Lead to Massive Consiquences
“I failed them. I lied, I tried, and I failed. I failed them. I failed all of them. Especially her.” Sunburst muttered. It should have worked. It should have always worked. But it never did. It never worked. Why should this have been any different?
The empire was desolate now. There was no point for anypony to be in the Crystal Empire. Not anymore. Not since he failed everypony, even the ones who never even noticed he had moved there. The shards of the crystal heart were strewn across the ground, still sparking with magic, still trying to keep the Empire running, but there was no point. The baby’s cry had de-resonated its structure, one line out of sync, and the thing shattered. The Crystal Heart had been a powerful artifact, and one wrong line broke it.
With the magic each shard still had, he could see it, as if a taunting specter were over his shoulder to laugh at it all. He saw his first step off the train, his foolish look of hope. Nopony knew him here, nopony would judge his past mistakes. Sunburst scoffed at his own logic now, they might have even been impressed with his knowledge.
It didn’t take him two days to start his old, bad habit again though. Another shard played it. He had been walking to his first job interview, a public librarian to help support himself, when he saw a construction pony trying to affix a support beam with the affinity crystals needed to help keep the city powered properly.
“Excuse me, sir? Are you trying to attach those affinity crystals to that steel beam?” He had asked.
“Yeah, but the darn thing ain’t workin like normal. Worked fine yesterday.” The gray stallion had replied.
“Do you usually use wood?” Starburst had asked, pretty much knowing the answer.
“Yeah, but boss says to start using some of this steel stuff, said to be sturdier. Can’t see how it helps if it can’t work right.” He had sighed.
“That’s probably because this has a different sticking algorithm.” Sunburst had said as he picked up a shard. Sure enough, the shard had been attuned to latch into wood grain instead of magnifying to metal. “These are going to have to be readjusted.”
The stallion groaned. “Great, more work I need to do.”
“It’s a simple fix really.” Sunburst had basically blurted out. Of course, everything to him was ‘simple’. That hadn’t stopped the stallion from perking up. “You just need to re-attune the grip from latch to pull.” That had garnered him a confused look from the stallion.
“Can you do it?” He had asked. The always stinging question.
“W-well, no. But it really is simple.” Starburst had tried to reiterate.
“Yeah, and you try to find and hire somepony who can do the adjustment.” The stallion huffed. “Otherwise, this entire batch is pretty much useless.” He huffed again as he dumped his now perceived useless crystals into an awaiting wheelbarrow. “Thanks any ways.”
And it happened again, and again, and again. He always knew the right thing to say, the right thing to do, but he could never actually do any of it. It didn’t matter that he knew the spell, it mattered that he couldn’t follow through.
Another shard sparked, and he saw another one. He had gotten the job at the library. He knew everything to do, and he could easily levitate books down from high shelves without even looking, but that came to an end this day.
He was shelving the books as was his norm, when a trio of colts came running around the corner. They weren’t supposed to, as this was a library, but some of the out of town colts who just moved in a few days ago still thought that all the space in the library meant that there was space to play as such.
That was until one of the three took the next corner a bit to sharp and bumped the display case at the end. It was of a book called ‘A Warrior’s Way’ by Commander Silver Wing, an old name even before the empire disappeared. The display glass kept the book from prying hooves, and he had been talked through a spell that weaved through the protections of the glass to turn the pages, and Sunburst had winced when the display fell. But nothing broke, and nobody screamed, so he sighed in a bit of relief as he put the display back.
And the book was torn and totaled. The display pages were smeared and torn, and turning the page to see any further damage only made it worse. But he knew what to do, he had dropped more than a few books and papers before in Celestia’s School to know how reverse a bit of paper damage. But the protective wards disallowed tampering other than page turning, and removing the glass would lock him down in a paralysis trap. All he had to do was use the same path as the page turn, but end the sequence with his restoration spell.
And it had worked. Almost. Not entirely.
He had gotten through, and he had started the repair process, but it seemed to more he fixed, the more frayed the pages seemed to become, and when he tried repairing the fraying, the ink started fading off. The more he tried to fix, the more it fell apart, so when he stopped, it was a worse mess than before.
The head Librarian apparently had heard the crash and seen the colts, and had brought the three back to check the damage, but he had already screwed up. The colts had leapt and left as the librarian scolded him, told him that they had their own restoration protocols, and he should have left it to them instead of doing it himself. Now who knew if the book would ever be salvageable.
He lost his job that day, and every day after seemed to be plagued by his mistake. Shard after shard began to play out eerily similar scenes. He would offer advice to a problem, there would be a banter, maybe even sometimes playful, until he was inevitably asked if he could help. If he backed down, they were disappointed. If he tried to help, he usually made it worse than before.
Then one shard sparked, not baby blue, but light purple, next to the same shade fur. It showed only this morning, but from another view than his. She turned to the dragon behind her, who edged her further on. She knocked, and he answered, bleary and bedraggled from deciding to sleep the day away for once. The mare he hadn’t seen since colthood. She was as beautiful as he had thought she would end up as. She was even as impressive as he imagined, even if she thought otherwise. She had bemoaned having turned evil, and admittedly, she had acted childishly bitter, but even in that mindset, she was still brilliant.
Another shard sparked two shades of purple, one light and one dark. It was both Starlight and Twilight in the clouds, shooting concussive and frost beams at one another, Starlight doing so even as she levitated herself. It was impressive to see; it even gave Sunburst a small twitch of a smile at Starlight’s achievements.
A gold spark drew his attention over to a shard that showed him carrying his books, but he was younger, and far too distant to be his perspective. It turned to show a mare with sunset colored mare reading and weaving a spell for a rainbow of fire, which Sunburst had never seen anything like.
“Don’t you think somepony might help give a second look Sunset?” Princess Celestia said.
“Nopony else knows what I’m working on Princess.” Sunset said near dismissively. “This is a very delicate spell; one wrong split would implode the entire thing. No, one set of hooves is all I need.”
“There are many students here Sunset, any one of whom could be studying the same field.” Princess Celestia tried to nudge.
“Please Princess, there’s a reason I’m up here and not down in the common library. Nopony down there would know the difference between aspect slicing and splicing.”
Sunburst snorted, that was exactly what he had been looking into at the time. He looked forlornly at the white tufts of fur that fluttered next to the shard. It didn’t matter now though. Glancing to the last remaining remnants, the blue fur that was left didn’t seem to be interacting with any of the shards around it. Sunburst thought it for the better, it’s not like she had met him before anywhere.
And that was all that was left. Three princesses and one mare he once knew as a friend. Little more than tufts of fur in a cold, deserted street. The snow was even making its way towards them. Soon, it’d all be covered. His mistake would be washed away by gales of snow, just… just like he always wanted his mistakes to end up. But this… this was too much.
Sunburst sank to his knees, tears having formed and beginning to run, even stinging as they froze along his cheek. He shouldn’t have tried. He shouldn’t have risked it. Nothing bad ever happened when he didn’t take risks. But he thought he could do it this time. Starlight had trusted him, he had even said that he could do it, and he had tried. Sunburst even wondered why he didn’t go with them; he had been as close as they were when the Heart exploded.
Sunburst sobbed as more memories played and more snow blew in. He heard whispers of conversations and shouts of arguments. Explosions within the memories almost intrigued him to see, but the thought of seeing any of their triumphs just made him feel worse. So deep in his turmoil and blind to the world, Sunburst barely picked up somepony shouting over the howling wind.
“Skyla!” He heard softly over the wind. Blinking rapidly as to why anypony would still be here, Sunburst began to look left and right to find the crazy pony.
“Skyla!” A second, male voice called, closer this time. Sunburst turned and saw Shining Armor quickly covering the snow covered ground. “Skyla!” Sunburst pieced together that the royal couple had named the baby Skyla, and were looking for her, and it troubled him all the more that they were doing it here.
“Agu!” Sunburst heard a foal say from atop his head. Sunburst crossed his eyes to try and focus on the alicorn foal on his head, and just barely got her. She giggled as he wrapped her up in his telekinesis and warmth spell. Even in his spell’s grasp, Skyla seemed to still have free movement as she seemed to swim to his chest a curl against him.
“Skyla!” Princess Cadence called from Sunburst’s left. The couple had split up around the castle.
“I-In here!” Sunburst finally spoke up, garnering both parent’s attention as the rushed to the lying stallion.
“There she is.” Princess Cadence sighed. “Why would she ever come back here?”
“Probably because this guy did.” Shining smiled wearily. “Come on… uh-“
“Sunburst, sir.” Sunburst replied as he began to hand Skyla back to her mother. Unfortunately, Skyla seemed adamant to stick to his chest. Even with her mother trying, Skyla wouldn’t budge.
“Well come on Sunburst, the last train is being held up for us, another half hour or so and we won’t be making it out of here on the tracks.” Shining said as he began to pull Sunburst up by the right shoulder. Sunburst didn’t oblige, acting only as dead weight, leading to Shining to drop him back.
“I’m not going sir.” Sunburst replied in a dead tone. “I know what I can do, and my house is pretty well insulated. I can keep myself up here trying to fix the Heart.”
“As well as that is, up here isn’t the best place. Not anymore.” Cadence looked around, having let her daughter continue to snuggle to Sunburst. “We can gather up the shards and bring them to-“
“We can’t Princess.” Sunburst interrupted, shocking both parents at the curtness of his interuption. “The Heart is the center of this city and its spell. To remove the Heart from here without an appropriate transfer location would lead to the entire spell failing.”
“Sunburst, it’s already failed.” Shining pointed out. “We can re-weave the spell later.”
Sunburst shook his head. “It’s still trying.” He nodded towards the shards. “And on a base level, it’s succeeding. If it weren’t, the wind and snow would be much harsher.” Sunburst gazed at the shards, one even playing the scene of his Marking. He saw how excited he was in his ‘talent’ of magic and how his parents and neighbors were happy as well, and it tore into him how heartbroken Starlight looked.
“She meant a lot to you, didn’t she?” Cadence snapped Sunburst out of his trance. He looked up to the alicorn to see a level of empathy he had never had before. “This isn’t just about fixing the Heart, is it?”
Sunburst looked back to the shard that had played the scene, which was now opaque baby blue again. “S-She did, I guess.” A happier tone edged into Sunburst. “We were friends back in foalhood, but drifted apart. I was to wrapped up in joy… a-and then shame to reach out to her.” Sunburst pushed his glasses back up, as they had fallen out of place quite a while ago. “And then she shows up today saying the Princess of Friendship wants us to rekindle that.”
“And apparently Twilight sparked a bit more than that.” Cadence stated, a small smile finding the side of her lips, even as she saw the dark purple fur.
“Y-Yeah.” Sunburst looked down to the baby Skyla, who was beginning to suckle on her hoof for a nap. “But things ended up happening so fast that… that I thought I could do anything.” Sunburst’s voice turned as chilly as the air.
“And you have Sunburst.” Shining tried to reaffirm. “Skyla has been much more manageable since you handed us that spell.”
“And that’s all I’m good for.” Sunburst shot the compliment down. “Finding the spell and handing it off. I was never anything better than an advanced librarian. And even then, I screwed up.” He glared at the offending shard that had played his failure. It was close to the Heart’s base, a stray bolt of magic crawled its way up, drawing Sunburst’s eye with it, to the empty space with arcing bolts. The silence between the three allowed for a moment of reflection on all of their parts, and when Starburst’s eyes wandered to the purple fur on the ground, a heavy lump caught in his throat.
He finally stood and turned to Cadence. “Here, match the heating spell and I don’t think she’ll notice.” He indicated to her to take Skyla. Cadence took a second to match the exact temperature, but soon Skyla was napping peacefully against her breast. There was only a small murmur of discontent before Skyla readjusted and continued on.
“All right, we can probably make it to the train before we have to get somepony to stay out in front of it.” Shining turned to go back to the train station, but Sunburst was meticulously scouring the ground for the Heart’s fragments. Shining sighed in a bit of frustration. “Sunburst, I can leave a field for later, but an effective expedition needs to be set up.”
“And you can do just that, I can hold out for a good month or two by living off my house and neighbors.” Sunburst said near dismissively.
“Sunburst, we don’t have time for this.”
“Then get to the train, I’m not stopping you.”
“We’re not leaving without you.” Shining stamped a hoof.
“WHY?!” Sunburst snapped, whirling to face Shining Armor. “I need to do this! This is my mistake and I need to fix it!” A small sense of realization hit as he looked down and away. “Even if that’s never worked before.”
“Sunburst, this wasn’t your mess to fix.” Cadence interceded. “You’ve already helped us immensely with Skyla, and we may even need more help keeping up with her, but this was our mistake that we shoved on you. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“But I did.” Sunburst whimpered before he screwed his eyes shut. “BUT I DID!” He screamed before a golden spark of magic arcked from the Crystal Heart’s display, rebounding off of several shards which began projecting four mares into the room, each shooting a beam into a cracked phantom Heart in the display.
Each were struggling, Princess Celestia and Luna were holding a stable field of zero gravity stasis as Princess Twilight held each individual sliver of the broken Heart together. Starlight was weaving the weather abjuration into the Heart to push back what had already come, but holding the spell at near completion was having its strain. Then he ran in, holding the charged shard from the Crystaling with enough power to surge through the entire Heart to pull it back together. And he ran like he had rarely done before, a jumped like he absolutely never done before.
Twilight Sparkle had actually thought ahead and left a space for the new shard to fit, and so Sunburst had let the shard go to slip into its space.
And Twilight didn’t grab it.
The shard, assisted by exterior gravity, gained enough acceleration to bump into the Heart prematurely, releasing its energy into two incomplete spells, completing them without preparation and backlashing into the four mares still feeding magic into the process. The phantom Starburst quickly stood and backed up to stand just beside the present Starburst, a look of utter horror upon his face as the rampant energy radiated through the cracks and rushed through the spells to their casters.
Sunburst didn’t need to see again the look of shock and horror on Starlight’s face as the wild magic ran right to her. It was seared into his brain; his lies had lead her here. And it had led to more than just her death. Equestria was now without three of its sovereigns.
The phantoms faded as Sunburst glared at the ground in seething self-hate. “This was my fault Princess. I should have led the shard myself, or made sure Princess Twilight had it, but I let go, I let this happen.” He looked up to see Shining Armor and Cadence standing side by side, looks of profound sadness looking back at him. “I failed them.”