Sunset Shimmer let out a sigh of relief as she watched Princess Luna levitate Twilight Sparkle back into the Crystal Castle. The sigh was of course for herself and the fact that she wasn't being chased anymore, not for any concern over Twilight Sparkle’s safety, because seriously, what kind of alicorn couldn’t even fly? It was just proof that Twilight Sparkle hadn’t been strong enough to fully ascend into an alicorn, and with Sunset now in on the secret, she never would. She would feel sorry for the mare, but it was Celestia that had gotten her hopes up in the first place, so it was hardly her fault, was it?
No, she had no regrets—not that there was anything to regret. Not being able to scry Twilight and the princesses would be a wrench, but it would pale in comparison to what she would gain.
Besides, having regrets would imply that she had had any choice in the matter to begin with, and in hindsight there had been none. Sure, technically she had decided to spy on the princesses in person instead of going back through the portal, but that decision hadn’t actually mattered one bit in the end. The princesses had been heading for the mirror portal before Sunset had even stolen the Element of Magic. Maybe there was a chance that she could have made it back to the portal in time if she’d rushed, but she wouldn’t have been rushing. Just the opposite; if she hadn't been in a hurry to spy on the princesses, then she would have been taking things slowly and carefully and wouldn't have had any chance at beating them to the mirror portal at all, nor would she have had the chance to witness such a cathartic event. She might have even missed this latest bit of information that would make it all worthwhile.
No. It was clear that this was what she was meant to do. She had mixed feelings about the Equestrian idea of destiny these days and far preferred to make her own, but if harmony had conspired to bring her here for this, then who was she to argue? All she needed to do was find a way out of this city and head to the Everfree forest.
She was just about to get on that, when Twilight, Celestia and Luna appeared at the base of the Crystal Castle.
Oh, and Cadance was there, too. Huh. She hadn't even noticed. That was cute, but there's no way that it was comfortable. Not even for a pegasus-slash-alicorn.
She forgot about that, though, focusing instead on listening in on the princesses’ plans, cursing at the mention of stopping the trains and almost giving herself away with a snort of laughter at Celestia's insistence that everything would be fine if the two of them could just talk this out.
It wasn't long before three out of the four princesses were gone and the fourth was left sleeping on top of the Crystal Heart. Sunset didn’t move from her position across the courtyard, which was a good thing, because Twilight soon returned with a blanket for Cadance.
It would have been adorable if Cadance wasn't close to twice her age now.
Once Twilight was well and gone for good, though, Sunset got to thinking through what she was going to do from here on out. She was distracted, however, by Cadance and the Crystal Heart.
There was no denying that the Crystal Heart was a powerful artifact but she had no interest in it. Just like she had no interest in the Element of Magic so long as she was staying in Equestria. What she wanted was power—not some wishy-washy do-gooder rock with a moral compass. No, she had no interest in something like that.
It, however, definitely had an interest in her. Considering her… well, her alignment for lack of a better word, that was probably a bad thing. She very much did not want to get smote on her first night back in Equestria, so she deftly turned the magic aside and waited to see what it would do. To her surprise it did nothing. It seemed curious and hopeful, in a way, but what did you expect from an artifact powered by love?
Now curious herself, Sunset shifted her attention to how the Crystal Heart was interacting with Cadance, because whatever it was doing, it was a lot more lively about it than the tentative olive branch that it had been directing at Sunset.
No, this was interesting, so instead of searching for someplace in the city to hide, she laid herself down in the cold crystal alleyway and settled in to watch Cadance sleep, which was a completely normal thing to do.
“Worth it,” Sunset Shimmer said with a triumphant, crusty-eyed grin.
By the time ponies were beginning to be seen up and about starting their day, Cadance was looking very sparkly indeed in the early morning sun. Sunset was going to have to get going herself before anypony saw her, but before that, she had an idea.
Standing up and stretching in the small alleyway from which she’d been watching Cadance sleep, Sunset reached out with her magic to the now familiar warmth of the Crystal Heart and forged her own connection to it—‘forged’ in the larcenous sense being the key word in this situation. The Crystal Heart could be said to have emotions in that it was, to an extent, made out of them, but it wasn’t actually intelligent in any way, shape or form. So, while it would absolutely and completely reject anything that was opposed to it, anypony who didn’t fall into that category would be welcomed with open arms and had a lot more leeway. In fact, the depth of the connection a pony had to it was almost entirely up to the pony and it would take a significant amount of soul-searching for the average stallion or mare to accept the warmth of the Crystal Heart into them.
Sunset Shimmer was not an ordinary pony. To begin with, she’d always been good with magic, and that had continued to be true during her tenure as Princess Celestia’s personal protégé. She was no generalist, though, and had always focused on big, impressive and obscure pieces of magic.
Especially when those magics involved burning things. She could do an impressive sun spell.
Yes, that sun. Well, close enough for government work, anyway. Literally. It was the exact same spell that Celestia practiced with, which was no simple thing. Sunset's wasn’t terribly large, but the fact that she could do it at all was a source of pride.
That had all ended with her exile into the human world. At first, she’d felt like she’d been tricked into it. The mirror had shown her as an alicorn, but the actual world that it had sent her to was all but devoid of magic, and what it did have was stiff and brittle. Doing anything with it was like attempting underwater basket weaving with dry spaghetti.
It was a nightmare and she’d been furious.
She’d gotten used to it, though. That simple sentence belied the blood, sweat and tears that she had shed to do it, but she’d done it and that was all that mattered.
Ever since then, she’d spent her time in the human world practicing the subtlest of magics and using them to scry through the ineffable chaos between worlds and watch ponies make friends.
Forming a wide, but shallow bridge between herself and the Crystal Heart? That was foal’s play, and as the connection was made she was filled with warmth, like there was a fire burning in her heart.
She could get used to this.
By the time Sunset Shimmer had made up for her lost sleep the night before, it was sunset and she was shimmering.
“Cool,” she said, holding her crystalline hoof out in front of her where it broke a beam of ruddy sunlight into dozens of spots across the floor of the abandoned house.
Well, the hopefully abandoned house. Sure, there was a dusty crib slowly disintegrating in the corner, but as she’d learned in the human world, you couldn’t assume anything. Some people had no self respect and just lived like that. Heck, maybe the family had lost a foal or had to give it up, so they'd walled of the room and cast a spell on it to make everyone forget that the foal had existed at all and there was a whole family living normally on the other side of the walls who would all be coming running to the room and the foal that they'd forgotten after she’d broken the seal by sleeping in it.
…
It could happen. It never hurt to be careful—entirely ignoring the situation that had resulted in her being trapped back in this world, anyway. That was not going to happen again. Probably.
Fortunately, the rest of the small house on the outskirts of the city did appear to be abandoned. Unfortunately, that meant that there was no food in the house for her to steal while secretly living in the closet and only coming out when no one was around.
In hindsight, the human world had been very strange and she probably shouldn’t use too many of her experiences there as a basis for her decisions.
Enough distractions, though. Sunset Shimmer shook her head and took a deep breath. She needed to focus on what she was going to do going forward , not weird stories from another world.
It was surprisingly easy. The moment she decided to calm down the warmth in her heart flared up and a feeling of contentment and belonging spread throughout her.
“Woah.”
That was…
“Woah.”
She began to giggle as she basked in the everpresent comfort and warmth of the Crystal Heart—and that warmth wasn’t just metaphorical, either. One would think that she’d have been miserable and cold sleeping in an abandoned building made entirely of crystal, but while the room was dark and the crystal cold to the touch, she very much wasn’t, and even the shadows seemed to diminish as she tapped into the Crystal Heart’s freely-offered power.
The sky was darkening into evening by the time Sunset remembered that she had more to do than test the limits of the power that she could draw from the Crystal Heart. It might have been even longer if not for the fact that her stomach had begun to growl at her.
Her stomach had good reason to growl at her; it had been nearly twenty-four hours since she’d last eaten. That wasn't unusual for her in the grand scheme of things, considering that she had spent a lot of her time on the other side of the mirror subsisting on rice and eggs and shoplifting multivitamins from the grocery store. She was used to going hungry and could stick it out if she had to.
She didn't yet know if she would have to. It will depend on just how extensive the search for her was. Celestia had told them not to turn this situation into a mare hunt, but surely they would at least have guards out in the streets looking for her, right?
Not as such.
After improvising a crystal scrunchie out of an old necklace she’d found in another room of the abandoned house and using it to tie her mane back, Sunset Shimmer had carefully made her way out into the city, checking every corner and expecting the worst.
She did, eventually spot a few patrolls of guards searching for her, but they were really, really bad at it. That wasn’t even her own inflated sense of self-worth being bolstered by the crystal heart, either. They were seriously bad at it to the point that she wondered if there was some sort of misdirection going on.
Where were the posters, the checkpoints, the guards stationed in the high-traffic areas? All they seemed to be doing was sending a few ponies out in groups to look for her and ask the odd pony on the street if they’d seen her.
That couldn't be all, could it?
After an hour of sneaking around, she eventually decided that, yes, that was all they were actually doing and decided to actually see if she could scrounge up some food when it happened.
She’d been momentarily distracted by the simultaneously hard and crystalline yet pliable form that her body had taken and thus, forgot the one thing that her time as a not-very-good-person in the human world hadn’t taught her, which was to look up.
A pegasus guard landed right in front of her, catching her completely off-guard.
“Have you seen this unicorn mare, ma’am?” the guard asked, holding out an old photo of her a few years younger, not long before she’d gone through the mirror. “She’d be an adult now.”
Sunset was dumbstruck. Now, that is. Not in the photo. She just stood there, shocked, her mouth hanging open.
The guard nodded, as if that was the response that he’d expected from a crystal pony. “Alright. Thanks for giving me a moment of your time. If you do see her, we would appreciate it if you would let the guard know. Princess Celestia would like to have a word with her. She isn’t a criminal, but we wouldn’t recommend confronting her all the same. Have a good evening,” he said and flew off.
She continued to stare into the blank space that the guard had just vacated for a moment. “...Did that just happen?” she asked herself, then rushed off to the end of the alley she’d been in to make sure that the guard hadn’t flown straight off to get Celestia, but no, he was giving the exact same speech to another crystal pony, a practiced smile on his face.
Sunset blinked and watched him fly from pony to pony, as if he hadn’t just asked her if she’d seen herself.
Shining Armor must be really good in bed.
Seriously, poor Cadance. What was even the point of becoming a princess if you still had the same incompetent ponies working for you?
Wait, no. That had been a pegasus, not a crystal pony, meaning that guard would have had to have been one of Celestia's. Poor Celestia? Ehh, nah. Didn’t work. That one was entirely on her. It wasn’t as if she hadn't had a thousand-plus years to get it right.
Suddenly, Sunset really missed being able to engage in her voyeuristic hobby of scrying Twilight and the others, because she really wanted to know what the hell they were thinking. There had to be an explanation for this that she was missing, right? Sure, she’d done the minimum to blend in with the crystal ponies and changed her profile by tying her mane back, but there were limits to what she could believe.
If they were this incompetent, maybe she could get a job in the castle as a maid.
No. Best not to press her luck. They couldn’t be that incompetent, right?
“Right,” Twilight Sparkle said, scanning down the list of local governmental elections that would be taking place over the next year. There was really nothing they had to do there, but it was interesting to note just how eclectic they all were. Apparently Princess Celestia had never instituted a standard election cycle, so terms and term limits varied wildly. Just in what she’d skimmed, she’d seen cities that elected a new mayor anywhere from every year to ‘whenever we feel like it.’ “I think that’s it, then,” she concluded, not daring to sound hopeful. “That was the last thing on the list.”
Princess Celestia ran her eyes over her copy of the agenda for the Princess Summit, nodding slightly as she mentally checked off each item to ensure that they had covered everything. Twilight edged forward on her seat, unable to contain her eagerness to be done with what had essentially been a week-long meeting. Amusingly, she wasn’t the only one to harbor such feelings; Cadance wasn’t quite squirming, but was sitting with a distinct lean, and while Princess Luna was the picture of collected poise, there was a distinct, intense air about her that said that the answer to Twilight’s question had better be positive.
Fortunately for all of them, Princess Celestia nodded one last time, set the scroll down and said, “Yes, I believe that we have covered everything. Twilight couldn’t be certain, but she wondered if she hadn’t heard a small amount of the princess’ own relief in that statement.
Twilight’s display of relief was much more obvious, involving as it did her flopping over onto the crystal table that she had become intimately familiar with over the past week and shouting her muffled gratitude into its glossy surface.
Cadance tittererd in amusement at the display, while the other princesses may have cracked their own smiles.
“That just leaves what we are to do about the ongoing search for Sunset Shimmer and the embargo on leaving the city,” Princess Celestia said soberingly. “The duke of Maretonia has been getting antsy about not being allowed to return home, and I expect that he isn’t the only one.”
For just a moment, Twilight wondered if the princess would defy expectations and declare some radical action, be it to continue the embargo until Sunset was 'found' or take some greater action that might actually be successful, but in the end, as Cadance had said, Princess Celestia would do what practicality demanded.
With a sigh and a shake of her head, the princess admitted, “I suppose there is nothing more that we can do, and continuing to inconvenience the city now would be shutting the henhouse after the fox has fled, as it were.”
“You think that she’s actually escaped?” Twilight asked, a sudden jolt of irrational fear running down her spine in concern for the princess’ previous student getting a head start on the magic of the Everfree.
“Unlikely,” Princess Luna declared with certainty. “But it hardly matters at this point. If we have not caught her by now—”
“Found,” Princess Celestia insisted tartly.
Princess Luna rolled her eyes at her sister. “If we have not ‘found’ her by now,” she corrected herself with some amount of sarcasm. “Then we are unlikely to do so as she forms a greater familiarity with the city and the guard. If there had been any sign of her, be it by sight or theft, then we might hope that she might be run to ground eventually, but it is clear by now that whatever her methods, they are not only effective at evading our 'efforts', but allow her a comfortable amount of leeway in doing so.”
“It’s not surprising,” Twilight commented. “If we didn’t think that we could stop her from boarding a train, expecting to find her in an entire city was probably optimistic.”
“What surprises me is that she has managed the entire week without doing something to call attention to herself,” Princess Celestia commented, not offended. “She never was a subtle mare.”
“Unless she was breaking into the restricted archives,” Cadance reminded her. “Or doing something else you wouldn’t approve of. She never had trouble sneaking around; it was the aftermath that got her in trouble—which makes sense, because she wanted the attention as much as she wanted to prove herself to you.”
“I suppose that I will simply have to hope that she one day comes to me,” Princess Celestia said with a melancholy glance out the window.
Twilight did her best to ignore the dismissal inherent in that remark, as if Sunset Shimmer was just going to live a quiet adult life and one day come to regret the impetuousness of youth.
“I was thinking about that, actually,” she spoke up. “We know that Sunset Shimmer is going to want to be on the first train south.”
Princess Celestia nodded. “Yes, as much as I don’t expect to be able to prevent her from boarding, that isn’t any reason to be lax on security. It is still the best bottleneck that we have.”
“I don’t believe that was Princess Twilight’s meaning,” Princess Luna said, motioning for Twilight to carry on.
Twilight, in turn, nodded. “Actually, I think it’s a very good reason to be lax on security,” she began. “She’s going to make it south eventually. If we stop her from boarding the first train then she’ll just take the second—or the third. She’ll want to be on the first one, though, if only to stick it to Princess Celestia.”
Cadance was nodding along. “So you want to let her on the train and focus on stopping her while she has nowhere else to go?”
“Yes,” Twilight agreed. “And if necessary, we stop the train in the ice fields to search it more thoroughly. As silly as it might sound—or because, of that, maybe—I guarantee that Pinkie Pie could ride a train by hanging onto the underside of one of the carriages, so we can’t assume that Sunset couldn’t do something similar. We just don’t know what she’s capable of after all these years.”
“It’s not the sort of thing that I would normally do…” Princess Celesia mused, but admitted, “But perhaps that is what is best in this situation. It is certainly a tactically sound plan, though it does rely on Sunset not becoming suspicious of the reduced security.”
The other three princesses all gave Princess Celestia their own deadpan looks.
“What?” the princess asked.
“Sister,” Princess Luna spoke up. “Given the attitude that we have received from you at the mere suggestion of implementing the sorts of security procedures that would have even the most remote chance of cornering this mare, I very much doubt that she will notice much difference. In fact, I think it likely that we can increase security by a significant amount and still go forward with this plan. Truly, she must think that we are imbeciles at this point.”
“Ah, but it will be sad to leave this marvelous architecture,” Rarity bemoaned as Twilight and her friends all packed to leave, piling their luggage up outside their rooms.
“Are you kidding me?” Rainbow Dash asked, sticking her head out of her room holding her single bag. “I like crystal as much as the next mare, but there’s such a thing as too much!”
“Well…” Rarity said, considering the point. “I have to admit, they do seem to lean into their theme a tad much, what with it being the Crystal Empire, north of the Crystal Mountains, home of the crystal ponies, ruled by the Crystal Princess and protected by the power of the Crystal Heart.”
“Ah’ll say,” Applejack heartily agreed. “Ah ain’t gonna question how other ponies choose to live, but Ah’ll be glad to feel earth beneath my hooves and get back to bucking apples.”
“Oh, yes,” Fluttershy said, supporting that sentiment. “I do hope all my little animal friends have been getting along without me.”
“Didn’t you get somepony to check in on them every day?” Twilight asked, already sitting out in the hall with Spike and their two bags, having packed the night before.
“Oh, I don’t mean to question Cheerilee,” Fluttershy insisted. “It’s just that some of them can be a real hoofful when I’m not around.”
Spike coughed something that sounded like ‘Angel’ and everypony pretended not to hear him
It wasn’t long until they were all headed to the train with a small squad of guards carrying their luggage.
“It was good to see you again, Twily,” Shining Armor said as they were unloading their luggage into the luggage car.
“Really?” Twilight said. “Even though you had to spend the whole time ‘searching’ for Sunset Shimmer?”
Shining Armor chuckled and waved it off. “No need to worry about that. If it hadn’t been Sunset Shimmer, it would have been something else, or we’d have just spent the entire week doing drills. I don't deny that Cadance has the harder job.”
“Ugh,” Twilight groaned. “Don't remind me. One week of that is about all that I could stand.”
Shining Armor leaned in and gave her a one-legged hug. “Aw, don’t worry, sis,” he said, half-teasingly. “I’m told you get used to it.”
Twilight shoved him off with a huff and said, “I don’t want to get used to it,” pouting. “I still say this whole thing is crazy! I’m barely an alicorn—what about me says that I should be a princess?”
“You've got to admit, it isn't as if you haven't been trained for this,” Shining Armor said.
Twilight rolled her eyes. “Before I went to Ponyville to ‘study friendship,’” she said, making air-quotes with her hooves. “I thought that maybe I would become the princess’ advisor or something like that at best. I never imagined… this!”
“And what about after you were sent to Ponyville?” Shining Armor asked, curious.
“Well…” Twilight said, flushing. “To be honest, it’s been a little like I’ve been sent out to pasture—hey! Don’t laugh!”
“Sorry, sorry,” Shining Armor said, getting himself under control. “It’s just that I find the implication that you seem to consider being the hero of Equestria boring and that you'd rather get back to your studies instead hilarious”
Twilight rolled her eyes. “I’m hardly the ‘hero of Equestria’ all the time, Shiny,” she half-whined. “I like being a small-town librarian and spending time with my friends, but it's hardly… important work, you know?”
“Well, now you've gotten a taste of the important work,” Shining Armor said.
“And I'll happily go back to being that small town librarian and spending time with my friends, now, thanks,” Twilight responded.
“Yeah, good luck with that,” Shining Armor said with some sarcasm as he reached over and gave one of Twilight’s wings a tug.
“I—” Twilight was interrupted from what would surely have been a witty rejoinder by the whistle of the train calling for all passengers to board.
“See ya, Twily,” he said, giving her a good-natured shove towards the train.
Twilight pouted at losing her chance to deny-deny-deny any implication that she was going to get caught up in anything remotely princess-like back in Ponyville, but it didn't last.
“See ya, BBBFF,” she said, waving back with a smile as she turned and boarded the train.
“That was sweet,” Fluttershy commented as Twilight joined the others on the train. “I wish I had a brother like that.”
Twilight scoffed and jokingly said, “You can have him.”
“She really can't,” Rainbow Dash called out from the front of the group as the six of them made their way down to the passenger car, which Twilight couldn't help but scan for that signature red and gold mane. “He’s kind of taken!”
Twilight sputtered, completely forgetting about Sunset Shimmer in that moment.
Two hours into the trip, Princess Celestia and Princess Luna both stood up from their seats.
“It looks like it's time,” Twilight announced to her friends, and stood up herself. “Rainbow Dash, Rarity and Pinkie Pie; head down to the front of a train with Princess Celestia. Applejack, Fluttershy; we’ll head back to the luggage car with Princess Luna.”
There were various sounds of agreement as the two groups split up and made their way out of the last passenger car. The other passenger cars would be searched by the other group, while Twilight’s—or was it Luna’s?—group would be starting with the sparsely-populated dining car.
“Fluttershy, if you could play Rainbow Dash for a moment and check everything from above, it would help,” Twilight said while Twilight and Luna carefully picked through the car, and Applejack guarded the door back the way they’d come.
As they made their way back towards the luggage car, though, they found few enough ponies at all, let alone the one that they were looking for.
“Ah suppose that we’re the decoy group?” Applejack eventually asked, just to fill the silence.
“I have no doubt that my sister chose the direction which she thought most likely to result in her meeting her old student,” Princess Luna said. “I am not so certain; the luggage car seems to be a prime location for our target to stow away.”
“Maybe a little too prime a location,” Fluttershy said as they all got a look at the boxcar full of bags, suitcases and even a few boxes. “We aren't going to search inside any of these bags are we?”
Twilight’s ears flattened as she saw Fluttershey’s point. “No. You’re right. She could be right here under our noses, but so long as she was inside something, we’d never find her.”
Princess Luna pressed her lips together in consternation. “Quite,” she said, glaring at the luggage as if it had personally offended her. “Regardless, we shall search as thoroughly as we can. Make a space on this side of the room, and we shall move the luggage into it one by one, leaving no suitcase unturned, and if one so much as squeaks, we shall investigate.”
They all nodded and got to work. Princess Luna, Applejack and Twilight all had the heavy lifting covered, so Fluttershy was once again assigned the job of watching from above to ensure that nopony slipped through the cleared area between the searched and unsearched areas.
As organized and efficient as their system was, they had still found nothing by the time the brakes of the train began to screech and the cars lurched, grinding to a stop.
This had been expected. In fact, it was a little late. Princess Celestia's group didn't have a car full of luggage to search at the other end of the train, so it had been decided that when they reach the conductor they would stop the train and begin the search of the outside with Rainbow Dash to spot and chase down Sunset if she tried to escape through the snowfields, Pinkie Pie to ply her contortionistic talents underneath the train and Rarity to… notice anything out of place? Okay, that was a bit of a stretch, but not everypony could have some skill specifically tailored to searching a train for a stowaway.
“Think they’ll find her?” Twilight asked Luna, who shook her head.
“I will allow myself to be happily surprised should our luck change at this juncture, but even with two squads of guards undercover inside, I fear that we do not have enough coverage to prevent a creative mare from simply slipping through our blind spots as we search.”
In the end, whether or not Princess Luna’s specific prediction was correct, both groups ended up returning to their car of origin empty-hooved.
Neither group said much after a short exchange of shaken heads, and Princess Celestia appeared to be quite down after having gotten her hopes up.
Twilight, too was rather upset, but for obviously different reasons than her mentor. Her friends did what they could to include her in their conversations, though, and by the time it was getting dark and the train was leaving the crystal mountains, she was laughing along with the rest of them as Pinkie Pie did impressions of certain ponies they all knew back in Ponyville.
“Miss? Miss! Are you alright?”
Twilight looked up at the panicked shouting down the car and craned her neck to get a better look. There was a young crystal pony collapsed in the center aisle, clutching her chest and breathing heavily.
“Oh my!” Fluttershy quietly exclaimed, immediately flitting over the gathering crowd to see if there was anything that she could do to help. Twilight soon lost sight of the mare, but something was bothering her about what she’d seen and she couldn’t put her hoof on what. She was barely aware of Rainbow Dash and Applejack pushing ponies away and telling them not to crowd Fluttershy of her patient, but it was the approach of Princess Celestia from the other direction that got them to finally back off and allow Twilight to get through to join them.
“Oh dear!” Fluttershy mumbled under her breath as she checked the mare over. “What do I do? What do I do? She’s so cold!” She turned to address the princess. “Princess Celestia—is there something you can do to warm her up?” she asked, but the princess was just standing there, shocked.
“…Sunset?” Princess Celestia managed to say, and Twilight finally realized what her subconscious had noticed.
This ‘crystal pony’ had a horn.
And yes, it was Sunset Shimmer.
“So, it sounds like the train is finally going to start running again,” said a pegasus stallion to his unicorn marefriend as Sunset hoofed over a pair of franchise-standard units of coffee.
She refused to use their stupid names unless she absolutely had to, and the privacy of her own head remained her own.
Mostly.
The warmth of the Crystal Heart filling her did make working in customer service almost bearable.
“Just in time for the end of the summit, of course,” the mare said, rolling her eyes. “Doesn’t that seem a little fishy to you?”
“What, that the princesses would insist the train runs for them even if it means worse problems later?” the stallion asked rhetorically as the two of them retreated to a table. “Sounds like business as usual to me.”
Sunset hated jobs like this, but they were a necessity. Under normal circumstances, the opportunity to eavesdrop on ponies was only barely worth having to actually interact with them, but in her withdrawal from scrying Twilight every week, she’d needed something that would be able to hold her attention and keep her from just spending her nights feeding trash to a tiny sun in the abandoned house she was squatting in.
She still did that, of course, but the important part was that she only did it to relax after a long day at work. So long as it didn’t interfere with the rest of her life, nopony could say she had a problem.
“You really believe it’s just ‘mechanical problems’ like they say?” the mare asked, Sunset’s ear swiveling just enough to continue listening.
“Why wouldn't I?” the stallion asked, looking blankly at the mare as they sat down.
“It’s this mare they’re looking for,” she said. “It has to be. It’s too much of a coincidence.”
Unfortunately for the mare’s theory, all the stallion said was, “What mare?”
“Are you seriously telling me you haven’t been stopped in the past week and asked if you’ve seen a unicorn mare with red and gold hair and a two-tone sun cutie mark?”
“Yes?” the stallion stated as if it were obvious. “It can’t be important enough to stop the train over if I haven’t even heard of it. I mean, come on, how does that even make any sense?”
“W—well…” The mare was momentarily dumbstruck as she searched for an answer until finally she had an epiphany. “Obviously they’re trying to keep it quiet. Think about it; that description? She’s gotta be Princess Celestia’s illegitimate daughter—and she’s been foalnapped!”
The stallion nearly choked on his coffee. “W—what?!” he said, scrambling to contain spilled coffee with a hoofful of napkins. “How in Equestria did you get that out of it?!”
“It isn’t obvious?” the mare asked, looking honestly confused as she levitated a new napkin dispenser over from the next table.
“No!” the stallion insisted. “That sounds like the plot of some Pom Prancy novel.”
“A good one, though, right?” the mare asked, hopeful to at least have that.
“There are good ones?”
Sunset was cleaning up her own little accident with the milk foamer as the two went on to argue the comparative merits of several different authors.
Celestia’s illegitimate daughter? How could some random pony off the street come up with that? Sunset wasn’t any stranger to the inane things that people pulled from whole cloth inside their heads, but that was stretching believability.
Really, that ship had sailed a long time ago. If Celestia expected to have an emotional reunion with her where Sunset cried and called her ‘mom,’ it’d be proof that the princess was even more disconnected with reality now than when Sunset had still been her student.
The rest was very interesting, though. She needed to be on that train when it left, so right now she had to plan.
Baffled, Sunset sat quietly just a few seats down from Twilight and the rest of her group. All of her plans had been useless because she hadn’t needed them. She’d just bought her ticket, boarded the train and sat down as if it was just a normal trip.
Part of her was offended, part of her decided that this was to be expected, part of her was suspicious and part of her had a creeping feeling of unease that slowly grew as the train pulled away from the station and began its journey southwest out of the Crystal Empire.
Those last two were both vindicated when the train stopped a few hours into the trip and the princesses started thoroughly searching it, though the fact that both groups essentially skipped the car that they’d started in meant that the first two got their moment as well.
Still, for what might have been the first time since she had come back to Equestria, Sunset was properly nervous. She didn't normally do ‘nervous,’ but she also didn't normally have to sit still and do nothing, hoping that nopony would notice her. There was something else that she couldn’t put her hoof on bothering her, too—enough that when everypony came back disappointed and the train started running again, she didn’t feel nearly as relieved and triumphant as she should have.
Embarrassingly, it took her another few hours to pinpoint where that feeling was actually coming from.
It was her connection to the Crystal Heart, which she had purposefully forged to be wide and shallow and was now peeling away from her the further she got from the borders of the Crystal Empire.
She needed to get out.
She needed to get out right now.
She didn’t make it. Just as she was stepping out into the center path of the passenger car, the train crossed out of the Crystal Mountains and the last small scrap of magic supporting Sunset’s connection to the Crystal Heart vanished.
When that connection then ripped itself free from her heart, Sunset felt like she’d been gutted and a sense of overwhelming loss consumed her, leaving her cold and shaking on the carpeted floor. Through it all, Sunset tried to hold on to any scraps of the Crystal Heart’s magic that she could find, but it was a lost cause. The magic was simply gone and she could already feel her crystal form unraveling.
Not, a small part of her argued, that it mattered because she had already garnered the attention of everypony in the entire passenger car, including Celestia.
“…Sunset?”
Yep. She was boned. Images of magic suppressors and ‘very disappointed’ talks were running through her head when it finally happened—Sunset's crystal body began to crack, crumble and finally shatter with a blinding flash of light, all in the space of a second.
She saw her chance.
While everypony was blinded by the flash of her transformation back into a fleshy unicorn, she powered through the surge of feelings and sensations to follow it up with another flash—a flash of teleportation.
It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that the modern teleportation spell had been made as boring as possible. Sunset’s time in the human world had given her ideas about all the things you could do with conservation of momentum, but unfortunately it didn’t actually work like that. Moving or not, a teleporting pony was always matched to the context of their destination and the difference was added to the effort it took to power the spell.
This was fortunate for Sunset since it meant that all she had to do was teleport fifteen feet to her left and the train was gone in seconds.
It was also unfortunate for Sunset since she really didn’t have it in her to make up that surcharge and having the last of her magic drawn away on top of everything else left her feeling completely hollow. She wasn’t even shaking from the cold that losing her connection to the Crystal Heart had left her with anymore; she just didn’t have it in her to do even that much. If she could just lay there in the dirt beside the train tracks for a while, that would be great.
She couldn’t, though. It simply wasn’t an option. As soon as the princesses realized what she had done, they would stop the train and backtrack. Celestia wouldn’t even bother stopping the train.
Still, they would have a mile or so of track to search. If she could just hide, they probably wouldn't find her and would just assume that she had continued to teleport away.
…
As she struggled to look around, what was left of her heart sank.
There really wasn't much just beyond the hoofhills of the Crystal Empire where a brightly-colored pony could hide.
Somehow, curled up and nestled in the middle of a thin, sparse and thorny bush Sunset Shimmer had managed to escape discovery by the princesses and their ponies—or so she assumed by the time the sun began to set.
Even hours later, she was still feeling tender, brittle and lost in more than just the practical ways. She also felt oddly squishy. She’d never gotten entirely used to being made of crystal, but the sudden change back was just as jarring—far more than the changes she’d undergone from traveling through the mirror.
Of course, part of it was that she had nothing to do but lay there in a bush focusing on the gurgling of her stomach while trying to drown out all the other things she was feeling, because immersing herself in the warmth of the Crystal Heart for a week and then having it ripped away from her like that had left her feeling anything but whole.
“Thank god Celestia isn't here to see this,” she grumbled to herself as she wiped the crust out of her eyes with her hoof. “She might think I had regrets or something.”
No, her heart might be raw and oversensitive from injury and she was no doubt suffering from some form of magical withdrawal, but she would heal and get over it.
And then, once she was feeling like herself again, she would find her way south to the Everfree forest and claim what was hers.
Well, okay, no—she wasn’t actually that delusional. She knew perfectly well what she was doing.
She would find her way south to the Everfree forest and claim what was Twilight’s.
“Well, that happened,” Rainbow Dash rudely exclaimed, dropping herself as heavily as a pegasus could back into her seat on the train, crossing her forelegs in annoyance. “We had her! We had her and she got away!”
As one of the ponies who had gone searching for Sunset after she’d teleported away in the middle of having some sort of seizure, Twilight supposed that Rainbow Dash had the right to be frustrated, but for the most part she was alone in that—or at least in expressing it quite so loudly.
Fluttershy, on the other hoof, was very clearly upset; possibly even more than Princess Celestia, who was at least confident that if Sunset Shimmer could escape, then that meant that she was fine.
Fluttershy was more deeply affected. As a pegasus, she hadn’t recognized the telltale signs of a teleport and had believed that the mare had crumbled to dust under her care.
Rarity was doing what she could to comfort her.
Twilight… had mixed feelings. Yes, she still felt the shadow of the threat that Sunset Shimmer posed to her and her magic looming over her, lending a sense of malice to everything Princess Celestia’s ex-student did, but at the same time…
Laying there on the floor suffering from some sort of magical backlash, Twilight had come to a realization that she had completely missed back in the castle when she’d been keeping her distance.
Maybe it was that she’d been vulnerable or maybe it was something to do with her crystalline form—Twilight didn’t think so, but it was possible—but laying there scared, crying and shaking, Sunset had just looked so… young.
Sunset Shimmer hadn’t looked like a mare ten years her senior, bitter and jaded after living a life in exile and planning revenge; she had looked like a lost and lonely teenager lashing out at the life and the mare who had failed to love her.
Admittedly, she was probably both, but still. The idea that Sunset had actually looked younger than Twilight by a few years… well, it got her thinking.
The remainder of the trip back home was quiet and uneventful, giving Twilight a lot of time to think. That wasn't always a good thing with her, but in this case, a little time and distance did help her get some perspective.
“Really, Twilight,” Rarity admonished her for moping a bit over breakfast the next morning. “You don’t actually have much to complain about.”
“Don’t have…?” Twilight wasn’t angry over the statement because she was just that dumbstruck.
“Well, yes,” Rarity said. “If you think about it, we may not have caught Sunset Shimmer—or even really ‘won’ this encounter to any extent that feels good—but Sunset Shimmer has definitely lost. Here we are, on a train, hurtling towards our destination at eighty miles an hour while she cowers in the dirt somewhere. It is far from the ideal situation, not the least because leaving somepony in her condition out in the middle of nowhere isn’t something I can condone, but your magic, at least, is safe.”
Twilight wasn’t so sure that ‘safe’ was accurate so long as Sunset Shimmer was still out there, but she didn’t argue the point and did her best to see it from that perspective.
Paradoxically, what helped the most was actually the source of her remaining uneasiness in the first place—because everypony still seemed to be operating on the unspoken assumption that Twilight would just show up at the Everfree, instantly receive her missing magic and be home in time for dinner. On the one hoof, it meant that she couldn’t just let the issue of Sunset Shimmer go—but on the other, there was nothing she could actually do about that and figuring out just how she was going to reclaim her magic was much more important right then.
It wasn’t exactly inner peace, but it worked for her.
As expected, trying to solve a problem with no new information to go on was not wildly successful and by the time the train was pulling up to Ponyville, Twilight was no closer to figuring out how exactly she was going to get the ancient and mysterious powers of the Everfree inside of her.
A fact of which the rest of her friends were woefully unaware. They all waved happily at her as the group split up, eager to see family members, get back to their usual routines and sleep in their own beds for the first time in a week and a half. Even Spike was in a hurry to leave her behind at the station in favor of eagerly digging through the mail for the comics he’d missed.
That was fine, though. Honestly, Twilight thought as she made her way out to the outskirts of the city where it met the Everfree, it was probably better this way.
It would be less embarrassing when she failed.
And fail she did—if she could call standing there just inside the forest scrunching her face for twenty minutes even trying.
Now that she knew what she was feeling for, she could sense the magic of the Everfree, sure; it was vast and so much more present than anything natural had a right to be, but did that extend to her having some connection to it or was it just the same feeling of being watched that had been keeping ponies away from it for a thousand years?
There was no way to tell. It wasn’t as if she could calculate her feelings and compare the 32.4 megaeverfrees that she felt to the 16.6 that another pony like Rarity experienced.
“I feel ridiculous,” Twilight said, sitting down with a groan.
“Well, that makes two of us!” said a very distinct voice from right next to her.
“Gah!” Twilight shouted, leaping away and pointing her horn at the Draconequus in a very well-made Starswirl the Bearded costume sized for a pony.
Twilight couldn’t help it. After all the stress and worry of the past week, she laughed. It was a short laugh—more of a giggle, really—but the look of seemingly innocent glee that crossed Discord’s face at her reaction came as a complete surprise. She was still wary of the Draconequus’ supposed reformation, but if she thought of him as another Pinkie Pie, then maybe she could give him a real chance.
Not that two Pinkie Pies wasn’t a sign to get out of Ponyville while she still could, but it was hardly unique in that and she was still living there.
Discord’s chance lasted exactly negative two seconds. “Wait, isn’t that my Starswirl the Bearded costume?!”
Discord coughed into his fist and snapped his claws on his other hand, vanishing the whole getup. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sparkle,” he insisted, affecting an offended mein. “It is nice to accuse your friends of things like that, you know—and besides, I'm not the pony who spent an entire official holiday publically cross-dressing.”
Twilight blushed. “I—wha—you! They’re robes!” she sputtered and yelled. “It doesn’t—”
“You know…” Discord said, looping over backwards so that he was laying down in the air in a set of fluffy pink pyjamas decorated with the faces of all four alicorns and leaning in to whisper. “Just between you and me, if there was a princess that could really pull off a nice fitted suit, it’d be miss tall, dark and shouty.”
Twilight… Twilight had no idea what she was supposed to say to that aside from imagining a tiny Rarity voice in the corner of her head nodding along and saying, “He’s right, you know.”
Wait, that wasn’t her imagination. There was an actual, tiny plastic Rarity on Twilight’s shoulder performing said actions.
Twilight may have taken a little too much pleasure in flicking the offending doll aside regardless of whether it was objectively right or not.
She did her best to ignore the other five little plastic ponies that rushed up to tiny Rarity, shouting in grief while she bemoaned what kind of cold, cruel princess would do such a thing… to her mane.
“Discord,” she said, growing irritated, but he seemed to have disappeared while the tiny plastic ponies continued their little skit. “Discord,” she said again, raising her voice a little as tiny Applejack began bucking at Twilight’s hooves and tiny Rainbow dash swore vengeance for making Fluttershy cry. She was about to properly yell at him when she remembered the look on his face when he’d gotten a laugh at her.
“Discord, please,” she said, sighing and sitting down—inadvertently crushing tiny Pinkie Pie, who had been sneaking up on her. Then, she said the magic words. “I’m not having fun.”
Just like that, the plastic ponies all stopped and clattered to the ground like dice. Moments later, Discord was there, sulking and picking them up one by one. The way he was acting, she almost thought that he would apologize, but maybe that was expecting a bit much at this stage.
“Look, Discord. I… appreciate your trying to cheer me up,” she said. It was a bit of a stretch, but the fact that he was trying at all said a whole lot more about him than getting his cooperation by threatening him with Fluttershy ever could. “But distractions aren’t what I need right now. I have a head start on this for now, but that's not going to last for very long.”
Discord didn’t say anything, so she just continued. “Everypony thinks I can just flash my horn and do this, but I don’t even know where to start. I've studied a lot of magic; I've even done some of my own research—but I'm a generalist. I can do anything from turning apples into oranges—and outrages if Applejack is nearby—to spells that affect gravity, space and even time… but I have no idea how to feel out a connection to some vast and diffuse source of magic that may or may not feel like having anything to do with me.
“And I think Sunset might. She’s the princess’ previous student who grew up seeking power and she somehow managed to turn herself into a crystal pony—probably within hours of her initial escape into the city. How can I compete with that?”
“Well… I—”
“Oh, I don't expect you to understand,” Twilight said, brushing Discord off. “You're a millennias-old spirit of chaos who could probably snap his fingers and solve this whole—” Suddenly, Twilight realized what she was saying, gasped and turned to him. “You’re a millenias-old spirit of chaos who could probably solve this whole thing with a snap of his fingers!” she said excitedly. “You took away our magic in the hedge maze, it’d only make sense that you could give it back!”
Discord winced just the slightest amount before bouncing back wearing a Trottingham police uniform and holding a sign. “Well, that’s just the thing, Sparkle—it would make sense, and that automatically makes it a no-go.” He showed her the sign, which read in big, block letters, ‘IN THIS HOUSE WE OBEY THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS,’ only the words ‘DO NOT’ were scribbled in between ‘we’ and ‘obey’ in red.
“What?” Twilight said, befuddled. “How does that—”
“I’m going to stop you right there,” Discord interrupted, placing a finger over her mouth to shush her. He then flipped over backwards, and appeared to be sunning himself in a hammock—sans sun and sans hammock, of course. “Tell me, Twilight, how much do you know about chemistry?”
Twilight’s train of thought had to stop and change tracks to answer that, and she could have done without the visual aids that Discord provided to represent it. Doing her best to ignore the blinking lights, she responded. “Well, I don’t exactly have lab coats stored around town in case of lab coat emergencies,” she said dryly, not sure where this was going and only barely willing to play along. “But I know my way around a chromatogram and have all the relevant licenses.”
Discord opened his mouth to comment, but Twilight preempted him. “Yes, that means I have a distilling license. I don’t see what this has to do with the Everfree unless you’re suggesting I chop the whole thing down, ferment and boil the magic out of it and get smashed.” Twilight frowned. “…Would that work?” she asked.
“That’s not the point,” Discord said, dodging the question. Twilight wanted dearly to ask him when that had ever mattered to him, but she wasn’t given a chance. “The point is that an understanding of chemistry implies an understanding of entropy.”
“Of course,” Twilight acknowledged, stating, “Any chemical reaction always results in a product of a lower energy state than its components. You mean you can’t help me because it would make me more powerful?”
“Oh no,” Discord said. “Quite the opposite, actually.”
Twilight’s face twisted up in confusion as she tried to untangle that statement, but she didn’t quite manage it before he continued to explain.
“You see, my dear Twilight, chaos is the opposite of entropy—the antithesis of order.
“In order for order to act, it needs to make things more boring, sending us further and further into the eventual heat-death of the universe
“In chaos for chaos to do something, on the other tentacle, it has to be something that livens up the universe.”
“But that doesn’t make—” Twilight had to stop herself before insisting that Discord make sense again. “I mean—doesn’t it follow that returning the rest of my alicorn powers to me would be a higher—energy state?”
Discord tsked, waving a claw at Twilight. “Twilight, Twilight, Twilight,” he said with an overly dramatic sigh. “You’re overthinking it. It’s not about energy states and free electrons; it’s all much simpler than that. A higher level of abstraction, if you will. Less thermodynamics, more—and I feel this should have been obvious—chaos theory.”
“Are you saying you can’t help me because…”
“I don’t solve problems,” he said with a shrug. “Sorry, princess.”
“That… makes far too much sense,” Twilight said, dropping into a chair that hadn’t been there a moment ago as she contemplated the implications. “Wait,” she said, coming up with an idea. “In chemistry, an imbalance of energy on one side of the reaction can be made up for by heating the solution—couldn’t you do something like that?”
“Well, I could…” Discord said, tapping his chin. Twilight began to have hope that this whole thing could be solved here and now only for those hopes to be immediately crushed. “I suppose the question would be, how many tentacles do you want with that? Not that you’d get to choose, of course. You never know, though? Maybe scorpion tails and lobster claws will be the ‘in’ thing this season?” he said, spinning around to show off a brocade dress with said appendages lifting it up indecently.
All the color seemed to drain from Twilight’s face. “N—no—that’s—”
“Are you sure I couldn’t interest you in an eye-stalk or several?”
There was a flash of light, and Twilight was gone.
“Huh,” Discord said to the empty forest path. “I didn’t even get to ask if these pseudopods made my butt look fat.”