Prologue — The Immortals of Canterlot Castle

"Celestia! Celestia?" the voice of Twilight Sparkle echoed through the halls of Canterlot Castle.

The Princess of Friendship turned to a guard who stood nearby, pale. "Could you tell me where Princess Celestia is?"

"Her room, P-princess. You know your way there?" The guard trembled ever so slightly.

"Thank you!" The gracious thanks did not alleviate the guardspony's trembling.

Twilight Sparkle skipped up the stairs. She skipped past the paled guards. She traipsed to the door of Celestia, the most powerful being in all Equestria, and knocked. The door opened, shortly after, and Celestia looked down on Twilight Sparkle. The tall, snow-white figure of Celestia was imposing at the least of times, but at this moment, it was slightly different. It was imperceptible to all but the most observant, but Celestia's eyes were somewhat puffed. As if she had been crying a while ago, but that said 'while' had already been diluted into miserable but well-suffered years.

"Leave." A taut frown had been drawn across Celestia's face.

"Bu-but Princess Celestia!" A rictus of despair spread across Twilight's visage. "I'm your prized student!"

"Your form does not amuse me, Chrysalis. Leave." The frown of Celestia deepened.

"Oh, bah on you, Celestia." An ugly sneer spread across the face of Twilight Sparkle. "I shouldn't have expected you to be any fun."

Celestia stood expectantly in the doorway, watching the disguised changeling queen.

"What, do you expect me to leave, Celestia?" Chrysalis laughed, but her laugh was hollow and mocking. "I'm here to parlay. To talk it out. You're not going to turn away diplomacy, are you?"

Celestia breathed in slightly in aggravation, but she stepped backwards, allowing the facsimile of her student into the royal chambers. Purple wings flapped as Chrysalis took flight, looping around Celestia before alighting eventually on the recently-inhabited bed of the diarch. She hit the bed hard, rolling onto her back as she became entangled in the giant comforter that lay atop her landing zone. It would have been significantly more endearing had Chrysalis not been cackling malevolently the whole while.

"Oh, Celestia," she called out, her voice temporarily softening. "Your bed is so warm! You should come, and join me!" Chrysalis couldn't keep her face straight, though, as the act gave way to more sickening laughter. "You should have tasted the hope you had when you first saw me! It was priceless! That an old crone like you could still hope for something so miraculous gives me hope, Celestia, you have no idea!"

Celestia walked towards the bed slowly and purposefully, speaking with words that were alloyed with equal measures of patience and ire.

"Speak your piece, Chrysalis, and be gone from here."

Chrysalis rolled over again, so that she faced Celestia. "Well isn't it clear, Celly-welly? I have a proposition. I can take the place of your Princess Twilight. You solve all sorts of civil unrest, no charge for you!"

"You're delusional, Chrysalis. Not in a million years. Now leave."

"Wait, wait!" Chrysalis chuckled. "I'm not done yet. I have a counter-proposal, should you not accept my proposition. See, if you don't accept, I defeat you, your sister, and all your guards, then raze Canterlot to the ground before conquering the rest of Equestria."

Celestia raised an eyebrow.

Chrysalis laughed. "You don't think I can do it, do you? But I can, Celly, I can! I feed off of emotions, in case you didn't get that last time. I stopped at Ponyville on the way here. The despair there is so thick that I could grow thirty times as strong as I was at the wedding just by passing through, but I stayed for eight hours, Celestia. You have no idea how powerful I am right now. Even if you were a hundred fold the strength you were at the wedding, your sun would be a pale candle to hold beside the flame of my power. I am invincible, Celestia! I truly am! And you have no trump cards that can save you. The Elements of Harmony aren't going to help. I have no idea what happened to them, something to do with a tree. Your Royal Guard? Weak. Even if you had Cadance here, I doubt that three alicorns could stand against me! And your precious little student, Princess Twilight Sparkle? She isn't going to help you. So what choice do you have, Celestia? You can lose, or you can die." The little lavender alicorn of lies rolled over onto her back again. "Your choice!"

"Leave, Chrysalis. My patience is running thin."

"Oh, and what will you do? Will you go all solar on me? Don't kid me. You can't stand up to me. You should bow. Bow to your Queen!" The horn of Twilight Sparkle was enveloped by green light. An aura weighed down on the front half of Celestia.

Celestia didn't budge.

"Not going to bend so easily, are you?" The green glow overtook the entire body of the enshrouded changeling queen as she righted herself. The lavender body that she had claimed stepped delicately over sheets before she hopped off, gingerly steadying herself after hitting the floor with a throaty chuckle. "I've been looking forward to this for a long time, Celestia. Any last words?"

Celestia huffed a bit of air, like she was disappointed.

"Very well. Now die."

Chrysalis' green magic swelled into a beam of destructive energy, melting the body of Celestia. The body of the sun princess vaporized into ash before Chrysalis' spell. And when she had finished, she laughed. She laughed, and laughed, and laughed. It was easy!

"You didn't have enough, Celestia! The love of a unicorn laid you low! The great sun princess!" Chrysalis sneered at the ashes. "It should surprise no one that the despair of an entire town could turn you to ash! I can't believe that I ever feared you."

Chrysalis kicked the ash, and stepped towards the door. Each hoof-beat filled her with confidence. She was the Queen! Princesses were trifles to her! She was a goddess! Not a goddess—The Goddess! She reached the threshold, and stopped in thought. She should say something. Some kind of a taunt? A proclamation! She could tell the entirety of Equestria that two Princesses were dead, and that she killed one of them. It sent shivers down her borrowed pony spine. Times were changing, and the dice were all rolling up changeling.

She sucked in a deep breath with the last step to the door. Yet as she prepared to call out, she couldn't quite set her foot down. It stuck, in the air, like it was tangled in string. Chrysalis held the breath that she had taken in. She needed to listen. Chrysalis' ears twitched. She knew the sound of flame, but this sound, it was a paradoxical one. It was the crackling of fire, but with none of the popping noises that came with it. Like distilled, liquid fire. Tamed fire. Chrysalis turned her head.

Crowned in a wreath of flame the color of purest gold, Celestia frowned at Chrysalis. She towered over Chrysalis, even given the fact that Chrysalis had crossed at least half the room before turning around—the aura of pure power that Celestia exuded warped space and ideas like a lens would bend light. Yet still, as she stood there entwined in the phoenix-flame, her frown was the most terrifying thing about her. The simple frown that was completely unchanged from several seconds before, but now communicated implacable rage.

Chrysalis lit her horn in desperation. The same beam as before ripped across the room at Celestia, but the beam of magic itself melted before it could even touch the white and gold phoenix-fire.

"Chrysalis." The sense of measure was gone, along with the illusion of politeness. It was a vocation of pure contempt. The word 'chrysalis' could never be spoken again in the ear of the changeling queen and communicate anything other than the sheer ire of Celestia.

"I tried lenience. But you have gone too far." Chrysalis launched spell after spell at the speaker, but they all failed before Celestia's brilliant aura. Chrysalis felt herself lifted into the air—Celestia's horn didn't even glow. It was as if Celestia had simply willed Chrysalis to rise, and the universe had chosen to make it so.

"No!" Chrysalis screamed. "No! It isn't fair! How can you be this powerful? I am the Queen! I have power worthy of immortality! You are a fluke! You cannot be, you should not be alive! Why wouldn't you die? Your student died just fine, but you just couldn't do it! Why won't you die? When will you die? Just die! Die! Die!"

"Yes... about my student." Celestia breathed out shortly and harshly, and the first actual wave of heat from the flames buffeted Chrysalis' face. "That is the reason that I have lost my patience. The reason that I will not let you leave this room without suffering punishment. You have the audacity, the sheer gall, not only to walk into Canterlot Castle and hand me an ultimatum, but to do so while wearing the skin of my beloved and faithful student. You disrespected not only our nation, but our hero. Princess Twilight... I had hoped so much of her. She would have saved so many lives, helped so many ponies, made so many ideas. To be taken away so early seemed an impossibility to me. And so you brashly trot into my castle, wearing her fur as an insult and a challenge to me, and expect it to go uncontested."

Chrysalis was sobbing, now, letting loose spell after spell and trying to shift form, trying anything to escape. The spreading phoenix-fire did not allow that, though. She quailed before the gaze of Princess Celestia, but found her head turned, forced to face the sun princess and her rage incarnate.

"Pay attention." Celestia's voice was full of anger, but it was not anger directed at Chrysalis. It was vague and nebulous scorn, which made it all the more frightening. Celestia was venting not only her anger at Chrysalis, but her anger towards the entire universe in all of its unfairness. "I am about to tell you what you did wrong. It would be wise of you to listen."

"Your mistake, Chrysalis, was all too predictable. It was exactly what I would expect from you. Your mistake was thinking that your victory over me three years ago at the wedding was a true measurement of my power. But really, it was deception. I only needed to stand up against you so that the public did not think I had abandoned them. Other than that, I could use the entire wedding as a working lesson for my little ponies. It also comes with a lesson for you, Chrysalis. You could take that lesson in more than one way. You could perhaps look upon it as a criticism of your confidence, that you would be so sure of yourself and the strength of the cocoon you put me in, to prevent me from escaping. You could view it as an attack on your strategic ability, that you would even consider keeping a trophy whose power you know at least rivals yours, rather than just killing me. But the lesson that I would like to have you take from this is the incredible sort of irony that is involved. That the queen of deception is the most gullible, the most naïve of all the enemies I have ever faced. That indeed, the worst card dealt to me is superior to your entire deck. If I had no lessons to teach to my little ponies, I could have disabled every changeling in Canterlot without a second thought. But in the end, I outwitted you. I tricked you into thinking that your power was greater than my own. The fact that you could not deflate your tremendous ego for a single second in order to realize that you are not the only liar in the world, that was your downfall.

"But you made another mistake. You misunderstood me and Twilight. You came here after seeing a simple student die, and went to bully her woebegone teacher by taking the form of the recently deceased, hoping that the teacher's emotional baggage would make her weaker." The phoenix-fire leaped up, dancing at the false lavender hooves of Chrysalis. It only tingled, leaving Chrysalis' hooves untouched just like the rest of the room, but Chrysalis still yelped in fear. "Instead, you got centuries of loneliness that was just denied a constant companion. I'm not sure what I thought of Twilight as. A daughter, that I could have never had? A friend who I could have been able to keep, for once? A student, the first that would one day surpass me? I was denied those things, Chrysalis. And you come into my chambers, impersonating her of all the options available to you. That made me angry. I'm not sure you realized that I could get angry. I control my anger very well. I would hate to hurt any of my little ponies. Yet even with my centuries of practice at not becoming angry, you succeeded in making me very, very upset. Congratulations, Chrysalis."

"I hope she died in pain!" Chrysalis gurgled, writhing in Celestia's arcane grip.

At that, Celestia's bottom lip curled into an ugly scowl, an unequine leer of teeth and anger. The phoenix-fire finally was finally unleashed, swarming about Chrysalis. It crawled up her body, and Chrysalis shrieked anew. The imitation of Twilight Sparkle was melted away and consumed by the golden white flame, dripping globules of essence running down the false body and collecting beneath in a pool. The puddle of seething, silvery essence bubbled and swelled, and Chrysalis was melted away until all that remained of her was the roar of phoenix-fire and the glimmer of mercurial essence. Warped and bulging under the phoenix-flames, something eventually arose from the pool. Screaming in fear and confusion, a filly not even a full head tall extricated itself from the arcane waste, her shrieks carrying over the sound of dying, unnatural flames.

The filly was light grey. Her mane was a darker grey. She was an earth pony, with no cutie mark. She was very small, but average-sized for her apparent age.

"Celestia!" the filly cried out, "Celestia, what have you done to me?"

Celestia smiled grimly at the tiny, squeaking filly. "Why, I gave you the thing that you wanted all of your 'subjects' to have, my dear 'Queen Chrysalis.' I gave you the body of a pony. You will find as you grow, in fact, that you are utterly unremarkable in every way. You are the perfect changeling, now. Your disguise is impeccable. It's what you would want for every one of your changelings."

"But I can't change! I'm stuck! I'm not a changeling! How can I rule like this?"

Celestia turned back towards her bed. "You won't rule. The invasion you planned on Canterlot was plenty enough to plant the seeds of discontent. Without you to boss them about, I'm sure the changelings will be happy to work out whatever differences they have with each other on their own. Diplomatically. Hopefully, they'll come to me, and perhaps stop a mess before it begins." Celestia's golden aura wrapped over the little filly, and gently set it outside. "You have to take care of yourself, now. I'd recommend you start at an orphanage. Now, as I said before, she who was once Chrysalis. Be. Gone."

The tiny filly raised her hoof as if to speak out... and then shivered, turned tail, and ran. The door to Celestia's room slammed shut behind the little filly. Celestia, meanwhile, stood herself up tall in her private chambers. She breathed in deeply, and when she finished breathing out, she had slumped some. She turned to the mirror in her quarters.

"Well. That was interesting." An asymmetric head, with asymmetric eyes, asymmetric teeth, and a slight downwards slope to his mouth judged Celestia from within her mirror.

"Discord." Celestia sighed in admission. She had not only grown to accept the draconequus' company, but to a certain extent, she had actually come to appreciate it.

"Forgive me if I intrude, my dear Princess, but I must say," Discord exited the mirror calmly, scooping an errant strand of phoenix-fire from the air and twirling it between his claws. "That I have never seen you quite so liberal in dispensing your anger. You always struck me as a pillow-puncher, to be honest."

"I..." Celestia bent her head. "I let my emotions get away, yes. But Chrysalis had to understand that she had gone too far. I ended her venom."

"Oh, believe me, Celestia, I truly do understand." Discord stretched the golden white flame into a feather, and stuck it behind his horn. "Quite honestly, were she saying those things to me, I don't think I would be nearly as gentle as you. You let her walk away on her own power." Discord grimaced. "I more likely would have changed her into something unpleasant. A bubblegum mousse, perhaps. Nasty, sticky stuff."

Princess Celestia didn't respond. She instead walked solemnly to her bed, and with a little trepidation, used her magic to straighten the sheets.

"Ah, Celestia." Discord tutted. "So grim, as always. I know as well as you do that there are other things you could be doing right now."

"Yes." Celestia closed her eyes. "Yes, I suppose you might be right."

"Then why so sad, Celestia?" Discord traced a smile across Celestia's lips, earning him a raised eyebrow for the invasion of her personal space. "It wouldn't kill you to crack a genuine smile, now would it?"

"I don't think you're nearly so clueless as you would wish me to believe."

"Ho-no-no, Celestia," Discord frowned, raising a question-mark from out of sight and wagging it disapprovingly before gently flicking it at Celestia. "I have not given you any sort of allowance to dodge any questions!"

"...No, Discord. It wouldn't kill me to smile." Celestia grimaced, turning to inspect a nightstand, focusing on even its unimportant details. "Perhaps my immortality factors into that statement. Perhaps if that privilege of mine hadn't been so exclusive, it wouldn't be an issue in the first place."

"Oof!" Discord winced. "Ouch. Poor word choice on my part." The draconequus coiled and sprang, compressing himself to paper thickness and drifting to a stop on top of the nightstand. "Look, Oh Great Princess, you just can't have Survivor's Guilt. Not that you can't pull it off well, but it doesn't really befit the situation or your character. And that aside, it makes you seem incredibly angsty."

Celestia's horn glowed, peeling Discord off of the nightstand so that she could look him in the eye. "I was the only Immortal in Equestria for at least nine and a half centuries, Discord. It's been at most forty years since Cadance was born, and she has never had the time to become my peer. Now that my significance has finally waned somewhat, with you, Cadance, and Luna all here... I feel entitled to a little angst."

"Yes, yes." The tiny paper Discord rolled its eyes. "Don't let me stop you from feeling needless misery over the quote 'demise' unquote of our ever so dear Twilight Sparkle."

"Discord, you—" Celestia hissed, her eyes narrowing, but was interrupted by a bang from just a couple meters to her side.

"Sister!" Luna glimmered with blue motes of power from her recent teleport. Her darker blue coat held a marred luster—ruffled from the hasty magical movement, but her mane still shone with countless stars, ethereally fluttering in the windless room. She looked around, swallowed, and spoke carefully. "I heard word from a guard that just recently, Twilight Sparkle was seen on the grounds."

"Chrysalis." Celestia needed only put forth a single word in reply.

"Oh." Disappointment etched itself across Luna's figure. "I suppose I should have come when I felt such surges of magic earlier, but I figured you might have simply been... venting."

"Venting? Ha!" Discord's neck telescoped out as he made himself known to the moon princess. "You should have seen her! I don't think I've ever seen Celestia so angry!"

Luna's brow creased in concern. "Was anypony harmed?"

"No, Luna. Everypony is fine."

"I see what you did there, Celestia." Discord wheedled his way out of Celestia's magic grip, grinning as he held up a flipbook. "I'm not sure you could have said the same in regards to 'everyling.'" The flipbook's pages turned, and showed Chrysalis vanishing in a poof of smoke, leaving a small filly behind.

"...Did you really?" Luna asked.

There was a brief moment of silence between the two sisters. Celestia just sighed, and sat herself on the floor. Luna stepped forward slightly, before sitting as well. She watched Celestia carefully—it was only this morning that Twilight Sparkle had died, and Luna knew that while no longer technically Celestia's student, the two still had held tight bonds. Celestia still held herself with reserve, patience, and control, but Luna had known Celestia long enough to spot the signs. Celestia would, under normal circumstances, never lose control of her emotions. Even against Chrysalis. The Celestia that Luna had long been familiar with had levels of self-control that paled in comparison to the pony that Luna was now getting to know once again, and even then, Celestia had lost her patience. To lash out in such a fashion seemed terribly out of place for the solar princess, but Luna was certain that no trickery or replacement had occurred.

"As much as I'm appreciating the absolute moroseness of the room, I don't suppose either of you are planning on actually doing anything, are you?" Discord idly hovered above Luna. His brows were creased in what Luna might have characterized as concern, had she not known the draconequus for his sheer lack of tact.

"I suppose that I should return to whence I came..." Luna sighed, turning away from her sister. "I left in the midst of some 'upkeep.' I was aiding the dear familiar of your... of Twilight. He needed somepony to talk to."

She began charging her horn for a new teleport, mentally tracing the path of the spell, a line of magic connecting her back to Ponyville as she gathered her focus. As energy filled the matrix she had made for her casting, though, a clawed finger wafted through the air. Discord propped himself on the line of magic that had former, bending the line as he leaned on it like a tired minotaur might lean on a wall, his weight shifting the line of arcane power. Luna's eyes bugged out wide as she watched the action—it took place faster than the mortal eye could see, and even for Luna, the motion was so quick that she could not react. Instead, she was forced to follow through with the spell, taking her wherever the new location was.

Luna popped into being right above her sister, falling with an unceremonious thump. Celestia didn't immediately respond to being fallen upon. Luna stood, awkwardly, and looked down at her sister, crumpled flat on the floor by the impact. Luna opened her mouth a little to speak—to chastise Discord, or apologize to her sister—but Celestia's hooves quickly shot out towards Luna's right front leg, interrupting her.

Luna stepped forward a little before hauling her sister up from the floor, and wrapping her forelegs around her in a hug. Celestia didn't cry out, in anguish or sorrow. She didn't sob, or sniffle. But Luna suspected that if Celestia hadn't forgotten or unlearned how to do each and every one of those things in the past several centuries...

"You can thank me later, Princesses." Discord gave an uncharacteristically gentle smile as he set up a small wicker chair on Celestia's bed, balancing on it with his tail as he propped open a book, The Art of Reading Upside-Down. "I'll even let you angst in my direction later."

"Shut up, Discord." Luna muttered.