foals, infants who could not have communicated whatever it was that they witnessed had their minds and what memories they possessed violated—and for what? One apartment. This apartment and the ponies living in it.

“By my authority as a ruling princess of Equestria, you are all under arrest pending an investigation into these matters. Given the grave nature of these accusations, anypony who resists will be immediately banished to tartarus for the duration of the investigation… or longer.”

⁂

There were some that claimed that a brisk, early morning chariot ride was as good at waking a pony up as a nice cup of coffee. Twilight Sparkle was not among them, but she was cordial about it. Even the most chipper of morning ponies would agree, though, that by the time the flight reached the five hour mark and morning was a distant memory, any energizing effect that it might have had would be drowned out by the constant sound of the wind burning your ears.

This was the state that Twilight was in as her chariot pulled into the Manehattan, but she tried not to show it in front of the stallions who had actually done all the work. Instead, she simply thanked them with as much cheer as she could force and sent them on their way before dragging herself into the station.

It was bigger than the guard station in Ponyville, but nowhere near the size of the massive compound in Canterlot. This made sense, since the one in Canterlot had a fundamentally different purpose than these small peacekeeping outposts, but all the same, it meant that the place felt small and cheap to Twilight in spite of the design and materials they all shared; enough so that she was able to find the princess just by ducking her head in a few doors, rather than bother asking for directions.

The room was simple by design. The golden trim that was meant to make the place feel like a piece of Canterlot stopped at the door, leaving only the plain white marble box with a worn oak table and chairs inside. It was an interrogation room—or what passed for one in Equestria—though it was not in use as such at the moment. The princess was alone.

She did not look as tired as Twilight felt, exactly, but all the same, a look of relief spread across Princess Celestia’s face as she lifted her head and saw her student entering the room. Lifting herself gracefully up, she crossed the room to greet Twilight with a quick nuzzle.

“I’m sorry for dragging you away from Ponyville for this, Twilight,” she said, directing Twilight to sit across from the seat at the table that she had claimed.

Twilight shook her head and pulled out the chair, which groaned agonizingly against the marble floor before she could fold herself into it. “Don’t be; everyone understands,” she said, leaning forward onto the table. “Do you know that even Applejack had her memories of Manehattan changed? She hasn’t been back here since she was a filly; she was not happy after the scan.”

“She is a fine example of her element, as are all of you,” the princess said, taking her seat once more. “I just hope it doesn’t come to that. I’m not sure if even the elements of harmony could reverse this all across Equestria, as they resist being used in a mechanical fashion. Given the seemingly petty nature of the change, punishing the offenders may be all we can do.”

Twilight’s head drooped—and not from the weariness she felt. “That’s what worries me. I want to believe that this was a monumental effort, but nopony with any sense would have done something this… irresponsible unless it was trivial to do so. Have they isolated the changes that were made to the building yet?”

“Yes,” Princess Celestia said. “The floor in question was simply added in full, including one one-acre apartment and two half-acre apartments.”

“And the tenants?” Twilight prompted.

“It’s not yet entirely clear,” the princess answered, extracting a set of photographs from a nearby folder, “but this is the one we suspect currently. She goes by the name of Elizabeth Browning.”

“A griffon name?” Twilight asked, trying to sound surprised. She wasn’t racist, just… acutely aware of the cultural differences. “That would explain the rumors of blood magic the charioteers mentioned when they came to pick me up.”

Princess Celestia’s head drooped. “No, I’m afraid those were premature.”

Twilight looked doubtful. “How premature?”

“Foolishly,” the princess clarified with some bitterness. “The suspect was caught holding a decanter of grenadine in her hoof that was mistaken for blood during the arrest.”

“Grenadine?” Twilight said, pulling back and blinking. “As in—”

“A sugary syrup made primarily from pomegranate juice, and used commonly in alchemy and alcohol,” Princess Celestia confirmed with a dejected sigh. “We suspect the former, of course, for a variety of reasons.”

“Right,” Twilight agreed with a frown. “Because what are the chances she was fixing a drink at nine in the morning? Wait, you said hoof? She’s not a griffon, then?”

“No,” the princess answered, finally setting the photo down on the table, along with a very brief set of notes on her. “I’m afraid not.”

“A pony, huh?” Twilight took the items in her magic with a bit of reluctance. Princess Celestia always had hated when her little ponies let her down. The one in question was dun brown and… stocky was the best way to describe it. She wasn’t exactly unattractive, but all the same, she looked very much like somepony had taken Big Mac, turned him into a mare and crammed him into a figure that could almost look Spike in the eyes. Her stature aside, though, she was definitely farm stock. “Wait, the primary suspect is an earth pony?”

Princess Celestia gave a nod. “Magic is magic, Twilight. Given the right cutie mark and technique, earth pony magic is technically capable of all the same things unicorn magic is, it’s just… less flexible.”

“Sure, in theory,” Twilight said, raising an eyebrow at that. “But you still don’t see earth ponies raising the sun.”

“Quite,” Princess Celestia agreed. “Though all the same, I would consider it a personal favor if you didn’t mention the possibility to your friend, Pinkie Pie. I could do without actually putting it to the test.”

Twilight gave a small “Oh,” of realization and looked back at the photo. “So you think that this ‘Elizabeth’ is like Pinkie Pie?”

The princess took a deep breath and let it out in a heavy sigh. “It’s all but certain, yes.”

“What’s her cutie mark?” Twilight asked, doing her best not to betray her curiosity. This was a serious situation, after all.

Princess Celestia brushed the top photograph aside with her magic, revealing another one of a black dress being pulled up to reveal the brown flank of a very angry mare. “A golden chest with magic flowing out of it.”

“Pandora’s box?” Twilight’s eyes widened at the implications.

“That is my interpretation, yes,” the princess said.

Twilight hmmed. “Anything to support that?”

The princess actually looked away from Twilight in what looked like embarrassment. “She bribed no less than twelve of the guards that were set to watch her.”

“With what?” Twilight asked, incredulous. “Tell me they didn’t let her keep her things.”

Princess Celestia leaned back and counted off a number of things, “Gold, jewels, bearer bonds, illicit substances… forged notes from me, personally acquitting her. There seems to be no bottom to her ability to produce exactly the right price to sway somepony. I very nearly decided to make good on my threat to send her to tartarus, but given her ability… I fear what she could do there if I did.”

That seemed almost impossible until Twilight remembered the comparison to Pinkie Pie. In that light, it actually made entirely too much sense. “Wait, did you mean that she attempted to bribe twelve of the guard, or—”

“No, those are only the ones that she was successful with,” the princess clarified, which explained her uncharacteristic embarrassment. The royal guard—more so than the regular town and city guard—were an extension of her will. If they could be bribed, it reflected badly on her.

“I suppose it’s too much to hope that she’s only a master of illusions?” Twilight asked, though it was a weak hope. “It would mesh with the memory alteration.”

“No,” Princess Celestia said, though she clearly wished it were otherwise. “I’m afraid not, and besides—memories are only half of what was changed. The worse half by far, yes, but we can’t ignore the physical events that they were meant to cover up, which are almost as insidious; pipes and plumbing all as if they’ve been there since the building was built, which is to say nothing of the physical records.”

“What about the others, then?” she suggested, moving down her mental list before she realized what that left her with. “If she’s some sort of master of the physical, then the one responsible for the mental alterations could be somepony else! Have they—”

“Calm down, Twilight.” The princess laid her hoof on Twilight’s much smaller one. “Yes, the others have all been separated and isolated; nopony has been allowed access to them.”

“They haven’t been interrogated?” That was surprising; it was already the middle of the afternoon, since she hadn’t been called until after the arrests had been made.

Princess Celestia shook her head. “Luna is keeping an eye on them remotely, but I wanted to wait until you arrived as well, just in case. Given your expertise with magic—especially the more modern developments—you may well notice something that we would miss. What information we do have doesn’t look good, however.”

Princess Celestia dropped another set of files on the table, comprised of photographs and some short notes attached to each. Twilight picked the top one up in her magic; it was a picture of a well-groomed adult unicorn mare with a flawless white coat and mane. She wasn’t really any taller or slimmer than the average mare, but she had an elegant look to her that Twilight wouldn’t have been surprised to see on the cover of a mare’s magazine. “Name… not applicable? Cutie mark… none?” Twilight frowned. “That can’t be right.”

“It’s exactly as it says,” the princess said. “The true name spells all return a garbled mess or complete silence. Written versions send the quill dancing through the air before shooting off into a wall. She is either an eldritch horror from whence such things have no meaning, or—”

“A badly made equuculus with a damaged or absent soul,” Twilight finished for her as she begun to understand. “In other words, an artificial pony created from whole cloth by our resident master alchemist and miracle maker.”

Princess Celestia nodded, not at all bothered by the interruption. “The practice is banned, of course, but somehow I can’t see Miss Elizabeth caring overmuch about such things. I haven’t mentioned it, but her attitude is… exceptionally poor.”

“Considering she’s already going to be brought up on bribery charges no matter what the rest of the investigation turns up, that doesn’t surprise me,” Twilight agreed. “The equuculus, too; how solid is that?”

“Take a look for yourself,” Princess Celestia said, motioning to the pile of files. “In fact, take the next three.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow at that, but did as she was instructed. The photos were less than helpful, however. They all showed the same exceptionally tall, gangly mare who had a strange, mottled coat and bright orange hair. In ironic contrast to the previous mare, she was as leggy as a model, but didn’t really carry herself in such a way; instead, she was dressed in a full suit—including pants—and looked mostly like a butler or chauffeur. Twilight supposed that, like the plain white coat and mane of the previous mare, the strangeness of this one’s coat might also suggest unnatural origins, but it was a flimsy lead. “I don’t get it. What am I missing?”

Princess Celestia’s mouth twisted into a brief, weak smile of mischief that barely escaped the heavy mood of the morning. “What tribe did you say she is?” she asked, covering the photos with her hoof.

Twilight’s face contorted in thought. “She’s a unicorn, isn’t she?”

Princess Celestia removed her hoof. “Look again,” she said with a nod.

“Caolán Ó Cochláin,” Twilight read, struggling with the galeic name. “Earth pony? That can’t be right,” she said, paging through the other files. “I’m sure I saw—Caolán Ó Cochláin, pegasus? Caolán Ó Cochláin, unicorn? Is she a shapeshifter?”

“That would be easier to explain, but no. They are three separate mares, each bearing the same true name, and while the suits covers it in the photos, it’s confirmed that they also lack a single cutie mark between them.”

Twilight’s eyes widened, and then narrowed in doubt. She looked back at the photos, but aside from the presence of a horn on one and wings on another, she couldn’t tell them apart. “That’s uncanny. More equuculi servants, then? You’re sure it’s not an enchantment like the one on royal guard armor?”

“Yes, the clothing is entirely mundane,” she said, eying the photographs uneasily. “Though the one we disrobed reacted to its removal as if…”

“As if what?” Twilight asked, cocking her head to the side. She didn’t know her mentor to be hesitant.

Princess Celestia closed her eyes and took a slow, steadying breath. “My apologies, my student, but I am very old, and not all of the things I’ve seen are pleasant. I was reminded of the days when I was forced to oversee gryphon executions of pony criminals. She reacted as if… they were skinning her alive.”

Twilight winced at the disturbing image. “That’s… horrible.”

“Yes,” the princess agreed, downcast. “The guards were unprepared for it, to say the least, which is why there are no photographs and the others were allowed to remain as they were after being searched, in spite of protocol.”

Twilight nodded, understanding. The royal guard was not a hardened military organization as the griffons had; they served as the face and voice of the government as much as they did spear and shield. “Still, that’s some rather extreme conditioning—but why? Is it so important to her that they never be seen out of uniform?”

“As you said; much of this seems to have been done according to whimsy,” the princess reminded her. “In this case, it seems as though the simpler the command, the stronger and less open to interpretation it likely is.”

“Do I want to know what the rest are?” Twilight asked, worried that the files were getting worse. Even listening to Princess Celestia talk about such repulsive crimes was distressing. She would persevere, of course, as she always did, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t hope for something better.

Princess Celestia dashed that hope with an uneasy look—at least at first. “To be honest, I’m not sure about the others. Elizabeth and the four equuculi lived in the larger apartment, while the last three were divided amongst the remaining two apartments on the floor. In addition, these last three ponies possess cutie marks, show evidence of memory tampering that the others do not and seem to possess records that are genuine, so it’s quite possible that they may just be victims.”

“Or Elizabeth has improved her art to the point where it’s indistinguishable from the real thing,” Twilight countered direly, then looked back down at the files she had on hoof. “Though regardless… complicit in her crimes or not, all the equuculi are victims of this ‘Elizabeth.’”

“Just so,” the princess said with a sad nod. “Hopefully, any programmed loyalty they may have can be circumvented. I would like to pardon them, should they be agreeable and it is safe to do so.”

“So let’s see these other ponies,” Twilight said, picking up the remaining files. “Vinyl Scratch, Octavia Melody and… Blossomforth? Princess, I know these ponies—all of them! Not well, but we’ve met.”

“I am aware,” she said, looking over the files. “And yet…”

“One unicorn pony, one earth pony, and one pegasus pony; two with white coats, one with red eyes and one with mane colors that make even me cringe,” Twilight said, cataloguing their oddities. “It’s circumstantial, but still suspect. Even if we assume the worst, though, it still leaves us with one problem.”

“The identity of our mind mage,” Princess Celestia agreed. She took the files in her magic and laid them out across the table so that they were all visible.

“Four ponies without cutie marks, two musicians and a weather pegasus that specializes in producing the ideal conditions for growing flowers. It’s not much to go on.”

“The DJ is the most suspect,” the princess said, pushing the file towards Twilight with her golden-shod hoof. “Given the large amount of magical equipment she has at her disposal and her regular access to large crowds. Bear in mind, however, that equuculi are not natural and any kind of magic could be hidden inside even those without marks.”

Twilight didn’t much like the suggestion. That DJ was the one that had played at her brother’s wedding—or so her memories told her. The changes were easy enough to detect, but not so easy to reverse. “I guess we’ll just have to see for ourselves,” she said with a grim reluctance.

Princess Celestia gave a nod and waved over one of the guard that was passing by the interrogation room. “Let my sister know that we’re ready for the first prisoner.”

⁂

We were all shocked enough by the soldiers crashing into the apartment that the trip to the local lockup went quickly and quietly, with nobody getting themselves sent to tartarus—which was, if I recalled right, the greek version of hell and apparently ‘a real place where we will be sent at the first sign of defiance.’ On the other hand, I’d give Beth about fifteen minutes alone with them before she pissed someone off enough to earn herself the trip.

It was a lot longer than fifteen minutes before I saw anyone again. The police station was strangely incongruous with the rest of the city, looking like it had been ripped straight out of an arabian palace. Everything was creamy marble, red carpets and gold trim, and the cell they put me in was no different. It was still a cell, though; featureless, plain, and, though they were gold, it had bars like any other—quite a lot of them, actually, with only one wall in four being made of the white marble that was so prevalent throughout the rest of the building.

As the day stretched on, hunger began to gnaw at my stomach; not an unreasonable reaction, considering I’d missed dinner, breakfast and lunch, by now. I spent quite a while considering the strange design of the prison in an attempt to distract myself and occupy my mind. Eventually, though, it came to me.

I was in a birdcage.

It didn’t look like a birdcage, and it wasn’t open to the sky, but it was on one of the higher floors of the police station, with large cells, high ceilings and what I eventually identified as a nice cross breeze coming down the curved hall that must have been open to the air somewhere.

It was a clever design and one that I quickly became grateful for once I worked out how to unfurl my wings a little and let the air flow over them. I didn’t realize at first, but they must have split us up by race. I didn’t remember the details of the cells the others were left in, just that we had started at ground level and I was the last of the group to be locked up. The other pegasus—Blossomforth, I think they called her—was on the floor below in a cell of similar design. There was probably room for a whole flock of pegasi on each floor, but the point was to separate us.

I didn’t know how I felt about being separated from the other two of me. It was going to happen eventually; it was probably even a good thing. Thinking back to those first moments waking up, I kind of liked the idea of having sisters, but it was just awkward when they were literally thinking the same thing you were and you were interrupting each other every time you opened your mouth. If the authorities expected to get different stories from the three of me by splitting us up, they’d be sorely disappointed.

And then, there was the elephant in the room. Not literally, because you probably couldn’t get one up the stairs, but the subject of stories was hanging over me. I had no doubt that the other two of me would tell the truth when it came down to it; we didn’t know enough about the situation to lie. Beth and the ex-faerie, however… they definitely had something going on. I had known that, but hadn’t wanted to push it. I’m not a confrontational person. I’m a bartender; I let people come to me.

I should have known it was going to come back to bite me the second the faerie described this wish as ‘my harlot-friend’s hell.’ That’s not something you just casually do. Of course, Beth wasn’t exactly coming out of this smelling like tulips and daisies when she’d had wishes of her own going on. I’d wished for this, but she got angry when it didn’t turn out like she’d hoped.

Honestly, that was pretty scary when I thought about it.

And I had a lot of time to think about it.

⁂

Pacing around the cell did wonders for my four-legged coordination and I even figured out how to move and flap my wings in a somewhat reliable manner. That wasn’t to say that I could fly, however. Whatever magic had allowed my proportionately small wings to hold me up earlier—and I do mean magic, because that’s what it had to be—was absent from the air that was keeping me comfortable. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that the species-specific design of the cell wasn’t just for my benefit, but the fact only made me more and more antsy as the afternoon stretched on.

Unfortunately, trying not to think about the things that had led to my current circumstances only left me the circumstances themselves to think about. I wasn’t that worried about being arrested, so that just left… everything else.

It’s funny how much less confident you can feel when there aren’t two more of you nodding their heads in agreement.

I was getting used to being a pony; that much was true. Getting used to being a female pony, well… I was no longer distracted by the feeling of cloth adjusting itself over my new anatomy when I walked—until I noticed it, anyway, and like breathing had to spend several minutes doing my level best to stop thinking about it.

Anyway, I was adjusting. Physically, at least. Adjusting to the idea of being a pony—let alone a female pony—was a different matter.

A frustrating matter.

There just wasn’t much that I could do about it in a vacuum. What did it mean to be a pony? What do ponies do? I wanted to pull that pegasus mare aside and ask question after question. I wanted to bury my face in the couch again, just to see how much dignity I could live without. I wanted to get naked and… figure out how how I felt about that.

Comparatively speaking, I mean. For science.

Instead, I was stuck in prison. Alone and bored out of my cute little skull.

Author's Notes:

There's going off the rails and then there's really going off the rails, but I just love the completely wrong conclusions made by Twilight and Celestia in a completely serious investigation setting. Since this was just an exercise, I really had no idea where I was going with it beforehand, but I really liked the idea of having a protagonist that's one of a set of identical twins (or triplets, in this case) since that's something I've literally never seen done anywhere (Cue people linking me all sorts of fanfiction and webcomics to prove me wrong) (There might have been a Harry Potter one, but if there was, it was 90% copy/pasted text anyway) (Yes, I've read some Harry Potter fanfiction; it's an incredibly frustrating genre and I blame Forthwith for giving me reason to do so).

Anyway, one of the more solid plans was to have a first arc where the earth ponies escape, the unicorns have to chase them down and the pegasi get trapped in Tartarus with Luna for a bit, just to give them some separate experiences and get Elizabeth tied down a bit before moving on to a more "what now?" kind of story.

【Sharing the Night】 Old Epilogue

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☼ ☼ ☼

As Celestia ascended the side of Canterlot mountain pulling a wagon of gold and jewels appropriated from the treasury, she couldn’t help but reflect on the matter at hoof. It was hard to believe that the pile of twisted metal in the saddlebags on her back had been any kind of pony, let alone an alicorn.

Her feelings about Harmony were complicated, but among them were guilts of several flavors. That the situation had broken down in such a way that Harmony had needed to sacrifice herself to save Luna in the first place felt like a failing on her part. She felt bad for being caught unprepared by Astri’s desperate escape, and that she hadn’t even borne witness to it was a particular regret.

These burdens, she was used to as much as one could be. She had lost—and failed—many ponies in her lifetime as a ruler of a nation. It was inevitable, and she could only endeavor that she would always do her best.

The fresh guilts that she wasn’t used to, on the other hoof, shamed and disappointed her. There were several of these, all mixed up around the fact that she did not entirely want Harmony back.

Part of it was simply recognizing that Harmony had not entirely welcomed life to begin with, though that, perhaps, could have been overcome with time.

Another part was the simple pragmatic conclusion that the Elements of Harmony had been more useful and more powerful than the alicorn herself. Perhaps this was because she had needed the guidance of the pure of heart to truly connect with the purity of purpose that slept inside of her; if so, then that, too, might have been a path that she could have walked eventually.

If it had been just those things, part of her might have shamefully hoped for the easier option, but the path forward would still have been clear; she would never have seriously considered anything else.

No, if all that Harmony had needed from her was a mentor and guide, she would have done her best and hopefully one day be proud of the mare that Harmony could have become—but that was not all that Harmony had needed from her; not according to Twilight Sparkle.

Celestia also felt guilty for the envy she felt for what her student and sister had, and while that, too, was a situation where her path was clear—if one that ached more than the others—it was also the root of her larger problem, because when Celestia reflected on the assertion that Harmony was her only option for romance, well… the only feelings she could drudge up for the matter were pangs of disappointment.

She didn’t truly blame Twilight her indiscretion. Certainly, she had not helped matters, but she would have inevitably considered it on her own, if only to distract herself from wanting what she could not have. Truthfully, she should probably thank Twilight, if only for preventing her from going too far down the rabbit hole looking for love in all the wrong places, considering that the list of otherwise eligible immortals included Discord.

Honestly, if Twilight had told her that Discord were her destined lover… well, she would have assumed it a joke, but it still wouldn’t have been as bad as Harmony. Discord’s antics made her feel like a parent with a rowdy child, trying to keep up, but Harmony just made her feel old—full stop.

Perhaps she was wrong, though. Perhaps Harmony would return and find wonder in the world; perhaps she would develop a biting sense of humor or become an incorrigible lech. One could say that this, too, was something that could be worked on—that they could fix.

But she shouldn’t—she couldn’t go into things want to ‘fix’ her. She could coax and guide a student to make them better to face the world, but she knew better than to try and change somepony so they might make a better partner for her. There was a small part of her that whispered in her ear to say that, intentional or not, this is what she had done with Twilight, and that would have turned out fine if not for matters that she could not have foreseen, but she quashed it with great prejudice. It was a line that she would not cross.

Shivering, she shook the idea from her train of thought. There was no point in tormenting herself drudging endlessly through moral quagmires when in all likelihood there would be no Harmony for her to pervert her mentorship of. She would find out soon enough, in any case; she had arrived at the summit—or close enough to it. The actual peak of the mountain was another few dozen feet up, but Canterlot mountain was as sharply topped as it appeared to be from a distance, and actually standing atop it, while satisfying a sense of drama, was not necessary.

The last time that Celestia had forced Harmony to manifest, she had used Canterlot’s largest telescope to focus the light of her sun in order to provide the power and environment that she had needed. This had been necessary because, unlike Luna, whose absolute control over her light had been shown the night previous, Celestia’s light became more of a thick, viscous conduit for her magic that she could only direct in heaving gouts of power when she took hold of it, as she had when fighting off the nameless dragon that Twilight and Luna had riled up.

What, then, was she doing here now? During her first, nearly disastrous attempt to create a body for Harmony, overexposure to Celestia’s magic had nearly killed the weakened alicorn, so what did she plan to do here, where her access to her magic was at its greatest?

Quite a lot, actually.

Her first action was to undo the harness and decouple herself from the wagon. Once she was free, she took a moment just to stretch and rest. With it being daylight, she could have simply remanifested herself as Twilight had become accustomed to doing, but for her, the relief she felt was worth the ache in her muscles it took to bring it about, and it wasn’t often she got a chance to experience it.

Once she was satisfied, her muscles cooling, Celestia walked around to the back of the wagon and made to undo the latch at the back. Somehow, it had stuck. Not terribly concerned, she turned around and gave the side of the wagon a good kick, successfully knocking the latch—and something else loose amidst an avalanche of riches that came pouring out the back.

“Oof, ow,” grumbled Discord as he pulled himself free of the surprisingly heavy mass wearing several necklaces, two crowns and somehow having found the gaudiest of rings to fit all the digits on both his lion’s paw and griffon talon. “I swear, this is the last time I ride coach.”

Celestia rolled her eyes, not terribly perturbed by Discord’s presence—which wasn’t a thought that she’d ever expected to have, but it was easier to entertain his sense of humor when he was no longer capable of turning the sky into blurple jelly when he was pitching a fit.

“Hello, Discord,” she said, welcoming him with as placid and serene a smile as she could manage, working around him to levitate the gold into a clean mound, plucking bits and bobs off of Discord as she went. “To what do I owe the pleas—oh.” Celestia halted her preparations and took a moment to look him over in a new light. “You… actually care about her?” she asked, caught somewhat dumbfounded by the concept, not just because it was unusual for him, but because he might actually be the only one who really, honestly did.

“Pfah! Me? Care? Don’t be absurd,” he insisted, waving the notion off like a bothersome fly. “But, ah, you know, since you mentioned it, I don’t suppose you’d mind if I stuck around and watched? Professional curiosity, you understand. In magic. I was quite the magic-dooer in my time.”

“Magic-dooer?” Celestia repeated, cracking a wry smile. “Is that a technical term?”

“Don’t listen to these kids nowadays with their horns and thaumamagical-whastsits,” he said, miming as if shoving the very idea away with his hands. “Real magic-doing comes from the spleen.”

“Not the heart?” Celestia asked, playing along.

“The heart?” Discord repeated, scoffing. “As if the heart ever has time for magic, always thump-ba-dumping—no creativity, no pizazz.” Discord sidled up next to Celestia and—to her stunned shock, since she’d thought him completely without his tricks—opened his chest just a crack as if it were a trenchcoat and he was selling watches. Inside, Celestia saw what looked like a stylized heart burning green with dragonfire. “No, my dear, the heart functions on an entirely different set of priorities.”

“I… see,” Celestia said, though she really didn’t. Her short briefing on Discord’s origins had been rather truncated, given Harmony’s presence at the time and her desire not to revisit past events. Clearly some important aspects had been left out. “In any case,” she continued, extracting herself from Discord’s personal space as he put his heart away. “You are quite welcome to watch my magic-doing, so long as you don’t interfere.”

“Interfere?” he asked, predictably feigning innocence. “Why Celestia, it’s as if you don’t even know me.”

Deciding that it probably would have ruined the mood if she’d pointed out that she really didn’t know him all that well, Celestia continued her preparations, shooing him away from the pile of gold and separating out the gemstones, using small applications of her magic to soften the fittings where necessary. When she was finally just about ready, she removed the saddlebags containing the damaged pieces of Harmony that Fluttershy had collected, thinking to set them away from her work area for the time being, and it was then that an idea struck her.

Looking down at the saddlebags floating in her magic, Celestia asked herself if this was really a good idea, ignored herself and held them out to Discord. “Would you like to hold her?” she asked. “I need her kept away from too much of my magic.”

Discord hesitated, but soon enough took the saddlebags from Celestia without a word. Sometimes, she thought as she watched him back away, it really was just like dealing with a rambunctious child. He was willful and prone to break his toys when he threw a fit, but not altogether a bad pony… dragon… whatever-thing.

Finally ready for the first stage, she pushed thoughts of Discord from her mind and pulled the thinnest strand of her magic from the sun as she was able and got to work fashioning something much like her original attempt—a golden sarcophagus imbued with her magic. The metal, saturated with enough power to destroy Canterlot, would make it impossible for any other magic to coexist, thus preventing any magical interference from outside the shell.

To this, she added the gemstones, lining the inside of it from wall to wall until it shimmered like a geode, each one enchanted with a particular spell attuned to her magic. The spell would crystalize her magic, containing and preventing it from damaging what would be placed inside.

Finally, quickly, as the cracks between the gemstones began to fill with crystalized magic, Celestia added more gold—a thick, heavy layer of it heated by proxy in a crucible and poured in by hoof so as to leave it as magically neutral as possible. This final layer all but filled the inside of the sarcophagus, leaving only a vague hollow pony shape that was not quite a mould in the center of it, shaped in such a way as to circulate the trickle of magic that Harmony’s remains were producing in the same way that Celestia had before. By the time she was finished, Celestia was sweating from handling the molten metal and was glad to step away from it, if only for a moment.

Wasting no time, she waved Discord over. “Quickly, we must place her inside and completely seal it. The remaining heat should do no harm.”

Discord looked dubiously at the contraption resembling both an implement of torture and something to bury a pony in, but didn’t hesitate in handing over the saddlebags and helping to arrange the remains of Harmony inside of it without simply dumping them in like a sack of plaster. Once that was done, Celestia did as she had said and shut the sarcophagus with a heavy, muted thud that was more felt than heard in the silence of the windswept mountaintop. Small additions of her empowered gold were made to ensure the seal, and then, it was done.

“And now?” Discord prompted.

Celestia let out a heavy breath and walked over to the wagon. Hopping up into the back with the slight help of her wings, she set about to find herself a comfortable place to sit. “Now we wait and see.”

And so they waited, and Celestia and Discord talked. It was an interesting experience for her, if a little frustrating at times, because of all the things that Discord was, he was never contrite or apologetic for anything he’d done. He was childish, but not a child. In fact, the more she talked to him, the more she thought of him instead as an old hermit that had long lost any care for the trappings of maturity, simple in his desire for novelty and so isolated that the concerns of others had ceased to register. She would almost feel guilty for sealing him in stone for a thousand years if not for the fact that his isolation had been measured in eons before she had even been born and he had not changed appreciably since—at least, not until he had lost his powers to Twilight’s ascension.

Now… she didn’t know what to think, or how to judge him. As he was not a child and had, at one point, known, understood and abided by the tenets of society, his actions could not be dismissed under the defense of ignorance. Being immortal, senility did not apply to him, but all the same, he had long since broken in ways and for reasons that he could not be blamed for. Responsibility for the actions of a drunk or otherwise mentally impaired pony’s actions sat squarely on the pony who had put them in that state, but assigning blame… wasn’t entirely the question at hoof. The question was what to do and how to treat him.

In the end, she failed to come to a reasonable conclusion by the time the sun was setting in the sky and she decided that it had been long enough. She waited for the next lull in the conversation, took a breath to prepare herself, and stood up.

“Is she…?” Discord asked.

Celestia hesitated, realizing that she had not really explained her expectations. “Perhaps,” was her vague response. “Normally I would expect a newly manifest alicorn to break free, but with how Harmony was, I can envision her waking up in an enclosed space and deciding to simply lay there unmoving. Alternatively, she may simply require more time; the magic that the remains were producing was quite a bit weaker than when she was the Elements of Harmony.”

When Celestia cracked open the sarcophagus, however, it became clear that Harmony was not simply waiting for them, nor did she require more time. What had formed inside the mass gold was… not an alicorn—not yet, though that was perhaps too optimistic a way to say it. The magically-neutral gold had been cannibalized like the white of a yolk, as it had been meant to, but what had grown in its place was a twisted and gnarled bramble, and at the heart of it, a seed.

Celestia look in a long, slow breath and let it out. “I’m sorry,” she said, and to her relief, she actually was.

“Ah, well,” Discord said, turning away from the sight while giving every impression that he was only mildly disappointed. “It was nice while it lasted.”

Celestia shook her head and let him be. She was, as she had expected to be, a little bit relieved. Things had just become much simpler for her—or so she thought. In abandoning her old concerns, new ones sprouted to take their place as she asked herself what this would mean for her when the seedling sprouted.

Presumably, they would have four alicorns once more, only this time instead of being faced with the moral dilemma of trying to change a guileless ancient alicorn to better suit her, she would have a foal; a blank slate who was completely innocent with only Harmony’s power to sustain her. Even if Celestia did not raise her, even if she somehow managed to avoid tainting their interactions with the shadow of what was expected to come later, this new alicorn would never be her equal.

Not unless Celestia made them equal.

Celestia did not know the story of the alicorn that Harmony had refused to hear named in her presence; she did not know the tragedies of her life or how things had devolved to the point that the world was destroyed and Harmony was created in order to give life to Twilight and Luna, but she did know that Twilight had referred to Harmony as ‘the last good that she’d had.’

Clearly it hadn’t been much.

Celestia, on the other hoof had… quite a bit more—not that she was foolish enough to rip out her good and place it in this seed, but what she knew of history said that she could, and that opened up a great number of possibilities. Here and now, she had the power to influence how this new alicorn would grow and develop in any of a number of subtle ways. She could make them equals and hope for the best, or she could mix some of her essence in, wrap it around this alicorn’s being at the moment of conception so that matters between them were never in question.

The very thought disgusted her, but she held onto it as a reminder that if she did the wrong thing here, the consequences of her mistake would ripple out into the future without end.

It was for that reason that she already knew what she would have to do. She could not contaminate her choice with wants or wishes, hopes and dreams for what might be. She could not rely on things going right, or the truth of the matter never coming to light. Her choice would have to be unassailable and entirely selfless.

“Celestia?” Discord prompted, interrupting her train of thought. “It’s getting dark. I don’t suppose you planned an easy way off this mountain?”

She was sorely tempted to take the out that Discord had given her—to go home, to plan and to think. It was the only reasonable option—but she could not afford to be reasonable here. She could not afford to calculate the pros and cons or gather more information. Nopony was threatening her, yet here in this moment, suddenly and without warning, she was faced with making a choice that would the shape everything to come.

“I’m afraid you might have to find your own way back, Discord,” she said, never taking her eyes off the seed in front of her.

Discord was taken aback. “What, you’re just going to go off and demanifest without me? That’s cold, Celestia,” he said, rubbing his arms for emphasis. “Literally cold, too—brr!”

“Someone gave you the fire of a dragon,” Celestia reminded him flatly. “I assure you, you’ll be fine—though no, I won’t be leaving.”

Discord stared at her, flummoxed. “I’m not sure I entirely like the look on your face. Please tell me you just really, really wanted to go camping after all?”

Celestia motioned at the seed. “This… will not solve matters; only put them off for the future. There cannot be two unequal alicorns of the day.”

“I would be less creeped out if you took your eyes off the divine embryo—just saying. I mean, I’m all for birth control—some ponies really should not breed—but this is taking it a bit far.”

Celestia shook her head. “No, I shall not destroy it. I suspect that doing so would only delay the inevitable—though it would, at least, put them out of my reach until they ascended. They would still always be second to me in all ways, however, and that I cannot condone. No, instead I shall take them into myself and—”

“NO!” Discord shouted, bodily tackling Celestia away from the seed. For goodness’ sake—what is wrong with you freaking alicorns.”

Celestia froze, completely unprepared for the eventuality that she would end up with Discord on top of her. Once she had collected herself, however, she levitated the draconequus off of her and stood. “You cannot dissuade me, Discord. It must be done. Things have been out of balance for far too long, and for my own unwitting part in that, this will have to be my recompense.”

“A single point cannot be balanced!” Discord yelled, squirming in the air as Celestia held him aloft. “Release me so I can smack some sense into you!”

Celestia blinked and did as he asked. Sure enough, no sooner had she put him down than Discord leapt to his feet and ineffectually smack Celestia upside the head. “Monotheism—is—bad!” he said, pausing to whack Celestia with his feeble mortal arms—though the lion’s paw still packed a bit of a wallop.

Celestia tried to hold him back with just her foreleg, but unlike her little ponies, Discord actually had more reach than her, though he seemed to be weakening rather quickly. “St-stop that!” she cried, too bewildered to think to just pick him up again or properly defend herself with magic. “Yes! Monotheism is bad! I’m going to join with the seed and split myself back into two equal alicorns!”

Discord froze, his griffon talons gripping Celestia’s horn and his lion’s paw wound up for another smack. Abruptly, he let go and stepped back, looking at his hands like they had touched a god—or a goddess, which, of course, they had. “Did that actually work?” he asked nopony in particular.

“No!” Celestia yelled, huffing with indignance, her cheeks red with embarrassment. “You just interrupted me!”

Celestia’s denial brought Discord’s attention back to her. For a brief moment, he looked uncertain, then he scrunched his face up in petulance. “Nope, if you do this, that’s what I’m going to tell everypony—that I smacked some sense into you and you sacrificed yourself in contrition to be reborn as two wee foals that I hid amongst the peasantry to hide them from the evil princesses of the night.”

Honestly, after their little kerfuffle, Discord did not look like he could handle one foal at the moment, let alone two. If she didn’t know that he would be fine, she might have actually been concerned for him. “Firstly, there is no reason that my resulting selves would regress entirely to foalhood. I cannot say how much of me shall remain in them, but with the proper division of celestial mass between them, they should be no younger than my sister.”

“Your other sister, you mean, as two of you will make three in total,” Discord said, cocking his head as he looked at her. “Well, you always did strike me as a bit of a narcissist, but I never suspected incest.”

“Second,” she continued without dignifying that with a response. “I would not leave myself in your care even if the only other choice was a rockodile—and third, I wasn’t asking.” Without another word, Celestia plucked the seed from its cradle of brambles, bent her legs and launched herself into the sky, leaving him behind as she headed for her sun as it neared the horizon.

Out of the corner of her eye, Celestia saw Discord collapse under the wave of pressure from her takeoff. He was such a drama queen, she thought privately to herself as she flew off literally into the sunset, never noticing that the seed cradled in her hooves was rather warm and glowing a faint green.

★ The End ★

【Equal Opportunity Ascension】 Not Chapter 23

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Chapter 23

After a thousand years at the Everfree’s mercy, the Castle of the Two Sisters was in ruins; the roof of the main hall had caved in and several towers had collapsed. All in all, though, it could have been worse.

“Yeah—I think we can work with this,” Twilight mused as she walked through the central area where the Elements of Harmony had once sat on display.

Rarity made noncommittal noises. “Perhaps… but darling, I realize that you may not be entirely comfortable with your role as a princess, but claiming a castle in the middle of the murder forest where nopony can visit you is hardly the answer.”

“Are you kidding?!” Rainbow Dash said, flying above. “This place is awesome! It even has a moat!”

“It's not really a moat,” Twilight clarified. “It’s a gorge that runs around three-fifths of the castle. There’s a short drop in the back, but it levels out to an area that used to be a small town, which has its own wall, which is as much in need of repair as the rest of this.”

“Ahem,” Rarity said, not accustomed to being ignored. “Murder forest.”

“You do realize we don’t actually call it that, right?” Applejack said.

“We do now,” Rarity insisted.

“That’s not actually why I’m doing this, Rarity,” Twilight said, rolling her eyes. “It actually has very little to do with it.”

“‘Very little,’” Rarity repeated, raising an eyebrow at Twilight. “So it is part of it.”

“Very little,” Twilight repeated in turn. “It’s not like it’s going to stay inaccessible anyway,” she said.

“It’s not?” Rarity asked.

“No, it’s not,” Twilight confirmed. “I’m serious about this, Rarity. I do expect to end up doing a lot of the work just because I can, but this isn’t a weekend project. I have a budget and I expect I’ll have to bring ponies and materials in somehow. At the very least, I probably need at least a dozen ponies just to dust this place.

“As for how to get them here safely…” she added. “Well, pegasus carriage is the simplest way for small loads or ponies and we could always scale up that option with some kind of airship. That isn’t really in the budget, though. What I really need to do is have the road completely redone. Once that’s done, I’m pretty sure that I can come up with something to protect it.”

“Did Princess Celestia really agree to all of this?” Rarity asked, somewhat dubious.

“She did,” Twilight assured her. “This is Princess Celestia we're talking about. Are you really surprised?”

“I suppose not,” Rarity admitted, allowing the subject to drop for the time being.

The front hall ended with a large plain stained glass window and two stairways that lead up and around it to the throne room beyond.

“You know,” Twilight said, breaking the silence. “I would have expected you to be a little more excited about this, Rarity.”

“Oh, I am!” Rarity insisted. “The architecture! The tapestries! This a veritable gold mine of inspiration! It’s just…” She gestured vaguely. “The whole ‘murder forest,’ thing, you know.”

“Would you please stop saying ‘murder forest?’” Twilight pleaded, rather exasperated. “It’ll be fine!”

“You say that,” Rarity said. “But I’m sure Sunset Shimmer said the same thing, and she’s only just gotten out of the hospital.”

“Look,” Twilight said. “It’ll be a whole lot less murder-forest-y if I can just reclaim my magic, okay?”

“Will it?” Rainbow Dash asked. “I mean, I guess maybe the timberwolves might just disappear, but there’s still going to be manticores, rockadiles and ursas; they’re not just going to calm down because the murder forest isn’t pushing them to—y’know—murder any more.”

“Wait—hold up there, a sec,” Applejack interrupted. “What was that about the timberwolves?”

Rainbow Dash shrugged. “Well, I just figure, you only find them here in the Everfree, right? They’re probably part of its magic, or feeding on it or something.”

“Ah hope not,” Applejack said with some concern. “The timberwolves are an important part of the zap apple harvest.”

“Uhh, I hate to break it to you,” Rainbow Dash said, flying upside down to look at Applejack. “But your magical apples probably aren't going to be a thing after the forest stops being magical no matter what happens with the timberwolves.”

For once, Applejack seemed to be stunned into silence. “But—we can’t not have a zap apple harvest!” she finally insisted.

Rainbow Dash shrugged and kept flapping upside-down. “Hey, I like zap apple jam as much as the next mare, but it’s like… On the one hoof, you have the immortality and relative goddesshood of one of your friends, and on the other hoof… apples.”

“Please don’t exaggerate,” Twilight said, facehoofing lightly. “Alicorns are not goddesses. Princess Celestia and Princess Luna just have cutie marks in very large-scale things that being an alicorn synergizes with.”

Suddenly, everypony had stopped and were giving Twilight strange looks.

“What?” Twilight asked, squirming under the attention.

Rainbow Dash did a small loop to bring her next to Twilight and patted her on the head faux-consolingly. “It’s alright, Twilight. You might only have a cutie mark in all magic ever, but we believe in you!”

Twilight scowled and whapped Rainbow Dash’s hooves away. “Fine, I’m one of them—but alicorns still aren’t goddesses. Not even close.”

“Can we get back to the zap apples?” Applejack requested. “’Cause Ah really don’t like the sound of this.”

“It might not be that bad…” Fluttershy suggested. “If Twilight regains the power of the Everfree, then she should be able to do whatever the zap apples need in order to grow, right?”

“Uhhh…” Twilight had no idea how she was supposed to do that. “Maybe?” she hedged. “Honestly, I’d ask Rainbow first.”

“Rainbow?” Applejack asked. “How do you figure?”

Twilight blinked. “Isn’t it obvious? All four stages are accompanied by weather phenomena and the zap apples are rainbow-colored. I figure it’s some combination of earth pony and pegasus magic that makes them possible. It might be that they have to come from the same source, but I doubt it. When you think about it, it really seems like the interaction of two different systems feeding each other.”

“You think it’s that easy?” Applejack asked.

“Well, it can’t hurt to try,” Rarity declared. “As Rainbow said, this is much more important than some apples, even if they are quite the exquisite delicacy.”

Applejack looked to Rainbow Dash with some concern, not entirely mollified.

“Hey, I’m willing to give it a shot if you are,” Rainbow Dash said. “If it works, though, you’re gonna owe me, like, all the zap apple cider.”

“If you can grow me zap apples on demand, Ah’ll rename the farm Rainbow Apple Acres,” Applejack promised.

“Oh my,” Fluttershy said, blushing, and Rarity wasn’t far off with her tittering. Twilight wasn’t nearly so affected, but she did have to clench her jaw and look away in order to control herself.

“Jeez, Applejack,” Rainbow Dash said, landing and throwing a wing over her back. “At least buy me dinner first, yeah?”

***

“I’m not saying that living in a castle wouldn’t be cool and all, but is this really going to help?” Spike asked once everyone had gone their own ways to explore the castle, he and Twilight searching for the castle library.

Twilight was slightly distracted in looking around, so just asked, “What do you mean, Spike?”

“It’s just—you said this is about sympathetic magic, right?” Spike said. “I guess I don’t see how living in a great big castle in the murder forest is gonna be at all similar to how Princess Amore’s sister lived. I got the impression she was more of a hut-on-the-plains pony.”

“It's not about sympathetic magic,” Twilight said, shaking her head as the two of them climbed some stairs.

“It's not?” Spike asked, confused. “But I thought that was what got all this started?”

“Sunset looking into sympathetic magic is what got this started,” Twilight clarified. “She’s an incredible liar, though. I’m not. I can’t just change who I am in order to sync myself up with the magic of the Everfree.”

“Then why bother with all of this?” he said, shying away from a dark alcove as they passed it.

“I’ve been treading water with my research and no amount of sitting around meditating on the forest is getting me anywhere either,” Twilight said. “I need to do experiments, and to do experiments, I need a lab.”

***

As expected, Twilight and Spike did eventually find a library up in one of the towers. It was comparatively small and out of the way, clearly a personal library rather than one that would have been available to the public, but it was possible that that was all that they had had back then.

It was also, beyond all expectations, full of books.

“Who would do this?” Twilight asked, brushing the dust off of an ancient book, On Levitation and the Art of Stonelaying. “Who would just leave all these books out here in the middle of nowhere? What if the roof had leaked or the animals had gotten in?”

“The same pony who left six ancient artifacts here?” Spike deadpanned.

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine, we know who, but why? Princess Celestia is the one who taught me to take care of books!”

“She obviously didn’t think she needed them,” he said. “What’s the big deal? We get rid of books all the time to make room for new ones.”

“It’s not the same thing, Spike!” Twilight insisted. “This is history!”

Spike shrugged. “It wasn’t at the time.”

***

“There you are!” came an annoyed shout from the stairs.

Twilight blinked, looking up from her book. “Rainbow?” she said, spotting her flying friend. “Was there something you needed?”

“Uhh, yeah!” Rainbow said. “It’s been hours. Everypony else has already gotten lost, found and lost again with all the crazy traps and secret passages in this place and it’s gonna be dark soon. We gotta get going.”

Twilight glanced around the room looking for a window to confirm that it really was that late, but there wasn’t one, which would explain it. “…Oh,” she said, not terribly bothered. “Sorry—though actually, your timing is just about perfect.”

“Come again?” Rainbow Dash asked as Twilight headed to the stairs.

“You’ll see,” Twilight assured her.

Making her way back to the front hall of the castle took next to no time at all once she knew the way. The castle may have had all sorts of twists and turns to get lost in—and apparently secret passages if the stories Rainbow Dash was telling her were true—but it was still less than half the size of Castle Canterlot. Actually, one followed the other, as the complicated layout was necessary in order to make full use of the compact space.

“So,” Twilight said, once everypony had been gathered. “As you might expect, having a castle in the middle of a—” She glared at Rarity. “—Murder forest… is a problem that Princess Celestia and Princess Luna had before. The solution that they came up with was to enchant the road out of the forest with a spell that would keep travelers safe with a magical barrier that repelled the creatures of the forest.”

“That’s great and all,” Rainbow Dash said and gestured out the door. “But in case you hadn’t noticed, that road is long gone.”

Twilight shook her head. “‘That road’ is three carts wide and made of pavers as thick as the ones used in this castle. It’s still there; you just can’t see it. Here, let me show you.”

Twilight stepped out the door and lit her horn, searching for the spell that the book that she’d been reading all afternoon had described. Without that description, Twilight wouldn’t have known what to look for—or to look in the first place—but now it came through clear as day. All she had to do was feed magic into it.

Lots and lots of magic.

The spell was a hungry one, easily taking in everything she could give it, unicorn magic or alicorn magic. In fact, it seemed to take the alicorn magic even easier than any of the spells that she had previously experimented with, which was a revelation. Slowly, she found that she was able to ease off on the unicorn magic entirely, which interestingly also seemed to reduce the conscious attention she had to pay to the spell.

As she continued to pour alicorn magic into the spell, two lines of pink magic burst forward from the door of the castle, running out over the grass and out to the ravine and stretching high into the sky until they faded away. Loose dirt and dust were thrown away revealing large paving stones two ponies wide, and even where the grass had taken root, it seemed to not want to be there.

“Woah,” Rainbow Dash remarked, and everypony else nodded.

“Come on,” Twilight said, starting down the road. “It looks like I need to walk the whole thing to get the magic to spread.”

None of them moved, however, and they weren’t just looking at the road. They were looking at her. “What?” she said, flattening her ears in apprehension of being stared at.

“Well… Look at yourself, darling,” Rarity said, producing a small hoof mirror for her.

Blinking, Twilight took the mirror. As expected, since she had reduced the unicorn magic that she was using to almost nothing, the glow around her horn had similarly faded to imperceptibility.

The glow around the rest of her? Not so much.

It wasn’t obvious at first; not like the nimbus of power that her horn produced when she was channeling magic through it. It was just the smallest, subtlest flexing of that aura that she’d seen when she was injured, softening her features and giving her an ethereal glow. It was the sort of thing that might even go unnoticed by somepony who wasn’t familiar with her and hadn’t just seen her come out of a dusty old ruin.

All, that is, except for the way it deepened and lifted her mane in a blatantly familiar way.

“Ah,” Twilight said, nonplussed. “Well, that’s awkward, though it does explain a few things.”

***

The sheer amount of magical energy that Twilight was feeding into the spell protecting the road through the Everfree was enormous. It made sense, then, that the effects would be similarly impressive.

It didn’t seem so at first, with the spell struggling to so much as peel back the grass that had grown over it, but as was the nature of alicorn magic, every bit she sent into the spell remained there, and soon, that compounding effect began to show.

The first sign that she wasn’t just pouring water through a sieve came when she reached the ravine and giant blocks of stone leapt out of it to form a bridge. Centuries of wear were reversed in seconds; cracks were mended, gravel came together to fill gaps and even the grit and dust settled into the rough face of the stone to produce a flat, polished surface. It wasn’t anything she couldn’t have done with a bunch of levitation and that spell of Rarity’s, except that it was all automatic. She didn’t even have to know that the bridge had existed, let alone what it had looked like, yet there it was.

“Okay, now that was pretty cool,” Rainbow Dash said, looping around the bridge to get a look at it from the bottom.

Applejack, on the other hoof, looked a little wary as she crossed over it alongside everypony else. “Looks solid enough,” she reassured herself, running one hoof along the stone wall of the bridge, complete with mortar. “This ain’t gonna just fall again once we’re over?”

“There’s no reason it would,” Twilight said, turning around to look at it once she’d crossed to the other side. “I expect that’s just the road maintenance part of the spell. You certainly could do something similar and make it temporary to act as a sort of drawbridge, but it wasn’t mentioned in the book and I didn’t get the impression that it was that complex.”

“So, this is alicorn magic?” Rarity asked as Twilight turned and the group continued on, following a building wave of magic that was pushing aside large rocks and mounds of dirt that had settled to cover the road.

“Sort of?” Twilight said, not quite sure of the distinction. “I am powering it with alicorn magic and you probably wouldn’t want to try with anything else, but the actual spell is no different than any other.”

“But there’s no way a normal spell would have lasted this long, right?” Rainbow Dash said.

“I’m sure it helped,” Twilight said. “But there have been unicorn enchantments that have lasted for just as long. It’s a question of structure, not power. Alicorn magic is persistent in ways I still can’t explain, even when it shouldn’t be, but you don’t need to break the laws of thaumadynamics to cast a spell that lasts a long time; you just need to anchor it to something and give it a way to hold on to or replenish a store of magic.”

“Huh. Then how come it isn’t used more often?” Rainbow Dash asked.

Twilight shrugged. “Same reason cloud houses aren’t more common, even for pegasi; it just isn’t convenient in a mixed society like most of Equestria.

“If you go to Canterlot, you can actually buy a magic-powered blender, for example, but there’s no way something like that can run off of the trickle of ambient magic in the air and while producing magic from a natural energy source like geothermal is theoretically possible, there’s no good way to pipe magic to a house like water, electricity and gas, so in practical terms you pretty much need a unicorn to power it like with that cider-pressing monstrosity that the Flim Flam brothers built.

“Compare that to electricity, which we have dozens of ways to produce both on the ground and in cloud houses and it’s easy to see why it’s the more common and practical option. That said, we have much better ways to store magic than we do electricity, but it’s underutilized.”

“Well, that’s lame,” Rainbow Dash said. “Electrical appliances can’t reverse gravity like magic can.”

Twilight gave Rainbow Dash who was doing something akin to a backstroke in the air a dubious look. “You say that as if gravity is anything but a polite suggestion to you.”

“Eh, you know what I mean,” Rainbow Dash said, waving her hoof as if to say that the details didn’t matter.

“Well, I don't know what else to tell you,” Twilight said with a shrug. “Ponies are pretty self-sufficient. We all have our special talents and with that comes everypony having their own way to do things. Enchantments are out there if you know where to look, but big ones like this or the one that holds Canterlot up are only practical with an alicorn powering them.”

“Speaking of which,” Rarity interjected, still marveling at the way a space wide enough for a dozen ponies to walk side-by-side was being cleared before them. “How are you doing, Twilight? This is a lot of power you’re using; surely you must be getting tired?”

“I am beginning to feel the drain,” Twilight admitted. “But nowhere near what I’d be feeling if even half of what I was using was unicorn magic. This is huge. If I can replicate this level of control over the ratio of unicorn to alicorn magic in my own spells, it’ll be incredible. It’s no wonder that Cadance was able to fly here all the way from the Crystal Empire and then go back the same day.”

“Wait, she did what?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Yeah. It took her the better part of a day, but she said that she came straight down over the Crystal Mountains.”

“That’s just not fair!” Rainbow Dash whined, then caught herself. “I mean, I could totally do that in half the time, obviously, but she’s…” Rainbow Dash gestured vaguely.

“She’s what? You do realize that Cadance was a pegasus before she was an alicorn, right?” Twilight reminded her. “In fact, she grew up as the only pegasus in an earth pony fishing village; she might not get much of a chance to use her wings these days, but I guarantee you she’s done her fair share of weather work. It’s only me that—” Twilight hesitated, immediately conscious of the forest splitting before her, the glowing walls of magic to each side of the road and her own slightly luminous state. “…Well, nevermind,” she said, looking away, her cheeks slightly red.

“Ugh,” Rainbow Dash groaned. “Now I wish I’d talked to her about more than you staring at Sunset Shimmer’s—”

“Injury!” Twilight vehemently interrupted, breaking out in a full-blown blush. “For the last time, I was looking at her injury! Where else would anypony look in that situation?”

“Well, I was looking at you looking at her haunch, so I’m covered,” Rainbow Dash assured her.

“I’m flattered,” Twilight deadpanned. “Really, I am.”

“Wait—what?” Rainbow Dash said before her brain caught up with her mouth. “Not like that!” she hastily insisted.

***

The Everfree forest had expanded in the last thousand years, so the road ended before they were quite out of it. Fortunately, this last leg coincided with the existing path in and out of the forest. This made sense, in a way, because though the road predated the founding of Ponyville and thus there was no particular reason for there to be an entrance to the forest right next to it, there also hadn’t been any regular hoof traffic into the forest for a thousand years, so there wasn’t any other reason for a path to exist.

At the moment, Twilight didn’t really care about the coincidence and was just glad that she wasn’t going to have to hike through somepony’s fields to get home.

“Ugh, finally,” Twilight groaned as she passed through the way markers that signalled the end of the road and let go of the flow of magic she was feeding into the enchantment. The moment she did so, the inner glow that had been making her somehow more guttered out and she was just regular old Twilight Sparkle again.

She nearly collapsed in relief.

“Oh my,” Rarity exclaimed, catching Twilight in her magic. “Are you alright, dear?”

“I am sore in ways that I didn’t know I could be sore in,” Twilight said, attempting to describe the way she felt. “Literally; my muscles are fine, but it’s like I have a full-body hornache.”

“You are quite warm,” Rarity said, and Twilight flinched as she felt a hoof on her side. “Quite warm indeed.”

Twilight, however, was distracted by a different quality that had been revealed by the sensation. “That… is weird,” she said, and shook her head to test it out. A moment later, she wiggled her rear.

“What in the hay are you doing?” Applejack asked.

“My hair is sore,” Twilight announced, dumbfounded. “My coat, my mane and my tail—all of it.”

“…So, wait, does that mean that if you shaved Princess Celestia, she wouldn’t be able to raise the sun?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Is that really what you got out of that?” Twilight flatly asked. “I doubt it anyway. It’s still a unicorn spell when it comes down to it, and I’m sure she’s put more than enough alicorn magic into it over the centuries that she could raise the sun with just her horn for years without appreciable degradation.”

“You mean to tell me that just about any unicorn could raise the sun, so long as the princess was providing the power?” Applejack suggested.

“It’s not quite that simple,” Twilight said, rubbing a hoof through her aching mane. “It’s a spell, not an enchantment, so it’s actually tied to her personally even if the alicorn magic makes it act more like an enchantment in certain ways. It’s not impossible that somepony could usurp the connection, but it’d require a great deal of skill and extensive familiarity with the spell. She could willingly pass the spell on to somepony else, I suppose, but I’m not sure when that would ever come up.”

“I mean, maybe she’d like to sleep in for once?” Rainbow Dash suggested. “It’s gotta suck never getting a single day off raising the sun for a thousand years.”

Twilight broke out into a yawn just thinking about it—or maybe it had something to do with the excessive amount of magic she’d pumped into the road to the Castle of the Two Sisters. Suddenly, she was really feeling it. “Well, you’re not wrong,” she said, glancing up at Canterlot in the distance. “With Luna back, she does have the option, but I’m not sure if she’d take it.”

“You think raising the sun might still be a touchy subject?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Just a bit.”

Cast-Iron Cast-Offs

by Cast-Iron Caryatid

Preface

【Sharing the Night】 The Ice Bucket Challenge

【Standalone】 Twilight Velvet and the Picky Princesses (Thanksgiving 2014)

【Sharing the Night】 Chapter 13 Cut Ending

【Sharing the Night】 Epilogue (April Fools 2015)

【Schrödinger's Dawn】Prologue - Beaten to the Punch

【Schrödinger's Dawn】Chapter 1 - Horns Are Magic

【Schrödinger's Dawn】Chapter 2 - Go For the Eyes, Boo

【Schrödinger’s Dawn】Chapter 3 - Courting

【If Wishes Were Horses】Chapter 1 - Never Drink and Contrive

【If Wishes Were Horses】Chapter 2 - Something something pony pony pony?

【Sharing the Night】 Old Epilogue

【Equal Opportunity Ascension】 Not Chapter 23

Chapter 23

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