The Most Beautiful Song
With every step Twilight Sparkle took, the desert stretched on a little farther and the merciless sun shone a little hotter. Patches of dry earth amongst the sand cracked and puffed dust under her lumbering hooves. One more step, she told herself. One more step. One more...
“You’re going to die here,” her brother said.
She gritted her teeth and stared forward as though she could will the horizon to give her something other than more sand and rock. Everything, everywhere, looked the same. Her muscles ached from her long flight, and it felt like she’d been wandering in circles for hours, but she knew she was going the right way.
“Give up.” His voice was calm.
Twilight swallowed dry spit. Her mind swam with dehydration, but she couldn’t stop; if she didn’t deliver the peace offer, the southerners would leave Equestria a bloodsoaked wasteland.
“They won’t listen to you,” her brother said.
Twilight spun to face him. “Shut up!”
But there was no one there—just her hoofprints trailing far across the sand.
“You’re not real,” she breathed. “You’re dead.”
No one answered.
Chest aching, she turned and continued south. Dehydration was playing tricks on her mind, that was all. All that mattered was ending the war and bringing home the thousands of Equestrian slaves the southerners had taken. She would find the king and buy back their freedom, no matter the cost.
The desert couldn’t go on forever. The nomadic southerners had crossed the Sand Sea as a single, enormous horde. If they could do it, so could she. There had to be an end to it, surely. But at this rate she’d die of thirst long before she reached their homeland.
Her tired eyes turned to one of the many limestone outcrops scattered across the desert. She would have a better view from up there. Maybe she’d see the edge of the desert. It was a fool’s hope, but it was all she had.
She dragged her hooves up the stony hill. The sloped ground was uneven and fragile, rocks crumbling and releasing puffs of pale dust as she ascended.
With a painfully dry throat, she reached the top, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the surrounding landscape.
The desert stretched on and on and on, north and west and east and south. No towns, no roads, not even a blade of grass. Just sand and rock as far as she could see.
Twilight sank down on her haunches. She would have wept if she had the tears.
The sun burned at her side, and the young princess glared south. If she failed, if she couldn’t make peace, her travel companions who had sacrificed so much to bring her this far would have died for nothing, and Equestria would bleed and burn until there was nothing left.
“There will be no peace,” her brother said. His image stood on the cliff beside her, wearing the same general’s uniform he’d worn when she’d seen him off for the last time nearly a year ago. So regal and strong, the very embodiment of authority and hope.
“It’s not your choice to make,” Twilight said.
Shining Armor stepped on her saddlebag.
Twilight felt a stab of panic, and almost leaped for the bag to save the peace treaty from being crushed. But she stopped herself. He couldn’t touch it; he was just a hallucination, a figment of her dehydrated mind.
I have to ignore him, she thought. All the books she’d read on hallucinations agreed that talking to them was dangerous.
“How can you still side with her?” he asked.
Twilight took out the last waterskin from the saddlebag, and squeezed it over her mouth. It was as empty as the last time she’d tried it.
“She’s led us to ruin,” he said. “And now she’s sending you to surrender what little we have left.”
Twilight clenched her eyes shut, futilely trying to will the hallucination away.
“You left me to die alone.” His words were a dagger to her heart. No one ever talked about his death; she didn’t let them. She didn’t even let herself think about it. But none of that stopped the image before her. “I needed you,” he said. “Why didn’t you come?”
“I couldn’t,” Twilight said without thinking.
“Lies,” Shining snarled. “That’s all you know. Her lies.” He looked down at her. “You had the power to do what you knew was right, but you didn’t. What does that make you?”
Twilight stood and moved past him down the hill, strapping the saddlebag on painfully tight as she went.
His voice followed her. “You knew what they’d done, what they’d taken. My wife. Your own niece. Butchered in their sleep. And you did nothing.”
I loved them, too, Twilight thought as she strode southward across the sand.
“If you did, you would have been at my side when I marched out against them.”
It was suicide.
“With your power, we could have killed them all,” he said. “The war would be over. But you’d rather leave our salvation to rot inside your horn.”
A princess can never harm a pony, Twilight thought.
“They lost the right to call themselves ponies when they started killing and enslaving us,” her brother said. “They’re monsters, and you can destroy them all with a thought.”
I’m doing what’s right, she told herself. I’m saving lives. I’ll bring them home. I’ll make peace and buy their freedom.
But for every step she took, her brother was there to erode her resolve. If this continued, if this got worse, he would break her.
I have to get rid of him, she decided. I have to find water.
She looked up to the pale-blue sky. In the lush lands of Equestria she could simply have condensed the humidity in the air, but things were different in this sun-cursed desert. There would be humidity even in a place like this, but it would be exiled high above ground by the punishing heat, spread so thinly that no clouds would form on their own.
But with magic, there was always a way.
“You wouldn’t dare,” her brother said.
Twilight pursed her dry lips and forced herself to look down from the sky. He was right; using her magic to condense such scattered humidity would take an enormous amount of power, more than a thousand unicorns combined could even hope to achieve. If her concentration slipped for just a moment, there was no telling what catastrophic destruction her alicorn magic might unleash.
But Twilight found herself gazing up at that endless blue again. She was so thirsty it hurt to breathe. Every swallow was agony.
“It’s as likely to kill you as give you water,” her brother said, echoing her own thoughts.
What choice do I have?
“Go home,” he said.
Twilight slowed, then stopped. She looked back the long way she came, and the thought of her brother’s island returned to her again.
‘Eight days sail from the west cape,’ he had said to her when the war was still young. ‘An island untouched by ponies. And through a blue lagoon and rich forests, there lives a bird atop a waterfall that sings the most beautiful song in the world.’
He’d often talked about how he wanted to find that island again when the war was over. Twilight hadn’t thought much of it, and he’d stopped mentioning it altogether when his family was killed. But when his death stole the light from her life, his dream of finding that island had sunk as deep in her as it had in him.
What must that bird sound like? Twilight wondered for the thousandth time. What is the most beautiful song in the world? She imagined it as a dove, or maybe an owl. A mournful song; a peaceful embrace when all of this was over.
“Turn back,” her brother said. “Forget this treason. Go back to Equestria and do your duty. And when the war is done, take a ship west if you must. Find the island, and hear its music.”
His words were the same sweet poison she fed herself every night she twisted in bed. Her heart ached with the yearning to leave everything behind and lose herself in a place she may never find.
But she remembered the thousands of ponies whose lives depended on her—ponies in chains, trailing death and misery into the Sand Sea. If she wavered, they would never see home again.
The princess turned her horn to the sky and fired a beam of magic up into the atmosphere.
Her magic rippled and sputtered. A surge of wind bore down on her, tossing her mane and forcing her to squint as dust stirred around her. She strained at the effort, reaching higher and higher, searching for any trace of humidity, reaching… reaching…
And there it was, higher than any pegasus would dare fly, at the edge of her magic’s grasp: water, spread thin as a cloud a thousand times over, but it was there, it was real, and she could condense it.
Her brother’s revulsion became a miasma that choked the air. “If only you’d use that recklessness against the enemy.” He wouldn’t look at her. “You risk so much to make peace with monsters.”
Twilight moved past him and continued south across the sand while maintaining her spell.
“You think they’ll just let you have them?” he asked. “They won’t give back their slaves for all the gold in Equestria.”
“I’ll find a way.”
“You should be fighting for their freedom, not begging for it.”
Twilight kept walking, keeping her eyes on the horizon.
“You should kill as they killed and burn as they burned.”
“It’s not my place to kill and burn,” Twilight said.
He stepped in front of her. “You can end this. You’re an Alicorn. Your magic can level a city. Do your duty and fight!”
She looked down from his eyes, and in her heart she felt her brother’s grief and anger as if it were her own. “I can’t,” she said. “A princess can never harm—”
“You can. But you won’t. Because of her. Because of your blind faith. She’s dooming us all, and our blood will be on you.”
Twilight walked through his image. It was all she could do. If she hesitated, his words would break her. And so she walked, ever southward, repeating over and over in her mind the words she lived by; A princess’s duty is to peace. A princess can never harm a pony. A princess’s duty is to peace. A princess… A princess...
The sun drifted down toward the west. Minutes turned to hours. One step, one more, then another, always another. Maintaining her condensation magic was exhausting work, the power swelling ever more as her beam of light tore into the sky. It was like levitating a mountain over her head that could fall and crush her at any moment.
South, she thought through her delirium. Find the king. Make peace. Bring them home. One more step… One more…
Twilight walked into a rock wall. Her focus slipped, and she had to rush to stabilize the churning power in the sky. Feeling safe in her control of the magic, she looked at what she’d walked into, and the shock when she realized what it was almost made her lose her magic again.
A stone building stood before her, half-buried in sand, walls cracked and eroded, its roof long since collapsed in on itself.
It took Twilight some moments to make sense of what a pony-made structure was doing in the middle of the Sand Sea.
Stonehaven, she realized. The old capital of the southern reach. At least, until Princess Celestia had banished the southerners for taking the wrong side in the War of the Sisters. That was a thousand years ago, a conflict lost to the mists of history, but the great city of limestone still stood—some of it, at least, bits and pieces of pale stone sticking out from the deep sand all around her.
Twilight walked between ruined buildings, down a path of sand that might once have been a great street filled with traders and goods. Empty windows stared at her from half-collapsed houses. Time had eroded the structures, leaving sharp corners smooth like stones on a beach.
It was strange to imagine the southerners living in a place like this. The only southerners she knew had invaded as nomads, their entire civilization—warriors, workers, mares, foals—travelling together in a barbaric horde that dried up rivers and flattened the earth.
They were no different than us, once upon a time.
Her brother followed her through the ruins. His silence spoke louder than words ever could.
She watched him, and for a heartbeat she was a filly again, basking in his pride when she’d told him Celestia had taken her as her personal pupil. He’d been everything to her, his pride for her the most wonderful thing she’d ever known, pushing her to strive harder even when she was on the brink of giving up on her studies.
She looked away from him, and the world was dead again.
A great, round field opened up at the end of the road, and at its center stood a pair of great statues: two winged ponies, buried to their knees in sand, looming tall and proud over an empire of dust.
Something white was gathered around their legs, like a heap of snow reflecting the glaring sunlight.
Twilight approached the statues. The sand surrounding them was darker than the rest of the desert. Halfway to them, she could make out details; the first statue was taller than the second, despite its missing head. The other’s face had been hacked and chiseled beyond recognition, but the outline of a broken horn remained.
They must have really hated them, Twilight thought. Forsaken. Banished. Forgotten.
Something cracked like a twig under Twilight’s hoof. She turned to look. Her hoof caught on something, and she tripped and fell to the sand with a grunt.
She spat out strange-tasting brown sand and reached under herself, pulling out something pressing against her stomach. She stood up and squinted at the object.
It was a pony tibia bone, having belonged to a male adolescent, judging by its size.
Twilight tilted her head, dumbfounded as to what a pony bone was doing outside of the Canterlot Royal Academy’s osteology department. She looked back at what she’d tripped on.
A ribcage jutted up from the sand, pale and weather-worn, ribs caved in where she’d stepped on them.
Twilight dropped the bone and backed away from the ribcage. More bones crunched under her hooves, white bits and pieces sticking out from the dark-brown sand. Her eyes turned to the ancient statues.
Gathered around the base of the statues was an enormous mound of skulls.
Twilight froze, staring at the disembodied remains. There were hundreds of them, thousands. Some ancient battlefield from long ago was Twilight’s first thought. But no, these bones weren’t old; their owners’ blood still soaked the sand.
“No,” she breathed. “No…” She fell on her haunches in the shadow of the pile of death. “I’m supposed to save them. I’m supposed to bring them home.”
Her brother screamed, and her throat hurt. They’d killed them. They’d dragged them into the Sand Sea to kill them here.
Why? For what possible reason… But then she felt it, as they must have: a blackness burning in her chest, a cold so vile it drowned all her pity, and the more she tried to suppress it, the angrier her brother became.
“You killed them!” he roared.
Twilight gasped for a breath she didn’t know she was holding. She wanted to look away from the skulls, but she couldn’t; something was holding her head in place and forcing her eyes open.
“You let this happen,” he said.
She felt him in her head, in her chest, in all of her, tearing at the wall around her heart, refusing to let her go.
“You’re not weak,” he said. “You could have stopped this. But you did nothing.”
Twilight tore herself free from him and ran. She needed to get away, away from the bones, but they followed her everywhere, crunching and snapping under the dry, blood-soaked sand.
“Kill them!” he shouted after her. “Make them suffer! Kill them all!”
Twilight’s magic trembled and sputtered. She couldn’t focus. Death was all around her, and she was losing control.
“You have the power to avenge our people!” he said. “Why won’t you use it? Why won’t you do what’s right?”
A sharp wind kicked up sand around her, cleaning the bones and turning the field sickly pale.
Her brother’s voice overpowered all other sounds. “You should have died with me. We could have stood against them together. With your power, we could have ended it.”
Twilight stumbled away, panting and coughing, eyes wide, horror and grief choking her.
“Coward!” His voice rose with every word. “You let everyone die. You killed me! Why didn’t you help me? Why won’t you do what’s right? Why? Why? Why?”
The magical force tore free from her horn with a deafening crack. Wisps of smoke materialized high above to form a monstrous, black cloud that ate the light from the sky.
The air around her popped like cannon blasts. Purple lightning flashed. A teeth-rattling shockwave knocked Twilight to the ground. More cracks, more thunder. Lightning harried the city, melting sand and pulverizing bone.
A great shadow rose across the horizon, so tall she couldn’t see the end of it. The dark wave swelled as it drew nearer, consuming row after row of ancient buildings until it reached the open field around the statues.
The sandstorm swallowed her.
Wind and sand lashed at her like knives. Everything was dark. The wind screamed and the sand burned, and to her horror she realized that a part of her was in control of what was happening—a part of her that wasn’t her.
“Why won’t you hate them?” Shining roared, and the sandstorm lashed out with him.
More lightning, more flashes, faster and faster, the only light in the hell they’d made together.
“They massacred our people,” her brother screamed. “They murdered my family. They burn and kill and steal and rape and you do nothing.”
“Stop!” Twilight cried into the wind.
“Where is your fury? Where is your hatred?”
“Please…” Twilight whimpered.
“Why won’t you—”
“I hate them!” Twilight screamed against the storm. “I hate them!” She drew breath for another shout, but her own words left her stunned. “I hate them,” she said, but this time it was with shame, not passion.
Shining released her. The storm calmed and the dust fell, burying the bones in sand. He stood before her. Their eyes met, and Twilight lost the strength to stand.
“I want to hurt them,” she said. “I want to kill every last one of them for what they’ve done.” She looked up at him. “How can you think I don’t?”
Something wet fell on her. Twilight looked up at the dark sky. Rain poured over the desert. She opened her mouth in shock, and the water tasted like fresh autumn snow.
A bestial instinct seized her, and she drank without thinking. She stretched her neck to the sky and channeled a cone of water with her magic. She drank and drank, and when at last she could drink no more, her brother spoke.
“Go home, Twilight. Go home, and make them bleed for every step they take into Equestria.”
Through the thinning fog in her mind, she realized that he would disappear soon. Having rehydrated, the hallucination would fade, and the thought of losing him again hurt so much it nearly choked the life from her. She looked deep into eyes that seemed so real, and she knew that if she just kept looking, she would know he was right.
She turned away.
“Twilight—”
“I know,” she said, her voice on the verge of breaking. “I know every word you could possibly say to me. I’ve thought it over a million times. Not a night goes by that I don’t...” She looked up at him, and he was close. “I should have been there, in the end. With all my being, I wanted to. You have to believe me.”
Her brother put a hoof on her shoulder, and she felt the emptiness where his warmth should be. “Go home. Make me proud again.”
Her heart ached. Her body trembled. The desire to turn back and leave everything behind took the breath from her, to disappear across the western sea and find her brother’s island and the bird that sang the most beautiful song in the world.
She looked south past the field of bones where the ruined city disappeared into a rainy haze. “I’m sorry.” Her heart twisted as she stood up and pulled her saddlebag on. “I can’t be what you want of me.”
“What are you doing?”
“I have a peace to make.”
For a moment, her brother had no words. “Does it look like they want peace? Look around you. They deserve death, not peace.”
“I have to forgive them.”
“Why?”
“Because someone has to.” Twilight walked south past the last of the bones.
“They’ll kill you.”
I don’t care, she thought.
Her brother didn’t follow her. His voice was fading into the rain, growing distant. She was walking away from him, leaving him behind as the fog in her mind slowly cleared.
She got her tears back, and she used them. The rain would not stop.
Her lonely journey continued in silence, rain washing the warmth from her and turning the sand rough and muddy. She clung to her duty, the only thing keeping her going. The rain would not stop.
She could barely see ten strides ahead of her. She walked through rain and cold and grief to make peace with those who’d stolen the light from her life. Her heart twisted against itself.
The rain would not stop.
A sound reached her. At first she thought she’d imagined it, but it came again, deep and distant: a drum, like the beating heart of some great beast. Boom… Boom… Boom...
Twilight stopped, a chill running through her. She knew that drum, that steady beat of approaching death, slowly drawing nearer, growing louder.
Another drum rose through the rain ahead, equally deep and somber. A third drum answered the call, then a fourth, and a fifth. A dozen war drums breathed death into the air, two dozen, three, a hundred, more—a great army, invisible in the rainy haze, coming straight toward her.
She caught a metallic glint moving in the rain. The whole horizon stirred, a low wave of wet steel approaching, then came the rising sound of a thousand hooves treading through wet sand.
Lightning flashed, and metal gleamed to the left and right of the formation, stretching out as far as she could see.
She looked to her side for her brother, but there was no one there.
Thunder crackled. The vanguard of the southern horde drew near enough for her to make out individual helmets in the front rank. When she was sure she’d be trampled by that mass of flesh and steel, a voice shouted a brisk command, and the entire front came to a halt. Similar shouts rose to the sides, officers ordering their units to stop, the command repeating and fading far into the distance.
The southerners stood still, watching the princess through the rain. Many of them were staring up at the weeping sky, no doubt dumbfounded at the unnatural sight in the Sand Sea.
Twilight reached into her saddlebag with her magic and raised the flag of peace for them to see.
After a short while, a section of the vanguard opened, and five figures emerged. The sound of their rattling plate armor reached Twilight as they approached. Four of them wore steel half-helms. Their leader wore a round, white mask.
The masked one stopped before Twilight as the other four fanned out on his flanks. It was raining so hard Twilight couldn’t even make out the eyes behind the slits in the officer’s mask. She had never seen a live southerner so close before.
The masked one shouted something at Twilight in a tongue she didn’t understand.
Twilight opened her mouth to speak, but all the words she’d rehearsed for this moment fled her mind.
The officer shouted at her again, but his tongue made no more sense to her. He was likely asking who she was and why she was wandering the Sand Sea alone.
Twilight stood as tall as she could, lit her horn with magic, and extended her wings.
The five southerners tensed at the sight. The officer took a step back.
“I am Twilight Sparkle, princess of Equestria. I seek an audience with your king.”
The officer’s face was hidden behind his mask, but the expressions of his four companions were equal part awe and horror at the sight of an alicorn.
The officer broke the silence with a command. The four soldiers stirred, but did nothing. He shouted at them, and this time, they attacked.
Twilight hardly had time to gasp before they tackled her to the ground. There was a window of opportunity where she could have torn their bodies apart with her magic, but she restrained herself and allowed them to disempower her by clasping an anti-magic device on her horn.
They bound her legs and dragged her by rope toward the horde. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. She half-expected a voice in her head to gloat at how wrong she’d been to expect anything else. But the only voice in her head was her own, and all she could do was grit her teeth against the pain and humiliation as the horde closed around her.
They dragged her past columns of steel-clad soldiers, hundreds strong, lances held high. Farther from the front, structured ranks turned to haphazard sections of stallions equipped with linen and shoulderbows. Deeper still, the majority were not warriors, but everyday ponies no different than rural villagers in Equestria: stallions working skins and iron, mares carrying baskets and waterskins.
A colt and a filly watched Twilight as she was dragged past, their legs covered in mud from playing in puddles. With Twilight on the ground, their eyes were level. The filly hid behind the colt. The colt raised a hoof as if in greeting. The filly hesitated, but did the same.
Twilight’s captors gave her ropes a painful tug, and dragged her up a slope toward a hill. The colt and the filly disappeared into the crowd below.
They took her to the crest of the hill where a massive tent stood several stories tall and wider still. The cloth structure hung from poles held up by uniformed stallions. Its walls were so lavishly decorated it would have passed as a grand tapestry in any castle.
After a brief exchange of words with a pair of guards outside, they dragged her through the entrance, and the rain stopped.
Inside was a vast open space of uneven sand and stone enclosed by walls of cloth. Ponies in exotic clothing stood in groups around the tent’s edge, growing increasingly interested in the prisoner being brought in. Half of them wore white masks. The masked and unmasked didn’t seem to mingle. More were streaming into the tent, word no doubt spreading like wildfire that a lone alicorn had been found wandering the Sand Sea.
On the opposite side of the huge tent, a short flight of wooden steps rose to an empty throne of curved and twisted wood. Round masks the size of carriage-wheels hung from poles fanning out around the wooden seat. The masks of previous kings, Twilight could only assume.
They dumped her at the center of the tent.
Anxiety made Twilight instinctively draw on her magic, and the anti-magic clasp on her horn grew hot in response. The device was likely capable of suppressing even the most powerful unicorns, but it was nothing to her. She could break free, maybe even escape with her life. But it would accomplish nothing.
The masked officer went ahead as the four soldiers surrounded her, their legs obscuring her view of the throne.
Twilight strained against her bonds to see. A soldier shoved her back down and pressed a hoof hard against her neck.
It rained a little, even inside the tent. Fat drops patted down in the sand near Twilight, falling from where the center of the ceiling caved inward under the rain’s weight, the fabric apparently not intended to have to keep out water.
“Shining…” Twilight whimpered into the moist sand. But he was gone, and she was truly alone.
A voice boomed through the tent. Everyone fell silent. The onlookers faced the wooden throne, and most of them kneeled. The masked ones remained standing, including those blocking her view of the throne.
It was quiet. Over the sound of distant thunder, Twilight heard hoofsteps on sand. The steps turned wooden, then stopped.
The spectators rose, and the officer in custody of Twilight spoke in the southern tongue. There was a silence when he was done.
Another voice, a calm voice, spoke from the direction of the throne, so quiet Twilight strained to hear it.
The soldier pinning her neck released her, and her captors moved away, leaving her alone on the empty ground with her saddle bag, surrounded by foreign nobles and masked warriors.
A stallion sat on the wooden throne. He wore a mask similar to the others on display behind him: twice the size of a pony’s head and pale as bone. He wore no crown that Twilight could see, but there was no doubt in her mind that this was their king.
Twilight slowly rose, feeling herself tremble under the gaze of the masked king. She willed herself to stand still, but couldn’t muster the courage to speak.
Before her sat the one most responsible for the atrocities committed in Equestria, the king who’d murdered friends and family, the king her brother had died trying to kill: the cruelest and most powerful creature this side of the world.
The king said nothing. There was only the patter of rain on cloth high above.
“Great King,” Twilight called out, her voice breaking a little, but she spoke loud enough for everyone to hear. “I am Twilight Sparkle, princess of Equestria.”
They wouldn’t understand much of her tongue, and if the king had a translator, he didn’t make use of it.
Yet the king stirred when she spoke, as if she’d said something interesting that he could understand.
“I have come to bring an end to the war,” Twilight said.
Silence.
There were precious few words in the southern tongue she’d learned since the Sand Sea reopened, but one of them she’d been memorizing religiously. She drew a breath and spoke the southern word for peace.
Murmuring erupted amongst the onlookers, swelling into shouts and laughter. The king stayed silent, his great mask betraying no emotion.
“Peace,” Twilight repeated in the southern tongue, but their shouts drowned out her voice. Her chest tightened. So much rested on her shoulders, so many lives hung in the balance. Make the peace, she told herself. Convince them. There’s always a way—there has to be.
The king raised a hoof, and the tent gradually hushed until it was so quiet Twilight could hear distant thunder again. He leaned forward in his throne, looking down at her with hollow eyes.
“Twilight,” the king said, his pronunciation spiced with accent. He sounded younger than she’d expected. “Twilight?” His tone indicated a question.
“Yes,” she said, hope fluttering. “I am Twilight Sparkle, princess of—”
“Twily…” the king said.
Twilight hesitated.
“Twily, Twily, Twily.” The masks adorning the throne rattled with the king’s movement. He gestured with his hoof and said something she didn’t understand.
One of the masked guards by the throne moved out of the tent, on his way to carry out whatever order his king had given.
Twilight couldn’t afford to let the silence last. “Great King.” She clumsily took out the rolled-up peace treaty from her saddlebag—it was difficult without using her magic—and set it down with the golden wax seal facing the king. “I bring you an offer of peace from Her Serene Highness, Princess Celestia.”
When she looked up, the king had risen from his seat and taken down one of the masks from the throne. He placed this mask over his own, and faced Twilight.
The new mask had different features and decoration than the one beneath, but most notably it bore a pear-sized hole in its left eye, as if it had been damaged.
The king shouted, and the masked guards by the throne did not hesitate. They took hold of Twilight with rough hooves and held her in place, despite her not having intended to go anywhere.
The king descended from his throne as if he were savouring every step he took toward her. When he reached the sand, Twilight could make out spots of dried blood on the damaged mask he wore over his own.
The guards produced a block of limestone and pressed Twilight’s head against it before she could even think about resisting.
Beside the throne, a pair of soldiers shoved a blindfolded captive out onto the sand: an earth pony stallion, pale and starved.
“Twily,” the king said. “Twily, Twily, Twily, Twily...”
Why is he calling me that? Twilight breathed into her own spit on the stone slab. “I am an emissary under flag of peace. This is not...”
Her words trailed off when she saw that the king was strapping a hammer to his foreleg, big enough to crush her head against the rock.
“Please, no...” the king said, making a whimpering sound, like he was mock-imitating fright. “No more. Please…” His two-layered mask may have hidden his mouth, but his eyes smiled through the slits.
A masked soldier presented a long stick to the king. The king took it and held it before him. A war lance. The engravings on the steel shaft seemed familiar, like something from a half-forgotten dream.
It was her brother’s lance. Twilight’s eyes widened at the realization, and all at once she remembered the day he’d shown it to her when she was a filly, the warm summer days in Canterlot she’d watched him train with the other recruits, and when she’d fastened it to his back before he’d left her for the last time.
The king tapped the tip of Shining’s lance to the gaping hole in his outer mask, and Twilight finally understood. He did it. Shining killed the king. He actually did it.
And now the king’s heir was wearing his father’s mask.
The young king turned his head to the captive they’d brought out, and Twilight followed his gaze as the guards removed the earth pony’s blindfold. Her eyes locked with the pale stallion’s, and what she saw in them sent burning ice down her back.
Shining Armor stood there, bone-thin and marked with scars beyond counting. His horn was a broken stub on his head, and his face was smeared with old blood.
When he saw his little sister with her head pressed against the stone slab, his mouth fell open, and his face twisted like he was about to shout.
The king’s hammer fell, and Twilight’s horn shattered against the stone.
Light flooded her vision, and pain flared through her skull. She heard a ringing sound. The ringing turned into a scream—her own scream. Her jaw fell open, her body tensed.
Sight returned in pulses: horn fragments in bonedust, a trickle of blood from the broken end of her horn, the anti-magic clasp lying bent and broken on the stone slab—still clinging to a shard of horn.
The king pointed the lance at Twilight’s heart, and looked to her brother.
Shining Armor struggled against two masked warriors holding him in place. He was so weak, so skinny—hardly able to make any resistance, but he was trying, trying to get to her. “Twily,” his lips read. “Twily.” But he made no sound. In the shadow of his mouth, she saw that he had no tongue.
Something broke inside Twilight in that moment. The world was wrong. Her world was wrong. She had heard, she had seen, she had felt, but she’d never believed. Now it stood before her, and there was nothing she could do.
You can, a voice said to her.
A sound fit for a dying animal rose in her throat.
You can.
Spit foamed through her teeth. The whole world drained away until all she could see was the king with his smiling eyes behind a white mask.
But you won’t.
Twilight screamed with years of untapped hatred and grief, and with all her strength and will and pain, she forced magic into her broken horn. An intense heat rose in the shattered stub, flaring a light so terrible it rivaled the sun.
She aimed for the king, but her broken horn twisted the beam of power into the crowd of onlookers, disintegrating those caught in its path and tearing limbs from bystanders.
The masked soldiers holding her staggered back in shock.
Twilight turned her horn to the king again, but instead of turning off when she willed it to, the magical beam swelled, throwing her head to the side and cutting upward through the cloth wall and slicing the ceiling open, then coming down again to turn dozens of southerners into red mist.
The beam sputtered out on its own, then exploded into a shockwave that threw king and princess and nearby guards to the rocky sand.
Twilight rolled to a stop, dazed only for a moment before the agony in her horn cleared her mind, then stood.
Rain fell through the hole she’d cut in the ceiling. The southern nobles were scrambling over each other to get out of the tent, clogging the only entrance with their bodies and blocking soldiers trying to get inside.
Hatred seized her. She lashed out. It was impossible to miss a crowd that thick. She tore sons from mothers, wives from husbands, friends from loved ones. She needed to hurt, to kill, to make them feel all the pain they’d inflicted upon her.
The warriors in the tent finally came to their senses. Shoulderbows thrummed, and bolts hissed through the air.
Twilight waved her horn to deflect the projectiles, but her broken horn twisted her aim again. Her sweep of kinetic force only managed to strike down a few before they reached her.
A bolt punched into her shoulder. Twilight reeled from the impact. Time slowed. Projectiles flew past, one slicing across her cheek.
Twilight drew a sharp breath and teleported.
Her world lurched. Something felt wrong; the teleportation was taking too long. A sudden force tore her apart, and for a heartbeat she stood in two places at once, then three, then a hundred.
Her essence coalesced in the air above the throne, and gravity slammed her into the wood, knocking the air out of her as she rolled down the steps and vomited blood in the sand.
She had no time to think. She stood up, mind spinning, and threw a wave of pressure at the group of soldiers who’d shot at her.
Their metal armor imploded, crushing the ponies beneath and collapsing in a heap of twisted steel and broken flesh.
The bolt in her shoulder was gone, lost during the teleportation, the wound pouring blood.
The king, she thought, rage burning so hot inside her she could scarcely breathe. Where...
The king came roaring at her with her brother’s lance, bladed hooves kicking up sand.
Twilight hurled destruction at him. The king dodged. Her magic struck the wooden throne, shattering it into a thousand charred splinters that shot out like arrows into the tent walls. Some struck the king’s back, making him stagger just before he reached her.
Her brother’s lance only grazed her neck, but the king’s bladed hooves slashed deep across her unprotected chest.
Twilight threw him off her with her magic, and pressed a hoof against her chest, feeling the wet warmth of blood. It hurt to breathe, but only the vaguest thought of fractured ribs passed through her mind before she spun toward the king.
He lay by a rock nearby, splintered throne-wood jutting out from his body. He stirred, but didn’t rise.
Twilight breathed through her teeth and forced herself to walk up to him.
The left half of the old king’s mask had broken off, and the young king’s mask showed beneath. There was fear in his eyes, but something else, too—something dark and visceral—and she knew that if his mask had been a mirror, she’d see the same in her own.
She had a thousand words for him, but they all melted together into a single, incoherent growl. She tore her brother’s lance from the king’s back and thrust it into him.
The steel point found his gut, then his thigh, then his neck. Twilight grunted and screamed. She stabbed until he stopped twitching, until he stopped whimpering, then stuck the lance into the king’s body one last time, and left it there.
She took a step back, breathing fast and shallow through clenched teeth, and looked down at the king’s corpse, and as she did, her rage drained away, and her hatred gave way to an emptiness so profound she staggered backward and collapsed.
Someone caught her. She turned her head, and her brother was there. He looked at her with the most selfish love a pony can have for another. His eyes were wet, and he was trembling—his lips most of all.
She was bleeding. There was pain, so much pain. But his warmth washed it all away. She touched his cheek, and he was there, really and truly there.
He put his forehooves around her and held her tight.
The torn and scorched tent walls folded outward and fell apart around them as they held each other. Twilight didn’t feel the rain; her brother shielded her from it. Past his shoulder, she could see the vastness of the southern camp sprawling out through the rainy haze around the king’s hill.
Far away, stallions were shouting—officers barking orders, soldiers lining up. They would be coming for them soon. All the tiny little eyes down there would be looking up at the hill, word spreading that their king was dead by Equestrian magic.
Twilight could feel the hatred churning down there: a million hearts, one by one choked by a blackness that would only be quenched by the waters of the innocent.
Sharp metal glistened in the halflight down the hill, moving up the slope. Warriors. Avengers. Murderers. Hundreds of them. Thousands.
“Shining,” Twilight said with feeble strength.
Her brother didn’t answer. He was hurt, she realized, stabbed somewhere she couldn’t see, their blood becoming one in the sand. Frail, starved, tortured—even without the wounds, he was a hollow thing clinging to life.
“Shining,” Twilight said again. “Stay with me.” She looked into his eyes. “Stay with me, and see.”
Her eyes filled with tears as light filled her broken horn.
The rain stopped. The wind calmed. The thunder hushed.
The haze drew back like a fog, revealing the entirety of the southern horde, their whole civilization—every stallion, mare, and foal—gathered under her sky.
Twilight reached deep into the well of sacred power entrusted to her, and defiled it. Her magic swelled like never before, her broken horn shining like a beacon over the horde.
A beam of light surged into the sky. The clouds drew back in an expanding circle, and behind them was a sky bearing neither sun nor stars.
She tore into the fabric between worlds, ripping open a seal left untouched for a thousand years. Living wind swirled around her beam, tossing their manes and flapping the collapsed tent walls around them. Her shattered horn was a dam ready to pour out all the power trapped inside her, to end the war once and for all.
A hoof rested on her shoulder.
Twilight turned her gaze down from the sky, and found her brother looking at her. She had expected passion, or joy, or ecstatic rage. But his face bore no such thing. There was a sadness in him. He was calm, and despite the pain from his wounds, he seemed at peace.
He looked at her like only a brother could, and with his lips, he formed one word.
Stunned disbelief seized Twilight. She looked back into the eyes of the brother she’d admired all her life, who had stood strong where anyone else would falter, and felt nothing but revulsion.
“Why?” Twilight breathed.
Shining put a hoof on her other shoulder, and looked at her with eyes that said, This isn't the sister I love.
Twilight’s magic quivered. The sounds of steel and roars drew nearer: the southerners coming up the hill, swarming like insects to cast down the divine.
“Then close your eyes,” Twilight said, and she pushed herself from his embrace, and plunged into the abyss of her power.
The purple sky cracked and tore open, and through the cracks descended tendrils of light thick as castle spires, falling with dreamlike slowness, like strings of silk, and where they touched the ground, sand melted and ponies died.
Death flooded the southern camp. The roars around her turned to shouts, and shouts to screams. Thousands of lives were extinguished, tens of thousands, more than she dared to imagine. She felt each one as they were snuffed out, could feel the terror and flash of pain as they plummeted into that endless oblivion.
The countless tendrils expanded and merged into a terrible cascade of blinding white and purple, closing tight around the king’s hill until all she could see was a torrent of falling light. Twilight blinked away tears and forced her eyes to stay open. Her symphony of death and destruction coalesced into a single, lonely tone that stretched on into eternity: a wail, distant and mournful, finally silenced.
For a long time, all was dark and cold.
But then a soft, red glow appeared far away. The sun rose over the world, weak and hesitant, and the shadows washed away.
Twilight Sparkle woke from her daze. Her eyes were already open. The southern camp was gone. She lay alone on an island of stone and sand, surrounded by a sea of pale-green glass shimmering with the light of dawn.
Her brother lay beside her, untouched by magic. His eyes were open, too; he’d never closed them. The intense heat had left trails of salt where his tears had run.
She crawled up beside him, too weak to stand. She opened her mouth, wanting to say his name, to ask if she’d made him proud. But she knew she hadn’t.
The low sunlight graced her face, but there was no warmth to it. She looked out at the ocean of glass stretching out as far as she could see, trying to find satisfaction in what she’d done. She found none. Her life was over. There wasn’t enough kindness in all the world to forgive her for what she’d done.
And yet, in a strange way, the world seemed right again.
Twilight closed her brother’s eyes, took out the flag of peace from her saddlebag, and laid it over him. It wasn’t the Equestrian flag she had once draped over an empty casket, but it felt right. He may have lived a soldier, but he died a prince.
Twilight turned, and slowly, step by numb step, walked away from the sun. She could have unfolded her wings and taken to the air, but she chose not to. She would walk, going far into the west, away from everything. Because out there, past the oceans of glass and sand and tears, something beautiful waited for her, and she would hear its song.