Everypony knows the Hearth’s Warming Eve tale of tribal unity and the shared rule which followed. Everypony also knows that alicorns - singular or dual - have sat on Equestria’s throne for well over a thousand years.

Very few have really looked in to what actually happened between those points.

Even Twilight Sparkle, until a chance encounter leads her to an alarming discovery: Neither she, nor any other alicorn, has actually held any legal right to Equestria’s throne. They are technically usurpers, autocrats - even tyrants.

Still struggling with her own personal rule, having the fundamental basis for her authority swept from beneath her leaves Twilight with one simple, yet impossible question: 

Now what?

Many thanks to Commawriter and Kirtai for pre-reading!

Cover image was edited by Vinylshadow. They deserve all credit for it!

Yesterday, Twilight Sparkle was hot in pursuit of dangerous stolen magic, her friends at her side and Ahuizotl in her sights. Today, she is imprisoned aboard a wondrous and horrifying city, hurtling through the empty void of space and surrounded by creatures and a world she barely comprehends and everything she thought she knew is upside-down - a world where a legion of ponies serve as seeming slaves.

Yesterday, Santana Guerro was finishing up an ordinary investigation - another day, another case, another synthetic assistant assigned to be by his side. Today, an ancient, living space probe from a lost world is in his office - the furthest possible thing from routine, and certain to be far from easy to close the case on.

Both of them need answers. Secrets are in play - secrets that others will kill to be the one keeping. But to find a way out, they’re going to have to understand each other.

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First-Place Winner of the 2023 Science Fiction Contest.

Cover art Credit: Twilight is from the show. All else is mine.

Given the circumstances that had found her permanently posed in granite, Chrysalis hardly expected to find herself freed from that state by Starlight Glimmer herself - much less asked for help by her number-one nemesis.

But for Starlight Glimmer and Spike, all other alternatives are exhausted. Something is sickening the changelings: A disease which spreads by no clear vector, no observable cause, and has no known history in their species. If any information or hope of a cure exists, it may very well reside with the mind of their former queen.

But coercing Chrysalis to cooperate for the sake of those she views as traitors will be hard enough, and even if she does, what will the consequences of her information be?

An entry in Imposing Sovereigns III, using the prompt Chrysalis / Perseverance.

Cover art made by Comma Typer, who deserves all credit.