> Legends Never Die: The Return of the King
>  by bookhorse125
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Prologue: Crescent Moon
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

In a secluded part of Equestria, the tower stood.

The Tower of Day and Night rose high above the mountains surrounding it, a tall, narrow structure of pure white stone jutting into the sky. All around it in the perfectly circular break in the mountains was a deep canyon, crossable by twelve rope bridges that surrounded the Tower at regular intervals. Whenever the sun shone on the tower, its shadow would fall across the land and reveal what the time was - if anypony was around to see it.

Alas, nopony had been to the Tower of Day and Night since its creation - and even then, the only pony there was Princess Twilight Sparkle herself, along with former princesses Celestia and Luna, whom she felt were obligated to see the Tower themselves.

The large, seemingly pointless tower was actually a large clock, and within this giang clock was a tiny amulet, the Amulet of Day and Night, which contained a small amount of both of the royal sisters’ magic, allowing whoever held the amulet and could activate it control over the motions of the celestial bodies above.

Of course, Twilight Sparkle had been given this amulet when she became ruler of Equestria and the royal sisters retired, but it hadn’t taken her long to realize that she couldn’t keep up with the exhausting task of ruling both the day and the night, and with nopony to help her, she decided to leave the amulet to its on devices - literally. She constructed the Tower of Day and Night and put the amulet inside it, so that, as the clock kept ticking, the amulet would be magically activated at the right times, bringing about day and night without Twilight ever lifting a hoof.

A perfect solution - at least, while Twilight reigned. But one of the two retired sisters knew that the purple alicorn would not reign forever - and could already sense danger on the horizon.

This place needed a guardian. And so she decided to find one.

Her hoofsteps were slow and deliberate. The mountain range loomed in front of her, but she flew over it leisurely. A magic shield - passed through with a single blast from her horn. Once the pony was inside, the shield went back up, flickering magenta pink before solidifying and turning invisible.

As always, whenever Luna was out and about in the day, she felt so out of place. Her coat and mane were dark blue to match the night sky and all its glorious splendor - the day just didn’t suit her. It was too demanding, too bright, too harsh for her liking.

But she would wait here. She would wait here and they would come.

They would come… if they were right.

Luna landed next to the Tower and walked around the base, inspecting it. When Twilight had first shown her and her sister the structure, they had watched from a distance as the princess cast a transparency spell on the side, allowing them to see the gears and levers and fancy mechanics inside the Tower working as the day turned to night.

But now she could see all the detail, the inscription along the bottom that explained what the tower was and how it worked. The shallow carvings in the smooth white stone had been immortalized by Twilight’s protective shield - the Tower was supposed to be kept here forever, always working, never changing. And, most importantly, nopony was supposed to know about it. Luna had a pretty good feeling why Twilight had looked at her specifically when she said that.

The Princess of Friendship was a lovely pony indeed - Luna had no doubt about it. But that didn’t keep her from making a few mistakes - everypony did it. That was why she had her friends to help her. But for this, Luna suspected that she was the only pony who really knew about it - other than perhaps her sister. And she knew that somepony needed to stand here and guard the Tower of Day and Night, and protect something else.

Around the Princess of Night’s neck was a small crystal in the shape of a crescent moon that exactly matched her cutie mark. She had taken it from the Tree of Harmony, hoping that the magical entity’s ability to see many things, both past, present, and future, would substitute for her and her sister’s ability of the same kind.

After all, somepony had to deliver the ominous prophecies that made it seem like the world was ending while also providing a faint hope that an unlikely group of heroes would save the day through a complicated and mysterious method.

And so she waited, without much to do. During the day, she would pass the time by exploring the valley and the Tower itself, trying to sort out how it worked, but eventually giving up on that when she realized that it was far too complicated for her to understand. When night came, Luna would explore the dreams of the ponies she chose, give them the message again, and wait. Waiting was all she could do at this point.

Until he came.

Luna had been waiting for a week, possibly more, and was even more bored than she was in the early hours of the morning when Celestia was still sleeping. She eventually decided to go for a fly around the Tower to stretch her wings. As her wings caught an updraft and she soared in circles just underneath the shield, she spotted a small blue and purple figure emerging from the mountains and slowly approaching the Tower, with the air of a pony who had just laid their eyes on something magnificent - something that they can’t believe that they are seeing right now.

She watched, hovering in place, beating her large blue wings silently through the air, as the pony below stepped out of the shadows of the mountains and into the noon sunlight, and there was something… different now.

Of course, whenever someone steps from shadow to light, they look a little different, but this pony practically glowed. It was as if his coat was infused with sparkling crystals-

With that thought, Luna had her answer. This pony was a Crystal pony.

But she hadn’t given her message to any Crystal ponies… and she was so sure that she only gave the message to ponies that would be able to find her and the Tower of Day and Night. How had this pony found her?

Deciding to make herself known, Luna soared down and landed at the edge of the canyon on the Tower’s side of the gaping void. The Crystal pony had crossed one of the bridges and was walking around the base of the Tower, reading the inscriptions that were there. Now that she was closer, Luna could see that the stallion was barely older than a colt (or maybe that was just her perspective, since she was more than a thousand years old) with a dark blue coat similar to hers and a curly purple mane that oddly glittered in the sunlight. His sky blue eyes bore the same resemblance to all Crystal ponies, with a glistening sheen over the crystal-shaped pupils.

“Uh, Your Highness,” he stammered, quickly bending his legs in a bow.

Luna rolled her eyes and sighed. She had been retired for years now, and ponies still bowed whenever they saw her. She didn’t blame them, per say - she could be very intimidating.

But for Celestia’s sake, why did old habits have to die so hard?

“Please, excuse the formal titles,” she said arily, waving one wing and tossing her head. He stood up, his hooves still shaking slightly, and she folded her wings, trying to appear as non-threatening and unintimidating as possible.

“What is your name?”

“Um, Midnight, Your Hi-” He clamped his mouth shut before he could continue.

“How did you get here?”

He pointed behind him. “There’s a tunnel leading through the mountains - I found it on an ancient map before I came down here.”

“And how did you know to come down here?” This was the question she was most anxious to ask - if she hadn’t given this pony her message, then how had he received it?

Midnight lowered his eyes and pawed nervously at the ground. “One of my friends… he’s a yak, and we usually meet in the mountains. He told me that he was having this strange dream, and he told me what it said, and I don’t know, I just - I felt like I should come down here. Like it was for me.” He looked into her eyes and said, “If you’d like, I can go back now-”

“No, no, it’s fine,” she laughed, and he looked surprised. “Though I did not give you my message directly, I sense that you coming here was no act of coincidence - and I shall accept your service.”

He looked confused. “Um… all the message said was that I was supposed to find the Tower of Day and Night, and you would explain the rest.”

“Did I not mention the pledge to service?” He shook his head. “I could have sworn I did. No matter, I’ll explain it. As you undoubtedly know by now, this is the Tower of Day and Night, and it is the reason we have day and night. This is a symbol of continuity and order in Equestria - what is to be expected.

“But it may not always be this way. For I sense that, soon, we will not know what to expect anymore - which is why we - I - need somepony to know what to expect.”

The Crystal pony in front of her gulped. “I don’t suppose you’re talking about somepony else?”

She shook her head. “I’m afraid not. But that is why I asked you to meet me here - I wanted to make sure whoever found me and the Tower would be up to the task.” She lowered her head until they were eye-level. “I hate to bestow such a burden to a pony so young as yourself, but I do hope that you will agree - I sense that you are the pony I am looking for.”

Midnight thought for a long moment. Luna could see that he was thinking hard, and she didn’t blame him - this would be a huge commitment. But then he took a deep breath and lifted his head.

“I’ll do it,” he said. “Just… what exactly is it?” Then, in an undertone to himself, “Maybe I should have asked that before I agreed…”

“It is nothing complicated,” Luna assured him. She used her magic to lift her necklace up and over her head and over his until the crescent moon rested on his heart. “This is a piece of the Tree of Harmony, infused with some of my magic. It will allow you to receive visions of any danger that may come to Equestria, and the ability to enter the dream world to warn the necessary ponies about it.”

Midnight was looking even more unsure now. “And… you want me to do that?” he asked, a hint of panic creeping into his voice. “I’ve never done anything this important before! What if I mess it up? I’ll probably mess it up! A-and how will I know what to do, and-”

“Midnight.” She put a hoof on his shoulder, and he looked into her eyes. “You found your way down here for a reason. I have complete faith in you. You are the pony I need, and I hope that you will find the confidence in yourself to believe the same.” She glanced at the sky. “If you would like, night is coming - I can help you practice what can be practiced tonight. But then I must leave, and the rest - you will have to figure it out on your own.”

“Okay,” he said heasitantly. “Just one more question - how long will this last?”

She sighed heavily. “That, I do not know. As long as it takes. The crystal will release you when the time is right.”

“Release me?” he cried, looking down at the small object that rested on his chest. “Is it stuck?” He tried to pull the necklace over his head, but the crystal glowed bright, and he yelped, letting it drop back to his heart. “Why can’t I take it off?”

Luna nodded sagely. “It is as I suspected. The crystal has chosen you - you are the right pony for the job. You will have all the answers to the questions I am sure you have, but in due time.” She gently steered him back to the Tower. “You are to guard the expected and announce the unexpected. I sense that you are the right pony for the job. I have the utmost confidence in you.”

The pony sighed and lifted the crystal in his hoof, staring at his reflection in the pure white stone. “I hope I will, too.”

The sun set, the moon rose, just as it always had. But the unexpected would come - and soon.
> Shapeshifter
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sunny Starscout crouched down low, the thick foliage covering her like large green wings. Shadows of leaves danced across her coat, and through breaks in the thick green canopy, she saw it.

The Changeling Kingdom.

Consisting mostly of a central hive in the center of the kingdom, the changelings had expanded since the Guardians of Harmony, and there were many smaller hives - built to accommodate one or two families at most, though she spotted a few larger ones - were scattered around the large one. Plants grew everywhere - tall trees, bright flowers, thick green grass, strange plants Sunny had never seen before, spilling their long vines over their perches - which made it very easy to sneak in and observe the changelings from a distance.

From what Sunny had overheard the Legion of Doom talking about, the other creatures weren’t the most trustworth of ponies right now, and they hadn’t been even before Cozy Glow had sweet talked them into agreeing to potentially go to war with Equestria.

She wasn’t sure what she expected - a thousand creatures that all looked like Midge? - but the Changeling Kingdom was not it.

Starting with the changelings themselves. Though they remained whole (as in, they had no holes in their legs like Chrysalis), they were generally darker colors, deep reds and blues and even a few blacks here and there. According to the Journal of Friendship, since the changelings had reformed, they were usually bright colors like all the kinds of exotic bugs you could find. This was obviously not the case anymore.

Giving her best educated guess, Sunny had to assume that, being secluded from everypony else as they were, the changelings’ ability to share love was limited - and they were starting to resort back to their old ways of keeping some of it for themselves.

Bad news for her.

Sunny was hoping she could meet at least one changeling who would be willing to listen to her - how was she supposed to fulfill her quest if she couldn’t even get them to talk to her? But with every moment she stayed hidden, the likelihood of that happening grew smaller and smaller.

Would they scream and run away at the sight of her? Stand their ground? Imprison her and force her to reveal secrets that she was never supposed to tell? Would they even listen to her message? Or would they just scoff and wave her off? With every passing second, the latter seemed more and more likely.

Sunny sighed and withdrew from her bush, backing away into the trees and disappearing from sight.

Or, at least, so she thought.

As she turned to return to her shelter, which she had strategically placed beyond the boundaries of the kingdom, she heard a gasp, a voice whispered, “So it’s true,” and then a changeling stepped into view.

She was the first really colorful changeling that Sunny had seen. Her shimmering iridescent body was a bright aqua blue with accents of purple around the hooves and the gossamer wings, which were a coral pink that was also shaded with purple. Her eyes were completely purple and stared at Sunny with what was clearly shock.

“There really is a pony here,” the changeling said in a hushed voice. Her face slowly shifted from shock to overwhelming excitement. “Oh my stars, this is so amazing!” she squealed, dancing on her hooves. “Hi, I’m Imara, it is so nice to meet you!” The changeling rushed forward and seized Sunny’s front hooves. “What’s going on in the outside world? Are ponies really as awful as every creature is saying they are? What’s going on? You have to tell me, I swear I’m going crazy from only seeing the same places for my entire life.”

Sunny blinked. “Um… My name is Sunny. Sunny Starscout.”

Imara gasped and put her hooves (were they hooves? They looked like hooves) to her mouth in shock. “No. Way! You’re Sunny Starscout? The pony who’s going to try and make ponies the superior race by exterminating all the other creatures? Terrible, yes, but so cool at the same time!” She gasped again as a new idea came to her. “Are you coming to stalk out the enemy, see what we’re planning, what our weaknesses are?” She prowled around Sunny as she spoke, studying her. “Hm. You don’t look super evil. Is it a disguise?”

“What? No!” Sunny finally managed to get in, still processing everything the changeling had said. “I - I’m here to warn you, and I definitely don’t want to… ‘exterminate’ you all. I’m here to save you.”

The changeling seemed to deflate. “You’re not?” she pouted, plopping on the ground, sighing. “That’s too bad. I’m so tired of sitting around with nothing to do. I mean, yelling at all the other changelings to actually do something can only keep you entertained for so long.” She looked at Sunny with a pleading look. “You’re sure you’re not even the teeniest bit evil?”

The earth pony nodded empathetically. “I’m very sure,” she said, getting an idea. “But… I may have something for you to do that would keep you from getting too bored.”

Imara gasped and leaped to her hooves. “Say no more!” she said, grinning and saluting. “Whatever it is, I’m sure I’ll be able to do it! Once, I-”

“Do you think there’s a way that I could find out what’s going on for myself?” Sunny asked. The changeling stopped immediately. “Like - like hear it myself. It’s one thing for you to tell me everything - it’s another to experience it myself.”

Imara tilted her head at her. “I suppose there’s that tribe meeting soon,” she said slowly. “The oldest member of each family is required to go. I’m going - I don’t have any siblings, and I never knew my parents.” For a split second, her expression turned sad, but she quickly shook it off. “But I could never waltz in there with a pony - least of all one who’s supposed to want us all gone.” She scrunched her lips and tapped her chin, looking at Sunny. “I’m sure there’s a way I could make it work-”

“What about this?” The small area was suddenly filled with golden light, and Sunny lit up her horn, more golden light dancing across the leaves of the trees. She surrounded herself with light and envisioned herself as a changeling - this was a spell she had always wanted to have an excuse to try.

When the light cleared, Sunny was still… Sunny, but now her golden wings were shaped like a bug’s, folded neatly on her back, her eyes were entirely a bluish-green, and her mane had disappeared, replaced with a sparkling pink ridge down the back of her neck.

Imara took a step back, her eyes widened, and she felt an irresistible grin. “Woah,” she said. “That was so cool! I didn’t know ponies could shapeshift!”

“They can’t,” Sunny explained, still getting used to this whole ‘shapeshifting’ thing. “You need a spell, and obviously magic, a lot of it. Plus a lot of unicorns don’t know a whole lot about magic, so it would probably only be the really powerful ones and alicorns.”

“What’s an alicorn?” Imara asked, looking thrilled at the prospect of more information. “Did you have wings and a horn? I’ve never seen a pony like that.” She gasped. “Is that an alicorn? Oh, wow, that is amazeballs, you have to tell me what kinds of magic you can do with that magic horn of yours, have you ever used it to take over the world? Oops, sorry, wrong question, you’re right, let’s go,” she amended at Sunny’s reproachful look, turning on her heel and leading the way out of the trees.

It was strange to be walking amongst these creatures she had never seen before with them hardly noticing her. Wherever Imara walked, changelings would sigh and turn away from her as if she didn’t exist. Sunny gave her a questioning look, for both why they were doing that and why she still looked so cheerful.

“I’m used to it,” she assured her. “I’m told it’s because of my free spirit, whatever that means.”

“IMARA!” called a voice, and the changeling tensed up, letting out a groan.

“There is, however, one changeling who will tolerate me,” she told Sunny, “and she just so happens to be the absolute most boring changeling in the existence of changelings.” She turned, plastered a very forced smile onto her face, and said in a falsely cheerful voice, “Auntie Cercus! How-” she gulped before forcing it out “-how lovely it is to see you!”

The approaching changeling sniffed and rolled her eyes. She was a withered old bug, a dull, washed-out peach color with purple wings that had seen better days. Her piercing purple eyes landed on Sunny, and they narrowed suspiciously.

“Who’s your friend?” Cercus snapped, raising an eyebrow at Imara while not taking her eyes off Sunny.

“Uh, she’s from out of town!” Imara quickly covered for her. “A-and her name is… is…”

“Ocellus,” Sunny said quickly, also wearing a fake grin and hoping that the changeling who befriended other creatures and saved the world a few times wasn’t idolized and written down in changeling history as the hero of the changelings.

Cercus’ expression didn’t change. “Now behave yourself at that meeting today, sweetheart!” she snapped at Imara. “Stars only know what would happen if we had another incident like last time.”

Imara paled. “What happened last time stays in last time,” she hissed at her aunt, who snorted and turned to hobble away. As soon as she was out of sight, the changeling breathed a huge sigh of relief and turned to Sunny. “Cercus isn’t really my aunt, but she’s the one who raised me, so…” She sighed and looked at the direction she had gone. “She’s not exactly the loveliest changeling in Equestria.”

“...Let’s get to that meeting,” Sunny suggested, turning and walking towards the main hive. Imara nodded and joined her, her bouncy attitude back.

Unlike Izzy, who was bouncy and cheerful to bring other ponies happiness and show them the good things in the world, Imara’s attitude came from a desire to bury any and all other feelings of sadness or self-doubt that she may be feeling. In her world, she had been abandoned and raised by a changeling she didn’t know (and also happened to be super annoying), and the feeling of being alone and uncared for resonated so deep within her that she swore never to feel that way again. You have to look out for yourself in this world, she always told herself.

Just like changelings, the changeling hive also shifted and moved. New doorways opened up as old ones closed, and just like the landscape outside, the whole thing was overflowing with plants.

“Wow,” Sunny said in wonder as she looked around. “This place is beautiful!”

“Yeah,” Imara said proudly, standing a little taller as she walked. “We’ve been making it amazing again, ever since it started shifting.” She spotted a new opening and walked over to it. “This way.”

“What do you mean, ‘started shifting’?” Sunny asked as she carefully pulled her hoof through the hole just before it closed behind her. “You mean it wasn’t always like this?”

“Well, if the old stories are to be believed, changelings used to be not very nice creatures,” she told Sunny out of the corner of her mouth. “In fact, we were downright mean. We would take the form of some creature you loved and grow stronger by feeding off their love for them. But no matter how much we took, we always wanted more. But then King Thorax showed us that we could share love instead of taking it, and suddenly, we felt a whole lot better! The hive used to shift just like this, but once we started sharing love, our feeling of being whole was reflected onto the hive, and it became solid.”

“But now…” Sunny prodded.

Imara sighed. “Now it’s reverting back to the old ways.” She dropped the gloomy expression, trading it for a cheerful smile. “But that’s if you believe the old stories, which just about no creature does anymore.”

“Random question,” Sunny said slowly as an idea came to her. “When you were taking love instead of sharing it… were you all black? With lots of holes everywhere?”

The changeling looked shocked. “How did you know that?” She gasped. “Can ponies read minds?”

“No,” she said hurriedly, uneager to start more rumors. “Just… read it somewhere.”

Imara shrugged, as if this was perfectly normal. Still, as Sunny looked around the hive at the opening and closing holes, she couldn’t help but feel that her quest had suddenly gotten a whole lot harder.
> Shadows on the Horizon
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

The sun rose that day in all of its glorious splendor, just as usual, bathing all of Equestria in its rays of warm, golden light. Even the most shaded places were warmed as the sun cleared the horizon. But Flurry didn’t feel the new warmth. Every part of her was shaking with cold and fear.

Because for the first time in her life, Princess Flurry Heart of the Crystal Empire was terrified out of her mind and she had no idea what to do.

She sat, curled up in a ball, off to the side of the clearing in which her friends had made camp, her wings wrapped around herself and her eyes closed, trying to block out the memories rushing into her head.

Him, bursting into her room with an evil smile-

Him, dangling her by a single hoof in front of her parents-

Him, forcing her and her family into chains-

Him, standing in front of her parents as they were forced to bow-

Him, controlling every last citizen of the Empire while she was forced to watch-

Him, pushing them to the side and causing jagged black rocks to sprout up around them-

Him, sitting on the throne with the Crystal Heart was suspended over his head, laughing-

Him, casting his fear spell on her aunt and her friends-

And then there were the stories, the tales she had heard so many times that now came alive in her mind in a whole new light.

Him, enslaving the entire Empire for his own selfish greed-

Him, forcing the innocent ponies of the Crystal Empire to fight for him-

Him, being trapped in the ice and bringing the Empire down with him-

Him, coming back, forcing her mom to work day and night to protect the Empire-

Him, creating a trap that ensnared her aunt in a cage of black crystals-

Him, hurtling towards the Crystal Heart, his eyes wide with hunger and greed-

Him, returning from the ether to take what he desired so much-

Him, destroying the Tree of Harmony and enslaving all of Ponyville, Canterlot, and Equestria-

Him, nearly obliterating everything that her family and their friends had worked so hard to build, not caring for another soul other than his own, bent on destruction and revenge, and now he was here, he was going it all again-

Flurry shivered and opened her eyes, glancing over at her friends, who were huddled together on the other side of the clearing, discussing what to do in hushed voices. Flurry was happy that she was not a part of this conversation - the last thing she needed was more reminders of how bad things were.

“...should keep looking for Sunny,” Hitch was saying, a hint of desperation in his voice. “We’re so close! We’ll find her, and then we can all go defeat Sombra together-”

“We’ve been here for a week,” Izzy interrupted, “and we’re no closer to finding her than flying to the moon. Besides, she said that… she said that she didn’t want us to come find her.” She stole a glance at Flurry. “Plus, look at her. Her home is in danger - that’s all she has left. We can’t just… not do it.”

“But if we had Sunny,” Hitch continued, “we’d have two alicorns on our side - Sombra wouldn’t stand a chance. We’ll defeat him better and faster if we find Sunny. She’s our friend - we can’t just abandon her.”

“But Flurry’s our friend, too,” Izzy protested. “And I don’t know about you, but having an all-powerful shadow pony in the mountains who’s left alone makes me feel like something worse is going to happen.”

“I agree with Izzy,” Zipp spoke up, lifting her head and meeting Hitch’s glare with her own fierce look. “We can’t just leave this Sombra guy unattended, and we promised Flurry we’d get her kingdom back. Letting it get overtaken by a villain seems like the opposite of that.”

Her comment had a rousing effect on the other ponies. Pipp, who clearly wasn’t sure who she agreed with, now looked certain that she stood with her sister on this one. Sprout, who looked like he was agreeing with Hitch, nodded and stepped over to Izzy and Zipp’s side. Seeing that he was outnumbered, the sheriff let out a frustrated growl under his breath.

“If you won’t help me look for Sunny, then I’ll do it myself,” he decided, turning and dashing away into the trees.

“Hitch!” Izzy called after him, but he didn’t turn back. She moaned and turned back to the other ponies. “I didn’t think we would have to split up over it,” she whispered. “I hate it when we do that.”

Zipp spread her wings. “I’ll go look for him and talk some sense into him.” She took off before any of them could say another word. Izzy still looked uncertain, but she turned to see Flurry still curled up under a tree, trembling like a leaf, and she trotted over to her, putting her hoof around the alicorn’s shoulders in an attempt to comfort her.

“It’s going to be okay,” Izzy said softly. Pipp and Sprout also approached her, to show their support. “We’re here for you. We’ll help you get your kingdom back from King Sombra - everything’s going to be fine.”

“No,” Flurry whispered, in a voice so quiet they almost couldn’t hear it. “No, it’s not going to be fine.” She took a deep breath and sat up straight. “King Sombra is a pony of shadows and darkness, and he stops at nothing to get what he wants. Even banishing him into the ether doesn’t stop him for long. There’s… there’s no way to defeat him permanently.”

“Then we’ll find a way,” Sprout assured her, rolling his shoulders back. “We’ve dealt with worse things-”

“But he can control you,” Flurry told them, desperation and panic seeping into her voice. “And not like Sunny - all he has to do is cast a spell, and BOOM, you’re under his complete control while living your worst fears in your head! It - it’s awful-” She broke off with a sob, burying her face under her wing. Her friends exchanged concerned glances. Pipp sat down on Flurry’s other side and put her wing around her. When Flurry finally surfaced, her face streaked with tears, her voice was punctured with hiccups.

“I - I don’t think I’ll be able to face him,” she cried. “He - he t-took everything away from me, and wh-whenever I s-see him, I - I remember all the things he’s done… the terrible, terrible things he’s done…” Another sob built up in her throat, but she forcefully swallowed it. “I’m sorry…”

“Don’t be,” Sprout told her fiercely, lowering his head so that he was eye level with the distressed alicorn. “The hardest thing to face is our own past - and any ponies that may be associated with it. But if we don’t - if we tell ourselves we can’t do it, if we keep trying to run away from it - it’ll keep catching up to us. Facing it is the only way to defeat it for sure. And, sure, it’ll come back and haunt you occasionally, but each time, you get stronger, and you know that you’ll be able to face it. I did it - I think you can do it, too.”

Flurry hiccuped and wiped at her streaming eyes. “Y-you think so?”

“I don’t think - I know.” He offered her his hoof, and she took it, and Sprout pulled her to her hooves. The alicorn was still very wobbly and leaned against Izzy for support, but she was standing, an improvement over a few moments ago.

Just being on her hooves again was enough to make Flurry calm down, though her head felt dizzy, like it was spinning in circles. She wobbled a bit and took a step to steady herself, nearly ending up face planting into the ground again. After a long and unsteady excursion, the four ponies found themselves seated around the dead campfire as the sun climbed higher into the sky, waiting for Zipp and Hitch to come back.

Flurry sighed. “I don’t like leaving Sunny behind - she’s an amazing pony - but I want to get home as fast as possible… to see what’s going on. Even though I also want to keep flying until I drop so that I never have to see him again.” She wrapped her wings around herself and shivered, though it was quite warm out.

“I know what you mean,” Izzy said, yawning and rubbing her eyes - it was clear the unicorn wasn’t getting very much sleep. “That’s how I feel whenever there’s an evil new villain on the loose. I want to know what we’re up against, but I’m getting a little tired of saving the world.”

“It doesn’t allow for much room for other hobbies,” Pipp agreed, glancing at her cell phone, which was sitting on the ground beside her. “Or any time for other hobbies.”

Flurry Heart shrugged. “At least the evil world-dominating villains gave my aunt and her friends some time between the heart-pounding magical battles for the sake of the world. They would have one fight, wait a couple weeks, and then have another one - repeat.”

Sprout poked at the dying embers with a stick. “So! Flurry. What… what can you tell us about Sombra?”

As always, the very sound of the name was enough to freeze Flurry’s blood, but she took a deep breath, reminding herself that she was with friends, and that Sombra was far away - though the thought that she would have to face him eventually didn’t help.

“All I remember is that he’s awful,” she said, “though that’s probably not very helpful. Nopony knows where he came from, but we do know that he’s lost all mortality - he gave himself completely to the shadows. The only way to defeat him - at least for a little while - is to trap him somewhere. Celestia and Luna trapped him in the ice - but that made the Crystal empire disappear completely for a thousand years. Every other time, he’s been expelled into the ether, usually by the Crystal Heart.

“But defeating him isn’t easy. He knows what can stop him - the Crystal Heart, so his first action is usually to gain possession of it - no, his first action is to imprison the ponies who could stand up to him. His second action is to gain possession of the Crystal Heart.”

She shivered. “With the Elements of Harmony in possession of the Legion of Doom, and you guys all kind of new to the whole magic of friendship thing, the Crystal Heart is probably the only way we can defeat him.”

“Then let’s get the Crystal Heart,” Pipp said, and Flurry winced at how easy she made it sound.

“But it could be anywhere,” she explained. “He could hide it and set a trap for anypony who tries to retrieve it, he could have it right over his head so that you would need a really good distraction to get it, and then you have to activate it - you’ll need the love and light of the Crystal ponies to do that, and now…” She swallowed and forced it out. It was the truth, and she’d better get used to it. “Now there’s none of them left.”

“It’ll be okay, Flurry,” Sprout tried to comfort her, patting her hoof. “We’ll think of something.”

“We always do,” Izzy chimed in, giving Flurry an encouraging grin. “Maybe it’s not as bad as we think - maybe the Crystal Heart has enough magic left in it to defend against King Sombra. Or maybe he hasn’t made it up there yet.”

“I wish it was,” Flurry whispered. “But the Heart wasn’t able to defend itself when it had all of its magic, and I felt that the Crystal Heart and the Empire itself was in danger. I wish it were any other way, but…” She shook her head, looking down at her hooves. “I know this sounds pretty hopeless, so I understand if you want to stay here with Hitch and keep looking for Sunny-”

“Are you kidding? We’re coming with you,” Sprout asserted, and Izzy and Pipp nodded in agreement. “You’re our friend, too, and we’re not about to let you go charging into battle alone.”

She gave a small smile, her heart filling with warmth at their support. “Thanks, guys.”

“But…” Pipp stole a glance at the sky, wishing her sister was here. “What do we do?”

The feeling of hopelessness began to creep in again, and Flurry lowered her head. “I don’t know.”
> Nothing Worth Having Comes Easy
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

“So, everything we’ve been told is a lie.”

“Yup.” Sunny stepped around a particularly thick patch of moss and hurried to catch up to Imara. “It was all a lie - and the creatures who told you it just want to use you guys for their own personal gain.”

“I can’t believe Queen Monarch believed that,” the changeling muttered under her breath.

“Well, Cozy Glow is very persuasive,” Sunny told her. “I’m sure it wasn’t your queen’s fault. But it doesn’t matter if you believe the lies - what matters is that you believe the truth.”

“Well, obviously yes!” Imara snorted and tossed her head, as if not believing was an act of pure idiocy. “I mean, for starters, none of us have even seen a pony for a century, except for you, and you seem very not-evil and nice and friendly, unless you’re also a really good actor, but I don’t think you are. Oo, here we are!” Imara waved her hoof at a new opening in the wall, which led back outside. Sunny stepped into the sunlight and squinted in the sudden change from the dark halls of the changeling hive. They were standing on a large, flat plateau on the top of the hive, filled with changelings assembled before a large throne, and upon it sat a tall, beautiful changeling. She was tall and elegant, colored black with shades of orange around her wings and hooves. Her purple eyes were calm and composed.

“That’s Queen Monarch,” Imara hissed to Sunny. “Before the meeting starts, we’re all gonna have to bow to her - just follow my lead.”

Queen Monarch’s eyes followed Imara as she stood near the back, an innocent and helpful grin on her face that didn’t fool the queen for a second. She cleared her throat, and all eyes turned to her, chatter in the room stopping immediately.

Standing up, the queen said, “Well, now that we’re all here, let us begin.”

As one, the changelings bent their legs into a bow, rippling across the crowd like a wave. Sunny hurriedly did the same, and though she could feel the queen’s eyes on her, she refused to look up. She did not want to make another enemy - she came here to make friends.

The queen nodded in satisfaction and said, “You may rise.” And they stood up. “I have called you here today to discuss any plans we may have to take action against the ponies. As we have been so kindly warned, they have been reunited, but a pony known as Sunny Starscout has taken control, convincing them all that ponies are the supreme race of the land, and any other creatures are lesser and should be exterminated.” A gasp and panicked whispers rose up from the crowd, and Monarch held up a single hoof to quiet them. “Now, what course of action should we take-”

“Maybe we should start by GETTING OUT OF THIS KINGDOM!” Imara suggested in a loud voice, all the changelings in the room, including Sunny, turning to stare at her. Monarch sighed and stood up.

“For the last time, Imara, we remain in this kingdom to keep ourselves safe,” she said in a tired voice that suggested that she had dealt with this changeling’s shenanigans more than enough times for one creature’s lifetime. “And with the threat at our borders, I would say that was the right thing to-”

“There’s only a ‘threat’ at our borders because we’ve been cooped up here for so long!” Imara shot back. “Maybe if we weren’t all holed up here like scared rabbits, the ponies wouldn’t be angry at us - they might be friends with us! You have no one to blame but yourselves for this.” She shifted her hooves and stared at them with an aloof expression. “Look, how do we even know that the ponies want us gone? We’ve never seen one! Never met one! And if they do, then they’re probably scared of us, and hmm, I wonder why? It’s like we’ve spent literally a century in complete social isolation.”

All the other changelings roared in anger at her comment.

“That was to protect us!” one shouted.

“Our queen was wise to make that choice!” yelled another.

“You know what would have happened if we had stayed - if the ponies could find us!” another one screeched, his voice trembling with fury.

“And what would have happened?” Imara said calmly, tapping her chin.

The changelings fell silent. The one who spoke stuttered, “Well - well, they would have - they would have-” He looked to his queen for guidance, but there was none. “They would have exterminated us, same as now!” he decided, and a deafening roar of approval rose up from the crowd.

“YOU DON’T KNOW THAT!!!” Imara screamed over the sound, and all the changelings fell silent. “You don’t know anything about what goes on outside this kingdom! We’ve been lied to - we’ve been falsely informed in hopes that we could be used - but the ponies don’t want to hurt us! They want to be friends with us!” She turned to Sunny with desperation in her eyes. “Tell them!”

Sunny swallowed and stepped forward. “It’s true! I - I’ve seen Equestria myself, and the ponies there - well, most of the ponies,” she amended under her breath, “they don’t want to hurt you. I-in fact, they want-”

“Oh, no one wants to hear that!” came one of the changelings, followed by a rousing boo from the others. The changeling who spoke flapped his wings and hovered beside the queen and pointed an accusatory hoof at the two changelings in the back. “Your Highness, these two are clearly delusional! We were told by a reliable source who very clearly sympathized with our causes that ponies were not to be trusted.”

Queen Monarch sighed and stood up. “I need a moment alone. This meeting is adjourned.”

“Fine!” Imara called, turning on her heel and starting towards the exit. “We’re done here, anyway. Come on, Sunny.”

“Sunny?” Monarch stopped in the process of retreating to her own private rooms. She turned slowly and studied the mysterious changeling she had never seen before prior to this day. “Did you say your name was Sunny?”

Imara must have realized she made a mistake, because she rushed back to Sunny’s side and subtly started pulling her towards the exit. “Uh, no! Her name’s Ocellus. Sunny’s just her… her pet name! Yeah! And, if you don’t mind, we’ll just be going here, so…”

Monarch frowned and lit up her horns. Imara panicked and shoved Sunny behind her.

“Uh, Your Majesty! Wh-what are you doing?”

“If she’s a real changeling, as you say she is, this will do absolutely nothing,” Monarch assured her, gently lifting Imara with her magic and setting her off to the side. She tried to get back to Sunny, but two changelings beside her crossed their hooves in front of her, preventing her from going any further.

Monarch stepped forward, and Sunny stepped back, the queen’s glowing horns reflected in her eyes. A wall of light suddenly encircled Sunny, rising up into the sky, and when it cleared, her disguise had been burned away. Even worse, her wings and horn had decided that this would be a great moment to return again. All the surrounding changelings gasped and stepped back, their eyes wide. Imara broke away from her restrainers and reached Sunny just as the changeling who had convinced Monarch that Imara and Sunny were delusional rose into the air, pointing a shaky hoof at the two.

“It’s her!” he gasped. “It’s Sunny Starscout! She’s here to destroy us all!”

Complete pandemonium ensued. The majority of the changelings tried to get away, leaping off the roof while spreading their wings, screaming blindly as they fled. Queen Monarch tried to singal some of her guards forward, but in the mob of running changelings, they couldn’t reach Sunny or Imara.

Imara jerked her head at the exit back into the hive and took off, Sunny close behind her. They sprinted through the ever-changing halls, and up ahead, Sunny spotted a hole opening to the outside, and she got an idea.

“Can you fly?” she shouted at Imara as they ran.

“A bit busy back here!” she yelled back, glancing behind her at the changelings in hot pursuit. “Yes, I can fly, why is that-”

They burst out of the hive, and Sunny spread her golden wings, the sunlight shining through them and bathing the entire kingdom in a golden light, and she soared up into the clouds. Imara caught up with her, her bug-like wings buzzing as she tried to catch her breath.

“You do know that they can all fly, too, right?” she gasped, just as the clouds behind them broke as dozens of changelings flew towards them. “Case in point,” Imara said tiredly.

“Yes,” Sunny agreed, “but can they do this?”

She lit up her horn, and she and Imara disappeared in a flash of golden light. The other changelings flew right through the empty space that, a few seconds ago, had once held a pony and a changeling, stopping to brake as they realized what had happened.

Sunny and Imara reappeared in Sunny’s makeshift campsite, tumbling onto the ground, out of breath. Imara’s eyes were shut tight, and she slowly opened them, realizing that she was not in the sky above her kingdom anymore. As a matter of fact, she wasn’t sure where she was. Shakily getting to her hooves, the changeling looked around, bewildered and shocked.

“What… what happened?” She spotted Sunny dashing forward, scooping up a small teal saddlebag and slinging it over her shoulder.

“I teleported us out of there,” the earth pony explained as her wings and horn faded away. “If you don’t want to come with me, I completely understand, but if you do, I would love your help-”

“Of course I want to come!” Imara rose into the air, grinning. “Is this an adventure? I’ve always wanted to go on an adventure! Especially one beyond the borders of the kingdom - there’s only so many times you can map out the entire kingdom in excruciating detail.”

Sunny laughed. “It’ll be dangerous-”

“Perfect!”

“-heart-pounding-”

“Sign me up!”

“-and we’re facing impossible odds.”

“Sounds like what I like to call a Tuesday. When do we begin?”

The sound of buzzing filled the air, and Sunny looked nervously up at the sky. “Um… how about right now?”

Imara noticed the sound, too, and she nodded. “Yeah, now sounds like a great time,” she agreed. Sunny nodded, turned, and led the way away from the changeling kingdom. The two ran as fast as they could, not speaking, until Imara finally panted, “Um… where are we going?”

Sunny skidded to a stop and pulled out her map. “I was thinking… The Dragon Lands are pretty close to here. Should we go talk to some dragons?”

The changeling let out an ear-piercing squeal. “That sounds even better than talking to ponies!”

“I’m going to choose not to be offended by that,” Sunny said teasingly, putting her map away and glancing behind her nervously. “I think we’re far enough ahead. Ready to fly?”

Imara grinned and spread her wings, the sunlight filtering through the pink membrane and making it glitter. Sunny reached down inside her and felt her wings and horn appear, spreading her own golden wings that gave off their own light on their own. They lifted into the sky, the dense forests and trees that surrounded the Changeling Kingdom growing smaller and smaller beneath them. Using the sun as her compass, Sunny veered north, with her new friend following behind her.

She sighed, looking back at the only home she had ever known. “It’s funny. I’ve always wanted to leave - to see what the world was like outside the hive - but now that it’s actually happening… I feel like I’m leaving something behind that I shouldn’t be.”

Sunny stopped and put her hoof on Imara’s shoulder. “Every choice requires sacrifices,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make them. You might be leaving something behind, but I know something even better will be waiting for you where we’re going.”

“There they are!” came a voice, and the two turned to see a group of changelings heading their way, not looking very happy. At the lead was the same changeling who had really started the whole mess. His dark green skin and bright red wings gleamed in the sunlight, and his red eyes narrowed menacingly as they approached.

“Aaand maybe we should have the emotional chats in another place,” Imara suggested, she and Sunny taking off into the sky.
> Between a Throne and a Hard Place
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Zipp Storm felt the wind throw back her mane and slide under her wings, pushing away her worries and making her feel so alive. Despite the dire circumstances, she allowed herself a smile.

This. This was what had been taken away from her all her life, all because some ponies decided to be complete idiots.

But she couldn’t blame them - at least not all of them - because it wasn’t entirely their fault. They had forgotten everything, but she could blame the ponies who decided to erase all their memories, and that was completely justified.

Right?

Argh. Now she was going to find out that they had wonderful reasons for doing what they did, and feel completely guilty for thinking that.

Why did life have to be so complicated? Couldn’t she say that ponies did dumb things and not have to suffer the consequences afterward, because they did do dumb things? Why did they all have to have really good reasons? That made it really hard to dislike them, even though they did so many awful things.

Focus on now. She could contemplate the complexity of the world later.

Right now, she needed to find Hitch.

The stallion had taken off into the woods with the intention of finding Sunny on his own, without the help of his friends. Though Zipp could understand his frustration and desire to find the earth pony mare - she wanted to just as much as he did - this was a very irrational decision for the sheriff of Maretime Bay. For as long as she had known him, Hitch had made logical choices that made sense. This didn’t make any sort of logical sense.

“Hitch?” she called, cupping her hooves around her mouth to amplify the sound. When the call went unanswered, she skidded to a stop, hovering in midair, and tried again, but louder. “HITCH! Are you there?”

Her sharp hearing picked up a slight rustle up ahead, and Zipp flew towards it as fast as she could. She had been at this for hours, and her friends’ continuous search of the surrounding forest had detailed that there was not another living creature within a several kilometer radius, so this was more hint than she had gotten all morning.

Was it even morning anymore? Zipp paused to look up at the sky and saw that the sun had begun to drift down the westward side of the sky - it was afternoon now.

No wonder her stomach was growling with hunger. But the good news was that Hitch’s must be, too. She had to keep going to find her friend.

Tucking in her wings, Zipp folded into a dive, plummeting towards the ground at such a high speed it made her eyes water, expertly weaving her way around the bare tree branches and landing lightly on the swampy ground. She folded in her wings and looked around, searching for something - anything - that could point her in the direction of Hitch.

Luckily, she didn’t have to look hard.

Imprinted into the mud was a set of hoofprints, leading away from the direction Zipp had been coming from, and upon closer inspection, she recognized the hoof shape - slightly larger than any of the mare’s, but smaller than Sprout’s.

While she was thrilled to have found a good lead, it was yet another concern for the future queen of Zephyr Heights - Hitch wasn’t one to leave such an obvious trail. Which then made her think that maybe this was a false trail meant to deceive her, but based on the sheriff’s recent behavior, Zipp had to guess that Hitch was so consumed with finding Sunny that all traces of logic and thinking things through had left his mind.

For some reason, she felt a pang of jealousy - would he do the same thing for her? Or did he care about Sunny… more than he cared about her?

Zipp forcefully shook her head, pushing the thoughts away. She couldn’t think like that when her friends were in danger. Spreading her wings, Zipp took off and found a stick with some leaves still attached to the end and flew above the trail, hiding what she could. Eventually, the path ended in a very scarce area of the woods, surrounding a muddy lake. The hoofprints went into a scraggly bush and disappeared from sight.

Curious, Zipp dropped the muddy branch and lowered herself to the ground, hitting the mud running. She poked her head inside the bush and gasped. “Hitch!”

He put a hoof to her mouth to shush her, and she glared at him. He mouthed, “Quiet,” and she nodded, getting the message. The earth pony removed his hoof and slid to the side, allowing Zipp to squeeze into the bush herself.

“What-” she started in a quiet whisper, and he pointed a hoof through the bush, where a large rock formation was visible. Zipp squinted through the drab green leaves and saw that it bore a striking resemblance to a ram’s head, complete with the horns. The eyes and mouth were mouths of caves, which all seemed to connect, and they were filled with a golden light that told her that whoever was in there had lit torches.

“This is it,” Hitch whispered, more to himself than Zipp, but she caught it anyway.

“What?”

“This is where Sunny is,” he murmured. “I’m sure of it.”

“How can you tell-”

He silently pointed to a pony emerging from the cave. She was a young pegasus foal that Zipp had never seen before, her coat a coral pink and her curly blue mane neatly groomed, not at all what Zipp would have expected from an isolated cave in the middle of nowhere.

Still, the moment she laid eyes on her, Zipp knew who she was: “Cozy Glow.”

Hitch nodded. “The others are here, too. Including those two ponies who had the memory stone and tried to erase our memories,” he said in such a quiet voice Zipp had to strain to hear it.

The thought that Permafrost and Sour Lavender were here - and unharmed - made Zipp’s blood boil, especially as she remembered what they and their little organization had done to her, her friends, her family, her subjects, and ponies she hadn’t even met yet. And it was all for such a worthless purpose that Zipp felt like she was justified in hating them for their actions.

“What are they doing here?”

Hitch shrugged. “Teaming up with them, I suppose. Probably to get revenge.” He paused. “Maybe that’s why they wanted Sunny. They could have taken any of us - but they took her, and I refuse to believe that there wasn’t any sort of reasoning behind that.” His voice had been growing steadily louder, and he clamped his mouth shut before their location was revealed to Cozy Glow.

The pegasus frowned at the bush but didn’t say anything. Instead, she groaned and called inside, “There’s literally no sign of her running off - this is pointless!”

“That’s because you haven’t left the cave!” snapped another voice in response, this one male and rough. “Perhaps if you actually looked, you might find something!”

Cozy Glow grumbled and spread her wings, lifting off into the air and scanning the ground beneath her with a furious expression, muttering, “Don’t know why I have to do this now when I could be useful anywhere else…”

“They’re looking for somepony,” Zipp muttered. She turned away from Cozy Glow to look at Hitch, and the crestfallen look on the stallion’s face didn’t go amiss. “What’s wrong?”

He stood up, his expression miserable. “She’s not here. She left.”

Zipp realized what he was saying. “Sunny?” He nodded. “But… but that’s a good thing, right? They don’t seem to know where she’s gone - she’s free now, Hitch. That’s what we were hoping for. Right?”

He shook his head, his ears drooping and his eyes downcast. “We were hoping that we could get her back,” he mumbled. “I… I want her back, I need her back. And now we have no idea where she is.” He turned and burst out of the bush, running away into the woods, not looking back… again.

“Hitch!” Zipp hissed after him, scanning the sky for Cozy Glow. but the filly had disappeared. She cautiously stepped out and chased after the stallion. I am not about to lose you again, you pony with horsefeathers for a brain, she thought. “Hitch, come back! Oof!”

Zipp stumbled back, massaging her muzzle, when she realized what she had bumped into. “Hitch! Don’t you ever run off like that again, you-” She paused. “Are you okay?”

For the stallion was standing in the middle of a small clearing, completely still, staring at something resting on a rock on the other side of the break in the trees. Zipp’s voice seemed to snap him out of his trance, and he walked forward to pick it up. Zipp had no idea what was going on, but she followed him, wanting to see what it was.

It was a lantern, a small pink one, the flame long gone out, with a small clip on the bottom that implied that it was supposed to hold something.

Like a message.

Or a drawing.

Zipp remembered her and her friends sitting around a campfire on their first adventure, Izzy explaining why she came to Maretime Bay in the first place - she had found a message, sent by Sunny, saying that the unicorns and pegasi had friends in Maretime Bay, and that they should come visit them.

A message sent by lantern, Izzy said.

But why would a lantern be here of all places? Unless…

“You sent Sunny a message,” Zipp guessed aloud. Hitch nodded, turning around and showing her the lantern, which now sat in his hoof. Zipp gently picked it up and studied it - it really was pretty. “But… what was it?”

“Something Izzy came up with,” he mumbled. “She wanted to give Sunny hope that things would get better, that we would come and find her. It was that little drawing Sunny sent out as a kid.” He kicked angrily at a small rock, and it skittered across the clearing. “Not that it’ll do any good now,” he said in a louder voice that made Zipp flinch - she wasn’t used to hearing him so angry. “Since she’s gone.”

There was silence, and Zipp came up with an idea. “Maybe then you could come to the Crystal Empire with us,” she suggested. “Help defeat King Sombra - then we’ll all be able to help look for Sunny.”

Hitch looked shocked and angry. “I can’t just abandon her!” he protested. “What kind of a friend would I be? No, I’m staying here until I find her.”

“But you have no idea where she’s gone!” Zipp reminded him.

“I have to keep looking! I can’t just leave my best friend alone in stars know where without at least trying to find her!” Hitch stamped his hoof. “I’m staying to look for her. And I’m not leaving until I find my best friend.”

“But you’re abandoning your other friends!” Zipp told him, her voice turning desperate. “Hitch, we need you. We can’t defeat Sombra without you, and you can’t find Sunny without us!” She held out her hoof, saying, “Please. Just come back with us. I promise we’ll find Sunny as soon as possible - but it seems more likely that she’ll just find us. And she would want us all to go help Flurry Heart defeat King Sombra.”

He still looked indecisive, so she sighed and resorted to a new tactic.

“Hitch, look. You’ve been given responsibility over Maretime Bay, right? You’re in charge of it.” He nodded. “Would you endanger the entire town just to do something that would happen on its own anyway?”

“Of course not,” he said quickly, then paused. “Well… it would depend on the thing.”

“When you’re put in charge of something…” Zipp sighed and swallowed, still not believing that she was about to say this. “As rulers, our job isn’t to listen only to our hearts or our heads - it’s to listen to both. Sometimes the logical decision is better, and sometimes the non-logical - but I’m telling you, right now, we need you, and you need us. So instead of dividing…” She offered him her hoof again. “How about we stick together?”
> Differences
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

If the Changeling Kingdom was sweltering hot and humid, the Dragon Lands were sweltering hot and dry.

Sunny wasn’t sure which was worse.

Imara obviously had opinions. “This is awful,” she would moan every five minutes. “Like, I didn’t even know something this horrible could exist, and I lived with Aunt Cercus.”

After the disaster at the changeling hive, Sunny and Imara had decided to find a dragon alone who looked like they would listen to what Sunny had to say and possibly carry the message back to the other dragons. This was easier said than done. While many dragons did go off on their own, none of them looked very diplomatic - in fact, most of them looked like they would rather pound a pony’s head in than listen to them.

“How long have we been here?” Imara moaned, sprawling out on the floor of the cave that they had found shelter in, the entrance facing away from the rest of the Dragon Lands. Luckily, it was safe from the smokey air that hung around the place - mostly.

“Three days,” Sunny said, standing at the mouth of the cave and looking out onto the red-hot landscape. “We’ve barely been here three days.”

“It feels like forever,” the changeling whined, standing up, walking in a circle, and flopping on a rock. “How long does it take to find a dragon who’ll listen to us?”

“As long as it takes.” Sunny pulled out her father’s journal and flipped to the back, where she was putting important information that she discovered on her adventure so far. She had to be careful to only put the absolute most important things she saw - there were only about three blank pages left in the back, and she didn’t want to waste them.

Imara huffed. “I’ve heard that dragons aren’t very diplomatic,” she mumbled into the rock. “I bet they won’t understand a word we’re saying because they communicate using roars and other meaningless sounds.”

Sunny winced, the description sounding all too similar to what the pegasi and unicorns thought of earth ponies. “We don’t know that,” she insisted. “I mean, you thought that ponies were your worst enemies and wanted you all gone - but here I am, and I don’t want that. Believe me, I’ve heard my fair share of stereotypes and rumors about other tribes, and none of them were true.”

“Maybe you’re right,” the changeling admitted, lifting her head, her eyes going wide. “Look out!”

With a shriek, Sunny dove to the side and covered her father’s journal protectively as something barreled into the cave and crashed into the back, where it curled up into a ball and began… sobbing?

Sunny cautiously lifted her head and slipped her father’s notebook into her bag, studying the creature. Small and gray-blue, not much taller than a fully grown pony. The reddish-orangish light from all the fire and lava reflected off of… scales?

As her eyes adjusted, Sunny made out a pair of wings wrapped around the creature, and a pair of pale white horns poking up from the creature’s head. It was a dragon.

“Excuse me?” Sunny said quietly, standing up and trying to look non-threatening.

The dragon gave a start at the sound of someone else in the cave, and when the creature lifted its head, Sunny saw that it was a girl, her eyes red and puffy, with a single pale white scale at the corner of each eye, like a tear. She wiped her eyes and curled up into a tighter ball, though Sunny could see her eyes peeking out between her wings. “Who are you?”

“My name’s Sunny,” the pony said, looking around for her friend. “My friend’s here too, and her name’s Imara.”

A column of light appeared in the center of the room, and one of the rocks was replaced by a changeling, who eyed the dragon with apprehension and mistrust. The dragon gave a yelp as a whole nother creature appeared out of seemingly nowhere and covered her mouth with her talons.

“What’s your name?” Sunny asked politely.

“Ash,” the dragon whispered so softly that Sunny had to strain to hear.

“It’s nice to meet you, Ash,” Sunny told her, slowly walking over to the dragon. “What are you doing in here?”

The dragon sniffled. “Hiding.”

“Hiding?” Imara demanded, taking a step forward and glaring at the creature. “Hiding from what?”

“Not a what,” Ash said, slowly relaxing her wings so that Sunny could see her better. “A who.” She took a deep breath. “I’m hiding from my father.”

“Why?” Sunny asked as Imara sniffed disbelievingly.

“I just had my molt,” Ash sniffed. “It’s a dragon thing,” she explained to Sunny and Imara’s confused expressions. “It’s when we get our wings, and it usually shows that we can go off on our own as big dragons now, so my father - m-my father kicked me out.”

The revelation made Ash’s eyes well up with tears, which splashed on the ground as she wailed and sobbed. The emotional display was enough to make Imara hesitate.

“I… I’m so sorry,” Sunny whispered, not knowing what to say. Her wings and horn appeared, and she put her golden wing around the shuddering creature. “If there’s anything I can do to help, I will, so don’t hesitate to ask-”

“Thanks,” the dragon warbled, “but I don’t think there is. E-every dragon gets thrown out eventually - it’s p-part of our c-culture. I-I just need to f-find a place to g-go now that he doesn’t want me a-anymore…”

“Can’t say I blame him,” Imara said conversationally, studying the weeping ball of scales in front of her. “I mean, aren’t dragons supposed to be tough?”

Ash’s tears increased tenfold, her wings shaking. Sunny glared at the changeling.

“What?” Imara said innocently, sitting down and studying the dragon with great interest. “I’m just being honest.”

“Honesty is not based off of rumors,” Sunny forced out through gritted teeth. “Ash, I hope it’s not too much to ask, but do you think you could give the other dragons? You see, we believe that the dragons have been told lies to-”

“Oh, I know all about that,” Ash sniffled, grateful that the conversation was taking a turn away from her. “I heard the whole thing. The ponies want to exterminate us all because they hate us, and they’re led by a super-scary pony named Sunny Starscout who united the pony tribes just to bring us down.” She looked at Sunny. “I think you’re her, and I don’t believe that for a second. I don’t believe anything that pegasus told us.”

“Wait, how did you hear about that?” Imara demanded, narrowing her eyes at the quivering dragon.

Ash winced, as if hoping it wouldn’t have had to come to this. “M-my father’s the dragon lord.” She took a deep breath, knowing that this next part was even harder for her to talk about. “A-and I can’t take a message back to the other dragons - I’ve been disgraced in f-front of the wh-whole tribe. M-my father t-told me that h-he was s-super disappointed i-in me, a-and that I would b-be lucky to find another h-home that would accept s-such a s-sniveling disappointment s-such as m-myself.”

“I’m sure he didn’t mean that,” Sunny stammered, but Ash shook her head.

“H-he did. Those were his exact words.”

“Well, I think differently,” Sunny said boldly. “I think you’re a wonderful dragon, and the other dragons should wish they were more like you. Being tough and scary isn’t the only way to live in this world.”

Ash dried the tears leaking out of her eyes and smiled at Sunny. “Th-thanks.”

“As a matter of fact,” Sunny went on, an idea coming to her, “we may be able to help you. You see, the pegasus filly who spoke to your father - her name is Cozy Glow, and everything she said was lies. But if our experience with the changelings is any indication, the dragons aren’t going to easily accept that, for whatever reason. And I’m not all too eager to repeat what happened there,” she added, with an empathetic nod from Imara. “So perhaps you could come with us.”

“R-really?” Ash sat up, looking intrigued. “Y-you mean it?”

“Yes,” Sunny said at the same time Imara shouted, “No!”

“We can’t bring her along!” the changeling protested as Sunny glared at her. “Just look at her! This lizard can’t even handle being thrown out of her own home - if we’re putting together a world-saving team, we need a different dragon - a fierce dragon. One who understands that the world is cruel sometimes and you gotta live with it. Hey, pipsqueak, I never had a home. I never knew my parents, and do you see me curled up in a cave, crying? No!”

“And that’s exactly what we need,” Sunny said in a quiet but sturdy voice. “Somepony who’s different - who’s caring and likes to see the best in ponies - and creatures. You were different from the other changelings because you wanted to change the world for the better so that no one would have to go through what you did. Look at her - she’s different from other dragons because she likes to believe in the best in others, putting her faith and trust in them to make the right choice! With you around, we need somepony like that!”

Imara opened and closed her mouth, at a loss for words. She finally glared at Ash, closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and forced a cheerful smile. “You’re right. Of course you’re right! You should definitely come, Ash! The more the merrier!”

Sunny offered the dragon her hoof and hauled her to her feet. “Come on. You’re one of us now.”

Ash wiped her eyes. “Where are you - we - going now? Please tell me it’s as far away from here as possible - I’m ready to leave this place behind for good.”

Pulling out her map, Sunny set it on a rock, and the other two creatures gathered around her. “Well, Mount Aris is southwest of us,” Sunny saw, tracing a path from the Dragon Lands to the mountain island. “Perhaps we should go there next and befriend some hippogriffs.”

“Hippogriffs?” Ash asked, pulling her wings in tighter, unable to disguise a slight tremor in her voice. “What are those?”

Imara laughed, light and airy, though Sunny felt the malice behind it. “Boy, you really don’t get out much, do you?” the changeling giggled lightheartedly, making Ash blush and wrap her arms around herself. “Hippogriffs are half pony, half eagle. We learned all about them in class.”

“And what did you learn about them?” Sunny asked, partially because she was curious, partially to defend her new friend.

The changeling thought for a while. “Not much,” she admitted, grinning. “Just what they are and how to turn into one. We learn about all kinds of creatures that way.”

“You can turn into one?” Ash asked, her eyes wide. “Woah.”

Imara was surrounded by a column of light, and when it cleared, there were two dragons in the cave. “You can turn into one?” Imara mimicked in a purposefully awful representation of Ash’s voice. “I can turn into anything, obviously. That’s what a changeling is.”

“Oh.” Ash frowned and averted her gaze to the ground. “Sorry. I didn’t know.”

“You don’t seem to know a lot of things,” Imara agreed in a scathing voice, turning back into herself.

“All right, every creature, enough!” Sunny snapped, leaping between the two and glaring at Imara. “I said enough, Imara, and I mean it. You leave Ash alone. She’s different from you, and if you can’t learn to respect others’ differences, then you can turn back around and go right back to your precious changeling kingdom if you’d like.”

The two held the glare for a while until Imara finally dropped her gaze. “You’re right. I’m sorry,” she said in a voice that told Sunny she meant it - at least for now. The changeling stole a glance at Ash. “I’ll try harder… next time.”

“You’d better,” Sunny growled. “Now, come on. We’re going to Mount Aris, and if either of you gets into another fight, you’ll end up in the ocean, and I will not feel bad about it.”
> Finding the Sun
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Night had fallen, and Zoom Zephyrwing had just been released from her post - but her day was far from over. Once she had checked in with her commander, the pegasus royal guard spread her wings and flew towards - not to the guard house - but to Maretime Bay. She had a mission and she was determined to complete it.

“Psst!”

Zoom skidded to a stop in midair and whirled around to see somepony hiding behind a dumpster in one of Zephyr Heights’ many alleyways, gesturing to her. Rolling her eyes, Zoom landed in the alleyway and trotted around to meet the pony.

“First of all,” she growled, “what are you doing here, Thunder?”

The green pegasus sighed and stepped forward so that the artificial light from the city glinted off his helmet. “How’d you know it was me?”

Zoom snorted. “Believe me, it was very easy. Now answer my question.”

Thunder grumbled, “I saw you leave, and I wanted to see what you were up to. And then I thought, you must be going after Sunny Starscout and her friends, and I wanted to come with.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I’m not doing anything of the sort,” she snapped. “Doing so without being given express permission from the commander would be treason. And I can’t leave the queen unprotected - who knows what those villains may be planning next? I was just going to do a quick lap of the city - make sure nothing suspicious is happening.”

She thought it sounded plausible enough to her ears, but Thunder clearly thought otherwise.

“I don’t think so,” he said, shifting his hooves. “You know I can tell when you’re lying. And you were given permission by the commander to search for Sunny - you and I chose to come back here. The offer never expired - you can still use that.”

Zoom scoffed, but she knew Thunder was right - though the fact that he had noticed made her feel a bit uncomfortable.

“Also,” he continued, now looking very proud of himself, “the queen won’t be unprotected. She has a very scary unicorn following her around everywhere.” Zoom snorted at the thought that Alphabittle could ever be considered scary. “Besides, there might not be a reason to protect the queen anymore.”

That caught Zoom’s attention. “What?” she snapped.

Thunder immediately wished he hadn’t said anything. “Um… I just… heard something. Last night, the queen and her unicorn friend were talking, and I was stationed nearby, so I… may or may not have accidentally overheard their conversation?”

“Do you have any idea how lucky you are?” Zoom snarled at him, and he flinched. “If the commander found out that you were eavesdropping on the queen, you’d be thrown out so fast it would make your head spin! I couldn’t-” She slammed her mouth shut before she could spew anything else. Publicly admitting that she would miss the silly green pegasus if he were thrown out of the guard was something she didn’t think she could ever find the courage to do.

“I didn’t mean to,” he mumbled. “I just sort of… was there.”

“Well?” Zoom snapped. “What was she saying? Is there anything we should be worried about? A new threat we need to protect her from?”

Thunder was silent. Finally he said, “I won’t tell you unless you tell me where you’re going and take me with you.”

A low growl built up in Zoom’s throat. Why had she taught this pony diplomacy and how to stand up for himself? It had brought her nothing but trouble ever since she’d bothered to get herself involved with other ponies.

And yet, whenever she saw him do it, a feeling of pride swelled up in her chest - just like it did now.

“Fine,” she finally agreed. Glancing around them, Zoom pulled Thunder further away from the lights and bustle of the city until they were completely enveloped in darkness. Lowering her voice, she hissed, “The earth ponies have built this device that can detect magic - like, lots and lots of magic. Including the magic in ponies… if they had a lot.”

Thunder’s eyes widened as he realized what she was saying. “So, if we got in there and figured out how it works…”

Zoom nodded, the light glinting off her helmet. “I could find Sunny and bring her back.”

“But you don’t have any clue how to work it,” Thunder guessed, and she wilted while glaring at him for spotting the one flaw in her plan. “And how would you even get in there? Breaking and entering is punishable by law, and I know for a fact that you do not have permission to break into earth pony technological facilities.”

“We’ll figure it out when we get there,” Zoom decided, spreading her wings. “You’re pretty good with tech - I’m sure you’ll find some way to make it work.”

The two guards took off into the sky, staying above the low clouds until they were well past the city limits, avoiding the spots that they knew were heavily guarded. As they flew towards the earth pony town of Maretime Bay, Zoom turned to Thunder. “So what did you hear the queen say?”

He flinched, as if hoping it wouldn’t have to come to this.

“Come on,” Zoom pleaded, “I brought you along, I told you what was going on. Now tell me, or by all the stars I am going to-”

“I think the queen’s going to run off to go find the princesses,” Thunder blurted.

Whatever Zoom had been expecting to hear, that was far from it. Her jaw dropped and her eyes went wide and for the first time in a long while, she dropped the formal posture she always carried with her everywhere. She only snapped out of it when Thunder took a picture. Shaking her head, she snarled, “Don’t you dare post that.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said innocently (and clearly sincerely, which, for some reason, made her even angrier). “But do you think she’d actually do it? Ditch everything just to see her daughters one last time?”

“You make it sound like they’re going to die,” Zoom said dryly. The very thought let loose a series of thoughts that she had trouble shooting down. I’m sure they’re fine.

“Not that,” Thunder said hurriedly. “But… Come on, Zoom, you’ve seen them with their friends. Do you really think they’d come skipping happily back to Zephyr Heights after this is all over when they could stay with them?”

“Their friends could come live here,” Zoom suggested, but even she knew it was a long shot. Deep within her, she knew Thunder was right. Pipp and Zipp had developed such a close bond with their friends that she knew they would never voluntarily leave them for anything else, even if their mother was here in Zephyr Heights.

The lights of Maretime Bay appeared in the distance, and Zoom focused on their mission. Some way, somehow, they had to find a way into the Canterlogic facility and gain access to what was most likely their most-protected piece of tech, and then figure out how it worked. Easier said than done.

She automatically began scanning the ground below them and directed Thunder to a small area hidden from prying eyes just outside the Canterlogic factory. She and her companion poked their heads out from the bush in which they were hiding, watching as everypony left for home.

Once the last ponies had cleared out, Zoom dashed out from behind the bush, snapped, “Now’s our chance!” to Thunder, and flew as fast as she could towards the doors… which shut and locked before she could reach them. “Oh, for the love of Haven!”

“Yeah… I didn’t think that was going to work,” Thunder supplied unhelpfully as he landed beside her. She glared at him.

“What are you doing?” came a stern voice, and the two guards turned to see two earth ponies staring at them, the larger stallion cowering behind the mare, both looking very familiar to Zoom. She squinted at them in the dark night until she came up with their names: Toots and Sweets. Sounding hopelessly cringy.

“Please don’t eat us!” Toots squeaked, ducking behind Sweets’ tail.

“Toots! Shush!” she told him, swishing her tail out of his reach before directing her gaze back to the guards. “What are you doing here? If you don’t give me a reason, I’m going to have to call security-”

“We were hoping to borrow something of yours,” Thunder said, and Zoom shoved him, hoping he would get the message to keep quiet. “What? It’s the truth,” he said instead, approaching the earth ponies. “Well, not really borrow, but we want to use something - to find a friend. Who’s lost. And we heard you had something that could be able to help with that?”

As she had been raised to believe that earth ponies weren’t exactly the brightest ponies, it took Zoom by great surprise when Sweets looked between her and Thunder with pursed lips and a concentrated look, seeming to put two and two together in her head. Her mouth dropped into a perfect O, and she whispered something into Toots’ ear. The chubby earth pony seemed to calm down somewhat.

“You’re looking for Sunny, aren’t you?” the pink earth pony said slowly, meeting Zoom’s eyes. “You’re the pony who asked me if the magic detector could detect extra-powerful ponies like Sunny - you want to use it to find her.”

Zoom shrugged. “More or less,” she said cautiously, not quite willing to let her guard down.

Toots and Sweets looked at each other and had a silent argument, which Sweets apparently won. She turned and marched up the road to the door to Canterlogic and pulled out a key, saying, “I’ve been wanting to do that myself for a while, but couldn’t quite figure out how. Maybe the two of you will have some luck. Follow me.”

It was eerily dark and quiet inside, and Thunder kept bumping into things - chairs, conveyor belts, white boards.

“Could you try to make a little less noise?” Zoom hissed at him right before she slammed into a tall, wide machine that was bigger than she was.

“Would you care to show me how?” Thunder asked innocently as Zoom massaged her muzzle.

She shot him a glare as Toots and Sweets snickered. “Whatever. Let’s just keep moving.”

The four ponies found the elevator and boarded, Sweets pressing the button that carried them down to the basement. The bottom floor was lit with an eerie red light that came from all the machines, and it was filled with a quiet beeping. The two earth ponies expertly led the way through the maze of machinery and to a door that Zoom recognized. Toots held his name tag to the door, and it made a beep before opening.

Sweets turned on the light and directed them over to the computers. “We can’t really search for anything specific,” she explained as she sat down and began pressing buttons. “We can just detect magical energy as it is emitted, and we have our sensors tuned to magic more powerful than the average pony. Liiike… that.” She pointed to the top of the map.

“That does not look good,” Thunder agreed, taking a step back nervously at the unnatural amount of red light coming from the northern mountains to show where lots of magic was being detected. “Maybe we should avoid that.”

“We haven’t seen anything that could be Sunny,” Toots agreed.

“Right.” Sweets started clicking around. “But I think I might be able to reprogram it to temporarily block out these readings so we can look for other things…”

There was silence as Sweets typed a few things and opened a few new files and did some crazy technology stuff that Zoom had no idea how to keep up with. Suddenly, the monitors went from a bunch of crazy lines to a single, red straight line, and the constant beeping that had been present in the room from the beginning was cut off.

“There,” the earth pony mare said in an exhausted voice. “That should do it.”

And so they waited. It must have been an hour when the beep finally came. The red line suddenly was reshaped into more up-and-down lines like a heart rate monitor, only these formed the shape of… stars?

“That’s it, that’s the other one we’ve been seeing,” Toots said excitedly. “It must be her!”

“Where’s it coming from?” Zoom demanded, and Sweets pressed a few more buttons and flipped a switch, looking expectantly at the map. And… nothing.

“That’s odd,” she said in a concerned voice, “this should show us where it’s coming from. Wherever Sunny is…”

Thunder finished Sweets’ thought: “She must be off the map.”
> Heart in Two Places
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mount Aris was easily the most beautiful place Sunny had seen so far - and from what she heard from Imara, the underwater palace of Seaquestria was even more beautiful than the elegant gray mountain above water. It was a little inaccessible for Ash and Sunny, but the changeling could transform into a seapony (which was basically an underwater hippogriff) and swim around to investigate.

The reports seemed mostly positive.

“They all seem pretty nice,” Imara was happy to tell Sunny. “And SOOO gullible. I told them I had been living on some coral reef out in the middle of the ocean for my entire life, and they totally bought it. Most of them live down in Seaquestria - they seem pretty paranoid, and from what I can tell, their ancestors had to hide down there from this guy who wanted to steal all their magic - but a few still live on the mountain, and oh my stars they are just the kind of small town community-helping creatures you would expect.”

“That seems like a good thing,” Ash carefully ventured. “I mean, they’ll talk to us without screaming and running away, right?”

Imara flipped onto her back in the water, still in her seapony form. “Yeah… I guess so,” she said, not meeting eyes with the dragon. Even though she hadn’t gotten into any arguments with Ash since the Dragon Lands, Sunny could tell that Imara didn’t like Ash - she thought she was weak.

“Do you think you could make a friend and bring them back here so we can chat?” Sunny said instead, studying Imara’s movements as she slipped around in the water. If only she could change into a seapony - but without a real one in front of her, she was finding it a lot harder to do than the time she turned into a changeling.

“Probably,” the seapony shrugged, turning back into a changeling and leaping onto the beach of their small island, shaking like a dog to rid herself of the salty water. Ash got doused.

“Hey!” she cried, wiping water out of her eyes and glaring at Imara.

“Oops. Sorry,” Imara said cheerfully.

The island that the three were camping on was just a small circle of sand with a grove of palm trees in the center that protected them from unwanted attention - and provided them with all the coconuts they could ever want. The water around the island was such a pure blue that Sunny almost couldn’t believe it existed - almost.

“So, where’re we going after this?” Imara continued, lying down in the sun and sighing as the warmth danced across her wings.

Sunny rolled her eyes - she had been asking that every day, eager to know what creatures they would meet next. Sunny pulled out the map and studied it, her lips pursed.

“I’m thinking the Peaks of Peril,” she suggested. “There’s these creatures called the kirin who live there, and they seem like they would listen to us, too. Don’t worry,” she said quickly, seeing Ash’s frightened expression. “It’s just a name - the Peaks are just hard to navigate, that’s all. But in here, the Guardians of Harmony wrote about a short-cut.”

“Short-cuts are good,” Ash agreed.

“There’s no short-cut in life,” Imara said, her eyes closed so that she didn’t see the dirty look that Sunny sent her.

“Anyway,” the earth pony continued, “we can’t leave until we find a hippogriff we can talk to.”

“You know, you could always just talk to me,” came a voice.

Sunny sighed. “Imara, you know that you’re not a real hippogriff-” she began, but when she turned to look at the changeling, she saw that Imara and Ash were both staring open-mouthed at something in the water. Sunny whipped her head around to see a seapony diving in and out of the waves, the sun reflecting off of her wet purple scales and curly aqua mane that hung over her shoulder in a ponytail. A necklace bounced on her chest - a small pink charm and two smaller blue beads on either side of it.

“Oh! Sorry,” Sunny said, scrambling to her hooves. “I - I didn’t see you there.”

The seapony sighed. “No, it’s okay. Most creatures don’t.” She leaped out of the water and was suddenly surrounded by a shimmering pink light that swirled around her, disappearing as she landed on the sand. She was no longer a seapony - now she had the hind legs of a pony, the front legs of an eagle, and a light purple coat that shifted into feathers at her hooves and claws.

“Woah.” Imara gaped at her. “H-how did you do that?”

The hippogriff’s bright purple eyes glinted mischievously. “Magic,” she said airly, pointing a claw at her necklace. “This is a piece of our magic pearl that turned us from hippogriffs to seaponies years ago to escape the Storm King. When he was defeated, we smashed the pearl to bits and gave each hippogriff a piece, allowing them to travel back and forth between worlds at will. I’m Kailani, by the way.” She smiled, satisfied, and sat down in the sand. “But! Enough about me. What brings you here?”

“I’m Sunny,” the earth pony explained, pointing to herself, and then each of her friends. “This is Ash, and Imara. We’re here because we think you’ve all been lied to.”

Kailani blinked. “Pardon?”

“What do you know about ponies?”

She shrugged. “Only what I’ve been told by my parents - which is that they’re a bunch of scheming masterminds who want to dominate the world and will stop at nothing to reach it - even eliminate us all.”

“And you believe that?”

It seemed to Sunny that this was a question that Kailani had been thinking about for a long time, and she still didn’t know the answer. “I… I’m not sure,” she admitted. “I mean, one one claw, my parents would never lie to me if they knew they were lies, but I find it all a little hard to believe.”

“Your parents were misinformed,” Sunny explained gently, “that’s all. This pony named Cozy Glow, a changeling named Chrysalis, and a centaur named Tirek have been going around spreading lies and rumors to get you to hate ponies and want to fight them. Then they’ll use that to weaken us and you, so that they can easily take over the world and divide it between the three of them.”

There was silence on the island as the hippogriff thought about this, fingering her necklace charm between her claws. “I… I know you’re telling the truth,” she finally said. “But I hope you can understand… It's a lot to take in.”

“Yup,” Imara agreed.

“But… what about every creature else? Are you going to tell them?”

Sunny winced. “I mean… perhaps you could? Our experiences with other creatures haven’t been exactly the best,” she told Kailani.

“Oh, no! I couldn’t!” she cried. “I never talk back to my parents - that would be wrong! I can’t tell them and every creature else that they’ve all been lying! Even if they didn’t know it, simply accusing them would be…” She shuddered. “I’m very sorry, but I… I can’t do it.”

“Wonderful,” Imara muttered, sinking back into the sand.

“But don’t you think that them believing the lies is worse than telling them that they are lies? Even if it does mean coming across as a little rude?” Sunny wheeleded. The hippogriff hesitated. “Look, Kailani, I know how hard it is to do something wrong in order to make something right - in fact, I had to go through the same thing.”

She looked up, her eyes sparkling with tears. “You did?”

Sunny grinned. “Yeah! To bring magic back, I thought I had to unite these two - and then I found out there were three - crystals that were spread across the three pony tribes. And to get the pegasus crystal… we had to steal it. Which then set off a chain of events that ended up with two of my friends under arrest and a queen stripped of her throne. But it all worked out… in the end.” Sunny thought for a moment. “And now, looking back, I don’t regret any moment of it.”

Kailani pushed her hair out of her face and took a deep breath. “I want to tell them the truth,” she whispered, obviously conflicted. “But that would mean breaking and sacrificing other things that I’m not sure I’m ready to do.”

“Look at me, Kailani.” Sunny gently set one of her hooves on the hippogriff’s claw. “Things will be a lot worse if the hippogriffs and seaponies continue to believe the lies instead of accepting the truth. Trust me when I say that the sacrifice will be worth it. And,” she added, “you could always come with us if you’d like.”

“Really?” Her entire face lit up, and Kailani beamed. “I suppose I have always wanted to see what the world is like outside of this place.” She took a deep breath and dived into the water, light swirling around her and turning her back into a seapony. She poked her head out of the water and spoke to Sunny. “I’ll be back at sunset… to let you know if it worked or not.” Then she dived into the waves and disappeared.

“Yeesh,” Imara said as soon as her tail slipped underwater, “what’s her problem? Doesn’t she see how important this is?”

“Of course she does,” Ash told her, sitting criss-cross in the sand, piling a mound over her claw as she spoke. The dragon sat back and shook the sand out of her wings. “Her heart’s torn - she doesn’t know what to uphold and what to sacrifice when there isn’t a clear answer - each side has its benefits.”

“But this is for the greater good,” Imara said in a slow voice, as if Ash was just a filly who didn’t speak Ponish very well. “Can’t she see that that is the choice you should always make?”

Ash pulled her claw free and shook the sand out from between her scales, saying, “Not always. Sometimes you need to put your family and your friends first. One of the hardest choices in life is knowing when or when not to do that.”

Imara huffed and fell silent, pushing sand into a mound in front of her nose as she glared at the pile.

The rest of the day passed excruciatingly slowly. Sunny tried to pass the time by writing in her father’s journal, but she found herself pacing the entire island as she waited for sunset. She wanted to ask Imara to revisit Seaquestria or Mount Aris to see if it had worked - heck, she wanted to dive into the waves and see if it had worked - but it was clear that the changeling was not in the mood.

Sunset came and went, and the land fell dark, the stars appearing in the sky next to the bright moon. Ash built a fire on the shore in case Kailani got lost, and Sunny lay down next to it, grateful for its warmth from the cold night.

“Are you okay, Sunny?” Ash asked, noticing her friend’s crestfallen face.

Sunny sighed. “I just… What if she’s not coming? What if she decided to… not do it?” She rubbed her eyes and took a deep breath to try and calm her thoughts. “I promised to try and tell all the creatures that they were being fed lies - but either none of them believe us, or they won’t listen to us.”

“You can’t control other creatures,” Ash shrugged, using a stick to poke at the fire. She turned to look at the sea, her expression focused. “There!”

A hippogriff was dragging herself out of the water, looking dejected and sad. The firelight caught her blue eyes, making the tears in them glitter. Kailani made it to the fire and sat down, not saying a word.

“Wha… what’s wrong?” Sunny asked tentatively, not sure she wanted to know.

The hippogriff took a deep breath. “They… didn’t believe me,” she began. “I tried to tell them nicely, too - but they said that as long as I didn’t have any evidence that they were being told lies, they weren’t going to believe me.”

“And?” Ash gently pressed. Sunny stole a quick glance at Imara and saw that the changeling had lifted her head and was listening intently.

“And… I told them that a pony had told me herself, and they didn’t believe you because you were a pony. And then I… then I snapped. I told them that we weren’t really happy hiding from the rest of the world, and that we would never know anything until we left our kingdom and went to find other creatures. I told them that none of them wanted us gone, and that was the truth, and if they didn’t believe it, then… then maybe… maybe they should… maybe they should start lying to every creature else, too.” The tears in Kailani’s eyes spilled down her cheeks and made dark spots in the sand. “Then they would be just like them.” She was sobbing now. “A-and my p-parents t-told me th-that if I c-couldn’t learn to sp-speak respectfully to others, m-maybe I should just g-go away.”

“Oh, Kailani…” Sunny whispered. Ash put her wing around the shuddering hippogriff. “I never would have asked you to do that if I knew-”

“I know,” she cried. “I know you wouldn’t have.” She took a deep breath and dried her tears. “But I still want to come with you. Other creatures need to know the truth, too, and I want to help with that.” She lifted her head, as if daring Sunny to say no.

Sunny grinned and threw her arms around the hippogriff. “Thank you, so much,” she whispered. Then, her other friends, she said, “We leave at dawn.”
> Adventure Calls
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

There was a change in the air. Perhaps it was being a pegasus and having ties to the weather, but as Queen Haven stood on her balcony in her private chambers, watching the sun rise over her city, a breeze blew in from the north, and she shivered - but not just from cold.

Something else was causing her discomfort, but she couldn’t quite place her hoof on it.

Like darkness stirring right in front of her eyes, but she couldn’t see until it was too late, and then it would suddenly burst out in all of its horridness, and she wouldn’t be able to do anything about it-

A knock on the door jolted her out of her trance. She called, “Come in,” and turned to see Alphabittle poke his head inside.

“Yup,” he decided, “something’s up.” She sighed - she had stopped trying to hide things from him ever since he had told her that he could read her expressions. Taking it as confirmation, the unicorn trotted up to stand next to her, wearing a very satisfied and smug smile. “Spill.”

“Do you feel that?”

“Feel what?” He studied the city in front of them, though nothing stood out. “The breeze?”

“No…” She shivered. “Something else. Something… dark.”

“It’s morning.”

“I know,” she huffed, “but this is something else. Some sixth sense is telling me that something’s wrong - and that we have to do something about it before it gets too late.”

“Is it about Zipp and Pipp?”

She flinched. “No,” she moaned, “but I wish it was - I wish that I knew something about them. Anything would be welcome at this point. I don’t want to hurt myself by daring to hope that they’re alive and well if they’re really… not.”

“Ah.” Alphabittle frowned. “What exactly are you feeling?”

She shrugged and opened one of her wings, letting the wind sift through her feathers for about a minute before folding it up again. “A lack of balance. Like a scale’s been tipped. Something is out there that shouldn’t be - a lot of somethings.”

“You mean those villains?” the unicorn demanded, his horn unintentionally lighting. “Are they planning an attack?”

Haven rolled her eyes at him. “No, I’m sure they’re perfectly peaceful young ponies who’re just going to sit around and have tea parties. Of course they’re planning an attack of some sort - and all we can do is be ready for it.” She let out a frustrated growl. “Which is why it would be easier to not have this little thing called the law right now. My gut is telling me that we need to prepare for an attack from the worst magical villains we’ve ever seen, but the law says that we have to have probable cause and all this other stuff before we take any drastic measures - and with all available troops out looking for Sunny, I can hardly even tighten security on the city.”

“There do seem to be less guards in the palace,” Alphabittle noticed, looking back to the door in which he had come, where only a single guard stood in the hallway.

Haven nodded. “I’d sleep better knowing that my citizens are safe rather than I alone am safe.”

“Wish we could go to a place where the law wasn’t standing in the way,” Alphabittle commented, giving Haven a sideways look.

She sighed. “Soon. Just as soon as I figure out what this new tip in the scale is.”

“Is it a tip in light and darkness?” Alphabittle suggested, the sunrise temporarily blinding him as he looked over the glittering city of Zephyr Heights, going over what the queen had said in his mind.

Haven gave a start. “Yes… yes, that’s it!” Her face fell as she realized what it meant. “Only…”

“Only what?” Alphabittle demanded.

Haven sighed. “Only it’s a shift in favor of the darkness. These three villains that we know of… and somepony we don’t.”

“That evil thing up in the mountains?” the unicorn suggested.

The queen thought. “No… though he is part of it. There’s somepony else in this equation… but we don’t know who they are.” She shook herself. “Either way, there’s far too much darkness in the world right now - what we really need are the ponies that can find the light.” She lowered her head.

“And they’re all wanted for treason,” Alphabittle finished with a heavy heart.

She nodded miserably. “I wish I could be more like them,” she whispered, the pain in her voice clear and evident. “I don’t know if I should leave or not anymore - maybe if I could find the little hope and light left in the world, I could share it with my subjects.”

He pulled her in for a hug. “Just having you here should be enough to give them hope,” he told her. “And there will always be the ponies who find the light - you can’t blame yourself if they chose not to.”

She smiled and leaned her head on his shoulder. In that moment, the scale balanced out again - the darkness was level with the light and hope. And that was enough for her.

Somewhere deep inside her, she knew that her daughters needed her help, and she was going to give it to them - no matter what it cost her. She had to see them again - she had to say good-bye, she had to make sure that they knew that she loved them - she loved them more than anything in the world.

Well, almost anything, she thought ruefully to herself, stealing a sideways glance at Alphabittle.

The door suddenly burst open, interrupting her train of thought and forcing her to turn around, Alphabittle along with her. Standing in the doorway was a slightly disheveled pink earth pony mare with a golden curly mane that was piled on top of her head. She wore a pair of pink cat-eye glasses, and her blue eyes were full of worry and lined with dark circles. On her back she wore a pack and other supplies, making it very clear that she wasn’t just on a quick little trip from Maretime Bay to Zephyr Heights and back again - she was going somewhere that she would not be coming back from for a while.

Haven breathed a sigh of relief. “Phyllis. Thank hoofness.” She turned to the guard who was standing just behind the earth pony, preparing to arrest her if necessary. “Thank you, sir, but we’re all good here.”

The guard nodded and ducked out of the frame, closing the door behind him. Haven redirected her attention back to the earth pony as she walked further into the room. “What’s going on?”

Phyllis Cloverleaf halted before the other two leaders and took a deep breath. “Last night, two of my employees stayed after hours to use some of the equipment for their own purposes… with two of your royal guards.”

The queen gaped. “What? Where are they now?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. They disappeared - left before sunrise.” She rubbed her chin. “Maybe they’re the ones who set up the lights…”

“Lights? What lights?” Alphabittle demanded.

“Somepony left on an old lamp of Sunny Starscout’s in the top of her lighthouse so that the light goes everywhere,” Phyllis explained. “I’ve been meaning to get somepony to go turn it off, but it’s become sort of nice after a while.”

“So… what are you saying?” Haven asked, glancing at the pack on Phyllis’ back and putting the answer together in her head.

Phyllis looked around to make sure there were no eavesdroppers and pulled the pegasus and unicorn aside to whisper into their ears: “I think it’s time we go looking for Sunny’s friends. Some sixth sense is telling me-”

Haven gasped. “You felt it, too?”

The earth pony tilted her head. “Felt… what?”

“Some scale’s been tipped,” Alphabittle explained arily, waving a hoof. “It’s no big deal - like, I can’t feel it, either, if that makes you feel better.”

Haven thwacked him with her wing. “It is a big deal, you giant feather brain,” she scolded him.

Phyllis watched the exchange and blinked, confused. Something told her that there was more going on with those two than just improving political relationships with the other tribes. She shook her head, getting back to the topic at hoof. “Anyway, something’s telling me that our kids are in danger, and I can’t just sit back and do nothing - I have to go find them. Whether you’re coming with me or not.”

“Of course we’re coming,” Haven told her, glancing at Alphabittle. “Just give us a while to get some supplies together.” Phyllis nodded and stood by the door while the other two rulers raced around, grabbing essentials. When they all relocated by the door, it was halfway through the morning already. Haven could feel her adrenaline building - it was happening, it was happening, she was going to go find her daughters, she was going to see her fillies again - and she pranced her hooves nervously, anxious to go.

“That should be everything,” Alphabittle muttered to himself, lowering the flap of his pack and turning to the others. “So where should we head first?”

Haven opened her mouth, about to make a suggestion, when there was a knock on the door, and a pony entered the room, staring at a stack of papers he was holding, saying, “Your Majesty, sorry to interrupt, but you need to-” The stallion paused, looking up and seeing the other leaders there. “Oh.”

“Quite all right, Helios,” she said politely, turning so that she was facing the bright yellow pegasus, his wings fading into an orange that matched his mane at the tips. “What can I do for you?”

“I-I just need you to sign this,” he stammered, thrusting out a form and a pen. “It’s a summons for a Council of the Affected - we assume you would want to put some form of new law into place, given the circumstances of this unique situation.”

As Haven looked at the form, she had to warring voices in her head - on one hoof, she could stay and change the law right here from the comfort of her own palace, she could make a law that would keep her daughters safe and bring them back to her! But on the other hoof, she knew she wouldn’t be fixing the law for most of it - she would likely just be stuck here for months on end, listening to ponies argue, when she could be searching for her daughters.

“Thank you, Helios, but I’m afraid the Council will have to wait until I return,” she said calmly, pushing the form back towards the pegasus. His brown eyes widened in surprise.

“Return? Are you… going somewhere?” He looked behind her and took in the sight of Phyllis and Alphabittle, all wearing full packs. “With… them?”

“Oh, it’s just a little camping trip,” Haven laughed, trying to make light of the situation while also desperately trying to find a plausible lie in her panicked mind. “Alphabittle knows of some ancient ruins in the forest that he wanted to show us - he thought they might hold some information on our current dilemma.” She sighed and looked down. “Of course, under normal circumstances, my daughters would most likely be carrying out this task, but as they have disappeared, I’m afraid it falls to me.”

“Of course,” Helios stammered, stepping to the side. “Forgive me, Your Highness, I did not - I hope you have an enjoyable time.”

“Thank you,” she said as Phyllis and Alphabittle proceeded to the door. She stopped. “Actually, Helios, there is something I need you to do.”

He snapped to attention. “Anything, my queen!”

“Could you please watch over the city for me while I’m gone? You’ve always been so loyal to me, it would bring me such peace to know that Zephyr Heights was left in your capable hooves. Just try not to change it so much that we don’t recognize it when we come back,” she added teasingly.

“Of course!” Helios bowed and scurried from the room. “Thank you, Your Majesty!”

Haven sighed and turned to her fellow leaders. “Well,” she said, “adventure calls.” And she led the way down the hall and out of the castle.
> Prisoner Again
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

“This is the worst,” Imara groaned. “I officially hate it.”

“You’ve said that about everywhere we go!” Sunny protested, nudging her and trying to be cheerful - and failing. “Come on, just give it a chance?”

The changeling groaned and dragged herself off the rock she was currently napping on, looking out of the mouth of the cave to the pouring rain storm outside. “Let’s see. Think positive. What do I like about this place?” She frowned, pretending to carefully study the terrain. “Well. The numerous amounts of cacti are just lovely. The bare desert really adds a feeling of home. And, to top it all off, we haven’t seen a single living creature yet! And we’re stuck here for stars know how long until this clears up.”

Sunny sighed. “Well, at least you gave it your best.”

“I like it,” Kailani supplied from the back, where she was huddled against the cave wall, next to Ash, who was maintaining the small fire - they didn’t want to attract any more attention than necessary. She shivered and wrapped her wings tighter around herself. “At least, when it wasn’t raining. When it was sunny out - that big, blue, open sky without a cloud in sight, and there was nothing holding me down and I could just fly away, fly as far as I wanted to without stopping…” She let out a contented sigh. “Paradise.”

“The heat didn’t bother me at all,” Ash offered. “In fact, it wasn’t anything more than what I was used to. I think you’re just determined not to like anywhere else other than your kingdom.”

“Can you blame me?” Imara waved her hoof at the downpour. “My kingdom was never like this!”

“We aren’t in your kingdom,” Sunny reminded her, looking up from the map she was studying, trying to pinpoint their location. “You said that you always wanted to see what life was like outside the hive - what kinds of places you would see. Well, this is it. This is the rest of the world - take it or leave it.”

Imara shrugged and stalked back over to her rock. “I honestly thought the rest of the world would also be like one big hive - and now that I know it’s not, I guess I’m not sure what to think.” She turned to Kailani. “I did like Mount Aris, though. Nice to be somewhere where shapeshifting isn’t something that makes creatures scream.”

“Other creatures haven’t seen magical transformations like you and I have,” Kailani said quietly, standing up and walking over to Sunny. “They’re just not used to it. Whatcha got there, Sunny?”

The earth pony looked up, startled. “Oh… it’s just my father’s journal. He recorded all of his findings in here - and when he… disappeared, I took it and kept going.” She laughed. “Most of it was just me writing down the questions I would ask a unicorn or a pegasus if they ever turned up on my front doorstep.”

“Why not changelings?” Imara asked, looking offended. “What’s wrong with us?”

Sunny laughed. “Nothing, I just hadn’t heard of you yet.” She pulled out her other journal and set it on the cave floor. “But that changed when I found… this.”

Kailani picked up the book and flipped through it, skimming passages. She stopped on a page about hippogriffs, and from the little she could see of it, Sunny knew that it was the entry that three little fillies named Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and Scootaloo - the Cutie Mark Crusaders, they liked to call themselves - had been called by the cutie map (which was the magical map inside Princess Twilight Sparkle’s castle - apparently it could call certain ponies to anywhere in the world to solve a friendship problem) to Mount Aris to help a hippogriff named Terramar, who couldn’t decide if he wanted to live above the sea or below it.

“Where did you find that?” Imara asked, taking the book from Kailani as she passed it to her. The changeling flipped a couple pages back, looking for something about changelings. “Woah, it talks about King Thorax in here!” She grinned. “We always learned that he was a peaceful king - he wanted to be friends with the world instead of hiding from it.”

Sunny laughed. “Now, that is a philosophy I can live behind,” she said, “and to answer your question, Imara, I found it in this abandoned airstation in Zephyr Heights that my ancestor built to try and get the three pony tribes to reunite. She and her friends wrote that journal and published hundreds of copies so that every creature could learn about the power of friendship, even if they didn’t come to their school.”

“It’s amazing,” Kailani whispered. “Like… even though they’re gone, the spirits of the past are still here, guiding us and helping us along the way.”

“Did you hear that?” Ash said suddenly, leaping to her feet and shaking her head as if there was water in her ears.

Sunny stopped. “Hear what?” She cautiously slipped her father’s journal back into her bag and stood up, looking around apprehensively. Kailani and Imara did the same, Kailani taking the Journal of Friendship and hugging it against her chest.

After several tense moments, Imara laughed. “You silly dragon,” she giggled, “there’s nothing out here but rain and-”

The rest of her sentence was cut off, and Imara dropped to the ground, out cold, a small dart protruding from her neck, the end tipped with bright red, black, and white feathers. Before Kailani had a chance to react, she was shot, too, and collapsed as well. Sunny whirled in a circle, trying to see who was shooting at them, and something grazed her hoof, she looked down and saw that the dart had skimmed her leg, and while she now felt sleepy, she didn’t drop to the floor as quickly as the others.

“Ash?” Sunny murmured, stumbling towards the dragon. “Go get-” Her hooves gave out from under her before she could finish. As her eyes closed, Sunny saw large, dark creatures run into the cave and surround Ash before she blacked out.





“Ugh…”

Sunny staggered to her hooves, still a little woozy. Those darts must’ve held a tranquilizer, she thought ruefully. Whoever had been using them was smart. As her foggy mind began working again, she remembered another time when she had been knocked out cold - and had woken up to find her friends’ memories of each other being erased.

Panic set in, and she whirled around in a circle, trying to get her bearings. She was standing in what looked like a… tent? Several poles spread out in a circle connected at the top, and several large pelts were draped over the poles, keeping out the elements.

Her friends were there - Imara and Kailani in the back of the hut, sleeping soundly… and Ash was nowhere to be seen.

“Ash?” Sunny called, and when there was no response, she tried again, but louder. “Ash?!?”

Once again, no response. Sunny took deep, calming breaths to keep the tears from forming, trying to convince herself that, wherever the dragon was, she would be safe.

“Where are we?” Sunny whispered to herself.

“You’re in Appleoosa territory.”

Sunny turned to see that a creature had entered the tent, smaller than a pony, with an arched back and thin, long legs. She had a black coat and a straight gray mane, and she was wearing a headband with two feathers sticking out of it. Her wide eyes were the color of the sky, and she walked like she was used to hanging out in the shadows.

“Who are you?” Sunny asked, tilting her head at the creature. “And, I hope this doesn’t sound rude, but what are you?”

“My name’s Little Braveheart, and I’m a buffalo,” she whispered. “And you’re Sunny Starscout.”

“I am.” Sunny studied the buffalo and decided that she didn’t appear to be much of a threat. “How do you know my name? Have you also been told that I want to lead the ponies to eliminate and exterminate all non-ponies?”

“No,” Little Braveheart said, shaking her head and looking horrified. “Do you?”

“Nah.” Sunny grinned. “It’s much easier to just enslave them. That was a joke,” she added, seeing Little Braveheart’s eyes widen. “I don’t want to hurt any creature - in fact, I want to stop other creatures from hurting us, too.” She turned and looked at her friends, still peacefully sleeping. “Are my friends going to be okay?”

Little Braveheart nodded. “The tranquilizer only lasts a little while - they should be waking up soon,” she explained. “You must understand, it’s much easier to bring trespassers in this way-”

“Woah, woah, wait.” Sunny held up a hoof. “Trespassers? We’re not trespassers.”

“We found you hiding in one of our caves,” Little Braveheart informed her. “You’re complete strangers on our land. That makes you a trespasser.”

Sunny opened her mouth to speak, but found that words had temporarily failed her. “Okay, yeah, I can see why that would make us look guilty, but we’re just passing through - honest! The only reason we were there was to take shelter from that storm. Please, just let us go, and we’ll be out of your manes before you know it-”

“I’m sorry,” Little Braveheart said, lowering her head. “But I can’t do that.”

Sunny sighed. “Can you at least tell us where Ash is? She’s my friend - a dragon - about yea tall with blueish gray scales? Any idea?”

“My father’s talking to her right now,” Little Braveheart said. “We have great respect for dragons-”

“Urgh…” muttered Imara as she blinked her eyes open. “Wha… where are we?”

“Buffalo territory,” Sunny told her, reaching out a hoof to help haul her friend to her hooves. “They say we’ve been trespassing. But apparently the Legion of Doom skipped them.”

“Legion of Doom?” Little Braveheart frowned. “Who’s that?”

“A group of villains,” Sunny explained, “made up of a pegasus filly named Cozy Glow, a former changeling queen named Chrysalis, and a magic-stealing centaur named Tirek. They want to rule Equestria, so they’ve been spreading lies to all the other tribes about how the ponies want to exterminate them all, so that the other tribes will want to fight the ponies, and once the ponies have been beaten and the other creatures exhausted, the Legion of Doom will take over and carve the world into their own kingdoms.

“But they might not even get that far, because they’re working with two other ponies who I’m not exactly on the greatest terms with - I saved the world from their evil schemes, if you’re wondering - and from what I picked up when I was their prisoner, they might stab Chrysalis, Tirek, and Cozy in the backs and take Equestria from them. So me and my friends here are trying to stop them.”

“That’s right,” said Kailani, standing up and wobbling a bit on her feet. “Woah… I’m good now.”

Little Braveheart hesitated. “That seems… very important.” She glanced behind her, out the tent flap. “I suppose, maybe you should go save the world… and then we can arrest you for trespassing-”

A roar suddenly rose up, and all the creatures jumped. A stampede of buffalo, all larger than Little Braveheart, their shaggy hair in different shades of brown and black, all with war paint on their faces and feathers in their manes, were running towards their tent, shoving the tiny buffalo out of the way and seizing Sunny, Imara, and Kailani. They dragged them outside, and Sunny saw that they were in a large camp, with many tents like the one she just came from in a circle around a fire.

“Destroy the trespassers!” boomed the largest buffalo of all, standing off to the side and holding back Ash as she tried to intervene. “Especially the pony - before she can obliterate us all!”

Little Braveheart tried to stop them, but at every attempt, she just got knocked out of the way. Seeing her being pushed around like that, Sunny felt herself growing angry, felt her wings and horn appear, felt a new kind of power flowing through her veins, heard herself roaring with anger, the buffalo holding her dropping her, but she didn’t fall to the ground, she spread her rainbow wings and lit up her horn, her mane flowing freely though there was no wind. Her eye glowed white, and in her head, admitst all the magic, Sunny heard a tiny, familiar voice say, Aha.

“Sunny?” Imara scrambled off the ground, her jaw dropping at the sight of her friend. “Woah.”

There was a blast of white light so bright that all the buffalo in the camp were blinded, and when it cleared, Sunny and her friends were gone.
> Back to the Forest
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Are we lost?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are we?”

“I don’t know!”

“That means we’re lost, right?”

Jinx Evergreen groaned, rolled up the map with her magic, and gave Rose Blossom a playful whack on the head - but enough for the earth pony foal to know how she felt. “The map is being very confusing!” the unicorn said in a loud voice. “I can’t figure it out!”

“Here, let me,” Lofty Skies offered, soaring down and scooping the map from Jinx as the unicorn let out a disgruntled “Hey!” The pegasus flew high above the trees and studied the land for landmarks. “Let’s see, Zephyr Heights is there, which means that Old Ponyville is… there!”

The pegasus filly swooped down to her friends and pointed in the other direction they were heading. “It’s this way, guys!”

“Are you sure?” Rose Blossom called back up.

“Positive!” Lofty Skies grinned. “Old Ponyville’s just south of the mountain, right? Well, if the mountain’s right there, then Old Ponyville is right there.” She pointed through the dense trees of the Everfree Forest. “Come on! If we hurry, we can get there before dark!”

“Well, I am not spending another night by ourselves in these woods,” Jinx agreed. “Let’s go find our friends!”

The Crusaders of Harmony were trekking through the Everfree Forest, intent on finding Old Ponyville and the creatures that lived there. They wanted to go after Sunny Starscout and her friends, as all the Crusaders had a feeling that they were connected to their quest somehow, but had no idea where to start. So they began where their last quest did - in Old Ponyville. But so far, they had spent three days in the forest with no sign of their old comrades.

“It has to be around here somewhere,” Jinx muttered to herself, alternating between looking at the map and studying their surroundings. She glanced down at the map that she had borrowed (read: stolen) from the Tree of Harmony’s library, but the problem was that it was at least a century out of date, which meant that, for all she knew, they could be going in circles.

She was so focused on the map that she ran headfirst into a tree.

“OW!” she cried, stumbling back and rubbing her forehead where her horn was. “That hurt!”

“Are you okay?” Rose Blossom asked, running up to her friend and making sure the unicorn was alright. When Jinx Evergreen assured her friend that she was fine, Rose bent down and picked up the map that the unicorn had dropped. “You need to look up more, especially in a forest like this!”

“Something tells me at least one of us would have run into that,” Lofty Skies said from above, pointing to the tree that Jinx had run into. Her two friends followed her gaze. “I mean, it’s not exactly tiny or anything.”

The tree in question was massive - it was the size of a house. But unlike the Tree of Harmony, it looked completely normal - normal color, normal leaves, normal everything. Except…

Jinx stepped forward and brushed the vines off of an object that caught her eye and leaped back with a yelp of terror. Staring back at her was some kind of mask - wooden and brightly painted, it looked like an elongated pony face, with holes for the eyes and mouth, even. The places that the vines had covered it were well-preserved - the color stood out as if it had been painted yesterday. For the rest of the mask, the elements had clearly worn down the color, so even though the plants had been brushed away, Jinx could still see where they used to be.

“What?” Lofty Skies demanded, diving to the ground and landing - too much action was happening down there for her not to be a part of it. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” Jinx peeped, her voice an octave higher than usual. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Just… that.”

Of course, the pegasus loved the creepy mask. “Cool!” she said with a grin. “And, look, there’s another one over there! And over there! And look at this-” she hefted up a huge ceramic pot “-it has more of those drawn on it!”

“Lofty, be careful! Don’t drop-”

“Woah!” The heavy pot slipped from the filly’s arms and headed towards the ground at a frightening speed. Lofty Skies swiped for it in vain, and it shattered upon impact with a large stone.

“LOFTY!!!” Jinx and Rose shouted together.

“Woops.” The pegasus blushed and rubbed the back of her neck. “Heh-heh. Guess I should be more careful next time?”

“You guess?” Rose Blossom exclaimed.

“Let’s not have there be a next time,” Jinx Evergreen suggested, and her earth pony friend nodded in agreement. “In fact, let’s not touch anything remotely breakable.”

Lofty Skies huffed. “Fine. Oo, look, a door!”

“Lofty! What did we literally just talk-” Rose started, but the pegasus had already landed and was pushing the door open before she could finish. She darted inside the dark interior as Rose and Jinx ran towards the door, studying it.

“There’s another one of those creepy masks on the door!” Jinx whispered to Rose, trembling. “What if it’s some monster’s nest, and they lure ponies in and then eat them?”

“You are way too superstitious, you know that, right?” Rose said, though she, too, was scared.

“You don’t know the stories we’ve been told about this part of the woods!” Jinx protested. “There’s supposed to be all kinds of beasts - giant bears, pony-eating crocodiles, magic-stealing pegasi-”

“What about a friendly face?” said a familiar voice behind them. The two foals turned and gasped.

“Midge!” they cried at the same time, running up to hug the yellow and green changeling.

“What are you doing here?” Rose asked.

“It’s so good to see you!” Jinx said at the same time. “Do you know what that hut is? It’s really creepy, and Lofty went inside, and she hasn’t come out, and-”

“Hey, guys!” The pegasus appeared in the doorway, grinning. “Did you know this tree is hollow inside?” She said it like it was the most amazing thing in the world, as if she and the other Crusaders hadn’t literally just been to another hollow giant tree that was also magic.

“Hm.” Midge gently pushed Jinx and Rose aside as he approached the tree. “So that’s where this ended up.”

“Huh?” Jinx leaped to trot alongside him, Rose Blossom beside her. “What do you mean? What is it? Why does it have all those scary masks? Is it some kind of… of… demonic summoning ritual sight?”

The changeling laughed. “No, it’s none of those,” he assured the fillies. “This is - was - Zecora’s hut.”

“Who?” all three fillies said at the same time.

Midge stepped inside, and the Crusaders followed close behind. “Zecora was a sort of… doctor, I guess you could say. She dabbled in potion-making and discovered the power nature had on all kinds of creatures - with both good and bad results. She was a zebra that had moved here a long time ago, and she lived in the Everfree Forest where she had access to all the plants she could ever want. She would occasionally come into Ponyville, I’m told, but when magic disappeared and the town was evacuated to escape the growing forest, Zecora refused to leave her home.” Midge walked around the circular room as he spoke. Now he stopped to brush a thick layer of dust off of the cover of a book. “I had always wondered what happened to her.”

“Clearly nothing good,” Lofty Skies spoke up, her voice much louder than Midge’s, causing her friends to jump. “I mean, look at the state of this place!”

“Look at the state of Old Ponyville,” Rose Blossom contradicted.

The pegasus fell silent. “Fair point.” She looked at Midge as the changeling fiddled with something in the middle of the room. “What do you think happened, Midge?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. There was a pop, and suddenly the room was filled with a warm, golden glow as Midge activated a fire in the center of the tree, sitting underneath an enormous black cauldron that must have been filled with something that evaporated long ago. “There we go!”

“Wow,” Jinx whispered, walking around the room, her eyes wide with wonder. “This isn’t a demonic summoning ritual site after all!”

Midge chuckled.

The walls of the tree were lined with wooden shelves stocked with every kind of plant you could imagine, most of them stored in dusty bottles with faded labels on them that must say what kind of plant they were, though a few were sitting out in the open, crumbling to dust when the unicorn filly so much as brushed them. There were tiny stone bowls and weird rocks that sat in the bowls, fitting inside them perfectly, and several books, all caked in dust, but when Jinx brushed off the covers, she found that they were all books about how to use the forest to your advantage, what kinds of cures and potions you could make from them.

“This is so cool,” the unicorn whispered.

“You’re welcome for finding it,” Lofty Skies offered, tossing her head with a smug look that quickly faded when Rose Blossom playfully shoved her.

“Just imagine the kinds of things we could come up with!”

“Uh, Jinx? I hate to spoil the moment for you, but maybe we should ask about the real reason we came?” Rose intervened, gently steering her friend away from the shelves. “We can look at all the cool potion stuff later.”

The unicorn sighed. “You’re right. Midge, we’re looking for Sunny Starscout’s friends. They’re apparently wanted for treason - we’re not sure why - and Lofty saw them just a few days ago in Maretime Bay, and we think they’re up to something. But we don’t know where to start, so we were wondering if you could point us in the right direction?”

Midge looked uncomfortable. “You’re looking for the new Guardians of Harmony?”

“Woah, they get a fancy title, too?” Lofty Skies shook her head sadly. “Shame nopony knows ours. We’re the Crusaders of Harmony - I think it sounds cooler. We don’t just guard things, we take action.”

“You’ll want to be careful,” Midge warned them. “What Sunny Starscout and her friends are dealing with isn’t something you want to get involved in-”

“We have to,” Lofty Skies persisted. “We’re connected to it all somehow - we can feel it! And if you won’t help us, then we’ll just wander around until we do find them.” She lifted her head, a mischievous glint in her eyes because she had him right where she wanted him. There was only one thing left to do, and Midge knew it.

He sighed. “All right, fine. We haven’t seen Sunny Starscout or her friends in a while… and we’ve been unable to go looking for them ourselves.”

“Why?” Rose Blossom asked, looking concerned. “Is something wrong?”

The changeling sighed. “You could say that,” he said miserably. “All the creatures in the forest - they’ve lost their magic. It’s been stolen by a centaur named Tirek - one of the villains that Sunny Starscout is trying to defeat. I can’t shapeshift anymore - so we’re stuck here. But I saw where Tirek went - he went southeast. I think his hideout’s down there somewhere. But promise me you’ll be careful,” Midge added, a pleading look on his face. “If something happens to you, I’ll never forgive myself.”

“We promise,” Jinx said, and Rose nodded.

“Geez, Midge, you sound like my dad,” Lofty Skies moaned, rolling her eyes. “But we’ll do our best to stay out of trouble. We’ll answer the call of fate and come right back here to tell you how it went.”

Rose Blossom hugged the changeling. “I wish you could come with us,” she whispered, her voice thick. “We don’t think you’re a freak or anything.”

He smiled bittersweetly and stroked her mane. “I’m sorry, my little ponies,” he said. “But I’m not quite sure I’m ready to face the world yet. Maybe someday.”

The Crusaders nodded, and then they were all hugging him, wrapping their arms around him, and then he was gently pushing them away, saying, “You best be on your way. Unless… you’re having second thoughts and want to stay here a little longer?”

Lofty Skies wiped the tears from her eyes and shook her head. “We wish we could, but…” She swallowed. “Come on, guys. Goodbye, Midge. We’ll come back soon - we promise.”
> Perilous Silence
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Sunny?”

She groaned and blinked open her eyes. She was lying half-submerged in a river, the cool water refreshing and a welcome change after the desert. She felt surprisingly calm after escaping from the buffalo camp - all her feelings of anger had disappeared. It was a welcome contrast.

Sunny got to her hooves and stood up, water dripping from her coat, and she shook herself off, getting rid of the excess water. She blinked and looked around.

She was standing on the bank of a river that came from a waterfall, though it surprisingly made no sound. Surrounding her were her friends: Imara, Ash, and Kailani. And Little Braveheart. The tiny buffalo looked absolutely terrified at the fact that she was nowhere near her home - she may as well have been on the other side of the world.

“Where are we?” Sunny tried to say, but no sound came out of her mouth. She covered her mouth with her hoof. She didn’t feel very different. In fact, she didn’t feel at all. She opened her mouth, and absolutely no sound came out.

“Oh, no,” Imara groaned. “Not you, too!”

Sunny furiously wrote in the dirt with her hoof. What’s going on?

“I don’t know!” Imara wailed, sinking to the ground. “You went all magicky back at the buffalo place, and then we appeared here, and Little Braveheart landed in the water, and she couldn’t swim, so Kailani went in after her, and now they both can’t talk, and you were also in the water, so now you can’t talk, and the river has stolen your voice somehow!”

Sunny gaped and turned to her other friends for assurance that this was not the case. Both Kailani and Little Braveheart shrugged, their expressions blank.

Oh, no, Sunny thought, but, strangely, it didn’t come with the rush of panic she’d thought it would. She still felt that blissful calm feeling. But while it was very soothing, she felt… empty. As if she was missing something she constantly took for granted: the ability to speak and feel.

“It’s okay, Sunny,” Ash whispered, thankfully able to still speak. “We’ll find a cure for this.”

“I’m not sure how you’d do that.”

From the bushes stepped a pony who looked like a unicorn, but with a very strange horn - it was taller and split into two prongs at the top - and a large bushy mane around his face. His coat was gray, as was his mane, with slivers of blue and silver that made it ripple like water when he moved. He had blue eyes that studied the group of strange creatures like they were a potential threat, though he wasn’t quite sure what to do about them yet.

“What did you say?” Imara demanded, stepping in front of her friends defensively.

The strange unicorn gestured to the river Sunny and her friends had fallen into. “The Stream of Silence. Once you touch that water, you’ll never talk or feel again until you get the cure.”

“So where’s the cure?”

“You’d need foal’s breath flowers for that,” the pony explained, “and we haven’t found them since last time.”

“Last time?” Ash asked, ignoring the glare that Imara sent her, and pretending not to hear the changeling mutter, “Let me do all the talking.” “What do you mean by that?”

Something sparked in the unicorn’s eyes, and suddenly a wall of fire engulfed him, just like Imara’s transformation, but with fire. When it cleared, his mane was made of flickering red and blue flames, his coat as black as coal, and his eyes a burning white. Imara and Ash screamed and clung to each other, and Sunny, Kailani, and Little Braveheart would have done the same, except that they couldn’t talk - and the panic they would have been feeling was numbed so that it was almost ignorable.

The wall of fire surrounded the fiery pony again, and when it cleared, he was back to his original state. “Niriks,” he explained, his voice seething. Small flames curled off his horn, and he took a deep breath, though the anger in his voice was still very detectable. “When kirin get angry, they turn into a nirik, a creature of fire and destruction. The last time everyone turned into a nirik, the village was destroyed, and they all went into the Stream of Silence to keep something like that from happening again.”

“But you can talk now,” Ash peeped, cowering behind Imara’s wing.

The kirin snorted. “How ingenious of you to notice,” he snarked. “We found a cure - foal’s breath flowers. But the short-cut out of the Peaks caved in, and we haven’t had access to the flowers in years. So I’m afraid your friends are stuck like that forever.”

Honestly, Sunny didn’t mind. It was actually sort of nice to not feel anything. She didn’t have to worry about the Legion of Doom now - all the stress she had been working up about the situation seemed to have evaporated. Her friends could handle the situation on their own, right? She didn’t have to worry anymore.

Hm. Her friends…

Why did they mean so much to her? Why did it seem like now… they didn’t?

Okay. That was slightly concerning. More than slightly. Every memory Sunny had of her friends told her that she loved them more than anything in the world. So why couldn’t she remember it?

At this point, she would welcome a full-blown panic attack if it meant she was feeling things again.

“Is there any way to get foal’s breath flowers?” Ash asked, looking slightly less terrified of the kirin now. “We really need to get our friends talking again. You see, we have a bit of a quest to save the world, and-”

“You think I care?” the kirin snapped, rolling his eyes and turning to leave. “That’s your problem, not mine.”

“Hey, watch your words, mister!” Imara told him, glaring at his retreating head.

The kirin stopped. When he turned to look at them again, Sunny was - or she would have been - startled to see that his surly gaze had dropped away, his voice trembling slightly with fear as he spoke. “You should leave. Before you get hurt.”

“Fine!” Imara shouted, rolling her eyes and scoffing. “We’ll find that cure on our own. We don’t need your help.” The changeling turned and led Kailani, Sunny, and Little Braveheart in the other direction. Sunny faltered as she saw Ash stay right where she stood, even approaching the kirin as he tried to leave again.

“I told you to leave,” he growled.

“I know,” Ash assured him. “I was just wondering… what’s your name?”

That stopped him. He looked at her and saw that she was completely serious… and he didn’t know quite what to do about that. “Brooks.”

Ash stuck out her claw. “Nice to meet you, Brooks. I’m Ash.”

It had been so long since he’d had a social interaction with another creature that Brooks wasn’t quite sure what to do. He eventually took Ash’s claw, and they shook.

“Are there other kirin around here?” Ash looked around as if more of the strange unicorns were hiding in the trees.

“No,” Brooks said too quickly. “I’m the only one around here.”

“Why is that?”

“Because-” He faltered. “Because I-” He looked at Imara’s retreating back and decided that he couldn’t tell it - but the opportunity to share his pain with another living creature was too much for him to resist. “Because I’m too dangerous!” he wailed, shoving his hoof into his mouth the moment the words were out of his mouth.

“Because you can turn into a nirik?” Ash’s expression wasn’t judgemental - it was sympathetic. Brooks nodded. “But can’t all kirin do that? What makes you more dangerous than the others?”

“Mine is worse,” he moaned. “Even the slightest thing will set it off - and it’s so destructive the village leader eventually suggested that it might be a good idea for me to go off somewhere else for a while - to protect everyone else. I knew I wasn’t wanted, and I knew I was dangerous, so I came here, to the Stream of Silence, so everyone else would be safe.” He walked over to the edge of the river and dipped his hoof in the water.

Sunny expected him to fall silent and bland, just like her, but he moaned and turned back to Ash with an agonized look on his face. “But it doesn’t work on me, see? So I just stay here, waiting to see if, maybe one day, that’ll change.”

Ash walked up to him and put her arm around his shoulders. “I know what it feels like to be unwanted,” she told him, and he looked doubtful. “My father threw me out, too. But instead of wallowing in that pain, I found some friends that are going to change the world - and I’m going to help with that. We can change so much in the world if we want to - we just have to find the confidence to do it - the courage to stand up and say, ‘Yes, I’m flawed, I’m not perfect, but that doesn’t matter - because I’m fighting for what’s right.’ ”

She walked towards her friends. “If you want to come with us, we’d be happy to have another friend along - the more the merrier, right?”

Brooks was silent. “Okay, I lied,” he blurted. “The pass out of the Peaks of Peril isn’t blocked - I just didn’t think it was fair that the Stream works on you but doesn’t work on me. If you want… I can show you where it is, and what foal’s breath looks like.”

“Really?” Ash smiled and looked like she could hug him. “That’d be amazing!”

“Ahem,” Imara coughed, pulling the dragon aside. “How can we trust him? He literally just admitted to lying - he says he’s really dangerous - he turns into a raging fire monster, for stars’ sake. What if he’s leading us into a trap?”

“I’m choosing to trust him,” Ash said firmly, gesturing to Sunny, Kailani, and Little Braveheart. The silenced creatures followed the dragon and the kirin, with Imara dragging along behind.

The short-cut was a simple rock tunnel that led through a massive set of mountains, and Sunny was glad they didn’t have to scale them. Brooks trotted over to another river - a different river, he assured them - and picked a blue flower off the bank.

“This is foal’s breath,” he said around the flower in his mouth. Then, trotting over to a small pool in a rock bowl, he dropped the flower into the water, turning it a deeper blue. Brooks stepped away, now looking like he regretted this whole thing. Kailani stepped forward, bent her head, and, eyes on Brooks, carefully took a drink from the blue water. The hippogriff stood up, frowning.

“Did it work?” she asked. Then she gasped and clasped her claws to her snout. “It worked!” She ran over to the kirin to give him a huge hug, but he lit up his horn and immobilized her before she could reach him.

“No hugs,” he said forcefully, though Sunny caught a hint of amusement there.

Sunny and Little Braveheart both approached the pool at the same time and drank from the water, just as Kailani had. The water tasted sweet, with a hint of bitterness, and Sunny lifted her head, waiting.

A rush of emotions nearly overwhelmed her. Fear, for the future. Panic, because time was running out, and none of the creatures were listening to her. Anger, at the Legion of Doom and all they were doing. And love - a love so strong she couldn’t believe she’d lost it, for her friends. Her friends.

Sunny looked around her, at the other creatures surrounding her, and she felt something… different inside her. For the first time since she had been cursed, she felt at peace.

“Oh!” Sunny said suddenly, thinking of something. She turned to Little Braveheart and said, “I didn’t mean to teleport you with us - if you’d like, I can bring you back home-”

“That’s okay,” the tiny creature interrupted. “I think - I think I want to help you save the world. I want to see these other creatures for myself, see these villains for myself, make my own decision on how I feel about them. I’m done with other buffalo - or ponies - telling me what things are like when I could be finding out for myself.” She looked at Sunny with a startled look. “I - I mean, no offense or anything, but-”

“I know,” Sunny laughed. “Some ponies just aren’t as awesome as I am.” She turned to see Brooks standing awkwardly off to the side. “Are you coming?”

He jumped, as if surprised she had noticed him. “I - I mean-”

“Oh, please do!” Ash took one of his hooves in her talons. “It would be so nice to have another friend along - especially one who might be better at releasing the evil fiery monster inside than I am.” She flushed and looked at her feet.

The kirin sighed. “I mean… why not. Maybe I’ll find a cure for this.” He lifted his hoof, where a flame burned bright. He quickly stamped it out. “And… if you want me.”

“Well,” Sunny said, turning to face all of them, “how do you feel about Griffonstone?”
> Darkness Rises
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

The cold wind whipped Flurry’s mane into disarray, and she couldn’t care less. Because the scene of devastation in front of her was too awful for her to even think about anything else.

All the long journey to the Crystal Empire, Flurry had been wondering how King Sombra would fare when he realized that the Empire was empty and devoid of any citizens - the only thing there was the Crystal Heart. Perhaps he would take the Heart’s power and use it to conquer other parts of Equestria. Or perhaps he would give up.

That last one had been far too optimistic.

And now she knew. He ruled the Crystal Empire with the Crystal Heart kept securely in his possession, and the citizens… the innocent ponies he brainwashed into defending him… were stolen from other parts of Equestria.

All this time, Sombra had been journeying the land, finding ponies on their own and taking them hostage, spelling them with his mind control before they even knew what was happening. Once he had enough for a small army - enough to protect him, at least - he marched into the Empire and took it by storm - not that there was any need for it, anyway. His actions had been so stealthy and secretive that nopony had even realized what was going on.

Well, Flurry knew now. And every moment she had to witness it, every moment she had to think about it, was worse than the last, and she wanted to curl up into a ball and declare the situation hopeless. And yet, she forced herself to do so.

This was her home. It was where she had been born, where she had been raised, where her mother and aunt and father had made their last stands to protect her and preserve harmony and friendship in Equestria for generations to come. It was her destiny to rule this beautiful city of crystals, and she was not about to let some jerk in a fancy cape take it all from her.

But wishful thinking wasn’t enough to stop Sombra, and most of Flurry’s motivational thoughts faded away when faced with the overwhelming hopelessness of the situation.

As she watched, two ponies, one a unicorn and one a pegasus, ponies Flurry had never seen before, their eyes completely green, their expressions blank, dragging an earth pony between them, heading towards the city. The earth pony struggled and cried, much weaker now than he might have been when he had first been grabbed, the wind and relentless snow and ice pelting the party as they moved towards the castle, which was barely visible in the distance through the protective shield that surrounded the Empire.

Occurrences like this were daily, and Flurry wished she could do something, but she knew that her magic was no match for Sombra’s mind control, and fighting them would just mean letting Sombra know that she was here. Then he would come looking for a fight, and then - No. She wasn’t ready for that yet.

Still. Just standing here, while innocent ponies were being dragged to Sombra so he could increase his army, while her kingdom was being covered in black crystals and devastated beyond recognition, was making her soul hurt more than all thoughts of Sombra put together.

“Flurry?” A warm blanket settled onto her shoulders, and she turned to see Izzy approaching her, dressed in a warm, thick blue jacket that brought out her eyes. “You sure you don’t want to come back inside? It’s plenty warm.”

“I’m fine,” the alicorn insisted.

“You’ve been standing out here for stars know how long,” Izzy told her, sitting down in the snow and wincing as her flank came into contact with the frozen stuff. She patted the ground next to her. “Sit.”

Flurry sighed and sat, and as she did, she realized how weak her legs were - they were ready to give out from under her as it was. Being raised in the Crystal Empire, Flurry had more tolerance for the cold than most ponies, but there was still only so long she could stand still in the middle of a blizzard, staring off into the distance.

“Everypony else okay?”

Izzy shrugged. “They’re managing. But…” She laughed, trying to make light of the situation. “It’s really cold out.”

“I could generate a magical shield to keep us warm,” Flurry suggested slowly. Her power was nowhere close to what the Crystal Heart could do, but she could keep out the worst of the elements - even simply eliminating the wind would be a huge game changer.

Izzy gave her a look. “Right, and how much energy would that take?”

Flurry avoided her gaze. “Not much,” she lied. She wouldn’t be able to sleep, and it would cost her nearly all her energy, but she would do it for her friends. But she knew they would never agree to it if they knew the toll it would have on her. “There’s… something that worries me,” she began, trying to steer the topic away from that. “The Crystal Heart. If… Sombra has it, he could put it anywhere, and we need it to defeat him. We can’t stay out here forever, but once we start looking…”

“He’ll know,” Izzy finished her sentence. “So… we can’t do that until you - until we’re ready to face him.”

Flurry took a deep breath. This was the part she had been dreading - the part she knew her friends would object to, the part that needed to happen, no matter what. “The thing is… you can’t face him. Only I can do that. And I’ll need to do it alone.”

“What? Why?” Izzy demanded, taking one of the alicorn’s hooves and squeezing it. “Flurry, you can’t do this alone. You can’t - you aren’t-”

“I know,” Flurry whispered. “I’m not ready. But I have to do it. The Crystal Heart - it can only be activated by the current crystal princess, and right now… that’s me. I have to find the Crystal Heart and activate it and defeat Sombra… on my own.”

As if sensing that this was one fight she couldn’t win, Izzy sighed. “I’m still going to try and talk you out of it, you know. But what can we do? You may have to face Sombra on your own, but we’re not going to let you waltz into the Crystal Empire and start searching for the Crystal Heart without backup.”

Flurry thought of the three ponies she had just seen, now lost in the swirling storm of snow and ice. “The ponies Sombra’s been keeping prisoner. He’ll try to get them to fight us, but we don’t want to hurt them - remember, they’re not in their right mind. I would appreciate it if you and everypony else could… trap them so that they can’t hurt us, but make sure that they’re uninjured. Once I… defeat Sombra, they’ll be free, and we’ll need to get them back to their homes and families.”

“That, we can do,” Izzy agreed, squinting into the storm. “What’s that?”

A dark shape was barreling towards them, and it wasn’t until the figure was a few meters away that Flurry realized who it was. “That’s Zi-”

The rest of her sentence was cut off as a pegasus crashed into her, knocking her down and sending both of them sprawling. Flurry lifted her face out of the snow and wiped the snow from her face before it could melt and refreeze.

“Zipp!” Izzy cried, running over to the pegasus and helping her stand up. The white pegasus would have been practically invisible if it weren’t for her hot pink mane and bright purple jacket with holes for her wings… wings that were held out at an unnaturally stiff angle. Flurry sucked her breath in sharply as she recognized that Zipp’s wings were frozen.

Izzy must have noticed it, too, because when her hoof gently brushed against one of the pegasus’ wings and Zipp flinched, Izzy’s eyes grew wide. “Hitch!” she called over her shoulder, having to yell over the howling wind. “HITCH!”

Their camp was in a large cave, where they had set up their tents in a circle with a fire in the center. Flurry could vaguely see the mountain in which their cave was located through the storm, and if she squinted, she could see the pony hurtling through the snow at an alarming speed, panic giving him super speed.

“What’s wrong?” Hitch panted as he skidded to a stop beside them, showering Flurry with snow, though she couldn’t care less. Izzy looked at him, at a loss for words, but he read the desperate message in her eyes. “Oh, no,” he whispered. He and Izzy supported Zipp as she hobbled back to the cave, Flurry tailing behind. She glanced behind her at the shimmering magic shield behind her, disappearing quickly into the swirling snow.

Was it just Flurry, or was the storm getting worse?

Pipp was standing at the mouth of the cave, looking frightened. “What’s going on?” she asked Hitch, but when her eyes landed on her sister, she gasped and ran forward to take her weight from Izzy. “Zipp? Zipp, are you okay?”

She managed a weak smile. “I’m fine,” she lied through gritted teeth.

“No, you’re not,” Pipp asserted, leading her over to the campfire. Izzy and Flurry came into the cave, holding a large pile of snow suspended above their heads with their magic, which they dumped in a corner. Hitch scooped up some in his hooves and turned to Zipp, forcefully rubbing the snow on her wings.

“OW!” Zipp tried to pull away, but Hitch held firm.

Pipp yelped. “What are you doing?” she demanded, taking her sister’s hoof and patting it comfortingly.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” Hitch muttered, too focused to talk much. Sprout, Flurry, and Izzy all grabbed some snow and got to work on Zipp’s wings, while her sister talked to her in a low, comforting voice. After several panic-filled minutes, Zipp sighed with relief and moved her left wing.

“Thanks, sheriff,” she told Hitch.

He grinned. “No problem.”

“What happened to you?” Pipp asked, panic still prominent in her voice as she clung to her sister’s hoof. “Was it Sombra?”

Zipp winced. “No. It was… Well, I heard this strange noise and went to go investigate. I’m not completely sure, but I think I saw these glowing shapes in the clouds, and this high-pitched whining sound, and it was a lot colder all of a sudden, and I lost the feeling in my wings as I tried to fly back, and the rest is history.”

Pipp sighed and curled up next to her sister. “That was very stupid of you,” she murmured, “but I’m glad you’re okay.”

Sprout noticed that Flurry was looking panicked - more panicked than before, that is - and said, “Are you okay?”

“Hm?” Flurry gave a little start, as if she was being jolted back down to earth. “I… no. That storm out there… I can’t believe I didn’t realize it sooner, but that’s no ordinary storm. That’s magic. And what Zipp saw… those were the Windigos.” She began to pace anxiously by the mouth of the cave. “But this doesn’t make any sense. My aunt dispelled them into the ether permanently. How could they have returned?”

She turned to her friends and studied their expressions. She expected to see panic and fear - that was what she was feeling - but instead she saw determination and courage. These ponies were ready to face whatever life had to throw at them, as long as they did it together.

There are times when hate overpowers friendship, but friendship prevails in a way hatred can only dream of.

Flurry sighed. “There is one thing, though. If those are the Windigos, we aren’t going to stand a chance out here - even my magic is no match for this. We have to get into the city. Sombra will only be occupying the main palace - just about anywhere else is fair game.” She nodded towards Zipp. “And we can’t have something like that happen again.”

A half hour later, their camp was packed up, their fire extinguished, Zipp had her wings bandaged (her sister had been very adamant about her not flying until they were completely better), and they were staggering through the dome and into the Crystal Empire.

The moment they did, black crystals rose up around them, trapping them in as a pony laughed at their demise. The darkness crowded into Flurry’s mind, and she blacked out.
> Frigid Quest
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Is it just me,” Kailani said, wrapping her arms around herself, “or is it getting colder?”

Sunny frowned. She had noticed that, too, though she had hoped she was just imagining it. It was close to fall now, but the weather was still unusual for this time of year. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” she assured her friend. “We are flying further north now - that must be it.”

Kailani frowned but didn’t argue.

The group was flying above the Celestial Sea (except for Little Braveheart and Brooks - they were in a basket that was floating on the water, being pulled along by Ash and Sunny), headed towards Griffonstone, home of the griffons. Kailani in particular was interested in meeting them - while hippogriffs were half pony and half eagle, griffons were half lion and half eagle. From what Sunny had read in the Journal of Friendship, griffons were typically rude and grumpy, so she was hoping they could talk to a nicer one.

And while the Legion of Doom may have skipped the buffalo and kirin because they were well hidden, there was no way they would skip the griffons.

“Are you okay down there?” Ash called as the basket skipped over a wave.

“We’re fine!” Little Braveheart called up at the same time Brooks cried, “No!”

“A little bumpy!” the buffalo amended after the kirin sent her a fierce glare. “Maybe you could go slower?”

Ash turned to Sunny, and the earth pony sighed. “I’m sorry, but I want to get to Griffonstone by nightfall - we don’t have a lot of time to spare.”

“What makes you think they’ll listen to us?” Imara asked, flying alongside Sunny. “Every other creature we’ve met hasn’t believed us, or even bothered to hear our story. What makes you think the griffons will be any different? Oh, and maybe someone else should do the talking,” she added pointedly, glaring at Ash. “Because it would be really nice if we didn’t have to run for our lives everywhere we go.”

Ash blushed, and Sunny wished she could drop her rope and hug her friend. At the buffalo camp, being under pressure from the buffalo to tell them why they were there, the poor dragon had stammered and gotten them to believe the wrong message - that ponies did want to rule the world and would destroy all other creatures to do it.

“Maybe you shouldn’t talk, either,” Sunny said cooly, “since you’re the reason we’ve got an army of angry changelings on our tails.”

That shut her up, and Ash gave a little chuckle that caused Imara to send her a furious glare.

Kailani gasped. “Look!” She pointed ahead, to a large dark mass in the distance. “Griffonstone.”

They all stopped, hovering in midair, the gray waves lapping gently against the side of the basket, as they stared at their destination.

Sunny took a deep breath. “Okay, every creature,” she said, turning so they all could see her and taking charge, “we need to find a place to land and hide until we can talk to the griffons. Any creature have any ideas?”

“What about there?” Brooks suggested, pointing to the shoreline, where a group of trees was bunched together. The greenery was so thick that Sunny couldn’t see two feet into the green mass - which hopefully meant that any griffons wouldn’t be able to, either. She nodded and led the way.

The beach was very rocky and made of gravel instead of sand, which scraped against the bottom of the bucket as Sunny and Ash pulled it onto land. Brooks immediately leaped out and raced towards a bush, hiding his head behind it as his lunch came back up for a visit.

“That was fun!” Little Braveheart wobbled on her thin legs as she staggered around until the ground stopped moving. She shook her head and grinned. “Can we do that again?”

“Let’s not,” Brooks spoke up weakly before ducking behind the bush again.

Sunny winced. “Um, okay, every creature. Kailani and I will go scout it out, and-”

“Woah woah woah, wait.” Imara stepped forward, raising an eyebrow. “What about me? I can turn into a griffon, remember?” There was a flash of light as she transformed. Brooks unfortunately looked up right at that time and saw it, his eyes going wide. He sat down on the rocks, muttering, “Why me?”

“Wouldn’t I be a better choice?” the changeling demanded waving one of her claws and spreading her large wings for emphasis.

“You are going to stay here and protect the others,” Sunny told her, “and no fighting. That’s final.”

Imara groaned and stalked away into the trees. Little Braveheart followed eagerly, wanting to see where the adventure would take them next. Ever since the Peaks of Peril, she had grown an attachment to the changeling and followed her everywhere.

“Will you be okay?” Sunny asked, turning to Ash and studying her with concern. “I know you and Imara don’t always get along, but-”

“I’ll be fine,” the dragon insisted as she helped Brooks to his hooves.

Sunny nodded. “All right, then. Kailani, you ready to go find some griffons?” She paused. “Kailani? Are you alright?”

“Hm?” She blinked and tore her eyes away from the sky. “Sorry, I was just thinking.” The hippogriff looked back at the sky and frowned. “Do you… do you feel that?”

“Feel what?”

“Something’s… off.” She shivered. “Like a… scale’s been tipped or something. I’m not sure. But something is not right in the world right now.” Kailani narrowed her eyes at the northern sky, at the dark clouds she could see gathering on the horizon. “And I think it has something to do with this new weather.”

This thought deeply unsettled Sunny, but she tried not to let it show. Spreading her golden wings, Sunny lifted into the sky, saying, “Come on! Let’s find a griffon now and worry about strange feelings later.”

Griffonstone was a very drab and gray city, with most of the houses having straw roofs, some even being perched on the branches of large trees like nests. The cobblestone streets were cracked and had large chunks of stone missing, exposing the dirt beneath it, up from which poked some weeds and small plants that were quickly discouraged from growing and flopped over onto the ground.

As Sunny and Kailani landed on the outskirts of the town and began to wander through it, they were surprised to find that nearly every griffon they passed either ignored them or glared at them - though there were far more of the former than the latter.

“It’s so strange,” Kailani whispered to Sunny as they walked. “It’s like they don’t even notice us.”

“Maybe visitors from other tribes are frequent occurrences?” Sunny suggested, though she didn’t look very convinced. She approached a griffon and gently tapped her on the shoulder. “Excuse me, miss, my friend and I were just passing through, and we were wondering if you knew where we could speak to your leader?”

“Do you have any bits?” the elderly griffon asked in a raspy voice.

Sunny was taken aback at the rudeness. “W-well, no-”

“Then get lost, kid,” the griffon snapped, turning around and coughing into her fist before moving on.

“Wow,” Kailani whispered. “That was rude.”

“Yeah,” Sunny said, her heart breaking inside. “Maybe griffons really are just all rude and greedy.”

“I’m sure that’s not the case,” the hippogriff said hurriedly. She gasped and pointed behind Sunny. “Look! A library!”

The building was made of stone and had four pillars supporting a triangular roof in the front, with only one floor, but it was clearly in need of repairs. The stone was chipped, and the roof was lopsided, as if it threatened to slide off at any moment. Despite this, the faded and cracked sign hanging over the door gave Sunny hope.

“Libraries are good, right?” Sunny asked her friend as they entered.

The inside of the building, too, was very worn and clearly unused. A lopsided desk stood just a few feet from the door, but there was no one behind it - in fact, there wasn’t another living soul in the entire building. Sunny felt her heart plummeting and turned to leave when Kailani grabbed her arm.

“Look,” she whispered, pointing to the far corner of the library. There, surrounded by books and stacks of paper, was a young griffon, full grown but small for his age. He had rich plum feathers, a bright contrast to the dull grays and browns Sunny had seen outside. He wore a pair of round reading glasses on the tip of his beak, and was alternating between reading from a thick leather-bound volume and taking notes with a quill.

“Excuse me? I hope we’re not interrupting,” Kailani said as they approached.

The griffon looked up suddenly. “Um… hi?” From the way he looked at them, Sunny got the feeling that he was expecting something - something he hated but was normal for him.

“We want to speak with your leader,” Sunny said, and from the way the griffon’s eyes widened at the sight of her, she knew that some of her suspicion was correct - ponies were a rare sight here, and one griffons were at least mildly afraid of. That is, if their brains weren’t so consumed with being rude all the time.

“Oh,” the griffon said, standing up and twitching his tail to rid it of several papers that were clinging to it. “We don’t have a leader.”

“You don’t?”

“Nope. Here, it’s just every griffon for himself.” He sighed and looked at the floor. “Even if you’re different.”

“We’re all different,” Kailani supplied, offering her claw to him. “Hi. I’m Kailani, and this is my friend Sunny. What’s your name?”

“Hugo.” He took her claw with his own, and they shook. He studied her. “You’re not a griffon.”

“Nope,” Kailani agreed. “Hippogriff. Part pony, part eagle. Though sometimes there’s a sort of fish component thrown in there, too. And Sunny’s a-”

“Pony,” Hugo finished, eying her with both interest and mistrust. “We know all about you.”

“Really?” Sunny tried to act like this wasn’t a big deal, but her heart hammered inside her chest. “What do you know about us?”

He glanced at the floor, suddenly embarrassed. “You’re rich,” he said simply. “You’ve been hogging all the money and wealth for yourselves and letting the rest of us sink into poverty without looking back - you like it when other creatures are suffering because it makes you feel good about yourselves.”

“That’s different than what they told every creature else,” Kailani muttered to Sunny out of the corner of her mouth. “Hugo, I know this is going to be hard to believe, but the creatures who told you that? They’re lying. Ponies aren’t rich - at least, not all ponies are rich, and they certainly don’t like other creatures living in poverty. Sunny’s here to help - she wants to unite the world instead of dividing it. She wants to be friends with you all. And if you want, you could help.”

Hugo snorted. “Good luck with everyone else,” he said, a bitter note in his voice. “They’ll never listen to you if you can’t fly.” He nodded to Sunny’s wingless back - she had put away her alicorn form for while they were in the city.

“Can’t you fly?” Sunny asked, purely curious, though she knew at once that it was not the right thing to say.

He glared at her. “Why don’t you go ask anyone else?” He unfolded his wings and flapped - nothing happened except that his notes were thrown into disarray. “I was born lame - I’ve never been able to fly, and I never will.” The bitterness faded away into sadness. “I wish I could help you on your quest, but I assume you want griffons who won’t drag everything down.”

“That’s not true,” Kailani insisted, putting a claw on his shoulder. “We’ve got two other friends who can’t fly, and we still bring them along! We’d be happy if you joined us.”

“If the griffons don’t have a leader,” Sunny thought out loud, “they aren’t likely to go to war with us anytime soon.” She turned to Hugo. “You’re welcome to join us - we’ve got some yaks to convince.”

His eyes went wide, and Sunny knew he had heard of them and had always wanted to meet one. “I’d love to,” he said, his voice filled with elation. Then he frowned. “But how are we going to get there? The Celestial Sea is too vast to swim, and the old bridge connecting this to the Crystal Mountains was destroyed ages ago.”

“We’ve got a very sturdy basket,” Kailani offered.

Hugo looked horrified. “A basket? Oh, no no no no no.” He began digging around in the mess of books and papers, searching for something specific. “What you need is something more sophisticated… something that can cover more ground… something like this.”

He pulled out a paper and showed it to Sunny and Kailani.

“Hugo,” Sunny said slowly, “you are a genius.”

Hugo beamed.
> Prison of Fear
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was the pain that woke her up.

After her wings had been frozen and then unfrozen and after she passed out from the darkness creeping at the edge of her mind suddenly lunging in and taking over, a painful tingling sensation coming from her wings began to bring her back to consciousness.

Zipp groaned and blearily opened her eyes to see… nothing. Complete darkness all around. She moaned and groaned as she staggered to her hooves, reaching out blindly, and feeling something smooth and hard and jagged at the top… Her hoof slipped on a sharp edge, and she hissed as she quickly drew away.

“Hello?” she called, hearing her voice echo around her. “Is anypony there?”

No response.

“Pipp? Hitch? Flurry? Anypony?”

Silence. Nothing.

Zipp sat back down, her panic making her heart race. She was alone in stars know where, trapped in a cage of black crystals, which could only mean one thing.

“King Sombra,” she muttered, so quiet she didn’t hear the slightest bit of echo, but suddenly, a deep laugh rang throughout what she assumed was a massive cavern.

“Very good, my little pony,” it whispered, and Zipp winced, shaking her head, but the voice wouldn’t leave her head, and that awful feeling of it oozing into her brain never went away. “It took you long enough - none of the others have even realized it yet.”

“What did you do to them?” Zipp demanded, standing up and flaring her wings, wincing at the sudden pain. She looked at them and realized that they were exposed to the freezing cold air down there - something that would probably make her sister absolutely freak out about. Her sister… She had to find Pipp. She had to know if she was okay.

“The same thing I’m doing to you,” King Sombra snorted, “obviously. Zipp blinked, and then he was standing right in front of her, a gray stallion dressed in steel armor and a twisted crown around a curved red horn. His midnight black mane and red cape waved even though there was no wind, and his red eyes, lined with purple smoke, seemed to bore into her soul, finding her worst fears and bringing them to life.

“Leave my friends alone.” It would have sounded braver if her voice hadn’t wavered. “If you dare hurt them-”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of such a thing,” Sombra said innocently, looking hurt, though his eyes told a different story. “In fact, their demise shall be because of them - I am merely…” He pursed his lips. “How should I put it? Speeding up the process.”

Zipp gave a roar and ran at him, leaping up to grab him, but her hooves passed right through him as if he was made of smoke. And when she turned around, she found that he was gone - but there was a new presence in her mind.

Though nothing around her had changed, Zipp could feel her breath increasing, her pulse racing, and she started seeing things, blurry images.

The last thing she saw before she blacked out was the crystal cage surrounding her lowering into the ground and disappearing.





She woke up in an empty black space. There was nothing there except for her. Shapes appeared in the distance, and as they came closer, she realized that they were ponies - ponies she knew very well.

There was her sister, Pipp, standing side-by-side with her mother and father, whom she barely remembered. Thunder. Zoom. Every other guard from Zephyr Heights. Her friends were there, too - Hitch, Flurry, Sprout, Izzy, and Sunny. Their eyes were green, edged by purple smoke like Sombra’s, their expressions blank, their colors dimmed until they looked almost gray. There was no recognition there - none. It was as if she didn’t exist.

“Pipp?” She rushed forward and grabbed her sister’s hoof as they walked by, but she shook her away and kept walking. “Pipp, listen to me! Look at me!”

She walked on - they all did. Zipp tried desperately to get their attention, but none of them noticed - none of them cared. Tears filled her eyes, and she tried to run after them, but found that her hooves were rooted to the ground, and she couldn’t move, and then-

Then she was falling, falling freely through the sky, nothing but blue space above her and below her. She spread her wings and tried to flap, but her wings didn’t work - in fact, they weren’t there at all. Zipp could only keep falling… and falling… and falling… She missed flying, she missed it oh so very much, she wanted to fly again, to stop falling, but she kept on falling…

And then she landed in the middle of Zephyr Heights, and she was surrounded by pegasi, and they were all shouting at her, glaring at her, spitting at her, surrounding her until she had no escape, and they were screaming for her demise, and they hoisted her up on their shoulders, carried her over to the side of the cliff, and threw her over, and as she looked back up, she could see all of Zephyr Heights exploding in a massive fireball, debris raining down all around her, and everything was gone-

It’s not real, she tried to tell herself as she fell. It’s not real, NONE OF IT IS REAL!!! IT CAN’T BE REAL!!!

Oh, isn’t it, my little pony?

She froze. It was him.

Everything you see here, the voice said, is your worst fear, your worst nightmare, everything you dread. How interesting. You fear losing everything that matters to you - your friends, your magic, your home. Such a shame that all those things will happen anyway.

No, she whispered to herself. No, he’s lying. He has to be lying. This won’t happen. This will not happen.

It will happen, my little pony, whether you like it or not. Perhaps you are not convinced. Let’s run the whole thing over again, shall we?

She was back in that black emptiness, and her friends and family surrounded her again, but this time, Zipp closed her eyes and thought of her real friends. She remembered stealing her mom’s crown with Sunny and Izzy, escaping Zephyr Heights with Pipp, chasing after Hitch in the forest, defeating challenge after challenge after challenge.

She had come so far, and she was not about to lose it.

I won’t let this happen.

She was falling, her wings failing her, her magic deserting her.

None of this is real.

Her subjects threw her off a cliff, shouting that they didn’t want her.

FRIENDSHIP IS STRONGER THAN MY FEAR!!!

You’re wrong, the voice said, but it was much quieter now - she could hardly hear it. She repeated it, over and over again: Friendship is stronger than fear. Friendship is stronger than fear. Friendship is stronger than fear.

Her hooves landed on solid ground. Zipp opened her eyes to find herself in a massive underground cavern made of crystals, all alone.

But she wasn’t really.

Her friends had to be here somewhere.

And she was going to find them.





The caverns seemed to stretch on forever. Zipp found herself going in circles (she swore she had seen that rock a million times before), and she was nowhere closer to finding her friends than she was when she was in Sombra’s sick mind prison.

Calm down, she whispered to herself. “These are your friends. You can find them. Think.”

Zipp took a deep breath to calm her thoughts and studied the crystal caves around her. They seemed similar to something she had found in Zephyr Heights - deep caverns underneath the palace that seemed to stretch on into infinity. Unlike everywhere else in the castle, Zipp had left this particular area unexplored.

She had been surrounded by black crystals that had disappeared when Sombra had invaded her mind. Something told her her friends would be set up in similar predicaments.

All the crystals looked the same - there wasn’t much light down here, so they all looked black.

But there were some that seemed to be absolutely devoid of color - like they were made of solid darkness. The ones Zipp could see were small and insignificant - likely just Sombra testing his power.  But there was a large section up ahead that towered over her, even from this distance.

Hope mixing with dread inside her, Zipp raced forward just as the crystals slid into the ground, vanishing and revealing a bright red stallion standing at rigid attention, his eyes completely covered by a dull green sheen, his expression blank.

“Sprout?” Zipp skidded to a stop and felt her heart plummeting. “Sprout, can you hear me?”

There was no response, not even a bit of recognition. It hit so close to what Zipp’s own mind prison had been that she felt herself sinking back into despair - until she remembered, this was her real friend. He wasn’t some illusion created by King Sombra, he was a real pony under an evil spell that she sensed he would be unable to break out of on his own.

She had to help him.

“Sprout, look at me,” Zipp pleaded, but he made no response. She could feel the situation getting worse and refused to give up. She stepped up beside Sprout and put her hoof on his shoulder, whispering, “I’m here for you - even if you don’t know it.”





His mother was speaking in her usual way - calm, stern, steady, without a glimmer of hesitation in her voice. Which made it so much worse that she was telling him that he had disappointed her. She couldn’t believe all the awful things he had done, and she was no longer proud to call him her son - in fact, she didn’t want to call him her son at all.

Then there was Hitch and Sunny and Flurry, all staring at him with blank green-eyed stares, their voices harsh as they mocked him for his mistakes, and how he would never be able to make them up - he would live in shame and regret forever, and they would never really forgive him.

It seemed like the end. He wanted it to be the end, wanted to sink into a dark hole and disappear, but it didn’t stop. He curled up into a ball, wishing somepony would make it stop, somepony would be there and tell him that everything would be all right, but he was alone, there was nopony here, they had abandoned him, and he was alone…

I’m here for you - even if you don’t know it.

That voice - it was so different from the one inside his head. It sounded so familiar, so comforting, and he stood back up, looking around to see who it was, but there was still nopony there - nopony except his mother.

You see? Nopony cares about you, the voice told him scathingly. You’ll always be alone.

You’re not alone, Sprout, the new voice whispered. And he agreed with it.

No. I’m not alone. I have my friends - my real friends. Fear may be strong, but friendship is stronger.





Sprout’s eyes flew open, startling Zipp. She took a step back - his eyes were his own again, the fear had left his mind, and he spotted her. He seemed to put two and two together, and gave her a thankful smile.

“Thanks for the assist,” he said sheepishly.

She grinned back. “No problem. Now let’s go find our friends. They’re down here somewhere, going through stars know what. And they probably need help.”

Sprout was already running off into the dark caves, not caring what lay in them as long as he found his friends. “Then let’s go find them.”

It was much easier said than done, but as Zipp’s hooves began to get sore and her hope began to dwindle, they found Izzy, going through mental trials of her own, and with Sprout’s help, they got her out twice as fast. The unicorn’s face broke into a huge smile as she threw her arms around them, pulling them into a hug.

“I thought you guys were abandoning me,” she whispered. “You said you didn’t want a misfit for a friend-”

“You’re not a misfit, Izzy, you’re perfect,” Zipp said firmly, extracting herself from the hug.

Pipp was only released from her fear trap when Zipp wrapped her wings around her sister and gave her a big hug. And when they found Hitch, it took all of them piling on top of him in a massive hug to wake him up - and he was extremely glad that they did. From the look on his face, Zipp guessed that whatever Sombra had shown him was still in there somewhere - and he didn’t want to talk about it.

“Where’s Flurry?” was his first question as he scanned the ponies in front of him.

“Not here,” Pipp told him, looking like she was thinking hard. “I mean, not down here. Sombra will want her somewhere else - somewhere he can keep an eye on her.”

Zipp swallowed her fear. She was with her friends now - they could handle anything as long as they stuck together. “Then let’s go free her.”
> To The Skies
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

“This is awesome!”

“This is insane!”

“Insanely awesome!” Little Braveheart hadn’t left the front of the zeppelin since it had taken off, the wind blowing her hair back and making her grin. “Look how far down the ground is! All those trees down there look like little toys!”

Brooks put his hoof over his mouth and took deep breaths. “I’d rather not think about it,” he muttered. Ash patted his shoulder comfortingly.

“Flying can take some getting used to, but it’s really amazing,” she assured him.

Sunny smiled from where she stood near the back, next to Hugo. The flightless griffon was standing behind a steering wheel, a look of immense concentration on his face as he carefully piloted them around the Crystal Mountains. Sunny had offered to take it from him multiple times, but he had always declined, saying that it was a very delicate machine, and he should handle it, as he was the only one who knew how. This always made Imara roll her eyes.

“How hard can a flying basket be to steer?” she would always ask.

“I can’t believe you had this sitting in your basement for so long,” Kailani said now, standing at the rail and studying the craftsmanship with an intrigued look. “It’s very detailed and precise.”

“Thanks!” For some reason, Hugo’s cheeks flushed, and he quickly diverted his attention back to the route. “I’ve always been looking for a way to fly without wings - you know, since-” He flapped his wings once and folded them up again. “But I never really had an excuse to try this one out - and a giant zeppelin flying over Griffonstone might raise some questions.”

“Didn’t they know how smart you were?” Kailani asked, looking shocked.

Hugo shook his head. “They actually thought I was a bit of a nerd… and that most of my projects were useless inventions that couldn’t do anything.”

“How ignorant are most griffons?”

Hugo fell silent, and Sunny said hurriedly, “I’m sure they’re just going through a rough period right now. Under normal circumstances, I’m sure griffons are quite lovely creatures, right, Hugo?”

“Something like that,” he muttered. “Though we haven’t had ‘normal circumstances’ for more than a century.”

“Oh.” Kailani put her claw on his shoulder, her expression sympathetic. “That must be hard. I… I can’t even imagine.”

“It’s fine,” the griffon said hurriedly. He glanced at the map Sunny had given him and glanced down at the snowy mountain range below them. “We’re nearing Yakyakistan - we should find a place to land. How about… right there?”





My friends are down there.

Sunny stood atop the mountain, staring down into the valley below her as the wind whipped at her mane. The snow had finally ceased, allowing her to see the glittering shield surrounding the Crystal Empire, protecting it from the cold. It seemed weaker now, not fueled by the same amount of energy as it had been before. But Sunny hardly cared.

Her friends were in there somewhere - she had a feeling. They were facing King Sombra, they were probably wondering where she was and if she was alright. She wondered if they had figured out that she had escaped the Legion of Doom. They must, or else she knew they would never have come up here - especially Hitch. He would never have left if he knew she was somewhere nearby.

They were down there… together.

The very thought made her heart ache.

“Sunny! We found it!”

She turned around to see a large yak running towards her, floundering through the deep snow drifts. The yak was surrounded by light as Imara appeared, grinning. “Yakyakistan,” she gasped, out of breath. “I-it’s just over there.”

“That’s… great!” Sunny smiled, but the changeling must have sensed that something else was bothering her friend. And it didn’t take her long to figure it out.

Imara stood next to Sunny as the earth pony turned to stare longingly at the valley down below, proving her suspicions correct. “Thinking about your friends, huh?”

“Yeah…” Sunny stopped. “How’d you know?”

“Oh, please, it wasn’t that hard to figure out,” Imara said teasingly, giving her friend a playful shove. “I’ve heard all about them from you, and every time you talk about them, you get this look in your eyes - and now it’s all over your face.”

Sunny sighed but didn’t deny it. “They’re down there right now,” she said quietly, and the feeling of saying it out loud reinforced her feeling that it was true.

“Does this have something to do with those strange feelings Kailani’s been getting?” Imara asked, glancing back at their camp, which was still on the zeppelin that Hugo had brought. “Because now she won’t stop shivering. Do you think they might actually mean something?”

She shrugged. “I’m not sure.” Sunny glanced at the sky, at the dark, swirling clouds above them. There was something… magical about them.

Imara transformed into a yak and gestured to behind her. “So… Do you want to go talk to some yaks or what?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Sunny said hastily, following her through the snow. “What’s it like?”

“I only saw the outside,” Imara explained, her hoof sinking into a particularly deep drift. She growled and shook the worst of it off. “There’s this massive gate with two wooden yak statues that have seen better days, and I don’t know how to get inside.”

Sunny grinned, and her horn and wings appeared. “Lucky we have magic on our side.”





The yak village had a small town feel about it - probably because it was a small town. All the huts were wooden with straw roofs and had smoke winding from the chimneys from the fires that must be in there to keep out the cold. A massive fire roared in the center, surrounded by a few yaks, sticking close to the warmth despite the heavy blankets on their backs and their thick hair that must be adapted to the frigid conditions.

The yaks bore a striking resemblance to the buffalo - large and bulky in shades of black and gray, but the yaks were shaggier, and their hair usually fell in their faces in massive bangs. Some of them had it tied into beards under their chins, and they all had helmets with holes for their huge horns to stick out.

Once again, it was amazing how the yaks easily ignored Sunny, though perhaps it was because she had trusted Imara to join her, disguised as a yak, and it seemed to dampen suspicions.

Sunny and Imara walked around, Sunny tagging along a few steps behind in case they needed to pretend that she was Imara’s slave or something that would help sell their story. The two looked for any yak that could possibly be in charge, or be in a position to know them.

“They all look the same,” Imara muttered to Sunny out of the corner of her mouth. “How are we supposed to know who’s in charge?”

“Keep looking,” Sunny whispered back. She was interested in a yak that was following their progress - or, at least, she thought he was. She couldn’t see his eyes - his tannish hair kept falling into his eyes, and he was repeatedly blowing it out of his eyes frustratedly. “Maybe he has a bigger helmet or something.”

“All the helmets are the same size,” Imara hissed back. Still, she kept looking.

As the day went on, it only got colder and colder, and Sunny found herself wishing she had a thicker coat like the yaks did. She tried to gravitate towards the roaring fire in the center, but the yaks all gave her angry looks if she tried to sidle too close. She eventually sat in between two of the huts, blocking most of the wind. She felt awful about it - leaving Imara to do all the investigating - but she could hardly feel her hooves now.

“Haven’t found what you’re looking for?”

Sunny’s head jerked up to see a yak staring at her, the same yak that had been watching her all day. His coat was charcoal black, and he angrily pushed his bangs out of his face. She caught a glimpse of his green eyes before his hair flopped back in front of his face, and he let out a long suffering sigh.

“N-no,” Sunny shivered, her teeth chattering.

“I assume you’re not from around here?”

“N-nope.”

“And I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me where you’re from?”

Sunny shook her head. She was too cold to trust herself to think properly, so she decided it would be best if she kept her mouth shut.

“What’re you here for?” He blew his hair out of his face and stamped the ground to warm his hooves. “You know, in case - in case I know where it is.”

Sunny hesitated. “W-we were w-wondering if w-we could t-talk t-to your leader? I-if that’s possible.” She winced at the obviousness of her words - maybe he would get the wrong idea and not take her to their chief at all. Or maybe they were like Griffonstone, and they didn’t have a ruler at all. All the yaks did seem kind of idle.

The yak flinched. “Um… you might want to come back another day.” He looked up at the sky. “It’s cold season… still. Prince Sujeed doesn’t like the fact that it hasn’t warmed up at all this year, so he’s in a bit of a… mood.”

Sunny’s heart sank. “So… we can’t talk to him?”

“Oh, you can talk to him all right - I just hope you’re ready to spend half the day shouting about unrelated topics.” He jerked his head in a way that told Sunny he was rolling his eyes. “And you most certainly will not get what you came here for.” The yak thought for a moment. “Actually, you rarely ever do, even in warm season. Prince Sujeed is very stubborn about what he wants.”

On the one hoof, this meant Sunny would most likely be unable to convince him to not attack ponies. On the other, this also made it unlikely that Cozy Glow would have convinced him to attack the ponies in the first place. She felt a slight spark of hope.

“What did you want to talk to him about?”

“I…” Sunny swallowed. “What do you know about ponies?”

He shrugged. “Someone visited us a week ago saying that ponies wanted to exterminate us all. I myself am not sure what I believe. I mean, ponies have always left us alone, and I don’t really see why they would suddenly decide to attack us.”

“And if they didn’t? What would you do?”

The yak thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” he eventually decided. “I suppose I would try to tell them the truth, though I’m not sure if they would believe me - so where’s the use in trying?”

“What if you could do something else to help change that? Something… out there instead of in here?”

The yak thought for a moment. “I think… that I might be willing to help with that.” He stuck out his hoof. “My name’s Lukas.”

Sunny grinned and stood up, taking the yak’s hoof. “I’m Sunny. And I’m trying to change the world.”

They shook, and Sunny turned, the blood moving back into her hooves, making them tingle painfully. “Come on. Let’s go find my friend, and then I’ll introduce you to my other friends - we’re all doing our part to try and change the world for the better.”

“Sunny!” It was Imara, running towards her and Lukas at top speed, tripping over her long yak braids and falling headlong into a snowdrift. “Blugh… Sunny, the yak prince won’t talk to us. He won’t see anyone. He’s having a screaming fit right now that I had absolutely no interest in getting involved in.” She stood and sheepishly shifted her hooves. “Sorry.”

“No, no, it’s okay.” Sunny nodded towards Lukas. “We got the help we need, anyway. And besides, I’m thinking this is something we should do without the help of monarchs and rulers and leaders and such. Less rules to follow that way.”

Imara grinned. “I like no rules,” she said, a mischievous smile crawling across her face. “So count me in on that. But… what do we do now?”

Sunny took a deep breath. Now… Now there was one more stop they had.

A very particular spot. One she had no idea how to find, but knew what - who - waited for her there.

It was time to find her mysterious dream pony.
> Nightmare Come To Life
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Flurry Heart’s eyes opened, she wished she had never woken up. Because this was her nightmare - but in real life.

She shut her eyes hurriedly, eager to return to the blissful relaxation of the dream world, but she quickly found that she couldn’t - and even if she could, there was no point, because now the waking world and the dream world had become one and the same - one massive nightmare.

Everything was so similar, yet so startlingly different.

Flurry stood up, her hooves trembling, and her mind went blank with fear when she saw the black crystals that surrounded her, meeting above her in a jagged peak. Through cracks in the cage, she could see the throne room of the Crystal Empire - so recently thawed by her and Sunny and Izzy - that felt like forever ago - now covered with dark crystals like these, jutting out of the floor and the walls and all pointing towards the place she knew the throne sat.

And the pony upon it…

“No,” she whispered, backing away until her flank hit the cold crystal wall. Even then, she pressed herself against the black stone, trying to get as far away from him as possible. Then she felt something in her bones, a kind of darkness radiating from the crystals that made her feel worse than she already did - filling her with dread and hopelessness. Flurry scrambled away, still muttering incoherently to herself, “It can’t be real… No… No no no…”

Something stopped her in her tracks, a deep laugh that made her freeze, sent her heart beating a hundred times a minute, and she knew instantly who it was - but that only made it worse.

“It’s very real, my little pony,” King Sombra told her, his face appearing in one of the breaks in the crystals, his malevolent gaze fixed right on her. “Your precious little kingdom has fallen, your friends are under my complete control, and you had no idea it was even going on.” He barked a laugh. “Of course, even if you did, you were much too afraid to do anything except run away. There really isn’t much point in me controlling you - everything you’re living through right now is already your greatest fear.”

The very sound of his voice was enough to make her feel like she was going to faint. She staggered back a step and collapsed, covering her ears with her hooves in an attempt to block out the sound, but his voice slipped into her mind and paralyzed her completely.

“You thought you could escape me,” Sombra chuckled, lighting up his horn, and a new crystal sprang up a meter away from Flurry. She sprang to her hooves and scurried away, and he laughed at the amusing display. “You thought that just because your weak parents, your pathetic aunt and her useless friends could stop me meant you were safe? I’ve always been here, lurking in the shadows, waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike back. And now that those silly villains have given it to me, I’m not going to waste it!”

Hearing him mock her family somehow made the fear temporarily recede from Flurry’s mind, and she had a moment of clarity long enough to catch Sombra’s last words for what they were.

“Tirek, Chrysalis, and Cozy Glow released you,” she whispered. Sombra caught that and laughed.

“I’m amazed it took you this long to realize that. Of course, it was to their own demise. The stupid creatures think that, just because I failed last time, I’ll fail this time. Well, Twilight Sparkle and her friends are gone, and the Tree of Harmony is destroyed, anyway. There’s nopony to wield the Elements anymore, and I have possession of both the Crystal Heart and the last remaining crystal princess - nothing can stop me now!” He sneered at her and gestured around him. “I’ve been building up my army, Flurry Heart, and once it’s big enough, I’ll take all of Equestria for my own - including those good-for-nothing villains who let me out!”

With a roar, he shot a blast at the wall, and a new crystal sprang up, pushing aside the pale blue wall and making Flurry flinch.

He doesn’t know that Sunny’s friends are the new Elements of Harmony, she realized. He’s been gone for so long that he doesn’t know what’s going on - and I can use that against him.

But he had her friends under his control - he could use them against her.

The thought that she might be forced to fight her friends - might accidentally hurt them without meaning to, or the other way around, and they would have no idea - was enough to bring the fear and panic back to Flurry’s mind.

My friends are strong. They can handle anything Sombra throws at them.

She took a deep breath and let the comforting thoughts flood her mind, chasing away the darkness and shadows and fear that Sombra had planted there. With her friends by her side, they could do anything… right?

Sombra’s face reappeared in the gap, and he was snarling now. His calm demeanor had faded away, and Flurry took it to mean that something had gone wrong - and even the thought that something in this evil pony’s malevolent plan had gone astray, no matter how small it may be, made Flurry feel so much better.

It must have shown on her face, because Sombra snarled and lit up his horn. His eyes glowed green, and then the green and purple smokey shapes drifted towards Flurry. Her heart practically thumped out of her chest, and she backed away as fast as she could. But the fear crept closer and closer, and she could already feel it tugging at her mind, could see blurry new shapes on the edges of her vision that hadn’t been there before, and she curled up into a ball, throwing a wing over her head to try and protect it when-

The fear disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. Flurry caught her breath, waiting for it to come back, but it never did. She opened her eyes and her breath caught in her throat.

Because she was glowing.

A shimmering white light surrounded her and even made the crystals around her seem to wilt and fade away. She turned to Sombra, wondering (and her mind must clearly be delirious if she was hoping that Sombra had the answer to her question), but there was no answer on his face - only fear. He looked completely panic-stricken, and Flurry felt herself smirking at that.

Then something caught her eye. Past the walls of her crystal cage was another glowing light, pulsing bright blue. Flurry spread her wings and lifted into the air, flying to the top of the cage, which shied away from the light she was emitting.

Suspended over Sombra’s throne (her throne, she thought furiously), was the Crystal Heart, held in place by two black crystals that were slowly filling it with black cracks.

The sight was so familiar to her that, a few days ago, it would have made her freak out, thinking that Sombra was returning and was going to end everything. But seeing the ancient relic that powered her kingdom and kept it safe filled her with hope instead of dread - especially at the fact that it was glowing just like her, pushing away the darkness.

Flurry flew forward, intent on grabbing the Heart and activating it, somehow, and defeating Sombra for good, but down below, the demonic unicorn himself snapped out of his trance of shock and let out a roar, sending a blast of darkness straight for her.

The light absorbed the blast, vaporizing it, but that was all it could take - the glowing sheen faded away until Flurry was just Flurry again. The Crystal Heart stopped glowing, too. Sombra saw this and, gleefully, sent another blast, and Flurry lit up her horn, surrounding herself with a bright yellow shield that absorbed the impact, though it sent her tumbling through the air.

As she struggled to right herself, five ponies ran into the room, and the sight of them was enough to send Sombra into a full-blown rage attack.

Zipp dodged the first blast, and it created an ugly black scorch mark where she had been standing a second ago. She saw Pipp take to the air, too, and together, the two of them flew around Sombra’s head, distracting him. Izzy would teleport all over the place, and Hitch and Sprout snuck around behind Sombra to the Crystal Heart, suspended over the throne, and tried to free it.

Flurry’s first instinct was to fly over and help the stallions with the heart, but she heard Sombra screech, “Guards! In here, now!” and she knew she would have to choose between her friends and her kingdom - a choice she had long dreaded making because she didn’t know what she would pick.

A dozen ponies filed in, all green eyed and blank faced. Sombra pointed a hoof at the intruders.

“Round them all up,” he snarled. “And don’t let one get away! Use force if you have to!”

The ponies all nodded in unanimous agreement before splitting up and charging each of the ponies, two for each one. Sprout and Hitch were almost to the Crystal Heart, but at the sight of their new pursuers, they ran in opposite directions, trying to shake them off. Zipp and Pipp both flew around in crazy circles above the throne room, but half of the guards were pegasi, and they spread their wings and chased them down. Izzy dodged two of her unicorn pursuers and ran to help Hitch, who was under attack from four ponies, one unicorn and three earth ponies.

Hitch tackled the unicorn while Izzy lit up her horn and suspended one of the earth ponies in midair. He struggled but was unable to move.

The remaining two earth ponies snuck up behind Hitch quietly, but Sprout suddenly appeared out of nowhere and rammed into them, knocking them aside. He readjusted his footing to a defensive stance, and he glared at the offenders. Then his face went pale, and his mouth dropped open.

“Toots? Sweets?” His voice cracked, and he shook his head, unable to believe it. “What are you doing here?”

Neither the chubby stallion nor the pink mare made any response, unless you count charging at him again. The shock from seeing ponies that they knew well under the control of Sombra was enough to cause Hitch and Sprout both to forget how to fight, and Izzy failed to keep off all four of them as two more came as reinforcements.

Up above, Zipp was dodging the pegasi chasing her with complicated maneuvers she had taught herself during all those lonely days in the airstation in Zephyr Heights. She glanced back to throw them a smug look (she had four on her tail while Pipp only had two) when she recognized the two in front and forgot to flap, plummeting a few meters before she managed to right herself.

“Thunder and Zoom?” She blinked hard, then shook her head, hoping it was just an illusion. “But… but how are you here? You’re supposed to be protecting my-” She stopped, the fear prominent on her face as the four pegasi surrounded her. Sombra, who was watching from below, recognized this pony as the reason that none of the others were still under his mind control, and who really wanted to shoot somepony, lit his horn and shot a powerful blast of darkness, which hit Zipp right in the wing.

Her scream of pain was enough to gain the attention of her sister, who stopped, crying, “Zipp?” as her pursuers slammed into her, pulling her to the ground with Zipp, Izzy, Sprout, and Hitch, who were all rounded up in the center.

Sombra laughed as he lit his horn, the strange dark light dancing up and down the curved red object. “I’ve always wanted to do this,” he told them. “Do me a favor and tell Twilight Sparkle that I finally beat her, won’t you?” He sent a massive blast of dark magic right at the group, who was far too slow to defend themselves, and then-

Then Flurry was there, standing bravely between the group and the magic, her horn lit as a bright yellow shield protected them. She grunted as Sombra’s magic wore away at her strength, sweat pouring down her face, and it was too much, too much-

“Flurry, you have to get out of here!” That was Izzy, who was standing up and looking right at her eyes. “You have to escape so you can save the Empire - but you can’t do that if you’re stuck here!”

“Can’t… leave… you…” Flurry whispered, every ounce of her energy being poured into her shield. “He’ll… kill… you!”

“You have to save Equestria!” Izzy put her hoof on Flurry’s shoulder. “It’s all up to you now.”

Flurry closed her eyes and made her decision. “No,” she said, “it’s up to all of us.” There was a bright yellow blast, and six ponies disappeared from the throne room.
> Expected and Unexpected
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

“So, where are we going?” Hugo looked back and forth between Sunny and the map, a very confused look on his face.

Sunny sighed. “I don’t know,” she said for the millionth time. “I’m trying to find a pony that I’ve only seen in my dreams - and the only place I saw him was in this kind of in-between world that was like I was floating in the night sky - but something tells me he’s not waiting above the clouds.”

Hugo clutched his head and adjusted his glasses. “That makes no sense,” he said. “There’s nowhere on here that could be anything like that.”

Lukas cleared his throat, and every creature’s attention was shifted to the yak. “I was just wondering, what kind of pony did you see?”

Sunny studied his face. “Why, have you heard something like that?”

He shrugged and blew his hair out of his face. “There’s an old story,” he began, “that when Equestria was ruled by ponies who controlled the sun and moon, the throne was passed to a pony who needed a magical amulet to move the celestial bodies. But she had many other responsibilities on her mind, so she constructed a massive clock in a tower that she hid from every creature else that controlled the sun and moon for her. But when her reign ended, a guardian was chosen to watch over the tower - the expected - and to deliver messages from the future - the unexpected. A pony was chosen to watch over both, and no one has heard from this guardian in over a century.”

As he finished his story, Sunny paced the zeppelin. They were hovering over the Crystal Mountains and slowly drifting south with the wind. The more she thought about the tale and what she had seen, it seemed to fit. “Where was this tower and guardian?” she asked Lukas, and he shrugged.

“In a place that nopony had ever been, where the day ended and the night began,” he recited. “That’s what the legend says, anyway.”

“That’s what we’re going off of here?” Hugo threw his claws in the air. The map slipped between his fingers, and Ash caught it before it could fly away. “An old legend that none of us have even heard?”

“The world’s been isolated for years,” Kailani reminded him gently. “And legends always have a basis of true fact.”

“What about there?” Ash had been studying the map, and she now pointed a claw at an area on the paper. Every creature dashed around behind her to see where she was indicating: a peninsula jutting off the edge of the map and full of mountains and forests. “The ‘Undiscovered West’, it’s called. Isn’t the west where the sun sets?”

“Where a day ends and the night begins,” Sunny whispered to herself. “In a place nopony has ever been.” She turned to Hugo. “Can you set course for the Undiscovered West?”

The flightless griffon sighed and took the map. “Let’s go find some mysterious tower,” he said reluctantly, and every creature cheered as he stalked over to the wheel and turned them ever so slightly to direct them southwest.

Even as they flew forward, Sunny couldn’t help but glance behind her. The north was consumed in a massive snowstorm right now, but she remembered seeing the place where her friends were - if she closed her eyes right now, she could imagine it, could imagine what they were doing, and wanted more than anything to join them.

But she had to do this right now. She couldn’t explain it, but she knew that she had to find this pony who had only appeared in her dreams twice.

As the Undiscovered West approached, all the creatures except for Hugo (who was at the wheel) and Lukas (who wanted to help but couldn’t, as his bangs kept getting in the way) stood at the railing, scanning the ground below them for any signs of the mysterious tower from Lukas’ story.

Kailani stood at the front, her wings slightly unfolded as the wind rustled her mane. She frowned at the horizon, then called to Hugo, “That mountain peak over there. Once you pass it, you’ll find a valley that you can only find if you’re looking for it, and the tower’s there.”

Hugo blinked. “How do you know that?”

She paused. “I don’t know. I’ve just got this feeling.”

He shrugged and directed it in the direction she had pointed in. Just before the zeppelin was about to cross over the mountain peak, it hit something in front of it, and came to a shuddering stop.

Sunny clung to the railing to keep from getting tossed around as the ship rebounded. She looked up to see a large pink shield appearing as ripple effects spread out from where the zeppelin hit it.

There was something about this magic that felt… familiar.

“There’s no way we can get through this!” Imara cried, landing back on the deck. “I don’t think your magic would be enough to get this whole thing through!” she told Sunny.

“Look!” Little Braveheart pointed to something over the side of the ship, and they all ran over to see where she was pointing. “See that slight indentation right there?” Sunny squinted but couldn’t quite make out what the buffalo was referring to. “That must mean there’s a cave or… or a tunnel that leads right in there!”

Sunny and Hugo exchanged a look and shrugged - it couldn’t hurt. Hugo gently landed the zeppelin in front of the mountain and offered to stay with the ship, Kailani also staying behind in case he needed backup. Sunny followed behind Little Braveheart as she led Sunny, Brooks, Imara, Lukas, and Ash up to the side of the massive mountain. Little Braveheart pushed aside some rocks, Lukas helping her with that, and they eventually revealed a long, dark tunnel that went down into the mountain and disappeared.

“Let’s hope this goes where we want it to go,” Imara said nervously, turning into a lightning bug to provide some light and following Little Braveheart into the darkness.

Sunny hoped as well. With every step she took away from her friends, she had to combat a feeling that grew stronger and stronger that said they needed her.

But her mission was to unite the tribes. And, as she looked around her, Sunny knew, with a sense of pride, that she hadn’t completely failed that - the tribes had been united. Or, at least, one member from each of them. And she would have to hope that would be enough.

The tunnel eventually sloped upward and evened out just in time for it to come out into a large valley, perfectly circular, with twelve rope bridges leading across a massive canyon at regular intervals so that it looked like a clock from above. And in the middle of the valley stood a white tower, tall and thin, spiraling up into the sky so high that Sunny had to squint to see it. She and her friends stood in awe, until Imara pointed at the base of the tower. “Look!”

A pony was sitting next to the tower, his hoof placed on the smooth white stone with an expression that Sunny couldn’t read from this far away - but she thought it looked like a longing of some sort. The fading sunlight caught the stallion’s midnight blue coat and deep purple mane, and Sunny gasped.

“That’s the pony I’m looking for,” she whispered. “We found him!”

“I can’t believe this is real,” Lukas said in a hoarse voice, literally holding his hair out of his face so he could see better. “The legend was true.”

“Well, of course it’s true!” Imara reappeared, laughing, and spread her wings. “Come on! Let’s go say hello!”

“Imara, WAIT!” Sunny called after her, but the changeling was already across the canyon. Sunny ran across one of the bridges, her eyes so focused on her friend, who was now diving around the tower and doing all sorts of tricks that Zipp would have been proud of, that she ran right into somepony.

“Ack! Sorry,” she said hastily, stepping back and rubbing her head. Then she noticed who she had bumped into. “Wait… it’s you!”

The dream pony blinked, and as his eyes swept her, his mouth dropped. “You’re here! You - you’re actually here! Wait, are you?” He reached out a hoof and gently prodded her, but she remained. “You’re here. This isn't a dream! Oh, wow, that is… this is…” He shook his head and took a deep breath, sticking out his hoof. “Hi. My name’s Midnight. I would have introduced myself before, but I have been instructed that the messages are more important than the introductions.”

Sunny took his hoof. “I’m Sunny, and these are my friends.” She gestured around her, where the other creatures had surrounded her. “This is Imara, Ash, Little Braveheart, Brooks, and Lukas.” All the creatures either waved or said “Hi” or “Hello” to Midnight.

“So… you did it then.” The look on his face was ecstatic. “You really united them all… not just the ponies, but all the tribes.”

“Um… yeah. About that.” Sunny rubbed her arm sheepishly. “You see… we may not have united all of them. Because, right now, we know that the changelings, at least, are preparing for war against ponykind because of a massive misunderstanding, so… it’s not as great as you make it sound.”

Midnight blinked. “But it is!” He waved his hoof at the assembled creatures. “Don’t you see what you’ve done? For the first time in over a century, all the tribes are represented here - with you. The last Sparkle. It all makes sense now!”

“What does?” Little Braveheart asked, voicing the question in all of their heads.

“The message,” Midnight explained, which didn’t explain anything. He bounced to his hooves, and Sunny noticed how strange his eyes were - they looked kind of… crystally. “Can I show you around? It’s been literally years since I’ve had any visitors, and you will not believe how bored I am.”

“I mean…” Sunny looked around at her friends. “Sure? I think we have time for a quick tour.”

Midnight squealed like a little foal (he kind of reminded Sunny of a foal from the way he acted, like all the social isolation had prevented him from maturing like other ponies) and led the way to the tower. Sunny noticed how there was writing on the base, some of which matched the writing on the little scrap of paper that Midnight had given her back with the Legion of Doom so she could escape.

“This is the Tower of Day and Night,” he said grandly. “Twilight Sparkle - your ancestor,” he added, pointing to Sunny, “-built this tower when she was ruler of Equestria so she wouldn’t have to worry about the rising and setting of the sun when there was so much else to do. She put a magical amulet in the center, and the rest of the Tower acts like a giant clock, activating the amulet when it’s time for the sun and moon to rise or set.”

“What’s that writing on the bottom?” Lukas asked, walking slowly along the base of the tower so he could read it.

“Ah. You see, when Twilight created the Tower, she did not anticipate what was to come - how unexpected the world would become.”

“The tribes separating,” Sunny whispered. “Magic vanishing.”

Midnight nodded. “Luna, who used to be one of the two rulers of Equestria, did see this, and she saw how important it would be to protect the continuity in this world - give the ponies something to cling to that would always stay the same, no matter what. She also knew that she and her sister, who sometimes received visions of the future, would not be around forever to warn ponies and other creatures about what was to come. So Luna sent out a dream message to multiple different ponies and creatures across Equestria, asking them to come meet her at the Tower.

“One of my friends was a yak - we would frequently meet, since we both lived so far north - and he told me about this dream message he had gotten. And when I heard it, I just sensed… that it was for me. So I came down here and found the Tower, and Luna gave me this.” He gestured to the pendant he was wearing, a pale crescent moon carved out of a shimmering white stone.

“It’s part of the Tree of Harmony,” he explained proudly. “Don’t worry, Luna assured me that it would not harm the Tree. But she infused it with a little bit of her magic, so now I occasionally receive messages from the cosmos that I distribute via dreams.” He let the pendant drop to his chest. “No big deal.”

“So… what’s the writing do?” Lukas persisted.

“Oh!” Midnight looked slightly flustered that he had gone off on such a detour. “That just explains what the Tower does, and why it must be protected. I’ve also written down all the messages I’ve received over the years.”

The way he looked when he said that - so sad and lonely - made Sunny wonder how long he had been here, how much he had sacrificed. She was struck by an idea, and she began slowly, “You know, if you want, you could-”

Midnight froze. The sun had set and the moon had risen, and now his moon pendant was glowing, rising ever so slightly off his chest and hovering in the air. The silvery light coming from the moon made the earth pony seem like he was glowing, illuminating each individual hair on his head with a shimmering sheen. He closed his eyes and looked so at peace, and then it was over. The moon crystal dropped again, thumping against his chest as he opened his eyes and quickly sought out Sunny.

Seeing the panic in his eyes immediately told Sunny that something wasn’t right.

“Darkness in the north,” he recited, a far away look in his eyes. “They fight, but they need help.”

His eyes met Sunny’s, and she felt her heart plummeting.

“Your friends are in danger.”
> Facing Fears
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

They reappeared underneath the palace, in the place where the Crystal Heart usually stood - in the place Flurry had spent a century taking an elongated nap while Equestria fell apart around her. The second she was out of Sombra’s presence, Flurry took a deep breath as she felt her own mind returning to her.

“Come on!” Izzy was already on her hooves, standing at the edge of one of the streets leading out of the Empire. “We have to get out of here!”

Already, Flurry could hear hooves thundering down the stairs in the pillars that supported the castle, and she scrambled to her hooves, the others doing the same. Zipp winced as she moved her wing, but when her sister offered her support, she gently pushed her away and limped along on her own.

The doors burst open, and at least a dozen enslaved ponies poured out from each of the four doors. Flurry took the lead of their fleeing party, the layouts of the streets flying past in her mind as quickly as they passed under her hooves. She remembered where all the places she used to hide out in were, and she doubted Sombra did.

“This way!” She dashed around a corner, took a sharp turn, and shoved open a door to a building - nothing special, just a regular civilian home. Her friends followed, their hooves skidding on the slick streets of the Empire. Once they were all inside, Flurry shut the door.

“Where are we?” came Pipp’s panicked voice. Flurry and Izzy lit their horns, providing some light, and Flurry shoved a crystal chair under the door handle.

“That should stall them,” she said with a satisfied smile.

“Uh, Flurry? Where exactly are we?” Hitch asked as the alicorn took off into the house, the others following close behind.

“This place used to belong to my teacher - she would invite me over for tea sometimes,” Flurry explained. “I thought we could hide out here for a while - develop a plan.”

Her friends stared at her. “What is wrong with you?” Sprout asked. “Five minutes ago, you would have been absolutely terrified out of your mind at the very thought of Sombra. What changed?” He gasped. “Is it mind control?”

Flurry laughed, which did not reinforce her friends’ ideas that she might be fine. “Don’t worry, I’m fine,” she said. “I just figured that, as long as I have you guys by my side, everything will be okay, you know?” She fumbled around for a light and found it, flooding the room with light. Every piece of furniture was made of blue, purple, or dark pink crystals. “Also, I may… have found a way to defeat him.”

“You what?” Zipp’s face filled with hope and somewhat savage pleasure. She flexed her hurt wing and flinched. “Please tell me it involves vaporizing him.”

“Probably,” Flurry agreed. “It’s about the Crystal Heart. Sombra tried to control me, but for some reason, it was… repelled. I was glowing, and the Crystal Heart was glowing, too, and Sombra’s magic didn’t work on me anymore.” She thought about it. “It’s funny. It was right when I realized how much you guys meant to me - and how much hope our friendship gave me. It made me stronger… Huh.” She frowned.

“Well,” Izzy spoke into the silence, “any way to defeat him is better than none, right?” The others nodded. “So what do you want us to do?”

Flurry felt their commitment, their willingness to fight, for her and for what she stood for, and she was flooded with hope, hope that made her stronger than Sombra was, hope that made her feel like she could do anything - even conquer fear.

“Well,” she began slowly, “I do have an idea…”





Sombra paced the throne room - his throne room, he had to keep reminding himself. For some reason, whenever he thought of this room, this castle, his mind always went to Cadance. This is not her time anymore, he thought. This is MY time. And I won’t let anypony stand in my way!

His mind now went to Flurry Heart. That stupid little foal was no smarter now than she was all those years ago. He laughed at the thought of her cowering away from him, waiting for something to save her-

His smile faded. Because something had saved her, something that scared Sombra to his core. What was that?

The doors opened, and four ponies walked in - the two pegasi and two earth ponies Sombra had found wandering around up north. They had been easy catches, though there had been a bit of struggle when he had shown them their greatest fears. He felt it now, a faint pushing back from their minds that let him know that they were still in there somewhere.

And he did not like it.

Still, his concern evaporated when he saw who they had brought with them - five ponies, two pegasi, two earth ponies, and a unicorn - the new Guardians of Harmony. He snorted at the ridiculous name. As if they could even do what Twilight Sparkle and her friends had done to him.

They were far too weak. And yet, whenever he thought about how they had beat his mind control and fought their worst fears, he felt a slight jolt of fear. Slight.

“Well, well, well.” Sombra stalked up to his throne and stood facing them all. “You’ve decided that you’ve lost, have you? Decided to turn yourselves in?”

“We haven’t lost,” snapped the white pegasus, and Sombra was satisfied to see the ugly black mark on her wing. “We’ll never lose if we don’t give up.” She lifted her head defiantly and met his eyes with her own blue ones - he had to admire her determination.

He barked a laugh. “You lost before you even began,” he snarled. “You let your search for your stupid friend blind you, giving me free reign of the entire land.”

The two stallions stepped forward simultaneously, and they were held back by the others.

Sombra delighted in their distress - it was very gratifying. “How sad to see what Equestria has fallen to,” he said in a falsely sympathetic voice. “Thank hoofness I came along - and decided to fix everything.”

There was something about their expressions now, as he lit up his horn, that made him pause. They looked as if they were expecting this - as if they had something else up their sleeve.

And where was…

With a start, he whirled around to see Flurry Heart, hovering behind him, reaching for the Crystal Heart, freezing when she realized he had spotted her.

Sombra roared and shot a blast of magic at her, but she grabbed the Crystal Heart and flew up - but the giant crystal was too heavy for her, and she couldn’t go far. Sombra sent another blast that caught her wing, and she screamed, dropping the Heart as she struggled to right herself.

Down below, her friends broke away, the pink pegasus spreading her wings and flying towards the Heart, grabbing it and slowing its fall enough for her other friends to grab it. The unicorn surrounded the Crystal Heart with her purple magic and ran out of the room, the two stallions and the white pegasus behind her.

“Flurry!” the remaining pegasus called, gesturing to the alicorn, pointing out of the window.

“I’m coming!” she called back, lighting up her horn and surrounding herself with a magical shield as Sombra continued to bombard her, furious that none of his spells were breaking through. “Go!”

“Don’t just stand there!” Sombra screeched at his guards, standing mindlessly by the door. “After them! Don’t let them get away with the Heart!”

Pipp yelped as Zoom took to the skies, followed by Thunder, and Toots and Sweets dashed down the stairs after Izzy, Sprout, Zipp, and Hitch. Pipp flew out the window, going as hard as she could, flapping her wings with all her might, as she raced her two guards to her friends.

“Get out of here!” she yelled as soon as they got into view.

Zipp and Izzy were positioning the Heart where it was supposed to be, with Hitch and Sprout guarding them, when they heard her. The doors opened, and Sombra zombie ponies poured out, surrounding them before they could blink. Pipp skidded to a halt, wishing she could do something, anything, and then she remembered-

Flurry’s shield finally broke, and she ducked behind the throne as Sombra advanced on her.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” he snarled, sending a blast of dark magic and shattering the throne to bits. “You want to play hide-and-seek? Then let’s play!”

Sombra leaped in front of Flurry and, before she could escape, wrapped her in tendrils of darkness, gluing her to the floor. She writhed and twisted, even lit up her horn to blast at the smokey ropes, but it did no good - she was trapped. Sombra laughed with pleasure as he stood over her.

“You’ve lost,” he snarled. “Everything you stand for - I’m going to destroy it bit by bit by bit, until nothing remains of your precious Empire or your pathetic family. All of Equestria will bow to me!”

His eyes glowed red as he said that last word, and Flurry flinched.

“You’re wrong,” she whispered. The words gave her strength, and she lifted her head, staring straight into his eyes. “You’re wrong. And you’re wrong because I haven’t lost. I have within me the most powerful magic of all - the magic of-”

“Oh, don’t get me started on all that ‘friendship is magic’ mumbo jumbo,” Sombra snapped. “It’s lies, all of it.”

Flurry’s smile widened, which surprised him. “No,” she said calmly, “not the magic of friendship, though I have that, too. It’s the magic of hope - hope, which is stronger than fear; hope, which is the light when everything is dark; hope, which is the reason the magic of friendship exists. Hope is the most powerful thing in the world, and I have all that light within me - and I will not let it go. So as long as I have that, you can’t defeat me - because that’s who I am.”

With every word, the triumphant feeling inside of Sombra grew fainter and fainter. “NO!” he roared. “Because I can still defeat you!”

“Flurry!”

With a clunk, the Crystal Heart landed on the floor and skidded across the throne room. Flurry spotted it and lit up her horn, shooting a blast of magic, not from her horn, but from her heart, full of all the hope she had ever felt, hope that she could defeat Sombra, that she and her friends could save the world, that she would see Sunny again, that everything would be okay, because she had her friends.

The Crystal Heart lit up, and rose off the floor. The shadowy bonds on Flurry vaporized, and she stood up, spreading her wings as the black mark on them disappeared. She grabbed the heart as Sombra screamed in fury and flew down to where it belonged, giving it another blast of hopeful magic to get it going.

The artifact spun around, suddenly sending a wave of magic across the Empire, destroying all the black crystals Sombra had created, wiping the mind control from all the ponies’ minds, and, best of all, dissolving Sombra into tiny bits that were scattered through the air as he shouted, “I WILL BE BACK, FLURRY HEART!!! THIS IS NOT THE END!!!”

To top it all off, everypony within the Empire’s limits was immediately covered in a crystal-like sheen, making them all sparkle and glow where the sunlight touched them.

Zoom Zephyrwing blinked, finally able to have control over her mind again. “What…”

“You did it!” Izzy jumped up and wrapped Flurry in a massive hug. “And we all look so sparkly!”

“Anypony mind telling me what happened?” one of the earth ponies muttered, rubbing their head. “Because I’m a little confused.”

Flurry smiled as she landed on the ground. “It’s a long story,” she said, but was cut short.

“One that shall have to wait,” said Chrysalis, landing behind them, a malicious smile on her face. Cozy Glow hovered next to her, and Tirek ducked out from behind one of the crystal houses. All the ponies took a step back out of fear.

“Such a shame,” the changeling continued conversationally, looking around at the newly restored Empire. “I was hoping Sombra would take care of you all - but he disappointed, as expected. Guess that means we’ll have to do it ourselves.”
> Reinforcements
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Chrysalis.” Flurry’s expression was calm and passive, without an ounce of fear. “Cozy Glow. Tirek. You have returned.”

“You don’t sound too excited, Princess,” Cozy Glow said mockingly, making a fake pouty face.

“I wonder why,” she responded dryly. “You would be wise to leave. I’ll give you to the count of three before you meet the same fate as King Sombra.” She stepped closer to the Crystal Heart, now spinning calmly in the center of the Empire as it had been and should always be, her horn alight. Izzy lit her own as well, and all the other unicorns followed her lead. The pegasi spread their wings, except for Zipp, who joined the earth ponies in defensive stances. Most of the ponies there had no idea who these creatures were, but they were ready and willing to fight them. The sight filled Flurry with hope, and she knew that, as hope was the strongest weapon of all, the Legion of Doom didn’t stand a chance.

Chrysalis, Cozy Glow, and Tirek burst out laughing, not taking Flurry’s threat seriously at all.

“One…” Flurry began, taking a step forward. They didn’t notice. “Two…” She glanced at her friends, and they read the message in her eyes. “Three!”

Flurry, Izzy, Hitch, Sprout, Zipp, Pipp, Chrysalis, Tirek, and Cozy Glow all disappeared in a massive burst of bright yellow light. They reappeared in the frozen wasteland outside the Empire, the cold wind whipping at all of their manes.

Chrysalis snarled and leaped forward, her horn alight, aiming a blast straight at them. The six ponies scattered, and she whirled around, hissing as they escaped from beneath her hooves.

Cozy Glow sped up and rammed into Pipp as she tried to fly away, sending her tumbling head over hooves through the air. The filly only had a few moments to enjoy her victory before Zipp leaped into the air, her wings still out of commission, and tackled her, knocking Cozy Glow to the ground and pinning her to the ground.

Izzy and Hitch were tackling Tirek together. Hitch would buck, kick, shove, and beat-up the massive centaur, while Izzy would contribute a blast of magical energy whenever it looked like he was going to possibly come out victorious, hitting him in the face and making him angrier with each hit.

Sprout had Chrysalis’ full attention, mainly by throwing snow in her face. Flurry had completely lost herself to rage at what this changeling had done to her family and had forgotten about using magic - now she was flapping around Chrysalis and whalloping her in the face with full-on punches and kicks and making sure that the changeling knew how she felt about her.

Cozy struggled on the ground with no success, glancing off angrily towards the mountains. “Well?” she snapped. “Aren’t you going to help?”

“Wait,” Sprout said, hearing her, and pausing, distracted so that he didn’t see Chrysalis’ leg come out of nowhere and hit him square in the chest, sending him flying into a nearby snowdrift.

A purple blur shot out of the mountains and headed straight for Pipp, who was hovering over her sister in case she needed help. Sour Lavender tackled the princess and tried to knock her out of the air. Zipp was momentarily distracted, giving Cozy Glow the opportunity to kick her right in her injured wing. Her cry of pain distracted Pipp, allowing her to be overpowered, and Hitch, who was currently whaling on Tirek’s head.

The furious centaur reached up and grabbed the stallion, throwing him to the ground. Hitch struggled to his hooves and shook the snow off his face, preparing to launch himself back at Tirek, when he reached down and grabbed Izzy in his massive hand, raising her off the ground and opening his mouth. Izzy’s horn lit up, and Hitch, sensing danger, practically threw himself at the centaur’s face, making him let go of Izzy. She dropped to the ground, panting.

“My magic,” she whispered. “Is it - do I-” She lit her horn and sighed with relief, but it turned to a scream when Tirek reached down and swept his arm across the snow, throwing both Izzy and Hitch’s legs out from under them.

Sprout picked himself out of the snowdrift and shook his head to rid it of snow. He turned and gave a start when he noticed Permafrost standing behind him, his horn lit. Sprout hurriedly backed away, Permafrost following, and the unicorn finally shot a blast of magic at the snow in front of him, throwing Sprout back.

Flurry was the only one who didn’t notice something was wrong. She lit up her horn and shot a blast of magic at Chrysalis, who dodged it, but barely. Chrysalis responded with her own, which Flurry easily dodged, diving through the air to hit the changeling again. Her horn lit up brighter than it had ever been before, the swirls and grooves in it glowing pure white.

In the Crystal Empire, the Crystal Heart began to spin faster.

Chrysalis saw her demise was only moments away, and she swept Flurry out of the sky, throwing the alicorn to the ground, her horn going out. Flurry stumbled to her hooves, in time for Tirek to pick her up by her wings and toss her into the pile of her friends.

“You just don’t know when to give up, do you?” Chrysalis said scathingly, she and the others lining up. Tirek conjured a fiery ball in between his hands, and Permafrost and Chrysalis lit up their horns.

“We do,” Flurry gasped, wincing. “And it’s never.”

Tirek, Chrysalis, and Cozy Glow all barked a laugh.

“Golly, let me write that down,” Cozy Glow said scathingly, miming taking notes on her hoof. “I need this for my daily affirmations calendar.”

“Friendship never lasts,” Tirek snarled, taking a step forward. “And neither will your legacy.”

The way he said it made Flurry think that, perhaps, he wasn’t talking to them - he was talking to somepony else, somepony they all saw…

Tirek, Chrysalis, and Permafrost all shot a combined magical blast straight for them. Flurry, Hitch, Sprout, Izzy, Zipp, and Pipp all tightened their grip on each other and braced themselves for the worst-

But it never came.

Simultaneously, they all opened their eyes to see a pony standing between them and their destruction - a pony that had conjured a massive golden shield around them, a pony who seemed to glow in the light of the Legion of Doom’s spell, a pony with golden wings and a matching golden horn.

The pony lowered the shield when the spell fizzled out. “Leave my friends alone,” Sunny Starscout told the villains, taking a step towards them.

All of the villains’ faces contorted into complete rage. “You,” Chrysalis snarled, her voice dripping venom.

Sunny smiled. “Me,” she said calmly before her voice turned hard. “You’re fight’s with me, remember?”

“All of your friends combined couldn’t defeat us,” Cozy Glow informed her, glaring at the ponies behind Sunny, who had stood up with looks of unmistakable hope and overwhelming happiness on their faces. The filly was filled with an unspeakable rage. “I doubt one pony could make a difference.”

“Oh, didn’t I mention?” Sunny glanced skyward. “I brought friends.”

Everyone looked skyward as they were bathed in shadow. A massive floating ship - a zeppelin - was descending from the clouds and stopped just a few meters above the group. Several creatures appeared, lowering themselves onto the ground and surrounding Flurry, Zipp, Pipp, Hitch, and Sprout: Kailani carrying Little Braveheart, Ash holding Midnight, Brooks surrounding himself with his own magic and lowering himself, and Imara as a bugbear, setting Lukas on the ground before changing back into herself.

Flurry and her friends gaped, Permafrost and Sour Lavender with them, but Tirek, Chrysalis, and Cozy Glow knew who these creatures were, and their eyes narrowed with hatred.

“So,” Cozy Glow seethed, “you went around to all the tribes and convinced them to help you. I won’t say I’m surprised. How did you get rid of the mind link?”

Pipp gasped and reached under her wing. Sunny spotted the movement out of the corner of her eye and knew what her friend was trying to do. “The what?” she asked innocently, pretending like she didn’t know.

“The mind link?” Cozy looked hilariously aggravated. “The spell we cast on you to let us invade your mind and control you? The very reason we kidnapped you in the first place?”

“Oh, that mind link,” Sunny said, playing along. “You’ll have to forgive me, it’s been a crazy past few days.” She gave the villains an innocent smile that they didn’t buy one bit. “Well, I was told,” she continued, glancing at Midnight, “that it was your fault.”

“What?” Tirek demanded.

“I only mean that you weren’t holding on as tight as you should have been.” Sunny shrugged. “Let me slip right through your hooves. So sad. Tell me, how does it feel to lose something you worked so hard for?”

“You are so going to get what is coming to you,” Tirek snarled, cracking his knuckles.

“Now!”

With a cry, all the creatures and ponies launched themselves at the Legion of Doom, and Sunny almost felt sorry for them.

Almost.

The earth ponies and Lukas and Little Braveheart were either throwing snow at the villains’ faces or tripping, kicking, hitting, or shoving the villains, mainly Tirek. After suffering a particularly bad hit from Lukas, Tirek’s vision refocused on Hitch, who was standing on top of Little Braveheart. He said, “Surprise!” and landed a fist squarely on the centaur’s nose. Tirek stumbled back and roared, preparing to charge when he was hit with a volley of snowballs from Sprout, Hitch, Little Braveheart, Midnight, and Lukas, temporarily blinding him. He wiped it off his face and roared.

Chrysalis was facing Imara and Flurry, both of whom had very good reasons to hate this creature. Flurry would shoot beams of magic while Imara would constantly change shape, confusing Chrysalis and tripping her up. Imara transformed into a bugbear and let out a tremendous roar at the changeling, making her stumble backwards blindly, meeting Flurry, who lit up her horn, picking up Chrysalis with her magic and tossing her across the landscape. She stood up, seething so much the snow melted off of her.

Cozy Glow was attempting to escape, but Pipp held her off, fending her off by flapping her fluffy wings in her face and taking a multitude of photos with the flash on - and bright. Spots in her vision, Cozy flapped backwards until she hit Sour Lavender, who was dealing with troubles of his own: mainly Kailani. She kept swooping around and dodging his hits, knocking him back with her wings, which were larger than his. She even kept him distracted by changing into a seapony mid-flight and changing back before she hit the ground, too fast for him to register.

Down on the ground, Permafrost sensed that he should leave, and he carefully backed away into the snow, where he knew he could hide, when he bumped into Brooks. The kirin snarled at the unicorn and was surrounded by fire until he emerged as a nirik. Permafrost yelped at the sight of the burning creature and backed away, but Brooks ran around him, trapping the icy unicorn in a wall of fire. Permafrost shot beams of ice at parts of the flames, dimming, and Brooks was having trouble keeping up, so Ash flew above him, covering the parts he missed.

Sunny spread her wings and flew up to help fend off Sour Lavender and Cozy Glow, creating golden shields in each of their paths whenever they tried to fly away. She could see Cozy watching her expectantly, as if waiting for something to happen, and she hoped it wouldn’t be more reinforcements for the Legion of Doom. Even as weak as they were, Equestria had been without magic for years, and compared to them, the Legion was extremely powerful. And as she looked around, Sunny could see her friends struggling to keep up - if something didn’t happen soon, the Legion would overpower them… and then where would they be?

As if sensing this, Little Braveheart looked up at Sunny now. “Sunny!” she cried. “You have to do to them what you did back in Appleoosa!”

She saw Kailani and Imara nodding, but Sunny wasn’t sure. The last time she had done that, the tiny voice in her head hadn’t been comforting. And there was the look on Cozy Glow’s face now…

Her friends were distracted, and Tirek threw some of them aside. Sunny let out a cry of fear, and Chrysalis, Cozy Glow, Permafrost, and Sour Lavender began to get the upper hoof.

Sunny felt her emotions running away from her, felt the power coursing through her veins, felt her mane lift off her shoulders and start waving, her eyes going white and glowing with magic, her horn and wings crackling with energy.

Cozy Glow closed her eyes tight and concentrated.

Magic is dangerous and cannot be trusted.

A flood of old thoughts came pouring into Sunny’s mind, and she hesitated.

These are not your friends.

Sunny was so confused now… She could feel herself slipping away…

Fight them, Sunny Starscout. Show them how powerful you are - show them that you do not need them.

She turned on the ponies and creatures now in a huddle, watching her with fearful expressions. Her horn lit up, rainbow light dancing up and down the glowing horn, and she prepared to fire when something caught her eye.

That blue pony right there. With the purple mane. His necklace…

The pale white crystal sparked something within Sunny, and an image popped into her head of her and her friends, after magic had returned, in a massive hug, and a feeling of intense love for these ponies raced through her, increasing her power and chasing the dark thoughts away… for now. Sunny could still feel them lurking at the edge of her mind…

Behind her, Cozy Glow flinched, and her forehead creased in concentration.

She didn’t have long, Sunny knew that. She turned on the Legion of Doom, her horn alight, and, with a cry of defiance meant entirely for her friends, fired.
> Reunion
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

They fled. Flurry watched them flee, disappearing into the mountain range, and while her brain told her to pursue them, she couldn’t. She couldn’t force her hooves to move in any other direction than the one she was running now.

“Sunny!”

Izzy reached her first, tackling the earth pony as she shakily stood up, knocking both of them into the snow. Sunny wrapped her arms around the unicorn and squeezed her, wishing she could stay here forever, surrounded by her friends, and there were no villains in sight, and everything was fine. She stood up and brought Hitch, Sprout, Zipp, and Pipp into the group hug, taking a deep breath as her friends surrounded her.

“You’re okay!” Hitch broke away and studied her from top to bottom. “Wait, are you? Did they do something terribly awful?” He whipped his head around to glare at the direction that the Legion of Doom had run, as if preparing to run after them and give them a piece of his mind.

“I’m fine,” Sunny insisted, extracting herself from her friends’ hug, unable to wipe the grin off her face. She turned to Flurry. “So, what’d you guys do while I was gone?”

“Oh, you know, we just sort of… hung around,” Flurry said arily, her own face covered with a goofy grin of her own. She spread her wing over Sunny’s back and pulled her in for a hug, and Sunny knew that everything would be fine.

“Um… you’re going to have to explain this,” Zipp said, and Sunny saw her new and old friends staring at each other awkwardly. Flurry seemed to finally really process what she was seeing.

“I was wondering where they had all gone,” she said quietly, and Sunny stopped.

“Wait, you knew about this?” Flurry shrugged, and Sunny made a sound that sounded like a cross between a sigh and a laugh. “Of course you did.”

She walked over to stand between the two groups and said, “Izzy, Hitch, Sprout, Zipp, Pipp, Flurry - this is Imara, Ash, Kailani, Little Braveheart, Brooks, Midnight, and Lukas. Oh, and that’s Hugo up there,” she added, pointing up at the zeppelin, which landed gently on the ground, the purple griffon inside waving from where he stood behind the wheel.

“But…” Pipp’s gaze flitted between them all. “What are they?”

“Imara’s a changeling,” Sunny explained, and Imara transformed into Sunny, mimicking her movements behind her back without her noticing, “Ash is a dragon, Kailani’s a hippogriff - or a seapony, depending on the time - anyways, Little Braveheart here’s a buffalo, Brooks over there is a kirin, or a nirik when he’s angry, so don’t make him angry-” She caught Imara in the corner of her eye and glared at her; the changeling shifted back to her original form with an innocent smile, “-Hugo’s a griffon, Lukas is a yak, and Midnight’s a-”

“Crystal pony,” Flurry interrupted, taking a step forward and studying the dark blue pony. “You used to be a crystal pony, didn’t you?”

He inclined his head. “Your Highness.”

“Oh, don’t bother with formalities,” she insisted, “call me Flurry. Where have you been all these years? I wasn’t aware there were any crystal ponies left.”

He looked awkward. “There… probably aren't,” he admitted, giving all of them a quick glance. “Things have changed so much since… I don’t think… I think I’ve been gone for a while. Everything seems so… different.”

Flurry nodded. “I know how that feels,” she said quietly.

“So…” Izzy shifted her hooves. “What do we do now?”

“Do we need to go after them?” Imara spread her wings and lifted into the air, her hooves balled into fists, but she deflated when Sunny said, “No.”

“What?”

“We can’t defeat them yet,” Sunny explained regretfully. “We could hardly hold them off before - we need time to get stronger before we face them. Besides, now we know what their plan is, and we can watch for any signs of them.”

“But you could just do that thing again,” Imara pointed out, a hint of desperation in her voice. “I mean, did you see yourself? You practically wiped them off the planet-”

Sunny shook her head. “It wasn’t like that,” she whispered. “Whenever that happens, I… I lose control, and then Cozy Glow creeps back into my head. She almost made me hurt you guys, and I - I couldn’t do that. But I feel like they’re going to use that power to control me, and I can’t let that happen.” She lifted her head and rolled back her shoulders. “I’m never doing it again.”

Imara nodded slowly. “Okay,” she said, thinking. “So… how do we do that?”

“We could use the Elements,” Zipp suggested, then muttered to herself, “No, those were stolen by them. Argh, I really wish I could fly right now.” She flexed her injured wing and winced.

“How about we start with something smaller,” Sunny suggested, walking towards the Crystal Empire. Once she reached the edge of the shield, she turned back to face her friends, looking particularly at Flurry. “Like… getting your kingdom back?”





Deep inside the Crystal Empire’s palace, three ponies had no idea what had just happened - other than the fact that they were now covered with a crystal sheen, and the black crystals that had acted as their cage had vanished in a burst of bright light. Haven, Phyllis, and Alphabittle looked at each other, all thinking the same thing.

The two mares ran forward and pulled open the door, bursting into the hall and disappearing before Alphabittle could blink. “Hey, wait for me!” he called following their hoofsteps, but they had vanished. He gave a long suffering sigh and lit his horn, trying to remember that location spell.

Meanwhile, Haven had spotted a window and dashed towards it, pushing it open and throwing herself out, spreading her wings and catching the breeze. She looked down and caught a glimpse of a group of ponies standing in front of the palace, looking very confused, and though she thought she saw a few ponies she recognized in the bunch, her daughters weren’t there, and she pushed onward. She turned and spotted another group of ponies walking down the street towards the castle, and the moment she spotted the pony in front, she knew who it was.

Sunny led her friends into the city, her wings and horn out and glowing brightly, not sure what they would meet. According to her friends, some of the Zephyr Heights guards had been under Sombra’s mind control, and she wasn’t completely convinced they wouldn’t just arrest them all on the spot. And then there were her new friends…

But then she spotted the ponies at the base of the palace, and she realized she didn’t know many of them. Of course, all the earth ponies she had seen around Maretime Bay, and there were Toots and Sweets from Canterlogic (what they were doing there she didn’t want to guess), as well as a number of unicorns and pegasi including Thunder and Zoom from the Zephyr Heights royal guard. Whereas everypony else’s jaws dropped, Zoom’s eyes merely narrowed. But Sunny never halted her step.

“Zipp! Pipp!”

The two pegasi started and stared at their mother, who had landed on the edge of the road and was now running towards them.

“Mom?”

Haven threw her wings around her two daughters and pulled them into a hug so tight that they almost couldn’t breathe. Zipp managed to wiggle her hurt wing out of her mother’s embrace so that it wouldn’t get squished.

“Oh, my darlings! I missed you so much!” She stepped back, releasing them, looking them up and down. “Are you alright?”

“Mom, what - what are you doing here?” Pipp asked, massaging her neck. “I thought you were back in Zephyr Heights - wait.” She and her sister shared a look. “Did you… did you come all this way… just to find us?”

“But what are you doing here?” Zipp gestured to the gleaming palace behind her.

“Oh, we got captured,” Haven said like it wasn’t a big deal. “These ponies appeared out of nowhere, and they had the creepiest eyes, like they were zombies, and they grabbed us and dragged us back here! I told that horrid Sombra pony that I was the queen, and he threw us in some kind of prison that we were just now released from, and I knew it had to be you!”

“Us?”

“Ack!” Sprout let out a cry of surprise as he was attacked by his mother, who pulled him in for a hug and seemed to never want to let go.

“Oh, sugarcube,” was all she could say without completely bawling.

“Mom? What-”

He was interrupted by a panting, sweaty, out-of-breath Alphabittle, who was dragging himself over to them and promptly collapsed onto the street.

“Why does that place have so many rooms?” he gasped.

Flurry giggled. “Oh, yeah, I forgot about that,” she snickered as the wheezy unicorn tried to catch his breath. “Perhaps my first royal decree is to have labels on all the doors - and giant signs pointing to where the exits are.”

“That would be very helpful,” Alphabittle agreed from the ground.

Haven spotted the two ponies decked out in royal guard uniform from behind her daughters, and she gently pushed them aside, saying, “What are you two doing here?”

Thunder squeaked and tried to hide behind Zoom, who rolled her eyes. “Kidnapped and dragged her against our will.”

“While we were out looking for Sunny,” Thunder added unhelpfully, and Zoom glared at him. He quickly realized his mistake and, nervous sweat making his helmet very uncomfortable, pointed at Sunny, saying, “And we found her! Yay…” His voice trailed off as Haven threw them a furious glare.

“I’m going to be having a talk with your commander when we get home,” she said through clenched teeth.

“As for you two,” Phyllis added, breaking away from Sprout to march up to her two employees - though Toots was much bigger than her, he quailed under the look she gave them. “Do not even get me started. You are going to be in very big trouble.”

Behind her, Izzy sighed. “The days when being in very big trouble was our biggest concern,” she said wistfully, staring at the sky with wide, blissful eyes. “How I miss them.”

Flurry sighed and stepped forward, taking the floor. “All right, first order of business is to get everypony back where they belong.” She turned to address the ponies standing by the Crystal Heart, all looking very confused. “I’m sure you have plenty of questions, so let me try to answer them.

“You were kidnapped by a pony known as King Sombra. For as long as he has existed, his goal has been to take over the Crystal Empire - but in the past, there have always been the crystal ponies who live here for him to enslave. Now, however, this once prosperous Empire is empty, abandoned. So he sought out others in other parts of the world, bringing them back here - and waiting for me.

“Sombra’s greatest strength is his ability to show ponies their greatest fears, which he does to control you. All we can do is not be paralyzed by the fear. Know that there is always hope on the horizon, no matter how dim, and light in the darkness.”

“How do we get back home?” one of the unicorns asked.

Hugo raised his claw. “I have a zeppelin,” he offered, doing a mental headcount of the ponies in front of him. “It should be big enough to fit all of you.”

It was the first time that the others really noticed that the other creatures were, indeed, other creatures and most definitely not ponies. Most of their eyes widened, jaws dropped, and a few took steps back. Haven automatically pushed her daughters behind her to protect them, but they rolled their eyes and stepped away.

“Girls,” Haven said in a weak voice, “I think you have some explaining to do.”
> Thirst
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Back in their main headquarters, in the near aftermath of the battle that had resulted in complete and utter failure, Chrysalis created an entirely new tunnel out of the cave by blasting it with her magic - though she still wasn’t convinced that it wasn’t just pure rage. Tirek and Cozy Glow were attempting to ignore the sounds of the former changeling queen carving her way out of the cave, and were so far failing to do a very good job.

Chrysalis lit up her horn, casting the small cavern she had already created in a sickly green light, and firing a massive blast at the solid stone wall in front of her with a roar. It crumbled as easily as if it had been made out of sand, but it brought her little satisfaction as she continued forward, looking for something else to destroy.

Those ponies… Even the thought was enough to make her blood boil. “They think they’re soooo smart,” she snarled, blasting a large rock to bits. “They got all these other creatures to help, thinking they could beat me, but I will return.” She spotted a few of the bits of rock off to the side, forming a star. She slammed her hoof down upon it, smashing them into further bits. Then she shot a blast of magic at the roof, blasting a hole to the sky and showering her with tiny pieces of rock, though she couldn’t care less.

“This is not the end, Sunny Starscout!” she roared, shaking a fist at the stars. “I will have my revenge on you and your pathetic friends!”

She had teamed up with a changeling. Chrysalis growled at the thought. Even after all these years, creatures that should have been her subjects continued to defy her. She blamed Thorax, she blamed Starlight Glimmer, and the worst part was that, now, she couldn’t have revenge on either of them.

But she could have revenge on that traitor of a changeling, who refused to see her as her rightful and true queen. What had they been teaching these creatures? Didn’t they remember her at all? What kind of a monster had she been painted to be?

I’m not a monster, she thought, vaporizing yet another rock. I was only doing what is best for my tribe - not that they care to see it that way. They all think that sharing love and being like ponies is what makes them happy, but it’s not. Why can’t they see that? They hardly seem like changelings anymore.

What had happened to her subjects? They had completely abandoned themselves in favor of something else - something Chrysalis didn’t see the appeal in. She had to return, had to take back what was rightfully hers, steer her kingdom and her tribe back onto the right track. They would rule over all the others, feeding off of more love than they could have ever imagined, doing what they were supposed to do.

Easier said than done. By a long shot. The only way Chrysalis could see the changelings regaining their identities was if she took them over by force - and that was exactly what she was trying to do. But they resisted every attempt.

Chrysalis thought about Sunny Starscout. The earth pony wasn’t her ancestor, not by a long shot - she was worse. She was more powerful, and she had her ancestor’s mistakes and adventures to look back on and learn from.

But she was so easy to manipulate. Cozy Glow had had her under her complete control in a matter of weeks - the spell said it would take months. Sunny Starscout had twice the power of her ancestors, but she lacked the experience to handle it. Whenever she tapped into that power, even a fraction of it, like she had demonstrated at the Crystal Empire, she became so easily susceptible.

Wait. Maybe that was it! Chrysalis wasn’t as well-versed in using the mind link with Sunny Starscout as Cozy Glow was, but she could make it work - and she hadn’t had her own mind invaded by the pathetic Sparkle.

Chrysalis had overheard Cozy Glow fretting to herself that she had been remembering things from a ‘better time’, things about friends she used to have. She felt a kind of presence in her mind sometimes, something that was pushing the bad stuff away and leaving only good things that she tried hard to forget. Chrysalis didn’t have to be a genius to know that this was Sunny Starscout’s doing. A little investigation had proved that Tirek felt the same… but Chrysalis had never experienced something like that.

So she had a leg up when it came to Sunny Starscout - something she could use.

And now that she was really thinking about it… she may not need her comrades at all. If Sunny Starscout was really as powerful as Chrysalis thought she was - and Chrysalis could smell power like she could sense love - then all she would have to do was take over the stupid little earth pony’s mind and turn her on her friends, destroying them and anyone else who dared to stand in her way. This would surely break the Sparkle once and for all, and then Chrysalis would have a powerful weapon in her grip that would do whatever she asked of it.

She wouldn’t even need her comrades, Tirek and Cozy Glow! They were still convinced of their original plan, that working together would solve all of their problems, but every day that passed made Chrysalis feel like she was sinking deeper and deeper into friendship’s trap. Every night, her dreams of single hoofedly defeating the Elements of Harmony for good and ruling all of Equestria on her own grew fainter and fainter. She had trouble imagining herself carrying out evil plans that didn’t involve the centaur or the pegasus in some way.

She was becoming… dependent on them.

And she did not like it.

But now… with Sunny Starscout under her control… a whole new plan unfolded in front of Chrysalis. As she thought about it, the more sure she became of it, and a confident smile creeped across her face.

She would continue to pretend to be the ally of Tirek and Cozy Glow, the Legion of Doom, all of them together, yaddah yah. But she would really be waiting for the exact right moment to stab them in the back and take control of this mission herself. She was done working with others - it made her too vulnerable to friendship and harmony and all that nonsense.

Friendship may make you strong, but it also makes you weak. She had seen it in her hive, and now, she was seeing it in her own partners in crime. Chrysalis snarled as she simply thought about them. They were weak, pathetic, susceptible.

But she was not.

She would get rid of this ‘working together’ scheme if it meant that she had no weaknesses. Because, right now, going along with what the others thought was best was what was slowing them down and making them - her - she had to remember that she did not work with others anymore as of today - fail at every turn, losing to these amatur ponies.

Chrysalis snorted and blasted another hole in the wall. Idiots. They could barely hold them off, and yet, they still managed to come out victorious in every encounter they had.

“I’ve had enough of this nonsense,” she snapped. “I work alone. Working together may make you more powerful together, but working alone gives you more power for yourself.” She tossed her head and carved another chunk out of her tunnel. “Besides, if you want something done right, do it yourself.”

She vowed to make that her personal motto from now on.

The changeling made the hole leading to the sky wider and flew out of it, perching on the top of the cave and staring up at the stars with a look of utter loathing on her face.

Some part of her couldn’t quite be convinced that Twilight Sparkle and her friends were really gone. And it was times like these that she felt like they were still out there, still together, and still more powerful than her, taking everything away from her.

Chrysalis’ blood began to boil once more.

“Just you wait,” she hissed. “I’ll pretend to be your ally - I’ll go along with what you want, I’ll follow the plan, I’ll stick with you - for now. But Sunny Starscout has more power than all of us combined - and once I control her, you all won’t stand a chance.”

She laughed and blasted another block to bits. “You’ll wish you had joined me sooner, had surrendered sooner - everypony will. But it’ll be too late. Because I - Chrysalis - will rule all of Equestria on my own!”

The thought gave her pleasure, and the next time she fired a beam of light at a rock, she didn’t feel anger - just a thirst for revenge.

Revenge on the ponies she blamed responsible for everything.





The world was holding its breath, waiting for the end.

Whether they knew it or not, all the creatures outside of Equestria had realized that there was a threat out there that they needed to protect themselves from - even if they had a completely wrong idea on what it was.

Fed up with hiding from the world for centuries, and now hearing that the rest of the world was done with them, these creatures would go to any lengths to get what they wanted - even if it meant destroying everything else in the process. Those who saw that, perhaps, they shouldn’t take such drastic measures, quickly lost hold on the rapidly growing group of creatures that wanted revenge.

Little did they know that others were using that thirst against them, mobilizing them for their own purposes, and in the end, the only ones who would benefit from all the chaos and hatred and anger that was about to ensue were the ones who had put it here in the first place.

Unless they were to unite, put their past behind them, and finally work together. However, in the current state of the land, the future looked bleak and uncertain.

And that was only the beginning. For another threat was coming, but it was one that the ponies and creatures of Equestria had created themselves, their stubbornness and inability to see what was right in front of them would bring their doom.

High in the northern skies, above the Crystal Empire, farther north than even Yakyakistan, yet its effects being felt across the land, swirling over the peak of Mount Everhoof, a storm was forming. Yet this was no ordinary storm. Once it began, it had no true end - it would always return in some way or another.

Furthermore, very few ponies even knew that such a storm existed. It had been erased from the history books long before, written off as a legend, a myth, a childish story that hardly anyone believed - until they forgot it entirely. And the few who knew it had existed, once, were sure that it had been dealt with and would not be returning ever again. They thought it had stopped. They thought it was contained.

They thought they were safe.

They were wrong.

Fueled by hatred and fighting, a blizzard as cold as their hearts would soon sweep the land, waking up after a century of laying doment, trapping every creature below in an endless winter created from their own hateful desires.

The final fight was coming. And when it did, the only hope was to unite a broken world - a world that would refuse every attempt.

The freezing temperatures were already being noticed, and it would not be long before the freezing storm was revealed to all, and they would sense their doom. But whatever they did would be feeble and ineffective.

One was already among them, making sure that they would never unite. He was not what he seemed, yet they knew no caution.

Equestria would be consumed by the hardened hearts and distrust and hatred and fear that it had fought so hard to escape.

An ear-piercing shriek pierced the cold winter air, and the howling wind intensified.

Because some things, even the magic of friendship cannot hold back for long.