The Bad Seed
The Nexus of Eternity is always moving. Shaking, undulating, shrinking, growing, and so on. When it experiences a sudden or powerful motion, things happen. Things will change. It will rewrite reality. It will open doors, and let in cold-hearted conquerors, hoping to grasp a world that never should have experienced their wrath.
The days when things in Equestria were what could hesitantly be called normal were quickly passing. The days grew darker, the nights brighter, beginning to mix and meld into a visual cacophony without description. The ponies chose to ignore these environmental warning signs however. The Princesses didn’t understand what was going on, and were investigating causes, but nothing turned up. No leads were to be found, and the denizens of Equestria simply chose to live life as normal. They pretended that the days and nights came as they usually did, and eventually convinced themselves that it was so. After all, no harm was coming to anyone. The sky was simply acting strange, alternating between dazzling colors and darkness of incredible completion. At some point, the princesses simply cast a spell over the land, convincing everyone that the day-night cycle was acting as it normally did. Vivid hallucinations, they could be called, that all was right with the world.
On one particular day in the Equestrian summer, a small filly named Babs Seed had come to town. She had suffered cruelty at the hands of other ponies in her hometown of Manehattan. Such was the situation there, and was the most immediate explanation for why she had come to visit Ponyville in the first place. She was to stay with her cousins, namely Applejack and Applebloom. She had planned to stay with her cousin for a few weeks, and then return to Manehattan for a fresh round of misery. Whilst there, The Cutie Mark Crusaders (Applebloom, Scootaloo, and Sweetie Belle) decided to induct Babs into the CMC on account that Babs didn’t have her cutie mark as well. However, Babs refused this invitation and instead decided to join two other ponies in torturing the CMC as stereotypical town bullies.
Eventually, these events culminated in an objectively heartwarming scene in which the CMC save Babs from embarrassment which they themselves would have caused. They opened up to Babs later on, letting her know that they knew what she was suffering at home, and they understood what she was going through. They expressed their hopes that she would forgive them for what they had done, and that they could start over and be friends.
That would have been a heartwarming moment, but harsh reality would come crashing down. Babs instead had forsaken their kind words, and decided to remain a bully. Her attitude became one of monstrous proportions, and in the few short weeks she remained there she seemed to become, to Applebloom and her friends at least, a pony born of hatred. Hatred for all that surrounded her. Hatred for this world that enclosed them, lashing out at anyone who spoke to her. Hate. Hate. It was all she felt, consuming everything that was once her. Until it seemed that nothing remained of what she once was.
The world around them had, in truth, grown stranger than before. With the spell the princesses had cast before, no one could see the truth of the world around them; that it was quaking. The princess couldn’t even see it, because they had altered their own perceptions long before that. The world was shaking. It would seem that reality itself was screaming, shrieking under strain from some unknown force, until it came to a head on the final day of Babs Seed’s visit to Ponyville.
All in an instant, everything shattered. A thunderous crack echoed throughout all of Equestria, in the very place above where Babs Seed was standing, after she had been subjecting Applebloom to the typical round of verbal torture. A slash in reality opened, a portal, a gateway, whatever colloquialism could be used to describe it, and a figure appeared. It was a twisted human, though all but one of Equestria’s citizens were ignorant as to humans and their nature. The being declared that its one purpose was to conquer, and that this world would belong to it. It would enslave them all, as it was The God outside the Machine, The Severed Scourge… it was The King.
However, one pony, one Lyra Heartstrings, would challenge The King to a duel. The battle was as glorious as it was furious; a clash so powerful and eventful that it is said that the universe still feels the impact of it to this very day. Sadly, the words to describe such a battle do not exist within the lexicon of knowledge, and only those who were there during those fateful events know exactly what transpired there, on that cold Summer day.
Regrettably, Lyra would eventually succumb to the power of The King. And Applebloom saw what was occurring. She could hear it all around her. There was to be nothing more. No more Ponies, No more Peace, No more Fire. All of reality would be destroyed, shattered like a glass pane struck by a large stone flung from the hands of eternity. She knew what she had to do.
She stood up, proudly, and looked to her cousin. Babs Seed’s hate had blinded her to the events that were transpiring, but she saw Applebloom stand, her face hard and unforgiving. Applebloom then said, in a voice that would ring throughout time itself:
“Cousin… let’s go bowling.”
Reality tore into itself, mixing every event that had ever occurred into one big chemical and universal anomaly, then rectified itself with nary an issue. It had stretched, shrunk, and grown all at once. Experiencing what would come to be known by those with great knowledge as The Sundering. Everything that had happened before The Sundering and was related to it became nothingness. The King was wiped out, and all the worlds he’d conquered had their own history rewritten without him. Babs Seed had accepted Applebloom’s apology the first time around, and Lyra suffered no defeat at the hands of an evil conqueror. Equestria returned to its natural order, and almost all who had suffered at the hands of the Sundering, The King, or the cruelty of one Babs Seed forgot, and lived the rest of their lives in relative ease.
Almost.