Prologue: Frozen in Time

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Princess Mi Amore Cadenza nervously paced her room, flinching at every howl the Windigos made. Something had to be done. The citizens of the Empire had already fled down south in fear to escape the freezing temperatures, and her husband… Cadance swallowed. She would not think about Shining Armor. She would not. She couldn’t afford to.

The protective shield around the palace proper shuddered as the Windigos launched another volley of freezing cold winds. Cadance gasped, then stopped as her horn glowed brighter, reinforcing the magical protection she had set up around the castle. The Crystal Heart would protect the Crystal Empire from the North’s brutal weather, but it was next to powerless against hate-fueled creatures such as the Windigos.

How has this happened? Cadance asked herself, resuming pacing. How had Equestria fallen so far? She mentally rewound the events of the past few years, remembering…

Something was wrong, and Cadance knew it from the moment she saw her younger sister-in-law’s worried eyes, despite her instances that everything was fine. Sure, things were tough for the ruler of Equestria, regarding her friends, but this was something entirely different, and Cadance couldn’t figure out what it was… until she walked outside to get some fresh air.

A pegasus and a unicorn were shouting at each other in the middle of the street, a crushed pastry at their feet. The argument became heated, and the pegasus launched himself at the unicorn, who lit her horn in defense. She shot lasers at the pegasus to ward him off that Cadance knew were harmless and just for show, and he tried to swoop down and frighten her with every pass, like he was going to carry her off to eat her. Passerby looked on with fear, and before long, all pegasi and unicorns were fighting each other, while earth ponies backed away warily. Somepony insulted them for being weak and pathetic, and all the earth ponies ran away.

Cadance lit her horn and tried to pull ponies apart, screaming and crying for them to stop, but they refused to listen. Eventually Twilight came and pulled her away, and Cadance knew from just looking at her that this was what was worrying her husband’s sister so much - and she knew that there wasn’t much hope that they could stop it.

Months passed, and Cadance could feel her magic weakening with each passing day. She noticed the increase of cold, dangerous weather that plagued the North, though the Crystal Heart should have kept out all the worst. She tried to keep her mounting anxiety hidden from her subjects… and from her daughter. But that was how she lost her husband…

The mountain groaned, and chunks of rock pierced the snow around her. She shouted to her husband, hoping he could hear her, but the wind snatched her words away and swirled up to meet the peak. The cold slowed her thoughts, making her brain sluggish and unresponsive. A pile of snow landed in front of her, followed by more, and before Cadance could react, a huge wall blocked the path in front of her. With a yell, she blasted it with her horn, melting the snow, but the freezing wind froze it again, turning a wall of snow into a formidable barrier of ice.

Tears welled up in her eyes and froze on her cheeks, and Cadance thought about everything up there - everything she had just lost…

Snow continued to plummet down, and the thin barrier of rock finally gave way as a huge white wall of ice and snow hurtled down the mountainside at frightening speeds. Cadance shouted for her family, her daughter, her husband, and cracks suddenly appeared in the ice wall. Hope flaring inside her, she blasted the cracks with her magic, and a young alicorn mare tumbled out.

The face inside the hole in the ice looked out at her with love, and as Cadance reached for Shining Armor’s hoof, the rushing wall of snow enveloped him, and he disappeared-

Cadance gasped as a howl broke her out of her trance. She couldn’t afford to go back there - not now.

“Mama?” came a quiet voice, and the Princess of Love spun around to see a young mare, barely full grown, walk into the room, her pale pink coat and multi toned curls dusted with snow. Her cyan eyes were full of worry and concern. “There’s somepony outside… I think they’re going into the mountains.” Her voice shook as she said it. The mountains were dangerous - they were past the Crystal Heart’s protection, and the WIndigos’ evil magic turned already lethal conditions even worse.

“Thank you, Flurry, sweetheart,” Cadance said gently, trying not to scare her daughter anymore than she already was. “Were you outside again?” The young mare hesitated, then nodded, a few snowflakes falling off her wings and onto the floor. “Remember to stay inside until the Wind- weather dies down.” She brushed past Flurry Heart and walked to her room, her hoofsteps echoing in the empty hallways.

“Mama? The weather’s not going to get better, is it?” Flurry Heart asked, trotting alongside her mother. “Those things out there - they’re Windigos, aren’t they? Aunt Twilight told me about them. Mama, something’s wrong.”

“What do you mean, sweetness?” Cadance asked lightly as she opened the door to her chambers. “This is just a big storm - I’m sure it’ll clear up soon.”

“Mama-”

“Everything’s going to be fine, dear. Aunt Twilight just has a few things to clear up down in the south, and everything will go back to normal.”

“Stop trying to hide things from me!” Flurry Heart cried, teleporting in front of her mother as the doors opened. “I’m too old for you to pretend like nothing’s wrong, Mama! Something’s going on in the south, I know it! Ponies are fighting, they’re splitting up, the other creatures have already retreated back into their kingdoms, the Windigos returned, and nopony’s going to be able to stop them on their own!” Her voice broke as tears began to well up in her eyes. “I can’t just sit here while the world falls apart around me. I won’t be able to live with myself if I did.”

“How did you know?” Cadance snapped, her violet eyes flashing dangerously. Flurry Heart took a step back in shock. “How did you know about that? Flurry Heart, tell me right now.”

“M-me and Luster… we were just… talking,” Flurry stammered.

Cadance took a deep breath. “Flurry, dear, it’s true that things are a little rough right now, but things will get better, I promise. It may take a little while, but things will get better. Trust me. Go back to your room now, and we’ll discuss everything when I get back.”

Without another word to her daughter, Cadance threw open the doors to her balcony, leaped off, and soared to the outskirts of the Empire. Once she passed through the magical barrier, she shivered in the cold for a brief moment before casting a spell to heat the air touching her coat, keeping her warm. As always, her magic seemed far away and hard to reach… Cadance strained her mind to remember when that had started…

A crack, a flood of snow, a pain-filled scream-

Cadance shook herself out of the memory. She scanned the ground beneath her, searching for the pony that Flurry Heart had pointed out. After the cursed cold began to finally pass through her magic and gnaw at her numb hooves, she spotted a bright pink glow coming from directly beneath the circling Windigos above them. Surprising even herself, a small smile came to her lips as she realized who it was.

“Cadance,” the purple alicorn said as the Princess of Love touched down behind her. “I was wondering how long it would be before you came looking for me.”

“I know what you’re planning, Twilight,” Cadance said, and the ruler of Equestria turned to look at her. There was a grim determination in her eyes that told Cadance that what she was about to say wouldn’t make any difference, but she had to try. “Please, you can’t do this. What will Equestria do in your absence? What will I do? And Flurry Heart, and-” She choked back a sob as her mind strayed to Twilight’s lost brother. Surely she would blame her for not saving him-

“It’s the only way.” Twilight Sparkle turned to look at the equine creatures circling above her. “I have nothing left here.” Her voice sounded so heartbroken, so full of pain, that Cadance was shocked that the Princess of Friendship wasn’t crying. Then she realized that her sister-in-law probably had no tears left. “My friends… they’ve all left me. Everything I stand for is slowly dissolving. I know you heard about Celestia and Luna… and Discord. And my brother…” She took a shuddering breath. “I don’t blame you. It wasn’t your fault.” Her normally calm violet eyes filled with such hate and anger that Cadance almost didn’t recognize her. “It was theirs.”

Cadance nodded her head in resignation. “Do what you must.”

Twilight sighed. “There are a few things, though. I suppose you’ve felt magic growing fainter?” The other alicorn nodded. “I fear that soon, our magic will vanish. The magic housed in artifacts, however, will last a bit longer - though perhaps not as strong as it used to be. Everything I have done - my friends have done - will most likely be forgotten. I will do everything I can to preserve it with my last few days, but something more certain should be done about this. Somepony to retell the stories. And I will need you to get me out of here. My daughter… she is waiting for me in Manehatten - Maretime Bay. Please… let me see her again.”

Cadance nodded again, though she wasn’t quite sure what Twilight meant by the first two requests. How was she supposed to -

Then she looked into the alicorn’s weary eyes, and she knew what she must do.

Twilight’s horn lit up bright magenta pink, attracting the Windigos’ attention. Cadance stepped back and cast a protective shield around herself as the three Windigos swirled around the ruler of Equestria. Ice began to creep up her hooves, but Twilight fought it off. Her magic swirled around her and lifted her into the air. Her huge violet wings began to grow fainter, and it seemed like time was rewinding. She shrank in size until she was the size of a regular pony, with three glowing balls orbiting her. Finally, a huge blast from the Princess of Friendship obliterated the Windigos, replacing them with a large holographic projection of a magenta six pointed star, surrounded by five smaller white ones.

She collapsed to the ground, along with three crystals. Cadance didn’t get a very good look at them, but one looked like spread wings and was a teal green, while the other resembled a unicorn horn and was a dark purple. As soon as they touched the snowy ground, they vanished in a tiny burst of light. The only crystal left was shaped like a perfect circle. Cadance dropped her shield and ran up to her sister-in-law. She was too weak to do much more than open her eyes, but when Cadance said through tears, “It worked,” she smiled before falling asleep.

With a jolt of shock, Cadance realized that Twilight’s horn had vanished as well, and all that remained of one of the most powerful ponies in Equestrian history was an exhausted earth pony who had just sacrificed all her magic for ponies who would forget about her and tear down all she had built.

Lighting up her horn, Cadance teleported both Twilight and the final remaining crystal to her desired location, and herself back to the Crystal Palace. She scoured the library for the rest of the day, feeling her magic growing weaker and weaker with each passing second. Soon she wouldn’t be able to lift a book, let alone perform the spell that was required of her. Finally she stumbled across an ancient spell book and was able to find something close enough to what she was trying to accomplish that she could twist it a little to fit her needs.

“Flurry, dear?” Cadance gently rapped her hoof on her daughter’s door. “Come out, sweetheart. We need to talk.”

Spreading her wing over the younger mare, she led her down to the Crystal Heart, rotating slowly in place like it had been for years. Outside, the wind howled and blew under the heavy curtains surrounding the room. There wasn’t much time left.

Reaching deep down inside her to find her last vestiges of magic, Cadance lit up her horn and blasted the Heart with cyan magic. The Heart absorbed it and glowed brighter. A shield flickered into existence around it, forming a bubble. Cadance sighed. The easiest part was over. The hardest part was next. It’s for her own good, she consoled herself. It’s for all of our own good.

“You know what the Crystal Heart does, yes, my sweet?” Cadance asked Flurry Heart, who looked confused.

“It protects the Empire,” she answered immediately.

“Correct. And now, it can protect you.”

Shoving down the feelings of guilt within her, Cadance pushed Flurry forward. Surprised, the alicorn stumbled, the tip of her wing brushing against the bubble. It reacted instantly, lighting up and reaching out tendrils to wrap around the princess, pulling her inside. Once she was, the shield dimmed to its original semi-transparent state.

“Mama?” Flurry Heart said, feeling fear wrap cold tendrils around her heart. “What’s going on?” Wherever her hooves touched the magic shield, it lit up white. She pressed her hooves against it, trying to push her way out, but the bubble was strong enough to not allow her to pass through.

Cadance gave no indication that she heard her, but she folded one of her wings over her heart - her and Flurry’s way of saying I love you.

Frost began to creep into the room at an alarming speed, and freezing winds blew the curtains away. Flurry felt herself getting drowsy, but she fought to stay awake, tears streaming down her face, screaming for her mother. Ice began to creep up the Princess of Love’s hooves, reaching cold branches around her that froze her in their embrace. Cadance opened her eyes one last time to see her daughter wailing and screaming as if her heart had just broken in two. Mi Amore Cadenza closed her eyes, and the ice crept over her face, freezing her completely.

Flurry Heart watched, now unable to make a sound, as a cold wind shattered what used to be her mother. She finally collapsed, giving in to the exhaustion she had been feeling ever since she had entered the bubble, closed her eyes, and the last citizen of the Crystal Empire fell into a deep, deep sleep.

If anypony had walked in during the time at which Flurry was asleep, they would have seen a pale pink mare sleeping soundly beneath a glowing Crystal Heart, all suspended in a blue bubble floating above the ground.

And so the last alicorn slept soundly until she felt something inside her reawaken - something she had lost but hadn’t noticed leaving her - and she felt the need to reawaken with it. Whenever she had tried this before, she had been unable to force herself into consciousness, but now she was surprised to feel her eyes blinking open, her sluggish brain beginning to work again. She gasped as she sat up, and the magical bubble around her suddenly dissolved, dumping her onto the ice-cold floor.

Flurry stood up and shook herself out, looking around for her mother… and then remembering what happened to her. Once again overcome by shock and grief, she sank to the floor, but no tears came. She must have used them all before.

Taking a shaky breath and standing up, Flurry pushed aside one of the heavy velvet curtains, which was covered with snow and frozen stiff. This she found a bit strange. The same could be said for outside the palace. Where there once were streets were now wind-driven drifts of fine, powdery snow with tall crystal formations poking up out of the glittering white. But she could see the Crystal Heart’s protective shield glowing above everything… But that wasn’t the only thing in the sky. Brilliant lights were dancing across the clear expanse of blue, all kinds of rainbow colors and lighting up the sky just as well as the sun. But these hadn’t come from the Heart - Flurry felt something different about these.

Glancing back at the Crystal Heart, which was slowly spinning in a circle once again, she remembered the magical bubble her mother had forced her into. Had she shrunk the Crystal Heart’s shield so that it only protected Flurry? Had it kept her frozen in time until it was safe to come back? If so, how much time had passed?

Knowing only one pony who could have the answers for her anymore, Flurry Heart lit up her horn and teleported to Canterlot.

After Every Ending...

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The wind blew through Sunny Starscout’s multicolored mane, and she closed her eyes and smiled, letting the currents catch her wings and lift her higher into the sky. Below her sprawled the town of Maretime Bay, pretty small from heights such as this one. Perfectly executing a twist that Zipp had taught her, Sunny whirled around and began to soar back to the ground, where she could see her friends waiting by the smoothie stand she worked for. They were talking amongst themselves excitedly when she landed, spooking Cloudpuff, who was flapping around Hitch’s head. The white pomeranian barked and flew over to lick her face.

“Okay, okay, I love you, too,” Sunny giggled, pushing him away and holding him at an arm’s length. “Pipp! Zipp! Please tell your dog that I am not puppy food!”

Zipp laughed and scooped up the flying dog in her arms. “Are you sure? I could have sworn you were… Learn something new every day, I guess.” She easily dodged Sunny’s swat with a flip, laughing as she gently set down Cloudpuff in her sister’s arms, who, amazingly, had her cell phone put away.

Sunny walked over to Izzy, who levitated a smoothie into her hoof. “Did you figure out the whole magic-wings-horn thing?” the purple unicorn asked, noticing the glowing appendages.

“Sooort of?” Sunny put the smoothie down. “I think it’s related to the magic of friendship, so…”

Zipp shrugged. “So long as I get somepony else to fly with who isn’t staring at a screen 24/7,” she finished, very pointedly looking at her sister, who was petting Cloudpuff and now looked offended.

“I do not spend all my time on my phone!” she said, and Cloudpuff barked in her defense. “I have to sleep, don’t I? And I haven’t been on my phone for more than an hour all day.”

“Oh, barely,” Zipp scoffed. “I saw you on it at breakfast, and you know it!”

Sunny laughed. “Anyways, what are you guys all doing here? I thought you were busy.”

The other five ponies exchanged looks that told Sunny that they knew something she didn’t. “You know when Hitch and I went down to investigate the wreckage of the, um… you-know-what?” Sprout hesitantly volunteered. “Well, we found something… interesting.”

“Like, what kind of interesting?” Sunny asked, panic beginning to mount inside her.

“There was something that looked like an old cave, but the entrance was caved in,” Hitch remembered.

“Yeah, and so I got one of the unicorns to move aside some of the rocks so that there was a hole,” Sprout continued, “and you want to know the weirdest part? Inside, it wasn’t caved in at all! The whole cave was covered in these crystals, and they looked a lot like the ones in Bridlewood - kind of blue and sparkly.”

“Gee, that narrows it down,” Izzy commented sarcastically, grinning and tossing her hair over her shoulder. Her crystal bracelet gleamed in the sunlight, and Sunny noticed that she now had two, albeit that the newer one looked like it was made by somepony far less experienced in the art of crystal-crafting and unicycling than her friend. “Do you think Bridlewood’s crystals came from that cave? Because we’ve been investigating where they’d come from for years and we haven’t come up with anything.”

Hitch shrugged. “It’s possible,” he said. “I was only standing outside it - Sprout’s the one who did all the real exploring - but even I could tell - that cave was magic. I can’t explain it really, but I felt some kind of connection to it. I don’t think any of the other ponies there felt it, though.”

“Huh.” Sunny turned her head as a flicker of motion caught her eye and spotted a filly standing in the middle of the street, staring at her horn and wings, dumbfounded. Their guardian finally came and dragged them away, and Sunny sighed, letting the magic fade until she was just an ordinary earth pony again.

“Oh, that reminds me,” Sprout said, turning to Zipp and Pipp. “Mom wants you to look at her design for the train system she’s working on. Well, she didn’t say you specifically, but she wanted somepony from Zephyr Heights, since that’s where she’s expanding it first. Something about trade routes and boring stuff. Should we…”

“Sure,” Pipp said, setting Cloudpuff on the ground, where he promptly launched into flight. “You guys want to come, too?”

Izzy slurped up the rest of her smoothie, tossed it into a wastebasket, and grinned. The group of six ponies set off across the town towards the Canterlogic factory, which towered over the town. The only point inside the city limits that might be higher was the tip of Sunny’s lighthouse, which was all the way on the outskirts.

It took a while to get through security (Sprout had an ID card, and Hitch got in free because of being the sheriff, but the rest of them needed visitor’s passes, which the guard was reluctant to hand out to pegasi, a unicorn, and an earth pony who had repeatedly trashed the factory’s annual presentations, but they convinced him eventually), and once they were inside, Phyllis Cloverleaf, who was hurrying towards the doors, came to a skidding halt, her face lighting up when she saw Sunny and her friends.

“Oh, thank the stars,” she said, grabbing Sunny’s hoof and pulling her into the building. “Sorry if this is a bit unprecedented, but I need to show you something. Your friends can come along, too,” she said as the rest of the crew stood there, blinking and looking confused.

Phyllis lead them into the elevator and down to the basement. Zipp, Pipp, and Izzy kept their muzzles up against the glass the whole time, staring in wonder at everything around them.

“Wow!” Izzy exclaimed as they came to a halt and the doors opened. “What do you guys do down here?”

Sunny surprised everypony by answering. “Construction mostly happens down here, though a bit happens on the first floor, though that’s mainly packaging and processing and whatnot. Offices and other things like that are on the upper floors, and they are much smaller than this.”

“How do you know that?” Sprout asked incredulously, and Sunny blushed.

“You handed out maps at one of your annual presentations?” she tried.

“Uh, no we didn’t,” Sprout corrected as Hitch figured it out.

“Did you sneak around the entire place?” he asked, and the flush on Sunny’s cheeks darkened.

“I had to find a new route every time,” she insisted. “You guys kept blocking all the ones I used to use. I sort of just memorized the layout on the way.” She turned to Phyllis, who was frantically navigating through the busy workers. “What did you want us to see?”

“We’ve been working on some kind of magic detection system,” Phyllis explained, nearly bumping into an earth pony that Sunny recognized, “you know, so we can see when a suspicious amount of magic is being used, perhaps for… unpleasant reasons, or if magic is in danger of disappearing again. But we’re getting a large amount of feedback from this area up north…”

“North?” As far as Sunny knew, there was nothing north but frozen wasteland. How could there be a lot of magic in use up there? “Where north?”

The pink earth pony pushed open a door to reveal a table with a few monitors on it, with Toots, a plump teal earth pony with a brown mane combed over to one side. He was studying the monitor with red spikes on it like a heart rate monitor with a bewildered expression. A second monitor featured a map of the continent, with a blinking red dot in the middle of the snowy mountains to the north.

“Do you know anything about this?” Phyllis asked Sunny, but surprisingly, it was Izzy who answered. She looked excited and a bit nervous.

“Well… the unicorns have an idea,” she volunteered, stepping forward to take a closer look at the map. Toots scooted out of the way of the unicorn. “I told you guys earlier that we had been wondering where our crystals came from in Bridlewood for a while, right? Well,” she continued after her friends had all nodded, “one of the theories branches off of a legend of a city made of crystals and snow. Something about magic teleportation or something, I can never keep them all straight. But I do know that the city was rumored to be in this area.” She traced around the red dot with her hoof.

“What was this city called in the legend?” Sunny asked. There was something familiar about the idea of a city made of crystals in the northern mountains…

Izzy shrugged. “I always just called it the Crystal City.”

“Do you really think that it could be real?” Zipp asked Izzy while her sister got out her phone to research it.

“With all the other stuff that’s happened recently, it seems pretty plausible,” Hitch commented.

“Oo, I can’t wait to tell Alphabittle!” Izzy said, grinning and bouncing on her hooves. “And Glacier and Lemon Pie! We actually found the Crystal City!”

“We still don’t know if it’s up there, though,” Sprout said, jumping at an opening in the conversation. “It could just be a fluke. Or some sort of magical discharge. Or after-effects of bringing magic back twice now. Or somepony using an evil magical artifact to gain lots of magic and is coming to bring us all down.”

“Cheery,” Hitch muttered. Sprout shoved him.

“According to my research, there’s nothing up there,” Pipp said, scrolling through her phone. “It’s extremely uninhabitable. The conditions can be lethal on a good day. Nopony’s been up there for generations because they didn’t have the equipment needed to withstand the cold temperatures.”

“How could something still be up there after all that time?” Zipp asked, looking a bit skeptical about the whole thing. “If it’s really as bad as you say…”

“We lost our thrones and were under arrest, went on a cross-country mission to discover some crystals, took out a giant war machine, got magic back, got our thrones back, lost magic again, lost our memories, almost went to war with each other, took out a giant war machine again, got magic back again, oh, and did I mention that one of our best friends can have wings and a horn whenever she likes? And somehow this stumps you?” Pipp asked incredulously, putting her phone away under her wing.

“It just seems so unogical,” Zipp protested. “I mean, sure, all that other stuff was crazy, but it more or less followed the laws of science! Even the magic-related stuff had limits and rules. But this… this is just impossible. There’s no way anything could be up here unless it was very powerful, and that would require magic, which, I’m not sure if you noticed, has been gone for almost a century, possibly longer. If there’s anything left, it’s most likely in ruins.”

“But can we at least go check it out?” Izzy asked, still looking like a filly who’d just had ice cream for the first time. “Please? We can’t not check it out. Like, that would be impossible. We can’t do that.”

“We might be able to help with that,” Phyllis began slowly, “but we definitely won’t be able to provide all the help you might need to get up there.”

“I’ll talk to Mom about it,” Pipp added, putting her phone away.

Zipp elbowed her playfully. “You mean, we’ll talk to Mom about it,” she corrected. Pipp looked a bit surprised that her sister was helping. “And while we’re there, I’ll check and see if there’s anything in the artifacts that we’ve collected about a Crystal City.”

Because they were already there, Phyllis gave Pipp a few rolled-up blueprints to take back to her mom, and Sunny, Izzy, Hitch, and Sprout promised to do some looking around Maretime Bay for anything about the Crystal City. Once the two pegasi were outside the city limits, Zipp took to the skies and whooped in delight. She turned to her sister, who was also hovering in midair, and said, “Race you to Zephyr Heights!”

With a burst of speed, Zipp was off, and Pipp struggled to catch up. The blueprints were kind of heavy, and she was much smaller than her sister, so it was slow going. Zipp eventually noticed that her sister wasn’t there and doubled back.

“You alright?” she asked, taking in the sweat beading on Pipp’s forehead, and how hard her wings were pumping.

“I’m fine,” she responded through gritted teeth. “Why don’t you go ahead and fly around the world while you wait for me or practice some tricks or something that just shows how superior you are to me. I know you love rubbing it in.” The bitterness in her voice surprised her, and her sister as well, it looked like. “Zipp, I didn’t mean-”

“No, it’s fine,” her sister said, reaching over and taking the blueprints from her. They flew for a while in silence until Zipp said, “You know, one of these days, I can show you how to do some of the tricks I’ve learned.”

Pipp looked over at her sister with a surprised look. Her sister had changed. “I’d like that.”

Once they arrived in Zephyr Heights, Zipp angled towards the airstation to check their stash of Ancient Equestrian artifacts while Pipp took the standard entrance to the palace, though skipping the elevator. She landed inside the entrance when she saw her mother hurrying towards her. “Mom, what-”

“Are your friends with you? Where’s your sister? Is Sunny here?” Haven asked breathlessly as she skidded to a stop, flanked by Zoom and Thunder, two of her most trusted guards.

“Z-Zipp’s in the airstation, and Sunny’s in Maretime Bay,” Pipp stuttered. “Why? What’s so important?” But Haven had already taken off towards the castle entrance to the airstation, followed by Zoom, so Pipp turned to Thunder. The green pegasus turned and geastured for her to follow.

“Come on,” he said, leading the way to the palace dungeons. “It’s better if you see for yourself.”

...Comes a New Beginning

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Flurry Heart blinked her eyes open, her memory fuzzy. The last thing she remembered was some strange motorized basket, a pair of pegasi, and then she blacked out…

She shook herself, lifting her head and looking around. She was lying across an elegant bed, but it was suspended from the wall by golden chains. A fountain was in the middle of the room, gurgling pleasantly. A bowl of fruit stood on a pedestal next to a… very strange chair.

Flurry stood up, shaking off the nausea, and went over to inspect the chair. There was a series of buttons on one of the armrests and she cautiously pressed one of them.

Instantly, the chair began to hum and rumble, and Flurry jumped backwards in shock. She lit up her horn and aimed it at the possessed seating, preparing to fire, and then-

“Ah, please don’t blast the spa chairs!” came a voice, startling Flurry. She whirled around to see that one wall of the room was made up of golden bars, and behind them, flapping her wings to keep her in the air, was a pink mare. Her curly purple mane was adorned with a small golden crown, and her eyes were a hazel color. Strangest of all were her wings, which were fluffy and were a shade of white. “They’re very expensive and would be a fortune to replace, and on top of that, they’re very hard to install, so, would appreciate it if you could not zap them.” She landed behind the bars and folded up her wings, but not before Flurry caught a glimpse of a small gold rectangle hidden underneath them.

Reluctantly, she extinguished her horn, and the pony reached through the bars to press another button. The chair stopped rumbling and fell silent and still. Flurry hesitantly approached the bars, studying her. This pony obviously knew how things worked around here, so Flurry thought it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that she had imprisoned her here… though, honestly, her surroundings didn’t look that much like a prison.

Behind the pink pegasus was another pegasus, this one green and dressed in the gold-lined silver armor of a royal guard. There was something about him that was vaguely familiar…

“You!” Flurry gasped, taking a step forward and glaring at him. “You’re one of the ones who knocked me out, aren’t you?” She lit up her horn, sunshine yellow magic dancing up and down her horn like electricity in her agitation.

The guard looked confused. “Uh… we didn’t do anything. You asked where Princess Twilight Sparkle was, and Zoom told you she wasn’t here, and hadn’t been here for a long time, and you just sort of… collapsed. I had nothing to do with it, I swear.” Even so, he took a hasty step back as he eyed Flurry’s horn with apprehension.

The memory surfaced in her foggy brain, and Flurry calmed down, dousing her horn and feeling the shock and pain and grief she had been feeling recently came crashing in, overwhelming the mare and forcing her to sit down, tears welling up in her eyes and cascading down her face and splashing into a puddle between her hooves. The two pegasi exchanged a look, but before they could say anything more, three more pegasi came running down the hallway.

One of them, a blue one who looked all-business, was dressed just like the other guard, and had Flurry’s brain been functioning properly, she would have recognized her as well as the second guard she had encountered. Another looked only a little older than Flurry, with a pale white coat, wings that faded into blue, purple, and pink, and a brilliantly hot pink mane that was streaked with blue and darker pink, spiked up and short. The third, who looked older than the other four, had a light pink coat and a lavender mane that was done up on her head, wearing all sorts of jewelry and royal regalia. The white pegasus skidded to a stop beside the smaller pink one and stared at Flurry with wide eyes.

“Woah,” she whispered. “She looks like Sunny.”

“No, not quite,” the smaller pink one said. The tone of her voice when talking to the other pegasus made Flurry think they were sisters. “Sunny’s are all golden and glowing and only appear when she wants them to. Hers look… more solid.”

The white one turned to the older pegasus. “Mom, how about you take Thunder and Zoom… and see if there are any other lost ponies in the area.” She gave her a meaningful glance that said, “We want to talk to her in private. Trust us.” Apparently, this pony was much better at trusting ponies than Flurry’s own mother, because she nodded and left, gesturing to her guards to follow in suit.

Once they rounded the corner, the white pegasus seemed to relax. She stepped up to the bars and said, “What’s your name?”

Flurry sniffed, dragged her hoof across her face to get rid of any more tears, and stood. “Flurry Heart.”

She smiled. “Hello, Flurry Heart. My name’s Zipp, and this is my sister, Pipp. Look, I’m sure you’re probably very confused, so let me just say what we know. You teleported into the city, approached two of our guards, and asked to see Twilight Sparkle, but when they told you she wasn’t here, you collapsed, and said guards brought you here so that our mom could contact us… well, actually it was our friend she really wanted to contact, but I guess we work for the time being, right, Pipp?”

The other pegasus nodded. Her eyes were flitting back and forth between Flurry’s wings and horn with a question in them, but Flurry didn’t bother trying to figure out what it was.

“Do you know where I am?” she asked Zipp. “I thought I was teleporting to Canterlot, but this can’t be Canterlot. It looks so different, and it’s filled with pegasi and all these glowing, moving pictures of ponies that I don’t recognize, and I’m so confused right now.” She almost wanted to sink onto the bed, which looked hypnotizingly soft after an extended nap in a magic bubble, but she had to get answers first.

Zipp and Pipp exchanged a glance. “This is Canterlot,” Pipp said slowly, like she wasn’t sure how to break the news. “Except… now it’s Zephyr Heights. It’s… future Canterlot.”

The words didn’t really register in Flurry’s brain, so she decided to let the matter go. So many questions crowded in her brain that it would be a relief to get some of the easier ones out of the way first. “Okay, I’m sorry if I sound rude, but who exactly are you guys?”

Pipp lifted her head, rolled her shoulders back, and spread her wings majestically, while Zipp rolled her eyes, like she knew what her sister was about to do and hated when she did it.

“We are the princesses of Zephyr Heights,” Pipp said haughtily. “Our mother is Queen Haven, and Zipp here is heir to the throne. I’m really famous, too, you know. I sing and do shows and vlogs and stuff.” She tossed her head and gave her most dazzling social-media-popstar smile.

Flurry Heart did the only thing she could do. She burst out laughing. She doubled over and almost kneeled on the floor, wheezing, tears streaming out of her eyes. Both princesses looked surprised, then Zipp’s expression shifted to amusement and Pipp’s to offended. “Okay,” Flurry gasped, standing back up. “That was a good one. That was funny. Look, I only know of three princesses in Equestria, and neither of you are one. Also, the only queen I know of is an evil shapeshifter who tried to take over Equestria multiple times. So, no way what you’re saying is true.”

Pipp started spluttering, so Zipp told her to shush and spoke to Flurry in a soft, comforting voice. “Look, Flurry Heart… I don’t know exactly where you’re from, but it definitely isn’t from this time period.” Pipp’s ears pricked up, and she looked at Flurry with a gaping mouth as if she was figuring something out.

“Do you think it’s like-” She broke off, not sure how to put what she was thinking into words, but Zipp seemed to grasp it.

“You got one, too?”

Pipp nodded. “A white unicorn with a curly purple mane. She - she taught me to be generous with what I have.”

Flurry’s own ears pricked up at the mention of that pony. Zipp looked surprised at her sister and said, “I met a blue pegasus with a rainbow mane. She told me to always be loyal to the ponies I care about, even if they don’t deserve it.” She turned back to Flurry. “But… they were all sparkly and stuff, and they disappeared.”

“You met Rarity and Rainbow Dash?” Flurry asked in a hushed voice. “Where are they? Are they here? Can I talk to them? Do they know where my aunt is?”

“They’re not here, Flurry,” Zipp said mournfully. “They haven’t been here for generations. This is the future of the world they left behind. I’m sorry, but… I don’t think anypony you knew before is alive anymore.”

All potential questions vanished from Flurry’s head as the weight of Zipp’s words sank in. Flurry stumbled backwards, mumbling, “No… no… it’s not possible…” She collapsed onto the floor, unable to stand anymore, unable to do anything, really. The bars raised, but Flurry didn’t care. Zipp put her wing around her, and Pipp held her hoof, but Flurry didn’t notice.

Her mother was gone, her father was gone, her aunt was gone, everypony she knew was dead… She choked back a sob and noticed that Zipp and Pipp were having a conversation.

“...should get Sunny,” Zipp was saying. “I think she’ll be able to explain this better than we can.”

Pipp nodded in agreement. “You go get Sunny, I’ll show her the airstation. You’re faster than me, anyways. Zipp,” she added when her sister made sounds like she wanted to interrupt, “trust me on this.”

The white pegasus slowly nodded and withdrew her wing, leaving the cell and galloping down the hallway. Pipp gently helped Flurry Heart to her feet, keeping a wing over her back to keep her steady. “Come on,” she said, leading her out of the cell, “there’s something I want to show you.”

Flurry didn’t care much where they went, but soon she was feeling strong enough to walk without Pipp’s support, which was fortunate, because the pegasus princess led her down a dark and excluded hallway, pried open a grate, and told Flurry Heart to jump.

She landed in the basket of a hot air balloon - Just like the one my aunt used to have, Flurry thought with another wave of grief - which was suspended over a large, open room. Pipp joined her and pushed a lever, which allowed the basket to begin lowering to the floor. Flurry looked around and noticed the tables lined with artifacts, shelves packed with books, and then she lifted her eyes to the stained glass window that took up an entire wall and gasped.

“I know, right?” Pipp said, trying to sound cheerful for Flurry’s sake, leaping gently out of the basket when it touched the ground. “Isn’t it amazing? Izzy did a great job of putting it back together. It was all broken when we found it, but-”

“No, no,” Flurry interrupted, pointing at the large pink six-pointed star at the top of the window, surrounded by five smaller white stars. “That’s my aunt’s cutie mark,” she whispered. “I’d know it anywhere. But why is it here?”

“My friend Sunny might be able to help you with that,” Pipp said after hesitating. Now she stared at Flurry Heart as if her horn was creating bright pink rhinos that were now parading through the streets and sneezing glitter. To be fair, she could do that, but she wasn’t doing that right now… right? “Right now, I’ll take you through what we do know about what happened.”

She explained to Flurry the copies of the newspaper articles that they found in the sheriff’s office in Maretime Bay, the copy of the map Sunny’s father had found, the box full of friendship journals, the books crammed on the shelves, the artifacts lining the walls, the window, the crystals it displayed, her friends’ theories on what happened, and was explaining how she and her friends had brought magic back, not once but twice, when she noticed that Flurry wasn’t listening. In fact, the new pony was curled up in a corner, shivering despite the fact that it was a relatively warm summer’s day.

“Hey…” Pipp walked over to her and spread her wing over the shivering pony. “Are you okay? I can stop if it’s too much. I’m sorry if-”

“You’re fine,” Flurry interrupted, speaking quietly. Pipp noticed that this was the only place in the entire station where you couldn’t see the star at the top of the window. “I’m just… not ready to remember all this stuff yet.”

Pipp nodded, completely understanding. “There’s just… one thing I wanted to ask you. Did you ever know… a pony named Rarity? From what you said earlier, I thought you might recognize the name or something. It’s totally fine if you don’t, I was just wondering.”

Flurry nodded, and her eyes got a sad, far-off look in them. “She was one of my aunt’s best friends,” she whispered. “Element of Generosity… master of fashion.” She chuckled a bit at the memory. “She and my aunt and four other ponies went on all sorts of adventures together. I was too young to remember most of them, but I’ve been told the stories so many times it’s like I was.”

“Y-you say it like-” Pipp started, but broke off once she noticed a bright flash in front of the window. She trotted out from behind the bookshelf so that her friends could see her. Izzy, Hitch, and Sprout looked a bit alarmed, but Sunny looked like she was going to explode, either from excitement or worry, Pipp wasn’t sure, and she didn’t think Sunny did, either. Zipp was looking winded and exhausted, her wings flopping on the floor on either side of her. She was probably too tired to even flap. Sunny spotted Pipp and ran over to her.

“What’s going on?” she asked. “Zipp was too tired to tell us much, just that we had to come to Zephyr Heights. Has something bad happened? Something terrible? Is magic going to disappear again?”

“See, this is why I keep telling Mom to hurry up with those cell phone towers,” Sprout was saying to Hitch, both of them watching Zipp.

“Wow,” Pipp heard Izzy whisper, and she spun around to see that the purple unicorn had pranced right up to Flurry Heart and was grinning at her. The other pony was standing and looking at Izzy as though she reminded her of somepony. “Hi, new friend! My name’s Izzy!”

“What the-” Sunny sidestepped Pipp and cautiously approached Flurry. Her eyes widened as she noticed Flurry’s wings and horn, both solid and not made of glowing light. She opened and closed her mouth, unable to speak.

“Like I said,'' Zipp panted, her wings still drooping, but able to form somewhat legible words now. “Emergency.”

“But-” Sprout looked back and forth between Sunny and Flurry with a bewildered expression on his face. “Sunny, you - But the crystals - How does she-” He turned to Hitch as if expecting answers, but the other stallion looked just as confused as he was.

“Hello,” Sunny said gently, trying to appear as non-threatening as possible. “My name is Sunny Starscout, and these are my friends. This is Izzy, that one over there is Pipp, and those three over there are Zipp, Sprout, and Hitch. Forgive me for saying this, but would you mind telling us where you’re from? There’s just a lot of confusion surrounding you, and if you could help us out, we would appreciate it.”

Flurry studied the mare in front of her. Her pink mane was streaked with red, yellow, and blue, which was unusual. Flurry got a sense of strong magic from her, though not as strong as her mother’s or her aunts. Don’t cry, don’t cry-

“My name is Princess Flurry Heart of the Crystal Empire,” she said, automatically lifting her head a centimeter. She pointed at the star on top of the window, saying, “Twilight Sparkle was my aunt.”

Explained and Unexplained

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“I just - I can’t,” Sunny said, clutching her head in her hooves.

“So you’ve said,” Flurry replied dryly. “Many times.” She looked at Zipp with a look of exasperation that said, “Is she always like this?”

The pegasus’ expression said, “Just you wait.” Flurry’s expression changed to fear and horror, and Zipp laughed.

The three ponies were all alone in the airstation, the noon sun shining through the window and creating reflections on the floor. Flurry still felt a wave of sadness whenever she saw her aunt’s cutie mark, and she was glad that not many ponies were around to see her struggling. Pipp and the others had gone to get some lunch, promising to bring some back for them.

“Your aunt was Princess Twilight Sparkle?” Sunny stuttered. “That - that means that… Wow. Okay. I was not expecting this. Wait, that means - Well, there’s no easy way to say this, but… you and I are related. Very distantly, of course,” she added hurriedly as Flurry opened her mouth to ask how. “From what I’m told, Twilight Sparkle was my ancestor on my father’s side of the family. Don’t worry, I still don’t completely understand that, either.”

Flurry let a small smile slip. “My dad was her brother. My mom was…” She couldn’t bring herself to say it.

“Like you?” Zipp asked, nodding to her. “Wings and horn and all that?”

“How did you get yours, by the way?” Sunny asked, sitting forward. “I’ve never seen any like yours - then again, I haven’t seen any others than mine. I got mine when three magical crystals reunited and brought back magic after generations of it being missing, but I haven’t read about anything like that happening in the Guardians’ time, so I was just wondering.”

“I was born with them,” Flurry said slowly, mentally pondering what Sunny had said. “My mom… she brought love to ponies, and Celestia noticed, and raised her as her own. My aunt finished a magic spell about friendship. They both went to this place where the transformation actually happened… Did you say that you are an alicorn?” The earth pony nodded and stood up, facing the window. She closed her eyes and breathed in deep, the reflection of the pink star on her face. Sunny began to glow, and when she turned back to Flurry, a glowing golden horn and matching wings had appeared.

“Woah,” she whispered.

Sunny laughed. “These are not ‘woah’, trust me. Yours are ‘woah’. These are temporary, and I haven’t even figured them out yet.”

“It’s just - I’ve never seen a pony unbecome an alicorn,” Flurry protested. “Well, I suppose there was Cozy Glow, but she only became an alicorn off of stolen magic, so, perhaps not the best example.”

“Cozy Glow…” Sunny muttered to herself. Her hoof gravitated to her blue saddlebag, with Flurry’s aunt’s cutie mark drawn in slightly darker blue.

“How did you get them?” Flurry asked, curious.

“It’s a long story,” Zipp said, looking towards the back of the station. The hot air balloon basket was being lowered to the floor, and when it was, out stepped Pipp, followed by another pegasus that Flurry assumed was her mother, flanked by the two pegasi guards she had seen outside the prison. Flurry’s spine stiffened automatically, but Zipp gently touched her hoof, and she relaxed. She knew that these ponies wouldn’t hurt her, but it was still hard not to harbor a feeling of anger that they had taken over the legacy that her aunt had created, demolishing it and replacing it with lies.

I have to trust them, she thought, taking a deep breath. None of this is their fault. Equestria was saved because of them. She stood up and followed Zipp and Sunny to meet the new arrivals.

“Hi,” Pipp said breathlessly. “Sprout and Hitch are hopefully getting some lunch, and Izzy left for Bridlewood to talk to her friends. I told her not to tell them too much, we probably don’t want too many ponies to know about a magical city to the north. I mean, some ponies might get the wrong idea and try to corrupt its magic - though I’m sure it can’t be used for that, right?” she finished, looking at Flurry hopefully.

The alicorn shrugged. “I mean… it shouldn’t be. The only pony I’ve ever known to do it…”

An image flashed in her head of her parents in chains, forced to kneel before a black unicorn by their own mind-controlled citizens-

“Flurry?” Zipp’s voice sounded far away. “Are you okay?”

“I… I’m fine,” she finally made out. “He’s gone. My aunt and her friends dealt with him.”

“Oh, wow,” Sunny whispered, her voice full of awe. “I can only imagine what that must have been like… The Guardians of Harmony bravely marching into battle to liberate Equestria of a cruel oppressor, standing together, defeating every adversory…” She gave a contented sigh, and her eyes glazed over as Zipp and Pipp laughed. Their mother smiled and turned to Flurry.

“Your Highness… It will take me forever to get used to saying that to another pony. Pipp told me you were royalty. But I’m sorry about earlier. As you can probably imagine, you appearing here came as a bit of a surprise to us. I apologize for any inconveniences we may have caused you, and I promise that we’ll do everything we can to help you.”

Flurry nodded her head in acknowledgement. “I understand. Thank you, Your Majesty. I accept your apology. And I apologize for all the trouble I’ve caused. This has all been a bit of a shock to me, too.”

“Wow,” Pipp said, grinning. “You are so good at this whole royalty thing. All cower before me, all ye lesser ponies, for I am far superior to you, your puny lives are nothing to me.” She shuddered. “And whenever I imagine Zipp like that, I know the apocalypse is coming soon.” Zipp shoved her sister, the two of them laughed.

“Queen Haven,” Sunny ventured, “would it be too much to ask for some funding for an expedition to the Crystal City - Empire? I know that I would like to see what it’s like, and I think Flurry would like to return home for some answers.” She looked to the alicorn for confirmation, and she nodded. “I think I might be able to convince Phyllis for some, too.”

“Of course,” Haven said, looking startled that she even had to ask. “What exactly do you need?”

“I-” Sunny turned to Flurry with a question prominent in her eyes.

“Nothing too fancy,” she assured the queen. “There might still be some of the old railways through the mountains, and the Crystal Heart keeps the worst of the weather at bay, so something simple will be enough.”

A bright purple light lit up one corner of the room, and Izzy bounded up to them, grinning, looking so much like Pinkie Pie that Flurry’s heart ached, but it was also filled with something else. Was it… hope? Hope that her family’s legacy had been passed into capeable hooves?

“I told Lemon Pie and Glacier that we think we found the Crystal City,” the unicorn said excitedly, “and they were so excited! Are we going? Please tell me we’re going, or else I will, like teleport there on my own. Is the entire city made of crystals? Is it shiny? Is it cold? It’s still up there, right? Are we going?”

“Yes, we’re going,” Sunny laughed. “How about… in two weeks? Would that be good? Enough time to get what we need?”

Flurry shrugged. “Every time I needed to get there, I’ve just taken the train.”

With a horrendous screeching sound, tall doors over to the side were shoved open, and two earth pony stallions entered, bickering. The red one - Sprout - was holding two long, thin boxes that were wafting some strange yet savory scent that made Flurry’s mouth water.

“I’m telling you, it was all wrong!” Sprout spluttered. “Everypony knows that pineapple doesn’t belong on pizza!”

“You can literally put anything on pizza,” the yellow one - Hitch - retorted, petting a white ball of fluff with tiny wings that barked happily. “If there can be avocado on toast, there can be pineapple on pizza.”

“It’s just weird,” Sprout insisted. “Pineapple and tomato sauce and cheese - not a good combination. We never did that in Maretime Bay.”

“This isn’t Maretime Bay,” Hitch replied coolly, focusing instead on holding a treat out to the dog and slowly rotating it in a circle so that the dog followed it. “We should be open to other ponies’ opinion, Sprout.” He tossed the treat to the tiny dog, spotted the group of ponies, and trotted over, Sprout in his wake, still grumbling about the sinfulness of pineapple on pizza.

“What is pizza?” Flurry asked, tilting her head at the red earth pony, who now looked horrified and forgot all about pineapple.

“You’ve never had pizza?” he asked incredulously.

Flurry shook her head, seeing how far she could agonize the stallion. “It must be one of those newfangled inventions,” she said with a yawn. “Something I shouldn’t waste my time on.” She put on her royal I’m-so-much-better-than-you aloof expression.

Sprout’s jaw hit the floor. Literally. “I - you - Here.” He shoved one of the boxes at her, and Flurry used her magic to open the box. Inside was a circle of baked dough, topped with cheese with something red peeking through beneath the heavy layer. The circle was cut into eighths, and Flurry lifted up a slice, rolling her eyes and saying, “Peasant food.” But the moment the tip of the slice touched her tongue, her eyes widened, and she gobbled the entire thing in what was such an un-princess-like manner that her mother would probably have her sent to her room. But she didn’t care anymore.

“You guys can share that one,” Flurry declared, using her magic to wrap the open pizza box in sunny yellow light and pull it towards her.

Haven and the guards excused themselves, hiding smiles as Flurry tried in vain to keep her precious pizza out of the reach of the others. Eventually, laughing and smeared with tomato sauce, the seven ponies debated on what to do with the remaining two slices. Sprout said that at least one of them should go to him, Izzy insisted that they should go to Flurry, who had never had pizza before, and then Pipp got an idea.

They snuck up to one of the guards on patrol and set the two leftover slices on a plate, which Flurry carefully placed just below one of the guards’ nose. The pegasus sniffed, looked down, and his eyes widened when he saw the pizza. Looking around to make sure that no one was looking, he reached down to grab it. Flurry took hold of a nearly invisible string with her magic and gently tugged the paper plate just out of his reach.

The guard looked surprised before his features changed to determined. He slapped his hoof down on the plate, but, once again, Flurry had tugged it away. Flaring his wings, the pegasus jumped on the pizza, and the plate slid just past his hooves.

Zoom strutted down the hallway and snapped at the guard, who pointed at the innocent plate of pizza sitting on the floor with an accusing tone. Zoom studied the plate and spotted the thin string tied to it, and she immediately knew what was up. She bent down and picked up a slice, taking a bite, and shrugging to the other guard, who looked shocked and angry. Zoom barked an order at him and walked down the hallway, passing by the seven ponies’ hiding place. Flurry wasn’t sure, but she thought the blue pegasus gave them a wink.

Smothering giggles, Flurry teleported them back to the airstation, where they all cracked up laughing.

“Did you see his face?” Zipp howled, wiping tears from her eyes.

Flurry grinned. “Yeah, he was like-” she spread her wings and fixed her expression with one of frustration “-surrender, ye self-moving plate of pizza, or I shall be forced to execute drastic measures on thee!”

“Oh, no, please, good sir!” Sprout wailed, throwing his hoof over his head and pretending to faint dramatically. “Please spare the life of a poor slice of pizza!”

“Never!” Flurry exclaimed, standing up on her hind legs and raising her wings. “I shall eat thee in one bite!”

The six ponies ran around the airstation, shrieking and hollering as Flurry chased them, shouting things like “Come back here, you distasteful scoundrel!” and “Surrender and - I mean, or - be devoured!” It was a long time before they finally got their breath back.

“So, Flurry Heart, right?” Hitch asked. All seven ponies were sitting in front of the stained glass window, watching the light dance through the colors and create shapes on the floor. “And… you said you were a princess?”

The alicorn nodded, the light dancing across her pale pink coat. “Only by default, though. My mother… she was a princess, so…” She shrugged. “I was supposed to have my coronation and become an official princess with a purpose and a special title and all that, but then… things started going south for everypony.”

Beside her, Sunny’s eyes widened and she gasped. “You mean… you were there when magic disappeared? How did it happen?”

Flurry shook her head, avoiding everypony’s gazes, though she felt them on her.. “I wasn’t… there, per say. I was… locked away, I guess you could say - frozen in time. My mother cast a spell on our most powerful artifact so that it would protect me - only me - for as long as it still had magic, and that it would release me once things were… better.” She wrapped her wings around herself and glanced at Sunny, seeing the question in her eyes. “I think that the magic housed in artifacts is much stronger than our physical magic,” she explained. “Back when I was little, somepony tried to transfer all the magic in Equestria into another realm, so, bit by bit, magic vanished over the next three days. Artifacts were the last to go. I think it’s because our magic is tied directly to ourselves - and as an extension, how we live with each other. Magic housed in artifacts stands alone, but even it can’t last forever if other magic has disappeared. They just last… longer, and are less powerful than they used to be.” She hunched her shoulders. “I promise I don’t have any more clue than you do. I’m not even sure what’s happened in the past several years.”

“Maybe… maybe we could figure it out… together?” Sunny offered.

Flurry turned to her and smiled. “I’d like that.”

Nightmares

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Flurry Heart dreamed that she was back home, but everything was frozen over. The halls gleamed with ice as well as crystal as Flurry passed them, the tip of her horn lit and reflecting off every glittering surface. Her eyes darted around, panic building inside her chest, but she was all alone… or was she? Up ahead, light poured out of an open doorway, and Flurry practically ran inside, hoping to see her mother, her father, her aunt, anypony…

She skidded to a halt inside the door, her eyes widening. There was a pony seated on the throne, but it was not anypony she particularly wished to see.

His chilling laugh wormed its way into her ears and into her heart, wrapping cold hooves around her soul. She tried to take a step back, but found that dark tendrils of shadow had wrapped themselves around her hooves, holding her in place - no, pulling her forward. Flurry freaked out and lit her horn, trying to blast the shadows away, but they kept coming back.

He laughed. “Oh, I wouldn’t do that, my little pony,” he snarled, his lips curling into a cruel smile. “Not unless you want the same fate to happen to them.” He gestured to a cage made of black crystals in the corner of the room. Between the jagged structures, Flurry could see painfully familiar faces, and she lost her concentration. “After all…” He sat back and studied her as if enjoying the full effect of his words. “This is all your fault, is it not?”

The pony on the throne laughed once more as his shadows overtook the young alicorn, winding their way up her legs and holding her wings to her body and crushing her soul until she became something she knew she could never be-

Flurry gasped, jerking out of the dream world, tears running down her face.

Was that… was that a nightmare?

She hadn’t had a nightmare in years. Princess Luna had always been there to keep the bad dreams at bay, so Flurry never had anything except for pleasant dreams… Except… there had been one. One bad dream. One nightmare. And she would never forget it.

Not now, she thought. Don’t go there now.

Flurry stood up and looked around the room that Sunny had given her in her lighthouse. They had arrived that day after a night in Zephyr Heights, and Flurry was staying with the earth pony because she wanted to show Flurry absolutely everything and possibly get some answers. Flurry didn’t mind Sunny’s multitude of questions so long as it kept her busy.

But Sunny was asleep right now, when Flurry really needed to keep her mind occupied. She slipped outside, straightening the picture of a young Sunny and her late father as she left. Flurry tried not to look at the picture; Argyle Starshine reminded her so much of her aunt that it was sometimes painful. So she barely gave the picture a glance before continuing. Spreading her wings, the young princess lifted into the sky, pouring on speed until the rushing wind tore away all her thoughts, leaving her with mindless bliss.

She soared over the town of Maretime Bay, and she couldn’t help but notice how different it looked compared to the city of Manehattan that she knew the place as. The buildings were smaller and more humble, with the exception of the Canterlogic factory. Flurry hadn’t been in there yet, but Sunny had promised a tour sometime.

Something caught her eye, and Flurry slowed down to study it. An earth pony was standing at the railing, the breeze ruffling his mane. Flurry tilted her wings and swerved around to land behind him.

Sprout jumped and turned around, his eyes wild with fear, until he registered who she was. “Oh.” He let out his breath and cleared his throat. “Uh, sorry. Old habits die hard, I guess.”

“Ponies have a habit of screaming whenever somepony drops out of the sky?” Flurry asked, joining him at the railing.

“Not really…” Sprout turned back to the ocean and took a deep breath. “I was… well, we all were, except for Sunny… Anyways, we were told that… unicorns could read minds and wanted to fry our brains with horn lasers, and pegasi would suddenly swoop out of the sky and eat us.” He gave Flurry a sideways glance. “Obviously, none of it’s true, but… that’s what we were told, so… It just kind of… stuck. Sorry,” he finished with a whisper.

“It’s fine,” Flurry said quickly. “This isn’t the first time Equestria’s divided.” She looked up at the sky, clear and dotted with stars. One group of stars in particular caught her eye - five stars surrounding a sixth. “How did you fix it?”

“I… didn’t,” Sprout admitted. “Sunny did all that. I really just made it worse.” He looked down at his hooves, embarrassed. “Her dad… he always believed that ponies could come back together, but nopony believed him. He told Sunny, though, so she kind of carried on the tradition. Then Izzy showed up one day, and Sunny went with her on a quest to bring back magic, and Hitch went after her, leaving me in charge. But… I had no idea what to do, so when everypony was scared, I just added fuel to the fire. I spoke to their inner fears and practically brainwashed them all into a little army, which did not last long. But I also built a giant war machine that destroyed Sunny’s lighthouse and almost hurt earth ponies, pegasi, unicorns, and my friends…” He shrugged. “Sunny showed everypony how we could come together, magic returned, and… yeah.” He looked at Flurry and then back at his hooves. “I know, you probably think I’m a monster.”

“Yeah, no,” Flurry said, and he looked at her, shocked. “Believe me, I’ve heard about plenty of monsters, and you’re no monster. For starters, you changed, so even if you did do terrible things, that’s not who you are anymore. Second, that was hardly anything. Try stealing everypony’s magic for your own benefit. Or taking over Equestria. Or extinguishing all light and hope. Or literal mind control-” She stopped, remembering her dream. “Trust me, my aunt and her friends have dealt with much worse.”

“Have any of them, you know… tried to make up for their mistakes?” Sprout asked carefully.

Flurry grinned. “Tons. And they all prove themself, don’t worry. Usually by saving the world. Have you saved the world yet?”

Sprout let a small smile slip and shrugged. “I mean… I saved Sunny so she could save the world? That counts, right?”

“From what I’ve heard, yes.” Flurry tore her eyes away from the starry sky and studied the earth pony in front of her. There was something familiar about him… “Look, my aunt and her friends defeated countless villains, and made friends with over half. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from them, it’s that the magic of friendship is a powerful thing, stronger than anything. And I believe that still applies today as much as it did back then.”

Something like hope entered his expression, and Sprout turned away to study the sky once more. “Couldn’t sleep?” he asked her.

Flurry shook her head. “Nightmares,” she replied, surprising herself. She had promised not to tell anypony about her dream, but she felt that this was one pony she could confide in.

“I used to have nightmares,” Sprout said, looking a little surprised himself that he was sharing this with her. “About… what I did.” He coughed. “But then I just talked to my friends about how I was feeling, and they just stopped. Like I didn’t have anything left to be ashamed of.” He gave Flurry a sideways glance. “What was your nightmare about?”

Something lodged itself in Flurry’s throat, and she found that she couldn’t speak. Sprout noticed and immediately backed down. “It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me,” he said, sounding sad. Flurry quickly realized what he was thinking, and said, “It’s not you. I’m just… not ready to recall it yet.”

They were silent for a while until Sprout plucked up the courage to ask another question. “So… you’re from up north?”

Flurry laughed. “That’s putting it lightly. We’re the northernmost settlement in Equestria - besides Yakyakistan, I suppose. We keep the bad weather at bay with a magic artifact called the Crystal Heart, which is powered by the love and light of the Empire’s citizens. It protects us.”

“But now it’s just you?”

Flurry nodded, her throat closing up again. “Everypony else fled south as soon as the Windigos appeared. My mother insisted that I go down with them, but I couldn’t leave my home. So I ran away from the train station to the mountains until the train left, but then I got stuck, and my parents came for me, and my dad…” She choked back a sob, feeling like somepony had dumped a bucket of snow on her wings. “It was my fault,” she whispered.

She felt a hoof on her shoulder and looked up, surprised, to see Sprout standing next to her, sympathy in his green eyes.

“I don’t think it is,” he said. “I think you’re just blaming yourself. There will always be something you can’t control, and you shouldn’t blame yourself for things like that. Trust me on this one.”

Flurry gave him a watery smile. “I do trust you.” She took a deep breath and wiped her eyes. “I’m going to go back to bed. See you in the morning?”

Sprout nodded and stood back as Flurry spread her wings and lifted into the air, the cool night breeze calming her down as she soared back to Sunny’s lighthouse. Opening the door, Flurry’s eyes drifted to the picture on the wall beside it as she walked in… and stopped. Why was the picture of Sunny and her father tilted? Flurry thought she had straightened it when she left, just as she did now. Flurry’s foot hit something, and it skittered across the floor. Lighting up her horn to take a closer look, she noticed that it was the wooden necklace that Sunny had kept from her father… except that there was a long jagged crack running through the wood so that it was snapped in two.

Flurry’s breath caught in her throat, as she knew how important this was to Sunny. She carefully picked it up and took it up to the earth pony’s room, where she gently set it down next to her alarm clock, not having the heart to wake up her friend. Then she quietly made her way back to her room, where she curled up and slept until morning.

“Did you break this?”

Flurry jerked awake and stared at the pony above her, brandishing two pieces of wood joined together on a piece of string.

“N-no,” Flurry stammered, having to mentally rewind the events of the night before to know what Sunny was referring to. “I went out for a fly because I couldn’t sleep, and when I came back, I saw that on the floor, so I gave it back to you.”

Sunny frowned like she didn’t quite believe her. There was something… different about the earth pony today. Flurry narrowed her eyes until she found what it was - her pink mane was done in a braid, secured in place with two blue rubber bands, unlike hanging in curls like it usually was. And there was something in her eyes that made them… colder, more distant. Flurry stretched her wings and yawned, managing to convince herself that she was imagining it. “Would you like me to fix it?”

“No, thanks,” Sunny replied, still eyeing the alicorn like she was about to go on a rampage and destroy her entire home. “I’ll get Izzy to do it - she’s great with glue.”

“You know that magic works better than glue for fixing things, right? At least, if you know the right spell,” Flurry Heart pointed out, jumping out of bed and using her magic to fix the blankets and fluff the pillow.

“I’d rather not,” said Sunny distractedly. She turned and left the room, her movements somewhat stiff. Flurry frowned. This wasn’t anything like the chipper and overly excited earth pony she had met a few days ago. It was as if somepony had taken her place or was mind-controlling her…

Stop that, Flurry chided herself. That hit a little too close to home for comfort.

But all the same… she couldn’t help wondering. What had happened to Sunny Starscout?

Mysterious Happenings

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Flurry Heart didn’t know whether to be comforted or scared at the fact that the other ponies definitely figured that there was something strange about Sunny. On the one hoof, at least she wasn’t going crazy. On the other, did that mean that there really was something wrong? Something serious?

She and the other mare met the others in front of the Canterlogic factory, where they were happily talking amongst themselves.

“Good morning, Sunny!” Sprout greeted her cheerfully, but instead of responding, Sunny flinched and avoided his gaze. Sprout winced and tried to make himself as small as possible, and Zipp nudged him gently, giving him a small smile of encouragement.

“Hey… you okay?” Izzy asked, taking a step forward and tilting her head at her friend. “You don’t seem like yourself today.”

“I’m fine,” Sunny said absentmindedly as she reached into her bag, pulling out her broken necklace and pouring it into Izzy’s hooves. “Can you fix this, please? Flurry found it on the floor last night, broken.” Her tone still suggested that she didn’t believe Flurry’s story, and the alicorn wilted. “No magic. Just glue.”

“...Okay,” Izzy said in a confused voice, taking it from Sunny and putting the still-intact string around her neck. “But you do know that magic would probably work better-?”

“I don’t care!” Sunny snapped, taking Izzy aback. Sunny’s eyes widened as she realized what she had said, and she reached out to the unicorn. “I’m sorry, Izzy. I didn’t mean it like that. I’d just like you to use glue, please.”

Flurry heard a sharp intake of breath from Pipp, and she turned to see the pink pegasus staring at her phone screen with a confused and alarmed look on her face.

“What’s up, sis?” Zipp asked, coming around to take a look for herself, and her forehead creased in worry.

“Is it anything we should be worried about?” Hitch carefully asked, his tone implying that he was referring to other things - probably more recent events, from what Flurry had heard about their adventures.

“It’s my mom,” Pipp said, her voice shaking just a tad. She took a deep breath and steadied it. “She wants us to come to Zephyr Heights right away.”

“I’ll teleport us,” Izzy offered, lighting up her horn.

“NO!” Sunny cried, leaping forward. Izzy doused her horn, and all of them gave Sunny confused looks. “Don’t. Let’s just walk. It can’t be that important, right? Otherwise she would have made it sound more urgent. Besides, I just…” She broke off, shaking herself as if to get rid of a fly. “Let’s just go.”

Flurry spotted Hitch and Sprout talking quietly to each other at the back of the group, and she slowed down until she was walking with them.

“Is she… always like this?” she asked, looking at the earth pony in the lead.

Hitch and Sprout shook their heads. “I’ve never seen her like this,” Hitch said in a worried voice. “It’s very unlike her.”

“And what’s all that about not wanting to use magic?” Sprout added. “She’s always wanted to have magic, to see magic, for magic to be a thing! She literally went on two quests to bring magic back, and now she’s being cautious about using it?” He blew a frustrated breath and his shoulders slumped. “And now she’s acting like I never changed…”

“I’m going to go talk to her,” Hitch said, quickening his pace to catch up to Sunny. After a while, he doubled back to regroup with Sprout and Flurry. “Okay, something is definitely up.”

“What’d she say?” Sprout asked.

Hitch looked like he didn’t know where to start. “Well,” he decided, “I asked her what she thought about magic, and she said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. It all seems a little risky, don’t you think? I mean, ponies have gotten along without magic for years now… Do we really need it?’ ”

“Are you kidding me?” Flurry burst out while Sprout shook his head.

“I know!” Hitch exclaimed. “And I asked her if she was still friends with Sprout, and she said, ‘I guess so. He did a lot of bad things, though.’ And I asked her if she forgave you, and she was like, ‘Sure? I don’t really care.’ What in Equestria is that all about?” Hitch shook his head and gave his friend a strange look.

“Why is she acting like this?” Sprout whispered, his posture slumped again.

“Could it be a spell?” Flurry asked. “Impersonation? Some sort of brainwashing or mind control? Have you guys ever had something like that happen?”

Hitch and Sprout exchanged a look. Sprout nodded, and Hitch called, “Hey, Pipp! Come tell Flurry about Midge.”

The younger pegasus sister looked a bit surprised and slowed down so that they could catch up. “Midge is one of my royal guards,” she explained, still looking a bit confused. “He was one of the ones who really cared about me, but it turns out, he wasn’t actually a pegasus. He says he’s a creature called a changeling, and they can take the form of any creature in existence. He’d been spying on me and my family for years, and we never knew. Why?” She gasped and looked at Sunny. “Are you saying that Sunny could be…?”

“An imposter?” Flurry shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought all the changelings had reformed - well, except for Chrysalis - but maybe they… unreformed with all the mistrust going around.” She sighed. “Well, changelings can only take the form of a pony - they don’t have all their memories or experiences. So far, she seems to remember everything that’s happened, albeit in a very strange new light. If she gives any indication that she doesn’t know something, then we’ll have a good reason to suspect her. But for now…” She shrugged. “Let’s consider other possibilities, besides that.”

“You mentioned mind control,” Sprout prompted. “Is there really a magic spell for brainwashing or mind controlling?”

“Izzy’d probably know about that,” Pipp suggested, waving the unicorn over. “She’s been studying magic non-stop since we found some Ancient Equestrian spell books. There must have been something in there.”

“Hi guys!” Izzy grinned as she bounded over. “What’s up?” She looked at their serious and worried expressions and seemed to put two and two together. “Is it about Sunny?” she said in a stage whisper that Sunny could probably hear.

“We were just wondering if you knew any magic spells for mind control,” Hitch said slowly, looking at Flurry with a question in his eyes. Please don’t ask me, please don’t ask me, please don’t ask me, she thought desperately. Just thinking about it was making her woozy - there was no way she would be able to talk about what happened with him…

“Not that I’ve found so far,” Izzy said, lowering her voice. “I mean… there could be some, right?”

“I think I found one,” Zipp interrupted, coming down to land gently beside her sister. “I was looking through all those books that we found, and while I’m nowhere near close to getting through all of them, I did find a legend of a dark unicorn who had the power to take over ponies’ minds.” She glanced up at Sunny. “This doesn’t seem like one of those times, though. I mean, Sunny’s completely normal… except for the fact that she had a complete personality turn around.”

Hitch sighed. “Let’s just… keep a close eye on her for now. We can always check in the airstation to see if there’s anything there.”

They kept walking for the rest of the day, not resting for very long. When the towering buildings of Zephyr Heights finally came into view, Flurry let out a relieved sigh. Her relief seemed to be shared by the other ponies. Once they stepped inside the city limits, Thunder rushed forward with three other guards behind him.

“Thank hoofness,” the green pegasus panted as he skidded to a halt. “We thought you might get here sooner, but…” He trailed off as he saw everypony except for Sunny’s frantic head shakes. “Anyway. The queen’s got a bit of an emergency on her hooves, and she was hoping that you could help her.”

“What’s going on?” Zipp demanded, taking a step forward.

“A couple of unicorns from Bridlewood,” Thunder exclaimed, turning and leading them towards the castle. The other guards went ahead of them, asking pedestrians to move to the side to let them pass. “Say they saw a strange creature like a pony, only… different. I’ll let them explain.”

The elevator never seemed to move more slowly. Zipp looked like she wanted to burst through the windows and fly to the top herself for more than half the ride. When it dinged as it reached its destination at the top of the mountain, the ponies inside practically shoved the doors open themselves and ran into the throne room. Queen Haven was seated on her throne, Zoom at her side, talking with a pair of unicorns on the throne room floor. Izzy gasped when she saw them.

“Lemon Pie and Glacier?”

The two unicorns looked up as they entered. One was blue with a purple curly mane and the other was pink with a yellow mane. Their eyes lit up when they saw Izzy.

“Do you know them?” Sunny whispered to Izzy, looking apprehensive.

Izzy nodded. “They’re some of my best friends from Bridlewood.” She grinned at the unicorns and waved, but Sunny looked slightly hurt, as if Izzy were replacing her with these two.

“They have a… very curious story,” Haven interrupted, looking hopeful now that Sunny had arrived. “Tell them again.”

The pink one, who must have been Lemon Pie, nodded. “We were helping take down all those signs in front of the forest, you know, since we don’t need them anymore. But when we were heading home afterwards, we saw this pony in the woods.”

“She wasn’t really a pony,” Glacier added. “She was like, really tall, and had a crooked horn, like somepony took huge chunks out of it. And Lemon Pie says she had these weird wings - not like a pegasus, but like some sort of really strange bug. But her legs had holes in it, which was really weird - like, how does that work? And Lemon Pie went up to her and asked who she was-”

“-and she just laughed and changed form,” Lemon Pie finished dramatically. “She turned into a bird and flew off! It was so weird!”

Flurry Heart froze, her head beating a thousand times a minute. She knew that description… How many times had she stared at her when she visited her Aunt Twilight, wondering why she would do things like that? How many awful stories had she heard about her evil schemes that almost pulled off? How was she here now?

The door burst open before any of them could speak, and a pony rushed in, colliding with Sprout and sending both of them toppling to the ground. The new pony stood up, looking around. His eyes lit up when he saw Zipp and Pipp.

“Oh, thank Celestia,” he said, offering a hoof to Sprout to help him up. “I wasn’t sure where to find you, and I need to talk to you.”

“Midge?” Everypony looked surprised, and Flurry couldn’t help feeling that she was missing something here. Pipp walked up to him as if he were an old friend. “What’s going on? Why are you looking for us?”

“Something’s going on in the forest,” Midge said hurriedly. “One of our scout teams reported that they saw a strange figure in the woods, so we doubled patrols. Then one of them came back… but they were completely drained of their magic.”

The entire room gasped in horror. The unicorns quickly lit up their horns to make sure they still worked, and the pegasi flapped their wings.

“Their magic must have been stolen,” Sunny reasoned, “since not everypony was affected.”

“We’ll get to the bottom of this,” Pipp promised Midge, who looked reassured. “Keep an eye out for that creature that you saw. I have a feeling that it has something to do with this magic stealing.”

“What if it gets worse?” Haven asked as soon as Midge left. “What if everypony’s magic starts being stolen and they blame us for it and decide that they should get rid of us?”

“I’m sure that won’t happen,” Zoom tried to comfort her, but it did little good.

“We’ll find this magic thief and this shapeshifter,” Sunny told her, lifting her head confidently. “I’m sure we will.” She turned to her friends, a question in her eyes. “Any ideas on where to start…? We could go check the books again…”

“Excuse me, Your Highness,” Flurry said, stepping forward and bending her legs into a polite bow, “but does Zephyr Heights have a royal garden of some sort?”

Haven looked taken aback, but she nodded. “I can have one of my guards show you-”

“I know the way,” Pipp interrupted. “I’ve been there loads of times. Come on, it’s this way.” She smiled at her mother and turned to leave, but then two more guards burst into the room.

“Pardon our intrusion,” one of them panted. “But the prisoners you recently acquired? The unicorn and the pegasus with the memory stone? They’ve disappeared.”

In the Gardens

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“Well, this is just great,” Sunny muttered to herself. “Not only do we have a shapeshifter on the loose, but creatures are losing their magic, and now two of our biggest enemies have escaped and are probably planning their revenge right about now.” She gave a long, insufferable sigh.

“Cheer up, Sunny!” Izzy said brightly. “We’ve always gotten through things together.”

“Honestly, it isn’t like you to think negative,” Hitch added. “Are you sure you’re feeling-”

“I’m fine,” Sunny said a little too quickly, speeding up. “Let’s just try to find whatever it is Flurry wants to find in here and be on our way. I want to find them before they wreck too much havoc.”

“Fair,” Zipp admitted. She was soaring overhead and now landed beside her sister and Flurry, who were at the front of the party. “What exactly is it that you’re looking for, Flurry? How do we know it’ll even still be there?”

The alicorn sighed. “We don’t,” she confessed. “I’m just hoping that they are, or that they at least aren’t… free.”

“You sound like you’re talking about actual ponies,” Pipp said as she pushed open a door. “Or creatures of some kind. I’ve been in the gardens many times, but the only ponies I’ve ever encountered have been the gardeners, and they have most certainly not been around since your time.”

Flurry was silent. “You’ll see. That is, if they’re there. If not, then… I’ll try to explain, but I sense I won’t be very successful.”

“Right, okay,” Pipp agreed. “But can you at least tell us what to look for? Maybe I’ve seen it.”

“It’s a statue,” Flurry said after hesitating. “Of three… creatures. One of them’s a little pegasus filly, I know that for sure, though I’m not sure how to describe the other two if you’ve never seen them before. And they all look… angry.”

“Angry statues, got it,” Zipp muttered.

“Uh, we’re here, guys!” Pipp called out, gesturing to a tall archway before them. “The palace gardens.”

Flurry squinted in the sudden bright sunlight, but as her eyes adjusted, she stared around in wonder. “It hasn’t changed much,” she commented, spreading her wings and taking to the skies, surveying the scene below her. “That’s good, I suppose.”

“All right, everypony, spread out,” Zipp commanded, joining Flurry in the air. “If you find anything that you think could be it, just… give a yell.” She flapped her wings and zoomed off to a corner of the garden. Pipp also spread her wings and soared over the flora, her eyes scanning for anything that could be a statue that matched Flurry’s description. Down below, Sunny and Izzy went one way while Hitch and Sprout went another.

Flurry started by going the route that should take her to where the statue she was looking for should be located, but that alcove was taken by a fountain. Feeling slightly discouraged, she looked around for the hedge maze that her aunts had gone into in an attempt to defeat Discord, but it was gone. The gardens had shrunk a good deal since her aunt’s day, which meant that some things must have been removed to make room for other things. Whether or not the statue was one of those things, and where it would have turned up, she had no idea, and it was making her nervous.

“Uh, Flurry?”

She whirled around to see Pipp hovering in the air behind her, looking worried. “Um, I remember seeing a statue that might have been the one you were talking about, but… now it’s gone.”

Gone. Flurry took a deep breath. It might not mean that, she tried to console herself. “I want to see,” she told the pink pegasus, who nodded and flew off into a far corner of the garden, where it was slightly more unkempt. Weeds poked out of the flowerbeds, and the stone path was cracked in some places. Pipp pointed at a corner that two tall hedges made, where a large, almost white stone pedestal stood.

Flurry walked around to the back, where a few words were carved into the stone: Here stand Tirek, Chrysalis, and Cozy Glow, as a warning to all who try to overpower the magic of friendship.

“Should I go… get everypony?” Pipp asked as Flurry exhaled a shuddering breath. “Because based on your expression, this is not good.”

“Yeah… yeah, I think you should,” Flurry said absentmindedly, her gaze turning to the pedestal. There were a few paler spots on the stone like somepony had stood there for several years… and if this was empty, then that could only mean one thing.

“What’s going on?”

Sunny’s voice jolted her out of her trance. Flurry turned to see all six ponies galloping toward her, the earth pony mare in the lead. She skidded to a stop in front of the pedestal. “Did you find something?”

“Yes, and it’s not good,” Flurry admitted, her wings aiding her in leaping over the pedestal and landing in front of the other ponies. She pointed to the stone. “This used to be a statue of three creatures - a changeling queen, a centaur, and a pegasus. They had tried and failed to take over Equestria, but my aunt and her friends always defeated them. Finally, they were brought together in an attempt to boost my aunt’s confidence as she became ruler of Equestria - long story. Anyways, they almost succeeded - they stole almost all of the most powerful ponies’ magic and nearly divided everycreature. But my aunt and all her friends that she had made over the years defeated them and turned them to stone as punishment. Now… it appears that they’re free, and believe me when I say that just because the Guardians of Harmony are gone doesn’t mean that they’ll stop their plans. They won’t stop until Equestria is theirs.”

“Okay,” Hitch said to himself. “No problem. We’ve done stuff like this before. No problem. We got this.” He took a deep breath. “What exactly can they do?”

Flurry winced, as if she knew this was coming but had been hoping to avoid it. “Chrysalis is the changeling queen. She was exiled from her throne and swore revenge. She tried to take over Equestria at least three times - once at my parent’s wedding, once when she kidnapped nearly everypony who could have stopped her, and once with the other two - though we think there was one more. As queen of the changelings, it was her job to find food for her subjects - love. A changeling originally took the form of somepony you loved and gained power by feeding off their love for them. But on her second attempt, the changelings eventually realized that sharing love was better than taking it for themselves, and they reformed, but Chrysalis refused. She can take the form of any pony and any creature in existence.

“Tirek is a centaur who can steal your magic. The more magic he gets, the bigger and stronger he is. He tried to take over Equestria once over a thousand years ago with his brother, who grew to like the ways of ponies and turned his brother in, sending him to Tartarus… I wonder what’s become of Tartarus.”

“Tartarus?” Pipp squeaked, stepping towards her sister.

“A nearly inescapable prison where the worst monsters usually go,” Flurry said airily, waving her hoof. “We’ll have to worry about that later. But Tirek escaped a thousand years later and stole every ounce of magic that he could - except, of course, for the magic of friendship, which my aunts used to defeat him, sending him back to Tartarus, where he acquired a penpal named Cozy Glow.

“Cozy Glow was a young pegasus filly enrolled at my aunt Twilight’s school of friendship, but she secretly had dark intentions. Tirek helped her figure out a way to suck all of the magic out of Equestria over the course of three days, when it would then be transported to another realm. She has a manipulative mind and convinced my aunt and her friends that Tirek might be behind the disappearance in magic, so they got trapped in Tartarus without magic to get out. She rallied the school to let her be the temporary headmare of the school and that six creatures trying to fix everything were the ones behind it all. The Tree of Harmony luckily stepped in and helped save the day through those creatures, and Cozy was sent to Tartarus with Tirek.”

Flurry began to pace as the full weight of the situation began to weigh on her mind. “With all of them putting their skills together, the fact that nopony knows who they are anymore or what they can do, and the fact that all of the other creatures are isolated in their own kingdoms, we’re basically sitting ducks for them.” She could feel her breath coming out in shorter pants, and Zipp eventually came up and gently put her hoof on Flurry’s shoulder.

“We’ve got you,” she said simply. “You’re like our secret weapon. If these guys are expecting us to all just lie down and let them take over our land, they’ve got another thing coming. Right, guys?”

“Yeah! There’s no way they’re getting past us!” Izzy said excitedly. “We’ll just blast them with magic rainbows as soon as we see them, right, Sunny?”

“Yeah… I don’t think it’s going to be quite that easy,” Sprout commented, and Izzy frowned.

Sunny approached the back of the pedestal and ran her hoof over the inscription carved into it. Something flashed in her eyes, and her hoof hovered over the words magic of friendship. “I know these names,” she said instead. “Chrysalis, Tirek, Cozy Glow… I don’t know how, but I know them.” She shook her head. “That’s weird…”

“They do sound kind of familiar,” Izzy offered, tapping her chin with her hoof as she tried to remember. “Weren’t they in that journal that you found, Sunny?”

Sunny looked confused. “Journal?” she asked. “You mean my dad’s?”

“No, the other one, the one you found here,” Zipp said slowly, taking a step toward Sunny, worry creasing her forehead. “The one that the Guardians of Harmony wrote. You found it when we were stuck in the airstation while Zephyr Heights was in open rebellion.”

Now she was really confused. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I think I would remember something like that,” she said, looking back at the stone. The small spark that had appeared in her eyes was gone now, replaced with a kind of dullness. “This is strange, that’s all.”

Hitch, Sprout, Zipp, Pipp, and Izzy all gave each other a look that told Flurry that they would be discussing this later.

“Maybe we can find out more about this statue,” Sprout finally said. “Like, are there any guards here? They might have seen something or heard something suspicious.”

“I’ll ask,” Pipp volunteered. “Anypony want to come with?”

“Hitch should go,” Sprout said. “He’s great at interrogating. My greatest fear is that I’ll end up on the wrong side of his questions,” he added jokingly.

“Ha, no,” Hitch said, playfully shoving his former deputy, “you’re also pretty good. We’ll both go.”

“I’ll come, too!” Izzy grinned as she bounded over to Pipp. “I’m amazing at spotting clues - we once did this scavenger hunt in Bridlewood, and I finished it in, like, five minutes. Turned out everything was in Alphabittle’s collection of prizes - who knew?”

“I’ll take Sunny and Flurry to the archives,” Zipp announced, flying overhead. “There might be something there that can help us.”

“Meet you back in the airstation at sunset?” Hitch asked, and everypony agreed before parting to go their separate ways. Flurry fell into step beside Sunny while Zipp flew ahead.

“So, Sunny… Uh, what do you remember?” Flurry asked, wincing at how obvious it was. “I mean, like, about your friends, and what you’ve uncovered about Ancient Equestria, and - and all that.”

The earth pony gave her a strange look but didn’t press it. “I remember… I remember that my dad wanted ponykind to unite, so… I went on a quest to do that. I made friends with Izzy, Zipp, and Pipp, and back home, Sprout was turning all the earth ponies into an army while building a giant war machine, and then he wrecked my lighthouse, but I… I can’t remember exactly forgiving him. I mean, he destroyed my home and tried to go to war with everypony - does he really deserve it? But it all worked out in the end - all three pony tribes began to get along again, and then… magic came back as well, but then somepony else came with a… a memory stone. Yeah, that was it. And me and my friends had to stop them before they undid everything.” She rubbed her forehead with her hoof. “That whole battle’s kind of blurry…”

“What do you remember about me?” Flurry pressed, feeling herself sinking into despair with every word that Sunny said. She remembered most of the events, just not why she did it. It was as if somepony stripped Sunny Starscout of her personality.

“You’re Flurry Heart,” she answered simply. “You come from the Crystal… City.”

“Empire,” Flurry corrected her.

“Yes, I was going to say that,” Sunny agreed hurriedly. She looked back at the place where the statue was, though it was long out of sight. “That statue gave me the creeps,” she admitted. “It was like something was supposed to be there, but it wasn’t, something I was supposed to know…” She shook herself. “Whatever it is, I’m sure we’ll find the answer.”

“Yeah,” Flurry said absentmindedly. “I’m sure we will.”

She watched Sunny quicken her step to go talk to Zipp and felt a growing sense of fear in her heart. Something - or somepony - had messed with Sunny’s mind, and Flurry had a sickening feeling that she knew who it was.

Archived

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Sunny gazed around in wonder at the Zephyr Heights archives, feeling her mind go crazy about the amount of information that may be in here about-

She frowned. About what? Not long after Flurry Heart had showed up, she had started to have these moments of clarity that were there and gone faster than her roller skates. It was as if she started to remember something, but as soon as she acknowledged its existence, it poof, disappeared, as Izzy would like to say.

“Woah,” Flurry whispered beside her. “Zipp, this is amazing!”

The pegasus grinned. “I know, right? There’s so much stuff down here that I don’t even have a tiny idea of what’s here. But now that I have help going through this, I might figure it out.”

“We should have brought the others for back-up,” Sunny commented, starting forward into the long room underneath the castle. “This is going to take longer than when we went through all the old files and stuff in the sheriff’s office in Maretime Bay.”

Zipp looked up hopefully. “You remember that?”

Sunny opened and closed her mouth. “I…”

“Nevermind,” Flurry said into the silence, putting her hoof on Zipp’s shoulder. Sunny wondered why her pegasus friend’s face looked so crestfallen. “Look for anything about Chrysalis, Tirek, or Cozy Glow. Is their escape new, or did they do it a long time ago and have just now gotten the strength to do anything? Was the statue just moved? Anything about them.”

Zipp nodded. “Got it,” she said as she spread her wings and took off. Sunny felt a weird shiver down her back, as if she were expecting Zipp to suddenly scoop her up and carry her off.

Magic is dangerous.

Flurry lit the tip of her horn, and a bright sunny yellow light filled the immediate area. The alicorn trotted off behind some shelves and disappeared, leaving Sunny on her own. Again. But that was fine… wasn’t it? Yes. It was. She didn’t need her friends. She could do this without their help and without magic’s help.

Magic should not be trusted.

The archives consisted of several rooms all filled with shelves lined with books, scrolls, and precious artifacts, all beneath the palace and, Sunny was convinced, beneath the city itself. Guards patrolled the entrance and surrounding area 24/7. It made Sunny feel trapped, as if she wouldn’t be able to escape. She shook herself and focused on the mission. This was for her father. He wanted all ponies to be friends with each other, and she and her friends were going to make it happen. They would defeat every obstacle that came their way with the magic of-

What magic?

Sunny shook her head, but the awful voice remained in her head.

You don’t have magic, it said scornfully. You’re just an earth pony that everypony else thinks is an overly optimistic misfit. These aren’t your friends - they’re just using you for their own gain. They think that since you don’t have magic that you’re weak and pathetic and that they’re better than you.

“I’m not weak,” Sunny muttered to herself.

“What was that, Sunny?” came a voice. Zipp trotted up next to Sunny, but when the earth pony faced her, her eyes were dull and glazed over. Her expression was blank, but her voice was angry.

“I’m not weak and pathetic, Zipp, no matter what you think,” she snapped. The pegasus took a step back in shock. “And I’m not overly optimistic, either, so you can stop thinking that.”

She ran off, leaving Zipp confused and hurt. As ground passed under her hooves, her mind began to clear up a little bit, the anger dissapitating and leaving guilt behind. I shouldn’t have spoken to Zipp like that…

Her hoof brushed against something, and she turned to look. Just a cardboard box, nothing special. She was about to move on when her eye caught something inside shining in the tiny bit of light down there and was immediately intrigued. Sunny pulled the box out from its shelf and pushed open the flaps, looking inside to see… a mound of broken glass.

Sunny groaned and was about to put it back when a random memory surfaced - a window in an abandoned station of three ponies, three crystals, and a star…

The memory was gone as soon as it had come, but now Sunny was intrigued. She gently took each piece of glass out of the box and set it on the floor. Now that she was looking at it, she saw that all the pieces were different colors, and they definitely went together. Excitement growing inside her, Sunny spread them all out and began to piece together a picture of six ponies shooting magic beams at a larger pony that had wings that looked strange. Just looking at the nightmare pony was enough to give Sunny chills, but when she turned her attention to the six ponies beneath it, she forgot all about it.

Something burned through her mind, pushing back the negativity and the horrible feelings that she had been having for the past day as she stared at a purple unicorn, blue pegasus, pink earth pony, yellow pegasus, white unicorn, and orange earth pony. The Guardians of Harmony. That meant that the dark pony above them was Nightmare Moon…

Then she felt a tingling sensation on her head and on her back, and when she looked, there was a pair of golden wings and a glowing gold horn, though she didn’t find this unusual. In fact, it was familiar. She remembered this… and she remembered everything…

Reinvigorated, Sunny turned back to the shelf and pulled down another box that also held broken glass and began to piece that picture together, and then another, and then another…

“Sunny?” came a voice, and a purple unicorn poked her head around the corner. “Are you here? We’ve been looking everywhere for - Woah.” Izzy fell silent as she noticed what Sunny had found. “What - you - Sunny,” she breathed. “This is amazing!”

“I know, right?” Sunny grinned at her friend. “I think these might have been windows - you know, like the one that shows the crystals. They show specific, important events in Equestrian history. There’s so much we can learn from these!” She noticed that Izzy wasn’t staring at the glass pictures anymore, but at her. “What?”

“Nothing,” the unicorn said hurriedly. “It’s just… you’re acting like you again.” Her face broke into a huge smile. “I’ve missed you, Sunny.”

Sunny smiled. “Wait, why are you here? I thought you were supposed to be interrogating guards or something.”

Izzy’s smile faded. “Sunny… it’s the middle of the night. We’ve been looking for you for hours.”

“What?”

“Flurry and Zipp were absolutely frantic when they came to the airstation an hour later than they were supposed to - well, actually, it was just Zipp who came. Flurry stayed back here to look for you, and Zipp came for back-up. We’ve just about scoured the entire place looking for you. How did you not know?”

Sunny shrugged. “I guess I was just so focused on this, I didn’t even notice so much time had passed. Sorry I made you all worry so. Where are the others? I want to show them this.”

“They’re somewhere around here,” Izzy said vaguely. “Are these two the only ones you’ve found so far?”

“Oh, goodness no,” Sunny laughed. “I’ve filled about six other aisles with these. They’re so big I can only fit about two or three in a single one, but there’s tons of windows that still need to be put together.”

“I’ll tell them where we are,” declared Izzy, taking a step back and lighting up her horn. She shot a small burst of light into the air, above the shelves, where it exploded in a tiny burst of light.

Magic is dangerous and cannot be trusted.

Sunny looked down at the most recent picture she had finished putting together, one depicting two ponies making a heart shape with their bodies and blasting a bunch of black creatures out of sight, but it didn’t help.

“Sunny? Are you-” Flurry stopped talking as soon as she saw the colored glass on the floor. “Oh.”

She shakily approached the window and studied the picture upon it, looking like she was barely refraining from crying. Her hoof traced the shape of the heart that the two ponies made, and a far off look entered her blue eyes, as if she was seeing something else - not just a picture, but what really happened.

“Did you find her, Izzy?” Hitch asked as he and Sprout rounded the corner, followed in close pursuit by Zipp and Pipp. He spotted Sunny and let out a sigh of relief. Sprout’s eyes wandered over to Flurry, and he walked over to see if she was alright. Zipp and Pipp stared in shock at the windows, and from their position in the air, they could probably see much more than the ponies on the ground could.

“Izzy, what happened?” Pipp asked, finally noticing how Sunny had retreated against one of the many shelves, her eyes dull and clouded over, shivering slightly, as if she was having a mental argument with somepony in her head that only she could hear. “Is she… okay?”

Before the unicorn could respond, Flurry spoke up. “Sunny found the stained glass windows that were used in Canterlot to record important events, such as just about everything my aunt and her friends did, but there were a few others…” She sighed and blinked hard, refusing to cry. She had to stay strong. “Like my parents.”

“I did a lap around, and Sunny found about fifteen of these,” Zipp announced, hovering far above them. “How many more are there, Flurry?”

“At least twenty,” the alicorn said, her voice growing more steady as she turned away from the picture of her parents. “Probably more. I know that there were enough to fill an entire wing of the palace, so what Sunny’s done so far is just the beginning. We need a big open space where we can assemble these all-” She stopped as the solution came to her. “We should take them back to the airstation,” she decided. “There should be enough space there.”

“Now you’re talking!” Zipp said brightly, gesturing to her sister. “Pipp and Izzy and Hitch and Sprout and I will get the rest of the windows that haven’t been put together yet. Flurry, can you teleport all these ones?” She gestured at the ones on the floor. “Meet you guys back there.”

“Just as long as we get some sleep before we put these together,” Pipp insisted, unable to stifle a yawn. “I feel like I haven’t slept in days. They aren’t going anywhere, after all.”

“After we rest,” Zipp agreed before taking off.

“Sunny, are you coming?” Izzy asked, a hopeful expression on her face.

“Huh?” The earth pony looked up, her eyes still clouded over. “Yeah… yeah, I’m coming.”

“What happened?” Hitch muttered to Izzy as they trailed behind Sunny.

“I found her, and she was - she was like her old self,” Izzy said in a wistful tone as she watched Sunny duck into an aisle and pull a box off the shelf. “It was as if nothing ever changed, as if those windows snapped her out of it. But then she… she went back to… that.”

“So that means…”

Izzy turned to look back at Sunny as she walked away. “Our friend’s still in there somewhere.”

Puzzle Pieces

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The next morning dawned with chilly breezes and a cloudy sky threatening to drizzle, which pretty much matched Flurry’s mood perfectly. After a quick breakfast, which had been served in bed, of course, she stumbled downstairs and into the airstation, where she found Izzy already hard at work putting glass pieces together.

“Good morning,” the purple unicorn said cheerfully when Flurry landed on the floor and folded her wings.

Flurry tried to return the greeting, but it just came out as a massive yawn.

“Yeah, I slept terribly, too,” Izzy said, grinning like she slept a full eight hours. “I was up practically all night thinking about these windows and how amazing they are, and I was wondering what kind of pictures there might be. Look, this one’s of a dragon!” She pointed a hoof at the window she was working on, where a small purple and green dragon was surrounded by a bright blue light.

Despite her personal ties to the image, Flurry couldn’t help but smile. “That’s the window that was made for Spike the Brave and Glorious after he helped save the Crystal Empire,” she explained to the unicorn. “There’s a massive statue of him still up there.”

“Wow,” Izzy whispered, her voice full of wonder. “Just imagine the stories behind these! I mean, you probably know them, but could you please tell me about that one?” She nodded at another one, assembled on the floor. “I’ve been trying for ages to guess what it is, but none of the things I come up with seem to be right.”

The window she was referring to was a picture of a strange creature made up of parts from all different animals controlling a unicorn, earth pony, and pegasus like puppets.

“That’s Discord,” Flurry said, pointing to the draconequus. “He’s a creature of chaos, and he used to want to turn Equestria into his playground. But then Fluttershy showed him the power of friendship and kindness, and he decided he valued friendship more. He did betray everypony when Tirek came to power, though, and then he brought back Triek, Chrysalis, Cozy Glow, and…”

“And who?” Izzy pressed.

Flurry swallowed and shook her head. “Nopony. He disguised himself as Grogar, but he didn’t bring him back.” She gave the unicorn a sheepish smile. “Sorry, my brain’s a little fuzzy on some of the details.”

It was a terrible lie, and Flurry knew it, but Izzy either didn’t seem to notice or sensed that, whatever Flurry had been about to say, she didn’t want to say it, and let it go.

“Have either of you seen Pipp?” Zipp asked as she flew into the station, circling Flurry and Izzy before coming down for a landing. Her hooves pranced and her wings fluttered nervously. “I haven’t seen her at all today, and nopony else has seen her. I’m starting to worry that something happened to her.”

“Don’t worry, I’m sure she’s around,” Izzy said comfortingly. “She’s probably just sleeping in. We were up kind of late last night. Zipp, you want to help us put these together?”

The pegasus nodded, though she still looked antsy. They put together another two windows before they heard the sound of the pulley on the elevator that meant that somepony was coming down. Zipp turned around hopefully, thinking that it was Pipp, but it was just Hitch, Sprout, and Sunny, who was once again looking dull and somewhat depressed.

“Is Pipp with you?” Zipp demanded as soon as the three earth ponies stepped off the lift.

Hitch frowned. “No, I thought she was down here.” He looked to Flurry and Izzy for confirmation, but they just shrugged and went back to working. Sunny slowly walked over and began to help.

“I think she left,” Sprout suggested. “Not on her own,” he added hastily when Zipp’s expression broke into full panic. “I mean that a couple of guards are gone, too, so she probably took them with her…”

“I’m just worried about her,” the royal stressed. “I feel like, if I’m not there to protect her, something terrible’s gonna happen.”

“That does fit with our current experiences,” Sunny added unhelpfully. She looked up and saw everypony except for Zipp glaring at her. “What? I’m just telling the truth,” she muttered to herself. “Not that you care.”

Most of the other ponies were far enough away that they didn’t hear the last bit, but Flurry was, and unless she was going crazy, Sunny’s voice seemed to change just a smidge, but enough to make her scared. She looked fearfully at the earth pony, but she looked the same as ever, albeit with a much more blank expression.

“How many of these are there?” Hitch asked, walking around the room to see the windows that were already put together. “And what are we going to do with them now?”

“Flurry said that they used to be put up in the castle,” said Izzy. “Maybe we could do that again? Put them back where they go?”

“But these are priceless pieces of history,” Sunny argued. “They should be in a museum or something. I vote we set them up here and leave them.” Her blank gaze shifted to one of the completed windows, and something flickered in her eyes, as if she remembered something important, but then it was gone.

“Let’s put them together first,” Zipp opted, joining Izzy and sliding another piece together.

So that was how they spent the rest of the day - putting together broken windows like giant jigsaw puzzles. Occasionally, Zipp or Flurry would take to the air and look down at the windows from above, reporting to the ponies down below when something looked right, or if one of the pieces looked a little off. Flurry found it getting harder and harder to keep going when she saw the finished pictures or caught a glimpse of somepony she recognized. She opened a new box and pulled out a couple pieces, which she then set gently on the floor. Before she could turn back to pull out more, she froze, staring down at the pieces resting on the floor. Her hoof shaking, she moved them until they fit together to form a face - the face of a pink alicorn with a curly mane colored pink, purple, and yellow.

“Hey, Flurry, can you-” Sprout stopped mid sentence once he saw her face. “Um… are you alright?”

She nodded, her throat closed up, unable to tear her eyes from the picture.

“Okay,” Sprout said hesitantly, “but you don’t look so good.” He came up next to her and studied the picture on the floor, then looked at her, then looked back at the glass, finally making the connection. “Is that your…”

“My mom, yeah,” Flurry whispered. She took a deep breath. “She was awesome.”

“You want me to help you put it together?” the stallion ventured, pawing at the floor with his hoof. Flurry smiled at him and nodded, using her magic to lift more pieces of glass out of the box and set them down.

After working for an entire day, the six ponies finally stopped right around sundown, every window now assembled and laid out so that there was hardly any room left on the floor.

“Wow,” Sunny whispered in awe, stepping carefully among the glass images and studying each one carefully. There was a kind of light in her eyes that Flurry recognized - it was the kind of look Sunny got every time she discovered something amazing, though the look was rare nowadays. “I can’t believe these were in your basement the whole time.” A thought seemed to occur to her, and her face clouded over. She walked over to the side of the room and sat down. Hitch stepped around a window and sat next to her.

“Flurry, look!” Izzy pointed excitedly at a picture. “I think it’s you!”

The alicorn spread her wings and flew over to the unicorn. “That’s the window I got when I was coronated,” she explained, smiling at the memory. “The Crystal Heart sent out a wave of magic so strong that it made everypony crystalize for months afterward… Of course, not long after that, they began to leave for the south.”

“I can’t wait to go up there.” Izzy sighed wistfully. “It must be amazing to live in an entire city made of crystals.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty great,” Flurry agreed.

The elevator began to creak, and everypony turned to see who was coming down. Zipp stepped forward, hoping to see her younger sister, but instead it was Thunder and Zoom who appeared.

“What’s going on?” Sunny asked, leaping to her hooves.

“Her Majesty Queen Haven requests your presence in the throne room,” Zoom said stiffly. “Princess Pipp has returned and brought some… items of interest.”

Zipp was out of the room before any of them could blink, but everypony boarded the elevator and was raised out of the room. The last thing Flurry saw before she left was the light shining through her aunt’s cutie mark landing directly on her own stained glass window.

Inside the throne room, Pipp and Zipp were having a mild argument, while Haven spoke with her guards. She looked up as the rest of the ponies entered and nodded her head in greeting, but the royal sisters barely acknowledged them. Behind Pipp was an updated map of Equestria on a sort of moveable board, along with some thumbtacks stuck in certain places - just inside Bridlewood, around the remains of Princess Twilight’s castle, and one in Zephyr Heights.

“What were you thinking?” Zipp was demanding when they walked in. “You can’t just go prancing off to random places without at least telling me or Mom!”

“I was fine,” the younger pegasus insisted. “I brought, like, three guards with me.”

“That’s not an excuse!” she contradicted. “What if something terrible happened to you and I wasn’t there to help protect you? What if somepony tried to kidnap you and we never saw you again?” She paused to take a deep breath. “You had me scared to death, Pipp.”

Pipp looked guilty, so she opened her wing and drew her older sister into a hug. “I didn’t mean to, honestly,” she said quietly. “There was something I had to do.” She saw everypony else and let Zipp go. “Okay, first things first - we’ve got a problem on our hooves. Some mysterious creatures are appearing, and some of our worst enemies have escaped. We need to find them before they do anything terrible, so…” She gestured to the map. “I’m thinking we should try to make sense on where they’re appearing, so then we can catch them.”

Zipp stopped. “That’s… actually pretty smart,” she admitted. “So what do we know?”

The youngest royal pointed to the thumbtack in Bridlewood. “Izzy’s friends say that they saw that shape-shifting creature about here,” she explained. “Midge said that some of his creatures lost their magic around this area here, and Mom was just talking to the guards, and we think somepony must have been here to help Sour Lavender and Permafrost escape.”

Haven nodded, turning to the guards behind her for confirmation. “They say that they never left their post, but as soon as they came back, they were just… gone.”

“It was like magic,” one of them said.

“The door wasn’t even open,” another added.

Sunny frowned. “Did somepony see anypony that seemed suspicious yesterday or the day before that?” she asked before turning to Flurry. “You said that one of the villains that was released from stone was a pegasus. It’s been years, so she could very easily blend in, right?”

Flurry nodded. “One of many downsides to them coming back several years later.”

“What does this filly look like?” Haven demanded, waving one of her wings slightly. A guard stepped forward from the door and produced a piece of paper and pencil.

“She’s got a curly blue mane and a coral pink coat,” Sunny jumped in, “but you can really know if it’s her if she’s got a cutie mark on each side of her flank, which I think is some sort of Ancient Equestrian dealio, since Flurry’s the only pony I’ve seen with them.”

“How do you know that?’ Hitch asked, tilting his head.

The earth pony mare shrugged. “They were on one of those windows downstairs, being blasted with magic rainbows or something.”

“Fair enough,” Flurry agreed. “And what she says is true,” she added to Haven. “Cozy Glow’s a manipulative little thing, so she could get anypony on her side without them realizing it. Being released in a new world with ponies who’ve never seen her before and don’t remember a thing about her will give her a whole new playground to make her own.”

“That doesn’t sound particularly comforting,” Haven said nervously, turning to the guard with the paper. “Did you get all of that?” He nodded. “Then you know what to do.”

With a bow, the pegasus slipped out of the room.

“Now what’s this about windows downstairs?” Haven demanded, turning to her daughters with a raised eyebrow. “Don’t tell me this has something to do with going on dangerous quests to save friendship or magic again.”

“We found a bunch of broken windows in the archives from Flurry’s time,” Zipp explained. “We think that they made a new one every time a notable event happened in Equestria.”

“They look amazing,” Izzy added.

“And that reminds me,” Pipp interrupted, “I went to the Everfree Forest to talk to Midge, and afterwards, I went back into the castle with him to see if there was any more information on these three villains, which I didn’t find, but…” She reached behind the board with the map on it and slid yet another cardboard box into their midst. “I found this.”

Light in the Darkness

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“It’s another window,” Sunny said unexcitedly, peering into the box.

“But what if it tells us another piece of Ancient Equestrian history that we’ve been missing!” Izzy said enthusiastically. “Can you imagine?”

Sunny sighed and rolled her eyes. “Yes, I can, because we’ve literally got twenty more of these.”

Despite this, she helped the other seven ponies (Haven insisted on helping, since she wanted to know what this all was about) lift the much larger shards of glass out of the box and set them on the ground, though the look that she gave Izzy and Flurry as they used their horns to levitate the broken pieces wasn’t wistful, but fearful.

“Woah,” Hitch said as he slid pieces together, forming the image of a sunshine yellow pegasus with a long pink mane. There was a look in his eyes that made Flurry think he had seen her before.

“I think this one’s going to be much bigger than the ones downstairs,” Sprout reasoned, tearing his eyes away from the chunks of glass that he had assembled to make a picture of an orange earth pony with a country style hat on her head to look at the size and amount of glass pieces on the floor. “A lot bigger.”

“How many windows did Ancient Equestria have?” Zipp asked Flurry, who shrugged.

“I dunno. I think the system’s been around for thousands of years, so there could be others in different places that we just haven’t found yet.”

They were silent for a while, putting pieces together on the throne room floor instead of transporting everything down to the airstation again. The final window covered nearly the entire floor and, with all of them working together, was finished within the hour. Flurry spread her wings and joined Zipp, Pipp, Haven, and just about every single pegasus in the room hovering over the completed picture.

She knew what it was, but as soon as she saw the whole thing, Flurry felt a rush of nostalgia, and she gave a bittersweet smile. The image was a giant mural of her aunt Twilight and her friends, including Spike, surrounded by things that they loved.

“Wow,” Haven whispered in awe. She turned to her daughters with a proud look on her face. “I want you to know how proud I am of you for doing all this. And every time you do it, it only makes me love you more.” She sighed and looked back at the picture. “I only wish I could be there for you more. It feels like you’re growing up too fast.”

“We’ll tell you everything we find, don’t worry,” Pipp assured her. “And we’ll ask you for help.”

“But there will be times when we have to go on dangerous quests with the fate of all of Equestria upon our shoulders,” Zipp reminded her mother.

Haven smiled. “I expect nothing less.”

The three royal pegasi embraced in midair. Flurry watched the scene from a respectable distance, but she still felt it tug at her heartstrings, remembering all the times her own mother had hugged her or told her she was proud of her, and knowing that it would never happen again. She also knew that her mother never let her go off on dangerous quests and had insisted on keeping her safe all her life. If Flurry had ever tried to save the world, Cadance would have followed her around with safety spells ready to fire.

She landed on the floor and felt somepony by her shoulder, and, expecting it to be Sprout, was surprised to see Sunny standing next to her, also staring up at the royal family’s heartwarming embrace.

“It’s hard, isn’t it?” the earth pony said, sighing. “When you lose your parents, and then your friends who still have them kind of… rub it in your face.”

“They’re not rubbing it in,” Flurry insisted. “They just… don’t know what it’s like.”

Sunny looked at her, surprised. “You think so?”

Flurry smiled. “I know so.” She nodded to the giant window. “One of my aunt’s friends, her name was Applejack, she lost both of her parents when she was younger, and she never felt like anypony who had parents was rubbing it in.” They were silent for a while before Flurry plucked up the courage to say, “Does it get easier? You know, after time?”

The mare laughed, sounding just like her old self. “If it does, it must be a very long time, because it hasn’t for me,” she said, grinning at Flurry. “Maybe we can work through it. Together.”

The alicorn took the earth pony’s hoof. “Together,” she agreed.

“This brings back memories,” Izzy commented as she joined the two ponies, nudging Sunny. “Of putting together a broken window and starting off on a quest to save Equestria and bring back magic?”

Sunny gave no indication that she recognized what Izzy was saying, so the unicorn dropped her hopeful expression. Zipp, on the other hoof, knew exactly what she meant.

“Yeah,” she agreed as her family landed, “who knew that would escalate so much?”

Pipp huffed. “I’m still angry with you for ruining my show, you know,” she told her sister.

Zipp grinned. “Wonderful, we’re back on track,” she said teasingly. “Hey, Pipp, where’s your cell? Just thought you might want to take a picture of this and post it on whatever.” She frowned. “When was the last time you had that thing? I don’t think I’ve seen it since you came back.”

The younger pegasus reached under her wing to pull out her cell phone, but her hoof felt nothing but empty air. “Huh,” she said, “that’s strange. I must have forgotten it in my room.” She shrugged. “It’s no big deal. I’ll find it later.”

Her older sister gaped at her before grabbing her shoulders and shaking her. “Who are you and what have you done with my little sister?” she demanded. “Are you an evil spy of sorts? Because I should warn you, I am an officially licensed world-saver and blaster-of-friendship-magic, so you might want to watch out!”

“Officially licensed what?” Hitch asked as Sprout doubled over, laughing.

“Where’s my official license for world-saving and friendship-magic-blasting?” Izzy asked, looking hurt. Then she brightened. “No worries! I’ll make some for all of us.”

“Add lots of glitter,” Pipp suggested. “Especially on Zipp’s, because she just loooooves glitter.”

“Ick, I do not!” Zipp said indignantly, making a delightfully humorous disgusted face.

“What about the time I got you that very glittery hoof polish for Hearts and Hooves Day a few years ago?” Pipp retorted, a smug and mischievous smile on her face. “Admit it, you just adored that.”

“I did not!” she protested. “I merely tolerated it until it ran out, which was quick because I wanted to get rid of it and not because I liked it!”

“Sure,” Pipp agreed, though her tone contradicted that. Zipp glared at her.

“What are we going to do with this?” Haven interrupted, nodding towards the giant window on the floor. “It’s too big to move anywhere like this, and there’s nowhere I can put it.”

“We could put it in the airstation,” Sprout suggested. “Flurry could teleport it there.”

Hitch shook his head. “We’ve got the entire floor covered. I vote we take it apart and put it back in the box for now, and put it back together once we’ve got a place for it.” He thought for a second. “Maybe we should do that for all the windows.”

“I’ll go get my phone so I can take pictures of them all,” Pipp volunteered before dashing out of the room. Before long, she was back, holding her phone aloft. She took to the skies, hovered near the top of the room to get the entire picture in the frame, and snapped a picture. Taking a few seconds to grin at her family, Pipp once again flew out of the room, this time heading to the airstation to take yet more pictures. Zipp leaped into the air and followed her.

“Sunny, you and everypony else go downstairs and start cleaning up,” Flurry instructed. “I’ll catch up with you after I get this all sorted out.”

The earth pony nodded and led Sprout, Hitch, and Izzy out of the room and closed the door. Haven remained in the room, and she looked at Flurry curiously as she lit up her horn. All the pieces of glass on the floor were lifted up and packed gently in the box, the flaps slid closed, and the box disappeared in a bright yellow flash to reappear down in the airstation.

“Wow,” Haven said, her voice full of wonder. “That was… incredible.”

“Oh, please, it wasn’t that cool,” Flurry laughed. “I’ve been doing things like that since I was a filly. I also broke a vitally important magical artifact just by screaming, and we all very nearly froze while I just flew around causing more trouble. It’s a long story,” she finished hastily, seeing the queen’s confused face. “But to shorten it, everypony did a big magic thing, and everything was fixed.”

“...I’ll take your word for it,” Haven decided. She took a deep breath and looked around the throne room. “So, back in… your time, your aunt ruled all of Equestria from Zephyr Heights?”

Flurry nodded. “It was called Canterlot back then, but… yeah, basically.”

“It must be really weird seeing us here instead of her,” Haven agreed. She shifted her hooves nervously. “If you wanted, we could step down, and you could take over. I mean, you clearly would be the better fit, and you’ve been around so many great rulers, and-”

“Stop, stop, stop,” Flurry interrupted. “I would never do that. I don’t want to rule all of Equestria - I just want to rule my home. I have no idea how to handle things in this time period, so even that’s going to be a struggle. And who said I would be a better fit than you? You had to be queen during a very difficult time in history - a time that broke both my mother and my aunt, who were some of the strongest ponies I knew. And you did a good job - Zephyr Heights easily surpasses Maretime Bay and Bridlewood in both happiness and advancement. Sure, the fake-flying wasn’t the best decision-” Haven winced as Flurry said this “-but sometimes there aren’t any really good decisions. I used to want to be like my aunt or my mom, and I still do, but now I also want to be like you - somepony who gives her subjects hope and keeps going forward even when they don’t really know what comes next.”

“You make me sound like a saint,” Haven said ruefully, and Flurry laughed. “But I’m afraid that’s not all it seems to be. If I was truly a good ruler, then I would have reached out to unicorns and earth ponies and tried to amend things and really solve the problem, not come up with false solutions. But I guess I was afraid that, if everypony could fly again, they wouldn’t need us anymore, since we wouldn’t be special or seemingly above them, and I just didn’t want my fillies to have to go through something like that.” She stared wistfully at the door through which they had gone. “They seem to be growing up too fast, and I’ve missed most of it…”

“Life is full of choices,” Flurry said, remembering something that Starswirl the Bearded had told her at one of her magic lessons. “But the most important choice is choosing to make, not the best choices, but the right ones.”

Haven smiled at that. “Princess Flurry Heart, I have a feeling that there is a lot we can learn from each other.”

Into the Arctic

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The skies opened the next day, unleashing a downpour of rain that had the few citizens of Zephyr Heights who were out in such miserable weather running from one shelter to the next. Thunder boomed and lightning frequently flashed across the black sky, so most sensible ponies remained inside.

An especially loud crack of thunder made Flurry, Izzy, Zipp, Pipp, and Sprout look up from where they were situated on the floor in the airstation, each with an open copy of the Journal of Friendship in front of them. Laid out in the middle of them all were printed-off and much smaller versions of each window that they had found, taken by Pipp on her cell phone. The windows themselves were once again in their boxes and pushed to the side, freeing up the space again, and right now the ponies were trying to match windows and journal entries. Queen Haven was distracting Sunny by taking her on a tour of the palace and trying to decide where to put the windows, and Hitch was trailing them to keep Sunny from coming downstairs. They had decided that the pictures of the Guardians of Harmony in glass giving Sunny a moment of clarity had been a one time only thing.

Of course, Flurry knew all the stories behind most of the windows, but she wanted to read the journal - see the hoofwriting of her aunt and her friends, read the lessons that they had learned over the years - so she joined the small gathering in the station. The other ponies had asked her to please not tell them - they wanted to figure them out for themselves. Unless they were really stuck, which had not happened yet.

“Oo, I figured out that one!” Izzy declared, pointing at a picture. “That’s the time that the Guardians of Harmony defeated Tirek with the Tree of Harmony’s magic chest that opened with six keys from each of them.” She turned to Flurry with breathless anticipation written all over her face.

The alicorn laughed. “Right again, Izzy,” she said, using her magic to pick up a pen and make yet another mark on a sheet of paper beside her. “That makes eleven for Izzy, eight for Zipp, and Sprout and Pipp are tied at five. I think you’re almost done.”

Pipp sighed as she turned over the picture of the window that Izzy had just figured out. “Only a few left,” she announced before turning to Sprout. “I am so going to beat you, you know.”

“You didn’t have to listen to these sorts of things every time you saw Sunny for every day of your life,” he retorted. “I couldn’t pass her in the halls at school without her bursting with a new story her dad told her about how ponies being friends defeated another evil bad guy seeking to drag them apart.”

“Oh, is that so,” Pipp said, tossing her head and pointing to another picture. “Well, I think that one is of Celestia and Luna defeating King Sombra for the first time."

Flurry froze, her adrenaline rising and her mnd racing. Don’t think about him, don’t think about him, don’t think about him…

Lines of ponies in chains, ponies standing at attention, their eyes green, her parents held at spear point and forced to bow to…

“Flurry?”

She snapped out of her trance and realized that Pipp was calling her name. “Sorry, I just… what?”

“Am I right?” Pipp asked, holding up a picture.

Flurry felt a wave of relief wash over her. It wasn’t him… “Nope, sorry, but that’s incorrect,” she said.

Pipp dropped the picture, her jaw falling open. “What?”

Sprout pointed to the picture she just dropped. “That’s Celestia and Luna defeating Discord for the first time,” he decided.

“Are you locking that in?” Flurry said in her best game-show voice. The stallion slapped the ground in front of him like he was hitting a buzzer, and Flurry continued. “And it is… drumroll, please…”

Zipp and Sprout pounded the floor with her hooves, and Flurry finished by saying, “It’s… correct!”

Sprout did an arm pump while Pipp broke into furious protests. Flurry smiled as she made another mark on her scorekeeping paper. “In a shocking turn of events, Sprout pulls ahead by one point! But Izzy Moonbow remains in the lead. Who will be the winner?”

“You should be on TV,” Zipp laughed. “Are you sure you don’t want to film this, Pipp?”

“I don’t post my embarrassing failures,” she said haughtily, lifting her head. “Next time we play trivia, can it be on something I know more about? Like music or mystery novels or something?”

“You read mystery novels?” Zipp asked, surprised. “I didn’t know that.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, dear sister,” Pipp retorted, burying her nose in her book. “And I’m going to get the next one.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Zipp said, flipping over the picture that Sprout had gotten right and pointing to another. “Because that’s the picture of Starlight Glimmer stealing the Guardians’ cutie marks with the Staff of Sameness.” She looked to Flurry for confirmation.

The alicorn made another mark on her scroll. “That leaves Izzy at eleven still, Zipp at nine, Sprout at six, and Pipp at five. Still.”

Izzy snickered, and Pipp swatted her with her wing.

“So, Flurry,” Zipp continued as if nothing had happened. “About the Crystal Empire. When can we go?”

She shrugged. “I mean… it’ll be cold, but we’ve got magic. And the Crystal Heart’s keeping the Empire from freezing over again, so we could just teleport right there, but…” She looked at the hot air balloon basket, currently suspended just below the grate entrance to the palace.

“But Sunny would never agree to it,” Izzy finished for her.

“We could just skip the worst parts of it,” Zipp reasoned. “Wait until some big fog comes in, and then Flurry can teleport us to the Empire so that it was like it was on the other side of the fog. Sunny would never know the difference. And we could walk all the way up to that point, so maybe her hooves would be sore and she would want us to teleport.”

“That could work,” Flurry said slowly, thinking. “It’s just that…”

“You hate tricking Sunny,” Sprout guessed, and Flurry nodded. “I don’t like doing it, either. But she’s not really Sunny anymore. There might be a way to snap her out of it, but for now, we have to find a compromise. We can walk for most of the way, but everything else is too cold to just walk through. If we’re going to get there, at first, it has to be by magic. There’s no other way. I mean, unless you know of one…”

Flurry sighed. “No, you’re right. Come on, let’s go get Sunny and Hitch and some supplies. I want to get up there, too. There might be things that could help us, and I want to fix it up. It is my kingdom. I can’t let it sit in ruin forever.”

“After we find out who wins?” Pipp pleaded, going back to her book. “I think I’ve got this one. It’s the window that Twilight Sparkle got after she was crowned ruler of Equestria.”

Flurry grinned and said, “Close, but no.”

“OH, COME ON!”

“You’re going to be walking?” Haven demanded when they told her. “In the snow?”

Zipp gave her friends a sideways glance and said carefully, “We’re going to be as careful as we possibly can be and go around the worst stuff. You don’t have to worry about us.”

“But I am worrying,” Haven fretted, beginning to anxiously pace the throne room. “Going on quests to save magic was at least doable - you were with somepony who knew where you were going and how to get there!”

Flurry cleared her throat, saying, “Resident of the Crystal Empire, right here.”

“Well, yes, sorry, Flurry dear, but it’s been a long time!” insisted the queen, not calming down a bit. “Things might have changed!”

“They probably have,” she agreed. Zipp elbowed her. “What?”

“What Flurry means is,” the pegasus covered for her, “it has been a long time, but where she lives, it’s really cold, and the temperatures have probably preserved just about everything of importance. And if there is a problem, we have magic on our side.”

Beside her, Flurry felt Sunny stiffen, and now it was her turn to elbow Zipp, though what she said seemed to do the trick, at least on Haven. She nodded and told Zoom, “Get enough supplies for seven ponies for a… how long will you be gone?” she asked them, and by the look on her face, Flurry reasoned that they shouldn’t be gone long - Haven might literally explode.

“About a week, probably less,” she decided. The queen looked like she wanted to protest, but relayed the order to Zoom, who bowed and left.

An hour later, Zipp and Pipp were wrapped in their mother’s embrace, which was slightly uncomfortable with the supply packs that were strapped to their backs, while she gave them a play-by-play of everything they needed to do to be safe and to make sure to not stray away from the group and to stay warm and not freeze and not eat too much and if they ever needed anything they could come home right away, and it would have gone on if Flurry hadn’t interrupted and said, “Uh, excuse me, Your Majesty? We might want to hurry; we want to make a good start before the sun sets.”

“Right, right, of course,” Haven agreed, tightening her grip on her daughters. Into their ears, she whispered, “I love you two more than anything in the world, so please come back.”

“We will, Mom,” Pipp promised.

“We won’t even to anything remotely dangerous,” added Zipp. “Yeah, okay, that was a complete lie,” she amended when Haven looked at her with an expression that clearly said she didn’t believe her.

As she let them go, Haven was surprised to be approached by Sprout.

“Hey, could you let my mom know where I’m going? She’ll probably freak out, but…” He shrugged. “I want her to know where I am.”

Haven promised to do so, and it struck her how far the stallion had come since he tried to declare war on the other pony races. She had originally had doubts about her daughters hanging out with him after he did, but he was clearly trying to change. All worries about him instantly vanished on the spot.

It was only a few hours after they had left that the sun set, and the seven ponies were forced to make camp. Everypony helped gather sticks and twigs for a fire, which quickly became a game that Zipp won, despite the fact that Flurry and Izzy might have cheated just a wee bit and used their magic. Sunny struck her hoof against a rock, creating a spark, and then Zipp fed the tiny flame with her wings until it grew and warmed all their faces.

“Just like old times,” Izzy sighed contentedly, sinking to the ground.

Sunny smiled, something flickering in her eyes as she stared at the firelight. Hitch nudged her affectionately.

Flurry watched the two foalhood friends, feeling a strong wistfulness as she thought of all the friends she’d had, though none as close as her aunt’s, with her being a princess and all. She noticed that, while Sunny seemed a little more stiff and formal around the others, her mood towards Hitch had hardly changed at all.

After a quick supper (Pipp had gagged at the sight of camp food and had refused to eat any of it before her hunger made her cave), the ponies all spread out blankets on the ground and were asleep within moments. All, except for Flurry. The alicorn tossed and turned until finally, with nothing else to do, stared up at the sky, tracing the constellations she knew so well in her head. It was comforting to her to find that, while they were in a slightly different position than before, the pictures were all still there… including that new one, the one she had seen when she and Sprout had been talking about their nightmares: a single star surrounded by five others.

Now that she was looking at it, Flurry got a sense of déjà vu, and she tried to imagine where she might have seen something like this before. An image flashed in her head of a mark she had seen all her life, a mark so easily recognizable that she was ashamed of herself for not thinking of it sooner - a pink six-pointed star surrounded by five smaller white stars. That mark had been at the center of her life, and now it was up in the sky. Just seeing it gave Flurry peace, like some part of her aunt’s legacy still lived on.

Flurry closed her eyes and as soon as she hit the ground, she fell asleep.

Pipp Loses Her Cell Phone (and Zipp Had Nothing to Do With It)

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“THIS IS THE WORST! DAY! EVER!!!”

Sunny jolted awake at Pipp’s agonizing scream, and she leaped up to see what was troubling her friend so. Everypony else blinked their eyes open and stumbled to their hooves as Pipp frantically tore up the campsite.

“Ugh… where’d the alarm clock come from?” Zipp grumbled, rubbing her eyes. “And why is it set for the literal crack of dawn?” she demanded louder, gesturing to the eastern sky, which was just beginning to get light.

“I lost my cell phone!” Pipp wailed, flopping onto the ground and sobbing.

There was silence. Zipp smacked her forehead with her hoof. Sprout said, “Uh… okay?”

On the ground, Pipp suddenly stopped. She lifted her head and slowly stood up, her deadly glare lasered in on Sprout, who took a step back nervously.

“Do you not understand what a tragic moment this is?” she whispered, deathly quiet. When Sprout shook his head (because he honestly didn’t understand, lacking a cell phone himself), Pipp’s volume level increased from somewhat-normal to literally-everypony-in-a-ten-universe-radius-can-probably-hear-you. “I LOST my CELL PHONE!!!” she screeched. “After all the quests, the discoveries, the vanquishing evil, NOTHING has prepared me for this!” She sat back on her haunches and looked pittingly devastated.

“Oh, for hoofness sake, Pipp,” Zipp snapped, “nopony cares! Shut up, Hitch,” she growled as the stallion opened his mouth. “You can get another cell phone later - I’m sure your fans will understand.” Her cheerful tone was very forced, and Sunny could tell her teeth were clenched.

“You think I care about my fans?” Pipp whimpered, pushing dirt away from her as if her precious device was buried. “How am I going to contact Mom? She’s probably going to go out of her mind with worry if she doesn’t get an update every day! And be thankful that it isn’t going to be every five minutes like she tried to do last time,” she growled.

Zipp took a step back. “Woah. Pipp. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you care about something more than your fans.”

Her sister threw her a withering glare and opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, Flurry interrupted. “I have an idea,” she ventured, stepping forward. “We didn’t have cell phones, but we did send instantaneous messages by teleporting scrolls with magic. We could try that. Did anypony bring paper?”

“There’s a few blank pages in the back of my dad’s journal,” Sunny hesitantly volunteered. “I’d prefer it if you didn’t use too many, though. I want to document the Crystal Empire in there.”

Flurry smiled at her. “No worries, I only need one piece.”

Sunny passed her a paper and a pen, and Flurry wrote:

Dear Queen Haven,

This is Flurry Heart and company. We are fine, but Pipp has unfortunately lost her cell phone, so for the time being, we will be sending messages via paper and magic teleportation. Due to limited resources, this will be the only letter we send before we reach the Crystal Empire, but once we reach the city, we will send you another message. If you do not receive a message within the next two days, assume something has happened that has prevented us from contacting you.

All the best,

Flurry Heart, Pipp Petals, Zipp Storm, Izzy Moonbow,

Hitch Trailblazer, Sprout, and Sunny Starscout

Pipp read the letter over after they had all signed it. “Seems okay,” she grudgingly admitted. “I do think she’ll be worrying, though.”

“Obviously,” Zipp agreed. She was looking at her sister as if seeing her in a whole new light.

“But what about pictures?” her younger sister whined. “How am I supposed to take pictures so that we can have records of what we see? What if there’s a very important clue that we can only figure out after hours of tediously studying images of it?” She turned to Flurry. “I don’t suppose there’s some sort of magical alternative to taking photos?”

Flurry grinned. “You know it.” She looked at the sky. “We’ll send this in a little bit, when your mom wakes up. For now, we’re awake, so we might as well get started.”

While they were talking, Sprout noticed something on the ground a few meters from the campsite. Cautiously going over to investigate, he found that, in a patch of soft ground, there was a hoofprint, but it looked like a big chunk had been taken out of it, almost like…

Like the hoof had a hole in it.

Sprout’s breath caught in his throat as he remembered a unicorn saying, But her legs had holes in it, which was really weird - like, how does that work? He looked back at the other ponies, who were putting out the last few smoldering coals in the fire. Who could he tell? Sunny wasn’t acting like herself - telling her could be dangerous. Hitch would probably tell him not to worry about it and that he would investigate himself. But there was somepony he could tell… two ponies, actually…

“Hey, Flurry, uh… can I see the letter?” he asked quietly. The alicorn looked surprised, but she gave him the rolled-up piece of paper and the pen. Sprout unrolled it on a rock and added a quick post script before giving it back to Flurry. Her blue eyes scanned the addition and widened as she realized what it meant. She looked at him fearfully, and he nodded towards the hoofprint. Flurry slipped away to go look and caught back up when they were walking again.

“Should we tell them?” Sprout asked in a whisper.

Flurry sighed. “Not yet. There’s just something that doesn’t sit right with the three villains getting released and Sunny acting the way she is happening around the same time… And now Pipp’s phone, our primary mode of communication, is gone. Keep your eyes open for clues, but don’t tell the others yet.”

Up in front, Sunny noticed the two whispering like best friends and felt a wave of sadness.

You see? the voice in her head said. They don’t care about you. As soon as they can, they’ll get rid of you - a pony who doesn’t know anything - and replace you with that pony - who knows everything, and who’s wings and horn aren’t magical illusions. She’s what they all want, not you. Mark my words, the first chance they get, they’ll throw you out. They’ve already been scheming against you.

Sunny shook her head and continued forward, the words creating anger that fueled her on. If her friends didn’t care about her, fine. She would show them that she didn’t need them, either.

The rest of the day turned out to be exactly like the first. They stopped for lunch around midday, giving Sunny’s throbbing hooves a break, before setting out again and continuing until sunset. They made camp and slept, this time not being woken up by Pipp’s wails that her cell phone was gone, or that she had lost any other precious items. She was already making plans to send her mother a message when they got to the Crystal Empire about how they needed to organize a search team to scour the area and find where her darling little cellular device had ended up. Zipp was showing great restraint in not strangling her within the first five seconds of this discussion.

Sunny’s dreams that night were nightmares that she didn’t understand half of. She was trapped in a swirling cyclone of dark gray smoke. Images flashed in and out of the wind, some of which she knew, some of which she didn’t. She called out, but her voice didn’t seem to work, or maybe the wind was too loud.

Then a voice called inside her head, Oh, poor little Sunny Starscout. So alone, without any friends. Such a sad, sad story.

Where are you? Sunny thought, whipping around to try and see who was talking to her, but there was nothing but swirling wind and dissolving pictures. She caught a glimpse of her father in the midst of everything, and her walls of resistance crumbled, letting the darkness seep in.

You already know that, the voice taunted her. And yet - you have no idea. No idea what you’re doing, or why you’re doing it. If only you had somepony to help you make the right decisions… Well, that’s why we’re here. Poor Sunny, you need somepony to tell you what to do. What choices to make. Where to go. Who to listen to. You need somepony to keep you from getting lost.

Something squirmed in Sunny’s heart, trying to tell her something, but she thought the idea of somepony else making all the tough calls sounded rather pleasing. She wouldn’t have to worry about anything anymore.

Let me take over, the voice said in a soothing voice. Forget all this and let me handle it.

A flash of pink light caught Sunny’s eye, and she turned to see a bright pink star floating in front of her, bold and defiant. The presence of the voice seemed to recede, and Sunny took a deep breath before answering: No. I stay with my friends.

If that’s what you want, the voice sighed. But let me warn you - they have already been acting without you. They think that you are dangerous and not to be trusted. They’re not really your friends - I am your friend. I know what you wish for, Sunny Starscout, and I can give it to you.

She shook her head and focused on the glowing star. She found peace in it, a sort of stability and clarity that she had been lacking the past couple of days. Leave, she commanded.

The voice would be back, and she knew it. But for now, Sunny felt like herself again.

The younger filly paced in front of her, agitated.

“Stupid friendship magic gimmicks!” she said angrily, kicking a stone across the clearing. “After all this time, we still can’t get away from that stupid pony princess, her stupid friends, and her stupid magic!”

“Patience,” the exiled queen said serenely, leaning back against a tree trunk, enjoying the scene in front of her. “We will have what we want, but only if we are careful. We will not fail this time.”

The filly groaned. “Ugh, when will he be baaack?” she whined. “I’m sick of just hanging around here and putting thoughts in other ponies’ heads. I want to go do some more evil stuff! Can’t we go cause some mischief among the other creatures now?”

“Later,” she replied leisurely, “but soon. The time is almost right. You say she almost complied?”

The filly beamed proudly. “I really thought we were going to get her then!” Her features faded into a scowl. “But of course Miss Twilight had to come along and save the day,” she grumbled.

“And we need them to find the Crystal Empire once again for our next trick,” the exile agreed. She tilted her head, hearing something far away in the woods. “Wait. I think it’s them.”

“About time,” the filly grumbled as a creature and two ponies entered the clearing. The large creature held a book close to his chest.

“You were successful?”

Sour Lavender snorted. “Obviously.”

Permafrost punched him in the gut, and the pegasus snarled as his hoof landed on his wing. “We got what you wanted - now give us what we want,” the unicorn told the exile, who only smiled.

“The only way you’ll get what you want is if you stick with us,” she replied. “Trust me when I say that you won’t last a week out there without us.”

The two ponies grumbled but made no further complaint. The exile turned to the creature. “Is our next trick prepared?”

He nodded, a diabolical grin spreading across his face. “Time to finally do what we were meant to do so long ago.”

Home At Last

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The snow started right around the middle of the second day. Already, almost everypony was shivering and were huddled together, and the frozen ground had specks of white on it that crunched under their hooves as they walked, but the flakes didn’t start falling until after they’d had their lunch break.

What started out as a gentle rain of snow soon became a freezing blizzard with winds that howled around them, whipping Flurry’s mane into her face. She could hardly see a meter in front of her, but Zipp somehow found her in the whirling snow. The pegasus princess’s face was covered up, but the look in her eyes told Flurry everything without needing words. She looked around and spotted a vague shape that resembled Sunny a few meters away. Sighing, Flurry lit up her horn and teleported them to just outside the protective shield of the Crystal Empire, where it was still pouring on the blizzardy conditions.

“This way!” Flurry called over the wind, lighting her horn so that the others could see her. “Follow me!”

The group of ponies stumbled together forward until they crashed through the magical shield and promptly collapsed upon arrival. Just like always, the sun was shining, helping melt some of the snow that had gathered in the streets and making the bits of crystal showing through gleam and glitter. Flurry remained on her hooves, having grown slightly used to the brutal weather around the Empire during her lifetime, and she removed the heavy winter gear they had packed.

“Did anypony feel something?” Sunny gasped, managing to stand up and looking around wildly. “Just a little while ago? It felt like - like my whole world went topsy-turvey and then righted itself again.” She looked at Flurry with both a question and an accusation in her eyes.

The princess smiled easily. “That’s just the shield’s magic,” she assured her. “It makes the surrounding environment a little disorienting, but I promise you’ll get used to it.”

“Oh my stars,” Pipp whispered, standing up. “Look. It - it’s beautiful.”

The other ponies stumbled to their hooves and looked in the same direction as Pipp. A huge palace stretched into the sky, surrounded by smaller buildings built to replicate crystals. Drifts of snow covered the streets but were slowly melting in the warm sunshine, and smaller crystal formations dotted the landscape.

“I think if that pony who collects crystals in Bridlewood would literally die upon seeing this place,” Hitch said, and everypony laughed.

Flurry led them into town, pointing out various landmarks as they went. “That’s the library, that’s where the guards usually lived, that’s the statue that we gave Spike after he saved the Empire, oh, and this is where we had jousting tournaments at the Crystal Fair!” Just walking through the city was making Flurry emotional - she kept remembering all that was, and knowing that it may never be again made her heart ache. This city used to be so alive - now it was little more than a ghost town.

“Your palace is huge,” Pipp said, reaching instinctively under her wing to pull out her cell phone and, remembering that it was no longer there, dropped her hoof. Zipp nudged her and said, “Bet I can beat you to the top.”

The princess leaped out of all her stuff and soared into the sky, whooping and hollering as she raced up the side of the crystal palace. Pipp laughed and soon met her sister in the sky, where they proceeded to do loop-de-loops and flips and all sorts of tricks.

“Did you ever have siblings, Flurry?” Izzy asked. The princess flinched, and Izzy hastily added, “Sorry, sorry, I - Forget I ever asked.”

“No, no, it’s okay,” Flurry assured her. “My parents decided that, after everything that happened with me and my Crystalling and the Crystal Heart, they wouldn’t have anymore kids. I still had plenty of friends my age, but none felt close enough to be like a brother or a sister. I always thought it would be nice.”

“What's Crystalling?” Sunny asked, looking up from her notebook, where she was furiously writing down everything she saw and trying to sketch a map of the city.

“It’s when a new baby is presented to the Empire, and they share their light and love with her, which is then transported to the Crystal Heart to make it stronger,” Flurry explained, then laughed as Sunny began to write at the speed of sound again. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

She ducked under the heavy purple curtains and held them aloft with her magic to allow the others to enter. Zipp and Pipp noticed that they were leaving and hurried to catch up.

“This is the Crystal Heart,” Flurry said proudly, gesturing to the artifact suspended in midair. “It keeps the Empire safe from the lovely conditions you saw out there and powered by the love and light of the Crystal Empire’s citizens.” Her smile faded as she realized what this might mean. “I suppose it might need recharging sometime soon here, but…”

She felt a hoof on her shoulder and looked over to see Zipp, who said, “We’ll get your kingdom back, Flurry - don’t you worry.”

“Shouldn’t we send a message to Mom saying that we’re here and safe?” Pipp asked, her hooves twitching as if they had never gone this long without holding a cell phone and snapping a selfie. “Flurry said in two days, and it’s been almost that.”

“There should be paper in the library,” Flurry volunteered.

“There’s a library?” Sunny exclaimed, nearly dropping her journal as her eyes widened to the size of the moon.

The alicorn laughed. “Come on, I’ll show you the way,” she said, walking towards one of the doors in one of the four pillars that supported the castle. “Though, Sunny, I’m afraid all of it will need to stay up here for the time being.”

Sunny didn’t seem to notice, as she was furiously scribbling in her journal and muttering to herself, “So many books… ancient history… all the reading! The research, the discoveries, the stories! I just… I can’t…” She put her journal away and took a deep, calming breath, deciding to distract herself by looking around them like everypony else as Flurry led them through the palace. Once the alicorn pushed open the doors to the library, however, Sunny lost every sense of calm she had ever had.

“THIS IS THE BEST! DAY! EVER!”

Without really noticing, Sunny’s wings and horn appeared, and she flew off to inspect the shelves full of books which, by some miracle, were only slightly frozen to the crystal shelves. Sunny pried a book off, read the title, squealed, and repeated the process until she had an entire stack of unread material in her arms. She then settled down on the floor, opened the first book in her pile, and began to read.

Meanwhile, Flurry used her magic to thaw a scroll, quill, and ink, which she then handed to Pipp, who looked like she didn’t know what to do with it, before Zipp took over and began drafting a letter to their mother.

“So, Sunny,” Hitch said in a teasing voice, walking over to where the mare was sitting, “did you find anything interesting?”

She gave him a playful smirk. “Only the most amazing things ever,” she said, shoving the book she was reading at Hitch so he could read the cover.

“How to Properly Polish Your Crystals?” he asked skeptically, raising his eyebrow at her.

Sunny nodded overenthusiastically. “Yes! It is such an interesting read! You can really learn a lot from books like these, you know,” she reprimanded him, going back to her book so she didn’t see Hitch roll his eyes. “Would you mind finding me some more?”

“You’re already going to be here for a week with just those!” Hitch protested, but he sensed that there was no use in arguing with her.

Flurry was teaching Izzy the spell she was using to thaw things so that they could hopefully fix up a few of the castle’s rooms for that night. When the purple unicorn finally managed to unstick a candlestick from a desk, she cried, “Look! I did it, I did it!”

“Good job, Izzy!” Flurry congratulated her, turning to the others. “Hey, guys? Izzy and I are going to go unfreeze a few rooms, so, we’ll be… around.”

“Oo, I want to help!” Sunny exclaimed, leaping up and knocking her tower of books into Hitch, who had come back with more.

“...Are you sure?” Flurry finally said, glancing at Izzy. Sunny had been acting more like herself lately, but Flurry was still slightly wary around her. Izzy shrugged. “You don’t want to stay here and read?”

“Pfft, I can read anytime,” Sunny said dismissively, trotting over. “But how often do you get to see an entire palace that nopony has stepped hoof in for years? This is something I don’t want to miss!”

“B-but what am I supposed to do with all these?” Hitch spluttered, waving a hoof at the massive stack of books on the floor.

“Oh. I suppose you can put them back,” Sunny said good naturedly as she ducked out the door with Flurry and Izzy. “Have fun!” she called back to them. “What does Hitch’s face look like?” she whispered to the other two horned ponies as they left.

“Uh… something like this,” Izzy said, rearranging her face to look like Hitch’s pouty face. “Why can’t you turn around and see for yourself?”

Sunny looked shocked at the very prospect. “What? Turn around and ruin the dramatic effect? That is not how we work here, Izzy Moonbow. No, that is not how we work at all. One of the privileges of having friends from foalhood is being able to have them clean up after you,” she added teasingly with a sly grin at the unicorn, who snickered.

“I always thought that was what you were supposed to do with younger siblings who idolized you,” Flurry said thoughtfully. “At least, that’s what Aunt Rainbow Dash told me I should do if I ever got a younger sibling, though I never did, so it didn’t really do much use.”

“Well, that, too,” Sunny agreed, “but as I am lacking a younger sibling who idolizes me - or any younger sibling, in fact - Hitch is the next best thing I got.” She gasped. “Oh my stars, what room is that?”

“That’s the kitchen.”

“And that?”

“A spare bedroom.”

“And that?”

“A shoe closet.”

“Really?”

Flurry snorted. “Of course not. That’s the throne room. We don’t really have shoe closets. More like shoe boxes. Because most of us only have about one pair that we only use on special occasions, and that’s it.”

“There’s a throne room?” Sunny looked as if she might just pass out.

“Is it sparkly?” Izzy demanded.

“Number one, why would there be a palace without a throne room? Number two, yes, it is very sparkly, or it will be, once we get done with it.”

Both mares’ faces lit up before they scrambled to get through the door at the exact same time when it was only open enough to let a single pony get through, resulting in them both landing on the floor in a tangled pile.

“Woah,” Izzy murmured, pushing Sunny off her and standing up. The other pony stood up, too, and looked around in wonder.

“This is. The best. Day. Ever,” Sunny whispered to herself.

“I think you already said that,” Flurry said teasingly, pushing the doors open and entering without mishap. Most of the things inside the palace only seemed to have a thin layer of ice over them that easily broke, though whether that was true for the rest of the city remained to be seen. “Or do you say that for every day?”

“Not every day,” Sunny insisted indignantly. “Only on the best ones.”

“Which is every day,” Izzy said, laughing as Sunny swatted her with her golden wing.

“Anyways,” Sunny continued, looking around, “where should we sta-”

A wave of heat suddenly engulfed the room, and when it ended, Sunny and Izzy looked up to see Flurry’s horn still glowing.

Her cheeks turned red. “Sorry. I was wondering if I could do an entire room all at once, and… I can?” She looked around the room, as if scanning it for any bits of ice that may have escaped her. “Maybe we should split up. We’ll cover more ground faster.”

“Sure,” Izzy agreed. “I’ll stay with Sunny, and you can go by yourself.” Flurry nodded and flew out of the room. Izzy turned to follow, but before she could, Sunny caught her arm, and the unicorn could tell that, by the serious look on her friend’s face, that this was something she wanted to talk about in private. “What is it?”

Sunny took a deep breath. “Izzy, you know when I’m… not quite me?” Her friend nodded. “Well, that’s because… I’m not. There’s something or somepony putting these thoughts in my head and making me act like this, and I know that they aren’t true, but I’ve got no way of resisting them, except… I think I might have found one. I’m still afraid, though. I’m scared that I’ll get you all hurt in some way, scared that you won’t want to be friends with me anymore… I already lost you all once, and I’m afraid it’ll happen again.”

“Sunny…” Izzy put her hoof on the alicorn’s shoulder and looked her straight in the eyes. “You don’t have to be afraid. We’re not going anywhere. We’ll help you through this, no matter what. We can-”

“No,” Sunny said, her voice choked up, pulling away. “No, Izzy, I just… I don’t want them to know. I feel like it’ll put them in danger. I’m telling you because you’re my best friend, and I want you to know what’s really going on. You have to promise me that, if things go bad, you’ll protect the others. If I’m right about this, there won’t be any coming back from it if I fall. I want you to keep them away from me, keep them safe. Promise me, Izzy.”

She still looked surprised and a bit confused, but she said, “I promise, Sunny. And just so you know, you’re my very best friend, too.” The two embraced. “Now, what do you say about warming this place up a little?”

Sunny laughed. “I say that’s a great idea.”

The Hall of the Princesses

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The seven ponies remained in the Crystal Empire for a week, rationing out the food that Haven had sent them with to make it last a few days longer. Sunny hardly left the library, and Izzy remained at her side - the unicorn rarely left her. By the second day, the entire palace was unfrozen, and Flurry was working on the streets. Zipp and Pipp flew around, exploring rooms and finding random things that they thought would be interesting to bring back home and study. Hitch and Sprout were given the fun and time-consuming task of figuring out how to fit these new things in the packs that they had brought. The royal sisters found tons of items, but it was the day they left that Sunny found the absolute greatest discovery ever.

Nopony else was awake other than Sunny on that very early morning, and the mare walked the now-familiar path to the library in slightly lower spirits than usual. Every night, she had the dream about being trapped in a swirling wall of wind as images from her life flashed in and out before her eyes. The voice would come and propose that Sunny let go and hand control over to it, and she always refused, focusing on the glowing star that was her ancestor’s cutie mark. Last night, however, she’d had a significantly harder time resisting the voice, and it scared her.

Sunny might have been acting like her old self again, but she still had a bit of a faulty memory, and she felt the voice’s presence in the depths of her head, waiting to attack again. Izzy promised to keep everypony safe, Sunny thought to herself. No matter what happened, her friends would be safe.

Like always, the library glittered with leftover sheets of ice. She and Flurry had decided to defrost this room one book at a time, worried that the paper might catch on fire, and there being so much of it, this could be a big problem. Flurry had experience with this - one of the rooms she had defrosted had a scroll resting on a desk, and a corner of it caught on fire when she did her spell. Now they unfroze paper products separately.

Sunny took a deep breath and breathed in the smell of old paper, leather covers, and musty ink - it always seemed to calm her down. Maybe because it reminded her of her father, who always smelled like that. Maybe because her ancestor was said to be a bookworm, and she had inherited the trait. She closed her eyes and thought of her friends, though the memories were harder to access than normal. Fighting down the panic, Sunny felt a tingling sensation start in her heart and spread to the rest of her body until her golden wings and horn returned once more. She spread her wings and soared to the spot where she’d left off and continued to scan the shelves for books that might help with her current predicament.

It must have been fifteen minutes before she noticed that a few of the books had been pushed aside, revealing a horseshoe bolted to the wall. This in itself was not overly surprising, but when Sunny looked closer, she saw a moon, a sun, a heart, and a six-pointed star carved around it…

Intrigued, Sunny inserted her hoof onto the horseshoe and felt something unlock beneath it, some sort of mechanism. Acting upon instinct, she twisted it to the right, and the entire shelf slid to one side, revealing a long, dark tunnel that twisted out of sight. Sunny took a hesitant step forward, then another, then another, until she was briskly trotting into the tunnel. The bookshelf slid closed behind her, but she wasn’t afraid. Though the tunnel was dark, her glowing wings and horn provided all the light she needed.

Finally, she rounded a corner and came into a large room that was just as dark as the tunnel, except for a large circle on the floor, glowing a dim white light. Sunny stepped onto the circle, and it lit up, turning into a perfect, glowing replica of her cutie mark. She felt a wave of magic rise around her, lifting her mane off her shoulders a bit before it spread to the rest of the room.

The room lit up, and Sunny gasped. Around the room appeared four beautiful stained glass windows like the ones back in Zephyr Heights, these of four beautiful ponies with wings and horns and very familiar faces.

A white alicorn with a rainbow colored mane in front of a rising sun was next to a dark blue alicorn with a mane that sparkled like the night sky, pictured in front of a circle that displayed all the moon phases. In the direction that Sunny just came from was a candy pink alicorn with a purple, pink, and yellow mane in front of the very castle that her friends were now in, and next to that was a very familiar purple alicorn and a beautiful castle made of crystal.

A beam of light stretched out from where Sunny stood on the floor and connected with the area between Twilight Sparkle and Cadance, and a new window appeared, but this one of Sunny. She was standing in front of her lighthouse - but it didn’t look like her lighthouse. It looked like it was made of some holographic rainbow material, with the shape of the three unity crystals above the door. Her golden wings were spread and her horn glowed.

“Wow,” Sunny whispered, stepping forward to see it better. She gently laid her hoof on the window, but instead of feeling hard glass, like she expected, the window appeared to be made of nothing, since her hoof passed right through.

Sunny jerked her hoof back and held it against her chest. What was that?

“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” said a voice, and Sunny whirled around to see Flurry walking through the picture of Cadance. “I was wondering how long it would be before I discovered this place.”

“What is it?” Sunny asked as Flurry stepped on Sunny’s cutie mark. It glowed and turned into Flurry’s mark, a blue shield with a heart displayed on it. A line stretched from Flurry to an empty space between Cadance and Celestia, turning into a beautiful picture of her standing in front of the Crystal Heart.

“The Hall of Princesses,” Flurry said, joining Sunny at her picture. “It’s a kind of netherworld that connects the homes of all princesses - see, that one leads to the Crystal Empire,” she explained, pointing to the picture of Cadance. “And, well, I suppose that one would, too,” she added, looking at hers. She pointed to each window as she named off the places they would lead to. “Canterlot - Zephyr Heights, I guess - I believe that one leads to the Castle of the Two Sisters - or what’s left ot it, anyway - and that one leads to Twilight’s castle in the Everfree Forest.”

“How do you know all this?” Sunny asked, experimentally waving her hoof through her picture and seeing if she could feel anything on the other side.

“My… mom told me about it,” Flurry said, looking at the giant image of Cadance. “She wanted to take me here, but every princess must discover it on their own right. Other ponies can enter it when the door is open, but only a princess can open the door.” She noticed what Sunny was doing and laughed. “I think yours might lead to your lighthouse, Sunny.”

“Cool,” she whispered.

“Sunny? Flurry? Are you - woah.” Zipp broke off as she stepped into the room. “This is… what is this place?”

She stepped on the glowing circle, and a new window appeared between Twilight’s and Luna’s. Flurry explained what the Hall of Princesses was, but Sunny suspected that she wasn’t really listening.

“What’s going on?” Sunny asked the pegasus.

“We couldn’t find you guys, and we were starting to get worried,” Zipp explained, finally tearing her eyes away from the picture of her in front of modern Zephyr Heights. “We should go back before they start freaking out more.”

The three princesses passed through the picture of Princess Cadance just to be safe and emerged in the library, where they found Pipp hudled on the floor, crying, with Izzy and Hitch at her side, comforting her.

“Pipp?” Zipp ran forward and reached out to her sister, but Pipp flinched and recoiled, so Zipp backed up. “What happened?” she asked Hitch.

“She tried to go in after you,” he said in an undertone, patting Pipp on the back as tears poured out of her eyes. “But it wouldn’t open.”

“Oh.” Zipp turned back to her sister. “Pipp, I’m sorry, I-”

“Sorry for what?” Pipp snapped, standing up and glaring at her sister. “Sorry that you’re so amazing and awesome and act like you’re so much better than everypony else? Sorry for all the times you’ve got Mom’s undying attention and left me alone without anypony at all? Sorry for acting like you’re oh so sick of me?”

“I do not act like I’m better than everypony else!” Zipp retorted. “In fact, you’re one to talk, Little Miss Perfect, who becomes the first topic that everypony - including Mom - ever thinks about! Do you know how many times Mom’s told me, ‘Your sister’s doing something useful with her life, your sister’s putting her talants to good use, your sister doesn’t disappear for hours upon end each day, your sister doesn’t obsess over flying, your sister’s fine with lying to the entire kingdom!’ ”

“I was only doing what I had to do to get ponies to remember that I existed!” Pipp screeched, taking a step forward. “Because nopony seems to remember that there’s another princess, oh no, they just care about Zipp this and Zipp that and Zipp, Zipp, Zipp, and you don’t even care! You let them talk about you like you’re the only pony in this world who actually matters!”

“At least I’m not a selfish, self-entitled perfect little princess!”

“Well, neither am I!” Pipp geastured wildly to the bookcase, which had slid back into place. “And I’m sick of you treating me like one!”

“I’m sick of you being one!”

“I’m sick of being your sister!”

“I’m sick of being your sister!”

“UGH, you are the worst!” Pipp whirled around and marched behind some bookshelves. In the silence that followed, Sunny could hear her quietly crying again. Zipp groaned and spread her wings, flying out of the room and slamming the door shut behind her.

“...Suddenly, I don’t think I want siblings anymore,” Izzy said into the silence.

Sunny sighed. “I think we should leave today. It’s about time, and now we have a much faster mode of transportation than walking for days on end.”

“Really?” Izzy asked, tilting her head at the shelf behind them. “Where does that tunnel lead?”

“We’ll show you,” Flurry offered, turning back to the wall. She paused at 90 degrees and looked at the bookshelf behind which Pipp was hiding. “Uh, Pipp… you want to come and see?”

There was a pause, and then the pegasus slowly walked out from behind the wall of books, her eyes bloodshot, red, and puffy, and her mouth set in a grim line. Her mane was slightly frizzy, but she walked over to where the other ponies were standing. Flurry was about to twist the horseshoe and open the door when the library doors suddenly burst open again. Sprout was standing in the doorway, Zipp behind him. He held out a sealed scroll that bore the crest of Zephyr Heights.

“I think you should see this,” Sprout panted, his breath coming out in short gasps.

“What is it?” Pipp asked, sounding genuinely curious. She noticed Zipp hovering behind the stallion and her eyes narrowed.

Zipp raised her head, and her eyes met Pipp’s, and the younger pegasus was startled to see that they were empty of anger and filled with something she rarely saw in her sister’s eyes: fear. “It’s from Mom,” Zipp said. “I think… I think something might be wrong.”

A Grand Summit

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“ ‘Dear Zipp and Pipp,’ ” Sprout read aloud, “ ‘I hope this reaches you. I had Alphabittle send it for me, but to be honest, I don’t fully trust his magical capabilities as much as he does.’ Don’t we all.”

“Alphabittle’s getting really good at magic,” Izzy protested. “And he did manage to send it to us, which is good.”

Sprout kept reading. “ ‘We have seen several more sightings of these strange troublemakers and have recorded their presences on the map, and we believe that we may have enough evidence to form a pattern as to where they appear, though we are by no means the experts, and that is why I am asking you to please return home. Alphabittle and Phyllis Cloverleaf are here with me in Zephyr Heights, and we are going to hold a summit to decide what to do about this as soon as you get back. Please hurry. Phyllis says that the three unity crystals that you worked so hard to find and put together have disappeared-’ ”

Everypony gasped and turned to Sunny. “I had them in my lighthouse under a magical enchantment to protect them!” she protested. “Whoever took them must have known a decent bit of magic, and not many unicorns in this time do…” A new idea struck her, and she turned to Flurry. “You don’t think it could have been… them?”

The red earth pony cleared his throat, and everypony fell silent. “ ‘-have disappeared, which is greatly troubling-’ ”

“She can say that again,” Sunny muttered. “Sorry, sorry, I won’t interrupt again,” she amended as Sprout glared at her. “Go on.”

“ ‘-so we would appreciate it if you found a faster mode of transport than walking through the freezing arctic tundra. I miss you, I love you, and I hope to see you soon. Signed, Her Majesty Queen Haven of Zephyr Heights.’ ” He looked at the others. “I really hope you do have a faster mode of transportation in mind, because it sounds kind of urgent.”

“Uh, we do!” Sunny leaped to her feet and geasturing to the group to follow. “Get your stuff, everypony, because we’re going back to Zephyr Heights!”

It didn’t take long for them all to assemble in front of the bookcase, ad although Pipp was looking very annoyed that they were going though the very place that she had been denied access to, the high tempers that had ignited between the sisters seemed to have calmed down at least enough for them to work together for a while, so Sunny decided to count her blessings. She twisted the horseshoe, and the bookshelf slid to one side, revealing the dark tunnel behind it. Flurry walked in first, and Sunny put out a hoof to keep the shelf from sliding closed. After everypony had gone through, she slipped in herself and let it close behind her.

Once inside, Zipp took the lead, bringing them to the large chamber that had all the passages to different places around the land, which was dark once again. The pegasus stepped on the circle, and her cutie mark appeared as the room lit up, causing everypony to gasp in wonder. Even Pipp forgot her anger and resentment as Zipp passed through her own window and disappeared, everypony following in pursuit.

They emerged in the airstation in Zephyr Heights, which made Sunny a little disoriented. She wobbled a little as she stepped out, as did most everypony else, but she wasted no time in regaining her balance and galloping to the elevator that would take them up and out. A few guards looked startled when they burst out of the grate in the floor, as they had thought that nopony was down there, but they didn’t ask any questions as the seven ponies raced through the halls, just exchanged a few strange looks. Sunny personally felt sorry for them. She had a feeling that she and her friends were going to get into a lot of magical calamities that involved reconsidering how they viewed reality.

Queen Haven was in the throne room with Zoom at her side, as always, though also accompanied by Phyllis Cloverleaf and Alphabittle. When she saw the group of ponies burst into the room, Haven let out a sigh of relief and rose off her throne to hug her little fillies.

“Thank hoofness you’re alright,” she said as she wrapped her wings around Zipp and Pipp. “I was beginning to get worried that something terrible had happened to you.”

“We’re fine, Mom, honestly,” Zipp protested, struggling to break out of her mother’s grip. “Besides, if anything terrible would happen, we would handle it.”

“That doesn’t stop me worrying one bit,” Haven whispered, squeezing tighter before finally letting go. “Did you get my letter?” Pipp nodded, and, by the throne, Alphabittle cleared his throat, which caused Haven to roll her eyes.

“I told you I could do it right,” he announced, standing tall and tossing his head. “And you thought I couldn’t.”

“I said that you had never done something like that before, and it would likely prove to be a challenge,” Haven corrected, a bit of flush creeping into her cheeks. “I had complete confidence in your powers.”

Zipp and Pipp looked back and forth between the pegasus queen and the large gray unicorn with wide eyes before meeting each other’s gazes.

Phyllis took this opportunity to strangle her own son in hugs and drown him in guilt of how he had worried her so and how she was so very glad to have him back and to not ever do something like that again without telling her and so on. Sprout was looking like he was tiering of this very quickly and, after a while, just held his mom at an arm’s length so he could breathe.

“Uh… who’s this?” Alphabittle asked, noticing Flurry Heart for the first time.

“This is Flurry Heart,” Izzy explained. “She’s a princess from the Crystal Empire. She’s not exactly from around here…”

Sunny giggled at the confused face Alphabittle was making. He then decided that these ponies were just too far ahead of him for him to properly understand what they were saying, and he should just go along with it.

“So, what’s the problem?” Sunny asked, wanting to get down to business. “Your letter said that the crystals were stolen…”

Haven nodded and turned to Phyllis, who now wore an extremely worried expression. “Not just the crystals, Sunny… whoever it was stole those magical gems that are tied to you and your friends - the ones you got when magic returned again.” She lowered her head shamefully. “I’m sorry.”

Everypony gasped, and Sunny fought down her panic. “It’s not your fault, Phyllis,” she consoled her. “If anything, it was mine for leaving them unattended while we went on quests and such. We’ll get them back, don’t worry,” she told her friends.

“That’s not the only troubling news,” Alphabittle added, jumping at a pause in the conversation. “There have been some unicorns who reportedly have lost their magic.”

“The same’s going on here,” Haven fretted. “Some ponies can’t fly anymore, and everypony’s freaking out, thinking that magic’s going to disappear again.” She turned to Sunny with a desperate look in her eyes. “Please tell me it’s not that.”

It was Flurry who answered. “No, magic’s here to stay,” she told the three leaders, who breathed a collective sigh of relief. “This is something different. Magic isn’t vanishing, it’s being stolen.”

“Didn’t you say that one of those creatures could steal magic?” Hitch remembered, talking over Haven, Phyllis, and Alphabittle’s gasps of horror. “Tirek or something?”

Flurry nodded sadly. “And let’s hope they haven’t got their hooves on… something else.”

“Where have they been seen?” Sunny asked, stepping forward. Haven gestured to one of her guards, and they rolled out the map that Pipp had set up. Except that now there were several dozen thumbtacks in the map, showing where these strange creatures had been sighted.

“That’s… a lot of places,” Zipp said in a small voice.

“It doesn’t seem like they’re being very careful,” Flurry noticed in a cautious tone. “Like they want to be seen, they want us to find them.” She shook herself. “No, it couldn’t be that. They wouldn’t want us to find them unless…” The alicorn froze as a horrible idea struck her. “Unless it’s a trap.”

“Maybe they’re just unaccustomed to this world?” Pipp suggested in a falsely hopeful voice. “Or they’re a little disoriented from being turned to stone for several years?”

“I feel like I’m missing something,” Alphabittle commented, and Phyllis nodded in agreement.

“These new creatures are from Flurry’s time - it’s a long story,” Izzy said vaguely.

“Pipp,” Sunny said slowly, an idea growing on her, “where do you think they’ll appear next? Can you find any pattern at all?”

The younger pegasus stepped forward and studied the map, her hazel eyes sweeping the paper and noting the location of each thumbtack. “Right there,” she decided, planting her hoof right in the center of the map. “They’re going there next.”

“How’d you figure that out?” Zipp asked, looking impressed.

“It’s obvious,” Pipp said, withdrawing her hoof. “They appear in places where there was something bad going on - you know, when we were all separated. Those signs outside of Bridlewood, Canterlogic, the place on the cliffs where Sunny and Izzy met Thunder and Zoom - and it all goes in a spiral inward. So they’ll appear right there next.”

Sunny took a closer look at where Pipp was referring to. “Hey… that’s the place where the Tree of Harmony is,” she noticed. “And where war almost broke out.” She turned to her friends. “I hope it’s not an omen that this place is a lot worse than all the others.”

“Do we have any idea when?” Sprout interjected. “Is there, like, a specific time that they’re most active or something?”

“Maybe when-” Pipp started, but Phyllis interrupted.

“There doesn’t seem to be any sort of pattern or correlation between times,” she admitted. “One day it’ll be noon, the next? Half past two in the morning.” She shook her head. “I think our best bet is to just be there and wait until these… creatures show up.”

“Yes, but the question is, what do we do about them?” Haven asked. “I don’t think our dungeons are very secure anymore.”

“You could-” tried Pipp, but she was once again spoken over.

“I say we zap ‘em,” Alphabittle volunteered, lighting up his horn and causing Sunny to wince.

“How about we don’t do that,” she said, and the large gray unicorn doused his horn with a pouty look on his face.

“Turning them to stone never works for long,” Flurry mused, “but it does work for a little bit. Maybe we do that until we have a better idea for what to do… though I hate the idea of returning them to stone after they were stuck like that for Celestia knows how long.”

“They’re vil-lains,” Hitch said slowly as if she didn’t get it. “They kind of deserve it.”

“Hey!” Sprout cried indignantly.

“Oops. Sorry. Well, not you, Sprout. You’re okay now,” Hitch amended, nudging the stallion and grinning. Sprout glared at him, and Hitch dropped it. “Sorry. I’ve just got this whole good-guy bad-guy way of thinking.”

“Guys-”

“Is there really a way to turn ponies to stone?” Sunny asked Flurry, looking frightened at the very concept, as if Flurry wanted to turn her to stone.

The alicorn nodded. “It was only reserved for very - very special circumstances, when literally everything else failed, or there it was the only way that Equestria could be ensured safety for a couple years.”

“Do you know this spell?” Haven asked Flurry, who flinched before nodding.

“My mom taught me it in case… well, she hoped I would never have to use it, but… I guess there’s not much else to do.”

“I’ll stage some guards around this area,” Haven announced, turning to Zoom, who stood at rigid attention. “Once these villains have appeared, send word as quickly as you can. Perhaps we should send a unicorn with you…” She turned to Alphabittle.

He nodded. “I’ll go find somepony to-”

“No,” Haven interrupted. “I want you to go with them.”

Alphabittle froze. “Me?”

“You’re just about the only pony who knows how to send messages with magic other than Flurry Heart, and no offense, but she’s somepony I don’t want to spare. Do it for Equestria.” She took one of his hooves. “Do it for me.”

Behind them, Zipp made a face like she was about to puke, but Haven didn’t notice, and neither did Alphabittle. He sighed and shrugged. “I mean… why not.”

Zipp turned around, saying, “Pipp, are you-” She froze. “Pipp?”

The youngest of the group was nowhere to be seen. Zipp spun around in a circle to see if she was anywhere else in the room, saw that she wasn’t, and was immediately flattened by a crushing wall of guilt. “This is my fault. Pipp…” Spreading her wings, Zipp flew out of the throne room, flying throughout the palace, calling, “Pipp? Pipp?”

To Be A Princess

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She wasn’t in her room, in the dungeons, above the throne room, and none of the guards said that they saw Pipp leave. Getting desperate, Zipp shoved the heavy grate aside as quickly as she possibly could and threw herself into the opening, spreading her wings to slow her fall. The station was empty except for a small pink pegasus sitting in front of the window.

“Pipp?” Zipp dashed over to her sister as fast as she could and landed just a little bit behind her. “Oh, Pipp, I was so worried about you. Thank hoofness you’re alright - are you alright? It’s not like you to just run off like that.” She trotted up to her sister and sat down next to her. “Pipp?”

“Why are you here?” she croaked, her voice thick. “Why don’t you just go back to everypony else, because you clearly don’t need me. The only things I’m good at are noticing details and singing songs.”

“That’s not true,” Zipp insisted. “You’re smart, you’re funny, you’re amazing at cheering ponies on, you’re actually pretty good at sneaking around, you know the city, you know how ponies work, you’re good at disguises-”

“Not as good as Izzy,” Pipp mumbled, though she sounded not as close to tears as before.

“Yeah, okay, that is true,” admitted Zipp, and Pipp let a small chuckle slip, “but the important thing is, you’re my sister, Pipp. And I’m sorry if I haven’t been a very good sister lately-”

“You’ve been a terrible sister,” Pipp said with a playful smirk.

“So have you! Anyway, remember when we went to Bridlewood to find the unicorn crystal, and you tagged along even though you didn’t really want to?” Pipp nodded. “I was actually really glad you did. I don’t think I would have been able to do that if you hadn’t been there. I’ve always kind of counted on you, and knowing that you’re there gives me courage that things will be alright. And about what I said back in the Crystal Empire - I didn’t mean any of that. I love being your sister, and I love you, Pipp.”

Zipp opened her wing to her sister, who leaned in for a hug. “Thanks,” she sniffled. “I think we’re both a little out of character today - you never seemed like one for emotional speeches.”

The older sister chuckled. “I think I can make an exception just for you.”

The two of them stared up at the image of the pegasus crystal on the window. “These crystals seem to have a habit of getting stolen,” Pipp commented, and Zipp laughed. “You’re going to make a great queen one day, you know.”

Zipp sighed. “Pipp, I’m sorry about the Hall of Princesses. I don’t know why-”

“No, no, it’s okay.” Pipp took a deep breath and sat up. “I’ve been thinking about it, and… I don’t want to be a princess. I mean, not like you. You’re a princess who will grow up to lead ponies - and you’ll be wonderful at it - but I just want to hang out with my friends and sing songs and not have to worry about all those responsibilities. You know, before magic came back, I always thought, Maybe I should be queen. I’ll handle things just like Mom does - surely that means that I should be the one. But you would do things differently than Mom, and that’s why this city needs you. You’re not a make-do-with-what-you-have pony, Zipp - you’re the kind of pony who sees a problem and goes to no lengths to fix it. You’re honest and believe in what’s right and will not hesitate to go on dangerous quests and completely destroy everything you had before if you think it’ll turn out for the better. Just please don’t ruin anymore of my shows this time around.” She fixed Zipp with a stern glare that made her older sister crack up.

“I will say I will try…” she mused, and Pipp thwacked her with her wing. Zipp grinned, stood up, and offered her hoof to her younger sister. “Come on. Let’s go back up there. I think you have some good ideas, Pipp. But I will definitely beat you up there.”

Pipp reluctantly stood up. “Okay, but - AH! Zipp, a rat!”

Zipp whirled around, wings flared, eyes scanning the station around her. She frowned and folded her wings, turning back to her sister. “Pipp, there was no-” She froze and heard laughter coming from the far end of the room. Zipp turned to see Pipp hovering just below the entrance to the palace, grinning.

“I thought you said you would beat me up here,” she called in a teasing voice. Zipp spread her wings and zoomed after her. Pipp let out a squeal and dashed out of the hole, flying down the hallway as fast as her wings could carry her, but Zipp easily pulled ahead of her and stuck her tongue out at her sister. Pipp playfully shoved her, and the two spent the rest of the short flight to the throne room in playful fighting, which Zipp, of course, won, though they were both laughing too hard to care much.

Queen Haven was the only one left in the throne room - Zoom had left with Alphabittle, Thunder, and a few other guards to go guard the Tree of Harmony and keep watch for these three villains. When she saw her two daughters flying in, looking in much higher spirits than before, she smiled. “You know, the last time I saw you two really having fun together before this - why, I think it must have been your very first Nightmare Night.” She smiled at the memory. “I remember that you were having a contest to see who would get the most candy, and then your father…” She broke off, a much darker memory clouding over the first.

Zipp and Pipp exchanged a glance. Pipp finally stepped forward and said, “Could you… tell us a little bit about Dad? We don’t have that many memories of him, so…”

The queen sighed and sat down on her throne. “Your father was… kind.” She smiled. “Handsome. Headstrong and hopeful of a better future… He wanted the best for you two, like I did, but he had a… different idea for how to make it happen.”

“He hated the fake flying,” Zipp said, her long-standing theory for why he left.

Haven shook her head. “He did, but… that’s not why he left. He left to go to the unicorns. He thought that it was time that they put their differences behind them and start over, but… he never came back.” She wrapped her wings around herself. “The last thing he ever said to me… he said, ‘A world torn apart by hatred and mistrust is not a world I want to be a part of.’ ” She looked up and smiled at her daughters. “He would be so proud of you, you know… Especially now, I see more and more of him in you every day.”

Pipp beamed with pride. Zipp looked around the room, and, as if for the first time, noticed that it was empty. “Mom, where’s everypony else?”

“I believe they went to the library,” Haven said, sitting up straight. “Izzy had something she wanted to show them. But before you go-” She stood up and trotted down to her girls, where she wrapped them into a big hug.

“What was that for?” Zipp asked when her mother stepped back.

“So that I’ve already hugged you good-bye for your next adventure,” she replied calmly. “Based on what you’ve gotten yourselves into so far, I have to cherish every moment I have with you, because there’s always big quests in between.”

The two sisters waved good-bye to their mother and made their way to the library, where they found it completely empty. Then Zipp remembered something Izzy had told her a few weeks ago and trotted briskly to a bookshelf that held a book with a moon on its spine and a book with a sun. Pulling both of them towards her and settling them back in their rightful place, the entire bookshelf rumbled before sliding away completely. Pipp gaped.

“What just - how did you-” she stuttered, and Zipp grinned.

“Just a little trick I learned while you were off preparing for a big show or something. Come on!” She led the way into the dark stone passageway, which twisted down several meters before ending at a large door that was slightly ajar. From inside leaked a golden light, and voices could be heard. Zipp pushed open the door, and Pipp saw Flurry, Sunny, Izzy, Hitch, and Sprout inside. When the two pegasi entered, Izzy leaped forward to greet them, and Hitch let out a sigh of relief.

“Thank hoofness you two are okay!” Izzy bubbled, gesturing to the room around them. “According to Flurry, this used to be the restricted section of the Canterlot library - isn’t that something? And this is where we found all those books for the surprise we did for Sunny.”

“Yes, I’m aware, because I was there,” Zipp said, grinning at the unicorn.

“How did we never find this before?” Pipp asked. “I mean, if all you have to do is pull a couple books.”

Izzy shrugged, and Zipp said, “I don’t think many ponies have really been in here for a while…”

“If you found this a couple weeks ago,” Sunny called, “why didn’t you tell me about it?” Her tone sounded accusing, and Izzy winced.

“We were a little busy,” Zipp retorted hotly. “In case you hadn’t noticed, nearly the entire city wanted us gone, so we had to go a little bit undercover, which made it slightly more difficult to bring you here even if we did remember it - which we didn’t, because we had more important things to worry about. And after that, more stuff happened, and nopony’s remembered until now.”

“Zipp…” Izzy said softly, putting her hoof on the pegasus’s shoulder.

Sunny straightened, and something flashed in her dull eyes - something that looked unsettlingly like anger. Izzy ducked her head and looked at the floor.

“Let’s not talk about this,” Hitch interjected, coming up next to Sunny. “How about this - what are we supposed to do in the meantime?”

They were silent as everypony thought, until Pipp spoke up. “Well,” she began, a slow smile spreading across her face, “how would you guys like a V. I. P. tour of Zephyr Heights by its favorite princess? Don’t look at me like that, Zipp, you know it’s true.”

Hello! I'm Your Princess Tour Guide!

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After a wonderful night’s sleep, Flurry woke up to an alarm at 7 in the morning, had a wonderful breakfast, and met her friends by the elevator a half hour later. The sun was shining once again, illuminating the city in all of its splendor. The crowds were mostly pegasi, but Flurry spotted a few unicorns and earth ponies in the mix. Bright neon signs and gold-framed screens advertised all sorts of things from horn polish to smoothies.

Pipp was already by the elevator, scrolling through her new phone. She looked up when Flurry landed beside her.

“Hi,” Flurry greeted, tilting her head at the device in Pipp’s hooves. “How long did it take you to get that?”

“I actually just got it this morning, so - Oh, you’re teasing me,” she realized as Flurry started snickering. “I was just looking to see what places we could stop at on our tour - I mean, we can’t hit everything, so I wanted to make sure we got the highlights.” She slipped her phone under her wing and joined Flurry at the edge of the walkway that led to the castle, staring down at the city.

“There’s something about it that’s just so beautiful,” Flurry commented. “I remember when this was Canterlot and everything was kind of slow - just ponies going about their daily business for the most part. It definitely picked up speed when my aunt became queen, but for the most part, things pretty much stayed the same. It didn’t appear that anything was changing other than who the ponies themselves were friends with - my aunt definitely opened up the borders of Equestria. But I suppose that was one upside to the tribes dividing - you had time to focus on things to improve your lives instead of other ponies.”

Pipp shrugged. “I never really thought of it like that, but… I guess you’re right.”

“Hey guys!” came a cheerful voice from the palace, and the two princesses turned to see Izzy and Sunny trotting towards them, Izzy with a huge grin on her face, Sunny looking slightly glum. Last night she had begun to sink back into her “other side,” as they had all started calling it, and Flurry couldn’t figure out why.

“This is so exciting!” Izzy continued once they reached Flurry and Pipp. “I mean, I’ve seen the city from a distance, of course, and now I practically know the palace like the back of my hoof, but I’ve never really gotten to tour the city itself! Isn’t this exciting?”

“Izzy’s excited about something?” Zipp said teasingly, flying in circles above them. “What sort of shocking revelation is this?”

“Izzy would volunteer for a Canterlogic presentation thinking it was fun,” Sprout added as he and Hitch showed up.

Sunny shuddered. “Izzy, I’m talking from personal experience here - don’t volunteer for a Canterlogic presentation. It is not fun.”

“I know that,” the unicorn scoffed indignantly. “Just because I think that some things are exciting doesn’t mean I think everything is exciting. In fact, I think that you guys don’t think enough things are exciting.”

“Ahem,” Pipp coughed, getting their attention. “Everypony, if you would please board the elevator.” As if it were listening for those exact words, the elevator doors dinged and slid open. Once everypony was aboard, they slid closed and began to descend to the city below. Izzy had her face pressed against the glass the entire ride, staring at the city as it loomed closer and closer and closer.

“Fillies and gentlecolts,” Pipp announced as the lift slowed down, “the first stop on our tour… the underground subway system.”

The doors opened to reveal a large room lit by LED lights that reflected off of the shiny blue floors and walls. A few benches sat here and there, but not many pegasi were inside. The few that were hurried a long and barely registered the fact that their princesses were there.

“This station is as old as the city itself, or so we assume,” Pipp said in an animated voice as she led the way through the slightly chilly room. “We refashioned it into a station for the subway system that runs around Zephyr Heights - I mean, there’s only so far you can get by walking, and without flying, it takes a really long time to get from one side of the city to the other. Some ponies prefer to take the walkways and enjoy the sunshine and sights, but others like the more speedy route.” She trotted over to a terminal and smiled at the pony on duty.

“Welcome to the Zephyr Heights Underground Subway System, how can I help you today-” he began in a bored, rehearsed voice before realizing who stood before him. “Oh, Princess Pipp! A-and Princess Zipp, of course. I’m sorry, Your Majesties, I didn’t recognize you.”

“Quite all right, Mr. Aeolus,” Pipp replied politely. “We’re looking for a train route with the best views of the city, please.”

“That will be the…” He squinted at the register in front of him. “The Purple Line, I believe. Right over there.” He pointed with his hoof. “The next train’s leaving in a few minutes. H-have a wonderful day, Your Majesties. A-and your friends, of course.” He inclined his head politely as they walked away.

As they waited, Pipp showed them a map of the subway tracks, showing them where they would be going and what kinds of things they would be passing by.

“You sound like you’ve practiced this,” Zipp noticed.

Pipp blushed. “I wanted to do some sort of ‘Tour of the City’ vlog, since I actually knew a lot about it, but we never got any new visitors until now, so I never really had a reason to. I still practiced what I would say, though.”

The subway was a long, sleek white tube with the gold shape of the pegasus crystal on the sides. The upper half of the train was one large window that curved over the plush purple seats, allowing for the passengers to easily gain a view of anything outside of the train. Doors hissed open, and Pipp led the way onto the train.

“This is so exciting!” Izzy said for the hundredth time.

“This is so high-tech,” Flurry murmured, testing the plushiness of the seats with her hoof. “The closest thing we had to this was the Crystal Express.” She climbed into her seat and looked across from her, where Sprout sat next to Hitch and Sunny. Izzy was sitting protectively beside Sunny - Flurry tried to remember the last time she’d seen them two apart. Zipp and Pipp took seats on Flurry’s side of the train. Other than them, their train car was empty.

Flurry gripped the edge of the seat as the train jerked into motion, but as it picked up speed, she became used to it and relaxed her grip a bit, looking up at the ceiling of the dark tunnel rushing past above them.

All at once, they went from dark tunnel to open sky. Everypony gasped. “Woah!”

Sunlight poured in, making the gold trimmings gleam. The screens and neon signs looked brighter than ever, and clouds surrounding them made Flurry feel as if she were riding on a cloud. She felt a huge grin breaking out on her face, and a quick glance around told her she was not alone.

“Look over there!” Izzy called, and everypony rushed to her side of the train. The unicorn was pointing at a tall waterfall that cascaded over different levels of rocky mountainside. Wherever the ground was flat, it collected in little pools before falling over the next outcrop. With the sunlight glinting off of the blue water, it looked like something made of magic.

Sunny truned to look behind them and gasped. “Guys, look!” she cried, leading the rush to the other side of the car. From here, you could see the castle in all of its glorious splendor, gleaming in the sunshine. Sprout looked down and sucked in his breath in awe, causing everypony else to shift their gaze to down below. They could see walkways stretching from cliff to cliff, full of pegasi.

A few of the winged ponies soared up beside the train, playing tag. They laughed and shrieked and flapped their wings harder to gain more altitude.

It felt weird to be back on solid ground after the subway, but Flurry was too excited to care. Their first stop was a long street that was lined on one side with shops and businesses, the other side open to the cliff. A few guards walked alongside the edge, making sure that nopony fell off.

“I thought we could take a look around,” Pipp said, shrugging innocently while her sister glared at her. “You know, just to see things.”

“Sure,” Zipp muttered, “that’s all.” Still, she followed the other six ponies into the first store.

A few hours later, they were back on the subway, though this time, they were laden with bags. Pipp had insisted that everything was on her - it was one of the perks of being a princess, she said. Zipp hadn’t gotten much - just a book about the laws of magic, likely a new addition to a city mainly inhabited by pegasi. Flurry herself had found a statue of the entire city in a snow globe, which reminded her of home. Izzy had practically died when they came upon an arts and crafts store and basically took their entire supply of glitter.

Sprout and Hitch found some tacky tourist merchandise and were apparently having a competition to see who could look the weirdest. Hitch was wearing a pair of exaggerated sunglasses with the giant shape of the pegasus crystal as the frame. Sprout was in a sort of vest with pictures from around the city plastered all over it, and both had found a number of badges that they had pinned to their sashes. Now they were trying to find a way to incorporate the tiny statues of the castle, royal family, and famous attractions into their display.

Pipp had found a new phone case with her cutie mark on it and had another bag sitting next to her on the train besides. When Zipp asked her what it was (in the kind of voice that made Flurry think that Pipp went shopping a lot and brought back meaningless things a lot), the younger pegasus merely smiled and went back to her cell.

In Flurry’s opinion, it was Sunny who had the best find. The earth pony mare had discovered a small pin of the three unity crystals - the green pegasus crystal like spread wings, the purpleish unicorn crystal glittering like a unicorn horn, the diamond earth pony crystal - which she had pinned to her bag next to her own homemade badges of Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, and Fluttershy’s cutie marks. She kept looking at the badge as if she remembered something about it but couldn’t put her hoof on it.

By that time, it was close to noon. The bright sun was poised right above them in the sky, and Pipp suggested that they go to McWings. Zipp agreed immediately. Flurry had been seeing ads for the restaurant all over the city, and it had been so long since she had eaten a meal that wasn’t prepared by some of the finest chefs in Equestria in her own palace, so she looked around openly when they entered the initial building.

“Let’s see…” Pipp murmured to herself, staring up at the menu. “I think we’ll have… seven double hayburgers and two large fries. Oh, and something to drink. What do you guys want?”

Sunny, Izzy, Hitch, Sprout, and Flurry were all lost in the massive size of the menu, so Zipp said, “We’ll just take smoothies. Strawberry mango. For all of us.”

“Huh?” Sunny muttered, looking away from the menu as if coming out of a trance.

“Trust me, it’s what you want,” Zipp assured her.

Pipp nodded and relayed the orders to the pegasus at the cashier, who in turn was staring at them all as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He shook himself, flashed an apologetic grin at Pipp, and furiously entered digits into the cash register.

A few moments later, Izzy was balancing a massive tray with her magic as Pipp and Zipp led the way outside and to one of many tables that lined the walkway heading towards McWings.

“Oh. My. Stars,” Sunny whispered with the first bite of her hayburger. The other ponies nodded and made varying noises of agreement - they couldn’t talk because their mouths were so full. Within no time, the tray was empty, the seven ponies were slurping up the last bits of their smoothies, and Hitch had dragged Sprout along to do litter detail.

“If we turn Hitch loose, he’ll have the entire city clean in a day,” Sunny said as they watched the stallion run back and forth between empty tables and the trash cans while Sprout was less than enthusiastically following behind.

“What should we do next?” Zipp asked as the two stallions rejoined them, the area now devoid of litter.

“How about the movies?” Sunny suggested.

“Yes! Judgement Neigh!” Izzy exclaimed happily, bouncing up and down.

“What’s a… movie?” Flurry asked, taking a step forward curiously.

“Okay, sweetheart, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do,” Pipp announced, grabbing Flurry’s arm and pulling her back to the subway.

Clues

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After a wonderful few movies in a Zephyr Heights theater and a ride home on the train in the sunset, Sunny retreated to her room after supper and lay down on her bed, thinking.

Your magical crystals are missing that you and your friends are connected to. No, not just missing - stolen. You have an idea of by whom, but you don’t know for sure, you don’t know how, and you don’t have any clues as to where they are. Maybe Phyllis was lying - maybe they’re still there.

There’s only one way to find out.

Sunny waited until the moon had risen and the stars were out, the lights of the city below leaking in her window. As quietly as she could, she slipped out of bed and put on her bag before tip-toeing out into the hallway. By now, she knew the guards’ schedule and managed to avoid them all as she made her way to the abandoned station, where she knew an entrance to the Hall of Princesses awaited her.

Something nagged in the back of her brain - maybe she should…

Should what? She had this under control, right? Nothing could go wrong. She was just going to go to her lighthouse - her lighthouse - in Maretime Bay to look for clues. Nothing wrong with that.

The station was lit with moonlight, the silvery glow criss-crossing with shadows across the floor. Under normal circumstances, Sunny would have found a sort of strange beauty in it, even though it would make a shiver run down her spine. But instead, she was focused on other things that she considered more important than simple moonlight and shadows.

If only there was a faster way to the floor of the airstation than the lift, but Sunny couldn’t think of any other than falling, and that would most certainly not end well. She leaped out of the basket and landed gently on the floor. There weren’t many places that the entrance could be, right? The one in the Crystal Empire had been on a bookshelf. There was one bookshelf in here, so that was where Sunny went. She pushed some books aside and found nothing but the wooden back of the bookcase. Of course she hadn’t expected to find it on the first try, but still she felt a bite of frustration. She pushed some more books aside to reveal nothing.

Growing more and more angry with each book she moved, Sunny eventually took off every book to reveal a completely ordinary wooden bookcase. No special horseshoe. No door to a netherworld. Nothing.

Sunny plopped on the floor, defeated and sad now. She reached over and picked up a book at random and began shoving them back on the shelf, thinking, This would be so much easier with magic.

My friends all have magic. They don’t share any with me. They could probably find a way, but they don’t. If they really cared about me, they would share their magic with me. But they don’t. They don’t care about me! And why should they? I’m just an earth pony without her father who never changed the world like he wanted. He probably died ashamed of me. They’re all secretly ashamed of me. They think I’m weak and pathetic and overly optimistic. They-

Something shone right in her eyes, making her stumble back, blinking hard to regain her vision. When she did, Sunny looked up angrily, wanting to see what it was that was blinding her… and forgot everything else.

The moon had risen to be right behind a part of the stained glass window, a pink six-pointed star, causing it to shine a magenta light right where Sunny had been standing. She stared at the beautiful sight, feeling a kind of connection to it that cleared her head and washed away her anger.

“You do have friends,” she whispered to herself. “And they do care about you.”

Taking a deep breath, Sunny reached deep down inside her - much deeper than she remembered - to activate her wings and horn, levitating all the books off the floor and returning them to their rightful places on the shelf. Then she looked around the room as her alicorn self faded - she could never hold the form for very long now.

If she was an entrance to a magical netherworld, where would she be?

Hidden in plain sight. She would be hidden in plain sight. And in a different place each time…

Sunny spun in a slow circle and took in every bit of the station. Something caught her eye - it was the picture of the flying team that Zipp liked - she believed they were called the Wonderbolts. The poster was beaten up a bit and tilted to the side, allowing a tiny bit of shiny copper to catch the light.

Knowing what she was going to see, Sunny pushed the picture aside to reveal a bronze horseshoe mounted on the wall, with seven pictures carved around it: the same sun, moon, heart, and star as last time, but now - Sunny’s heart skipped a beat as she saw her own cutie mark alongside Zipp and Flurry’s surrounding the small artifact.

Sunny twisted the horseshoe and opened the portal to the Hall, taking one look behind her before she left. Maybe it was just paranoia, but there seemed to be something final about the opening closing behind her.

The transportation once again disoriented her, but once she regained her balance, she found herself in her lighthouse.

“Oh…” Sunny whispered. She took a step forward and stopped, her eyes adjusting to the dark interior, a scene of horror revealing itself in front of her. Phyllis had mentioned that the Elements of Harmony were stolen - but she didn’t mention the shattered glass case on the floor, the slightly scorched wall behind where the gems used to be kept, probably from deactivating the enchantments that Sunny had set there. She didn’t mention that the pictures of Sunny and her father and Sunny and her friends had been knocked off the wall, the glass cracked. And surely there would be more destruction to come.

Sunny carefully took the pictures out of the broken frames and slipped them into her bag. She took a deep breath and trotted over to the lift, which she rode to the top of the lighthouse, where the unity crystals were. Once again, Sunny’s lamp that her father had made for her had been knocked to the side, wondrously intact, and the huge stand that held the massive lightbulb for the lighthouse was scorched and tipped on its side.

She set to work searching for clues. A hoof print there… so it must have been a pony. Or at least, there was a pony with them.

Or somepony disguised as a pony.

Sunny had overseen Izzy putting the protective spells around all the gems, and she knew exactly how they worked. Only Sunny or her friends could go within two meters of the crystals without an alarm going off that would both alert Sunny and fend off the attacker as best as it could. Only a unicorn could have undone those enchantments - a unicorn who was very skilled at magic.

The only ponies I know of who are good - really good at magic are Flurry and Izzy, but they would never-

Would they?

What if they thought that you aren’t good enough? Flurry Heart is a real alicorn - of course they would want her to lead them instead of you. Why would they need a pathetic earth pony such as yourself? They probably wish they’d never met you, were never friends with you. Not me, Sunny Starscout. I will be your friend forever and ever and ever. Just come meet me. Let me guide you there and come see who I am so that we can show those ponies that we don’t need them. We can conquer Equestria on our own, can’t we?

Sunny gasped and felt her legs grow weak. She broke out in cold sweat as she felt something worming its way up to her brain and into her heart, intent on taking over. Already she felt like she was losing control over her thoughts, over her actions, over herself.

You don’t need your friends, Sunny Starscout. Come to me, surrender to me, and everything will be alright.

“No,” she whispered. “No, no, I won’t do it!” Her legs gave out from under her, and she collapsed to the floor. With an agonizing scream, Sunny writhed on the floor as she felt something dark and evil and horrible taking over her, wrapping its dark tendrils around her mind and taking control. “No!”

Think of your friends, she told herself in a comforting voice. “My friends…” Sunny croaked, somehow finding the strength to stand up. “I… I have to get back to them.”

No, my little pony, the voice crooned, no… you do not need them… come with me…

“No,” Sunny whispered, stumbling onto the lift and descending through the tall lighthouse. She made it to the first floor and managed her way to the horseshoe on the floor underneath the rug. She twisted it and rushed into the Hall of Princesses, feeling the voice leave her mind. Whatever, whoever it was, they couldn’t follow her here. And that small comfort gave Sunny the strength she needed to make it back to Zephyr Heights.

“She’s going to break.”

“How do you know?” the exile asked mildly, tracing a star in the dirt.

The filly shot her a glare. “I was inside her head, duh,” she snapped. “I almost got her this time. Next time, I swear…”

“This time wouldn’t have worked anyway,” the exiled queen retorted. “We want them to see her walk away, want her to break right in front of their eyes. Only they won’t know that. They will never know that. They will think that she has betrayed them, and even if some of them won’t give up, the majority of them will. We’ll have taken away their leader, and without her, they’ll fall apart.”

“I still don’t see why I don’t get to go with them,” the filly whined, and the exile rolled her eyes, thinking, This again? “Those ponies may hate Sunny Starscout and her friends, but they’re still ponies. They’ll probably decide that what we’re doing is too evil and they’ll ditch us first chance they get.” She flopped across a large rock. “Besides, I’m bored.” Not moving anything other than her arm, the filly grabbed their one and only book and opened it up to a random page, her eyes scanning the paper in disinterest.

“Every time we try to take over Equestria, Twilight Sparkle and her friends find some sort of way around our plans and defeat us,” the exile snarled, whirling around to face the filly, who, in turn, looked no more interested in her than the book. “We don’t know if this new generation has the same problem, but I am done taking chances. We’re going to take over Equestria in the slowest way possible if it means that we win in the end.”

“The only ‘villains’, if you can even call them that, that they ever defeated were a pony with a giant robot and those guys with a fancy rock,” the filly snorted, turning the page.

“Be as it may,” the exile said through clenched teeth, “this is the only possible option we have left. Our plan is proceeding as well as we have hoped - all that is left is for us to knock Sunny Starscout out of the game and set up a little game to keep her friends-” she spat out the word like it tasted like rotten fish “-busy while we sit back and wait for them to destroy themselves.”

“Really wish we could divide all the ponies again,” she huffed, putting the book down and glaring at the trees, “but they’ve made sure that’ll never happen again. For a while, at least.” She shrugged, a new thought occuring to her. “I guess one good thing about being turned to stone and then released years later is that you can reuse all your old tricks.”

“Yes, I suppose,” the exile mused. “But this will be it. Nothing that Twilight Sparkle and her friends did to us will stop us now.” She turned to the drawing of a star she had done in the dirt beside her and stomped on it with her hoof. “Equestria will finally fall.”

The Moon and Stars

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Izzy Moonbow knew something was wrong the moment Sunny walked into the large room where everypony was all dining on breakfast together. Her head was hanging, her steps slow and sluggish, and her eyes - Izzy did a double take.

Thank hoofness, her eyes were still her friend’s eyes. But they were so full of despair and devoid of hope that she almost didn’t recognize the pony that she had met on the street in Maretime Bay so long ago.

“Sunny?” Hitch asked, drawing everypony’s attention to her. “Are you okay?”

“Huh?” The earth pony looked up. “Oh - oh, yeah, I’m fine. Just didn’t get a very good night’s sleep.” She turned to Izzy and said, “Can I… talk to you? In private?”

“Um…” Izzy looked to her friends for support, but they just shrugged. “Sure, Sunny.”

The earth pony led the unicorn into the hallway and away from the guards. She turned to Izzy and said, “Izzy… it’s getting worse.”

She didn’t have to ask what she was talking about. “You mean… the voices in your head?”

“It’s not just voices now, Izzy,” Sunny went on, her voice growing desperate. “Whatever it is, it - its trying to take over. And I - I can’t let it.”

“Then it’s nothing to worry about, right?” Izzy said, trying to convince both of them. “You’re fighting it. You’re still our Sunny.”

“That’s not the worst part,” she interrupted. “Last night… last night it almost did. It fought its way into my head and I just barely got away, and Izzy… I don’t think I’ll be able to get away again.” She lowered her head shamefully as Izzy figured out what she was saying.

“So you…” Izzy started, not wanting to say it out of fear that would make it come true faster.

Sunny nodded miserably. “There’s no hope for me, Izzy. I’m already gone. I won’t be here for much longer - I can feel it. You’re the only one who knows, and I don’t want you to tell anypony else. I know our friends - they’d never accept it. Promise me that you’ll accept it, Izzy. But if they find out - if they try to come after me - it would just put them in danger, and I couldn’t bear that. They would get hurt - whoever this is, they’re like nopony we’ve ever dealt with before. If I… lose myself, keep the others safe… and forget about me.”

Izzy gasped. “Sunny, no. Absolutely not. I am enacting the best-friend-rule: we do not forget about each other.” She took one of Sunny’s hooves and squeezed it tightly, then reconsidered her words. “Well, unless there’s a magic stone involved, but even then we didn’t really forget about each other. And it was because of you that we were able to get ourselves back. Sunny, you’re the glue that holds this group together - you’re the reason we met and the reason we can be friends. You’re the reason I can do this.” She lit up her horn and teleported them both to the outside of the palace, looking out upon the city. “Sunny, the whole reason we’ve gotten this far… is because we’ve had you to keep us going.”

“And you’ll have to keep going without me,” Sunny whispered, putting her hoof on Izzy’s shoulder.

“No!” Izzy protested, stepping away. “What has gotten into you? I know this is the actual you talking, but it doesn’t sound like the actual you. The Sunny I know would stick with her friends through thick and thin, just like you know we’d do for you.”

“You think this is easy for me?” Sunny suddenly shouted, taking Izzy aback. Tears welled up in her eyes and cascaded down her cheeks. “I’m asking the best friends I’ve ever had, the only friends I’ve ever had, to give up on me and basically leave me for dead! I don’t like this anymore than you do, but you’re not the one with a voice in your head, Izzy! You don’t know what it’s like! You never have to look at your hooves and wonder if they’re really yours, you never have fake thoughts put in your head that make you do horrible things that you regret! This is the hardest thing I will ever have to do, but I’m doing it because I love you guys. I don’t want you in danger, and I know now that having me around will only lead to that. I’m sorry, Izzy, but I just - I can’t-” She broke off, sobbing.

“Oh, Sunny…” Izzy whispered, putting her arm around her friend and pulling her into a hug. “Sunny… I’m sorry. You’re right, I have no idea what you’re going through right now. I guess that… you know, you’re my very best friend, and I’m afraid to lose you.” She took a deep breath and proposed a compromise, even though it still made her heart hurt. “I’ll keep the others from going after you… but I won’t let them forget you. And also there is no way you’re leaving of your own free will. Because I will glue you to this very spot if I have to.” She squeezed Sunny tighter, and her friend smiled.

The sun was still rising over the city, and the two friends sat to watch it, glittering golden rays of light spreading across the city and casting everything in a dazzling glow.

“Remember when we first came here?” Sunny asked in a low voice. “Just a couple of ponies hoping to find out how magic worked?”

“Ah, those were the good old days,” Izzy sighed contentedly.

Sunny gave her a strange look. “Um, I seem to remember us getting thrown in prison while Maretime Bay roused itself into a miniature army. What about that was good?”

“Well, it was definitely not the best time ever,” Izzy admitted, “but I was with you guys. So that made it worth it. Also, though it may have been quite the calamity, at least it wasn’t a magical calamity. That seems to be all we’re dealing with these days.” Sunny chuckled. “What about those new crystals?”

“The Elements of Harmony,” Sunny explained, taking a deep breath. “Yes, they’re gone. Stolen, I know that for sure. Only a very powerful pony could have figured out a way to break those spells you cast. I went back to my lighthouse last night to look for clues, but… that was where it found me.”

“Okay, that’s it,” Izzy decided in a final voice. “I am self-appointing myself your personal guard. Anywhere you go, I go. You clearly have a knack for getting yourself into very dangerous situations.”

“So do you! And, well, all of us,” Sunny amended. “Besides, that’s exactly the kind of thing I don’t want. I’m worried that you’ll get hurt. What I’m dealing with… it can’t be solved with glitter.”

“Everything can be solved with glitter,” Izzy contradicted, tossing her head.

“I’m sure you would find a way,” Sunny conceded, patting her friend’s hoof assuringly. “But not in time for me, I’m afraid.”

“Can we please not talk about this?” Izzy pleaded, and Sunny nodded. The topic of possibly being taken over by an evil voice inside your mind that would result in your friends having to let you go into danger alone and quite possibly not come out did tend to put a damper on your conversation.

“Sunny!” Hitch called as he ran towards them. He skidded to a stop and paused to catch his breath. “We’ve been… looking for you…” he gasped, looking between her and Izzy. “What were you doing?”

“Just watching the sunrise,” Izzy said cheerfully, gesturing to the view before them.

Hitch didn’t look convinced. “Sunny, can I talk to you?”

She nodded, turning to Izzy. “Go check on the others, personal bodyguard,” she said in a teasing voice. “I can guarantee that Hitch can do nothing to hurt me. Now, if he had his animals, on the other hoof…”

“Excuse me?” Hitch interjected, looking wounded as Izzy left, laughing. “Do you not think I am dangerous at all? And why is Izzy your personal bodyguard and not me?”

Sunny shrugged. “She was self-appointed.” She patted his hoof. “And you can be very scary.”

“Thanks,” he muttered, plopping down beside her. “Sunny… what did you really come out here with Izzy for?”

She fell silent. “I… I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Oh.” He took a deep breath and said what he really meant to say. “It just feels like, ever since all three pony tribes reunited and magic returned… you and Izzy have been… inseparable. And I remember, when we were foals, that used to be me. I just… I feel like I’m losing my best friend.”

Sunny was silent for a heartbeat before speaking again. “I’m sorry, Hitch. I didn’t mean to. I just… you will always be my friend, Hitch. And whenever I need a very scary personal bodyguard, I will call on you, if it makes you feel any better.” She grinned and stood up. “Now come on. I want to ask Pipp if we can go to McWings again today. Because their smoothies are delish.”

“Forget magic crystals,” Hitch added with a smile, also getting to his hooves. “We could probably unite the world on McWings smoothies.”

The World Is Not United By McWings Smoothies

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A few days had passed without word from Alphabittle or the pegasi guards with him at the Tree of Harmony, and Queen Haven was getting frantic. Eventually Flurry, after being asked by Zipp and Pipp, sent a letter down there asking to send back a pegasus every couple of days so that Haven wouldn’t lose her mind. This request was accepted, and Zoom returned to Zephyr Heights that night to report that there were no signs of the villains, though they were visited daily by Midge, who was probably hoping to open up a good relationship with the pegasus city so that the creatures in the Everfree Forest wouldn’t be contained to the woods anymore. Of course, he never revealed that he was actually a changeling. That would have to wait.

Sunny kept having her dream - trapped in a cyclone of wind while pictures from her life flashed in and out of existence. The voice would come and talk to her, but this time, there was no pink glowing star to save her. Each night the voice seemed to develop a more triumphant tone, sounding more confident. And each night Sunny sank deeper and deeper into despair. She was glad that Izzy would keep her friends from going after her when she inevitably left, and she was also secretly glad that the unicorn had insisted that Sunny remained with her friends for the time being. Sunny suspected that they were why she had lasted this long.

The fact that Sunny would lose herself to an evil creature and never return was like a dark cloud on the horizon of a beautiful day - you knew the storm was coming, you knew that it would be awful, and you knew that there was nothing you could do about it. And that feeling of helplessness was the worst thing in the world.

She was glad that she hadn’t told the others about it. It was weird enough to have Izzy following her around everywhere and giving her worried looks - she wouldn’t have been able to stand it if the others had been doing that as well.

One morning, Sunny woke up to find Izzy sleeping outside her door.

“Izzy?” she asked, taking a startled step back as she spotted the snoring, slightly drooling unicorn blocking the doorway.

“Huh?” The unicorn snapped to attention, blinking the sleepiness from her eyes. “Oh… Hi, Sunny. I-I was just worried about you, so-”

“Izzy, I get that you want to protect me,” Sunny said, lowering her voice. “But it won’t do any good, okay? It’ll still happen whether you’re sleeping outside my door or not.” She caught her friend’s defeated look and hastily added, “But I appreciate you doing it. Thank you.”

“Happy to help,” Izzy replied happily.

Your friend doesn’t trust you. That’s the real reason she’s out here.

Without much else to do, Pipp suggested having trivia nights. Of course, she recorded them and posted them on the Internet, and it was surprisingly getting a lot of popularity. Each of the group would find a topic that they liked and create a set of trivia questions on it. This was also supposed to expose Flurry to as many things related to the modern world as possible, though she had never hosted a trivia night herself - she hadn’t found something that she liked enough yet. Which only prompted her friends to double their efforts.

Tonight’s topic was the laws of magic, by Zipp, of course. The pegasus stood in front of the other six ponies, each of whom had a buzzer in front of them. One of the royal guards kept score. He sat in a corner with a piece of paper and a pencil, wondering why he was doing this.

“Which law states that ‘All creatures have a magic within them that makes them who they are’?” Zipp asked, pacing in front of them.

Flurry slammed her hoof on the buzzer in front of her. “Sunburst’s Second Law of Magical Energy,” she announced, looking confident in her answer.

“Correct!” Zipp announced, slamming a hoof on one of two buzzers in front of her, making a ding sound ring through the station, and the guard made another mark on his scroll.

“You’re really good at all of this magic stuff,” Izzy commented, sitting next to Sunny, as always.

Flurry beamed. “I had a lot of really good teachers,” she said. “I actually knew Sunburst personally - he was my Crystaller, and-”

“Next question,” Zipp continued. “What is…”

Hitch leaned over to Sunny and whispered, “Do you have any idea what she’s saying half the time? And how exactly does she know all of this?”

Sunny snickered, and Zipp glared at her. “No, and I think she read a few books on it,” she hissed in answer. Hitch shrugged as Flurry hit her buzzer, once again with the correct answer. “And I don’t know half the things she’s saying, either,” Sunny added.

She’s so much smarter than you. You don’t know anything.

When they weren’t holding trivia nights, they were putting the stained glass windows they had found back together. Queen Haven had decided to put them right in her throne room, where she already had a bunch of empty frames that looked about the right fit. These windows had been kept empty so that the light could help sell the charade that the royals could fly - as Zipp had said, it was all about good lighting. But now they were unnecessary, so Haven had her guards take out the golden swirls and shapes that had originally stood there to make room for the windows. Phyllis had decided to stick around to help, so they were filling her in on what each of them stood for and the stories behind them.

“Ugh, I am covered in glue,” Pipp complained, shaking a little bit off her hooves. “Izzy, how in Equestria are you fine with this?”

The unicorn looked down at herself and shrugged. “I guess I get so excited to finish the project that I don’t notice how messy it gets,” she said, squeezing a glue bottle to gently lather the sharp edges of the piece of glass she was holding with glue, then levitated it up a little higher than she could reach and gently set it in its place.

Zipp swooped down to where the earth ponies were standing next to the open cardboard box. They were setting up the rest of the window on the floor so they could see where the rest of the pieces went. “How’re we doing, sheriff?”

Hitch handed her a large piece of blue-green glass. “Almost halfway done,” he said.

“Only halfway?” Pipp groaned and wiped glue from her wings. “I’m going to need a bath after this. Please tell me this glue comes out.”

“Um.” Izzy frowned at the container she was holding. “Maaaybe?”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Zipp said to console her sister before she could start freaking out. “And if it doesn’t come out with water, I’m sure there’s a magic spell for it, right, Flurry?”

Flurry laughed. “There’s definitely a way, don’t you worry,” she assured Pipp, who still looked sulky. The alicorn hovered next to Zipp and levitated a few more pieces into place. With a quick glance at Sunny to make sure the earth pony was occupied, she whispered to the princess, “When we’re all done, I’m going to zap it with a magic repair spell, just so that we know it’ll stick.”

Zipp looked down at her earth pony friend and sighed. “I guess that would be better. She just seems so… conflicted. Like, a few weeks ago, she was completely against using magic. But since then, she’s used her own sometimes. I don’t know.”

Down below, Sunny winced and shook her head as if she was having an argument with herself. Hitch looked over, a concerned expression on his face, but the mare smiled and waved him off.

“I am not a big fan of trickery,” admitted Flurry, “and I hate having to do this to Sunny. But until we know what’s going on - what’s making her flip moods and almost swap ponies like this, we can’t risk it.” She put her hoof on Zipp’s shoulder. “I know Sunny’s your friend, and she’s my friend, too. But this may be for the best.”

“I guess so,” Zipp said unenthusiastically. She flew down to the earth ponies to get another piece of glass.

Meanwhile, Sunny had been watching the exchange between the two princesses out of the corner of her eye, and she wondered what they had been talking about, and why they didn’t care to share it with her, or anypony else. It made her feel left out, like the other ponies were avoiding her on purpose. Then again, they probably should. This was for the best. But it still made her soul ache.

Your friends don’t care about you anymore. They’re plotting to get rid of you.

“Sunny?” she heard Izzy call. “Are you okay?”

She blinked; without realizing it, she had walked to the door and had pushed it open. When had that happened? “Yeah, I’m fine,” she replied, trying to keep her voice from shaking. “If you don’t mind, I’m just going to take a few moments to myself.” She slipped out the door and gently shut it behind her.

Sunny was in the airstation, sitting in front of the window with a scroll spread out in front of her, lit up by magenta pink light. Tears streamed down her face as she read the messages that her ancestors had left for her, hidden until revealed by the light of Twilight Sparkle’s cutie mark.

“I don’t know what to do,” she sobbed, wiping tears from her cheeks only to have them replaced by more. “Every second I can feel myself slipping away, and it’s the worst feeling in the world. I feel like I’m going to hurt my friends, and if I do, I’ll never be able to live with myself. Everything’s going to go wrong, I just know it, and I know it’ll be all my fault. And I just can’t help but think…” She paused, looking up at the window, at the star glowing brightly from sunlight up there. “Are you really there? Why is this all happening?”

It is happening because the end is near, Sunny Starscout, and you will be a key player in that, the voice in her head replied, and Sunny could almost hear the sneer in its tone. You are all alone now - nopony will help you when you call. Your friends have abandoned you. There is nothing left for you.

That night, Sunny had her nightmare again. Only this time, as it came to a close, she felt herself dissolving and swirling away in the chaos.

The Unicorn, the Emperor, and the Sheriff

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Hitch Trailblazer paced restlessly in front of Sunny’s door. He couldn’t help it - some sixth sense was telling him that something was terribly wrong with his best friend, and he couldn’t stand the fact that there might be nothing he could do about it.

Even more so, he couldn’t stand the fact that she might have trusted others with her secrets other than him.

A small growl rose up in his throat. When Izzy Moonbow had first stumbled into Maretime Bay, Hitch had been rightfully freaked out, while Sunny had been absolutely ecstatic that she was seeing a real, live unicorn. When Hitch tried to do what he knew he had to do, Sunny had resisted, like he knew she would, somewhere deep down inside. And then Hitch had gone after them and unintentionally joined their quest, and he had realized that he liked Izzy - not in the like like way, but as a friend. He liked all of them. But now…

Now it felt like he was being replaced. Sunny was choosing to have deep, private conversations with a bubbly unicorn than her foalhood friend who had been there for her in just about every way. He didn’t want to hate any member of their group, but he was starting to get a little bit resentful towards Izzy.

And just thinking about it made him feel guilty.

Sunny’s still your friend, he tried to comfort himself. She’s just got a lot of other friends, now, too. He sighed and plopped down against the wall across the hall from Sunny’s room.

“Hitch?” came a voice in the shadows. “What are you doing here?” First came a pale white horn, followed by a curly blue mane and a lavender coat. Izzy tilted her head at him curiously, and Hitch fought to keep his cheeks from turning red. He had just been thinking negatively about her a few seconds ago, and despite the fact that he knew better now, part of his brain was still convinced that unicorns could read minds… and if that was true, Hitch didn’t want her to see anything in his head.

“Couldn’t sleep.” He eyed her suspiciously. “What are you doing here?”

The unicorn shrugged and sat next to him. The close contact made Hitch slightly uncomfortable. “I’m worried about Sunny,” she confessed.

“Aren’t we all?” Hitch replied dryly, covering up his actual feelings.

“Yes, but…” Izzy sighed. “For… different reasons.”

Hitch blinked, confused. “Other reasons than the fact that she’s been acting strangely off and on for weeks now? Other reasons than the fact that the Sunny we know may be gone for good?”

Izzy winced; his comment struck a little closer to home than he had expected. “Sunny’s told me… a few things, things she asked me not to share with you guys. She felt that it would keep you safer, and she didn’t want you to be put in danger because of her.”

“Oh, was this during one of your little private chats?” Hitch asked a little harsher than he meant to. “If Sunny has so much to say to a pony like you that she doesn’t care to tell us, then, yeah, now I’m even more worried.” He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth - the unicorn ducked her head and became very interested in the floor. “I-I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-”

“I know,” Izzy tried to assure him, though just the sound of her voice so heavy and sad made him guilty. “It’s hard to let go of your entire world view just because of… recent events.”

“How do you let go of it so quickly?” he asked, having secretly wanting to ask the question ever since the three pony tribes had reunited.

She glanced at him, surprised, and then shrugged. “Growing up, I was always… the misfit, I guess you could say. All the other unicorns were depressed and sad, and I was always so cheerful and hopeful, especially once I found Sunny’s lantern. I loved trying to make ponies smile and feel happy, even though most of the unicorns didn’t care much for my attempts. So I was always kind of left out, and… I don’t know, knowing that I had you guys as friends made me think that maybe things weren’t as bad as they seem. Like, if you and Sunny can be smart and hard-working and definitely not smelling of rotten sardines, and Zipp and Pipp weren’t scheming masterminds who wanted to steal our magic, then maybe other ponies - other earth ponies and pegasi - weren’t as bad as we were taught. And I just try to keep an open mind so that I don’t let stereotypes define how I look at ponies.”

They lapsed into a comfortable silence, watching the moon cast shadows on Sunny’s door, both thinking the exact same thing.

“Do you think she’s going to be okay?” Izzy eventually asked, voicing both of their thoughts.

“Of course she’s going to be okay,” Hitch replied immediately, more for his own benefit than the unicorn’s. “She’s Sunny. I’m sure this’ll pass. And once it’s over, she’s going to tell us that we were silly to worry about her.” Even as he said it, he had a hard time convincing himself that it was the truth, and the look on Izzy’s face certainly wasn’t helping.

“She said there was no coming back,” the unicorn whispered, so quiet Hitch almost couldn’t hear her.

“Pardon?” he asked, certain he had heard her wrong.

Before the unicorn could respond, a small scuffle came from the shadows of the long hallway in between the windows. Hitch shot to his feet, and beside him, Izzy lit the tip of her horn for better light. A beam of purple light fell on… another earth pony.

“Sprout?” Hitch took a step back, surprised. Izzy doused her horn and tilted her head at the stallion as he came into the light, the silvery beams from the moon giving his coat a strange sheen, as if it were glowing. “What are you doing out so late? Doesn’t your mother scold you if you don’t get at least eight hours?”

The stallion huffed. “Please don’t tell my mom,” he pleaded, and Hitch smirked, implying that he had no intention of doing that. “I just wanted to see if Sunny was okay.” His green eyes flitted to the closed door. “Is she?”

Hitch rolled his eyes. “Well, we aren’t exactly going to barge in there and ask her,” he snorted.

“Really, you guys, you should go back to bed,” Izzy insisted, stepping in front of Sunny’s door protectively. “I’ve got it from h-h-here…” She tried and failed to stifle a huge yawn that nearly made her jaw unhinge. For the first time, Hitch noticed the dark circles under her eyes, the way that she stumbled around like she was half awake, half asleep.

“Uh, no, you are going to bed,” Sprout said, pointing at the hallway behind him. “You look like you’re about to fall asleep on your feet. Look, get to bed or I’ll tell Hitch that you littered the other day.”

“She what?” Hitch’s jaw dropped in shock, and the unicorn stifled a laugh.

“Don’t worry, I made sure that all my trash went in the garbage can,” she assured him with another yawn. “M-maybe just a quick nap…” She stumbled past Sprout, yawning, and quickly disappeared into the shadows as if she had never been there at all. Hitch felt a shiver down his spine. Nighttime was creepy.

“Did she really litter?” he asked instead.

Sprout snorted. “No. But why are you out so late? I know you - if you don’t get enough sleep you are a zombie in the morning.”

“Yes - well - friends are more important than sleep,” Hitch protested.

“You aren’t going to be a very good bodyguard if you have your hooves full with coffee and are sleepwalking around the place,” Sprout retorted.

“And since when have you cared so much?” snapped Hitch. “Forgive me if I’m remembering this wrong, but didn’t you destroy her lighthouse and nearly kill her all because of your ego?” Sprout winced; he’d struck a sore spot.

What is it with me and speaking without thinking tonight? Hitch wondered. Maybe I really should get some sleep. “Sprout, I didn’t mean that,” he apologized. “I’m just stressed, that’s all, and I’m speaking without thinking. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”

“No, no, it’s okay,” Sprout muttered. “I’m used to it by now.” He took a deep breath and faced the sheriff. “Actually, I have something to apologize to you for.”

“Was it the time that you took the last donut?” Hitch asked, arching an eyebrow at the other stallion. “Because I’m still mad at you for that-”

“I’m sorry that I did what I did,” Sprout rushed. “I always wanted to prove myself, and then you gave me a chance, you trusted me to take care of the town, and I messed up so bad. I feel like everything that’s going on now is my fault, and what I’m trying to say is, I’m sorry that I let you down and took advantage of a chance that you gave me. All I’m asking is that you give me a chance… and hopefully I won’t mess it up as badly as I did.”

Hitch put his arm around the former deputy’s shoulders. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you could do a good job,” he said. “You’re a great pony, Sprout - a terrible emperor, that is true, but a good pony, and I know that. And Sunny knows it, too. As for second chances, you don’t need ‘em - you’ve proven yourself already.”

“I have?” The red earth pony looked surprised. Hitch grinned.

“Didn’t you jump in front of an evil memory-sucking magic-beam before it could hit Sunny? You basically saved the world right there.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. Come on.” Hitch steered the stallion away from Sunny’s door. “I think Sunny’s going to be fine for tonight, and I don’t want to be a zombie tomorrow.”

Sour Lavender and Permafrost crouched in the shadows of the Zephyr Heights archives, their eyes trained on the door.

“I hate this,” the pegasus growled. “I hate this so much.”

“I thought you would be glad to be back in your lovely hometown,” the unicorn replied snarkily. “Or is it not the kind of homecoming you would have liked?”

“What are we even doing here?” Sour Lavender snapped, standing up and angrily pacing. Permafrost hissed at him to get down, but the purple pony didn’t listen. “Why are we following these guys? They’re weirdos, all of them - even that little filly makes my skin crawl. It’s like they aren’t supposed to be here at all.” He looked off in the direction that the creature they were with had gone and narrowed his eyes. “Perhaps we should go off on our own. We can get Sunny Starscout ourselves, and once we do, we won’t need these strange creatures to get what we want.”

“Has boredom muddled your brain?” Permafrost hissed, grabbing his wing and yanking him back into hiding behind a few shelves. “That queen was right about one thing - we won’t get five steps without them. They have a way to take over Equestria, but it won’t be easy - Sunny Starscout and her friends will inevitably put up a fight, and they will fight with everything they have. Once these creatures have been worn down by them, we will strike, take the throne for ourselves, and rule in seperation - just as things were always meant to be. But we need them to do all the hard work first. And that means pretending to go along with it.” The pegasus growled but didn’t say a word. “Shh.”

A hulking creature appeared in the shadows, looking angry. “It isn’t here,” he snarled. With a massive clawed hand, he seized the pegasus by the wings and held him in front of his face. “You said it would be here!”

“I-I thought it would be!” Sour Lavender protested, struggling in his grip. “I swear, if there was anything like that, it would probably be here! I don’t know anything else!”

“Sunny Starscout probably knows,” Permafrost scoffed as the huge creature let Sour Lavender fall to the floor in a heap. “Why don’t you just ask her to bring whatever it is you’re looking for to you?”

The creature stopped, a slow smile spreading across his face. “Yes,” he muttered, “I think we can make that work.”

Overtaken

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Sunny found Flurry in the throne room the next morning before many other ponies were awake, finishing another stained glass window, this one depicting Twilight Sparkle as an alicorn. They had decided to put the stained glass windows of past rulers in the throne room, along with space so that more could be added for current rulers. The alicorn lit up her horn and took a step back when she noticed Sunny out of the corner of her eye.

“Oh! Hi, Sunny,” the alicorn said hurriedly, dousing her horn and turning to her.

“Hi,” the earth pony replied warily. There was something about Flurry’s smile that made her suspicious. “What are you doing?”

The alicorn shrugged. “Just finishing up here,” she said airily, waving her hoof at the completed window. “We’ve got a lot of these to get through, so I thought I would work on them some more while everypony was asleep.”

“Want me to help?”

“Um… sure?” Flurry looked a little wary, but she nosed over a new box of glass and a few bottles of glue. “Where do you think we should put this one?”

Sunny looked around the room - so far, they seemed to be in chronological order. She opened the flaps of the box and peeked inside, able to tell that it was a picture of the Guardians of Harmony defeating Discord. “This one should go out in the hallway with the others,” she decided, and Flurry nodded, lifting the box with her magic and trotting out into the hallway, Sunny at her heels. They had already assembled the Guardians of Harmony defeating Nightmare Moon, as well as many of Celestia and Luna’s first defeats of many of the villains that the Guardians of Harmony later defeated. They had been arranged in chronological order, so Flurry set down the box in front of the empty space next to the window showing Nightmare Moon’s final defeat.

“How many of these do you remember seeing?” Sunny asked as they took the pieces out of the box and laid them on the floor. Flurry’s hoof hovered over the picture of her late aunt and sighed.

“All of them,” she said miserably. “And now… whenever I look… and I remember… that’s when it hurts the most. That everything… everything is gone now. And I have to learn to live with it.” She gave Sunny a sideways glance. “You get it, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” Her voice was quiet. “I get it.

The two lapsed into comfortable silence as they spread the rest of the window out on the floor and started putting it together. Eventually, Flurry began to put pieces into the empty frame, casting a look at Sunny every time she used her magic to levitate a piece of glass into place.

Magic is dangerous and cannot be trusted.

It was an old refrain, but somehow it had even more effect. Sunny stumbled back a step and just barely managed to collect herself before Flurry noticed.

Not now! she mentally pleaded. Please not now! I know it has to come, but can it wait?

Oh, no, my little pony, the voice inside her head told her in a gleeful tone, no, it cannot wait. We are ready for you.

“Sunny?” Flurry’s voice. Sunny blinked. The alicorn was right beside her, looking worried. “Are you okay?”

“I…” Sunny swallowed. The simplicity of forming her own words was becoming more challenging, as if somepony was trying to make her say things she didn’t want to say. “I don’t know.” She took a deep breath. “Let’s keep working.” She turned back to the pieces of glass, though she felt Flurry’s gaze on the back of her head. “Please, Flurry.”

With every second that passed, Sunny could feel her own consciousness slipping away. She felt herself reach for a piece of the window, but it was like she was outside herself, watching herself do things without actually having any control over them. And with every second, she thought of her friends. She thought of bubbly Izzy, so kind and cheerful and friendly to everypony. She thought of Zipp and her desire to fly again, her wanting to be honest to her subjects. Pipp, and her encouragement and somewhat hilarious obsession over her cell phone. Trusty, dependable Hitch, who had been her friend since foalhood, who had crashed a pegasus party to come looking for her. And Sprout, who was trying so hard to be accepted and forgiven and part of the group…

Sprout. She made a promise about him… If only she could remember…

Think, she commanded herself. What could it be? She mentally scanned her memories, searching for something, anything…

That was strange. There seemed to be a lot less memories there than usual. And the few that were there were fuzzy and hard to focus on. Something flashed in her mind - a memory of her father on the balcony of their lighthouse, watching something float away in the sky, and he did… something…

She couldn’t remember. Couldn’t remember. Sunny froze, concentrating on the last thing she remembered about her father. There was a story, a story that he would tell her every night… What was it? He disappeared that night, and then Sunny knew she figured out what had happened, but she couldn’t put her hoof on it. The very thought that she was forgetting her father, the pony who meant the most to her in the world, was enough to make her freeze and almost let down her defenses. But once the darkness in her head reached out its tendrils to take command of her, Sunny slammed her walls back up.

Or, at least, she thought she did. But these walls were thin and easily breakable. She heard the voice hissing on the edge of her mind, preparing to strike, and she knew it would only be a matter of time before she fell.

I have to get out of here.

Leave her friends, leave her mission, leave everything behind. She had to get away. She had to protect her friends, and this was the only way.

“Sunny? What’s wrong?”

That voice - she knew that voice. Where had she heard that voice before-

She looked up and saw a purple unicorn in front of her, and behind the unicorn were two earth ponies, two pegasi, and a unicorn with wings, all looking at her with concern. She felt like she should know them, but she couldn’t put her hoof on any of their names.

And why did they keep calling her Sunny? She didn’t know them. That wasn’t even her name.

What was her name?

These are not your friends, Sunny Starscout, a voice in her head whispered comfortingly. It sounded so kind, so sincere, so friendly, that she decided to listen to it. They are nothing but a group of fakes who don’t care about you at all. They have lied to you on many occasions. They scheme and plan behind your back. They think you’re dangerous and not to be trusted. They are afraid of you, but they will not help you. They put their faith in magic, but magic is dangerous. It corrupts those who have it. If everypony can’t have magic, than nopony should have it. If these were truly your friends, they would share their magic with you, but alas, they refuse to do so. They enjoy seeing you powerless and pathetic.

These are not your friends.

I am your friend, Sunny Starscout. Follow me, and everything will be fine.

The sound of the voice was so comforting and lulling that she almost forgot what was going on in front of her.

“Sunny?” the unicorn said again.

She felt her mouth opening, heard words coming out of it. “I’m fine, Izzy. Not that you would care. After all, you all just can’t wait to get rid of me, isn’t that right?”

The unicorn took a step back, looking wounded. Everypony else looked shocked, and one of the pegasi looked angry. But she didn’t care. She stood up and took a step towards the group of ponies, and they all backed away.

“Sunny…” The unicorn reached out to her. “We’re your friends, remember?”

“My friends?” she snapped, taking another step forward. Nopony looked shocked or angry now - now, they all looked scared. “Friends don’t lie to your face. Friends don’t conspire behind your back. Friends don’t abandon you when you need them most!”

She didn’t know the words coming out of her mouth, but she didn’t care anymore. These ponies deserved every word.

“You lied to me, you planned to get rid of me! Is that what friends do? They think that, because you’re acting a little strange, you’re dangerous and need to be confined and locked in a cage like an animal? They think that they can trick you and make you believe things that aren’t true? They leave you alone when you’re hurting? They leave you to carry the struggles of life all on your own when they’re supposed to help? Is that what friends do?”

Icy tendrils of darkness seeped into her mind and took control, reaching down to her heart and oozing into every crack, filling her with a cold emptiness, like something was just ripped from her soul - something vitally important to her. The feeling was so awful that, somewhere deep down inside, she steeled herself, tried to push back against the horrible coldness, but it was a feeble and pathetic attempt. She no longer felt her hooves against the floor, no longer felt her mouth moving, no longer knew the words coming out of her mouth. She had completely lost control, and it was as if she were watching her own self from an outsiders perspective - helpless to anything she was doing.

The other ponies scrambled back as she took another step forward. “You aren’t my friends. You don’t care about me at all, and I certainly don’t care about you. You’re just a bunch of lying, faking traitorous jerks who don’t know the first thing about friendship!”

One of the earth ponies stepped forward - the yellow one with the greenish mane. He put his hoof on her shoulder, and even when she glared at him, he didn’t let go or look away.

“Sunny,” he said, and his voice was like warmth seeping into her bones, chasing away the frigid coldness like a fire, “I know you’re still in there. And I don’t know who is doing this to you, but trust me when I say that we can work through this together. That’s what friends do. And we are your friends. We care about you - about each other - more than anything else in the world. We won’t - I won’t - ever let you go.”

Something flapped at the edge of her mind, and for a moment, the darkness seemed to recede, and she began to hope, and hope was like a flood of warmth, pushing back the darkness even more. She felt the ground beneath her hooves once more, could control herself, and she began to remember, remember these ponies, remember her name-

And then the darkness came rushing back, stronger than ever before. Now, it seemed that it wasn’t just one pony, but many, working together to force her to bow to their will. Her knees buckled, and the earth pony in front of her caught her in his hooves, but she didn’t feel it, didn’t know it. All thoughts of love and hope and happiness vanished from her mind, replaced instead by a thirst for vengeance, a hatred of friendship and all it brought, a kind of seething anger that consumed her mind with nothing but the thought of revenge on those she blamed responsible.

“You think you’re my friends?” she whispered, her voice not her own. “You think you care about me?”

All the ponies nodded, taking a collective step forward, the looks on their faces showing that they were daring to hope.

She stood up and stepped away from them all. The hope in their eyes fizzled and died as something - somepony - else invaded and took control. Something changed - she was no longer herself, but rather a puppet for others to move around and force to carry out their bidding.

“You are no friends of mine,” she said, her voice low and harsh. “And I will never care about you.”

And with that, Sunny Starscout, the earth pony-turned-alicorn who had always dreamed of unity and harmony, the one who brought the tribes together and allowed magic to return, the pony who had dared to hope, the last remaining Sparkle, curled up in the depths of her soul and surrendered.

The Sun Sets

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They were waiting for her at the Tree of Harmony.

Three creatures - one a pegasus filly with a coral pink coat and a curly blue mane. Her face had an air of innocence surrounding it that allowed her to easily deceive and trick. Her cutie mark was a red castle - a chess piece. Another like a pony but black and with holes in her legs, mane, and wings, which resembled a bug’s. She had a crooked horn and looked like the kind of creature to threaten rather than negotiate. The third had the bottom half of a massive black stallion and the top half of a strange creature. Long arms with claws on the ends, a bearded face, and huge bull horns protruding from the top of his head. There was an ancient look about him that was absent from the other two.

And behind them stood a pale blue unicorn and a purple pegasus - Permafrost and Sour Lavender. Neither of them looked happy about their current position.

The creatures and their companions stood in the shadow of the massive tree, concealed from the silver shred of moon above them, and the pegasi and unicorn that waited in the area around the tree, waiting for something - anything.

A pony stepped out from behind the tree, having just emerged from the secret tunnel underneath the massive tree. She had an orange coat and a pink mane that hung loose in a curl over her shoulder, streaked with bright colors that stood out in the dark night. Her eyes were dull, clouded over, and had a slight red tinge to them. She held something in her hooves - a rusty, cracked greenish bell.

The creatures exchanged a look and emerged from their hiding place. The mare spotted them and trotted over in a stiff manner. The largest creature plucked the bell out of the mare’s hooves, holding it revelently in his claws as if it held all the power in the world. The exiled queen gave a sinister smile and turned to leave.

“Wait!” came a cry from down the hill. All three creatures and three ponies turned to see a large gray unicorn running towards them, a dozen pegasi behind him, all wearing the uniform of a Zephyr Heights royal guard.

“Sunny,” Alphabittle panted as he skidded to a stop in front of the earth pony, “what are you doing? Where are your friends?” She looked back at him blankly. “Sunny?”

Turning now to the three creatures, he lit up his horn and snarled, “What did you do to her?”

“Only what we needed to do,” the exile hissed, taking a step forward, lighting up her own crooked horn a sickly green that cast a glow over the surrounding ponies. The pegasi took a step back.

“Get them!” Alphabittle shouted, leaping forward with his horn ablaze. The exile knocked aside his first blast and turned to the pegasus filly. She nodded and closed her eyes. The earth pony mare suddenly went limp, dropping to the ground as her legs gave out from under her, her eyes closed. The exile used her magic to lift the mare from the ground and held her in front of the three creatures and their two pony companions.

Meanwhile, the pegasi had surrounded the group and were preparing to strike. The large creature noticed and a fireball appeared between his horns, floating just above his head.

“Stay back or she gets it!” the exile snapped. Alphabittle looked at the earth pony, unconscious and suspended in a bone-chilling green light in front of this snarling creature. He didn’t have to question whether or not she would actually do it. With a jerk of his head, the pegasi fell back, though somewhat reluctantly. Zoom and Thunder in particular looked like they were barely refraining from attacking the creatures as they draped the earth pony over the large creature’s back, turned, and left.

“Should we follow them?” Zoom demanded as soon as they were out of earshot.

But Alphabittle didn’t answer, didn’t notice that the guard had asked a question.

Clouds gathered above them, thick and heavy and full of rain, blocking the moon and blotting out the stars. The land turned dark, but the unicorn could still see the three creatures in his mind, tailed by traitors to their land, his friend in their hooves. The pegasi looked up at the sky with worried expressions, though not wanting to leave until they were told to.

“Sir?” Zoom asked again, waving a hoof in front of Alphabittle’s face though he made no response. “What should we do?”

The unicorn was silent, so Zoom addressed the troops. “Sent somepony to Zephyr Heights. The queen needs to be warned of this. In the meantime, we need to get out of the rain.”

“Should we tell her friends?” Thunder asked in an undertone as the others left.

Zoom sighed and turned to face the large mountain in the distance. “We will have to. As of this day, Sunny Starscout is a traitor to Equestria.” Even as the guard said the words, she winced at the severity of them. This would mean that she would have to hunt down a pony she had once considered a good pony, somepony she wouldn’t have hesitated to stand beside. But things had changed. And the change scared her.

Zoom and Thunder walked down to the camp, leaving Alphabittle alone to stare after the small party that had taken his friend. The skies opened up, dumping sheets of rain on the unicorn, but he hardly noticed and certainly cared even less.

“Oh, Sunny,” he said, his voice barely audible. “Sunny, what happened to you?”

Legends Never Die: A New Age

by bookhorse125

Prologue: Frozen in Time

After Every Ending...

...Comes a New Beginning

Explained and Unexplained

Nightmares

Mysterious Happenings

In the Gardens

Archived

Puzzle Pieces

Light in the Darkness

Into the Arctic

Pipp Loses Her Cell Phone (and Zipp Had Nothing to Do With It)

Home At Last

The Hall of the Princesses

A Grand Summit

To Be A Princess

Hello! I'm Your Princess Tour Guide!

Clues

The Moon and Stars

The World Is Not United By McWings Smoothies

The Unicorn, the Emperor, and the Sheriff

Overtaken

The Sun Sets