Stopped Clock

Chapters

"Excellent. I'm going to kill you now."
"Let's have a talk, I and I."
“Oh, spare me. Us. Yourself. Whoever.”
“When in doubt, throw stuff at the future and see what sticks.”
"The Hearthswarming season really brings the stab-happy do-gooders out, doesn't it?”

"Excellent. I'm going to kill you now."

First, the quiet. Birdsong and muttering wind and the patter of snowfall. Distant chatter from ponies in a little village, muffled by neat walls of trees.

Then the static that rippled through the air. Pealing light and crashing white-gold arcs that sent the few creatures in the trees into a headlong retreat, before the light built and built to a peak that erupted in one great flash.

And last, when the light had cleared and the last sparks had fizzed out of existence, the voices of the six.

“Tartarus. Where are we now?”

“These are apple trees, right? Check the map, there was an apple orchard somewhere on there.”

“Stars above, I think I just stepped in something rural.”

“Odd. You wouldn't think the place it all started looked this … innocent.”

“That's how they fool you. I swear I had my crossbow when I stepped in the box. Has anypony seen my crossbow?”

“Quiet.” The last voice, lower and more guttural than the others. “Don't bother with the map, I've been here enough times to know we're off-target. The target's en-route to our baby tyrant as you all blether, and we've not got long. Follow me. And don't kill or canoodle anything you don't have to, for the love of Sol.”

The knock sounded at the library's door, in the same instant that the library's clock chimed once. Twilight Sparkle looked towards it, surprised. Few ponies around here called at the library, less still when a full-day blizzard was on the schedule.

“Coming!” she called, neatly stowing away her book as she rose. Spike had lent his services to Rarity for the day, so she'd have to play doorman. Maybe this was him coming back, although she'd have expected him to call out or use his own key.

She opened the door, letting a blast of cold air and a flurry of snowflakes into the library's warm confines. A pony stood outside, huddled and hidden amidst a rumpled cloak. Their white legs stamped impatiently on the front step. The outline of a horn pressed against the cloak's hood.

“Rarity?” Twilight stepped back from the doorway, and made an ushering motion with her hoof. “Come inside, you'll freeze out there. How's Spike? Is he behaving himself?”

The unicorn stepped inside, kicked the door shut behind them, and let the snow-dusted cloak fall away. Twilight blinked and took an involuntary step back. It wasn't Rarity. Her coat was white, but their stature was smaller, their eyes were a bright and piercing gold, and their mane fell down in a yellow braid across their back. Crossed lightning bolts gleamed on her flanks.

“Excuse me,” said the unicorn mare, her voice soft and hesitant, “Are you Princess Twilight Sparkle?”

“I am,” said Twilight. “What's your name, and how can I help you?”

The unicorn breathed in and closed her eyes. “Okay,” she murmured. Her eyes opened and tracked up and down Twilight, taking in her mane, her coat, the wings on her back. Her jaw tightened. “Okay. Excellent. I'm going to kill you now.”

“... what?”

White magic glimmered around the mare's horn, and a small steel blade flashed out from the cloak's depths. The unicorn held it before her in a professional fencer's stance. “Close your eyes, tyrant. Don't make this harder than it is.”

“No, wait, hang on, what?” Panic was a vague suggestion at the back of Twilight's mind, trying to make its way past a rising tide of bewilderment. “Have – have we met? Why are you doing this?”

“Be quiet!” Faster than thought, faster than Twilight could so much as blink, the steel flew out straight at her throat. Panic finally wrestled its way to the front of Twilight's mind and seized hold of her reflexive magic. In a flash, she reappeared outside the library's front door, the cold air and wind slapping her senses into full alertness.

She caught her breath as she glanced around the town; no other ponies were out and about in the winter weather, though there were voices in the distance. Nopony nearby though, which was good. They wouldn't get hurt in what had all the makings of a scuffle.

Twilight whirled on the library door as it slammed open, and the strange unicorn came charging straight at her. Two blades levitated around her head, and both came spinning at Twilight from different directions.

“Look, calm down!” Twilight hastily threw up two magic shields at different angles, and the blades glided off the shimmering purple surfaces. “What's your problem? Why are you attacking me? Calm down!”

The unicorn snarled, and a third blade bobbed out from the library's doorway as her horn blazed with incandescent force. The blades rose and came scything down at Twilight. With a frustrated yell, Twilight extended the shields into a single unbroken sphere all around herself. The blades struck along the surface and dug and twisted at the arcane material, hunting for any entrance. Sparks sprayed and tortured metal keened, putting paid to the snow-shrouded peace of the Ponyville streets.

“The Manehattan purges,” the unicorn hissed. Her blades raked along the bubble. “The Crystal Empire burning. All of Capra turned to molten glass and screaming shadows! The refugees, the harvesting camps, the dead upon dead upon dead! That's what you've done!”

“I don't know what you're talking about. Any of what you're talking about!” Twilight looked towards the unicorn's blazing horn and focused briefly. A whipcrack of purple energy slapped against the unicorn's horn, making her release the magic and drop the blades with a surprised yelp. “Look, please, articulate your problems like a grown-up mare and we can talk about this.”

The mare just scooped up the blades again and held them poised over her head. A shimmering white shield sprung into existence at her front. “No words,” she murmured. “Not now. Not after I've come so far.”

“So far from what?” Twilight could hear the voices in the distance coming closer, amidst what sounded like multiple ponies galloping. She cursed internally. Her jackhammering heartrate didn't need to be amplified by a bunch of other ponies coming onto the scene and putting themselves at risk. “Just please talk to me! Why are you attacking me, what have I done, when did I allegedly do it, is there some medication you should be taking? Tell me something!”

The mare met Twilight's gaze. Something in the depths of her expression looked broken, and she paused for a moment. “I'm sorry,” she said quietly. “You don't deserve this yet. But you will. Oh, you will.”

“Will?”

By way of answer, the three blades flew at Twilight. She teleported away in the instant before they landed, reappearing with a flash several metres above where she had stood. One hasty flap of her new wings reoriented her to face downwards, looking at where the blades briefly hovered. Spell energy blazed out from her horn's tip in the blink of an eye, and amidst the violet cascade of light, three molten puddles fell to the ground.

Breathing slightly, she looked towards the unicorn mare once more. In lieu of appearing fazed or intimidated, she'd instead produced a fourth blade. Twilight wasn't brave enough to speculate from where.

But the blade was still close to the mare, and Twilight seized the chance to contain them both. With a furious cry and an outpour of magic, a solid purple bubble appeared around the mare and blade. Past the translucent surface, the mare blinked, and then threw herself into slashing at the interior of the bubble. Pale lines and sparks hissed into existence where she struck.

For a long moment, there was no sound for Twilight Sparkle but her own thunderous heartbeat, her steadied attempts to regain breath, and the muffled sound of her assailant attacking the bubble's interior.

The moment passed. The distant voices grew yet closer, along with the distinct clop of hooves rapidly hitting stone. Twilight felt her heartbeat and breathing settle down to what were approximately healthy levels, and looked at the strange unicorn.

She was still slashing away at the bubble.

Twilight, feeling her tether's end near if not actively be passed, snapped, “Give up. I'm not going to hurt you, but I can sure just keep on containing you until I deliver you to the authorities.”

“Hah!” The mare's gaze, now wild, locked with Twilight's own. “That won't save you! I'd like to see the authorities that could contain me!”

“TIME POLICE! STOP IN THE NAME OF AN ORDERLY CONTINUUM AND WE WILL USE LETHAL FORCE!” came from the left.

Twilight whirled to where the shout had come from. At the end of one of the streets leading towards the library, half-shrouded by the falling snow, half a dozen ponies galloped towards her position. Dark blue armour covered them, strange metal crossbows bristled from their hooves, glowing devices slung from bandoleers decorated them. One of them, a pegasus mare hurriedly flapping above the others, was waving a hourglass-adorned badge in the air and yelling, “See? We've got the badge! Actual Time Police! We're official and everything!”

Several – many - lots of questions clamoured for answers.

The first one to make it from Twilight's open mouth was “... Wait, don't you mean 'or you will use -?'”

Two glowing-red bolts thrummed out from the advancing figures, whipped inches away from Twilight's nose, and punched into the containing bubble. The bubble disintegrated in a flurry of pink-and-red motes, and the unicorn quickly struggled free of its remains. She hastily sidestepped another bolt which came flying at her. “Tartarus take you!” she screamed as she brandished the blade. “You enabling pack of fanatics!”

“Toujours, Star Gazer!” snapped one of the figures, a smaller one at the centre of the group. “Engage the assassin hoof-to-hoof! Jiffy, keep them covered from above! Solstice, allay the protectee! Spring Green, you and I are on congruity duty! Remember your training and you might all live!”

Two of the ponies, an earth pony stallion and a unicorn mare, sprung straight at the strange mare. Their horseshoes gleamed with a dull and unpleasant lustre, and emitted a strange low drone as they swung at her. She jumped back barely in time to dodge their blows, and pivoted sharply on her front hooves to slam her back legs into the stallion's jaw. He fell back with a pained yelp, tripping up the mare behind him. The pegasus above loosed a bolt from their crossbow, which whipped past the clashing trio and blurred past Twilight's nose to smack into the library's front sign.

Behind them, two of the others - a earth pony mare and stallion, the latter the same one who'd been barking orders – stalked around the struggle. Their crossbows had been stowed away and small twinkling hoof-held rods were ready in their place, aimed at seemingly random windows and doors and other parts of the scenery rather than the fight itself.

What?, screamed part of Twilight's mind, which the rest of her frothing faculties failed to direct to her mouth.

She felt a warm presence come up to her side and a hoof pat her across the withers. “Don't worry. It'll be all over soon,” said one of the strange ponies, an earth pony mare. She smiled nervously at Twilight. “Toujours and Star Gazer rated the highest at close-quarters subdual in the Time Academy. They're really good.”

Twilight regarded the fight. It seemed to have devolved into the strange unicorn casually holding off the mare with one outstretched hoof while repeatedly kicking the downed stallion in that most strategically exploitable of stallion parts. Above them, the pegasus fumbled with the crossbow and dropped a bolt into the snow.

“Glrk?” Twilight coaxed forth from faculties that had still seemingly briefly abandoned her.

“But, um, maybe they're having an off-day. Or the assassin's really good too.” The earth pony awkwardly patted Twilight's withers again. “Sorry, am I reassuring you? I – we're kind of new to this. First mission and all. Lieutenant Bramble knows what he's doing, though. He'll keep us on track.”

“Hllg?”

The downed stallion, in spite of his litany of high-pitched meeps and facial expression that suggested fervent praying for a mercy kill, managed to flail out with his legs from his position like a pinned beetle. One gleaming shoe skiffed across the unicorn's leg in mid-air and froze it there, the section of struck leg covered in a strange crackling stasis. The unicorn cursed as she exerted all her might on the stuck leg, trying and failing to move it. Her mare opponent took that chance to lunge in, and withdrew an instant later with a freshly-bloodied snout. Another bolt whipped down and buried itself in the snow.

“So,” said the earth pony. “Are you – are you actually Twilight Sparkle? The Twilight Sparkle?”

Twilight had just about managed to mentally compose herself to accompany her “Bluh?” with a bewildered nod.

The earth pony looked at her, her gaze newly wide and … scared? “Gosh,” she said, with a note of tremble. “But … you know, you're still young. You haven't done anything yet, have you? None of all of it?”

Finally, words. Or a word, at least. “Wuh? It?”

“Everythi -” The earth pony turned away. “Nothing. Never mind. Just – it's going to be alright.” Her hoof clapped Twilight across the withers once again.

The unicorn assassin still, both of her assailants battered to the ground. She dragged in ragged breath after ragged breath, one of her front legs still frozen in mid-air. She panted and looked around.

Just in time to see the order-barking stallion saunter up and slam his shoe-clad front hoof into her face. A grimace passed across the stallion's face, and tendrils of dark energy coiled off from the shoe for a split second.

A succession of horrible images that she was too slow to close her eyes to flashed across Twilight's vision. The unicorn opening her mouth to scream. Her hide wrinkling and eyes filming over. Her flesh sloughing off as dust from her bones. Her bones crumbling and joining the dust pile.

All in a single second.

As if in slow motion, Twilight dragged her gaze away from the dust and the converging ponies, where the commanding earth pony offered the stricken stallion and mare a helping hoof up. She looked to the library sign. Or what had been the library's sign. The bolt which had struck it lay amidst a pile of rotting, mould-spotted wooden splinters.

“Well, the beginning of that was awful to watch,” came the low growl of the commander. “And the less said about the middle, the better. And the end, where I had to intervene, that was pretty bad in its own special way. We'll have words. In the meantime, to your hooves. How's the family jewels, Toujours?”

“Why can't I die, Lieutenant?” whimpered Toujours.

“Builds character. Hold on -”

Twilight turned back round to see a solitary note for sanity enter the scene. A grey pegasus mare, Ditzy Doo, trotted neatly around a corner, bearing a wrapped Hearthswarming parcel by a ribbon in her mouth. She stopped as her eyes aligned to focus on the scene before the library. Her mouth opened a fraction.

The mare who'd been assisting the commander earlier stepped primly up, aimed her device at Ditzy with a vworpvworpvworp sound. Ditzy's eyes unfocused immediately, acquired a bluish sheen, and her mouth closed in an amiable smile. She turned on her heel and calmly walked back around the corner.

“She'll be out of it for a few minutes,” grunted the lieutenant – Bramble, wasn't it? - as he swept off his helmet, revealing a dull black coat topped with a bright pink mane. “Should give you all time to clean up. Remember the marks what ought not be left? Set to.”

“No, seriously, WHAT?!” shrieked Twilight Sparkle.

“Ah, yes,” said Bramble, flicking his eyes in her direction. “Good job reassuring her, Solstice.”

“She seemed out of it,” protested the earth pony mare next to Twilight. “Is she really Twilight Sparkle?”

“Bet your life,” grunted Bramble. “Apologies for all this fuss once again, Your Highness. Rest assured that none of it will soon matter. You'll always get some short-sighted bright spark many years from now deciding that world events will be improved by your absence. Never mind the Flow. Never mind everything that'll live then on.”

“Many … years from now? Improved by my absence?” Gears were beginning to churn and thunder once more in Twilight's mind after her initial shock. “What did you mean when you called yourself the … Time Police?”

“Come on, you're smart. In all the wrong ways, as it turns out.” Bramble turned to the assembled other five, who had recovered or were concealing their limps for the most part. “Tell our protectee who we are, you lot.”

“The Time Police, wardens of the Flow and all within,” they haphazardly chorused. The words had an air of rote recitation about them.

“Who are we, protectors of the tyrants and monsters and history's saints and sinners alike?”

“Protectors also of the Flow's course, so all current or future may be preserved from the paradoxes of the past.”

“Outstanding! Who are we, that look to the past so others may look to the future?”

“The Time Police, wardens of the Flow!”

“Spectacular! One day, you all might even be good at that, allowing for miracles. Clear up and repair what needs to be repaired. I'll see to our protectee.”

Twilight stood silent in furious cogitation as the five turned to attend to their surroundings and Bramble advanced on her. “I've used time spells before,” she said, half to herself and half to Bramble, beseeching any sort of enlightening interjection. “You guys do the same? Crack down on those who use them to … try and disrupt the flow of time, correct?”

“You learn quick.”

“So that … that assassin ...” Twilight closed her eyes and tried to pretend she couldn't taste dust in her mouth. “She was from the future? Why did she want to kill me?”

“She had – and also will have – reasons. Lots would sympathise. A few try the same as her. That's where we come in. Time's Flow can't be mucked around with. No matter what you do. No matter all of what you'll do.”

Bramble gently spun the little twinkling device in his hoof. “That's why I'm also doing this. Otherwise, you'll probably just get ideas to do your own mucking around as well.”

Twilight felt very cold, and very small. “Do what, lest I muck around with what? What will I do in the future? Tell me.”

“She might have yelled some of it. They usually do,” said Bramble, flicking his tail back towards the diminishing dust pile. “You'll find out in due time by yourself, of course. Joy of discovery and all that.”

Twilight opened her mouth, prepared to gather magic around her horn, and Bramble aimed the little device at her.

Twilight's world turned blue.

Twilight Sparkle sat at her desk in the library and started as if waking from a light doze. She glanced absently at her clock. Ten past one.

Time flew when she was reading, that was a fact. But by that much? It wasn't that enthralling a book.

Dust tickled the back of her throat, and she coughed as she rose to get a glass of water. She'd finish another chapter, and then pick up Spike from Rarity's at half-past. In this sort of weather, the rest of the day should be similarly uneventful.

On her way back with the water, she noticed a deep score in one shelf's wood. As if a knife had gone into it, or, more plausibly, Spike was developing clawing habits.

She made another note to discuss it with him, and settled down amidst the quiet of the muffled snowfall outside.

"Let's have a talk, I and I."

Twilight looked down at the cover of Unravelling Baleful Psychomancy - Fourth Edition.

She looked up to regard the pony that had given it to her. Pinkie Pie smiled back.

“It was under ‘U’,” the perky pink party pony proffered helpfully.

“Thank you, Pinkie,” said Twilight with a sigh, cracking the tome open at the index and poring through. “One of these days, I’m going to stop third-guessing my second-guessing of my first guesses.”

“Ain’t going to happen anytime this century,” said Applejack. She, the other Element Bearers, and Spike had gathered in the main room of the library. On one wall, above a window that opened onto the snowy dark of early evening, a clock chimed seven. “But don't fuss. You just focus on undoing whatever’s cloudin’ up your mind.”

“Yeah! Find out whoever’s been jerking around with your head,” said Rainbow Dash, hovering above the group. She smacked one hoof into another. “We’ll return the favour to ‘em with interest and then some.”

“It might not be anything bad or with a malevolent party behind it, Rainbow. But rest assured, Twilight, we're ready to help if anything unwanted arises as a result of this,” said Rarity. She winced, and rubbed at the side of her mouth. “Urk. No, really, did I roll over on something in my sleep and do this? I'll need to consult Colgate. This hurts.”

Twilight turned to the correct page and cast her eye down the spell meant for unlocking memories that had been sealed away. It was a complicated and broad catch-all for all manner of causes – memory loss by an external spell, flubbed teleportation, predation by a psycheghoul – but the basic elements were all recognisable. Standard Starswirl Notation in a sixteen-line format, sygaldric runes down the left denoting the magical patterns to be composed in mind at each stage, declared variables to carry the values that would be shifted around in Twilight's mind's Arcane Summary, and sequences of notes she recognised as safeguards to minimise the risk of a lifetime thereafter spent drooling and smiling vacantly.

All straightforward enough on its own merits. She closed her eyes and steadied herself. Magical motes trailed from her horn as she exerted what was needed to declare the spell's initial values.

“Assign ravelstate to cranial degrees two through seven,” she murmured absently to herself. A warm glow pulsed through her brain as the Arcane Summary took its reading. “Assign unravelstate to ravelstate through the Thaumic Sequencer, Comet-Pattern ...”

“Am I the only one a little concerned that Twilight has a protocol for suspected memory-wiping?” came Fluttershy's soft tones, muffled and distorted by the flowing haze of magic Twilight was immersed in. “Is … is that a thing other ponies have?”

“Eh,” said Spike, and Twilight could imagine his shrug. “She's prepared for sillier things in the past. I remember when we were still in Canterlot, and she'd gotten it into her head -”

Despite the complicated workings filling her mind and spilling down from her horn in glowing arcs, Twilight still found the focus to reach out and zip Spike's lips shut on that embarrassing foalhood matter, which was apparently still referred to by the School's staff as the Incident That Never Happened. “- that therenngh! Mmmph!”

She'd been a normal and well-adjusted foal for the most part, damnit.

The magical sequences running in parallel through Twilight's mind neared their crescendos, and the whole universe around her shivered with pent-up power. One beat, and they stilled. One more beat, and she harnessed them and prepared the channels in her mind and horn for them to travel from. One last beat, and she released them.

Light pulsed red on the surface of her eyelids as the energies were released, and gradually cleared. Twilight opened her eyes to find her friends blinking and papers in the library rustling, but no change other than that. No scorch marks, no inadvertent transformations, no interdimensional travel. A successful casting.

She didn't feel much different. There had been that moment – there was always that moment - at the spell's apex where the universe had seemed to go 'pip!' and shift slightly around her, but beyond that, nothing.

Twilight considered the situation where she stood, and tried rummaging back through her memories to see if anything new had come up.

For a short while, she stood there, stock-still, her face frozen.

Applejack was the first to trot up to her and pat her on one wither. “Talk to us, Twi. Find out anything? You feelin' alright there?”

Twilight's stare had become distinctly glassy.

“Twi? Talk to us. Tell us what's happening.”

“Flying feathers, I become what? Time Police, what? Tyrant, what? Did I get bits of assassin in my mouth? Aaaaagh! How long have they been doing this? What did they mean, I'd do these things? I wouldn't do these things! I can't conceive of any feasible prospect in any utilitarian ethics system I might subscribe to that would make these things a good idea! How could I even turn Capra to molten glass even if I hypothetically wanted to which I don't! It's nigh-on two hundred thousand square miles and I don't control the Sun!”

Wide stares from every inhabitant of the room warily watched the display. Applejack breathed out, and gingerly patted the gibbering, wailing alicorn on the head. “I suspect 'There, there' ain't gonna cut it. Pinkie Pie, get Twi a paper bag. Spike, go brew up some tea. Strong tea.”

Meanwhile, in the future.

“And that, recruits, is why Time Police training includes that initial three-month course on interior decorating, carpentry, rhetoric, historical sociology, or other such disciplines as you may be assigned to. It's not enough to just whack any onlookers with a Remember-Me-Not and trot gaily into the sunset. You've got to get a disturbed environment back into plausible order. You've got to pick up that table, boil a new pot of tea to replace the broken one when your ancestors are still in stasis, and persuade an angry crowd that there's no need to investigate the wellbeing of their friends in the ravaged building – before you can get them all en-masse with the Remember-Me-Not, of course. Rewinders are marvellous little tools for our purposes on the other fronts, cherish them. No job can be perfect, of course. Fray always finds a way. But we can dampen down where it'll be the most incongruous in our estimation. There's never any harm in doing a perfect job. But there's not necessarily much harm in not getting each tiny detail back the way it was.”

Bramble addressed the assembled recruits outside of the Chronocube. Varying states of fatigue and frazzlement were on full display. Bramble couldn't blame them. He hadn't anticipated being forced to painstakingly rebuild interior walls either back when he first joined the force. He'd opted to follow Pencil Pusher's advice – the mare herself was watching with an amused expression from the comfort of the control panel – and lectured rather than bollocked. Kindness was a virtue that ought to be occasionally indulged in, he supposed.

“Time's Flow is a river. It carries on in the one great direction, and it has momentum. The big events and great movers and shakers are set in their course, and aren't easy to shift. One of those onlookers was the Element of Generosity. If we hadn't dealt with that teapot, then that in itself wasn't likely to be a risk to the overall Flow. She was hardly going to step on a splinter, get an infection, and croak from that, something inconsequential enough for Time to brush over. She's got the rest of the Deeds of Harmony and the Great War and her own rebellion against Sparkle and the Siege of Manehattan to get through, and they're all big enough to pull on the past. To iron out all the petty cracks in teapots and little mundane differences. A bolt through her head, say, would be enough to Fray the future apart. Less so for something peripheral. Understand?”

Some tentative nods were ventured.

“Oh, good. I still don't, so some of you can explain it after. The point is that we dampen down Fray regardless, even in the small ways. There might be some small hiccup in behaviour from that broken teapot, and that little hiccup's difference can potentially get a little momentum of its own that Frays the future Flow. I assume you're all at least vaguely aware that that's a bad thing. The sort of bad thing you underline twice in your lecture notes and accompany with frowny faces.”

Some more confident nods this time. Jiffy's nod was a little too much so, and she turned green again as her chronologically-displaced body protested.

“Good to know you know that much. Dismissed. Get to the mess room and count your bruises. I'll be along soon to drag each of you out and berate you individually on your performances.”

Bramble relaxed as he watched them tread towards the door once again. Two missions in one day, fairly rigorous ones at that, wasn't bad going. He caught Pencil Pencil's gaze and grinned. She looked up and returned it, briefly, before her face collapsed back into a frown and looked back down at the control panel. Bramble ventured closer to find out what the problem might be.

He was stopped mid-trot by Pencil Pusher hissing, “Oh, skyfire,” and a persistent and alarming vwoorp-vwoorp-vwoorp noise suddenly coming from the panel. That was a noise Bramble had learned to hate.

The recruits stopped where they were and glanced dubiously at each other as Bramble galloped past them to reach Pencil Pusher.

“Fray spike. A big one. Another big one,” said Pencil Pusher, gesturing at the relevant dial. She twiddled something complicated, and a magical display of intersecting glowing lines and parabolas sprung into existence over a flat section of the panel. She narrowed her eyes at it, muttering all the while.

“Another - ? How many assassins are going to try their luck before the day's end? Was there a convention of the pricks that we missed or something?”

“Not assassins. No entities moving up the Flow.” Pencil Pusher brushed the tip of a wing against the display, narrowing in one several of the flickering parabolas.

“Then what – oh. Blast. Something was left behind, wasn't it?” The recruits in Bramble's field of vision started exchanging terrified looks.

“Something has shifted Sparkle's behaviour, certainly. Nothing's interacting with her directly from our present or further up or down the Flow.”

Bramble exhaled heavily. “Alright. One more mission. Reset the Chronocube and zero in on the incongruity, Pencil. Recruits! Belay the mess hall. Gallop to the armoury, dump your armour, shoes, and crossbows; and power up your Remember-Me-Nots. We're going in non-lethal, and preferably in a stealthy, non-intrusive manner at that. Move out!”

Hooves thundered on the floor around him, machines chirped and ticked, and yet in the moments that followed, one sound yet managed to cut right through to Bramble's attention.

A speaking tube on one wall thumped. A speaking tube only used by one pony in the Time Police's complex.

He cautiously ventured over, unheeded by the blissfully unaware recruits and watched by the nervous Pencil Pusher, and picked up the tube. “This is Lieutenant Bramble.”

The cold voice of a mare came down the crackling line. “This is Commander Tenebris.”

Bramble licked dry lips and rallied. “Commander. To what do I owe this call?”

“Three Fraying incidents in your sector in one day. That's what you owe this call to. And that's what you're about to explain to me.”

“Two initial assassination attempts, both thwarted. This latest one seems to be the product of contamination from one of the earlier missions. My team is readying as we speak, and we'll see it dealt with, ma'am.”

“You shall. This sector is one of our lynchpins. You would not appreciate the consequences if it were to fall apart. I will call again in three minutes, and I'll expect to hear of your success and acceptably low levels of Fray.”

There was the sound of the tube being set down at the other end. Bramble gingerly set his own back down and stepped away. He realised his posture was tense, and upon brief consideration, saw no reason to relax it.

“Was it … um -” ventured Pencil Pusher.

“I'm not dead. Yet. Come on. Tell me what's going on in the past.”

“...and that's when I left the note for myself and they zapped me with that little device of theirs,” said Twilight. Her magic tightly held a trembling cup of tea. “And then they left the four of us – Rarity, Spike, Sweetie Belle, and me – all in stasis in a corner while they fixed the damage and spoke to other ponies who came running up. Then they reposed us back into sitting positions around the table, teleported away, and the stasis wore off.”

The story had gradually emerged with the application of a paper bag to breath in, the interior dusted with smelling salts Rarity had donated. Twilight's subsequent sneezing fit had calmed her down sufficiently for coherent words to begin emerging. Spike carefully patted her free hoof as she spoke.

“And how long do you reckon they've been doing this?” said Rainbow Dash, bewilderment written into her face. “Just those last two times?”

“The spell only works back through the last few days. But they implied this happens a lot. They were even bringing along … new … recruits ...” Twilight's mouth slowed as her brain caught up with the words. “How often does this happen? I'm apparently a training mission for them!”

“Sugarcube, still yourself,” said Applejack, pressing Twilight gently yet firmly back down where she'd started to rise with indignation. “Multiple packs of time-travelling bozos aside, there's a few things that have to be laid out plain and clear.”

“Like what?”

“Well, all those ponies you described were fixated on the belief that you turn into some kinda tyrant in later life. You really need us to tell you that's a steaming pile of horseapples?”

“The Twilight I know wouldn't ever become some sort of high-and-mighty meanie,” said Pinkie Pie, snuggling up close to Twilight and surprising her with a sudden hug. “Sure, she's got a meanie tendency or two when ponies bend book spines or by some totally innocent accident get chocolate powder inside the pages or all manner of other things I swear weren't my fault. But that's just little, conventional, kinda justified meanie-dom. You're not a Sombra or a Capricious Crown or a Chrysalis or anything like them.”

Twilight shook her head. “When somepony travels back through time itself just to try and kill you, then they're really convinced you're up to no good. And when multiple someponies are apparently up to it? What does that say?”

“Says they're all bozos. Bozoitis is an infectious disease in the future. And hey, now you as a Princess are informed and can take steps to counter it.” Rainbow Dash spread her forelegs wide and grinned. “See? Silver lining. The future ain't written.”

“Maybe they're all bluffing. I'll subscribe to a belief in the the most elaborate of ruses before I believe you become some manner of despot, before I believe the witterings by a bunch of madponies who attacked you and me without cause in the boutique.” Rarity looked indignant. “Those ruffians owe me a tooth. Generosity be damned, I'm going to collect.”

“Put it this way,” said Fluttershy, uncertainly. The others turned to her and her tone strengthened. “You're not going to become a tyrant, Twilight, not ever. But even if you're worried you are, then you can just resolve not to. Just keep an eye on yourself and what you do, avoid doing cruel things, and listen to your friends if we say you're doing something wrong. We all believe you're smart enough. Um. Well, not to presume everypony else's opinion. But I'm sure you're smart enough. And, um, by that previous statement I'm not implying anypony else here doesn't -”

“We get it, Shy,” said Rainbow, breaking Fluttershy off with a sudden and affectionate head-rub. She turned back to Twilight. “But Fluttershy's right. Heck, if you resolve to do that like she says, then you'll never become a tyrant, nopony will want to kill you, and no Time Police or assassins will come for you again. Problem solved!”

Twilight looked to all of them. A smile forced itself from her lips. “Thank you, everypony. I suppose when you all put it like that, then I just have to consistently start deciding against tyranty or evil things and think about them when they might arise. I can do that.”

And in the instant she stopped speaking, there was a flash of light outside the window. Pinkie Pie rose briefly off the ground, trembling violently, and fell back to the floor with an almighty sneeze. She looked around, startled, and wiped at her nose with a hoof.

“Was that Pinkie Sense for something?” said Twilight, guarded.

“I think so. Not sure what, though.” Pinkie considered it for a moment, as if cross-checking the sequence against other signs. “Somepony somewhere got married? Got divorced? A vaudeville show's coming to town? Somepony time-travelled? Honestly, I don't have a clue -”

There came a knock at the door. A hush fell across the room.

“Let me get it,” said Applejack suddenly, making for the door. “I'll sound 'em out. Stop them gettin' to you immediately if it's Time Police or assassins here for you, Twi.”

“Be careful,” hissed Twilight at Applejack's back to no avail; the farmpony was already moving and had set a hoof to the door. “Spike, go upstairs. Don't come downstairs, no matter what entertaining things you hear.”

“Aw, c'mon. I already apparently pulled off one awesome-dragon-assistant-rescuing-Twilight trick today, it could be repeated -”

Applejack opened the door just far enough to be greeted by a pair of ponies, a pegasus mare and an earth pony mare, each wearing saddle bags and metal rings around their legs. They stood as if at attention on a drill ground, suppressing shivers amidst the snow. A large bush past the library rustled slightly.

“Good day, fellow pony!” announced the pegasus, smiling widely up at Applejack. “What a nice day it is, living in the Early Quadrumvirate Period as we do. Boy, how about that Changeling Incursion? That's a contemporary thing to have happened to us, being the normal ponies that we are. Say, Princess Twilight Sparkle isn't here by any chance, is she?”

Applejack stared down at the pegasus. From the bush, there was the sound that might be made by a forehead meeting a hoof with some force.

“Well, I can't say for certain,” said Applejack after a moment. One side of her mouth crooked. “I don't suppose you fine upstandin' mares have badges of any kind?”

“Ooh, we do!” The pegasus excitedly wheeled around, reaching for her saddle bag. “Got them yesterday after preliminary graduation! We're Time Police now! Official … and ...” The pegasus, holding her badge in one hoof, stopped and looked plaintively up at Applejack. “Aw, Tartarus. Um. Could you maybe forget what -?”

“You've already tipped them off, you moron! Rush them. Wipe Sparkle's memory!” screamed the bush, which was now thoroughly agitated with rustling.

The pegasus and earth pony hurriedly turned on Applejack, just in time to meet a tree-shattering buck courtesy of Applejack's thews. The pegasus was mercifully only clipped enough to wheel off through the air, squealing and clutching a broken snout. The earth pony sailed off insensate, hitting a couple of the four ponies emerging from the bush. A chorus of pain sounded from all quarters.

“Time Police,” spat Applejack, rising from where she'd crouched to buck and fixing her gaze on the others inside the library. “Pack of half-a-dozen, knocked one out. Best if y'all hang back-”

“To hay with that!” roared the rainbow-hued blur that filled the air above Applejack for an instant before sweeping out into the snowy evening. A couple of the oncoming Time Police, an earth pony mare and stallion looked up just in time to be hammered flat, tumbling back in the street and kicking up sprays of snow. They coughed and struggled as the next two Time Police, another mare and stallion earth pony pair, leapt over them.

“Consarn it, Rain – actually, no, that works fine. Keep at it!” Applejack descended from the front door to meet the oncoming mare in a hoof-filled storm. Rarity, Pinkie Pie, and Fluttershy galloped out in her wake. And with that, Tartarus broke loose.

As Applejack laid into the mare, the stallion – a short, black-coated one – rose his hooves to lash out at Pinkie Pie as she barrelled straight at him. She dropped and slid under him, and as he staggered and glanced down at her, he found himself staring into the barrel of a Pie-patented Party Cannon. Thunder pealed and colour lashed the snow as the stallion plummeted to the ground a short distance away. The stallion behind him, who had been laid low by Rainbow Dash, forced himself upright in time to meet Rarity's demonstration of how the principles underlying the serene art of Ponikido could, in fact, be used to not protect an attacker from injury at all. More pained yelling rang out across the street. The mare who had accompanied him staggered to try and assist, and in turn was hit side-on by Rainbow Dash. She dug a long groove into the snow before Rainbow opted for straight-forward pummelling instead of prolonged fanciness.

Fluttershy, who had taken to the skies, encountered the vaguely-wheeling Time Police pegasus. The pegasus looked down at the scene on the street, looked to Fluttershy, and immediately raised her hooves. “Non-combatant?” she ventured.

It was over swiftly. Twilight stepped out of the library after finally teleporting Spike away just in time to find matters settling down. Applejack, Rainbow Dash, and Rarity were all subduing and pinning their own targets with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Pinkie was perched on top of the short black stallion – Bramble, if she remembered correctly – doing one of the several patented Pinkie Victory Jigs. The earth pony mare Applejack had bucked at the beginning was still unconscious and embedded in a bush. And Fluttershy -

Fluttershy alighted before Twilight, holding the pegasus gently by the hoof. The pegasus looked beseechingly up at Twilight. “I surrender. Please don't eviscerate me and throw my pieces to wolves and harvest my soul and magic for use as a weapon of war. Please?”

“I don't know where on earth you ponies in the future have been getting those appalling ideas -” started Fluttershy before Twilight stopped listening. She focused, and scooped up each of the fallen Time Police into a separate bubble, dislodging several of her friends in the process. They tumbled off the bubbles, protesting, as she rose each one into the air before her. Flapping her wings, Twilight flew up to regard Bramble in his own.

He returned her look with a bleary glare, and sneezed out a strand of confetti.

“I'm not going to hurt any of you,” Twilight started. “But I am going to ask you some very pointed questions, and deliver you all to Princess Celestia and Princess Luna. I'm not the monster you think I become. I'm not going to become that monster at all. If you'd just -”

“No, I don't think so,” said Bramble abruptly. He reached down to the ring around his leg, and quickly cast his gaze over the other Time Police before flicking it sharply with his hoof.

White light immediately coursed around his form and those of the other Time Police, enveloping them before Twilight could blink and vanishing them from existence with short pops of displaced air filling a vacuum. She looked at the emptied bubbles, and dispelled them with a curse. “Aaaargh! We had them!”

“We've sent them off back where they came from, at least,” said Rainbow Dash, flying up to Twilight's side. “That's something, right?”

“Yes,” said Twilight, “But unless we've somehow mucked up their future for good – the one where I become a tyrant – then they're coming back.”

“Why? Why would she keep punching me in the mouth?”

“It wasn't surrendering! It was – it was a tactical ploy. It was planned!”

“I saw one of them get a cannon out. Where was she keeping it? Seriously, where?”

“'Become one of the Time Police,' Dad said. 'Upstanding vocation, daughter mine. Keep us all safe and see foreign parts. Fun and useful in equal measure.' Screw you, Dad. Screw you with a sideways lance.”

The recruits had been dumped onto the floor of the Chronocube and largely remained there, groaning and babbling and nursing their various aches. Bramble would have dearly loved to follow their example, but terror had a way of hooking into and pulling up at one's underbelly.

He hobbled out of the Chronocube, brushed past Pencil Pusher's concerned queries as to what had went wrong and why there was a streamer in his ear, and made for the speaking tube. He glanced up at the clock as he neared. The speaking tube thumped at the exact three-minute mark.

Silence greeted him when he rose it to his ear. “This is Lieutenant Bramble,” he ventured. He licked his lips and pressed on. “My apologies, ma'am. They're clued in and ready to resist us. My recruits won't cut it, and they'll just get hurt if they're sent back again. We have to rotate in one of the veteran squadrons, or even some of the Timetroopers. A quick strike before the Fray ticks up any further -”

“Be silent.”

Bramble complied for the long pause that followed. Common sense railed against him, but eventually he broke the commanded silence with, “Commander Tenebris, how is it to be dealt with?”

“Your recruits shall stand down for now. You shall join them. The Timetroopers shall stay out of this.” Commander Tenebris's tone was as cold and absolute as a glacier. “I'm going to deal with this myself.”

Gathered once more in the downstairs of the library, the six and Spike hashed events out.

“I propose a watch on our parts,” said Applejack. “If these Time Police are fixin' to come back, stands to reason they'll come back as quickly as possible since preparation time's not a issue for 'em. We'll all stay at the library throughout the night and make sure no Time Police-related mischief comes lookin' for Twi. If they do, we'll show 'em what for and teach 'em Twi's not for turnin'.”

“We'll make a sleepover of it!” chirped Pinkie Pie. “I have games! And spare s'more ingredients- though they may be on the teensiest side of stale, they've been in my mane for a while. Let me check.”

“I'd feel better to have you all here, no kidding there,” said Twilight. She smiled at Spike. “But it makes sense to keep Princess Celestia up to speed with what's been going on as well. If she has any insight into Time Magic that I don't, then her advice would be a great help to understanding all this. Take a letter, Spike.”

“Oh, sure. Keep your heroic and handsome dragon assistant out of the exciting stuff and bring him back in when it's time for the paperwork,” Spike grumbled, rummaging on a shelf for a pen and paper. “Can't remember the awesomeness I did to begin with, and don't get to replicate it. Bah. I'm only doing what you say right now because I'm worried as well as annoyed. I hope you appreciate tha-”

Softly, quietly, the universe went thwip.

Spike's voice stopped short just as Twilight turned to remonstrate him. He'd frozen with his claw probing along the shelf.

“Spike?” said Twilight. “I'm not going to apologise for keeping you out of danger if I can, you should appreciate that as well. You're still … Spike?” The little dragon's body was stock-still. His eyes were unblinking. In the light around him, the drifting dust motes hung suspended.

“Spike? Spike!” Twilight glanced from side to side, and froze herself when she caught a glimpse of the others. They had all stopped where they stood, still in their poses. Unmoving, Applejack regarded the spot where Twilight had stood. Pinkie Pie held something that might have once been a marshmallow before her, still as the grave. The others were locked in their middle of their own motions or shrugs.

Frantic, Twilight looked from side to side. Still snowflakes drifting forever outside the window. The flame of a candle made an upright, inert ribbon of orange. No tick from the clock, no breaths, only Twilight's rapid breathing and heartrate hammering in her ears.

Nothing but those, and a single clear voice from upstairs which broke the unnatural hush like the crack of lightning. “Come upstairs, Twilight Sparkle.”

Twilight all but leapt out of her skin and cast her gaze as far as she could up the winding staircase. She saw nothing, nothing but the suggestion of a shadow coming from the direction of her bed.

“Come upstairs,” the voice – oddly familiar somehow – commanded. “There's a mystery ahoof and you'd quite like to solve it, wouldn't you? Come upstairs. There's nothing moving in Time apart from you and me right now.”

Her heartrate hammered, and magic came unbidden to the tip of Twilight's horn, ready to be hurled forth as fire and thunder. Instead, she took her first step leading up the stairs. And another. And another.

She reached the top, and looked towards her bed. Upon it, there rested an alicorn.

A lavender coat and a purple mane, the colours of the dying day, streaked through with rose. Tall, taller than Twilight, with a horn capable of being used as a short lance. She sat with her legs folded beneath her on Twilight's bed, poring through a book.

She set the book down, and Twilight stared into her own violet eyes, flecked through with acid-green specks. A cold smirk played along the alicorn's mouth.

“Salutations,” said Twilight Sparkle to Twilight Sparkle. “Let's have a talk, I and I.”

“Oh, spare me. Us. Yourself. Whoever.”

In a set of dimensions whose relationship to the rest of time and space was tumultuous at best, a draconequus regarded the eleven cards in his grasp, and peered over their top to study his opponent.

The smooze’s own cards floated around its interior, affording Discord only brief glimpses past the opaque green. The smooze itself sported a blithe smile and bubbled to itself.

Discord had learned to hate that poker face.

“I’ll raise you ....” Discord’s gaze flitted around the interior of his dwelling and the bric-a-brac therein, “...an Antlertian fertility statue, the Crown Jewels of Bovaland - which we may have to give back, Celestia’s been getting shirty about that - and the shirt off my other back. Deal?”

The smooze vaguely burbled. It might have been affirmation. It might have been a sign of trepidation. It might have been just a vague burble.

Discord smirked and laid his hand out on the table with a flourish. “Voila! Eleven kings! Now I’ll admit I may not be as clear as crystal water on the exact rules of this -”

The smooze spat out a royal flush.

Discord stared, and slouched down into a sulk. One claw snapped, and the table abruptly creaked under the weight of the crown jewels, fertility statue, and his spare shirt. The smooze’s smile widened, and it oozed forward and up onto the table to appreciate its winnings.

“This time,” muttered Discord, as he drew the cards back and began reshuffling them, splicing in little additions of his own. Several more queens. An alchemical explosive primed to trigger in the presence of flushes. A very small and exceedingly confused jaguar. “This time, we shan’t just rig it from top-to-bottom, no, no, no. I’m rigging this side-to-side and inside-out if that’s what it takes -”

One of Discord’s horns began to tremble, and he paused mid-shuffle. He frowned, and his eyes flew out of their sockets to regard the horn. It pulsed with an internal rainbow light, trembling ever-more violently.

One of his eyes flew abruptly into it, knocking it into stillness. The rainbow glow persisted, and Discord’s eyes drifted back into their sockets with some trepidation.

“Do you ever get that same impression?” he said to the smooze, which had made headway on engulfing the fertility statue, starting with the least fortunate appendage. “That there’s something delightfully chaotic happening elsewhere, something that’s making the sense in the universe gnash its teeth with aggravation, and which really, really deserves some immediate attention and possible admiration? And all the fun ‘a’ words?”

The smooze’s mouth was a bit too full to form any sort of meaningful response, but the bubbles inside it broiled energetically.

“Thank goodness. I thought I might be the only one.” Discord shrugged and shuffled in another jaguar. “I’m sure it’ll last for another hand, though. We’ve got time. I think.”

The clock on one wall had frozen mid-chime. Twilight’s heartbeat was the only metronome going. She stared fixedly into her own eyes, which blinked as slowly and languidly and cruelly as a serpent’s. The splashes of green marring the violet coiled slowly inwards, and - even with all the other horrible things pressing for her attention - somehow the colour sent a thread of dread slithering through Twilight. Memories of dark magic came back to her.

A red glow from beneath caught her eye, and she looked down. The Alicorn Amulet hung around her older self’s neck, suspended by a thin silver chain, glowing as if an ember was held at its heart.

Some part of Twilight’s hindbrain suggested it would be a great time to start screaming and running in little circles. Another part suggested commencing to kick everything resembling a threat until all possible dangers had been reduced to a fine paste. Whatever part of her conscious self was still in the game advised both parts of the hindbrain to shut up and ordered her body to take a calming breath.

“You know, I’d been expecting a question or two by now,” purred her older self. “Cat got my tongue? Spare me from having to spell it out.”

“No. Yes. Hold on. Be quiet. Let me … let me think.” Twilight closed her eyes. “Let me think about this.”

Her older self folded one foreleg over the other and smirked. “I do appreciate a pony that thinks. Go on, then.”

Think. Think. Twilight’s hoof tapped out a beat against the wooden floor.

“Three main possibilities present themselves,” she began to say, her tone occupying the giddily calm space before frothing hysteria. “First of these is that I’m hallucinating all of this, and shall have to arrange an appointment with a professional while I possess the faculties to do so. But … since this isn’t that unusual compared to other things that have happened in the past year alone, I don’t think that’s likely. Unless I hallucinated all of those as well.”

“Dismiss the prospect,” said the older Twilight coolly. “Ponies who want to get anywhere in life shouldn’t leave things open to doubt. Least of all themselves.”

“Secondly, this is all some sort of fantastically elaborate prank in which Rainbow and Pinkie have somehow impersonated several different ponies claiming to be Time Police, have somehow cast mind-wiping spells between earlier attempts, and have somehow gone on to create the impression that time has frozen in cahoots with the others and the … weather and general environment, apparently, before producing some spectacular ventriloquism, rushing upstairs without my noticing, and pretending to be me. I … ah, Rainbow, Pinkie, if there was ever a time you wanted to pull off the costume’s head and shout ‘Boo!’, then ...”

“Complexity penalty,” said herself, sounding bored.

“Yes, I know, I’ve taken that into consideration. I’m not saying it’s the most likely of the three options. But considering the prank they pulled last Hearts and Hooves day, it’s not that unreasonable.”

“You know, we never do find out how exactly they got both Luna and Prince Blueblood’s signatures and personal seals,” said the older Twilight thoughtfully. “Or the flock of trained doves.”

“We don’t? Bummer. But, ah, that leads me onto the third prospect.” Twilight swallowed. “That you’re really me. From the future. Which I know is a thing that can happen ...”

You don't deserve this yet. But you will. Oh, you will.

“... and you’re absolutely, categorically, bad news in every conceivable way! Why are you wearing that amulet? Why do you have dark magic coming out your eyes? What do you do?”

Her older self paused for a moment. “Well, some of your assessment there is correct. I am indeed you from the future. The rest of your interpretation stinks, if you’ll pardon the colloquialism. I happen to be rather fond of what I achieve in the future. You’ll be as well.”

“Fond? Fond? How on earth do I end up being fond of ...” Twilight’s brain shifted gear as it mustered several memories. Horrible, recently-acquired memories. “... Turning Capra to glass, destroying the Crystal Empire, harvesting souls en-mass, feeding prisoners of war to timber wolves, and becoming an all-round horrible tyrant? Amongst other highlights?”

“Oh, these were hardly highlights,” said her older self, waving a hoof dismissively. “I did a lot many other things than those. Those are just the ones ponies whined about the most.” She paused. “Or will whine, rather. It’s in my past, but your future, and we need a quick way to express that. We should improve Equish grammar while we have the chance. I’ll make a note for the next time I’m in power.”

“We … what? No! That isn’t the point! We’re not talking about grammar.”

“Well, I’m talking about grammar. You’re being disappointingly unreasonable and getting hung up on us neutralising some perfectly valid enemy and insurrectionary targets, and enacting some perfectly efficient wartime measures. I ran the numbers. The soul-harvesting allowed me to acquire - well, that doesn’t matter. And it wasn’t as if I was feeding the prisoners to the timber wolves for fun. Well, not entirely for fun.”

Her older self seemed to interpret the deafening silence as an invitation and pressed on, her eyes brightening. “You see, we’ll find out that if we blast enough magic into a timber wolf’s chromosomes and turn them inside-out, we can refashion them into -”

“Why are you here?” shrieked Twilight. “Why do you exist?”

“I’m here because you’re being very disruptive,” said the older Twilight, now looking annoyed. “Your behaviour - not what merely happens to you and which my Time Police can clean up, but you yourself - threatens to throw the Flow of time into disarray and Fray our future out of existence.”

“The future you’re from? That you’re responsible for?” Twilight looked herself up and down. “Why shouldn’t I destroy that?”

“Because you’ll destroy every great thing you’ll ever achieve, as well as me, you naive, blinkered little ...” Her older self stopped and took a calming breath. “Perhaps I’m being unreasonable. We’ve not been through the Great War yet. You’ve not seen what it really means to be on a losing side. You’ve not had to step up and take responsibility. Not yet.”

“The Great War?”

“Ah. An epic pony war from the future. A war between Equestria and our allies, and some ragtag alliance of our enemies. A war we’ll have no business losing.” Sparks all but flew from the older Twilight’s teeth as she bit down on the last word. “Eventually … eventually, at the cusp of it all, we’ll step up. We’ll take responsibility and turn the tide.”

She supported the Alicorn Amulet in one forehoof and looked down towards it, her gaze somewhere remote. It glistened and pulsed with a sickly red light. “Responsibility, as it happens, is a marvellous habit to keep up.”

“I’m smarter than this,” said Twilight in a small voice. “You saw what that thing did to Trixie. How could you think picking it up would be anything like a good idea?”

“Oh, please. Generalise from Trixie? Why not generalise about calculus from a worm’s ability to solve problems while you’re at it? We are an alicorn. What other being could the amulet have been made for? My power is unrivalled, and the dead weight it removed from my decision-making process made everything so much … clearer. Qualms, it turned out, were a dreadful fetter.” Her older self paused, and her expression misted over. “And besides that … things were desperate. I can’t overstate that. Somepony had to find an edge.”

Twilight swallowed and thought. The implications had come to her almost immediately; phrasing them in a way that would convince was more of a problem. “Then tell me about the war,” she said. “Don’t you see? If you tell me about it all now, I can go to Celestia and the other princesses, and … and we can fix it all, don’t you see? We can arrange things so that the war never happens, or becomes a lot less desperate. I’ll never have to pick up the amulet, and the future will be fixed.”

Her older self studied her, the violet-and-green eyes as cold as the depths of Tartarus. Twilight pressed on. “Don’t you see? That’s the solution. If I can change the future right now, things won’t have to get so grim. Rainbow Dash just said that the future isn’t written. This proves that. If we -”

“You’ve not been listening,” said the older Twilight, her voice a cold thread of steel. “Why should I undo the war? The war made me. Me, and all that I made in turn. And despite the savage ingratitude I’ve been met with at every turn, I’ve made everything so much better. So much more efficient.”

Twilight’s next line froze in her throat as her older self thoughtfully continued. “I shan’t lie; the prospect of going back and setting things in motion earlier has occurred. To keep the amulet rather than give it to Zecora for safekeeping. But … the changes that would produce would likely be great enough to Fray myself away. And all things considered, I suppose I’m quite willing to live with some inefficiency so long as I actually live.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she glared down at Twilight. “The future is written. Written by me. And I’ll be damned to Tartarus before I let anypony else interfere. Least of all myself.”

“There’s got to be a better path. Anything other than becoming a tyrant,” whispered Twilight.

“Oh, spare me. Us. Yourself. Whoever,” said her older self, disgust and disappointment clear on her expression. “You sound just like all the ponies bleating after I returned in glory and subjugated the other princesses into thralldom. I didn’t tyrannise Equestria, I optimised it. And if you want to make an omelette, sometime you’ve got to break a few eggs and ruthlessly terrorise the yolks into submission. Honestly, if the common rabble hadn’t had the gall to get all insurrectiony on me and become completely unmanageable, I’d be sitting pretty on a very well-run -”

Twilight gathered breath.

Gathered focus.

There seemed to be only one way this could end, and if she could steal that extra mile on herself, subdue her and find a way to stop the time-freeze, get Spike to alert Princess Celestia … then this might all end neatly and quickly after all.

Violet light slashed out from her horn, shearing through the silver links holding the Alicorn Amulet before her older self could so much as blink. It bounced off the floor with a metallic clink and fell still.

Twilight looked up, a warm wave of triumph flaring through her, to meet the cold gaze of her older self. Who didn’t look in the slightest bit amused. Or horrified by a sudden attack of conscience. Or in any way less evil.

“Ah...” started Twilight, and got no further. Violet and green erupted before her, filled her vision, knocked away her senses, and the next impressions to vaguely hit her were flying wall crash flying cold air flying flying ground.

For a long moment, she sprawled and wheezed, trying to pick herself up from a cold surface that slowly identified itself as the snow-covered ground outside. Her blurry vision resolved itself, and vague points of light resolved themselves into snowflakes hanging still under the night sky. Light spilled out over them from her library’s windows and from one Twilight-shaped hole in its side. Fragments of wood hung suspended in the air around it, and green-and-violet flames wreathed around them. In that gap, her older self stood, cold and poised and imperious.

“Credit where it’s due, you tried to attack what you saw as a source of power than engage me directly,” said her older self. Magic glimmered up her horn, and the amulet rose up to secure itself around her neck once more. “But the amulet ceased being my touchstone a long time ago. Dark magic is a wonderful thing to make a study of. It imparts its own powers. Lifts additional fetters.”

Twilight coughed and, by painful increments, rose to her hooves once again. She glared up at her older self and spread her wings.

“Now, regrettably, you’re obviously still a bit too stupid to accept my own superiority and correctness,” said the older Twilight. She sighed. “And admittedly, I may have miscalculated by thinking you could be argued into reasonableness. The only real question here is whether you want to submit now. It wouldn’t be too painful. Or you could try to overcome me. Emphasis on try.”

Twilight took off the ground with one mighty beat of her wings, closing her eyes briefly as she did so and summoning forth a gleaming shield to guard her advance. She thought as fast as equinely possible. Protect herself, gain altitude, hammer her older self with every rote blast she knew. It was a plan of sorts.

The instant after she threw her shield up, green and violet light forked out through the air once again. It violently tore through her shield like tissue paper, and Twilight desperately swerved to avoid it as it ripped past mere inches from her head. She flapped on through the air. Her gaze flitted from side to side, desperately blinking away the fierce aftereffect as she sought for her older self. The second later, something smashed into her mid-air with a locomotive’s force, and her world turned to spinning chaos as she was slammed back into the ground.

She blinked away the constellation of light that wheeled across her vision, whimpered as her abused nerve endings registered their disapproval, and found herself staring point-blank into the fierce gaze of her older self, towering above her and pinning her to the ground.

“Yield,” growled her older self.

“N - not fair,” stammered Twilight woozily (stars above, it hurt to speak) as she caught sight of a possible distraction at her older self’s back. Time, time, even a few seconds would do. “Al - already participated in three pitched fights today. Not at my best.”

“My heart bleeds. Yield!”

Time enough. Twilight’s horn blazed with a last, desperate, painful burst of magic, and she tore down her salvation. Her older self turned around, just in time to meet the library’s descending bee hive face-first. Wasting no time, Twilight rolled right around onto her belly and scrabbled at the ground in a crawl. Gain space, breath, take flight again -

A hoof crashed down onto the small of Twilight’s back and pinned her where she lay, forcing all the air remaining in her lungs free with one shocked wheeze. Something bounced on the ground next to her head, and she turned to see the bee hive rolling past. Inside a broken-open gap, she saw the insects, completely still mid-motion.

“A tip between selves,” growled her older self. “That works better when time isn’t stopped.” Twilight tried to respond, to gather magic once more, and was interrupted by a hoof smacking into the back of her horn, disrupting the flow of energy. “I see I’m just going to have to brute-force this problem towards a solution. Why must the world always insist on being difficult?”

“K - kill me and the Time Police will come for you as well!” managed Twilight. “They … they can somehow detect when things change in the past, they’ll -”

“Hah! I’m hardly going to kill myself, you idiot. I have something different and rather ingenious in mind. And the Time Police are hardly going to help you. Were you not listening earlier? Who do you think commands them?”

“Y - what?”

“When the ponies of Equestria became completely insubordinate and unmanageable, I slipped away from public life. Left them to stew in their own mess … though, alas, they ended up breaking into the Royal Palace and spreading the texts on chronomancy far and wide. They commendably formed the Time Police themselves in short order. But I thought giving a little direction to them under an alias would be as decent a way to while away the years until my return. Frankly, they need all the help they can get. And I’m hardly going to leave my past at somepony else’s mercy.”

Twilight seethed even as panic welled up inside her. “So what now? Are you just going to memory-wipe me?”

“No. Though I shall have to repair the library. And the hive for that matter. You’ve foiled my Police on the memory-wiping measure and I have enough respect for myself, even at this stage, to imagine we’ll wriggle free of it once again in some manner. No, I’ve devised something better. Something that should eventually keep you pliant at the subconscious level before memory-wiping’s conducted. And if it’s the correct thing to do, I imagine I’ll get back to the future and find nary a hint of Fray. Everything will be solved.”

“You - no!” Twilight struggled, and received another kick to the horn for her trouble. “Ow! Stop that! If you change my behaviour or twist my mind … then, then you’re just twisting yourself back then, don’t you see? How’s that not a paradox?”

“Twilight, Twilight, Twilight,” purred her older self, leaning down close to her ear. Twilight all but felt the buzz of magic around her older self’s horn crisp her mane. “Time, regrettably for you, can be so very pliant about these things. And even if the Fray levels indicate a developing paradox … I’ll have all the time in the world to come up with something cleverer. Now obey me!”

Twilight opened her mouth to protest. There had to be more sense to it all than that, there had to be. But the horn pressed into the back of her head, and her world turned white.

The white faded. Twilight coughed as her senses dragged themselves back into focus.

“Wha … what the he … uh,” she started, and then stopped.

She wasn’t in the library, or even the outdoors for that matter. The room she found herself in was dingy and ovoidal, lit only by two great murky and circular panes at one side. A chair rested in the middle of the room, next to an unlit projector screen.

“What?” she managed.

As if from a great distance, she heard Spike’s voice, coming from somewhere outside the room. “- that. Bah. One of these days, I’ll just rush off and do my own exciting stuff. With blackjack! And hookahs! Though I don’t actually smoke, so I might not bother with the latter. Why’s everypony so keen on adding some dumb waterpipes to anything, anyway?”

Spike?, Twilight blearily thought, and looked around for a door. Finding none, she rushed over to one of the windows. Past something that looked like a great lavender muzzle, she saw her dragon assistant, pen and paper in his claws.

Her own voice then suddenly boomed across her bewildered line of thought, similarly coming from a great distance and somehow jerking in time with the movements of the muzzle and the disorientating shifting of the window’s field of vision. “That’s a ‘why’ to be answered when you’re older, Spike. Actually, I’ve had second thoughts about the letter.”

If she didn’t know better, the exterior past the window looked uncannily like the library. And the ponies outside looked uncannily like -

“No, seriously, what?” shrieked Twilight. She slammed one hoof against the window, the surface of which turned out to be harder than crystal. She tried to draw upon magic, and found it simply non-existent, unresponsive to her efforts.

There was a sudden click behind her, and she turned to see the projector come alive. A voice - her own voice! - piped into the dingy room, seemingly coming from all sides. “Good day! Welcome to your personalised Voice of Reason Charm, version six-point-naught! If you’re hearing this, then you must be -” the tone shifted, “Twilight Sparkle. And I’m trying to convince you to -” the tone shifted again, “pursue your glorious future without fruitless disruption. Once deemed suitably reasoned down to the subconscious level, you shall be memory-wiped and given command of your own physical faculties once more. Do you understand the purpose and desired outcome as stated?”

Twilight couldn’t muster a ‘What?’ There had been enough what-ing for one day. For one lifetime. She slumped slowly to her haunches. “It was a nice day, at the start,” she whispered. “It was such a nice day.”

“Reason one for pursuing your glorious future!” her own voice announced, as the world outside the windows - her own eyes - shifted once more. “We shall admirably solve all possible food shortages to ever afflict Equestria and the world. Enacting the Soylent project means that we will simply feed half of the hungry to the other hungry. Reason two -”

“Alright, that’s it,” said Discord, as his horn fluttered in little circles around his eye, flashing crimson and hallooing enthusiastically. “Something’s definitely happening that warrants my attention. Don’t you think so, smooze?”

The smooze flolloped over a pile of its winnings, absently digesting a monde. It bubbled at Discord.

“Quite right. And what about you … Parcel Post, wasn’t it?”

“I have a shift to return to, Mr Discord!” wailed the postpony, tucked under Discord’s arm. He paused to consider. “And also a family!”

“Pfft. Details. But I suppose I should see what’s going on.” Discord rose from his armchair and casually tossed Parcel Post at the smooze. The postpony gloopily settled inside it and struggled forlornly. The smooze’s head nuzzled his cheek and sported a smile. “Hold the fort, you pair. Try not to break anything. Or fix anything. And if the Outsiders try to get in again, just bang some pots and pans until they’re scared off.”

Disocrd strode over to where his coat and hat hung on one wall, and smoothly drew out a stand from a pocket. Sweeping the stand over his shoulders, he pushed open the door and stared out into the maw of madness. The smooze gurgled quizzically after him.

“Probably not too long,” Discord replied as he stepped out. “I’ll see it all sorted in good time.”

“When in doubt, throw stuff at the future and see what sticks.”

Author's Note

If you're not already aware, the previous chapter underwent a heavy revision and was re-posted around three weeks ago. This chapter picks up on a few of the threads that were left to dangle in the re-write. If you've not read the new chapter four as yet, doing so is advised. Not that a bit of needless confusion isn't fun, from time to time.

“When in doubt, throw stuff at the future and see what sticks.”

Spike felt the universe go thwp as he rummaged around for pen and paper. It was the sort of sensation he associated with magic briefly discombobulating reality to the point where the universe had to stop and readjust its approach. This being Equestria, such sensations were a dime a dozen, and he shrugged it off.

“I hope you appreciate that. Bah,” he continued with nary a hitch. One probing claw found a quill pen, and he smoothly dipped it into an inkwell on the same shelf as his other claw alighted on a dusty sheet of paper. He turned to face Twilight, still speaking. “One of these days, I’ll just rush off and do my own exciting stuff. With blackjack! And hookahs! Though I don’t actually smoke, so I might not bother with the latter. Why’s everypony so keen on adding some dumb waterpipes to anything, anyway?”

Twilight, her eyes bright and her expression abruptly and oddly more cheerful, let out a breezy giggle and said, “That’s a ‘why’ to be answered when you’re older, Spike.” Behind her, Rainbow Dash tried and failed to suppress a snigger, Fluttershy blushed, and Rarity coughed and shuffled. Twilight ignored their reactions, instead suddenly appearing thoughtful. “Actually, I’ve had second thoughts about the letter.”

“About the letter? Why’s that, Twi?” Applejack tilted her head, a motion Spike mirrored himself. If anything deserved an intervention the size and shape of Celestia, surely time-travelling assassins would?

“I’m thinking … I’m thinking we hold off on alerting Celestia, for now. I mean, she’s surely got a lot on her plate, what with the parasprite infestation across northern Neighvada and the Pachydermian trade disputes and that sort of thing.” Her voice was measured and thoughtful, as if gearing up for that lecturey mode Spike did his best to avoid. The suspicion that he’d have to take notes on all this entered his mind, and he quickly put the pen and paper away.

“Darling, are you sure that’s wise?” said Rarity. “We’ve just been attacked by these Time Police. I’m sure that’s a problem it’s only wise to consult her for.”

“If they really are Time Police. Look, I know it’s scary and unexpected. I know that more than anypony, I’ve got all the memories revealed to me. But … maybe you’re right. Maybe they really are just elaborate pranksters, and we’ll soon get to the bottom of it all.”

“I … well, that was more a statement of confidence in yourself, Twilight, than an actual possibility I considered realistic. But -”

Twilight pressed on. “Thinking about it, it has to be something closer to home. I’ve just resolved to not be a tyrant, haven’t I? Since that’s the case, then there surely wouldn’t be Time Police coming back in the first place. And if they were genuine, they’d hardly set the situation up where I’d decide to change the future course of time, accidentally or otherwise, so as to make them never come back at all. That’s some exciting flavour of paradox, all in itself.”

“I ...” Rarity’s eyes crossed slightly in the ensuing attempt at comprehension. Spike sympathised as his own brain frothed. “Er, do hold on, Twilight, I’m trying to sort out the logic of that in my head.”

“I get it!” said Rainbow Dash with a grin. “If they were real Time Police and did all that, they’d just paradox themselves into next Tuesday. Or some part of the future. Or … uh … what does happen if you paradox yourself? Does time get all tangled up, or does the Creator come down to have an angry word with you, or -?”

“I’d have to look it up,” said Twilight. “I’ll look it up while we have that sleepover. After a night’s rest, I’m sure we’ll all have clearer heads.”

“Sound thinkin’, that alicorn,” said Applejack, nodding. “Ain’t nothing lost by walkin’ away from something and returnin’ with a sound mind.”

“And we’ll stay on guard!” said Pinkie Pie, whose sudden acquisition of a helmet and prop crossbow Spike wasn’t about to question. “You’ll have nothing to worry about, Twilight. We’ll make any Time Police that try to wipe your memories away have to do so o’er a breach filled with our equine dead!”

“Wha -” started Fluttershy.

“Our equine dead, Fluttershy.” Another helmet, filled to the brim with marshmallows, was conjured and abruptly pressed into Spike’s claws. He stared, shrugged, and popped one into his mouth.

“You sure about this, Twilight?” said Spike, as the others moved off to busy themselves around the library. The unicorn smoothly turned to face him, her motions surprisingly quick and graceful. The same dexterity that informed Twilight’s dancing usually manifested to some small degree in most of her motions.

Something seemed off. He would have blamed nerves for Twilight’s oddness, except that Twilight’s reactions to stress usually consisted of desperation, anger, and only occasionally mass-brainwashing. Instead of those, however, Twilight sported a gentle smile. “Don’t worry, Spike,” she said, reaching to draw him into a light hug. “Whatever this all is, I’ll get it all sorted out. I promise.”

And because, if nothing else, Twilight had a good track record on that sort of thing (with capable and handsome draconic assistance, of course), Spike chose to believe her.

That night as Spike slept, his belly full of amethysts roasted between layers of marshmallow and cracker, he tossed and turned, his dreams full of little but fleeting flashes from the day’s events. The sensation of biting on an assassin’s leg came back to him, and as his body pitched, something like the tread of hooves of floorboards intruded on his unconscious mind.

Then there was a flash of blue in his dream, and Spike slept through the rest of the night as soundly as a log.

The morning upon awakening, after a quick communal breakfast of whatever Spike had found and prepared in the kitchen cupboards, he and Twilight saw the others off at the door. “Thank you for coming to the sleepover, girls,” said Twilight. “We haven’t had one in a while. I thought it would be nice to catch up.”

“T’weren’t nothing, Twi. Stay inside now, but if you’re free later, you’d be welcome to mosey by the farm once the weather’s cleared up.” Applejack frowned out at the steadily falling snow, and at the darkening sky. “Rainbow Dash, don’t suppose you know -”

“Couldn’t say for sure; I’m off this week. But last I saw, the schedule was all blizzards. Snow’s gotta go somewhere,” Rainbow replied with a shrug. She looked out towards the ground, and looked briefly quizzical. “Huh. The ground outside the library looks disturbed - as if foals have been making snow pegasi. They must have been super-stealthy about it if I didn’t hear ‘em. And why’s there coloured bits?”

“Coloured - ? Hey, that looks like my confetti!” Pinkie Pie hopped out to critically regard the few pieces of paper poking out above the snow. “Silly confetti. Escaping from me again?”

Spike looked up towards Twilight, and saw her frown, as if regarding a problem. Even odds she’d be spending the rest of the day on the Mysterious Travelling Confetti Case. Her frown slipped away, though, and she shrugged and smiled. “Must be picking up your mysterious ways, Pinkie Pie. Stay safe, everypony.”

They moved out and away into the snowfall, Spike waving at their backs until Twilight gently closed the door.

“No sense letting any snow in,” she said. “We’ve got enough to clean up here already.”

“- Markedly reducing the bureaucratic costs of maintaining a court system. Reason eight hundred and forty-two for pursuing your glorious future! We shall do away with antiquated and grotesquely inefficient ways of administering to the dead, such as cemeteries, crematoriums, or sky burial. In addition to previously-discussed initiatives such as the Soylent project and the industrial glue facilities -”

“Shut up,” said Twilight, her tone dull and hoarse, as the projector screen flickered to show a cross-section of a smiling cartoon pony, down through the muscle and bone. This was surely just some egoscopic projection of herself, so how could it get tired? How could she be getting tired?

“- Vellum is an admirable complement to existing forms of parchment, and its use saved costs for our own bureaucracy - as well as minorly contributing towards our balance of trade.” The helpful image that showed then, demonstrating the vellum creation process, was one that couldn’t actually raise Twilight’s egoscopic projection’s gorge, but which really, really made her want it to.

“Shut up,” she whispered.

Maybe the ongoing list of atrocities was a factor in the tiredness. Maybe.

After the first few horrible moments, Twilight had spent a leisurely however-long running through any method she could think of to get loose. Absent access to magic, her viable options weren’t many. Teleporting was out. Becoming temporarily ethereal was out. Sending distress flares to the effect of ‘HELP I’M STUCK IN HERE BREAK ME OUT’ through her eyeballs was out. But even though magic was beyond her and that being a sufficient source of hopelessness in and of itself, she’d thought she had other options. What would a brave pony like Rainbow Dash do?

The projector had proven resilient to pummeling, even prolonged over what she guessed to be half-an-hour. As had screaming and pounding the glass-like surface itself whenever Spike or one of the others had drifted near.

Now Twilight lay huddled in a dark corner, and pleaded with her brain to answer when called.

“Reason eight hundred and forty-three for pursuing your glorious future! Slavery is a term with many undeservedly negative connotations attached to it over the years by ponies who simply didn’t sit down and examine its utility in certain -”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up, not a single thing you - I - you have said is anything even approximately -” Twilight trembled where she lay. This couldn’t be hopeless. It couldn’t be. She wasn’t going to cry, she told herself. Not yet. Not yet. “I need some idea, some detail, some … something useful!”

“Why, dear Twilight, I can do useful,” interjected a new and familiar voice. “Circumstance-dependent, of course. And for varying definitions of ‘useful’.”

Twilight slowly dared to look up, her own dreadful voice briefly becoming mere background noise. Out from the projector, out from a pie-chart helpfully detailing the optimal distribution across industries of a chattel slave force, a familiar horned figure wound. Discord emerged into the darkness of the room and glanced around, his expression betraying curiosity as he studied the projector. Another head sprouted from his shoulders to look quizzically at Twilight.

“D - Discord?” Twilight rose unsteadily, hope swelling inside her like an airship, all but enough to lift her off her hooves. Her mouth opened and closed before she dared to speak. “I’m not going to lie; you are a very, very welcome sight right now.”

“I’d like to think I’m that all the time, being the dashing entity that I am,” said the draconequus, his two heads schlurping back into one. He glanced around and prodded the projector with a clawtip. “You wouldn’t believe how many confused pony minds I had to wander through before finding the source of all the chaos. What are you doing in your own mind to produce that sort of effect? I’m more confused than usual.”

Twilight sighed and gathered breath. “An evil version of myself from the future has imprisoned and is attempting to brainwash me in order to stop me from trying to stop her from existing and foiling all her evil plans in aforementioned future.”

Discord regarded her.

“When I say it out loud -” said Twilight hesitantly.

“Well, of course when ponies spell their problems out loud, it’s going to sound obvious,” said Discord irritably, throwing his forelimbs up in the air and catching them as they descended. “Do make allowances, I’m still trying to get in touch with this whole ‘pony nature’ business. Friendship is involved; that’s as far as I’ve gotten.” He paused. “So what’s the actual problem here?”

“The pro …? Discord, what part about an evil me isn’t a problem?”

“Remembering what are and aren’t appropriate times for afternoon tea with Fluttershy is enough of a trial as it is. Excuse me if I need this ‘good’ and ‘evil’ thing explained for me in smaller words.”

Twilight opened her mouth, closed her mouth, and then gesticulated towards the projector. “L … listen!” Discord crooked a brow and leaned closer to it.

“Reason eight hundred and forty-five for pursuing your glorious future! In addition to being an excellent source of protein, orphanages are also an excellent recruiting ground for brain-washed soldiers! So long as they’re recruited early on, of course. Doing so will entail at least a twenty percent rise in -”

“You see?” Twilight gesticulated with as many hooves as would let her keep balance.

“Wrong, of course,” said Discord contemplatively, as he leaned away from the projector. “The amount of protein you can extract from the average orphan just isn’t worth all the hassle. Though I suppose if you’re just using existing orphans rather than specially cultivating them -”

“I … wha … how do you know … wha … no!”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” said Discord quickly, waving his claws to settle her. “I only borrowed their protein when finding that out; I gave it all back. Eventually. That’s a good thing to do? As I understand the term.”

Twilight very badly wanted to go somewhere by herself and scream for a while. Or explode something. Maybe both at once. Instead, she forced herself to breath slowly and steadily.

In and out, Twilight, came the soothing voice of Cadance from memory. Breath out the stress. No need for anything to go on fire. Yet.

“Discord, you need to let me out. Please,” she said, her tone calm and carefully measured. “I’d be very grateful. And you’d be helping Equestria a lot. I can’t emphasise that last part enough. Millions of ponies and other creatures would owe you their lives and happiness.”

The draconequus looked dubious.

Twilight heaved the latest in a series of that day’s groans. “And you’d get to tear the best-laid plans of the future to shreds.”

“Now that’s a goal I can understand,” said Discord, beaming. “You just want me to break you out of here, then?”

“Yes. Can you?”

“Hmm.” Discord frowned at the projector for a long moment, and let an elongated tongue roll out of his mouth to carefully lick it, leaving an ultraviolet smudge on the current displayed cross-section of a soul-powered golem. He drew it back it, swished thoughtfully, and then said dubiously, “Tricky.”

Twilight winced. “Tricky?”

“Tricky and tricksome. I muddle minds, certainly. Unmuddling is a different beast.” Discord gave the projector a hard flick; static buzzed briefly across it before the image re-clarified. He turned back to Twilight and shrugged. “The enchantment on this is potent, besides. I mean, I could try warping you yourself, whatever’s conscious and talking to me -”

Twilight gathered breath for a No! loud enough to express her opinion of that plan, to be cut off as Discord pressed on. “- But that wouldn’t solve the problem I think you want solved. I think. Shall I go get some outside help, instead? And throw a little spoke or two through the plans of the future while I’m at it?”

“Yes! Please,” said Twilight. “Get Princess Celestia, tell her what’s going on. She’ll know how to solve this - hey!” Discord reached out suddenly to snap his claw just to one side of her snout, with the sensation of a static jolt across her teeth and a brief burst of white noise. She stumbled back, raising one warding hoof against the little white orb that now hovered a inch from her mouth. “What the hay is that?”

“A way of keeping in touch. Do give a running flattering commentary on my technique. It’s the least a fair damsel can do for her knight in patchwork armour.” Discord winked and began to grow ethereal around the edges. “Watch with awe, princess!”

“Watch wi - technique? Discord, what are you planning? Discord? Discord!”

But the draconequus had already all but faded away, leaving only his disembodied grin in mid-air. After a few moments, the grin wavered, looked sheepish, and flitted out of existence.

Twilight mutely turned to the windows that were her eyes. “I hate today,” she said with feeling. “I hate today, I hate today, oh stars above, I hate today. What is he planning?”

“Wonderful things, dearest Twilight!” crackled Discord’s voice from the orb. “I promise you, you’ll love it.”

“Love it? What even is it? Discord?!” Twilight cried at the orb, which thereafter remained silent despite the torrent of increasingly desperate and unkind invective Twilight poured upon it for the next moments. When her breath failed her (did an egoscopic projection even need to breathe, or was force of habit keeping her doing so?) she subsided and tried to take stock.

The initial onslaught of Time Police and assassins had been a frying pan in its own right. Her older self’s appearance and means of problem-solving were the subsequent fire. With any luck, Discord represented a friendly-ish set of tongs, rather than a dropped barrel of black powder.

She caught a motion outside one of the eye-windows in the corner of her vision and, in dire want of a distraction, looked towards it. Outside, her physical self seemed to be reading a book by the upstairs window, white snowfall framing the book’s dark binding and old cream-coloured pages.

Would her physical self even be reading the book, or would it simply be looking? If you were implanting some sort of psychomantic puppeteering, you wouldn’t necessarily need any magical construct capable of thinking for itself. You’d just need something that could blindly and automatically go through the motions, produce the right noises, and respond to stimuli convincingly enough to persuade onlookers that nothing was amiss.

Horrendously complicated, no doubt, but if you were as potent as a dark magic-empowered, Alicorn Amulet-wielding alicorn, and had all the available magical lore in the world at your hooves, and had a potential model of yourself to extract from your own memories … it could almost be foal’s play. And it was undoubtedly intriguing, and wouldn’t necessarily have to -

“... we shall reimpose the Pax Equestria. This will be due to there being only Equestria after the previously described series of targeted solar flares -” interjected her older self’s voice, breaking Twilight from her train of thought.

Right. No. Bad Twilight, she told herself. No finding your evil self’s work intriguing. No evil trajectory. She could surely avoid that whole future if she just kept those thoughts at bay, and if Discord broke her free from here. However he planned on doing that.

“Hot chocolate, Twilight?” As if from a great distance, there came the voice of Spike, and her body’s field of vision rotated to see the little drake offering her a gently steaming mug. A pang that had shot through Twilight’s heart at the sound of his voice redoubled once she saw his face, innocent and smiling and utterly unsuspecting.

“Thank you, Spike,” her own voice replied, all-surrounding and distant at once. Purple magic enveloped and lifted the mug up for a sip, giving Twilight a brief view of the contents. “Did you finish cleaning the dishes?”

“So clean you could eat your dinner off them,” he replied proudly. “Made a start on reorganising the library as well, using that … Daisy Decimal system, right? Complicated as heck. Heck is complicated.”

“It’ll be a good system to introduce, Spike, especially if we ever have the library expanded,” her body replied. “If we start organising the books by related topics rather than just an alphabetical circuit, it could really improve -”

Please notice something, Spike, Twilight silently pleaded, as the words broke around her like distant thunder. Something had to be off, surely. The puppeteering force couldn’t be doing a perfect job. He knew her best, he had to notice something. Had he noticed something wrong and was making an effort to not let on? She studied him as her body spoke.

...his face shouldn’t usually be glazed over like that when she was talking, should it?

“- and if it brings us into accord with the other libraries in Canterlot and Manehattan, that means that cross-library orders can be made much simpler for -”

“That … that’s great, Twilight. I get it. Not confusing at all. Honest. So, uh, it shouldn’t take me too long to finish. Anything needing done after?”

“I’ll help. It’ll take even less time, then. After that, we can wrap up and trot over to Sweet Apple Acres. Chat with Applejack, and drop off her and the rest of the Apple’s Hearthswarming cards.” Another sip from the hot chocolate. “I doubt it’ll be one of those especially exciting days, Spike.”

And as if on cue, that was when the explosions and screaming commenced.

Light pealed and flashed outside the window, and a shockwave seemed to tremble right through the library and even wobble Twilight in her own mind. The world pitched wildly outside as her body trembled. The mug of hot chocolate tipped over, and even with every other new and old awfulness grabbing for her attention, Twilight still cursed with horrified fury as the contents sloshed over the pages of the book before her. To her older self’s credit, her body did the same.

“That was a first-edition Damsire collectio -! What was that?” Her body steadied, and looked out through the window, towards the tower at the top of the town hall. A snow-shrouded silhouette clambered up it, hulking and huge and seemingly lit up by golden fire. “I’m getting the others! Stay here and watch the library, Spike!”

“What? But I -”

“Stay here!”

“Discord,” Twilight growled at the orb, as her body teleported from building to building, coming upon and spiriting away her similarly startled friends. “What are you doing?”

The orb flared to life, and a little ethereal claw swirled out of it to boop Twilight’s snout. “Tsk tsk. I’m not one to spoil surprises.”

Twilight waved away the claw and ground her teeth. “Explain how exactly this is intended to go about freeing me, or I swear to the Creator I’ll -”

With a sudden thwp all about her, her body teleported herself and all five of her friends into the snow-packed streets around the town hall. Flakes of snow drifted up from the ground, each flashing different colours and reforming into musical notes to harmonise with the screams coming from the ponies fleeing in all directions. The sky pulsed with yellow polka-dots, and the air gyred and gimbled serenely to itself.

At the hall’s summit, the hulking figure of Discord rose, packed over with slabs of furry muscle and blistered over with gratuitous antlers and horns. He waggled a great clawed fist at the polka-dotted sky, red eyes blazing like twin beacons. “TREMBLE AND OBEY IN THE CHAOS CAPITAL OF THE WORLD, FEEBLE PONY FOLK! BOW BEFORE MY EVERY FLEETING WHIM! FORGET WHAT YOU EVER KNEW OF ORDER! IN THIS NEW WORLD, THERE IS ONLY DISCORD! UP THE DECIBELS ON THAT SCREAMING, PONIES, COME ON!”

“What,” said Twilight, her voice as cold and flat as a glacier.

“RIGHT HERE! CHAOS CAPITAL! BEHOLD MY SUDDEN BUT INEVITABLE BETRAYAL! ARE YOU ALL PROPERLY INTIMIDATED YE - oh, there you all are. Hello!” The beams that blazed forth from his eyes turned in the direction of the group.

“You are surely pullin’ my tail,” murmured Applejack, to the right in Twilight’s field of vision, as she stared up at Discord.

“No, no, no,” came the soft voice of Fluttershy. “What are you doing, Discord?”

“I’m apparently becoming a complete, undiluted, chaos-based menace once again, for deep and subtle reasons beyond your immediate ken. Look, I can make things explode!” He pointed at a drifting and entirely blameless cloud, which immediately found itself blasted out of existence. “And that thing there!” A streetcart full of cabbages met oblivion via fire. “And that bird!” Multi-coloured light flashed and feathers flew.

“Discord!” shrieked Fluttershy.

“It’s alright, Fluttershy,” the draconequus said hastily. His claw snapped, and a small cloud of particles flew over from where the bird had been flying and swirled in his palm. “Look, I’ve got its molecules. I can reform it. See? Good as new.”

The reformed bird tottered awkwardly on his palm, chirped, and then fell over.

“Getting the cerebellum right is always a bit of a skitter, though,” muttered Discord, scratching his head as he regarded the bird. “How do you fleshy things cope with all that complicated anatomy?”

“Enough of this!” yelled Twilight.

“Enough of this!” yelled Twilight’s body. “Do you think we’ll hesitate to seal you away again if we have to?”

“Do I think? Why, certainly. There’s a certain degree of method to my madness, if that means anything to you and certain other skeptical parties for whose benefit this all is. In the meantime, you know that big mountain range running up the middle of Ungula? The Greycairns?”

“What about them?” snapped Twilight’s body.

Discord snapped his claw. The world went thwp.

“Correction. You knew the Greycairns.”

“What in the hay did you just do?” said Rainbow Dash.

“Re-distributed some of the geopolitical landscape. Capra had an unfair share of mountains anyway, and the Diamond Dogs were getting bored of all those cosy underholds. How about another trick? A nice, straight-forward diplomatic incident?”

“I regret every single decision I’ve ever made,” said Twilight softly. “Especially this one.”

“When in doubt, throw stuff at the future and see what sticks,” said the orb cheerfully. “That should hinder your older self.”

“You don’t need to go this far! And how will this break me out?”

“You’ll have to speak up, Twilight. All I caught there was ‘You need to go this far’ and ‘Break me out!’ Hold your horses!” The orb dimmed once again, and Twilight uttered every Equuish profanity in a sudden release of breath.

“For my next trick - where you will behold nothing up my sleeve,” Discord continued outside, “Prince Blueblood! Give him a rousing hoof-stamp, everypony!”

“What the actual deuce?” screamed Blueblood, who manifested in Discord’s spread claw with a single flourish. His mane and coat were wet and covered in soap-suds, and he flicked his golden tail around to cover himself. “What’s going on? Where is this? Who and what are you?

“And in his possession - the Crown Jewels of Bovaland!” Discord tweaked Blueblood’s ear and, with a surprised squawk from the prince, withdrew a heavily jewelled crown, several torcs, ornamental barding, and a monde. All were abruptly shoved into Blueblood’s hooves, and he all but toppled off Discord’s claw. Discord sneezed, and Blueblood vanished with the crown jewels as abruptly as he’d appeared.

“Wha … what was the point of - no, you know what? I don’t even wanna know.” Applejack glowered up at Discord. “You stop actin’ like a lunatic, or you’ll be beggin’ for a sharp dose of the Elements!”

“Point? Mostly for fun. And for unspecified though undoubtedly fun consequences. And to get attention.” Discord smiled blithely. “What Elements, by the way? You returned them to the Tree of Harmony.” His expression suddenly sharpened. “Oh my. You did indeed return them. What’s a poor draconequus to do?”

“Creator’s mother!” shrieked Twilight. “No! Don’t even consider it. We have a deal, Discord! You said you were going to let me out!”

“A time limit wasn’t specified,” grumbled the orb. “What’s a little new reign of chaos between friends?”

“Do you think Fluttershy would want that?”

“Flutters would ....” The orb trailed off. “Oh. I see. Fight dirty, do we?”

“Yes. You wouldn’t?”

The orb didn’t deign to respond. Outside, her body and her friends looked up at the unmoving Discord.

“We don’t need the Elements,” said Rainbow Dash, stepping forwards. “We’ve still got other ways of knocking you down to size.”

“Name one,” said Discord absently.

Rainbow Dash waggled her right forehoof as she limbered up her wings. “I call this one ‘Concussy’.”

In the sky, unacknowledged by anypony save Twilight, gold and blue and pink light pulsed out from different directions. Twilight held her breath.

“That’s nice,” said Discord. He snapped his claw. “Concussy is now a shark.”

“Wha - ? Aargh! Get off!” Rainbow Dash flapped backwards and flailed as the small shark suddenly sprouting from her forelimb snapped affectionately up at her face. Applejack immediately wheeled to try and land a kick on the shark, and succeeded in landing one on the pegasus, who tumbled backwards into Pinkie Pie. Twilight’s body sprung up into the air to avoid the developing scrum, while Rarity yelped and then leapt in to assist. Fluttershy looked from her friends to Discord, her eyes pleading.

“Please!” she called. “Discord, you were doing so well. You don’t have to do this.”

Discord winced, and held one claw over his improbably muscular chest. “Dearest Fluttershy, please let me assure you I do have something like an ulterior motive behind all -”

White-hot lines of fire stitched through the air, and with a thunderclap, Discord was all but sent whirling off the hall’s summit, holding on by only one claw. Past him, the shape of a white alicorn came swerving back around for another strike.

Discord flailed up with his other claw at Celestia, a motion which the princess casually avoided as she flew. The next moment, with a flash of uncannily-glowing unlight and a sound that was just the complete cessation of noise, Luna smashed right into his exposed torso. Discord toppled backwards, his grip lost altogether, and after a moment of ponderous falling, landed with an almighty crash in the snow.

He flailed on his back like a turtle, and was altogether helpless to stop Cadance crashing upon him like a pink hammer-blow. The shockwave briefly blotted out sight, and Twilight was left blinking for a few minutes. When her vision finally cleared, she saw Discord lying deflated down to his original size. Three alicorns stood poised above him, wings spread and horns blazing with pent-up magic. Twilight’s vision was obscured slightly as Cadance came to stand between her body and Discord.

“Oh, woe is me, I have been undone and now see the error of my ways and all that,” croaked Discord. He rose his claws and waved them placatingly. “Truly, I shall be a better draconequus from now -”

“Silence,” snapped Luna. “Restore the Greycairns, or see weeds watered with thine blood.”

“Luna, at ease,” said Celestia. Her words soothed, her tone was controlled and cold. “This old battle again? Foolish, Discord. Do you think the Elements are beyond my ability to retrieve if need presses?”

“No. You’ve got something like a few tricks to pull in that area, I respect that much.” Discord sprung up into the air, as if he’d never been struck at all. “I suppose it would just have to come down to whoever could stop the other faster. How are your reflexes these days?”

“Speed would be so easily made a non-factor,” said Celestia, a hint of weariness showing past her chilly exterior. “I’m disappointed. I’d been told such promising things regarding your redemption.”

“Oh, that’s still on-track,” said Discord casually. “This was more deliberate attention-getting than an actual return to form.”

“Attention-getting,” repeated Celestia. “You’ve succeeded there, I’ll grant you that. To what end?”

Discord yawned, poked at a tooth, and then said, “You might care to take a look inside your most faithful student’s head. She’s got something she’d like to tell you. And something she’d like you to break.”

All eyes turned towards Twilight’s body, while Twilight herself heaved a sigh of pure relief. Her body hesitated, and then stammered out, “I … I have no idea what he’s talking about, princesses. He’s clearly gone mad. Madder.”

“A ploy,” Luna murmured. “He seeks to divert our attention. Retrieve the Elements from a suitably unattended time and cut our losses here.”

“I suspect otherwise,” replied Celestia gently. “But even if that’s the case, taking the Elements from a point in the past and returning them promptly would be a one-alicorn job. My job, anyway. We can hedge our bets. And you are the better psychomancer.”

Luna’s frown held for a moment, and fell away when she shrugged. “True enough.” Her posture straightened, and she looked towards Twilight’s body. “Twilight Sparkle, do you consent to the examination of your mind so that we may investigate Discord’s claims?”

Her body opened her mouth. Her body closed her mouth. Magic fizzed reflexively around her horn, and Twilight saw the projector screen inside her mind dim somewhat.

Then, like lightning from a clear sky, magic erupted from the tip of Twilight’s horn, more than she should be reasonably able to draw upon even as an alicorn, magic that had an unhealthy tinge to it even as it spilled light down over her eyes. It came out as a blue-and-violet flash, the mark of the memory-wiping charm, spiralling right towards the nearest Princess. Twilight’s body was turning even before the spell landed, rotating smoothly to fire off another spell. The sheer blazing intensity of it forced Twilight to turn away from her own eyes, shielding her vision from the pandemonium beyond.

There was the sound of a scuffle and a bodily impact, Discord crying ‘Oof!’ and then the unmistakeable shiver of powerful magic taking hold. Wings flapped and familiar pony voices cried. There was the crash of impact as something hit her body, which even Twilight’s egoscopic projection could feel. She dared to look up, and where the world wasn’t seared with the aftereffect of magic, it was a steady pink. “Easy, Twilight!” cried Cadance. “You’re going to be okay! Luna, now!”

“I have my doubts,” muttered Twilight. There came another crash from outside, and Twilight saw it came from her own body slamming into the snow. Cadance held her struggling body pinned, and something else pressed down on her horn and disrupted the energies there - she could see the frustrated sparks of it leaping down across her body’s vision.

Dark blue light inveigled itself into the chamber of her mind then, and Twilight turned to see its source. A shimmering indigo cloud resolved itself into the shape of an alicorn, an outline of Princess Luna in which stars glittered. The princess stopped, looked at Twilight, and then turned to regard the projector at one side.

“Princess Twilight?” said Luna, her voice gratifyingly immediate. “What has assailed you?”

“A ...” Twilight hunted for a way to explain it that wouldn’t invite all manner of follow-up questions to the effect of ‘What?’ or ‘Do you need to take your medication?’ or ‘Die, future-tyrant!’ “A powerful magic-user has sealed my consciousness away behind a psychomantic construct that’s designed to both act like me and try and break my will. They - she’s exceedingly powerful and clever, and she may have used dark magic.”

Luna nodded and stared thoughtfully at the projector.

“Reason eight-hundred and fifty-six for pursuing your glorious future!” helpfully chirped Twilight’s own voice. “The assumption of Luna’s magic will provide excellent scope for dreamwalking and establishing a more-or-less stable reign of terror. Undeclared rebel leaders can be subjected to unrelenting nightmares even in the waking day, and thus rendered unable to -”

Luna turned to look flatly at Twilight.

“Ah,” said Twilight. “Ah. Um. There is an exceedingly reasonable account behind that statement and the others like it being produced. I don’t, um ...”

“I suspect ‘reason’ wants nothing to do with this whole mess,” replied Luna. She met Twilight’s gaze, and her expression was gentle. “Regardless, I shall see you safely out of here, Twilight Sparkle. Accounts can come later. Just let me examine the construct, that I may dismantle it appropriately and safely.”

Luna turned back towards the projector, her tongue protruding slightly from her mouth with concentration, while Twilight heaved a sigh and looked back towards the outside. Her body still appeared to be pinned and struggling on the ground, while a rapid-fire conversation went on overhead between Celestia, Cadance, and her friends. Variations on ‘What the hay was that?’ and ‘I don’t know’ seemed to be common refrains. Luna’s body was still, her eyes closed as if she was sleeping while standing. Discord stood at one side, blinking and smiling amiably at anything and everything nearby. “Pardon me,” she heard him say, “The last thing I remember is a flash of blue light. Do any of you happen to know who I am?”

The situation was settled, just about. Twilight dared to let herself relax. Just by a fraction.

And then there was an eruption of white light from just behind Celestia and the others, light that cleared to reveal the shapes of a squadron of ponies in barding. “TIME POLICE! STOP IN THE NAME OF AN ORDERLY CONTINUUM AND WE WILL USE LETHAL FO - for - uh. Force?”

Twilight stared out at the squad of Time Police, who in turn found themselves looking at Twilight pinned beneath an alicorn princess, another alicorn princess sleeping at one side, another alicorn princess turning to loom over them, a befuddled draconequus, and the Element Bearers, one of whom had a shark for a leg.

“Oh, Tartarus,” said Lieutenant Bramble, in the instant before magic and chaos started happening everywhere, to everypony, with no particular discrimination.

“How’s everypony faring out there? I hear a ruckus,” said Luna, as she prodded the projector with a hoof.

“Everypony’s fighting a squad of ponies from the future, who apparently keep time going the way they think it ought to go.” Twilight paused, and her voice fell. “The … the way they need it to go, if they want to keep existing.”

Luna paused before answering. “Hmm. Yes, I shall be keen beyond measure for this account, I think.” She considered the projector for a moment longer, before blue magic flared to life around her horn and her hoof. “This should do the trick.”

“What should?” said Twilight. By way of response, Luna swung her hoof forward into the projector, the crash of it sending splintered glass and randomly-sparking trails of green-and-violet magic everywhere. Twilight leapt back with a surprised yelp as more sparks and magic flew out from the machinery, indigo lines of static now crackling across her vision and making her stumble.

“Brace yourself, Twilight Sparkle!” Luna’s voice came, as if from a great distance, as the static spread to swallow Twilight’s whole vision. “Reality shall be upon you!”

Twilight tried to respond, found her mouth gone, found herself spiralling down … away? … elsewhere, all inchoate and disintegrating around her.

Reality hit her.

It hurt.

Twilight coughed feebly, the pain of her abused magic hitting her as a thunderous headache. She lay inches-deep in cold snow, and trying to so much as shift her legs sent waves of fatigue shuddering through her. A weight rested atop her and pressed down on her horn, warm and gentle for all that it was firm and unmoving.

From somewhere before her, dark legs moved, and there was the sound of wings triumphantly spreading. “Huzzah!” came the voice of Luna. “We solved the problem!”

A moment’s silence followed before Celestia’s voice broke it. “She doesn’t appear especially solved … Twilight? Are you alright?”

“I … ” Twilight coughed, and she felt the weight atop her relax and the pressure lift from her horn. “I’m alright. No longer psychomanced. Ow. Yes. Alright.”

A nuzzle came down against her own then, softly brushing across it. “You’ll be alright, Twilight,” said Cadance. “We’ll make sure of it.”

“Are those my feet?” said Discord, to one side.

“No!” came another voice, from somewhere in front of Twilight. “No, no, no, no, no!”

Twilight blearily lifted her head to find the source of it. Past them, where the white aftereffect of the Time Police’s retreat hung in the air. Underneath, a pegasus mare desperately scrabbled through the snow for pieces of a shattered metal leg band. “No! Please, no! I can’t be stranded!”

“Stranded from what, exactly?” Celestia spoke, and the pegasus leapt up as if electrified. She stared wide-eyed at Celestia, and her mouth opened and closed mutely. Celestia pressed on. “I do not recognise your devices, and you and your fellows came to one of my towns armed and armoured for battle. I will know who you are and who you represent.”

“I … Constable-in-Training Jiffy, of Equestria’s Time Police, serial number one-naught-seven-seven-four. I, I have a badge.” Jiffy’s face crumpled. “Please don’t hurt me, ma’am! I … I have a gran, she needs me for -”

“Nopony is going to harm you, Constable Jiffy. But you are going to tell me everything I need to know about this situation and your involvement.”

“I can help with that as well, Princess” said Twilight. Her friends had gathered around her, and helped her back to her hooves as she spoke. “I can help a lot more than Jiffy, I think. One important thing, though. You can cast time magic?”

Celestia crooked a brow. “When the need is at hand. Why?”

“Can you … is there any spell you can cast that can stop ponies travelling back to our time? I’m being attacked by - well, I’ll explain it all shortly, but essentially ponies from in the future. They either want to kill me or keep me on a bad course and ...” A yawn threatened. “I need a breathing space. Please.”

Celestia’s soft smile broke like the dawn, and her horn began to flare with golden light. “I can promise nothing indefinite. But I can let you at least breath, Twilight. Breath - and if I may ask it of you, even speak.”

Twilight felt the motion of magic more powerful than most anything she’d felt before tremble through the earth, through her, sending the world all-a-thwp, and all she felt was fatigue. Applejack and Rarity on either side were all that kept her standing.“I think I need some tea as well. Very, very badly,” she croaked as the world reeled around her.

“Do you know you’ve got a shark on your leg?” Discord said brightly to Rainbow Dash.

In a far-distant office in a far-distant time, Twilight Sparkle sat in the shadows of her office and watched a little pony puppet on her desk, jerking and alive with an internal green light, fall as if its strings had been cut. She sent out a probe of magic, found it inert, found the connection through time severed.

At one second, a dial denoting Fray chimed as it ticked upwards.

Her teeth ground, and she called that same magic back. Streams of magically-produced numbers and letters uncoiled from banks of dials and gears at the back of the desk, readouts for the relevant squadron. She clocked their immediate deployment with satisfaction.

Their return the instant later, with one less member than they’d gone in with, failed to inspire the same satisfaction. The Fray dial chimed.

Why couldn’t ponies just do what was required? Why did she have to solve everything herself?

Twilight summoned a drop of her magic once more, the method for chronomancy now as easy to her as breathing. She clocked the time and position from the readout, plugged them into the co-ordinates the magic required, and prepared to plunge back into the past. The Alicorn Amulet purred on her chest and the beguiling shadow that now permeated her magic seemed to simmer with want of release. Soon, she promised it.

She plunged back in time, and was almost immediately knocked back where she came from, dazed and blinking. A simple wall of pure golden force had flown up in her path, a familiar sort of magic. Magic whose bearer she’d once sent down in flames, who was now a drooling pet in Canterlot Palace.

She could conquer that. Given time.

But time was running out as the damned Fray dial chimed, and her younger self would be preparing.

“Fine,” muttered Twilight as she rose from her desk. “I can do harsh measures. I’m very, very good at harsh measures. I’ve never fought a war across time, but I fancy I’m still a fast learner.”

The speaking tube for Bramble’s department thumped, and she ignored it. He’d get his orders along with everyone else, and hopefully lead himself and his incompetent squad to a neat and unobtrusive end in whatever followed. Her magic reached into the depths of her own throat, linking it up to every speaking tube in the headquarters and attached barracks, and coughed once, making the tubes thumped. A moment passed, in which she felt every squad leader and commander in the force rush to pick up the tubes. They all knew better than to keep her waiting.

She began to speak, and as she did so, almost unconsciously shifted into the form of Tenebris - a tall and gaunt grey-coated unicorn mare, with a sea-coloured mane and eyes as dark and pitiless as the night sky.

“All of you will mobilise your squads and take them to the Crisis Chamber. It falls upon us to conduct a full-scale incursion.”

Voices chirruped in her ear. Some of them had the gall to query. She cut them short.

“All of you!”

"The Hearthswarming season really brings the stab-happy do-gooders out, doesn't it?”

Tumult and spinning weightlessness and howling light. Travel through the Flow was always the same for Lieutenant Bramble. It would pass each time and discharge him into...

...onto a hard marble floor, which he'd learned to avoid meeting jaw-first. As he landed and the static around his senses cleared, he heard Toujours, Star Gazer, Jiffy, Solstice, and Spring Green learning their first painful lessons on that front.

He rose to all four hooves and took stock of the room around them. That was important. One time, on one of his first missions, they'd found the wallpaper a different colour and a confused sentient raptor manning the control panel. Oh, the paperwork and retroactive missions that had entailed.

They'd materialised inside a large, brass-bound box, the faces wrought from transparent, turquoise-tinted glass. Dials and wires and extraneous gears dotted the inside, and all but blanketed the exterior. Stumbling outside, Bramble found that the box – the Chronocube, if he had to give it its technical name - occupied all of one side of the room. Past it, a pegasus mare sat behind a control panel. She glanced up at them, pushed down on a lever, and nodded approvingly at whatever came up on a screen before her. A short set of stairs led up to an ajar door that squeaked on its hinges. On the wall, a sign proudly declared: IT HAS BEEN 8 DAYS SINCE THE LAST GRANDFATHER PARADOX. Below it, a line of speaking tubes sprouted.

Everything was as it should be. Bramble relaxed.

“How did it go?” said the pegasus mare, Pencil Pusher, as Bramble trotted clear of the box and beckoned for the variously groaning and/or vomiting recruits to follow him.

“You're cleaning that up, Jiffy! Ahem. Went fine, as far as these things go, Pusher. Assassin neutralised, the tyrant lived to tyrannise another day, and no obvious signs anything had ever happened left behind. What does the data say?”

Pencil Pusher shrugged and pushed another smaller lever. A stream of glowing-blue magical motes flew out of the panel before her and reformed into letters and numbers in the air. A dial whirled and squeaked. “The Fray's shot sharply down, down to about eight-point-nill. Time's flowing as it should. You're golden. Five-second delay as well. Practically pulled back as soon as you went in.”

“My stars. I might start to regard the technicians with something other than hostile contempt.” Bramble turned back to the recruits. “Form up, you miserable shower!”

With obvious reluctance and varying states of discombobulation, the five did as instructed. Jiffy, apparently having been cursed with a sensible constitution that objected to being yanked up and down the Flow of time like a yo-yo, took a moment to throw up again before straightening.

“You'll all be glad to know that our reality, in spite of the assassin's and your own best efforts otherwise, survives. Your muckups were not, according to the numbers, apocalyptically catastrophic.”

The five exchanged cautiously hopeful glances. A few relieved exhalations were ventured.

“That doesn't mean there wasn't a whole glittering array of incompetence greeting my senses back there. Get your haunches along to the mess room. I'll verbally flense you all down to the marrow in short order.”

The five slumped and trudged towards the stairs. Bramble watched them leave, and was jolted from his thoughts by Pencil Pusher briefly nuzzling the side of his neck.

“You shouldn't be that much of a monster to them,” she said. “We weren't exactly the finest Time Police ever to don badges ourselves, back in the day.”

“Heh. True. But give me some credit where it's due. I'm practically a teddy bear compared to old Tenebris.”

“Urgh. Don't bring back those memories. Let her stay safe and far away in her office rather than in my mind. And that's a low bar to set for yourself besides. Sparkle herself would probably be more suitable for training baby Police than Tenebris.”

“Let's test that. I'll borrow her the next time we go up the Flow. See how her coaching technique fares next to ...”

“Ha, no. This Fray dial's knackered enough as it is -” Pencil Pusher gestured to the dial in question and paused, frowning. “Hold on.”

“What is it?” said Bramble, craning to look as Pencil Pusher scrutinised the dial and muttered. She pushed yet another lever, and more lines of arcane text flickered into existence.

“Fray's at ten and rising sharply. Focused on this sector. Looks like Twilight Sparkle's had herself another unwelcome visitor. Or two, rather. And by that rate, it was either fatal or very informative for her.”

Bramble winced. It was a struggle to not look down at himself, to look for the telltale signs of the universe deciding to Fray his sudden incongruous self away.

No danger yet, though. They still had a fair amount of time before the universe caught on.

“Another one? Now? The Hearthswarming season really brings the stab-happy do-gooders out, doesn't it?”

“Time spent with friends, time spent with family, time very much not spent with those who aren't there,” said Pencil Pusher quietly. “You'll get a few doing some thinking in those latter cases. Not enough thinking. Shame, really.”

“I'll get the idiots back here,” said Bramble, heading for the stairs. “Another chance to acquaint them with the ropes. Depending on how well they do this time, I'll hold off on the bollocking. Spirit of the season and all that.”

“Gosh. You do have something vaguely resembling a soul. I was beginning to wonder.” Pencil Pusher allowed a faint smirk to cross her features as she headed towards the great box itself.

“Less snarking, more box-resetting. No need to make it fancy. Just quick and accurate enough to prevent another murder.”

“You mean, undo another murder -”

“Less being a pedant as well!”

“Do you ever get that feeling,” started Twilight Sparkle, sat within the warm confines of Carousel Boutique, “Right on the edge of your mind, just out of reach, that you've forgotten something? Something very, very important, but when you go through your list of Important Things to Recall, you just don't find a match?”

Rarity sat across from her, and sipped at a steaming cup of tea as she appeared to ponder the question. “Well, I don't have such a list,” she said hesitantly. “But I do recognise the sensation. Why, when you're in the zone, when you hit that sweet spot of inspiration that makes the world melt away, it's sometimes rather hard to bring yourself back to reality. I once got so wrapped up in a new line, I forgot to go outside or interact with anypony at all. I believe I was declared legally dead for a few days.”

“That's, um.” Twilight hesitated and then rallied. “Not quite what I was thinking about, but still something. How did that work out?”

“Frightfully, Twilight, and not resolved nearly quickly enough. I don't recommend being legally dead at all. Ponies just scream and try to push garlic in your mouth whenever you so much as walk down the street.”

What had begun as a visit to retrieve Spike from the boutique had turned into afternoon tea. Twilight was happy for it, though. The tea was good, her winter clothes were getting nicely toasted on a little magical heater, and Rarity's company was never something to be passed up. Spike and Sweetie Belle, by the sounds of it, had found a board game in the next room behind Rarity and were doing an adequate job of entertaining/tormenting themselves while the approximately-functioning grown-ups talked.

Twilight sipped her own tea, and as drowsiness set in, she let Rarity's prolonged account become as much as a part of the background noise as the patter of the snow outside. From the room along, there came a triumphant squeak from Sweetie Belle and Spike groaning, “You sunk my galleass!”

Twilight liked this current state of existence, and was happy to see it prolonged.

From outside, there came a couple of muffled pops, to which she paid little heed.

“- and that was when Mayor Mare said, 'That could be anypony's pulse.' I ask you! As if I was some sort of ghastly skin-trotter. Which, for the record, I'm not -”

From the door behind Twilight, there came a muffled thump, as if something had hit the window.

That shifted her from her drowsiness, a job which was finished by noises from the next room to the effect of an indignant squeak of “There's no air ships in this game! That's cheating!”, which was followed by “Hey, technological progress waits for no stupid ruleset -” and which in turn was terminated by the sound of a board and pieces being overturned.

The alicorn and unicorn glanced briefly at each other, before Rarity rose with a sigh. “I'll see to those two,” she said, as the sounds of a scuffle escalated. “You check the window in the back room, darling. Make sure no foals are throwing snowballs at it or anything of that nature.”

“Sure,” yawned Twilight, rising from her chair and making for the back room, stifling a yawn as she went. She opened the door and stepped inside, a rising series of “He started it!”, “No, she started it!”'s at her back.

She stepped into the murk of shadows and shrouded boutique materials and wrapped Hearthswarming presents, pressed the light switch, glanced around, and stopped in her tracks.

By the window – open past the blinds, if the draught was any indicator – two unfamiliar ponies stood; a yellow-coated unicorn mare, and an earth pony stallion entirely covered by heavy metal barding. They looked up guiltily in the sudden light, and locked awkward gazes with Twilight. The strange mare's eyes narrowed ever-so-slightly.

“Who are you two? What are you doing breaking into Carousel Boutique?” said Twilight after a pregnant pause.

“Before we answer that,” said the mare, “Are you Twilight Sparkle by any chance?”

“Yes. What does that matter? Why are you in here?”

“Ah,” said the mare, with satisfaction thick around the syllable. The stallion took a step forwards, and Twilight found herself taking an involuntary step back.

“Let us spare you elaborate explanations,” said the stallion, one armoured hoof pawing at the ground. “Truly, as the great Shakelance himself penned in The Tragedy of Iridium, 'Speak, hooves, for me -!'”

“Coprolite, give the quoting a rest,” said the mare wearily. “Nothing is going to make that Equish degree relevant.”

“Nova, please! You're ruining the moment ...” Coprolite breathed out. “Oh, to Tartarus with it. EVERY TYRANT TO THE SWORD!”

And with that, before Twilight could so much as blink, he was up and rearing, two iron-clad hooves clawing at empty air before he came plunging down upon her.

She yelped and reflexively teleported back a vital few inches, hooves cleaving the air a hair’s edge from her snout and slamming into the floor with enough force to rattle the walls. “Clear a space!" came the shout of Nova, muffled by sudden pounding clouds of adrenaline, and Coprolite lumbered to one side. Twilight found herself staring down Nova’s horn, the whole levelled length of it incandescent with orange light.

Twilight delved swiftly into whatever magic she had at hand, and a thin magical shield snapped into existence before her in the next instant. The lines of it flared, bolstered by her innate alicornhood, but she could still see the sheer blazing force of Nova’s magic fly out -

It impacted. Twilight’s world turned to spinning chaos as she was bowled clean off her hooves by the weight of the magic. Weightless, deafened, she tumbled through falling shards of door and wall and scorched dust, leaving the suggestion of a Twilight-shaped hole in Rarity’s inner wall. She knocked into the table, and cups and boiling tea fell down around her recumbent and coughing form.

In her blurry field of view, where the floor and ceiling filled the right and left sides, she saw Coprolite and Nova bludgeon a path clear of the splintered door and wall. The armoured stallion advanced on her, and Twilight’s fragmented world painfully focused on the sheen of his sharpened shoes.

The same hoof lifted to the left, and as if from a great distance, she heard him begin, “Sic semper -”

“TIME POLICE! STOP IN THE NAME OF AN ORDERLY CONTINUUM AND WE WILL USE LETHAL FORCE!”

A window at the room’s side that had previously been offering distinguished service by way of admitting wan rays of sunlight exploded inwards, and a blue-armoured pegasus mare rocketed through. She alighted on the floor, exhaled, rummaged with a hoof around the edge of her peytral, and produced a badge which she waved triumphantly at Coprolite and Nova. “See! We’re official Time Po-”

Coprolite’s hoof was a grey blur in the air that connected with a resounding thunk. The pegasus exited the window with the same speed she’d entered, hitting another blue-armoured earth pony mare that had risen in the window at the worst possible time. They fell with mutual aggrieved screams.

“Quick!” Nova exclaimed, “While they’re out for the count -”

And in the next instant, four circles of light flashed in the room and faded to reveal four ponies. One unicorn mare, slumping and panting as her horn smoked with the effort of the carry-along teleportation. Three earth ponies, a mare and two stallions. The shortest stallion cast his gaze quickly around the room and snapped, “Focus on the assassins! Star Gazer, on the unicorn! Solstice and Toujours, with me on the earth pony! Keep them clear of Sparkle!”

Twilight stirred and unsteadily rested one hoof on the ground as chaos unfolded, as the unicorns wheeled on each other. Furious arcs of magic crackled back and forth between them, pink meeting orange with the sound of fireworks and the clash of meeting daggers as each sought to disrupt the energies around each other’s horn. The three earth ponies plunged on Coprolite and the armoured behemoth swung to meet them with a furious roar. Hooves swung and armour crashed and a pony went flying, too quickly for Twilight to notice who. The newcomer’s apparent commander, who had all but swung himself up onto Coprolite’s back, slammed one gleaming shoe on a back plate and sent it flying away as rusty powder. Coprolite cursed, bucked, and sent the stallion flying to bounce off a wall.

It was a lot to take in, and with adrenaline’s initial wave washing away, Twilight really wanted to have a nice lie-down and a cup of tea and to calmly observe it all from a distance.

A door slammed open behind her, and Twilight turned.

In the open frame, Rarity stood, her mouth hanging open as she regarded the current state of the room. Below her, Sweetie Belle stared with a kind of bewildered enthusiasm. Spike, who seemed to have a little ship-of-the-line jammed up one nostril, boggled.

“No! Get back!” yelled Twilight. “Get the authorities, get somepony else, send a letter to -!”

Another roar from Coprolite jangled her already-rattled eardrums, and she turned back to see him kicking the last assailant into a wall. Behind him, the unicorn duel as yet raged. Coprolite turned to regard it, snorted, and wheeled back on Twilight. His eyes narrowed behind the slit of his visor. “The rest is silence, Sparkle.”

“Who in the BLAZES are you all and what are you doing destroying my HOME?” screeched Rarity, her own horn flaring blue. Coprolite ignored her and focused on Twilight, who was only now struggling to rise to her hooves. He started forwards, and Twilight tried to goad her own staggered reflexes into action as he neared.

A purple-and-green blue flew past her, surprising her as much as Coprolite, whose own eyes opened wide upon seeing a dragon whelp lunge at him. Spike screamed a high-pitched battle-cry as he leapt out and bit hard on the tip of the stallion’s snount, flames flapping out the sides of his own mouth as he yelled, “Oo shkay away fr’m Kwiligh’!”

Pony and dragon screamed in unison, the big stallion spinning on the spot and flailing at his front to try and dislodge Spike. They whirled like a spinning top, concussing a rising armoured newcomer as they did so. Sweetie Belle, sensing a moment to contribute, jumped in as well past Rarity’s yelled warnings and bit down on the tip of Coprolite’s tail as it whipped past. The spinning medley of colours acquired a note of white and the chorus of ongoing screams shifted ever-so-slightly higher.

Rarity dived in after Sweetie Belle, and was rewarded for her pains by Spike slamming into the side of her head. She stumbled back with a discombobulated “Glerk!”, rallied, stepped forwards, and was clocked across the teeth by her little sister. She fell, and displayed no great enthusiasm in rising.

Twilight shook her head, and the last of the fog cleared. One pulse of magic built around her horn, and she unleashed a concussive blast at the centre of Coprolite’s mass and past the white-and-green-and-purple edges. It staggered the stallion, sending him flailing back even as Spike and Sweetie Belle continued to affix themselves.

It was all the opening one of the armoured newcomers needed, the taller of the two earth pony stallions. He charged right into Coprolite and slammed one gleaming shoe into his unarmoured underbelly. Coprolite turned, opened his mouth to curse, and then started to scream.

The scream lasted up until the instant where Coprolite’s body collapsed into dust and fell across the stallion. The barding fell into the pile like shipwrecks breaking the surface of the shore.

At that point, Rarity, Spike, Sweetie Belle, the pinned stallion, and Nova all started or renewed their screaming, upon which Twilight’s eardrums just gave up and found the nearest metaphorical bar in which to unwind from a hard day.

Nova’s screams didn’t last long. The unicorn she’d been fighting stunned her with a brief blast of magic, trotted up while Nova reeled, and punched her with another gleaming shoe.

Dust scattered across the floor.

“Is every -” The fallen commander began, then coughed as he wearily rose. “Is everypony alright?”

“Oh sol, oh sol, he’s in my mouth!” wailed the stallion underneath the dust pile formerly known as Coprolite. “He’s in my eyes. He’s in my ears!”

“Builds character. Dig yourself out of there, Toujours. Where’s Jiffy? Where’s Solstice?”

“Here, sir,” said the first earth pony mare to appear at the window, holding an unconscious pegasus over one shoulder. “Had to retrieve her from a market square. Got some funny looks along the way. I think other ponies might be coming to check on the fuss.”

“Nightmares take it.” The commander ground his teeth. “This is going to be one monster of a clean-up job. Get started. Check the environment and add up the disruption, Star Gazer. Put Jiffy down and allay the civvies, Solstice. You and Spring Green can wipe their memories and then attend to those outside. Toujours, you and I will do the same for Sparkle.”

Amidst the teeming barbarian hordes of questions which battered at the gates of Twilight’s mind, the first one to cleave its way to the forefront was Wait, memory-wiping?

The commander advanced on her then, painting a wide and easy smile across his features. “Now then, Your Highness, apologies for all this disruption. We’ll soon be out of your mane and set everything back the way it was.”

Behind him, the Coprolite-covered Toujours advanced on Rarity, who regarded him with a expression of mute horror. A small twinkling device in the cleft of his outheld hoof flashed blue, and Rarity’s expression blanked in that moment.

“Now then -” said the commander reassuringly.

Twilight teleported away.

She reappeared in the back room, to the sound of a blistering curse from the commander outside. Her gaze swept from side to side, hunting for what she needed, what she’d planned as a contingency in the event of oncoming memory-wiping when she was a filly (and she had a normal and mentally well-adjusted foalhood, honest). There - a sheet of paper and a pencil.

From outside, a shout. “She’s in there, Lieutenant! Look through the hole!”

Little time. She positioned herself to try and block what she was doing from sight with her tail, pretended to just be coughing and gathering in breath, and swiftly set pencil to paper, writing more quickly than she’d ever written before.

The dying-spider-scrawl flew across the page, and hooves scuffed outside. Twilight looked around for a corner that hadn’t been disturbed at any point, saw a dusty cloth that seemed to conceal a pile of Hearthswarming presents, and tucked the paper under there.

“‘You’re being paranoid, Twily, nopony wipes memories’,” she muttered in a sing-song tone. “Chew on this, BBBFF.”

The broken wood around the hole she’d made with her body cracked, and she turned to see whoever was forcing a way through. Briefly, she saw the form of the commander, and looked down to see a twinkle in his hoof -

Her world turned blue.

It was a lovely winter’s afternoon in Ponyville, as ponies ploutered through the snow blanketing the streets. Evening edged closer, with orange and indigo suffusing into the cloud-covered sky. Foals laughed and threw snowballs under the golden glow of the tall magical streetlights.

Twilight observed it all from within a cosy set of walls, with a cup of hot chocolate at her lips. She’d already come home to the library from a lovely afternoon tea at Rarity’s, and saw no reason to end the day’s pleasure early. With Spike asleep upstairs, she’d get some peace to herself.

A knock sounded at her door. She wondered who could be calling, and set down the hot chocolate and went to go see.

Rarity stood at the front door, her scarf being tossed about in the cold breeze. A piece of paper floated at her side.

“Rarity? Come inside. Did I leave something at your place?”

“Maybe, Twilight, I’m not sure.” The unicorn stepped into the cosiness with a grateful shudder, and then winced. She poked at the inside of her mouth, as if checking for a wobbly tooth. “I found this piece of paper when checking a few of my things - it seems to be for you, or even by you, judging by the hoofwriting. I haven’t presumed to open it, of course.”

Twilight frowned and accepted the paper. The front read, in her own hoofwriting, For the attention of Twilight Sparkle. Her frown deepened. She unfolded it and read:

Dear Me,

If I’m reading this, and have no idea where it comes from, then my memory has been wiped. This deserves investigation, don’t I agree?

Your (My?) Dutiful Self, Twilight Sparkle