Love Hungry

by helmet of salvation

Rating: everyone
Tags: Adventure, Shining Armor, Discord, Twilight Sparkle, Main 6, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Princess Cadance
Length: 38191

The prospect of a Changeling invasion of Ponyville means that friendship becomes more important than ever. Yet can friendship stay strong when your friends could be your enemies in disguise?

Equestria is facing another Changeling threat. This time the campaign to devour ponies' love is commencing in Ponyville.

It's up to the Princess of Friendship, Twilight Sparkle, and her friends to contain the danger until Shining Armor and Princess Cadance can cast the shape-shifting invaders out.

But when suspicions arise about Twilight herself, will the Power of Friendship be powerful enough to defeat the menace?

Published 2015-02-26 19:10:02 UTC
Last updated 2016-01-07 21:42:22 UTC

1. A Visit from Royalty

Like an apparition, the pale figure wafted soundlessly through the darkened hallway of the castle, her glistening tail billowing behind her. The only source of light was the dim, ambient reflection of the moon, and there were many rooms in which her target might be. Yet the intruder had little need of light. She followed her quarry's pheromonal vapour trail as a bloodhound follows a scent, honing in as the sensation grew stronger.

Within minutes she had located the bedroom of her prey. Before approaching, she listened through the open door. The pony within was sleeping fitfully, writhing under her covers and murmuring incoherently. The intruder knew she had made the correct decision in adopting a disguise; her target might awaken any second. She had also prepared a short speech to allay any anxiety her sudden appearance might cause her prey: Do not be alarmed. I am here on a matter of the utmost importance. I need you to listen carefully.

The ruler flew slowly into the bed chamber. Even though this mode of flight was quieter than when undisguised, her presence soon stirred Princess Twilight Sparkle from her slumber. With a tired groan, the young purple pony turned towards the intruder. Her squinting eyes quickly widened into saucers. An unannounced visit from the ruler of Equestria in the middle of the night—in her bedroom, no less—was not what she expected at all.

"Princess Celestiaaaaah-oomph!"

In her haste to wake up and come to attention, Twilight Sparkle rolled gracelessly off her bed, taking her covers with her. The more she struggled to free herself, the more entangled she became, all the while blurting out a string of sentence fragments punctuated by grunts of frustration and embarrassment at her ignominious position.

"Just a ... nng ... I'll be ... oof ... sorry about ... unh ... please forgive ..."

The ruler smiled. Apparently, this would be easier than she thought. She vaulted to the other side of the bed, angled her head to the squirming Twilight and fired a noisy beam of green, luminescent energy from her spiral horn. The white figure prodded her hoof around the charred, tattered remains of the bedclothes.

There was no trace of Twilight Sparkle.

* * *

The white alicorn whirled around until she caught sight of movement. She prepared to take aim at the horned figure, only to realise that she was looking at her own head. Not the stately, snow-white, flowing-maned head of Princess Celestia, but her real head. Pitch-black, green-eyed, with tattered strands of hair dangling limply from her crest and a hideous, sharp horn, perforated with large holes, jutting from her forelock.

The changeling queen's eyes narrowed as she turned from the mirror just in time to see an enraged Twilight directing her own spiral horn towards her. The queen launched herself with blinding speed through the bedroom door, narrowly avoiding the alicorn's magical energy beam.

"You!" Twilight galloped after the changeling and fired off a quick spell to ignite the torches lining the hallway. She could see that the intruder had completely reverted to her natural form: a horrific, black-coated, translucent-winged, pony-insect amalgam with nightmarish, gaping holes dotting her limbs. "Trying to steal Equestria's love again, huh? Well you're not going to get away with AAAAH!" The alicorn hastily dematerialised to avoid another bolt of energy from the changeling.

"I see my reputation precedes me," the queen purred to the reappearing Twilight while firing off more bolts.

"Don't you remember me? Maybe you don't recognise me with these babies." Twilight flared her wings and took to the air, unleashing a barrage of energy beams at her adversary. "It's Twilight. Twilight Sparkle? Now Princess Twilight Sparkle to you."

"Charmed." Despite her great size, comparable to the biggest of ponies, the changeling flitted through the air with the speed and precision of a dragonfly, and dodged Twilight's bolts with little difficulty.

"Canterlot? Royal wedding? Attempted invasion ending in you and your swarm's total defeat and forcible ejection from Equestria? Ring any bells?"

"Must have been another, less effectual swarm leader. I have my own subjects. Wait, are you saying that all we changeling queens look the same to you?" Spinnerette, the changeling queen, clicked her tongue in mock reproof as she continued to trade fire with Twilight. "Such bigotry."

"What? Oh, no no no no no, that's not what I think at all, I just ..." Twilight's hurried, placatory tone instantly evaporated as she came to her senses. "Hey!"

A comparative novice flier, the princess quickly realised she was no match for Spinnerette's aerobatic skill, and resorted to her magic teleportation spell, disappearing to evade the queen's blasts and re-appearing in a different part of the hallway to return fire. For her part, Spinnerette's lightning-fast reaction time and keen instincts enabled her to keep out of harm's way. As the duel raged on, Twilight's thoughts turned to her five faithful pony friends. Together, there was no threat they could not overcome. Yet they were asleep in their respective homes, dotted throughout Ponyville. How could she get word to them without luring the changeling queen out into the open and thereby endangering the rest of the town's populace?

A forcefield? Creating a magical barrier from without was trickier than from within but if she teleported herself outside the castle, it would most likely take the queen a good few seconds to realise what had happened. That would give Twilight the time to execute the spell and raise the alarm. Trapped inside, the changeling could not harm any of Ponyville's citizens.

Except for Spike.

Spike! Twilight's faithful assistant was tougher than he looked but he was still only a baby dragon. She could hardly seal him up alone with that rampaging monster. She had to get to his bedroom and zap him outside before the invader found him ...

Twilight's mounting anxiety created only a brief, momentary distraction, but it was all Spinnerette needed. A blast from her dire horn caught the princess squarely in her flank. An explosion of light filled Twilight's mind as her legs gave way beneath her.

Her blurred eyes could just make out the changeling queen, wings abuzz, swooping towards her. Too dazed to conjure any spell, the alicorn tried to flee but her strength was sapped. Before she could even cry out, Spinnerette was upon her, grinning in malevolent triumph. Twilight could do nothing but moan feebly for help as she struggled in vain against both her attacker and her own creeping unconsciousness.

2. Hey, you know what this calls for?

Focusing intently on her task, Spinnerette failed to register the length of rope falling before her eyes until it was too late. She felt a lasso tighten around her, pinioning her forelegs and wings to the sides of her thorax, and jerk her violently to an unstable bipedal position. She wheeled around to see that the other end of the rope was between the teeth of an orange-coated, blonde-maned earth pony mare wearing a Stetson hat. Supporting her in mid-air, to keep her approach silent, were two pegasus pony mares, Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy. The pair lowered Applejack to the floor and she began tugging forcefully at the changeling.

Her eyes blazing with anger, Spinnerette prepared to fire a bolt of energy at Applejack when a length of dark fabric glided through the air towards Spinnerette's face. As if alive, it wrapped around her eyes, blinding her, and the ends tied up in a tight bow behind her crest. As she tried to shake off the blindfold, three more figures approached. Rarity, an elegant white unicorn mare with stylish purple mane and tail, had used her magic telekinesis to apply the improvised blindfold she had brought from her boutique and home. With her was Pinkie Pie, a pink earth pony who had the bright eyes, spun-sugar mane and playful temperament of a gifted entertainer. She threw herself with equal enthusiasm and determination into any kind of party, including a rescue party. Behind them, fearful yet unhesitant, waddled the short, pudgy figure of Spike.

Twilight Sparkle's worries about her number one assistant and friend had turned out to be needless. For not even Spike could sleep through the fracas that Twilight and Spinnerette had created. Unnoticed by the two ferocious combatants, the baby dragon had scurried out of the castle and through the streets of Ponyville, bellowing for help and launching balls of flame high into the night sky like flares. Rousing themselves as quickly as they could from their slumber, Twilight's five pony friends rallied together to mount their rescue.

Spinnerette could sense the love emanating from her attackers but the pheromonal clouds roiled around and mingled with each other, making an accurate shot on that basis nearly impossible. Lurching unsteadily on her narrow hind legs, Spinnerette pulled against the lasso and prepared to fire her beam towards the source of the resistance she felt. Before she could shoot, sleek, powerful Rainbow Dash lanced swiftly and soundlessly through the air and slammed forehooves first into Spinnerette's side, sending the already unbalanced queen toppling onto the hard marble floor.

Even in her partially restrained state, Spinnerette was far too big and strong for Rainbow Dash to subdue on her own. Applejack worked to wind her rope around Spinnerette's viciously kicking hind legs, while Rarity, Pinkie Pie, Spike and Fluttershy launched themselves into the fray, emitting idiosyncratic battle cries as they did so:

"Hai-yah!"

"Wheeeee!"

"Rahr!"

"Oh my goodness oh my goodness!"

Firing bolts of energy in all directions, Spinnerette violently arched and twisted her upper body, casting her assailants left and right. Spike tenaciously bit and clawed at the changeling's tough, chitinous exterior—he dared not use his fiery breath for fear of harming his friends or weakening Applejack's restraining rope—while the ponies trampled and kicked with all their might. Except for Fluttershy, who knelt to one side, cringing face averted, and frantically flailed her forelegs at the empty air in front of her. "Come on Fluttershy, this is an emergency," she sobbed, frustrated at her own lack of resolve.

A loud cry of pain caught the primrose-coated pegasus' attention. Rarity had been thrown badly and was struggling to get to her hooves but her front leg appeared unable to support any weight. The unicorn groaned and wailed in piteous agony, tears flooding her long-lashed eyes. Incensed, Fluttershy bared her teeth and rocketed in unfettered fury toward Spinnerette, whaling upon her with as much power and ferocity as any of her comrades. Smiling with self-satisfaction, an apparently unharmed Rarity promptly re-joined the melee.

As she continued her mighty struggle, Spinnerette ceased shooting wildly at her unseen adversaries and started using every split-second respite to scrape her crest against the floor, trying to loosen the blindfold enough for her to shake it from her eyes. Finally believing she had done so, she sat up, ready to show these pathetic ponies what real power could do.

* * *

A sudden, tremendous force, intangible yet all too real, slammed the shocked Spinnerette instantly back down to the floor. Grunting, she fought to raise herself again but the crushing pressure bearing down on her thorax was irresistible. A golden-shod hoof gently pushed Spinnerette's blindfold up over her eyes and she let out an involuntary cry of dismay. Princess Celestia—the real Princess Celestia—had arrived at the castle. Hovering beside her was another alicorn mare, smaller, with a midnight blue coat and billowing blue mane and tail studded with glittering, star-like points of light. Between them, the two princesses generated the magical holding beam that flattened the changeling.

Spinnerette tried to conceal her fear with nonchalance. "Celestia, Luna, this is an unexpected honour. Shall I change into somepony more formal?"

"That won't be necessary," replied Celestia coolly. "You need only tell us where the rest of the changelings are."

A weary groan interrupted the questioning. Twilight Sparkle had regained consciousness and was groggily trying to stand up while taking in the unexpected scene before her.

"Twilight!" Fluttershy rushed over and strained laboriously to help her friend to her hooves. "What did she do to you?"

With a loud snort, Twilight shook off her lingering dizziness and checked herself over. A little weak and sore, a couple of flesh wounds, but she basically felt okay. "Not enough, it would seem," she replied triumphantly. She cast her eyes over her rescuers. "Thanks to all of you," she added warmly.

"Yes, your precious princess cut quite a feeble figure before you all showed up," gloated Spinnerette. She adopted the head and voice of Twilight Sparkle and weakly bleated, "Help, helllp," in a slightly exaggerated impression of the young alicorn.

"Enough." Celestia glowered at the prisoner. "Where are your changelings?"

Her normal head restored, Spinnerette rolled her eyes around their sockets and gave the most evasive air she could. "Oh, they're ... around. I'm sure you'll know them when you see them."

"Tell us," demanded Princess Luna.

"Or what? You little ponies can't threaten me. I care for nothing but the survival and prosperity of my changelings."

Celestia raised an eyebrow. "And how will your changelings survive without their queen?"

Spinnerette flinched at the implied threat before quickly regaining her defiant demeanour. "There is enough love here in Ponyville to sustain them. Then, once they've sucked this quaint little town dry, the strongest shall take my place and lead them to new pastures."

"We won't let that happen," declared Celestia emphatically, eliciting a chorus of agreement from the other ponies in the room.

Spinnerette barked out a derisive laugh. "It took all nine of you just to contain me. What can you do against an entire swarm?"

With a smile, Celestia turned towards her prized pupil. "Twilight, would you care to tell our visitor what we intend to do about her invasion?"

Twilight's face lit up knowingly, then she smirked mischievously as an idea occurred to her. She walked towards the captive queen and spoke with the timbre of an impudent schoolfilly. "Tell my big brother on you!" For good measure, she blew a raspberry.

"Amusing," Spinnerette deadpanned.

"Oh, the last changeling queen didn't think so. You see, when Shining Armor and his bride, Princess Cadance, get together, they can generate a wave of love that not even an army of changelings can withstand. Blasted every last one of them and their queen clear out of Equestria. No disguise nor hiding place could protect them. Gone. And they'll do the same to you and yours."

"No. You're lying. It cannot be tr—" A thought struck Spinnerette, arresting her mounting horror. "Did you say he's your brother? Interesting."

"What of it?"

"Close, are you? Do you have a tight bond of sibling love?" Spinnerette taunted.

"None of your business," scoffed Twilight. "What do you know about love anyway? It's just food to you."

"I know it can turn the wise foolish and the strong weak," she jeered.

"And the weak strong," retorted Fluttershy. The skirmish in the castle was hardly the first time that the sight of her friends hurt had compelled her to draw on reserves of courage she usually forgot she had.

"And I know it can cause more pain than any other force in the world."

"It's gonna cause you pain, all right, sister," Rainbow Dash warned, hovering menacingly nearby.

Spinnerette slowly cast her narrowed eyes across all the ponies in the room. "If you take this action against my changelings, be sure that you will suffer. You will remember that day with unimagined anguish for years to come!"

"Why?" challenged Twilight.

Spinnerette said nothing.

"Come on, it's the only chance your precious changelings have. If there's any reason Shining Armor and Cadance wouldn't want to cast their spell, now's the time to tell us."

Spinnerette's only response was a stony glare.

"Hmph. As I thought." Twilight Sparkle turned to her mentor. "I have nothing else to say to her."

Celestia changed the angle of her spiral horn and frowned with concentration. A rectangular portal opened in mid-air, revealing a huge, desolate chamber filled with narrow, winding rock platforms. At the end of each platform was a jagged mountain, the summit split open to reveal a crater. Several of these craters bore creatures of all shapes and sizes, roaring, wailing or simply brooding, either in barred cells or tethered by unbreakable chains to immovable stakes in the ground. These were the wretched inhabitants of Tartarus, the prison world of Equestria.

With a nod from Celestia, Applejack loosed the rope binding Spinnerette. Celestia and Luna altered their magic to lift the writhing Spinnerette into the air, then unceremoniously cast her through the portal. As she was irresistibly flown to an empty crater, where her bonds latched onto her, she glared balefully back towards the ponies. "You'll be sorry. You'll aalll be sorryyyyy..." Her voice cut out as the portal to Tartarus closed.

"Yer highnesses!" Applejack and her friends—including Princess Twilight Sparkle, who was getting used to her relatively recent ascendancy—dropped reverently to their knees. "Y'all came in the nick o'time. But how did you know?"

"Please rise," replied Celestia. "I received an emergency communiqué from Spike."

"Fastest quill in Equestria," Spike added as he smugly admired the four-digit appendage at the end of his right foreleg. Indeed, this peculiar anatomical feature enabled more efficient writing than any pony's mouth, or even unicorn magic telekinesis. Additionally, his fiery breath contained a magical enhancement that could transmit material to and from Celestia virtually instantaneously. As he had fled earlier that night, he snatched up some writing material—of which there was rarely any shortage wherever studious Twilight Sparkle lived—and literally fired off a request for urgent assistance. He knew how much power a changeling queen could wield, as did Celestia, which was why she brought her sister Luna with her.

Twilight voiced the thoughts of her pony friends. "It goes without saying that we are very grateful you both came. And to you, Spike, for getting help."

Luna looked with concern to her elder sister. "Speaking of urgent messages, we don't have much time. If the changelings are already in Ponyville, we need to send word to the Crystal Empire immediately."

"Can you please take care of that, Luna? I'll stay here in Ponyville in case the changelings attack in the meantime."

"No. I should stay behind. That way, if we need help from you as well, Spike can get in touch with you immediately."

"Very well. Twilight Sparkle, it is up to you and your friends, with Luna's help, to protect Ponyville, and the rest of Equestria, from the changelings until Shining Armor and Cadance can arrive and defeat them."

Twilight Sparkle looked at her friends, who all gave her reassuringly determined, dedicated smiles, then turned back to Princess Celestia. "We won't let you down."

Author's Note

Edit: changed the spelling of Shining Armor's name to canonical in this chapter and in the long description

3. The onslaught begins

"Hi! Thanks so much for coming. Please step this way for a quick security check. Nothing to worry about. Hi! Thanks so much for coming. Please step this way for a quick security check. Nothing to worry about. Hi! Thanks so much for coming. Please step..."

Wearing a black dinner jacket, a dummy earpiece and a pair of dark glasses with glittering, fancy rims that rather undermined any imposing appearance they might have had, Pinkie Pie cheerfully welcomed the citizens of Ponyville as they filed wearily into the town hall. Her sunny disposition and ability to talk continuously for long periods without shortness of breath made her the ideal pony for the job.

Once the townsponies stepped over the threshold, Twilight Sparkle cast a magic spell over each of them, young and old, from head to hooves. It was the same spell she had used to unmask Spinnerette the night before. As Twilight cleared each entrant to the hall, she nodded to Spike, who marked their name off on a long parchment.

The crowded hall echoed with baby ponies crying, schoolfoals whining and adults murmuring. An emergency town meeting this early in the morning was unprecedented but the townsponies knew that when Princess Twilight Sparkle had an urgent message to deliver, it was unwise to second-guess her. Ponyville had faced her share of threats over the years and Twilight tended to be the pony who knew what to do.

As the last of the citizens finally entered, Rainbow Dash swiftly scanned the hall's surroundings to ensure nopony else was listening in, then flew inside to undergo Twilight's anti-disguise spell. Twilight then magically closed the doors and took her place at a long table at the front of the hall, along with her friends, Princess Luna and the town's mayor.

"Order, please. Order." Twilight telekinetically struck the wooden sound block before her with a gavel and raised her voice above the crowd's hubbub, which gradually died down. "Thank you all so very much for meeting here at such short notice. It's an early start and many of you had to wait in line a long time while I performed my security check. However, I believe these steps were all necessary for the safety of Ponyville and possibly for all of Equestria.

"Last night I found myself under attack by a changeling queen."

A collective gasp of horror rose from several adult ponies.

"She is now safely locked away in Tartarus. However, we have reason to believe that the changelings under her rule are still at large in or near Ponyville."

A cacophony of talking erupted, which Twilight quickly silenced with further blows of her gavel.

"For those of you who don't know, a changeling typically looks like this." Twilight directed her horn to the wall behind her and magically generated a luminous, three-dimensional, life-sized image of a changeling. It resembled the queen but was smaller, about the size of an adolescent pony, with blank blue eyes, a backward-curving horn and sharp fangs jutting from its upper jaw. Twilight rotated the image 360 degrees so that the audience could view the creature from all angles. Many ponies cried out in dismay at the horrific sight.

Twilight switched off her spell and turned back to her audience. "Oh, I haven't gotten to the scary part yet. It can also look like this."

"Whoa!" Applejack flailed her legs in surprise as Twilight magically lifted her into the air for all the gathering to see.

"Or this." Twilight set Applejack back down and immediately levitated a fearfully squealing Fluttershy. "Or this." The next subject was Rarity, who indignantly demanded Twilight put her down that instant.

"Or even ... this." With these words, Twilight Sparkle herself took to the air, flying in a few circles before landing back in her place.

"In short, as far as we can tell, a changeling can look like anything. Usually, it assumes the appearance and voice of a loved one, be they a special somepony, friend or family member. Then it feeds off the love you have, gradually growing stronger as you grow weaker. It can also produce a substance similar to spider silk, that can restrain ponies bodily. They may do so to the ponies whose places they take.

"We believe that if the changelings were strong enough to take us by force, they would have done so by now. It's more likely they'll try to weaken us first. Now, Princess Celestia has sent a message to Prince Shining Armor and Princess Cadance. They are able to combine their mutual love into a force that can rout the changelings in one fell swoop. Until they arrive from the Crystal Empire, it's up to us to resist these invaders. Now I know some of you might be afraid, and with good reason, but I have every confidence that we can do this. Because each and every one of us also carries a powerful magic that we can use against them.

"The magic of friendship.

"Mares and gentlestallions, fillies and colts, over the next day or so I want you all to think about who your friends and loved ones really are, and what they really mean to you. Think of all your shared experiences, your laughter and tears, hopes and anxieties. Think of your friends' characters, all their little quirks, tics and mannerisms, everything that makes them them. Because no changeling can fake that. By talking with each other about our friendships and keeping those friendships foremost in our minds, we'll soon make any impostors expose their true selves, so that we can deal with them.

"If you have any suspicions, come to me. I have a magic spell that can uncover a changeling's disguise, the same spell I used on all of you as you arrived. Don't worry, it has no ill effects on ponies. Are there any questions?"

A pale yellow-coated earth pony mare raised a forehoof. "What if your friend is acting differently because they're just not feeling themselves? Like they're having a bad day or something? How can we tell the difference?"

Twilight smiled. "That's an important question, Golden Harvest. We don't want to turn our interactions into interrogations. So, what would you normally do with a friend who isn't acting themselves?"

"Talk with them?"

"Talk with them. Heart-to-heart. You'll soon figure out whether they're the real deal or not."

Amethyst Star, a pink unicorn mare with a young daughter beside her, spoke up. "If we do believe we're face to face with an impostor, how exactly can we bring them to you to decide? I'm not too eager to execute a citizen's arrest on one of those horrors." Several other ponies murmured in agreement.

"Just cry out 'Changeling!' Princess Luna and Rainbow Dash will be patrolling the skies. One of them will be sure to hear."

"And if I hear, you bet I'll help out too," chimed in Thunderlane, a dark-coated pegasus stallion with a blue-and-silver mohawk mane. A number of other stallions indicated likewise.

"But by the time help arrives, the changeling could take on a new disguise and escape," pointed out Amethyst Star.

"If that happens then too bad," answered Twilight. "Remember, my brother and his wife will ultimately take care of the changelings. The safety of Ponyville's citizens is our top priority for now. If you're not sure you're up to tackling a changeling, don't. We want no unnecessary heroics."

"Yeah, leave those to me," added Rainbow Dash proudly, not fully aware what her words conveyed in that context.

Cup Cake, a plump, pleasant earth mare with a mane like a swirl of pink icing, turned to her husband and twin foals, then looked pleadingly at Twilight. "Suppose one of us does fall victim to these creatures. Can the love they drain from us be restored?"

"Spreading love is Princess Cadance's magic specialty. She can cure any casualties."

Still somewhat uneasy but not quite afraid, the townsponies had no further questions, so Twilight closed the meeting, allowing the attendees to help themselves to the assorted apple-based confections that Applejack has rustled up for them.

Twilight approached her friends with a nervous, almost apologetic smile. "How do you all think that went down?"

"Like a tankard of fresh apple juice on a hot summer's day," replied Applejack in her distinctive, hospitable twang.

"Mmm-hmm," Twilight's other friends chorused.

"Your destiny as Princess of Friendship appears to suit you to the ground, Twilight Sparkle," added Princess Luna.

Twilight blushed. "Let's just hope it works."

"Sure it will," grinned Pinkie Pie, her mouth full of apple cobbler. "Remember, Shining Armor and Princess Cadance will be along soon to take care of everything."

Suddenly, Spike's face contorted into an anxious grimace. Reflexively, he placed a clawed forefoot to his mouth as an attack of nausea struck him. Turning protectively away from the ponies, he spewed out a tongue of flame, which quickly dissipated to reveal a rolled-up parchment bearing a royal seal. His method of receiving messages from Princess Celestia might have been efficient but it was not the most comfortable of sensations for him.

"Great! News of my brother and Cadance." Twilight telekinetically opened the scroll and lifted it to her eye level. As she silently read, her excitement melted into consternation. She released her magic hold on the parchment, letting it drop to the ground.

"What's wrong, Twilight?" Fluttershy voiced the collective concerns of her friends.

"They're not coming."

* * *

"Oh the dragon is the greatest creature everrrrr."

SLAM!

"With awesomeness that goes right through the rooooooof."

SLAM!

"And if you're dumb enough to try to cross oooooone."

SLAM!

"You better put on something fireprooooof."

With each out-of-tune line of his raucous, deafening song, the gargantuan reptile launched himself high into the air, then swooped down with a thunderous crash into the transparent dome surrounding the Crystal Empire. Despite his incredible mass, he absorbed the tremendous impact without harm. The barrier stayed intact but the dragon was unshaken in his determination to plunder what lay behind it.

For a thousand years, the Empire had lain dormant underground; her residents, the Crystal Ponies, in suspended animation, hidden from prying eyes. Then she had arisen and, with the help of Twilight Sparkle and her friends, including Princess Cadance and Shining Armor, the crystal ponies had activated their ancient artefact, the Crystal Heart, to obliterate the empire's tyrannical ruler, King Sombra, defeating him for the second and final time. Under Cadance's rule the revived empire had prospered, her glittering buildings standing as a testament to the power that lay within ponies.

Unfortunately, the great crystal structures had also attracted some altogether unwanted attention. Dragons rarely ventured into Equestria except in passing. However, this rogue had spotted the empire from afar during his wanderings and flew eagerly in, only to collide with the forcefield that Shining Armor and Cadance had erected just in time.

The dragon hammered at the barrier with ever-increasing forcefulness, hurled monstrous boulders, breathed blazing fire, to no avail. He tried to dig under it but the barrier penetrated the ground as well, completely encasing the realm. Growing ever more frustrated, the dragon intensified his onslaught until he felt something. Not a fracture, just a tiny yet clearly perceptible buckling in the barrier before firming up again. It was then he remembered talk among his elders about some ponies, the ones with horns, having some kind of freaky magic powers, and he guessed it was they who were responsible for this forcefield. Well, he doubted their power was inexhaustible, and that buckling, slight though it was, renewed his confidence. He continued his assault day and night, fortifying himself with gemstones from his hidden hoard, cheering every small yield in the barrier and making games to keep from getting bored and losing his focus. After a few rounds of heaving colossal boulders into the air and swatting them at the barrier with his tail, he was now dive-bombing and singing.

This was the terrifying sight that greeted the royal messenger, who promptly fled back to Canterlot to deliver the unfortunate news to Princess Celestia.

"Excuse me." Celestia's voice, despite its serenity, was loud and resonant enough to catch the attention of even a huge dragon. She hovered in mid-air, flanked by a platoon of royal pegasus guards. A detachment of unicorn guards waited on the ground nearby.

"Oh, hey babe, what's up? Listen, if it's about the noise I'm real sorry. For some reason these crazy ponies wont let me in!" The dragon noisily pounded his clawed fist into the forcefield in time with his last three words.

Judging by his voice and turn of phrase, the dragon seemed to be a very young adult. However, his enormous size—his upper jaw alone was bigger than Celestia—matched that of a much older reptile, for dragons continued to grow even after reaching maturity. This suggested that he was particularly prone to the greed that triggered growth spurts in his race. Powerful, ambitious and reckless: a highly volatile combination. "I am Princess Celestia, ruler of the realm of Equestria."

"Cool. Say, nice tattoo." The monster was peering at the radiant sun image that decorated both sides of Celestia's hindquarters, symbolising her governance of the Equestrian sun. "What's it mean? That the sun shines out of your——"

"Would you be good enough to tell me what business you have with the Crystal Empire?" Celestia was not naive but she felt it only polite to give the visitor the benefit of the doubt.

"Selling flowers. Whatta you think? There is some serious crystal booty in here and it's just what I need for my jewel hoard."

"I'm afraid those crystals are the property of the Crystal Empire. They form her buildings, her infrastructure. You may not take them."

"Huh? Oh, okay, sure."

Celestia arched her eyebrow at the dragon. A creature so potent and determined would not likely give up his plunder so easily. "Really?"

"Really. Leave the crystals alone. Got it."

Despite his ungrudging apparent concession, the dragon made no move to depart. Celestia waited for the inevitable catch, which came a few seconds later.

"After all, who needs crystals when you can have crystal ponies?" The dragon laughed out loud as Celestia fought to suppress her horror and rage. "I mean, can you begin to imagine the joy that surged through my heart when I saw them all galloping around in here in panic? Crystal. Ponies. Who would've dared to dream such a delicacy could even exist?"

Celestia barely managed to maintain her calm demeanour. "You will not prevail."

"What, against your magic bubble here?" He slammed his huge tail into the forcefield. "You don't believe that yourself, or you and your pony posse wouldn't have shown up."

"Even if you succeed in breaking through the forcefield, the empire is under the protection of the Crystal Heart, which——"

She was unable to continue over the dragon's outburst of laughter. Not scornful laughter—he was genuinely, uncontrollably tickled by Celestia's warning. "'The Crystal Heart'!" roared the dragon at last, repeatedly smashing his fist against the barrier in an attempt to regain his composure. "Oh, that kills me."

"Quite possibly," the princess replied soberly.

"Listen, sweetheart, your sparkly magic trinkets might help you in your little pony slap-fights but come on!" The reptile swept back and forth before Celestia, showing off his prodigious size and golden, armour-like scales.

"Are you really prepared to take that chance?"

"I'm a predator, sugarhoof. Every hunt carries some degree of risk. You pansy plant-eaters wouldn't understand."

"Understand this. I did not come here to threaten you. I came because I don't want your greed to cause any creature to suffer, including you. Please, leave now in peace."

The dragon's cocky smile had faded. He was fed up with this conversation and did not appreciate some sissy prey animal making veiled threats towards him. "Thanks for your concern but I'm good." He soared high into the air once more, ready to dive-bomb the top of the dome once more. As he plummeted towards his target, he saw Celestia hovering directly in his path, her horn pointed straight at him. The sight did nothing to slow him down. Nice try princess, he thought. If you think your dinky little horn can put a dent in my scales, then ...

A ball of blinding white light erupted and expanded around the tip of Celestia's horn. Sensing the princess was planning something more than mere impalement, the dragon veered to his left just as Celestia fired a beam of power at him. The beam struck a glancing but stinging blow against his solidly armoured haunch.

More affronted than physically hurt, the dragon wheeled around to face Celestia. "So, Princess Prissy-Pants wants to play rough, huh?" He surged forward and heaved a deluge of flame at Celestia, who generated a barrier for herself and her guards just in time. Even behind her forcefield, the ponies cringed at the scorching heat of the fire. "Bring it."

* * *

"So that's it. Until they see this dragon off, we have to deal with the changelings on our own." Twilight Sparkle gazed sullenly at the ground where the royal message lay, as a collective gasp arose from her friends.

"Princess Celestia and the royal guard are going hoof-to-toe against a fully-grown dragon?" exclaimed Pinkie Pie. "They could get roasted alive!"

"I can't imagine the strain Princess Cadance and Shining Armor must be feeling right now," added Rarity. "That forcefield simply has to hold."

"But what about the Crystal Heart? That'll take care of the dragon, right?" asked Spike with a hope he didn't entirely feel.

"Maybe," Applejack answered anxiously, "but who knows what kinda damage that monster could do in the meantime?"

Fluttershy pressed her forehooves against her cheeks in despair. "Those poor crystal ponies. And their poor little tiny cute little crystal sheep."

Decisively, Rainbow Dash rocketed several feet into the air. "We've gotta get to the Crystal Empire now! They need all the help they can get."

"Hmm?" Twilight, who had been staring at the dropped parchment during her friends' various reactions, snapped out of her reverie. Yet even as she spoke, she seemed half-hearted and unfocused. "Oh, no, no. Princess Celestia has instructed us to stay here and protect Ponyville from the changelings."

Twilight's distracted mood did not go unnoticed. Princess Luna walked gently towards her. "This must be a terrible blow to you, Twilight Sparkle."

"You have no idea," murmured Twilight.

"Is there anything we can do to lift your spirits?" asked Pinkie Pie.

"Yeah, we're here for you," added Rainbow Dash.

Twilight looked pensively at her friends. "Actually, I think I'd like to be alone for a while."

Unhappy but understanding, the ponies watched as Twilight Sparkle walked slowly towards her Friendship Castle home. Spike jogged until he caught up with her, then walked alongside her.

Twilight turned to the baby dragon and tried to sound as inoffensive as possible. "Alone alone, Spike. I admire and appreciate your devotion to helping me but I really need some time on my own right now. So, if you could just let me get to my castle?"

"Uh, Twilight, I kind of live here too."

"Oh. Right. That."

4. Rallying and reassurance

The siege of the Crystal Empire lasted for several days. Conventional pony weaponry was of no use against the dragon: no arrow nor spear nor grappling hook would pierce his armoured hide, he could smash their catapults and trebuchets to kindling with ease, and as for flaming ammunition ... he was a creature who could bask in lava without flinching. Normally when dealing with such a threat, the ponies would goad their enemy into giving chase so as to lead them into a trap. Yet this dragon was not interested in the royal guards. They were a nuisance, an obstacle for the real prize. Until reinforcements from neighbouring locations could be mobilised, all the guards could do was harass him and distract him from his remorseless attack on the barrier. Unicorns charged in from all sides, fired their energy bolts at him and galloped away. Pegasus squadrons shocked the dragon with bolts of lightning and battered him with localised ice storms. And Celestia constantly soared back and forth, launching her laser-like beam at him.

For his part, the dragon flew with remarkable speed in all directions, belching tremendous flames, snorting out great clouds of dark smoke to disorient his assailants and sweeping his colossal tail at any ponies who tried to surprise him from behind. His scales, particularly on his back and sides, were highly resistant to the ponies' attacks. Only Celestia was able to cause him any real pain, so she tended to attract most of his attentions. The pegasus divisions found themselves working overtime to clear the smoke and put out fires, reducing their capacity to weaponise the weather, which the dragon could fly above in any case. And any chance the dragon got, he took to inflict more damage on the forcefield; a number of times he was even able to draw the ponies' fire onto the barrier, prompting his loud, mocking laughter. Sensing the strain from the other side of the barrier, the reptile's confidence grew with every passing moment.

In the throne room of the imperial palace, Princess Mi Amore Cadenza—Cadance—silently read a history book while drinking from a crystalline trough of cool, fresh water and grazing on a platter of crystal berry confections and hay that crystal pony volunteers had brought to keep the royal couple's strength up. Prince Shining Armor hadn't eaten much, though. He paced the room agitatedly, stopping several times to look grimly at the siege through a telescope. Cadance watched her beloved with concern. She knew what his thoughts were well before he vocalised them.

"I should be out there."

"Come away, Shining. You have to concentrate. And eat something."

"The royal guards are getting hammered. I'm their captain. They need me."

"The crystal ponies need you. I need you. You know I can't maintain this forcefield on my own for long. You're the only one who can reinforce it."

"Convenient," Shining Armor replied bitterly. "So I get to stay in my comfy palace with my beautiful, adoring wife and eat muffins while my stallions are putting their lives on the line. What kind of example is that to set them?"

"And what kind of example will you set them by abandoning your post?" The slender alicorn rose from her lounge and marched purposefully towards her muscular, white-coated husband. "It won't be too 'comfy' in here, or anywhere else in the Crystal Empire, if that dragon breaks through our forcefield. All your stallions' fighting and sacrifice will have been for nothing. You must not let your pride interfere with your duty, Shining Armor. Now stand your ground and focus."

The blue-maned unicorn's face softened in silent concession and the pair united in a long, warm, tight nuzzle, drawing inner strength from each other's deep, unfailing, consummate love and magically radiating that strength to both the crystal ponies and the protective shield that surrounded them.

* * *

Despite the uncertainty as to when the royal couple would arrive to dispatch the changelings, morale in Ponyville was on the rise. The prospect of waking up one day to find their loved ones replaced by parasitic strangers brought home to the townsponies just how precious their relationships were, and they embraced Twilight Sparkle's advice on identifying any impostors. Families spent more quality time together. Friends and couples talked and listened more. Ponies reminisced about times past and shared their dreams for the future. The more they thought about the many different aspects of one another's personalities, the more they appreciated and cherished those aspects. The joy of friendship permeating the town was palpable, and nopony gave any reason to doubt their identity.

Nopony except one.

Through the cloud of steam rising from the hot coals in the sauna, Rarity looked with uncertainty at Fluttershy. The primrose pegasus was far from talkative by nature but she always engaged with the words her friends spoke, and her weekly spa treatment invariably drew her out of her usual shyness. Today, though, she seemed a thousand miles away, showing no sign of comfort, much less enjoyment, and barely reacting to Rarity's delightful anecdotes. Even the one about that fabulous witticism she made to Upper Crust at the Canterlot Gallery's mixed media exhibit opening last week.

"Fluttershy, is something bothering you?"

"Oh, um, nothing. It's fine," she murmured unconvincingly, keeping her eyes averted.

"'Fine'? Whenever you say things are 'fine' it means they are certainly not. Come now, you know you can tell me."

Fluttershy's discomfort increased. She wrang her forehooves together and her voice became quicker and even more delicate than usual. "There's, um, nothing wrong. Really. I can't say." Still averting her eyes, she nonetheless felt Rarity looking intently at her. Her resistance began to evaporate like the steam that enveloped them both. "No. I mustn't gossip about my friends."

"Gossip——?" With a super-pony effort, Rarity tempered her basest instincts and suppressed her sense of excitement. "I shall be the soul of discretion. Now what is troubling you?"

Reluctantly, Fluttershy turned in anguish and guilt to her unicorn friend. "It's Twilight. I ... don't think she's been herself lately."

"Oh, of course not, darling. Twilight hasn't been herself for days now." Rarity telekinetically drizzled a ladleful of water onto the coals, generating more steam with a satisfying hiss.

"I, um, oh, you noticed?"

"How could I fail to? Remember my dinner party the other night? She scarcely said a word, her smiles were the fakest I've ever seen, and she very cordially and civilly, in front of the whole party, volunteered her oh so 'constructive' opinion that I'd used too much coconut cream in the eggplant curry!"

"It was just the teeniest bit bland." Fluttershy hurriedly added, "But I didn't want to say anything".

"Precisely. You were a guest in my home, not a customer or critic in a restaurant, and you behaved accordingly. Oh, she apologised afterwards. The poor thing was mortified. The point is, one can hardly blame her for not being her usual self. Shining Armor and Princess Cadance were the only pony friends Twilight had before she moved to Ponyville, and Princess Celestia has been her personal mentor since her foalhood. The three of them were a huge part of her formative years. Now they are holding the fort against a fully grown fire-breathing you-know-what. It's only natural that she'll be a little on edge."

"Oh. That makes sense." Fluttershy's relief turned to a renewed sense of guilt. "And there I was worried she might have been a changeling. Oh, how could I not have realised she'd be stressed? How could I have thought the worst of her? I feel so ashamed." She cowered on the wooden bench and covered her eyes with her front pasterns.

"The only thing that should make you ashamed is carrying your worries around inside you instead of sharing them with a good friend. You know better than that, especially with the threat of changelings being around."

"You're right. I'm so sorry. I was just afraid you'd think I was bad-mouthing another good friend."

"Fluttershy, dear heart, you may speak to me about anything except country music or contact sports. And don't worry about Twilight. We just need to be there for her and help her get through this difficult time. Her true self will shine through in the end."

* * *

"UUUURRRGGH! WILL you QUIT that PACING?! I'm trying to read here."

"Sorry Twilight," Spike bleated, nervously dovetailing the digits of his forefeet. "I can't help it. We haven't heard from Princess Celestia in days. What if something's happened to her? What if the Crystal Empire has fallen? What if there's nopony left to tell us?"

"If you're that worried, why not just send a letter to Princess Celestia yourself and ask her what the situation is?"

"Yeah!" Spike excitedly picked up a quill and started to look for an inkwell, only to freeze in alarm. "No! What if my letter arrives just as she's about to execute a difficult spell or manoeuvre at a crucial time? I could throw off her concentration and lose the battle for them! The whole empire could fall because of me!"

Twilight groaned in exasperation again. "Well, what do you want from me?"

"I dunno. Help me stop worrying. Teach me how to be detached like you."

"'Detached'?" Twilight shot an affronted glare at her assistant. "I am not detached. I have just as much reason to be concerned as you. More, if anything. I just know from long and painful experience that worry doesn't accomplish anything. Here, try this. Breathe in." The alicorn closed her eyes and inhaled slowly, gently and deeply, drawing her forehoof up to her chest. "And out." She sighed an exhalation, lowering her forehoof.

The action brought an involuntary smile to Twilight's muzzle. It was the first sincere smile Spike had seen on her since they had first heard about the siege of the Crystal Empire. He decided it must be worth a try, and followed Twilight's actions as best he could: "Breathe in, and out".

"Okay, would you care to try it again without the fire this time?" The smile had well and truly left Twilight's now blackened, smouldering face.

"Uh, heh-heh, sorry." Spike retried with a greater degree of control, then spent a few of seconds assessing his physical and emotional states. "You know, I do feel kinda relaxed now."

"Works every time. I learned it from Princess Cadance."

"Princess Cadance?" Spike's body seized up, his eyes like saucers. "As in 'defending the Crystal Empire from a humongous rampaging dragon' Princess Cadance?"

Twilight cocked her head. "No, as in 'cleaning out Dodge Junction's public outhouses' Princess Cadance, you dawnhorse*. What difference does that make?"

Spike cringed. Although Twilight had hardly been averse to using sarcasm in the past, he felt her gibes had recently become more and more caustic, and indifferent to his mood. "Now I won't be able to use that technique without thinking of the siege."

"Well, what about that counting-to-ten trick you told me about? The one you used at the Equestria Games."

Spike froze again. "The Equestria Games? That were held in the Crystal Empire? As in the 'under attack from a humongous rampaging dragon' Crystal Empire?"

"Oh, forget it."

"That's what I'm trying to do," whined Spike.

Twilight resisted the urge to scream. "You just need to do something to take your mind off it. I know, I'd arranged to have a flying session with Rainbow Dash today but I won't be able to make it. I'm too busy. Go tell her, will you?"

"Okay," sighed Spike resignedly. "Where were you going to meet her?"

"I don't know. My calendar's around somewhere. It should be written down there."

Spike fished Twilight's calendar out of its drawer, scanned it for the day's appointments, and dropped it with a yelp of fear. "You were supposed to meet her twenty minutes ago!"

"Twenty minutes?" exclaimed Twilight. "I must have lost track of time. Well, don't just stand there. Go tell her."

With a strong sense of impending dread, trying to come up with an explanation as to how the most organised pony in town could miss an appointment without knowing at least hours in advance, Spike swallowed heavily and began to walk gingerly out of the throne room.

"Move it! She's been waiting long enough, don't you think?"

As the whimpering young dragon rushed from the castle, Twilight teleported to the bathroom to clean up her face then returned to her reading. A short while later, an appalling thought struck her.

"Twenty minutes? I kept Rainbow Dash waiting twenty minutes? She is going to be fighting mad. And I sent poor Spike to face her?" Frustrated, she slammed her face into the open pages of her book. "Ow. I'll have to beg his forgiveness when he gets back."

She didn't.

* "Dawnhorse" was the colloquial name given to a fox-sized, hyrax-like creature whose fossilised remains had been found in some of Equestria's palaeontological digs. Its discovery triggered the postulation, soon to become widespread within biological circles, that all equine animals in Equestria had descended from a pair of such creatures. The hypothesis did not win universal acceptance, though. Several scholars dismissed it as pointless, unverifiable conjecture: they maintained that the ancestors of all equines would have looked equine and that the unfortunate dawnhorses had simply become extinct. Nevertheless, the expression "dawnhorse" survived in popular pony parlance as a particularly insulting term for a boorish or dim-witted pony.

5. Scares and suspicions

Princess Luna watched anxiously from the eastern balcony of Friendship Castle, barely able to distinguish the horizon from the black sky. She had lowered the moon a good few minutes ago, signalling the end of another Equestrian night, and her sister was overdue to raise the sun to its appointed place. However, there was not the faintest glow of dawn to be seen.

She was reminded of the last time the sun did not rise on time. When she, corrupted beyond all reason into the creature calling herself Nightmare Moon, had resolved never to let the sun rise again. The shame of those memories exacerbated her anxiety and added a sense of bleak irony. Back then, she relentlessly craved the chance to rule Equestria alone; would that role now be forced upon her? Would she once again find herself separated from her sister, not for a thousand years of exile but for life?

Please raise the sun. Please raise the sun. Please raise the sun. Please raise the sun. Please raise the sun. Please ...

Her silent begging finally received an answer. A dim but unmistakable pink suffusion in the eastern sky told her that Celestia was alive, and attending to her cosmic duty. A little late, but accounted for nevertheless. Luna's heart leapt as rapidly as the dawn crossed Ponyville, bathing the little town in its warm, life-giving light.

Heaving a deep sigh of relief, Luna made her way from the balcony to the castle's main dining room. Twilight was already up, impassively grazing on a bowl of oats and chopped apple. She barely acknowledged Luna, let alone offered her any breakfast.

This ungracious display undermined Luna's elation somewhat, but she could not stay offended. Not at Twilight Sparkle, the pony who had led her then-new friends on that fateful journey to unleash the Elements of Harmony and annihilate the corruption that had enslaved her. Luna owed both her restoration and her eventual acceptance by Equestria at large to Celestia's unassuming student. So, during her stay at the castle, she tolerated the unexpectedly terse and aloof manner that had been emanating from her hostess lately.

"I need to speak with you, Twilight Sparkle".

"Mm-hmm."

"I'm afraid I need to spend this morning in Canterlot, possibly longer. There are certain duties I have to fulfil in Celestia's absence."

"Sure, fine, no problem," Twilight replied with an air of indifference.

Unsure whether Twilight had registered her words, Luna continued, "If you need my help with the changelings, or anything else, by all means send for me immediately".

Twilight shrugged. "We haven't needed you at all so far. There hasn't been any hint of the changelings. No suspicious behaviour at all. Stay in Canterlot as long as you need to. We've got it covered here. If we need your help, we can send for you."

Luna was taken aback by Twilight's unconcerned reaction, not to mention her unsubtle implication that she was not needed. However, she did not feel it was her place to question it. Twilight was Ponyville's resident princess. Luna was here only because she volunteered to stay and help. "Very well then, I shall get ready to leave."

"You do that," replied Twilight, not even looking as Luna walked back to her bedroom.

Spike emerged from the shadows, working up the courage to speak. "Twilight, did I hear that right? You told Princess Luna to stay in Canterlot as long as she needs to?"

"She can do more good from there. The rest of Equestria needs leadership too."

"But that leaves us more vulnerable to the changelings!"

"I guess you didn't eavesdrop on all of our conversation, then. There's been no sign of any changelings."

"Yet. What if they've been biding their time, waiting for the right opportunity to strike? Which you might just have given them?"

"Sheesh, Spike, if it's not the siege worrying you it's the changelings," snapped Twilight. "If we need Luna, we send for her. Now stop questioning me. I'm going into the library to catch up on my studying and I'm in no mood for interruptions. Got that?" Without waiting for an answer, Twilight dematerialised from the dining room, leaving Spike to contemplate this latest unsettling exhibition from his mistress and the horrifying implications thereof.

Spike had lived alongside Twilight Sparkle ever since she magically hatched him from his egg and worked as her assistant as soon as he was able. He was intimately familiar with her temperament, her foibles, her unfathomable yet somehow adorable ideas of fun. He had never known her to be so cold and remote as she had become over the past week. It was worse than before she moved to Ponyville, before she even knew or cared what it was like to have friends her own age. Even when doing something she usually enjoyed, like reading, she seemed to be going through the motions. Now here she was pushing Princess Luna back to Canterlot when the town was on high alert for changelings. The suspicion that had nagged him was now the only explanation that made sense to him. He had to find out for certain, but the mindset Twilight had been in lately suggested that would be easier said than done.

A loud, insistent knocking jarred him from his thoughts. He answered the front door of the castle and recoiled in fear as an aggressive-looking Rainbow Dash barged in. The unpleasant experience of bearing bad news to the abrasive pegasus was still fresh in his memory, and aggravated his already troubled mood.

"All right, where's Princess Punctual? I'm gonna give her a piece of my mind about standing me up yesterday. 'Too busy', my hindquarters."

"You just missed her," the baby dragon blurted. "She just stepped out for some, uh ... flying practice!"

Spike could have kicked himself. What kind of excuse was that? Rainbow Dash could simply go out and search the sky for Twilight. As the swiftest and sharpest-eyed flier in Ponyville, Rainbow would take barely a minute to realise she was on a wild pony chase.

"Oh, now she's got time to fly, huh? I'll send her flying." Sure enough, she turned back towards the front doorway and made ready to zoom out.

"Wait!"

Rainbow Dash whipped around to face Spike, who was gazing at her with huge, imploring eyes. Her impatient glare crumpled into a grimace of guilty embarrassment as she recalled her initial reaction to Twilight's no-show. "Uh, heh-heh, yeah. Look, Spike, about those things I said to you——"

"Never mind that. We've got bigger problems." Spike looked hurriedly around to make sure Twilight had not emerged from the library. "It might be best if I spoke with all five of you."

"You mean all six of us, right?"

Spike shook his head sadly.

* * *

Twilight Sparkle's pony friends, gathered in one of Ponyville's meadows, listened with mounting concern as Spike told them of Twilight's increasingly uncharacteristic disposition and behaviour, and what he thought it meant.

"It appears I was mistaken about your concerns, Fluttershy," Rarity confessed. "There does seem to be more than mere stress at work here. Even so, a changeling?"

"Think, Spike, think," Applejack gently urged. "Has Twilight said anythin' that only she'd say? Anythin' ay-tall?"

Spike perked up slightly. "She did mention my counting trick and Cadance's breathing exercise."

"Well there you are," replied Rarity.

The dragon's face fell, and he folded his forelegs stubbornly. "No. It's not enough. Twilight and Cadance could have discussed that stuff at the Equestria Games. There were thousands of ponies hanging around there and any of them could have been changeling spies."

The orange earth pony looked dubious. "Seems kinda far-fetched but ah guess we could try talkin' with Twi some more. Maybe get somethin' more private outta her."

"But Twilight has hardly talked with us these last few days," fretted Fluttershy.

Rainbow Dash, hovering in mid-air, pounded her forehooves together. "Then we'll just have to make her talk."

Pinkie Pie hopped up and down excitedly. "Ooh ooh, I'll do it! What do you think of this?" She took a deep breath before launching into a sample coercive filibuster: "Ever noticed how many words rhyme with 'orange'? None, that's how many. Why should this be? Why should beans and pears have all the fun, huh? Well I don't intend to stand for it. I'm gonna make up some words to eliminate this literary shortfall. And have fun doing it, because making up words is fun-tacular!"

"Uh, Pinke Pie?" Applejack tried to interject but the pink pony was on a roll.

"Here's one: 'splornge'. It's the sound a pogo stick makes when you use it in the mud. Isn't that the most fun to say?" Pinkie Pie stotted around her nonplussed friends, gaily repeating her freshly coined neologism: "Splornge splornge splornge splornge splornge splornge splmfmmblmph".

"Pinke Pie, we're talkin' 'bout Twilight Sparkle here. Little Miss Magic-Caboose? And them changelin's seem to have some magic o' their own too." Applejack noisily plucked her work-callused forehoof from Pinkie's now-unspeaking mouth and wiped it dry on her other foreleg, ignoring Rarity's shudder of distaste. "So, 'less'n yew want her sealin' up a mess o' pony socks in yer yapper, ah reckon we'll need somethin' a mite more subtle."

"And I've got just the thing," boasted Rainbow Dash. "What does Twilight Sparkle like more than anything?"

"Readin'," said Applejack.

"Magic," said Rarity.

"Reading about magic?" guessed Fluttershy.

"Lemme put it another way. What's the one thing Twilight just plain can't resist?"

"A crowd song?" Pinkie Pie dashed out of sight and returned not two seconds later, grinning ear-to-ear and quivering with excitement, laden with at least half a dozen musical instruments.

Rainbow Dash gave up. "How about I just tell you all my idea?"

* * *

"This better be important, Spike. I said no interruptions."

"W-we've got a suspected changeling. Could you come and settle their identity please?"

With a must-I-do-everything-around-here sigh, Twilight turned away from her book and briskly followed her friends, stubbornly avoiding eye contact with them.

"We are so fortunate to have your magic gifts to help us in these matters, Twilight," said Rarity gratefully.

Twilight's only response was a brief, neutral hum.

"Aw shewt, just havin' Twilight herself as a good friend is reason enough to count our blessin's, ah reckon," added Applejack.

"Yes Twilight, you've made such a wonderful difference to our lives since you came to Ponyville," cooed Fluttershy.

"Good to know," replied Twilight curtly. "Can we just get on with this?"

"Remember the day we first met, Twilight?" asked Rainbow Dash, gazing nostalgically at the high castle ceiling.

Twilight also directed her eyes upwards, but not out of fondness. "Good grief, are we really going to do this now?"

The beaming, blue-coated pegasus continued, "The sun was shining, the sky was clear, the——"

Twilight reared to a halt with a whinny of astonishment. "It was not! The sky was full of clouds. Clouds that you should have been clearing up for the Summer Sun Celebration the next day. Instead you were too busy loafing around, showing off and knocking me into mud puddles, until I appealed to your pride and you finally got your act together." She ended her rather slanted screed with a smirk of petty triumph.

Rainbow Dash smiled questioningly at Spike, who smiled back and said, "Good enough for me". Twilight's pony friends simultaneously expressed their relief and delight. They had drawn out from her an incident with details that only the real Twilight Sparkle would have known, thanks to the one thing that even in her current grumpy, unenthusiastic mood she just plain could not resist.

Being right.

Twilight's jaw slackened with incredulity as the nature of her friends' gambit dawned on her. "Me? You wanted me to settle my own identity? You actually thought I might be a changeling?"

With a slightly apologetic wince, hoping Twilight wouldn't be too offended, Applejack hesitantly replied, "Well, yeah".

"Well that's just silly. If I were a changeling, don't you think I'd be trying to get closer to you all? So I could feed on your love for me? Why, these days I'm hardly spending any time with you at ... all." Twilight's voice tailed off as she examined the looks on her friends' faces. They weren't just relieved that she wasn't a changeling; they were relieved that they still had the real Twilight with them. They loved her as dearly as any pony ever loved a good friend.

Points of water began to form in her widening eyes. This is it, her friends thought. Any second now, she's going to smash through that wall of ice surrounding her, gallop up to us for a group hug and apologise for the way she's been neglecting us, and our friendship will be back to normal.

But that was not how Twilight reacted. Instead, she sagged her shoulders, paced around in circles and repeated a single word with the tempo and volume of energy bursts rapidly firing from her horn: "No. No, no, no no nononononononono. No." She shook her head as if trying to erase her actions from the past week. "I'm a fool. I am such a fool."

Thinking Twilight was expressing remorse over her attitude towards her friends, Fluttershy carefully approached the young princess and spoke in her sweet, soothing, high-pitched voice, "It's okay, Twilight."

"No it isn't, Fluttershy. It is unequivocally, catastrophically not okay." Twilight's voice trembled with self-recrimination. "I remember the day I first met you all right, Rainbow Dash. I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember Applejack's extended family extending my belly with food, and Rarity making me try on a dozen different outfits, and Fluttershy barrelling me into a bush so she could gush over Spike, and Pinkie Pie throwing me a surprise welcome-to-Ponyville party when all I wanted to do was curl up with a history book. I remember all the incredible things we've accomplished together. All the great times we've had, all the support and comfort we've given each other when times haven't been so great. I've enjoyed myself more, learned more, achieved more, grown more and given more than I could ever have dreamed, all because of you. Do you know how that makes me feel right now?"

Her friends barely contained themselves as they anticipated Twilight's inevitable outpouring of emotion.

"Apathetic."

Spike and the other ponies exchanged dumbfounded looks of dismay before turning back to Twilight.

"And that can mean only one thing. I'm not a changeling. I'm the victim of a changeling."

7. Discorde

"Has the day finally come to pass?" From the embossed stallion silhouette marking the entrance to the male restroom, a flesh-and-blood head emerged. A head looking as though it belonged in the toybox of a foal with a vivid and somewhat dark imagination. A grey stallion head with a close-cropped black mane running down his crest, it also sported a deer antler and a twisted goat horn sprouting from his poll, a white, goat-like beard and a single, sharp, curved fang jutting from his maxilla. His bushy, white eyebrows drew mischievously together above his asymmetrical red-on-yellow eyes.

"Princess Twilight Sparkle, the most organised and rational pony in Equestria, Miss Equine-imity herself, is out of control?" As Discord gleefully spoke, his long, serpentine body undulated out from the restroom sign and stood towering above the group. Like his head, the rest of his body was a grotesque hotchpotch of different animal parts. And this was his normal appearance. "Oh, this I simply must see. I can't imagine anything more entertaining."

The draconequus vanished into thin air, then re-appeared next to Twilight, sociably resting his leonine right forelimb on her withers. "You know, Twilight, this could add a whole new dimension to our friendship. Why, we could become chaos-buddies." He stood up to reveal that he was suddenly wearing a T-shirt with a boldly coloured abstract fractal design on the front. Twilight noticed she was also wearing a cape with the same design—one that, under normal circumstances, she would absolutely adore.

"Sorry to ruin your day, Discord, but I am not out of control," Twilight responded testily.

Discord, no longer wearing his shirt, gaped in melodramatic, shocked reproof at Twilight, who was likewise capeless. "Are you suggesting that honest Applejack here would stretch the truth?" While he uttered these last three words, the eagle-like talon on his left foreleg pinched the tip of Applejack's snout and drew it elastically from its base until it resembled a long, thin shaft of timber with a round cross-section.

Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash tried unsuccessfully not to laugh.

"Will nyew cud dad oud?" demanded Applejack, her voice comically nasal.

"Anything you say." Discord was now clad in surgical scrubs. Grasping Applejack's extended nose in his gloved eagle claw, he produced an outsized scalpel from out of nowhere. Before anypony could react, he brought the blade slashing down on to Applejack's muzzle.

"NO!" the ponies cried in unison.

The instant the blade touched Applejack's muzzle, her snout harmlessly reverted to its usual size and shape. With ten years' growth scared out of her, she glowered unamusedly at Discord.

Twilight rolled her eyes. "Still, since you're here, you may as well make yourself useful," she said brusquely, hoping she would not regret seeking his help. "We need to get to the Crystal Empire."

"The Crystal Empire," Discord repeated excitedly. He disappeared again, reappearing a second later wearing a broad-brimmed hat, sunglasses, a camera around his neck and a short-sleeved shirt with a gaudy floral design. "Oh, I hear it's marvellous this time of year. The scenery, the wildlife——."

"This isn't a sight-seeing tour, Discord!" snapped Twilight. Even at the best of times, she struggled to maintain her temper in the presence of the living embodiment of chaos. "Ponyville is under changeling attack."

"Oh I seeeee," mused Discord, his hideous vacation outfit now mercifully gone. "So you're all getting out while the getting is good, leaving the rest of town to deal with this soul-destroying menace on their own. Wise choice, very wise."

Twilight began humming angrily through her tightly shut lips. Rarity hastily stepped in front of her and addressed the draconequus in a somewhat more diplomatic manner. "I'm afraid the getting, as you put it, isn't quite so good for poor Twilight. She has already fallen prey to the changelings. They've consumed a considerable quantity of her love."

"Haven't you noticed Twilight being all unfriendly and irritable and grouchy?" Pinkie Pie's well-meaning exposition of Twilight's symptoms did little to mollify the princess, who had now progressed to gnashing her bared teeth.

Discord shrugged. "As opposed to what?"

That was the last straw. Shrieking with fury, Twilight flared her wings and launched herself up at Discord with a view to smacking him upside his smart-alecky head. Thankfully, Applejack saw the move coming from a mile away. She clasped her teeth around Twilight's tail and yanked the little pony back to earth, both literally and figuratively.

Discord, wearing a karate gi and a white bandana with red rising sun motif, slumped forward in disappointment from his defensive stance. "Oh Applejack, you spoilsport."

"We ain't got time fer sport, Discord," replied Applejack. Between them, she and Rainbow Dash explained the situation in the Crystal Empire and why they were going to help.

The mention of the dragon seemed to erase Discord's impish mood. "A dragon?" He vanished again and rematerialised a second later in front of Twilight. "You mean this one?" Dangling from his paw (unlike a real lion's paw, it had an opposable thumb) was a set of elastic strings suspending a colourful, cartoonlike dragon marionette, its wings flapping and its head pitching as it bounced in mid-air. The toy's googly eyes bobbled on springs hanging from their sockets and a long, pink tongue flapped around from its wide open, grinning mouth. Pinkie Pie rocked to and fro on her back, giggling at the sight of the marionette.

"No, a real dragon," replied Twilight with as much patience as she could muster. "One that's besieging the Crystal Empire as we speak."

"Yes, this is the one," Discord insisted merrily. He brought the puppet closer to Twilight so that it almost touched her snout, and spoke in the sort of silly, deep voice a young foal would use while playing at being a monster: "Rahr, rahr. I so sorry. I be good dragon from now on." Discord lifted the puppet's head so that it 'licked' Twilight's cheek. Its tongue was moist. "I think he likes you, Twilight."

Twilight tried to swat the toy away, only to find that it had acquired the mass and inertia of a large sack of wet sand. Shaking the pain from her forehoof, she yelled, "Will you get that ridiculous thing away from me?"

Discord gathered the dragon in his arms and turned away, shielding it from Twilight, and spoke to it in an exaggeratedly soothing tone. "Don't you listen to the nasty pony. You are so a real dragon, aren't you, Snookie Boo?"

"'Snookie Boo'? Look, I have neither the time nor the inclination to put up with your shenanigans, Discord. Can you get us to the Crystal Empire or not?"

Again, Rarity sensed the need to step in, adding some extra honey to her voice. "Because if you were to be so kind as to help us out in this matter, we would be ever so grateful and appreciative." She directed a frozen smile to the alicorn. "Wouldn't we, Twilight darling?"

Discord eyed the friends thoughtfully for a few seconds. "This is what you all want?"

"It's the way it has to be," replied Rainbow Dash.

The others added their assent, including Fluttershy, who defeatedly murmured, "I guess so".

"Very well." With a snap of the fingers on his lion's paw, he instantaneously transported himself and Twilight's party from the railway station to one of Ponyville's open fields. To give himself some room, he flew backwards with his mis-matched wings—one of a pegasus, the other of a bat—then reached his eagle talon up to his left eye. Twilight and her friends shuddered and recoiled as he plucked his own eye out of its socket, the long optic nerves trailing behind it. To their even greater horror, he wrapped his talon tightly around the eyeball and gave it a very firm tug.

At once, a huge bulge appeared on his back, quickly expanding until it dwarfed his body. He pitched forwards and floated in mid-air just above the ground. When the ponies and Spike dared look they saw to their astonishment that Discord had converted his own body into an airship big enough for all seven travellers to board. His head and thorax jutted from the front of the gondola like a carving on a longship's bow.

And his left eye was back in place.

* * *

"Comfortable, Fluttershy?"

Physically, she was indeed comfortable. The spacious cabin was softly lit and painted in pale shades of pink and yellow, matching her own hues. She was seated on a plush lounge contoured to her size and shape. Before her was set a stack of magazines filled with photographs of cute animals, a platter of freshly baked (or at least freshly conjured) raspberry hayseed muffins and cinnamon oatmeal cookies, and a magnum of chilled apple juice resting in a bucket of ice. Sweet, lyrical music played at an unobtrusive volume from a gramophone in the corner.

Yet she was fidgeting and glancing around in clear unease. "It's very nice Discord, and I appreciate the effort you've put in, but I really would prefer it if our friends could join us in here as well."

Outside the gondola Twilight, Spike, Rarity, Rainbow Dash, Applejack and Pinkie Pie were tethered to the great cigar-shaped balloon of the airship, by ropes tied fast around their flanks. The chilly, turbulent winds caused by the dirigible's speed and altitude buffeted the group, spinning their bodies and bouncing them uncontrollably against the envelope of the balloon.

"Yes, yes, I'll let them in soon enough." Somehow, Discord managed to be present with Fluttershy inside the gondola that was simultaneously part of his own body. Such was his disregard for the laws of Equestrian physics and logic. He sat opposite her with his goat-like hind leg casually crossed at the knee over his theropod-like hind leg. "I just wanted to have a little chat with you in private. Tell you how much I admire your incredible bravery in embarking on this perilous mission."

Fluttershy looked away in abashment. "I'm hardly brave."

"Oh but you are, Fluttershy. You must be. After all, you're going into battle against an aggressive, fully grown dragon. Your greatest, most profound, most paralysing fear."

Fluttershy's breathing rate increased. Her eyes darted every which way except in Discord's direction and she shifted continuously in her seat as if uncertain where to put herself. It pained Discord to inflict such distress on her. She was the first creature in his aeons-long life to call him a friend and treat him as such, and still the only one to do so completely unbegrudgingly. Yet it pained him even more to think that she might be accompanying her other friends against her will. He was determined to make her confront whatever weakness had brought her to this point. He continued, "How ever were you able to put aside your all-consuming terror of these colossal, sharp-toothed, fire-breathing monsters?"

Heavily panting, gasping and swallowing, she appeared to be steeling herself to talk. Discord waited patiently, ready to lend a sympathetic ear to her confession, give a shoulder to cry on, and help her overcome her sorrowful capitulation and become a stronger pony for it.

"My friends need me. And Equestria needs my friends. It's my duty to help, regardless of how I might feel."

Discord narrowly suppressed an outburst of annoyance. Fluttershy always could resist his manipulation. He suspected that was why he liked her so much. Still, he wasn't quitting yet.

* * *

As if her situation were not already intolerable, Twilight was feeling seriously airsick. As the winds whirled her body around, she saw that Rarity and Spike, trammelled behind her, were also looking decidedly queasy. Spike, in particular, seemed likely to succumb any second. Sure enough, his purple scaly cheeks suddenly inflated. Twilight quickly twisted away; the baby dragon's diet was both eclectic and copious, and a mid-air expulsion of his stomach contents was a sight she could well do without. Especially if any of it should splash onto Rarity.

"Twilight, a message! A message," Spike bellowed above the howling winds.

Twilight looked back to see a sealed, rolled-up scroll twirling off into the distance below them. Quickly, she fired a telekinetic beam at the scroll, reaching it just before it spiralled out of range. She drew it back and unrolled it in front of herself, her magic aura keeping the parchment from flapping about in the breeze.

Once she had finished reading it, a murderous expression clouded her face.

* * *

"Well I must say, Fluttershy, your devotion to your pony friends is quite remarkable, facing your worst nightmare for them."

"They'd do the same for me," murmured Fluttershy, keeping her eyes averted.

Discord could have easily used his reality-bending powers to force himself into her line of sight, but he chose not to. "Of course they would," he concurred unctuously. "So naturally, you would only agree to undergo such a horrifying ordeal totally of your own volition. It's not like they'd ever pressure you to do something so traumatic."

Fluttershy said nothing.

"Take Twilight Sparkle, for instance. The Princess of Friendship. Such an important responsibility. I'm sure she took your wishes into full consideration."

Conflicted, the mare furrowed her brow silently for a few moments, before replying with quiet firmness, "Twilight's our friend. I don't feel right talking about her behind her tail."

"You're right of course. The question is: how would you feel talking about her to her face?"

For the first time in several minutes, Fluttershy looked directly at Discord. His gently voiced yet relentless stoking had finally reached a raw nerve. She knew how important it was to assert herself to her friends. Actually doing so was another story. Could she unambiguously convey her true feelings and demand respect from a powerful, magical princess who had been stripped of so much love? Haltingly, she opened her mouth to ask the draconequus for advice.

"DIS-COOOOORRRRRD!!!"

The deafening blare of Twilight's enraged voice sent the gramophone needle flying with a cacophonous scratch off the record. The apple juice bottle shattered, spraying its contents everywhere. The walls of the cabin cracked and splintered. Fluttershy jumped squealing into Discord's arms for protection as the disintegration spread rapidly and inexorably throughout the gondola, then to the balloon itself, the fabric noisily ripping and tearing until no visible trace of the airship was left.

"Is something wrong, Twilight?" Discord asked innocently.

Something was wrong. Horrendously wrong. With the airship gone, the six exterior passengers were no longer anchored to anything. Once this realisation sank in, they plummeted towards the ground, miles below.

Including Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash, whose wings were still fastened to their sides.

And at this velocity, a mass teleportation spell or protective forcefield was beyond even Twilight's capability.

9. Theatre of war

From the first day they spawned changeling nymphs could alter their shape, although in the earliest stages of development their changes were entirely instinctive. Sharing, with hundreds of their siblings, a host little bigger than they would be when ready to emerge, their bodies needed to conceal their presence. The solution: long, thread-like forms that became longer, not bulkier, as they grew, and could snake and coil through their hosts' bodies without detection.

The only noticeable side-effect of their parasitism was the gradual decrease in the host's feelings of affection. This was something of a disadvantage of this stage of the changeling's life cycle. A fully-formed changeling could assume the form of their host's loved one and thereby continually arouse the host's affections, enabling an indefinite supply of nourishment. Incubated nymphs, by necessity invisible to their host, were in no position to do so. They had to rely on indirect love generation through their host spending time with, and reminiscing about, loved ones: time that decreased along with the host's loving feelings. Yet this was at most a minor inconvenience. The nymphs' food supply needed to last them only until their incubation period was over, usually around a week or so.

Now, Twilight's anti-disguise spell had returned the nymphs within her to their true form. They fought for room inside the alicorn's body while still feeding their appetites, which grew all the more voracious as the time to emerge drew near.

"You mean the changelings can disguise themselves as ... food? What have I eaten in the last week?" Pinkie Pie screamed in naked terror.

"No, you dawnhorse!" Twilight's pain, fear and reduction in love had stripped her of any social niceties. "The queen must have implanted them in me during the fight, probably while I was out. They've been feeding on me from the inside this whole time. That must be why I couldn't detect them. Why the queen didn't end my life when she had the chance."

"And why we'll be sorry if we cast the love wave," Cadance added sadly.

Spike inhaled sharply as he realised how close they had come to disaster. "If we hadn't delayed you, Twilight could have exploded."

"I may explode anyhow at this rate," screeched Twilight, her great bloated barrel heaving and pulsing like a queen termite. "Get me to the hospital."

With considerable effort, Rainbow Dash and Cadance hauled Twilight into the air and flew from the station platform, Cadance using her magic telekinesis to provide badly needed support to Twilight's tender abdomen. The others followed on hoof, Spike riding like a jockey on Shining Armor's back, until they neared the centre of Ponyville.

"Uh-oh," intoned Applejack.

Dozens of ponies were gathered in the town's main streets, which in itself was not unusual. However, they were no longer merely going about their everyday business. The sound of Twilight Sparkle bawling in agony and distress as she passed overhead had not exactly gone unnoticed, and once the townsponies had craned their necks to witness the abnormally outsized alicorn being ferried in the direction of Ponyville Hospital, then looked back to see Twilight's friends and brother galloping towards the same destination, they put two and two together and came up with trouble. They converged on the pursuing party and launched a cacophony of questions.

Applejack raised her voice above the hubbub. "Gang way, everypony, it's an emergency. Spike'll explain everything."

"Me?!" Spike blanched at the thought of having to tell the easily-spooked ponies that a swarm of changelings could descend upon the town any minute. Then he realised the alternative would be to help contain the changelings himself, possibly even facing one or more on his own. "Oh, yeah, me." Shining Armor stopped briefly to allow the baby dragon to dismount, then tore off after his little sister's friends.

The three airborne ponies neared the main entrance to the hospital, Cadance adjusting her magic to open the doors. Rainbow Dash led the trio to the front desk.

Pleasant Reception had ducked below the front desk, retrieving a patient's file, when the sudden commotion in the foyer caught her attention. She arose from her task and gaped at the sight. Thinking the receptionist was preparing to speak, Rainbow Dash immediately pre-empted her. "No time for your red tape, sister. Princess Twilight here needs surgery, like, yesterday."

Rainbow's brusqueness disarmed young Pleasant, who could only blurt out the first thing that came to her head: "I'm not a sister——".

"Less chat, more stat," barked Rainbow Dash, not caring whether that was correct grammar. "Emergency C-section. As in C for changeling."

Cadance chimed in, using a rather gentler yet equally firm tone, "You'll need to start your evacuation procedures soon." She and Rainbow Dash briefed the receptionist on the situation, struggling to make themselves heard above Twilight's increasingly hysterical moans.

The sunny yellow pegasus pressed a large button on her desk and spoke quickly but clearly into her microphone, her voice carrying to speakers placed throughout the hospital. "Attention all hospital staff. Nurse Redheart to reception immediately. Repeat, Nurse Redheart to reception immediately."

Within a few agonisingly long seconds a white earth mare wearing a nurse's uniform briskly arrived at the front desk. She and Pleasant had a short discussion before the nurse trotted back out through the double doors to the interior of the hospital. Twilight, Rainbow and Cadance waited another brief but unbearably anxious period until two burly pegasus orderlies burst into reception. One uttered a quick word to Pleasant, who delivered another message into her desk microphone: "Attention all hospital staff. Code black. Repeat, code black".

The two orderlies hoisted Twilight onto a gurney and wheeled her towards the operating theatre, guiding her past the staff and patients filing in the other direction. Rainbow Dash and Cadance followed, trying to encourage their quivering friend.

"Everything's going to be fine, Twilight," Cadance said soothingly.

"On what do you base that?" wailed Twilight.

"We're here for you, that's what," answered Rainbow Dash determinedly.

Normally, Twilight would have taken heart from such words. Now it was as if she had heard them from a pair of strangers. She had forgotten just how much courage she drew from her friendships, friendships that the parasites within her were greedily consuming. Fluttershy's words from that fateful night echoed in her mind: Love can turn the weak strong. Her love was all but gone now. In no state to reach within herself for her remaining reserves of love, she felt loneliness and despair overwhelm her. She wanted to curl into a foetal position but her monstrous belly ruled that out. Instead, she drew tight to the pillow on her gurney, closed her streaming eyes and submitted herself to her fate.

They arrived in the spotlessly clean, brightly lit theatre to find a four-pony operating team already scrubbed and ready to proceed. Doctor Horse, a caramel-coated unicorn, gestured towards the designated bed, which had been lowered almost to the floor to accommodate Twilight's copious barrel. Powerfully, yet with gentleness and precision, the orderlies placed the shaking Twilight upside-down on her bed and left the room to join the other evacuees.

Nurse Redheart, brandishing a transparent mask, moved towards the patient. The near-delirious Twilight fearfully drew her head back. "What are you doing? What is that thing? Get it away from me."

Sweetheart, the other nurse in the room, gently but firmly placed her lavender forehoof on Twilight's withers. "It's all right. This will take your pain away."

"Mask. Now," demanded Twilight.

As Redheart fixed the mask over Twilight's muzzle, Knockout, a gangling, powder-blue unicorn with curly white mane and tail, approached. Knockout's colthood had involved several humiliating years trying fruitlessly to gain prowess at various unarmed fighting disciplines, before discovering mid-bout that his definitive talent entailed spraying strong narcotic gas from his spiral horn. He inserted his horn into a round slot in the mask and told Twilight to relax.

"'Relax'? Twilight repeated, the mask thankfully muffling her voice. "How can you possibly expect me to——?" Knockout's magic vapour took its effect and Twilight drifted into unconsciousness.

The two nurses began shaving Twilight's abdominal hide, which was no easy feat considering the bulges continuously shooting out. The two unicorn stallions telekinetically smoothed out Twilight's belly as best they could as the nurses proceeded with their delicate work.

Pleasant Reception entered the theatre. "Doctor Horse, the hospital's been fully evacuated."

The doors behind her swung open, knocking the poor pony flat on her face. Shining Armor charged into the room, Twilight's breathless friends accompanying him.

"Except for our visitors, of course. Here, you'll need these." Dazedly, Pleasant Reception handed the visitors a cluster of facial masks and mane caps, then stumbled out towards the emergency exit. Rainbow Dash followed her out, ensuring she didn't detour into any supply closets or restrooms, then raced back to the operating theatre.

Doctor Horse was the most experienced surgeon in Ponyville, and could not have asked for a more reliable team. Yet he had never performed an operation such as this. The closest he could remember was that ectopic pregnancy years ago, and he expected there would be a considerable difference between saving the life of a helpless, premature pony foal and deflecting a swarm of savage changeling nymphs. He carefully guided his scalpel towards Twilight's bald abdomen, which was now stretched almost to the point of translucency.

As soon as he made his incision, the nymphs started excitedly pushing their way out, threatening to tear their host apart.

"Forceps."

At Horse's emphatic but unemotional command, Redheart quickly passed him the instrument. The surgeon took them in his telekinetic aura and pressed them firmly down on the uppermost changeling fighting to emerge. Simultaneously, he guided the scalpel through Twilight's flesh. Yet the pressure from within quickly became too great. One, two, half a dozen glossy black figures, still glistening with Twilight's internal fluids, shot into the air above the operating team and spread their perforated wings and limbs.

Twilight's five friends drew closer together, simultaneously seeking and providing mutual protection. Shining Armor and Cadance did likewise. The gravity of the situation brought the love the ponies had for one another to the surface, instantly detectable to the changelings. The aroma from the five reminded the hovering nymphs of the feast of phileo, mixed with agape and storge, that they had gorged on within their former host. The two larger ponies, however, were producing a different kind of love altogether, a powerful, irresistible cloud of the changeling's most treasured flavour of love: eros. Hissing with relish, the nymphs swooped down towards Princess Cadance.

Shining Armor stepped in front of his wife, caught the attackers in his magic grip and dashed them onto the hard floor, just as six more nymphs followed their siblings out of Twilight's open abdomen. Rainbow Dash arced at them with lightning speed and expert precision, gathering the nymphs in her forelegs and tackling them to the floor. Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Rarity and Fluttershy joined Rainbow Dash, causing a melee to erupt, while a dozen more buzzing changelings dived towards the royal couple.

Doctor Horse and his team did their best to focus on their fragile patient despite the battles raging around them. Their professional detachment meant the only love emanating from them was agape, nourishing to the changelings but not especially appealing to their tastes.

A cluster of nymphs latched onto Shining Armor's haunches, savaging hs hide with their sharp fangs. The muscular stallion bucked them clear and tele-slammed another group who aimed for his vulnerable face and neck. He fought with an unbridled ferocity that stemmed from more than mere protectiveness. He still resented his inability to take direct offensive action against the dragon at the Crystal Empire, and he felt he had to atone somehow.

Cadance lured a group of changelings as far from Twilight and the desperately concentrating operating team as possible, then started firing bolts of energy at her attackers from her horn. The fast-flying nymphs, criss-crossing across Cadance's line of sight, were difficult targets to hit. They bombarded her from all directions, forcing her to resort to the unfamiliar measure of hoof-to-hoof combat. The graceful alicorn battled gallantly but the changelings' relentless assault soon ground her determination into frustration which, in turn, gave way to distress. The nymphs began ejecting adhesive green silk over her.

Hearing the cries of his beloved, Shining Armor started remotely dragging the nymphs off his wife and casting them aside. Witnessing Cadance getting the worst of the fight intensified his love, attracting more changelings to him. His battle-honed reflexes enabled him to counter their attack, anticipating their moves and swatting them from the air with powerful hoof-strikes. Less than half a minute later, the nymphs lay stunned around Shining Armor, who stood panting for a few seconds before walking towards Cadance. Every step caused him pain which he strived to conceal.

As the white stallion magically cleared the sticky threads from the unsteadily rising Cadance, he noticed that the fighting on the other side of the room had died down. He looked up to see Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Rarity and Fluttershy emerge from behind the operating team. They were dishevelled, but wore smirks of triumph.

"Nice work, mares. Now we just have to——."

Smirks of triumph.

Which meant they were not wearing masks.

Nor mane caps.

Before either pony could react, the five disguised changelings blasted with blinding speed at Cadance, slamming her against the wall with a force that knocked the wind from her lungs and the consciousness from her mind. Shining Armor lunged furiously at the attackers, letting his own guard down. Two nymphs leaped onto his sensitive muzzle, where his magic range was at its weakest. They raked at the thin layer of flesh and guzzled down the unicorn's love. He reared up, exposing his underbelly to the arrow-like attack of the other three nymphs. He violently jumped and twisted, trying to shake creatures off, but they clung on doggedly, evading his magic and his trampling hooves.

Battered and dazed, Applejack, Rarity, Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy — the real ones — struggled vainly against the silken threads pinioning them to the floor, while Cadance lay motionless near her gradually weakening husband.

10. Closing up

"We have to do something."

There was plenty to be done as it was. All of the changelings had left Twilight Sparkle's body but she was not out of danger yet. Their thorny, chitinous bodies had inflicted considerable internal damage, and the substances surrounding their foreign bodies could cause who knew what infections.

Nevertheless, Dr Horse knew Nurse Redheart was correct. Shining Armor was struggling to fight off the changelings mauling him, Cadance was unconscious, Twilight's friends were trapped, and the other changelings scattered around the operating room floor were gradually beginning to stir. If the surgical team did not take measures to keep the changelings at bay, any repairs done to Twilight's insides would count for nothing.

"Sweetheart, try to revive Princess Cadance. Knockout, cover her. Redheart, number 12 scalpel."

Sweetheart wound her way past the fallen changelings over to Cadance and began forcing air into the pink alicorn's lungs, while Knockout anxiously stood guard beside the pair. Redheart passed the specified blade to the doctor: a long, wide blade, hooked like the profile of an eagle's beak. Dr Horse guided the blade towards Rarity, who was uttering loud groans of disgust at the sticky substance fastening her to the floor.

As soon as she saw the blade gliding towards her, Rarity ceased her complaining. "No Doctor, you must start with Applejack and Rainbow Dash. They are much better at fighting than I." She knew her words might be construed as trying to keep herself out of harm's way, but there were far more important things at stake then her pride.

"If I can loosen your bonds a little," replied the surgeon, "you can help me free the others".

Rarity pondered this for a second. "Splendid."

The sharp blade scythed through the taut silken strips swaddling Rarity's forelegs and withers until she was able to elevate her front half enough to turn to her side. The unicorn mare called for her own scalpel, which she started applying to Applejack's restraints, while Doctor Horse set to work on releasing Rainbow Dash. Although the scalpel was unfamiliar in Rarity's magical grasp, her experience with various cutting implements enabled her to get the hang of the instrument expediently.

Within a minute, Applejack and Rainbow Dash were able to bolt to the other side of the theatre and set upon the changelings anchored to Shining Armor's muzzle. They could not deliver full-force kicks lest they harm their ally in the process. Instead, they clapped their forehooves around the sides of the changelings' heads and wrenched at their thoraxes until the monsters finally relinquished their hold, whereupon the two mares promptly slammed them across the floor then helped Shining rid the changelings from his underbelly.

Not a moment too soon, for the other changelings in the room had picked themselves up in preparation another assault. Shining Armor, Applejack and Rainbow Dash drew close together, their haunches elevated in readiness for battle, while their opponents clattered their translucent wings and hissed aggressively. Each side waited tensely for the right moment to strike.

"HERE I AM!!"

The changelings whipped around as one towards the source of the exuberant, falsetto exclamation. Rainbow Dash took immediate advantage, firing herself like an arrow towards the centre of the changelings and scattering them left and right. Shining Armor, Applejack and the newly-freed Pinkie Pie galloped in to lend some assistance.

A squad of half a dozen changelings took to the air to bombard the ponies, only to find themselves in the trajectory of Fluttershy, who swooped mightily back and forth, swatting and kicking aside any changelings in her path. There was no need for her friends to feign injury this time. These creatures had already hurt Twilight Sparkle on the most profound level. Any concern the enraged pegasus had for her own welfare was gone.

Severing the last of Rarity's bonds, Dr Horse cast his scalpel towards the other beslimed used blades before he joined Redheart in cleaning and mending Twilight's interior. The newly freed Rarity darted gracefully from one melee to the next, landing blows that made up in precision for what they lacked in strength.

United as a team, drawing courage and inspiration from one another, the ponies began to gain the upper hoof. One of the changelings, larger than his hostmates by a small but significant degree, opened the theatre doors and let out a rasping hiss, drowning out the noise of the battle. His siblings turned towards the commanding sound and shot out to the hallway. Rainbow Dash set off in pursuit but she only had time to glimpse some of the retreating changelings assuming the forms of the ponies in the theatre before Shining Armor magically slammed and bolted the doors and stood imposingly in front of them.

"Let them go."

"But they're going to attack Ponyville," Rainbow protested.

A thunderous peal resounded through the operating theatre, alarming all conscious ponies in the room except Shining Armor.

"Not on my watch," he replied as more clanging noises permeated the room.

Applejack beamed behind her mask. "A forcefield."

"They can hammer away at it for a week and not make a dent."

"I wish I could say the same about those doors," warned Doctor Horse, without looking up from Twilight. "This is a hospital, not a fortress."

Shining Armor guided a high-backed chair towards the doors and wedged it under their handles. He then planted his forehooves firmly on the smooth floor and braced his hind legs against the doors. Twilight's friends quickly followed suit, just as the doors jolted under the impact of the returning changelings. Laughing and hissing, the parasites slammed their tough bodies forcibly against the other side of the doors, small groups taking turns so as to maintain a steady barrage. All the while, the resounding blows against the forcefield continued in the background.

As the ponies fought to preserve their barricade, they had their first chance to notice Cadance, now breathing but still unconscious. Sweetheart had placed a cold compress on the pink alicorn's head but further treatment would have to wait until the changeling attack ceased.

"Princess Cadance," cried Rainbow Dash.

Applejack turned her head remorsefully towards Shining Armor. "We're powerful sorry, yer highness. These critters are a tad stronger than the ones we tangled with in Canterlot."

"No wonder. They've been feasting on a deep vein of finest-quality love for days," the captain replied, grim but unreproachful. Another factor at play was the timely intervention of Twilight's friends during that first battle at Friendship Castle. Spinnerette had the time to deposit only a minority of her offspring into Twilight, so those who were able to incubate could consume a greater share of their host's love than they could if part of a full brood. This greatly increased their individual strength. Conversely, the small size of the brood not only saved Twilight's life when she cast her anti-disguise spell over herself, but meant that the changelings were not numerous enough to conquer Ponyville by force, so they would have to rely on their uncanny shape-shifting ability to deceive and drain their prey over a long period.

The relentless assault on the doors began to open a gap that widened slowly but inexorably. The ponies pushed ever more desperately to close the gap until Knockout, eyes gleaming, galloped towards the doors, climbed onto the chair and thrust his horn through the gap.

A jet of soporific gas expanded and flooded the corridor. The changelings instantly collapsed, coughing, wheezing and finally fainting. Two of them frantically tried to flee the vapour. Knockout sprayed ever harder, shouting with effort, until the pair succumbed to the effects of the gas and staggered to the floor. Knockout himself then slumped in the chair, spent. The ponies exhorted him with assorted cries of 'all right' and 'way to go'.

"How long do you think they'll be out?" Shining Armor asked.

"Can't ... say," Knockout panted. "Uncontrolled dosage ... wide area ... creatures of unknown constitution."

"Then let's go in and finish them off." The hovering Rainbow Dash brandished her forehoof aggressively.

"We cain't go in there, Rainbow. The gas could take us out too." Applejack grunted and spluttered as a sudden gust of wind blasted her in the face, blowing her Stetson to the floor.

Rainbow Dash chuckled smugly at the glaring earth pony. "I'm not just a pretty face, you know, AJ." Taking a deep breath, she opened the theatre doors and flew several speedy laps through the corridor, her powerful, rapid wingbeats dispersing the gas. Sniffing the air a few times and deciding it was safe, she beckoned her friends to join her.

Shining Armor, brow furrowed with concern, was the last to join them. "I've just spoken with one of the nurses. They'll have to keep Cadance under observation for a good while yet. We can forget about casting that love wave for now."

Rarity looked around at the dozens of inert changelings littering the floor. "What are we going to do with all these creatures? They could recover any moment."

"Who wants to play dress-ups?"

At the sound of this excited, utterly incongruous suggestion, the other ponies turned incredulously towards Pinkie Pie, only to see that she was carrying a mountain of medical dressings that she had somehow managed to retrieve from a supply cupboard. Smiling, Rarity guided the dressings towards herself and began expertly tying the changelings up.

Fluttershy glanced nervously around. "Um, is this all of the changelings?"

"I think so," replied Shining Armor.

"Then why can I still hear b-b-b-banging against the forcefield?"

The other ponies gasped. In all the turmoil, the continual noise had receded into the background so that they no longer noticed it until Fluttershy mentioned it.

A quizzical frown crossed Shining Armor's face. "Wait a second, it's coming from outside."

"I'll check it out." Pinkie Pie dashed off towards the main entrance and disappeared from the other ponies' view. Seconds later, they listened anxiously as a piercing scream rang down the hallway. As the pink pony raced back, they saw she was not screaming in terror, but squealing with delight.

"You gotta come see this! You gotta come see thiiisss!"

Rainbow Dash stayed behind with Rarity, ready to sound the alarm if the changelings began to awaken. The other ponies followed Pinkie to the hospital foyer, and stared in astonishment at the sight greeting them through the doors that Shining Armor had opened.

Standing at the main entrance, flanked by a squad of bat-winged royal guards, was Princess Luna.

11. Identity Crisis

"... relax when I'm about to burst at the seams with a brood of—Hey!"

Indignantly, Twilight Sparkle craned her head around to search for the anaesthetist who had just rudely disappeared while she was in the middle of talking to him. She found him anxiously peeking through the theatre doors, along with the rest of the operating team. As the four ponies turned in reaction to the sound of her voice, Twilight prepared to demand to know why they weren't preparing to operate on her, until a puzzled frown contorted her face. Slowly, she turned back to look at her own supine body. Her monstrous abdominal bulge had vanished, leaving only a shaven patch bearing a lengthy, livid, stitched-up scar. "Oh."

Sweetheart approached with a caring smile. "How is our patient feeling?"

"I'll be fine as soon as I——." A sight from the corner of Twilight's eye cut her answer short. She rolled her head to the side of her pillow and cried in dismay when she saw the bed next to her. "Cadance! What happened? Will she be all right? Oww!"

Sweetheart put a gentle but firm hoof onto the shoulder of Twilight, whose frantic attempt to climb out of bed had triggered a sharp pain. "She should be fine. You need to rest, Princess Twilight. You have your own recovery to think of."

That's all I am thinking of, thought Twilight miserably, not daring voice the words.

* * *

"Has nopony taught you better than to keep a princess waiting? I shall be having words with Cadance about this."

The four ponies in the foyer whipped off their caps and masks, revealing their grateful, delighted faces. Shining Armor opened a portal in the forcefield as his companions dropped reverently to their knees. "Luna, you came."

"As soon as I heard. And not just I." Luna flared her right wing. At this apparent signal, dozens of Ponyville's residents approached, in ranks standing shoulder to shoulder. Earth ponies, pegasi and unicorns, stallions and mares, the stronger and more athletic of the town's ponies at the forefront. Spike was there too, proudly pointing the pony ranks out to Twilight's overjoyed friends.

"We're so glad you arrived. The changelings are this way." Shining Armor turned to lead the way. Or rather he tried to but found his hooves cantering pointlessly in mid-air. Applejack, Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy likewise found themselves suspended, as if by cables, inches above the floor. They looked towards Luna, who had angled her horn towards them.

From within Ponyville's assembled residents, the town's beige-coated, grey-maned mayor emerged. "I'm afraid we've already seen the changelings take your forms. I have no intention of allowing Ponyville's defenders to be led into a trap. So before we can proceed, you must establish your true identities."

Pinkie Pie turned to the unsmiling princess. "But Princess Luna, we were three of the ponies who used the Elements of Harmony to change you back from Nightmare Moon," she cried, her voice a blend of urgency and hurt.

"That is hardly a state secret, whoever you are," replied Luna implacably.

It might be to a batch of changelings fresh out of the oven, thought Applejack, but she felt the extra caution was forgivable. "Come on y'all," she spurred her companions, "we gotta think of some special memories only we 'n' our friends here would know." She turned to a towering, almost horse-sized earth stallion with a red coat and heavy eyelids. "Big Macintosh, 'member when we were foals an' we put that obstacle course together at Sweet Apple Acres?"

Big Macintosh rolled his eyes in thought for a few seconds, before a smile of recognition crossed his weather-beaten muzzle and his deep voice answered his younger sister, "Eeyup".

"An' ah got the bright idea to set up a rope swing over the brambles?"

His smile broadened. "Yup."

"Ah was sure ah'd made that jump long enough." She winced, gently caressing her hindquarters with her tail.

Big Mac's imposing, red body jolted in a silent chuckle. "Nope."

Fluttershy glanced demurely at another prepossessing stallion, a white pegasus, shorter than Big Mac but with forequarters swollen almost to bursting with lovingly-developed muscles. "Um, Bulky? Remember when we were by the river training for the Equestria Games? I got my mane caught in a tree branch and you couldn't untangle it——."

Bulk Biceps' even stare broke into a grin. "Yeah, so I snapped the branch off at the trunk."

Fluttershy blushed at the memory. A tree branch. On her head. With the node pointing outwards! "I had to go all the way to the spa with that silly thing stuck to my head. I might have died of embarrassment if you hadn't been there with me."

"Ooh ooh, Princess Luna," Pinkie Pie babbled excitedly, "remember when you came to Ponyville on Nightmare Night and I dressed as a chicken and Twilight lured me down an alley with a trail of candy and you came out of the shadows and I was like 'buck buck buck braawwwwwk' but then I covered my mouth 'cause I remembered I'd promised Twilight that I wouldn't scream but then Rainbow Dash snuck up behind you and she was dressed as a Shadowbolt and she made this huge thunderclap that made me scream and an egg came out and I——?"

"You guys wanna hurry it up out there? The newborns are starting to wake from their naps, if you know what I mean."

At the sound of Rainbow Dash's rasping, impatient voice, Applejack turned to the princess. "Ring any bells, Yer Highness?"

Luna smiled warmly. "Pinkie Pie, you are a genius."

"No I'm not, I'm a chicken. Braawwwk."

Shining Armor was last. The only ponies here that he knew well were in the operating theatre on the other side of the hospital. Even Luna wasn't very familiar to him. She was the princess of the night: in the brief window between the lifting of her exile and his reassignment from Canterlot to the Crystal Empire, his eventide attentions had been on another princess altogether. As for her royal guards, assigned to the night shift, they were under a different commander. He struggled to think of some memory he shared with somepony ...

Or some dragon.

"Spike?" Shining craned his neck to get a glimpse of the baby dragon. "Remember back in Canterlot when I took you to your first hoofball game? Baltimare were visiting?"

Spike's purple scales glistened in the sunlight outside as he beamed at the memory. "That's right, Baltimare. Oho, they had an awesome team back then. Halter Pastern, Menacing Hedgejump ..."

"We had a little wager on the quiet over which team would score first."

Spike barked out a smug laugh. "I still have that star sapphire, sucker. At least I did until Tirek ... blew up the library." His voice faltered at the memory of the tree-hewn library that he and Twilight Sparkle had called their home since they first moved to Ponyville. Indeed, everypony present had grim recollections of the evil centaur's ruthless bid for power, and mention of his name caused a pall to settle upon the assembled crowd.

Luna quickly snapped back to attention. "There shall be no more misery inflicted upon Ponyville today," she declared, releasing the four ponies from her telekinetic hold. "Lead the way."

* * *

Like a four-legged bird of prey, Rainbow Dash cruised back and forth through the air in the hallway, her keen eyes trained on the fallen changelings. Any sign of movement and she swooped down in a flash to stun them with her hooves. Satisfying though she found this action, it was gradually becoming more frequent, and she felt this game of clobber-a-changeling could eventually reach a point where even her great speed and agility would not be enough to keep the monsters under control. "You guys wanna hurry it up out there? The newborns are starting to wake from their naps, if you know what I mean."

Rarity, meanwhile, was methodically working her way through the changeling heap from the edge nearest the lobby. One by one, she deftly strapped the changelings' wings to their flanks, bound their legs together in taut knots with the dressings passing through the dire holes perforating their limbs, then wrenched their heads back and tied those too, preventing them from aiming their horns at anypony. For good measure, she tied the changelings to each other as well, hampering them even further. Both she and Rainbow had cast aside their caps and masks.

Rainbow Dash glanced unappreciatively at Rarity's steady progress. "Can't you go any faster?"

"What's that, darling? Can I do a sub-optimal job and increase the risk of the changelings escaping, thereby rendering the entire exercise worse than useless? Certainly, if that's what you wish." As she spoke, Rarity stayed focused on the task at hand, preventing her from seeing Rainbow petulantly miming the unicorn's words.

"Yeah, yeah," grumbled Rainbow as she plunged down to strike another changeling.

Rarity magically guided another dressing towards one of the inert changelings and was about to lift the creature's leg when a green, glowing, flame-like pulse burned like a fuse along its body. The pulse left in its wake a long, purple, limbless shape, as thick at its widest as the muzzle-to-dock length of a pony: a ferocious monster from within the changeling's racial memory. The changeling had managed to regain consciousness without stirring, and had lain in wait until Rainbow Dash had moved to the far end of the corridor before making its move.

Balancing on its coiled tail, the worm-like figure reared up to strike, its head just below the ceiling. From the corner of its black, beady eye, the changeling saw Rainbow Dash rocketing towards it. The creature made no attempt to evade the onrushing pegasus. Instead, it opened its jaws to reveal a mouth resembling a huge, pink, three-petalled flower with long, black stamens in the centre.

"For me? You shouldn't have." Rainbow Dash steered towards the creature's throat only to discover, too late, that the undulating dark tendrils were in fact tentacles. The appendages shot elastically from the changeling's mouth, coiling tightly around Rainbow Dash's legs, lashing her wings to her flanks and snaking around her throat, constricting her breathing. Her wild struggles quickly turned to convulsions as her awareness began to fade.

12. Sacrifice

With a fearful, ringing cry for help, Rarity bounded in front of the changeling-tatzlwurm, pirouetted 180 degrees and slammed her rear legs squarely into the creature's body.

"Take that! And tha—oh."

Conceptually, the only limit to the forms a changeling could assume was its own imagination. However, it could not simply transmogrify into, say, a skyscraper-sized, armour-plated, flame-shooting colossus and expect to demolish everything in its path. Merely moving such a corpus would take a tremendous reservoir of power, as would generating the fire, not to mention the magical energy required to effect such a transformation in the first place. Changelings could be strong, but not infinitely so. There had to be compromises.

This changeling, in its youthful inexperience and haste, had directed too much of its remaining strength to its tentacles, leaving the bulk of its body relatively unprotected. So it was that Rarity was able to smite the unwieldy monster to the floor in a single blow, the impact loosing Rainbow Dash from its coils.

As Rainbow lay coughing, heaving and gulping for precious air, Rarity overcame her surprise to press home her advantage, stunning the changeling with a flurry of kicks and stamps to the base of its skull. Seeing her enemy was no longer moving, Rarity emitted a snooty harrumph, then turned her attention to her panting friend, who was staggering to her hooves. "Rainbow, treasure, are you all right?"

If anything, Rainbow was even more surprised than Rarity. The flighty, finicky fashionista had single-hoofedly saved the tough, fearless, athletic tomcolt from the constricting clutches of a changeling-tatzlwurm. How to convey the gratitude and humility due such an act?

The pegasus lifted her pastern melodramatically to her forelock and adopted a fair approximation of Rarity's prim accent. "Oh doctor, you simply must release Rainbow Dash first. She's far more accustomed to the ways of the brute than little me." She cracked a wry grin and elbowed the white unicorn mare in the shoulder.

Rarity sheepishly poked at the long, curled, purple tresses of her mane. "Ahem, yes, well, I never said I was completely helpless now did I?"

"Well ah reckon that about settles the question of whether yew tew are the real deal."

At the sound of Applejack's unmistakable twang, Rarity and Rainbow Dash whipped around in surprise to see not just Shining Armor and their friends, but a sizeable detachment of Ponyville's residents gathered behind them. Even more astounding was the sight of Princess Luna and four of her guards. "Your highness," they blurted in unison, dropping to their knees.

Luna extended her foreleg. "Arise. The time for action is at hoof. Shining Armor?"

The unicorn stallion drew his narrowing eyes across the twitching changelings strewn along the hallway. The two ponies most special to him had wound up in hospital beds thanks to these vermin. Time to put them out of action once and for all.

"We hit them with all we've got. Fliers, start at the far end, the rest of us go from here. We meet in the middle. Smash every last one of them to a pulp. Any questions?"

"Sir, yes, sir."

Shining Armor turned with slight surprise to Rainbow Dash, facing straight ahead with a rigid expression. He had not expected such formality from the pegasus, who came across to him as something of a smug wisecracker. Then he remembered Twilight telling him about Rainbow's training with the Wonderbolts — Equestria's venerable elite paramilitary flying squadron. Princess Luna had tacitly granted him leadership over this operation, meaning the assembled ponies were under his command, and Rainbow Dash was showing that she acknowledged his authority. Clearly, the Wonderbolts had instilled a sense of discipline and subordination into her. "Go on."

"Sir, the changelings are no ordinary adversaries. Their ability to change shape at will makes it hard for us to know our allies from our enemies, which has the potential to create a lot of confusion. It won't be possible to watch each other's tails all the time." Rainbow ascended several feet of the ground and hovered. "This position provides a perfect vantage of the entire——." She suddenly ceased talking and shot forwards into the changelings, stunning one with her forehoof then reversing to kick another unconscious, before returning to her position. "... battlefield. If you were to post a sentinel here, they could keep track of any shape-shifts and shout them out to the ponies." She paused almost imperceptibly before continuing. "And I'd like to volunteer for that detail, sir."

A collective gasp of incredulity arose from Rainbow's friends.

"It makes sense," she explained. "I'm the best pony for the job. I set new Wonderbolt Academy records for aerial endurance and visual acuity."

"Yeah, she did," affirmed Bulk Biceps, who had been one of her academy classmates.

"But Dashie, you wouldn't be able to do any fighting," protested Pinkie Pie, care in her eyes.

Rainbow Dash, of course, was all too keenly aware of this. After another slight pause, she replied, "There's enough of you here to have it covered".

"Yew'd ... sit out a whole monster fight?" cried an incredulous Applejack.

"For us?" added Fluttershy.

Through sheer force of will, Rainbow Dash kept her voice from trembling. "I'd never leave Equestria hanging."

Shining Armor's thoughts turned inexorably to the siege of the Crystal Empire. To how he was champing at the bit to leave his post and join his charges at the front line — out of sheer conceit that he could make a significant, positive impact on the front line and that he would be less of a stallion doing otherwise — leaving his beloved bride to shoulder the burden of maintaining the forcefield on her own. Now here was this proud, pugnacious, hot-headed young mare asking to withdraw from a battle, for the greater good, apparently not giving a flying fetlock if anypony thought less of her because of it. He had rarely felt so humble.

"If it weren't against Royal Guard protocol to salute civilians. Permission granted, Rainbow Dash. If there are no other questions, everypony take your positions."

Rainbow Dash ascended to the vantage point she had indicated. Luna and her guards soared to the other end of the hallway, along with Thunderlane, Bulk Biceps, Fluttershy and a few more of Ponyville's pegasus population. Standing at the forefront of a squad of Earth ponies and unicorns, Shining Armor quickly cast his eyes around the assembled ponies, then down to the changelings. "Attack at will."

The air was soon filled with the sickening crunch of keratin against chitin, hissing shrieks of pain and fear, and Rainbow Dash yelling out reports of changeling movements:

"Fluttershy, behind you.

"AJ, enemy at your left flank.

"Thunderlane, fake guard at four o'clock. No, your four o'clock."

The ponies battered the changelings with vigorous tramples and kicks, Shining Armor and Luna additionally using precision magic energy blasts against any exposed invaders. The new arrivals to the battle were fresh, and many of them were larger and stronger than Twilight's five female friends. Big Macintosh alone was worth over half a dozen ordinary pony stallions in power, and had an impressive turn of speed as well. He brutally dashed the changelings in all directions.

The changelings who were able to rouse themselves tried to fight back but the surprise and ferocity of the pony onslaught, coupled with the lingering effects of Knockout's anaesthetic and Rainbow Dash's diving hoof-strikes, took their toll. Their bodies were weakened, their minds groggy, their silk-shooting misdirected. Within a few minutes, the parasites lay scattered and dormant, their bodies twisted into unnatural positions, and all ponies were present and accounted for thanks to Rainbow Dash's watchful eye.

As the ponies congratulated one another on the result, Shining Armor turned to the town's leader, who had been observing the battle from the foyer along with some of Ponyville's less bellicose residents. "Madam Mayor, we can't disperse the changelings until Cadance recovers from her injuries. Does Ponyville have enough room in her holding cells to fit them all?"

"Possibly, but what's to stop them from turning into snakes or worms and escaping through the bars?"

"The dressings, ma'am," replied Rainbow Dash, pointing to the trussed-up changelings near the lobby. "I saw a couple of these guys try but they couldn't." Changelings could disguise themselves to look like they were wearing clothes, but their transmogrifications could not remove physical restraints. "Trouble is, it takes a while to tie 'em up right."

The mayor smiled. "I for one would be happy to help."

"So would I," said Amethyst Star. "Provided we have some ponies keeping guard," she added hastily. Several other mares added their assent.

Thunderlane pointed to the inert changeling that was still disguised as a worm. "What about flower-face here?"

"I could watch him." Knockout had emerged from the emergency room, along with the rest of Twilight's operating team. "Keep him in the quarantine area, blast him with sleepy gas if he gets too restless."

"Not by yourself," warned Rarity. "That one's tricky. He needs an extra pair of eyes."

"I got it," volunteered Thunderlane.

So it was agreed. A contingent of stronger ponies carried the changelings into the hospital's spacious physiotherapy room. There, they kept watch as a dozen of Ponyville's mares, under Rarity's tutelage, bound up the captives. Once that job was done, the changelings were ferried to the local holding cells and unceremoniously crammed inside, allowing the hospital to be cleaned and re-populated with patients and staff.

* * *

"Princess Twilight?"

"Mm." Through her half-open eyes, Twilight saw the figure of Nurse Redheart verifying that she was awake.

"You have visitors."

"Tell them to go away," Twilight muttered in a defeated monotone. "I don't want anypony seeing me like this."

"I'm sure we can do something about that."

Twilight knew that voice anywhere. "Cadance!" She looked up excitedly — sending a desultorily-read book sliding to the floor — to see the elegant pink alicorn wearing that unmistakable, affectionate smile, her beauty marred only by a bandage around her head. Behind her stood Shining Armor, Spike and Twilight's five best pony friends. Incredulous, Twilight turned to the bed beside her, saw that it was now unoccupied and neatly made, then looked delightedly back to her former foalsitter. "But when ... how?"

Cadance chuckled, "You were sound asleep".

"Thank goodness you're all right. Now you can restore my love."

"Yes. I have to keep the bandage on for a while yet but——."

"But you can still restore my love," interrupted Twilight.

Only slightly fazed, Cadance continued to fill Twilight in. "You'll be happy to know that Shining Armor and I have cast out all the changelings——."

"I'm sure I will be as soon as you restore my love."

"Many citizens of Ponyville came to help your friends——."

"Stop it."

Cadance blinked at the unexpected reproof. "Twilight?"

"You think I don't hear my own words? That I can't perceive how self-centred and callous I'm coming across as right now? I might not have been Miss Congeniality this past week but I hardly think I deserve to be an exhibit in a freak show. Now for pity's sake, restore my love."

"Of course. I'm sorry, Twilight." Chastened, Cadance angled her horn towards Twilight's. A charge of energy crossed over to the younger alicorn and coursed through her psyche, ready to mingle and react with the love within her, magnifying it until it crowded out the pallid chaff of negativity and apathy infesting her.

"Well?" barked Twilight. "What are you waiting for?"

"I'll, I'll give you an extra dosage," stammered a flustered Cadance, before imparting even more magic into Twilight.

Twilight could sense the magic energy flowing through her but felt no increase in her love towards those around her. "Why isn't this working?" she demanded.

"I don't know. It should——." Cadance began to tense with grave concern. "Oh no."

"What do you mean, 'oh no'?"

"I've never heard of this happening before but, it might be that the changelings have ... taken all of your love."

"So put it all back then!" Twilight's impatience began to incorporate a touch of panic.

"You don't understand. I can't just make a pony love another pony. No unicorn magic can or should have that power. My spell awakens and amplifies love that's already there. It clears away all the negativity — worries, resentments, jealousy, silly little disagreements — and brings forth the love that lies dormant underneath. But if there's no love there to begin with then——." As she watched Twilight's indignant expression turn to sad bewilderment, Cadance began sobbing with sympathy and despair. "I'm so sorry, Twilight. My magic can't restore you."

13. Recharge du temps perdu

"Wha-bu-didn't you-I saw——." Desperate and confused, Twilight Sparkle cast her mind back to her fillyhood, to the days of strolling around Canterlot with Princess Cadance, watching her then foal-sitter changing quarrels and complaints to smiles and embraces seemingly without effort. She had never considered that the love spell had a limit. Yet as she thought about it, it dawned on her that Cadance reserved her spell for couples, families and friends, never mere acquaintances or strangers. And she always strengthened a kind of love already present; she never turned friends into romantic lovers, for instance.

Twilight looked back up at Cadance's tearful, helpless visage. The young alicorn's utter lack of empathy at the sight reminded her of what she had lost, and this forged her desperation into determination. Steadily, she shook her head. "Ohhhh, no. Don't you 'sorry' me, Mi Amore Cadenza. Spreading love is your gift, your destiny." At this last word, Twilight levitated Cadance's hindquarters, emphasising to all present the crystal heart cutie mark — the insignia representing a pony's definitive, integral talent. Letting Cadance drop, Twilight continued, "And a pony always pursues her destiny, no matter how hopeless it seems. Now pull yourself together and tell me what we need to make this work".

Seeing the implacable resolve in Twilight's eyes helped Cadance gulp back her despair. "You need some trace of love energy within you. A residue, a-a-a spark——."

"A spark?" Like a faithful dog sensing the long-awaited arrival of her master, Twilight sat up in her hospital bed, only to cry out in pain as the sudden movement aggravated the soreness in her belly. Wincing, she settled gingerly back down. "Why didn't you say so? I'll get you a spark. Just give me a few minutes of unbroken concentration." She gently closed her eyes and prepared to take slow, deep breaths.

At once the theatre doors burst open and in cantered the two pegasus orderlies who had wheeled Twilight there earlier. "Princess Twilight," said one.

"Uurrgghh!"

"Please forgive the intrusion, Your Highnesses, but we're re-populating the hospital now and the doctors need this theatre for surgery. We're here to transfer Princess Twilight to her private room."

"Great, just what I ... actually, that is just what I need. Carry on."

The orderlies carefully but swiftly carried Twilight onto their gurney, transported her to her room, lifted her to her bed and left. The room was comfortably furnished and large, for a single room, but with seven other ponies and a baby dragon present, it was somewhat crowded.

"Want us to give you some privacy, Twi?" asked Applejack.

"Yes. No! I might have a better chance of kindling that spark if my friends are here with me." Resuming her regulated breathing, Twilight shut her eyes and guided her consciousness through her many memories.

Okay, she mused. Last time I found the spark, it was the time I forgave Discord his betrayal of Equestria to Tirek. Hm. That spark's out now but if I follow the same pattern, I just have to find the time I showed my other friends the most forgiveness. That's easy enough: the changeling invasion of Canterlot at Shining Armor's wedding to Cadance.

I get it. Storming into the rehearsal and calling the bride-to-be "evil" in front of everypony wasn't the most strategic of moves. But I knew Cadance from my fillyhood, I'd spent so much time with her, and she was absolutely nothing like the brute who'd been leering at my friends' wedding preparations and abusing my brother. Yet my friends, who didn't know Cadance at all, just brushed it off as so much pre-nuptial stress. And unfortunately for me, and for the rest of Canterlot, Shining had answers for all my accusations. I was not his favourite pony in Equestria that evening.

I'll never forget the expressions on my friends' faces. No, not their looks of disgust as they swept silently past after Shining Armor tore a strip off of me, although that was devastating enough. It was their scandalised looks the next time they saw me, at the wedding. The wedding Shining had warned me to stay away from. After I had spent all night and half the morning trying to escape from the catacombs with the real Cadance. What went through their minds when I didn't come back the night before? Where did they think I was? Were they even concerned? Was the chance of me making another ugly scene really foremost on their minds right then?

I don't know. I never bothered asking.

"Sorry Twilight, we should have considered the possibility that there was something to what you were saying and not totally abandoned you and made you feel half an inch tall."

"That's okay."

That's okay. Just like that. It was OK because we were back together, because my need for my friends, my love for my friends, was so great.

So why can't I conjure up any love for them now? Why can I only think of how rotten they were and how magnanimous I was? Nngh! This isn't fair.

Duh, you spent a week hosting a swarm of parasites who think love is food. You expect them to play fair, dawnhorse?

So now what? Is there another angle from which I can approach this?

Wait, that's it! What was it I read that time? Who has been forgiven much will love much? Maybe it's not how much I have forgiven my friends but how much my friends have forgiven me. Oh, stars and studs, are there some rich pickings in that field.

The parasprites. Eesh. I was standing right there. Pinkie Pie said what they were called, that they were bad news, and what she needed to defeat them. Did I listen? No, I just ignored her. Then, when it turned out the parasprites were uncontrollable, a smart pony would have thought Pinkie might have had something useful to contribute, and actually asked her why she was galloping all over town collecting musical instruments. But nooo, she obviously had no idea what she was doing and was just getting in our way. I'd better save the day with my magic. Magic solves everything.

Heh, it sure was fun repairing the town after that catastrophe. Still, at least I learned never to dismiss my friends' behaviour a priori as irrelevant nonsense. Cough, Snookie Boo, cough.

Yet she forgave me.

Speaking of magic solving everything and not causing a gigantic mess, how about my first Winter Wrap-Up in Ponyville? I said the townsponies didn't need magic to change their seasons. I said their traditions were important to them. I said, I said, I said.

Then I went and did it anyway because I was too impatient to find a way to help. Boy, Applejack was madder that I'd used magic than at the hours I'd set the snowploughing back.

Yet she forgave me.

Smarty Pants. Celestia save me, Smarty Pants! Here's a friendship lesson for you, genius: Dear Princess Celestia, One of the best things a friend can do is help a friend who has a problem. Sometimes, though, your friends don't have any problems. Everything is going fine. Moments like this don't always come along, so it's important to enjoy and cherish them together. Your faithful student, Twilight Sparkle.

But nooo, the only way you could think of to learn about friendship was to solve a problem and, when you couldn't find one, you made one! Brilliant! Enchanting your old Smarty Pants doll so that innocent ponies would fight over it and you could teach them a lesson about sharing. Yeah. Except when a spell makes you want something more than anything, that really means anything. Rarity's sister, Applejack's sister and brother, about half the town got caught up in the hysteria until Princess Celestia came and countered the spell.

Forgive me? My friends blamed themselves. They just wanted to help me apply some perspective to my late-friendship-letter problem but they came across as insensitive and uncaring. Of course, you wouldn't know anything about that, Miss Babies-take-a-lot-of-responsibility-some-ponies-just-aren't-up-to-the-job.

I just hope Smarty Pants has forgiven me.

Barely acknowledging Spike while he was tearfully resigning as my assistant, turning Fluttershy into a vampire fruit bat-pony mutant ... so many thoughtless words and actions, and they always forgive me. They want me—me—to stay their friend. Yet I can't muster up one little spark of love for the friends who love me and care about me so much? All I'm summoning is reproach for myself.

Well, there's only one thing for it.

No.

Yes.

I can't.

You must and you will. The stakes are too high for you to repress that memory anymore. You have to open it up, submerge yourself in it, absorb it into every fibre of your being.

The worst coronation day ever.

* * *

Of all the myriad questions swarming around in Twilight Sparkle's mind at the reception after her coronation, one kept surfacing above the horde: will my friends treat me differently now that I'm a princess?

One thing seemed clear: if the raucous, mocking laughter filling the air was any indication, Rainbow Dash was one pony who would have no such problem.

"Oh, you nailed the take-off, Princess, I'll give ya that," the hooved hoyden cackled, "but a few seconds in that open air and you were like a loose kite in a thunderstorm".

Twilight met her friend's banter with a crooked, tight-lipped smirk. She had only herself to blame, after all. Full to bursting with euphoria at what she had accomplished with the help of her beloved friends, she had spread the wings that she had acquired as part of her ascendancy and joyously taken to the skies in a graceful, spiralling arc ... only to realise very quickly that there was considerably more to flying than just flapping her wings. Aligning her body, negotiating airborne currents ...

"I think you did very well for your first flight, Twilight," said Fluttershy kindly.

Only because you didn't do that well in your first hundred flights, thought Rainbow Dash. Fluttershy was acutely sensitive about her late blooming and generally modest aerial ability — as well as many other things — and Rainbow knew better than to tease her. Twilight, however, was fair game as far as she was concerned.

"Good thing I was around to rescue you with my awesome speed, skills and quick wits," Rainbow continued. "Hey, I saved the life of a princess! Does that mean I get to be a royal guard? Ooh, or a knight?"

"Slow down, Rainbow," chuckled Twilight, "there's a lot I need to find out myself about this whole princess thing".

Applejack spoke up. "B'sides, didn't Twilight become a princess by savin' yew, Rainbow Dash? And alla us too?"

Twilight's smile grew marginally more bashful. So far, only she and Spike knew the whole story of how her friends had come to need rescuing in the first place. Would confessing achieve anything positive? Maybe what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them.

Rainbow's smugness faded slightly. "I see your point, AJ. Phew, yeah, what a crazy couple of days that was."

"And not the fun kind of crazy, either," intoned Pinkie Pie. "More like the 'who am I this can't be happening somepony please get me out of here' crazy." She stared hauntedly at nothing for a moment, before humming cheerfully and sipping some more punch through a straw.

"A couple of days?" Applejack gaped. "Sufferin' sundowners, ah felt like ah spent half mah life trapped in that boutique. Uh, no 'fence, Rarity."

"Oh, none taken, darling," the courtly unicorn replied. "That's how the illusion affected us all, saddled with our mis-matched destinies. How odd, though, that whatever scrambled our cutie marks only targeted the five of us."

"Somethin' to do with the Elements of Harmony, ya think?" suggested Applejack.

"Possibly," replied Rarity, "but why then wasn't Twilight affected?"

Fluttershy spoke up, "I don't know, but thank goodness she wasn't. After all, Twilight was the one who fixed us". Twilight's other assembled friends voiced their agreement.

Twilight felt a wave of relief at the apparent turn the conversation had taken. The more her friends discussed what could have caused the confusion of their destinies, the more likely her role in the calamity would emerge. "Technically, we all fixed one another. I just came up with the idea. And I couldn't have even done that without Spike here."

The baby dragon blushed. "Aw, I doubt that. You would have figured it out sooner or later."

"Mm, I don't know, Spike. I was really lost there. If it weren't for you, I'd probably still be beating myself up about it."

Instantly, both Twilight and Spike realised that the former had said too much. They exchanged an eyeblink-fast glance of anxiety.

"Why Twilight, why ever would you admonish yourself for something like that?" asked Rarity. "Our predicament was hardly your fault, now was it?"

Twilight summoned all of her well-honed intellect to deliver a convincing response that would avert any possible suspicion. "Uhhh ..."

Spike hastily jumped in. "Oh, you know Twilight. If she can't solve the problem, she's part of the problem."

Rainbow Dash's eyes were narrowed with suspicion. "I think I've got a pretty good idea of who was responsible."

"You do?" Twilight winced uneasily.

Rainbow snarled, "Discord".

"What?" cried Twilight and Fluttershy simultaneously.

"Why so surprised? Freakishly powerful magic, changing our true selves, turning Ponyville into a disaster area? That's Discord's M.O. all the way."

"B-b-but, but, but he, I, um——."

"I think what Fluttershy is trying to say is that Discord has reformed," interjected Twilight, carefully avoiding a lie. She herself was rather dubious of the depth and sincerity of Discord's professed reformation. Unfortunately, other than Fluttershy, so were the other ponies: they seemed quite receptive towards Rainbow's hypothesis.

Rarity turned gently to the shy pegasus. "Sweetheart, maybe Discord has taken a genuine liking to you, but he is a spirit of chaos and disharmony. He spent aeons following his whims and wreaking havoc, not caring how he affected his victims. I find it hard to believe that he could quash those instincts virtually overnight."

Rainbow Dash felt even more emboldened. "Yeah. I say we confront him."

"With what? Your cutie marks are all back to normal." It was a desperate gambit and Twilight knew it.

"How about the whole population of Ponyville? They saw it too. Let's just see what he has to say about it."

"No!" Twilight's emphasis startled even herself, but she would not countenance accusing Discord — true friend or not — of a deed she knew he did not commit.

"Come on, Twilight," protested Rainbow. "Who else could cook up the kind of magic that can change a pony's destiny?"

Trapped, Twilight shot a resigned look to Spike, then hung her head in abject shame. "Star Swirl the Bearded."

She told her friends everything. About how Princess Celestia tasked her with fixing Star Swirl's unfinished spell; how she tested it without even thinking of what the consequences might be, let alone planning for them; how she had inadvertently changed the Elements of Harmony which, in turn, had exchanged the destinies of their bearers (save for Twilight herself, for casting the spell had given her immunity).

It was several excruciating seconds before her friends could speak.

"You ... ruined our lives?" rasped Rainbow Dash.

"Yew ruined mah family's livelihood?" cried Applejack.

"You ruined all of Ponyville?" shrieked Pinkie Pie.

"But she——." Spike started blurting out a protestation that Twilight had fixed the problem, only to fall silent when the dejected alicorn held up her forehoof.

Flabbergasted, Rarity stammered, "Wh-wha-what were you, what were you thinking?"

"That it was a chance to learn from a legendary magical unicorn and ... impress Princess Celestia. I was greedy for knowledge and approval. Nothing I say or do can mitigate my actions." Twilight's voice was almost gone. "I'm sorry."

Another lengthy silence settled on the group as they tried to process Twilight's reckless folly, staring aghast into space and slowly shaking their heads.

Fluttershy had not uttered a sound since Twilight's confession. She fixed the centre of their table with a tense, brooding frown for a few minutes, before turning coolly towards the new princess. "Punch?"

"Sure." Twilight smiled weakly, then yelped in pain and surprise as she sustained a sharp shoulder jab from Fluttershy's forehoof that almost toppled her.

"Don't ever do that again!" Fluttershy snapped in a burst of fury.

Massaging her sore shoulder, Twilight grimaced in dismay as the outburst brought home to her the suffering she had caused.

Fluttershy fumed at her for a moment, then shrank back and began shifting her eyes around nervously. "Um, Y-Your Highness," she whimpered.

A round of gentle chuckling broke the tension.

Rarity leaned confidentially towards Fluttershy and spoke with fake apprehension. "I'm not entirely sure, darling, but I think you might just have committed high treason".

"Off with her head," growled Pinkie Pie, before retracting her own head inside her body, mumbling a string of incomprehensible words and finally sitting firmly down on her haunches so as to pop her head noisily back out.

Fluttershy turned ashen. "Ohh, I'm so sorry."

Twilight felt brave enough to venture a joke. "Hey, this is my grovelling apology, Fluttershy. Stop stealing my spotlight."

"I'm sorry," Fluttershy repeated unthinkingly, to more laughter.

"So you guys aren't mad?" Twilight asked with hesitant hope.

"Well ah kinda am," Applejack admitted, "but yew did work things out in the end, Twi. It's what we all gotta do from time to time."

"And ... and what if I hadn't worked things out?"

"What if the moon were made of durian-flavoured ice cream, silly?" asked Pinkie Pie. "Let's just deal with what did happen. Now enough Gloomy Gus talk. This is a coronation party!"

Fluttershy passed Twilight a cup of actual punch, which the new princess accepted, overwhelmed with gratitude. The celebration of Twilight's ascendancy, and of the group's indestructible friendship that had made it possible, began anew.

* * *

"It's gone."

Twilight's friends gaped at her, as if unable to process the confirmation of their worst fears.

"There's no spark," her muted monotone continued, "no residue, no trace. There's nothing. It really is gone".

"'Gone'?" Spike exploded, rushing towards his mistress and best friend. "It can't just be gone. How can it be gone?"

"I don't know what else to tell you, Spike," Twilight murmured. "I can't generate any feelings of love."

"But you can't stay like that!" Spike turned to Cadance and gazed pleadingly up into her streaming eyes. "Princess Cadance, do something!"

"I'm sorry Spike." So distraught was Cadance that there was literally nothing else she could say at that point.

Spike wrapped his forelegs tightly around Cadance's front cannon and shook it with the untempered desperation of a bereaved child. "Please. You've gotta fix Twilight. You've gotta fix her. Please. Whoa!"

A powerful yet intangible force yanked him from the limb and dashed him flat onto his back, his hind legs in the air. Sitting dazedly up, he looked across to see Twilight glowering at him.

"Enough," she scolded. "This isn't Cadance's fault, Spike. Stop tormenting her."

His grief now compounded with guilt, Spike inexorably joined the chorus of quiet sniffing emanating from various quarters of the room. "Sorry Princess Cadance, I didn't mean to ... torment her?" His reptilian eyes widening, Spike leapt to his feet and again rushed towards Twilight, this time in excitement. "Why would you tell me to stop tormenting Princess Cadance unless you still cared about her on some level? Huh? I knew it! I knew there had to be some love still left in you."

Thinking it worth a try, Twilight looked deeply into the eyes of the pony who had brought such joy to her fillyhood, and was now bringing even more joy to her beloved brother. She tried to absorb Cadance's despair and hurt, to trigger some emotion buried within herself.

It was no use. "It just seemed wrong to me. I'd feel the same no matter whom you were upsetting."

"Agape," Cadance said quietly.

"What's a 'gah pay'?" asked Spike in morose confusion.

"Agape means love for ponykind as a whole. A sense of justice, duty, right and wrong. It looks like that's what the changelings have left you, Twilight. It's the most important kind of love there is and I can magnify it all you want, but ... I can't convert it into affection."

"So that's it," rejoined Twilight in a soft, bitter voice. "This is my new destiny. A heartless monster."

At these words Rarity removed her anguished face from Rainbow Dash's shoulder and protested tearily, "You're not a monster, Twilight".

"Oh? What would you call something that looked like a pony, walked like a pony, talked like a pony but could never feel affection for any other ponies?" Twilight glanced despondently back at her right wing. "I'll tell you what you can't call her: the Princess of Friendship. It's like you said, Rarity. My love for my friends and family has been with me every step of my journey. I'd be nowhere without those feelings. Without my friends. And that's where I am now."

"What do you mean?" exclaimed Pinkie Pie. "We're still your friends."

"But I can't be a friend to you. You don't mean anything to me."

"Maybe not," replied Fluttershy, keeping her voice steady despite the rivulets flowing down her cheeks, "but you mean more than anything to us".

"Darn straight," added Applejack. "And ah'll be hornswoggled if ah see yew kicked to the compost like a melon rind, just 'cause those dirty changelings took all yer sweet stuff. A pony ain't a piece o' fruit, Twi."

"This pony feels more like a vegetable." Twilight sighed heavily. Could she really maintain friendships with ponies she could never love? It seemed impossible to her. "Look, let me go, okay? I'll be fine. I still have my books and my magic. And I can still help fix any trouble Ponyville might have, if what Cadance says about this 'agape' is true. But don't put yourselves through the heartache of pretending that what's left of me can be your friend. Remember me the way I was instead."

"We do remember you the way you were, Twilight," sobbed Rainbow Dash. "That's why we'd never let you go as long as you live."

As Spike hugged Twilight's lower foreleg, the other ponies in the room drew wordlessly around Twilight in a communal expression of undying adoration. Twilight looked at her friends, one by one, absorbing the expressions in their eyes — pain and determination born out of their abiding love of her.

"As you wish."

14. Tears in Tartarus

The glittering, blue-green orb glided silently through the dank air, a rare vision of colour and beauty in the desolate environs of Tartarus. It was as if some pony in power had graciously allowed a Hearth's Warming ornament to lift the spirits of the prisoners to some degree.

Yet no Equestrian authority even considered any such desire. Not that any of the Tartarean inmates had sufficient regard for pony aesthetics, much less tradition, to make such a gesture meaningful. As the sphere drifted overhead, they directed a cacophony of curses, imprecations and unintelligible howls of rage at it.

After a few minutes Princess Cadance, magically generating the protective sphere from within, neared her destination. Queen Spinnerette lay curled in a ball, chained fast to the ground. Her heavy bonds looped around and through the perforations in her legs, preventing her from transmogrifying into a limbless form. Her neck was manacled so as to keep her from aiming her horn at any approaching pony, on the off chance she should regain the strength to generate a harmful energy beam. Her chitinous exterior, glossy and black when healthy, was tinted grey, and her formerly blazing green eyes were pallid and conveyed a sullen inner emptiness.

Aware of Cadance's presence, Spinnerette turned weakly to face her. "Another visit from royalty," she croaked. "To what do I owe this honour?"

"I'm afraid I have some very bad news for you." Cadance raised her voice to make herself heard through her forcefield but she still sounded as sombre as her appearance suggested.

"You are unable to attend my housewarming function?" Spinnerette's defiance was all she had to help her tolerate her lonely, interminable incarceration. That, and the hope that her changelings were growing strong on the bountiful food source she had found for them.

"My husband, Prince Shining Armor, and I have cast our love wave in Ponyville. Your entire changeling brood has been ejected from Equestria."

Spinnerette flinched away, her eyes shut tight. She could not say that this came as a total surprise. Her warning to the princesses about the disastrous side-effect of the love wave could not be specific, otherwise the ponies would have immediately excised her undeveloped nymphs from her chosen host and disposed of them. Any fear and worry she sowed among the ponies gave her brood their only chance, but it was remote.

Yet the realisation that her final defeat was upon her struck her to her core. She had taken such pains to ensure that they would have a continuous supply of love to sustain them. Now she had no idea where they were or whether there was food for them. The queen pined for about a minute, silent save for an occasional sharp intake of breath, before another thought occurred to her. "You are Shining Armor's wife?"

"Correct."

"What news, then of your sister-in-law, who so graciously offered to act as surrogate mother to my dear changelings? Twilight ... Twinkle, was it?"

"Sparkle. And your dire predictions didn't quite come to pass. She survived."

Survived. That did not exactly sound like the optimal outcome from the ponies' perspective. Perhaps she had been badly injured, never to recover. Or perhaps ...

"Your Highness, it's so hard to keep track of time in this dreadful place. Pray tell me, how long have I been imprisoned here?" Spinnerette implored, trying to sound feeble and helpless, which wasn't difficult given her physical and emotional state.

Cadance thought for a moment. "Ten, eleven days."

Spinnerette grew excited. "That's well past my brood's incubation period. And you're only just telling me now?" Her dull eyes gained a hint of a malicious gleam. "Did my little ones leave your sister-in-law feeling a little ... empty?"

Cadance wanted to leave without answering but felt that very action would provide the answer. She could not give Spinnerette any sense of victory. Instead, she tried to stifle her rage and sorrow.

As a changeling, Spinnerette's survival depended on deception and on discerning the feelings of her prey; she immediately picked up on Cadance's cues. To confirm her suspicions, she transformed her head to that of Twilight Sparkle, her expression neutral and hollow. The guise had its desired effect: Cadance trembled noticeably.

Spinnerette chuckled in Twilight's voice. "They took it all, didn't they?" The coldness emanating from the changeling made her seem even more like the Twilight that Cadance had last seen in Ponyville. This effect compounded Cadance's distress, feeding Spinnerette's schadenfreude even more. "Oh, what are you so upset about? You have my brother, after all. You can love him forever." The fake Twilight's demeanour turned morose. "I'll never have what you have. I'll spend the rest of my days in that big castle, feeling completely alone, never again to experience friendship or romance or family love ..."

Determined to resist Spinnerette's taunting, Cadance remembered the promise she made to Twilight, to stand by her and treat her with as much love as she ever had. She stoked the fierce love she felt for her sister-in-law, warming herself in the flames engulfing her.

"Twilight will always have us," she told the impostor. "She means more to us than you can imagine."

"Really?" Twilight-Spinnerette goaded.

"Yes, really. Your brood might have taken Twilight's love, but our love for Twilight is as strong as ever. Nothing can ever diminish that."

"Not even the futility of wasting your affection on that hollowed-out husk of a pony?"

"Not even that."

Cadance caught herself with a start. Twilight was not a hollowed-out husk, and showing love to her would be neither futile nor wasted. How could she even think such a thing, let alone articulate it?

The answer was literally staring her in the face, feigning deep hurt at Cadance's words.

Cadance instantly cleared her mind of all thoughts of Twilight, silently cursing herself for a fool as Twilight-Spinnerette burst into scornful laughter. The ravenous changeling queen had deliberately fueled Cadance's love so as to consume it, and Cadance had played right into her hooves. Her forcefield was no defence: love could transcend any barrier. Cadance could replenish her love easily enough but that would do nothing to offset the triumph of the queen, who was meant to be in a permanent state of misery and torment.

"Mmm, delicious," Twilight-Spinnerette enthused. Her eyes were now alight, and her body looked fractionally less weak. "You'd better watch Shining Armor doesn't get jealous. What a rich, deep source of adoration you have for me. Too bad I will never reciprocate that love." She laughed and laughed. It was the first moment of pure joy she had felt since her imprisonment and she exploited it for all it was worth.

Cadance shook with rage. Spinnerette, now restored to her full changeling appearance, saw this reaction and laughed even harder, until tears began to form in her eyes. As she bathed in her small but precious victory, the tears became a steady flow, until she had to bury her face in the cold, hard ground, her body quivering.

"My babies."

Changeling love was vastly different from pony love. Changelings felt no eros nor phileo; that was for lesser creatures. Yet their urge to reproduce was not entirely cold instinct, either. Deep within the psyche of a changeling queen was a tiny kernel of storge, a hint of caring about her brood, a consideration of them as more than just gene-carrying minions but ... family.

Princess Cadance had found that kernel.

Spinnerette's transition from laughter to mourning was so seamless that she herself didn't notice it at first. Her brood needed her and there was nothing she could do. As her rudimentary love amplified to levels unknown to changelings, her sense of loss and helplessness inflated and burgeoned within her, crowding out her vengeful defiance and utterly overwhelming her.

Through her blurred eyes she saw Cadance, gazing impassively at her. The image ignited an irresistible urge to take out her terrible grief on her captor. Spinnerette lunged and thrashed wildly but impotently against her bonds and shrieked a lengthy torrent of changeling obscenities that would have been barely intelligible even to another changeling.

Cadance contemplated giving her prisoner an additional love magnification to clear away her furious hatred, but saw that she needed not bother. Spinnerette's tantrum quickly exhausted her, despite the energy she had gained from her stolen meal, and she collapsed, wailing abjectly.

"My babies."

Cadance firmly believed in treating others the way she would want them to treat her. For example, if she were gloat mercilessly over the misfortunes of an enemy, she would expect to be repaid in kind given the chance. It would be what she deserved, after all. So she had no compunction at all about subjecting the changeling queen to a fraction of the cruelty that the queen had inflicted upon Twilight and her former loved ones.

As Cadance ascended to leave Tartarus, the sounds of Spinnerette's grief began mingling discordantly with the howls of fury and frustration emanating from her wretched neighbours.

15. If you love somepony set them free

It was three days after the routing of the changelings before Princess Celestia resumed her royal duties. She had wanted to discharge herself earlier from the Imperial Hospital but her attending physician strongly advised against it. Celestia thought it better to show that she trusted his professional judgement, as well as Princess Luna's capacity to rule in her stead.

Among her first orders of business was to make Equestria less vulnerable to future attacks. The realisation that Luna's assistance might be needed as urgently as Celestia's meant that Spike's fiery breath required further enhancement to enable him to send instantaneous messages to Luna and Cadance as well. Shining Armor also requested Celestia's tutelage to help modify the barrier spell that he and Cadance cast over the Crystal Empire; if it could allow energy bolts to pass through from the inside, it would greatly reduce the need for ponies to battle powerful, outsized invaders while relatively unprotected. After significant writing, testing and refinement, Celestia conjured a suitable spell that she taught to the Crystal Empire's rulers. The spell required considerable power and focus, and Shining and Cadance practised diligently.

* * *

"So I warned him, in my inimitable gentle-yet-menacing voice, of what the consequences could be if he went blabbing to his dragon friends about the Crystal Empire. And Snookie Boo's standing there, holding out what's left of his jewel hoard, and he says to me, 'Brohh, I got mugged by a bunch of ponies and turned into a puppet. You think I'm breathing a word of this, you're crazier than you look'."

Discord's rasping, slack-jawed rendition of the dragon's voice elicited a round of chuckling from the ponies gathered at the Friendship Castle dining table. Twilight Sparkle finished laughing a beat after her friends, leading to a somewhat awkward silence.

"Well, you sure told him," Twilight spoke at last. "I wish I could have been there but I was a little preoccupied with getting my stomach ripped open and ... the rest." Her very slightly forced cheeriness petered out at the memory, and she turned to her side. In so doing she caught sight of her cape.

It looked identical to the abstract fractal cape that Discord had briefly clothed her in at the railway station weeks earlier. This one, however, did not disappear a few seconds after the draconequus had conjured it. It was permanent, a gift. The sight quickly prompted Twilight to perk herself up. "Oh, Discord, have I told you how grateful I am for this beautiful cape you gave me?"

"Several times, but feel free to do so again," Discord grinned, regally waving his talon.

"Certainly. It's exactly the sort of design I would have loved. You know, before ... um ... who's ready for dessert?"

Applejack, full from the four courses she had already consumed, began to convey her desire to wait a spell before consuming anything else. Yet she had barely drawled out one syllable before Twilight brightly and somewhat hastily chirped, "Great, I planned the recipe very carefully and I can't wait for you all to enjoy it."

"I'll get it." Spike hopped up from his chair.

"No, no, no," Twilight hurried, her pleasant smile broadening marginally into the realm of the unnerving. "It's fine, I've got it." She pushed her chair back noisily and simultaneously turned to leave. Her inability to co-ordinate the two actions causing her to stumble and fall flat on her muzzle. "Oof." Picking herself up with a slightly-too-hysterical laugh, Twilight cantered towards the kitchen, leaving her friends to exchange pensive looks.

* * *

"They were close to real smiles. Really close," Pinkie Pie said sorrowfully. "But there's still nothing behind them."

Twilight's horribly strained dinner party had ground to its conclusion. Her guests had said their goodbyes and were now gathered outside the castle, conducting a post-mortem.

"I got the sense she desperately needed to be with us yet at the same time, couldn't wait to get rid of us," added Rarity.

"Every time I've been with her, she's been the same." Applejack's sombre comment elicited a round of unhappy agreement from the other ponies.

Fluttershy sniffed. "Poor Twilight. She's trying so hard to act like everything's back the way it was. But I don't think it ever will be. It's been weeks now."

Rainbow Dash was determined to buck up her friends' resolve, as well as her own. "We just have to keep at it, guys. Show Twilight we'll stick by her no matter what."

"That's the spirit." Discord's voice bore a marginal overflow of cheery enthusiasm that betrayed his cynicism. "Yes, Twilight will never feel love again for the rest of her life but at least you can feel good about yourselves, knowing that you are still prepared to tolerate her presence in your lives."

"How dare you?" thundered Rarity. "If we could restore Twilight's love we'd do so in a heartbeat but there's no way we can."

"No way at all? Are you quite certain of that?"

The ponies stared intently at the draconequus. "Got somethin' in mind, Discord?" asked Applejack.

"Well, at the moment it's just a hypothesis——."

"Come on, what is it?" the ponies urged.

"It will be extremely difficult for all concerned ——."

"We don't care, tell us," they clamoured.

"And there's no guarantee it will work ——."

By now the ponies were practically falling over themselves. "Just tell us."

"Very well." Taking a few seconds to compose himself, Discord began. "If I could point to the one moment when I truly realised how much I cared about your friendship, it was when Tirek betrayed me. After I had betrayed all of you to him, just so I could go back to doing whatever I wanted. I resigned myself to never experiencing your friendship again.

"Right then, in the depths of my despair, there was not a single thing I would not have given to have you all back as my friends."

"Um, that's a beautiful story, Discord," said Fluttershy, "but I'm not sure how it helps us."

"Don't you see?" Discord broke into an eager smile. "My need for your friendship rekindled because I thought I had lost it for good. So, if we could convince Twilight that we weren't her friends anym——."

"OH-kay, gonna have to stop you there, Psych Ward." Rainbow Dash shot up to Discord's head and planted her forehoof over his fanged muzzle. "I mean, props for thinking outside the paddock and all but Twilight needs us now more than ever, so whatever nutsy break-her-heart-to-save-her scheme you're cooking up will just have to wait until never, got it?"

"Letting Twilight think we are no longer her friends certainly does seem to be an extreme measure," added Rarity. "Although I agree, nothing makes you appreciate your friends like thinking you've lost them. Remember Fashion Week in Manehattan? You worked so hard to help me out of a tight spot, and I behaved abominably towards you."

"You behaved abominably?" exclaimed Fluttershy. "What about me after my 'assertiveness' training, which turned into me just throwing my weight around and attacking everypony for no good reason, even my friends who were just looking out for me?" Bitterly, she recalled one of the slogans from the workshop she had attended. "'Don't be shy, look them in the eye.' I didn't think I'd be able to look any of you in the eye again."

"Shewt, ah was so scared to face y'all after the Canterlot rodeo, when ah thought ah'd let y'all down, ah up 'n' left Ponyville fer good. Cherry Jubilee was a nice pony to work for an' all but it just weren't the same. Ah'd a' done anything to have mah friends back." Applejack hung her head. "Anything 'cept admit the truth."

Rarity pondered for a moment. "Perhaps we do need to change our approach. After all, if there's even the slightest chance of this working ..."

"We couldn't call ourselves Twilight's friends if we didn't try whatever we could to fix her," concurred Applejack.

Fluttershy started to consider the idea seriously as well. "Discord's right, it's going to be so hard. But doing the right thing isn't always easy."

"Am I the only pony around here who hasn't completely LOST HER MIIIND!?!"

The others turned in shock to the flabbergasted Pinkie Pie.

"I know what it's like to think I've lost my friends too, you know. Remember when I invited you all to Gummy's after-birthday party and you all made excuses for not coming?"

"Hold it right there," interrupted Discord, brandishing a clutch of assorted 'Stop' and 'No Entry' road signs. "You planned an after-birthday party? As in, another party straight after a birthday party? For your pet alligator? And you didn't invite me?"

"Oh, no no no no no, this was back before we'd met you, when you were still encased in stone." Pinkie gave Discord a placatory, reassuring smile before resuming her enraged screed.

"I didn't know you'd already planned a party for me for the same day. I thought you were all shunning me because you didn't like me or my parties anymore, and I had no idea what I'd done to deserve it." She fell silent for a moment, controlling her breathing so as to prevent herself from weeping at the memory. "I hated you. There, I said it. I hated you all and I didn't care if I never saw any of you ever again. And if we pull a stunt like this on Twilight, she could wind up feeling the same way about us. Is that what you want?"

"It don't matter what we want," Applejack pointed out. "This is about what Twilight needs."

"And you think Twilight needs to feel rejected and betrayed and totally alone? To hate and resent her closest friends?"

"If the only alternative is having Twilight feel nothing at all towards us," Fluttershy thought carefully before continuing, "yes".

Pinkie's lower jaw dropped in astonishment, before she slowly drew it back up into a clenched snarl. "Fine. Go ahead. Play your sneaky little mind games. I'll have no part of it. Hmph." She turned to face away from her friends.

"Me neither." Rainbow Dash flew to the pink pony and hovered beside her, forelimbs stubbornly folded and back turned to the others. "I said I'd stick by Twilight no matter what and that's just what I'm gonna do."

"But this won't work if we aren't all in it together," protested Applejack.

Rainbow Dash did not look around. "That's your problem, quitter."

"'Quitter'?" Applejack felt her temperature rising. She prided herself on her determination to see matters through; there could be few greater slurs to her honour than to accuse her of piking out.

"Wait, did I say 'quitter'? I meant 'traitor'."

That was one such slur. "Don't make me come over there," Applejack growled quietly.

That got Rainbow's attention. She glared back over her shoulder, then planted her four hooves firmly on the ground and faced the orange earth pony unflinchingly, ears pinned back and hindquarters swaying. "You and what army?"

Before Applejack could respond, Discord snapped his lion's-paw digits. Instantly, a platoon of Applejack-lookalike ponies materialised into view, all wielding spears and wearing military helmets and body armour.

"Oh, real cute." Rainbow let loose a dismissive snort. "An army of traitors. Give me one loyal friend at my shoulder any day." She stretched across with her foreleg and drew Pinkie Pie close to her side, a second later spinning her around so that they both faced the same direction.

"Stop this at once." Rarity galloped into the middle of the confrontation. "Just because we disagree on the best way to help Twilight doesn't mean anypony is giving up on her. We all have the best of intentions."

Rainbow Dash scoffed, "You know where you can put your best intentions".

"Quite: into practice," retorted Rarity archly.

"Whatever," squawked Pinkie Pie. "Rainbow and I are not helping."

"You can say that again," sneered Discord.

Rainbow Dash rounded on him. "You should talk! This whole fight started because of your crazy idea."

"How do you know Discord's idea is crazy?" scolded Fluttershy. "You didn't even let him finish explaining it."

"Make like we aren't Twilights friends?" rasped Rainbow Dash. "I heard enough!"

And so it went. The argument quickly escalated, the participants yelling more and more insistently over the top of each other. In time, the cacophony began to reverberate and echo, becoming too deafening for them to continue. They gradually subsided, whereupon they realised why their arguing had become so loud.

They were no longer outside. They were in the Friendship Castle hallway.

So intent had they been in their heated disagreement, they had not noticed TWilight Sparkle materialising in their midst and magically transporting them back inside the castle.

Including the platoon of Applejack clones, whom Discord hurriedly dismissed from his current plane of existence with a snap of his digits.

The alicorn princess was now regarding her friends with cocked head and raised eyebrow, her expression one of calm disapproval.

"Problem?"

16. Princess of disharmony

"Oh, no, no."

"No problem at all."

"We, we were just ... "

"Everything's fine."

"It's nothing."

"Yeah, nothing."

"Nothing."

As the hurried, stammering, overlapping denials petered to an end, Twilight Sparkle steadily cast her skeptical eye over her embarrassed friends, giving particular attention to the two ponies who were conveying the least amount of conviction: guileless Applejack and timid Fluttershy.

"Nothing, huh?" she replied at last. "Well, next time nothing is troubling you, do you think maybe you can resolve it a little more peaceably? I just received a message from the Crystal Empire. They're complaining about the noise."

Frowning in bewilderment, Pinkie Pie opened her mouth to voice her many questions regarding the feasibility of Twilight's assertion. Rainbow Dash jolted the pink pony with her forehoof and shook her head as a signal to let it go.

"You're the ponies who taught me about friendship," Twilight continued. "I expect you — no, I need you — to set an example, especially with me in this condition. Not have screaming matches out in the street like a bunch of schoolfillies. Is this how it's going to be from now on? Are you just going to fall apart without me?"

The questions were rhetorical, of course, but the thought of such a situation coming to pass hit Twilight close to home. She proceeded in a gentler tone. "Is there anything I can help with?"

Her friends looked uncertainly at one another. They hardly wanted to let Twilight know that they had been arguing about whether to ostracise her in an effort to reawaken her capacity for love. Understandably, Twilight misinterpreted her friends' body language. "I haven't forgotten the friendship lessons I've learned, you know."

"No, no, we know," they replied.

"So why were you fighting?"

Her friends winced and glanced around, conflicted. Twilight quickly surmised that they were keeping something from her. Somehow, she doubted that the source of such a raucous fight was in the nature of a surprise party.

"You aren't falling apart without me," she murmured, crestfallen. "You're falling apart because of me, aren't you?"

Applejack blurted, "It ain't yer fault, Twi".

"I never said it was," yelled Twilight, before taking a couple of deep breaths to calm down. "Nevertheless, you're not denying that I am the cause of the friction among you. I warned you. I knew this ... this charade would never work."

"Don't say that, Twilight," cried Rainbow Dash. "We can still make it work. So we're going through a rough patch. What friends don't? We all just need some time to adjust. In the meantime, we're gonna do all we can to make you feel like our friend."

"But, you aren't.

"You've been inviting me to do all the kinds of things we did together as friends. Parties, picnics, makeovers, flights. Things I loved doing with you because I was doing them with my best friends.

"Now I'm just ... doing them. With a bunch of ponies I know. I'm not enjoying your company. I'm enduring it, just as you're enduring mine. Don't deny it, I'm not totally oblivious. Every moment I spend with you just reminds me that I don't care about any of you anymore."

"Then why did you invite us all to your dinner party?" a dismayed Rarity asked.

Twilight drew to her full quadrupedal height. "Because that's what friends do. You all invited me to join in with your fun, so I had an obligation to do the same for you. Except this evening wasn't fun for me at all. I felt like a-a-a waitress, sitting at her customers' table. A gatecrasher at my own party. Only without the possibility of at least making friends.

"Don't take this the wrong way. This isn't a reflection on any of you. It's all because of those ..." Twilight grew tense, breathing heavily through her flaring nostrils and stamping the floor with increasing tempo and force at the thought of the changelings who had ruined her. She spat out a staccato string of incoherent word fragments before emitting an exasperated sigh, deepening into a groan that in turn rose exponentially in pitch and volume into a lengthy scream of helpless fury and anguish. When it was over, she stood panting before her sorrowful friends.

Yet she did not cry. She was sick of crying. More to the point, she knew that if she cried her friends would try to comfort her, which would only serve to make her feel completely awkward, so she would shoo them away, and that would hurt their feelings even though they'd probably deny it.

Finally, she looked up at her friends. "Maybe I should take a step back from you all for a while."

Her friends turned to one another in consternation. A step back. That was on a one-way downhill road to "let's just be friends". Or in this case, "let's just not be friends". Pretending to unfriend Twilight would have been painful enough. Now she was asking them to leave her alone.

"How long is 'a while'?" asked Rainbow Dash uneasily.

"Until I feel ready to socialise with you again."

Timidly, Pinkie Pie voiced the collective question in her friends' minds: "But what, what if you ... never feel that way?"

Twilight shrugged.

There was a moment of silence as Twilight's friends achingly contemplated this proposition.

Eventually, Discord cleared his throat and guiltily scratched his crest. "You may as well know, Twilight, you are not the first to suggest that such a course of action might help you somehow."

Rainbow grimaced. "Yeah, that was pretty much what we were fighting about."

Twilight managed a weak smile. "Desperate minds think alike, huh? Look, I'm not planning on becoming a recluse. Any time you need my help organising, solving a friendship problem, driving a dangerous runaway creature back into the Everfree Forest, anything like that, I'm only too willing. But as far as quality time is concerned, it can't be done. Not with the way I feel. I mean, the way I don't feel."

"What about me, Twilight?"

Twilight looked down in surprise at Spike, who had wandered in to see what the ponies were talking about. He was standing by her lower hind leg, his eyes huge and imploring. "Are you gonna 'take a step back' from me too?"

Twilight soughed. Another innocent casualty of those good-for-nothing changelings. "Spike, my home is your home, and it will be for as long as you want. And I will always be grateful to have you as my assistant. But for the time being, I'm afraid that's all our relationship will amount to."

"And you're sure this is what you want?" asked Fluttershy.

"Of course it isn't what I want." Again, Twilight had to pause and breathe deeply to quench her own anger. "What I want is for us all to be the best of friends like we were before. But we can't always have what we want. I'm just trying to think of ways to make my situation a little more bearable."

"I'm so sorry, Twilight," choked Fluttershy.

"I'm sorry too," added Rarity. "If we had the faintest idea we were only making you feel worse——."

Twilight held up her forehoof. "No need to apologise. We're all dealing with something new here."

Pinkie Pie began sobbing. "Then I guess ... this is ... goodbye."

Weeping like a widow on the inside, Applejack wiped her misting eyes on her foreleg. "Sure gonna miss yew, Twi."

Discord fought hard to contain his emotions. Ever since Fluttershy had introduced him to the magic of friendship, of all her circle of friends, Twilight Sparkle had taken the longest to warm to him. Everything had to be logical and straightforward with her, everything in the right place at the right time, planned meticulously to the last detail. As a spirit of spontaneity and disorder, his very being was anathema to her approach to life. Yet even they shared some common ground, particularly their mutual love of magic. It seemed to him that they were just now making some genuine connection, only for that friendship to be snatched away, possibly never to return. "Until next time." He gulped heavily. "Chaos-buddy."

The ponies wanted to rush forward and give Twilight one long, tight embrace. Yet they sensed this would only make the princess more uncomfortable, so they refrained out of respect. Slowly, they turned to leave.

"Twilight?"

The speaker was Rainbow Dash, who had turned back in mid-air to face the princess. The other friends halted their departure to listen.

"I just want you to know that I will never give up on you. No matter how long it takes you to come back, my door is always open."

"Mine too," added Fluttershy emphatically. The other friends firmly conveyed the same sentiment.

Twilight Sparkle nodded with a slight, wry smile. "I know." She turned and headed glumly towards the castle library, Spike trudging alongside her, while the others filed towards the front door, each looking back to get one last, sad glimpse of their dear friend.

* * *

After a few steps Twilight paused, thinking.

"Twilight?" inquired Spike.

"I know."

"Huh? I didn't tell you anything. I was gonna ask why you'd stopped."

"I know."

Silence.

"Ssooo, why have you stopped?"

"I know."

"But I don't know. That's why I'm asking."

Twilight seized Spike in her forelimbs and launched herself joyously into the air. "I know!"

Spike's thrill at realising Twilight was exuding honest joy for the first time in weeks was only slightly dampened by the alicorn's sudden dematerialisation, which left the poor dragon to plummet unceremoniously to the floor. Thankfully, the scales of even his underbelly were highly impervious to such an impact.

Before Spike reached the floor, Twilight reappeared in a burst of magical energy in front of her startled friends and began stotting exuberantly in a circle around them. "I know! I know I know I know I know I know I know I know."

There it was. The uninhibited, adorable glee that the normally subdued academic would unleash upon discovering some arcane knowledge or solving some intractable problem. After the stilted, forced happiness she had been displaying recently, her newfound bliss was as a cool, fresh spring erupting in a desert.

"Twilight, what do you know?" Rainbow Dash broke in excitedly. "I mean, besides a bajillion magic spells and the entire history of Equestria?"

"That you'll never give up on me. That's why I couldn't generate the spark until now. I'd been thinking of all the love you've shown me over the years, your contrition, your forgiveness, how glad you all were just to know me and be with me. But that was the old me. What about the post-changeling me? The me who couldn't love you back, who might never love you back? The me who couldn't even bear to keep your company? You still love that me and you'd still do anything for that me, no matter how much it hurt you. And I know it. With all my heart, I know it."

"Well, sure, but we told you that from the beginning," Applejack pointed out.

"Oh you told me, all right," replied Twilight. "But deep down I didn't really believe it. I had no love for you at the time, meaning I had no trust. And you didn't know what an emotional burden I'd be on you, either. Now I've experienced for myself just what you're prepared to put up with from me. All because you consider me your friend."

Twilight's friends felt their hearts overflowing. Her spark was back for sure. They converged on her but she held up her forehooves to stop.

"No time for hugs. It's still only a spark. Off to the Crystal Empire for a full recharge. Spike, can you please send Princess Cadance a message letting her know we're——?" Twilight stopped short at the sound of a burst of flame. She looked over to see a swirl of glittering particles that had once been a scroll, gliding through an open castle window.

Spike, clutching an ink-tipped quill, grinned smugly at Twilight. "On our way?"

"You're the best, Spike. Now where are my timetables? The trains should be back running to the Crystal Empire by now."

Discord chuckled. "Oh pish-tosh, Twilight Sparkle. Why fiddle about with signal failures and whiny passengers when you can travel in comfort and style, directly to the Empire, via Discorde Air?" Suddenly clad in a pilot's uniform, he struck a proud pose and summoned a stirring fanfare.

The others just looked at him.

"What? Obviously you all get to ride together first class this time."

"You mean actually inside the airship's gondola rather than strapped to the balloon envelope?" Rarity asked tartly. "What a rare privilege."

"Precisely. And I promise not to drop any of you into a mud pit." Discord smirked at Twilight. "Provided there are no more piercing shrieks of rage."

Twilight gave Discord a warm smile, before her lips, her eyes, her entire body started quivering uncontrollably. "Is ... crying allowed?"

Discord made an excessive show of being inconvenienced. "Fine, I suppose. As long as you don't set me off. It's dreadfully hard to navigate when your eyes are all blurry with tears." He extended his forelimbs so that they encircled Twilight and her lifelong friends, and drew them together in a snug embrace. "No time for hugs, my cloven hoof." With a snap of the prehensile fibres at the tip of Discord's tail, the eight creatures vanished from the castle, to reappear in an open field suitable for Discord's airship self-transmogrification.

Or possibly at the Crystal Empire itself. Discord still needed a few milliseconds to decide.

THE END

6. Tetchy beast

"If only I'd talked with you all before now. I could have figured out what was wrong in time to deal with it. Oh, but of course I didn't want to talk with any of you, did I? In the end, I didn't want anything to do with you. That's what makes the whole thing so insidious.

"It started with little things. Like when we got that message about the siege at the Crystal Empire. You were all hoping the crystal ponies and Shining Armor and everypony else would be all right, and my only thought was, oh great, now we have to deal with the changelings on our own. I figured it was just shock. Then it happened more often, these little lapses in empathy, and I thought it was just stress bringing my old antisocial self out again and I was too embarrassed to talk about it anyway. By the time I realised it wasn't stress, I didn't care enough to do anything about it.

"Now look at me. A changeling, or possibly even more than one, has drained so much love from me that I hardly care about my best friends and I don't have a clue how those monsters are getting under my guard. A fat lot of good my pretty little speech at the town hall did me."

As Twilight summarised her experiences over the last few days her flat, morose tone punctured her friends' hearts more deeply than a river of tears. Yet they were not about to let this development get the best of them, especially not with their friend in trouble.

"We ain't licked yet, Twi," spurred Applejack. "At least we know they're targetin' yuh. We can get Princess Luna back and set to flushin' 'em out. Yew'll come up with a plan, ah know it."

Twilight shook her head. "First things first. We can't afford to wait any longer for that love wave. We need to go to the Crystal Empire and help rout that dragon ASAP."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa." Rainbow Dash flew between Twilight and the front door, and held up her forehooves in a 'stop' gesture. "Princess Celestia told us to stay here and protect Ponyville from the changelings."

"We couldn't even protect me from the changelings. That horse has bolted, Rainbow Dash. We have to escalate. Now."

Fluttershy gaped in surprise. "You'd disobey a directive from the princess?"

It was an unfortunate choice of words. Twilight narrowed her eyes at the timid pegasus. "'The princess'? 'The princess'? Need I remind you that I am a princess? Not a sub-princess, not a vice-princess, not a junior princess. A princess. And I rather think I've earned the right to exercise a little initiative, considering the number of times I've saved those other princesses' hindquarters."

Twilight's friends were staggered. True, on more than one occasion it had fallen to Twilight to rescue Equestria from dire situations while her fellow princesses were in no position to help; and, yes, even rescue said princesses themselves. Yet she had never betrayed the slightest condescension nor disrespect to any of them. Certainly not to Celestia, for whom she always had the utmost reverence. Twilight's condition was looking ever more serious.

Spike stammered, "But-but-but are you sure you're in the right frame of mind to make that kind of decision?"

Twilight pondered this question for a moment then defiantly responded, "Why not? My intellect is as sharp as ever. Maybe I can make even smarter decisions, now that my mind isn't so cluttered with sentiment." She turned towards the door, only to yelp in alarm as Pinkie Pie, who had been back with the other ponies not a second ago, suddenly appeared without warning, wearing a baleful expression, in front of her.

"Twilight, that is the craziest thing I've ever heard. And I've heard myself. A lot."

Before the annoyed alicorn could retort, Rarity marched up and firmly put in her two bits' worth. "A second ago you reminded us that you are a princess and you've saved Equestria time and again. Well, need I remind you, Princess Twilight Sparkle, that your 'sentimentality', of which you speak so derisively, has played an integral part in every step of your journey? That love wave you're so desperate to unleash? The one that defeated the changelings at Canterlot? You wouldn't even know about it had you not given Shining Armor and Cadance one last precious moment together when all hope seemed lost. What chance would you have stood against Nightmare Moon, or Discord, had you not understood the meaning and value of true friendship? What chance would you have stood against Lord Tirek, had you not shown friendship and grace towards the most undeserving wretch in all Equestria? And if it weren't for your appreciation of what our friendship means to each other, you certainly wouldn't be a princess. You'd still be holed up in your bedroom feeling sorry for yourself, while we five ground Ponyville into the dirt, trying to fulfil each others' destinies that you and your intellect had mixed up in the first place."

"All right, all right," Twilight shouted. "You've made your point. But if it's true that I can't be what I need to be without love, then it's even more crucial that I get to the Crystal Empire. Cadance is the only one who can restore my love. And she and Shining Armor are the only ones who can save Ponyville from the changelings. I've got a dragon to fight. Who's with me?"

Rainbow Dash hated leaving Ponyville behind but bringing the love wave forward did seem like the better long-term option. Also, she felt compelled to help Princess Celestia and the Crystal Empire. What was more, Twilight was still her friend even if she wasn't acting very friendly. She flew to the purple pony's side. "I'm in."

"Me too." Spike waddled determinedly to his mistress. "I don't know what I can do but whatever it is, I'll do it."

Applejack, Pinkie Pie and Rarity quickly followed suit. Twilight gave a resolute smile. "Excellent. I'll notify the mayor. The rest of you, go make your preparations and meet back here in half an hour. Make sure you don't give away too much about what's happened to me. We don't want to cause any panic."

Half an hour later, the ponies had reconvened at the Friendship Castle and Twilight had magically scanned them to ensure none of them were changelings. Yet there was still no sign of Fluttershy.

Twilight scowled impatiently. "This is ridiculous! We don't have time for delays. What could be taking her so long?"

Pinkie Pie spoke up. "Wait, did she even agree to come?"

Within minutes, the ponies were at Fluttershy's cottage. Twilight hammered at the front door. "Fluttershy, we know you're in there. You're not chickening out of this. The future of Equestria is at stake. Open this door or I'll——"

Before the princess could reveal her intentions, the door opened to reveal not Fluttershy but a brown bear, a wolverine, a billy goat and a bald eagle perched on one of the goat's large, curved horns. The creatures stared uninvitingly at the ponies, who stepped back in instinctive fear.

Except for Rainbow Dash, who took one look and zipped out of sight.

And Pinkie Pie, who broke into a broad, cheerful, ingratiating smile. "Hi, woodland critters. We're here to pick up Fluttershy. Is she ready yet?"

The bear emitted a low, aggressive rumble.

"No? That's okay, we can wait a while," replied the unfazed pink pony.

With her vast array of potent magic spells, Twilight Sparkle had dealt with more formidable creatures than these. Quickly summoning her courage, she stood directly in front of the doorway, braced herself, pointed her spiralled horn at the animals and sternly called out: "Fluttershy, call off your critters right now, or I won't be responsible for aaaaaaaaah! No! Snake! Get it away from me!" Screaming like a little filly, Twilight jumped clear onto Applejack's crest, her legs wrapped like slap bands around the bemused earth pony's face, and fearfully watched the tree snake's sinuous approach along the cottage floor to the threshold.

A noisy commotion from within the cottage interrupted the confrontation. Sounds of hooves trampling and various wooden furnishings being knocked over culminated in a piercing whistle fast approaching the ponies.

"Found her," Rainbow Dash's voice announced. Of course she had not deserted her friends: she had merely darted around the cottage until she located an unlocked, unguarded entrance. Once inside, she conducted a none-too-gentle search for Fluttershy and soon discovered the poor pony hiding under her bed. The whistling was in fact Fluttershy crying out in terror as Rainbow Dash carried her speedily through the air, back towards Friendship Castle.

Twilight telekinetically slammed the door shut and signalled for her flightless friends to gallop away. Instantly, the door burst back open and a motley menagerie of critters swarmed out of the cottage, intent on rescuing their beloved steward. A ball of white light grew from the tip of Twilight's horn and the fleeing ponies disappeared.

Without Fluttershy's guidance, the animals baulked at venturing deeply into the ponies' developed habitat to conduct a search. They returned defeatedly to the cottage to wait for her return.

* * *

"Of course I know how vital this mission is," whimpered Fluttershy, "but it's a dragon, Twilight. A dragon. I'll be nothing but a burden to you."

"Nonsense. You've acted in spite of your fear in the past."

"That doesn't mean I can do it again." Fluttershy's fear of dragons was not the wary, respectful awe that all sensible ponies held towards the gigantic predators. It was a phobia: a crippling, mind-snapping pathology as impervious to reason as a slab of concrete.

Rainbow Dash joined Twilight in her attempts to bolster Fluttershy's fragile resolve. "What if one of us gets hurt? That'll snap you out of your funk smart enough. You'll fly right up to that sucker and put him in his place, just like you've done before."

"Rainbow Dash, this dragon isn't curled up asleep in a cave. He's fighting a full-scale battle. You could get ..." A strangled sob escaped from Fluttershy's throat as she contemplated the awful possibility: "... more than just hurt. And if that happens, the only things I'll be putting in any place will be flowers on your resting place."

Rainbow Dash glided closer to the cowering Fluttershy and urged her ever harder, "Come on, Fluttershy, we need you. Equestria needs you. You have to help".

"Hold on a second there, Rainbow." Applejack stepped protectively in front of Fluttershy. "If Fluttershy doesn't think she's up to it then maybe it'd be better if she did stay behind. Keep an ah on things while we're gone."

"But we're friends," protested Pinkie Pie. "We're a team. We have to stick together."

"Not if it means coercion," Rarity pointed out.

Rainbow, Rarity and the two earth ponies promptly started arguing insistently and at length, talking over the top of each other. Fluttershy shrank down even further, looking more and more indecisive as well as ashamed for being so afraid and causing so much trouble. Twilight could see this was getting nowhere.

"QUIET!"

The bickering ponies fell silent. Doing her best to come across as firm but not intimidating, Twilight walked towards the pale yellow pegasus. "Fluttershy, whether you come with us or stay behind is entirely up to you, but we need a decision now. Which is it to be?"

"Um, well, you see, um——"

"No ums. No excuses. Just tell us if you're coming. Straight answer: yes or no."

"No."

"Horse apples. You're coming."

* * *

Shining Armor and Cadance drew their flushed, straining bodies tight together, the power of their combined mutual love converting into badly-needed reinforcement for their magical barrier. The crystal ponies desperately tried to boost their own communal will so as to power the Crystal Heart if required, which was looking increasingly likely.

The dragon was concentrating his fiery breath into a straight beam, narrow yet intensely powerful, that was in serious danger of breaching the barrier. He grew excited as he sensed the impact he was having. Unfortunately for him, this mode of firepower was particularly draining. What was more, it meant exposing his flanks and rear to the royal guards for prolonged periods. Individually, their attacks did negligible damage to his tough hide. Over time though, they became increasingly irritating, like a swarm of biting insects that he could not swat or scratch. Still, he persisted with his focused fire, determined that the barrier would break before he did.

Yet it did not. Unable to bear the bombardment of weather elements and magic energy any longer, the dragon whirled around with a bellow of impatience and flew off, scattering the ponies in his path. A little ration break and he'd soon be able to bore his way through that barrier, whatever those pony pests threw at him.

A short flight from the Crystal Empire took him to a range of tall, steep, rocky mountains, large and numerous enough to conceal even his enormous body. It was here that he kept his hoard of gemstones. The stones provided dragons with more than essential minerals and calorific energy. They cleansed, renewed and strengthened the igniferous sacs in their lungs, and replenished and reinforced damaged areas of their scales. Dragons also found them delicious, and easy to chew and digest. Small wonder that the pursuit and collection of gems formed a significant part of their lives.

Following a trail meaningful only to a dragon, the reptile picked his way through the maze of mountains until he reached the one containing his treasure. He climbed towards the cave entrance, his anticipation building, only to discover the real danger of turning his back on his adversaries. Princess Celestia—scorched, bruised, scarred and noticeably hampered in her flight—hovered directly in front of the cave entrance, her spiralled horn angled towards the interior. Two pegasus guards, also bearing visible battle trauma, flanked her. For a scout party had earlier made their way past the dragon to the mountain range, found the larder and reported its location back to Celestia.

One of the guards saw the dragon as soon as he appeared and sounded a whinnying alarm. As the three battered ponies lurched around to flee, the enraged dragon launched a house-sized fireball at them. The ponies dodged the worst of the impact but their eyes were so seared and the ferocious heat inflicted such agony that they could no longer maintain their trajectories. Surrounded on all sides by plumes of smoke and sheer walls, they careened into the mountainsides and skidded down, not stopping until they slammed onto the nearest ledges below.

The dragon gazed aghast at the sight within the cave. Only a few dozen scattered jewels remained of the once-proud hoard he had spent his youth accumulating. Celestia's de-crystallisation spell had reduced the rest to their formative particles. Twitching alarmingly and making unintelligible noises of incredulous horror and misery, the reptile repeatedly dug his fists deep into the mound of sand and soot and watched helplessly as the fine particles sifted through his digits.

Weakly, Celestia lifted her head to take in the pathetic scene. It gave her no pleasure at all to witness this mighty, majestic creature brought down to such an abject state. Yet this was far from the most drastic measure she had employed for the sake of her subjects, as even her own sister knew only too well. In any case, he was still young, by dragon standards. Better he should spend more years rebuilding his treasure than risk obliteration by the Crystal Heart.

"How do you weaken an enemy who is too strong for you?" she asked pensively, by way of explanation. "Cut off their supply lines."

Slowly, the dragon turned his contorted face towards the princess. His expression made it clear that he intended to make her pay dearly for her sabotage. Too badly injured to escape, Celestia aimed her horn, ready to dedicate every sliver of magic power she had left into debilitating the dragon as much as possible until the furious vengeance he was about to unleash finished her for good.

Farewell, dear sister. May you rule with wisdom, righteousness and compassion. Farewell Twilight Sparkle, my faithful pupil. Never stop making me proud.

* * *

Ponyville's station master tried not to stare as Fluttershy, suspended upside-down in mid-air, struggled frantically and uselessly to break free of Twilight Sparkle's telekinetic grip.

"I'm sorry, Princess Twilight. All civilian passenger rail travel to the Crystal Empire is prohibited until further notice. Orders of Princess Celestia and Princess Cadance."

Twilight grunted in frustration—she could hardly overrule two princesses—and started to walk around the station in an effort to jog her mind into devising a plan B. She happened across a poster with a diagram illustrating Equestria's railway network. She intently studied it along with the nearby timetables before returning (with the hapless Fluttershy still trailing like a kite behind her) to her other friends, whom she had teleported with her from their castle.

"Okay, we can't travel to the Crystal Empire directly. We need to change at Manehattan, take the all-stopper on the northern line to Stalliongrad and go the rest of the way under our own steam. It's not ideal but at least it gets us there."

None of her friends were impressed.

"Well whoopie-tah-yo," snorted Applejack. "Ah ain't goin' nowhere wit' yew 'til yew slow down and get a holda yerself, Twilight Sparkle. Yer outta control."

"Out of control?"

The jovial, slightly pompous, disembodied male voice caught Twilight and her friends by surprise and they cast their eyes around for the source.

"Discord?" they chorused.

8. Deep in the heart of Twilight

As Fluttershy desperately nosedived towards her falling friends it occurred to her, too late, that she had acted purely on impulse. Even if she could reach them in time, she was scarcely strong enough to carry even one pony to safety—barring an emergency-triggered adrenaline surge, and she could hardly rely on undergoing one of those. Discord could surely help her but he was nowhere to be seen. Why hadn't he followed? "Discord, I need you," she pleaded aloud. "I can't do this on my own. Please help me. Please help my friends."

Her friends' best chances of survival lay in untying Rainbow Dash. Twilight Sparkle thrust the pegasus across to Rarity, whose magic was better suited to intricate, dextrous tasks than Twilight's. However, the knots Discord had conjured were tangled, complicated messes, while the ropes themselves were of some reinforced material that stoutly resisted cutting. For safety's sake no doubt, thought Rarity darkly as she fought to loosen Rainbow's bonds in the seconds they had left.

"Hurry," begged Rainbow Dash.

"You can do it, Rarity," exhorted Spike.

"Ooh look, cotton candy," chirped Pinkie Pie.

Before the passengers could react, they struck an enormous, thick, densely packed cloud of pink spun sugar. They did not come to rest but plunged through the base of the cloud, the sticky substance merely slowing them down.

"Urgh, thanks for nothing Discorblooblmph."

Twilight's complaint had not fully emerged from her mouth when the party splashed into another floating mass: a voluminous pool of viscous, translucent, brown liquid, somehow holding its shape in mid-air. After they fell through the underside, Pinkie Pie slathered her long tongue around her chops. "Mmm, molasses."

They passed through one incongruous, edible, fluid layer after another—cake batter, honey, custard, double cream, ice cream, cookie dough, jelly, molten chocolate, caramel, peanut butter. Each layer retarded their descent, little by little, until they finally hit a boggy patch that Discord had created on the ground beneath them. They splornged into the soft mud over their heads, suffering no more pain than a high dive into a deep pool of water, before finally coming to rest. Laboriously, the ponies and Spike hauled themselves out of the quagmire and plodded, groaning and spluttering, onto dry land.

"Mud? Aww, I was so looking forward to licking us all clean," whined Pinkie Pie.

Fluttershy and Discord were waiting for them; the former looking relieved, the latter smug.

"Mares and gentledragons, our sincerest apologies for the unscheduled enforced landing. Though honestly, I don't know what Twilight was thinking. Is it not common knowledge that airships made from draconequus bodies are extremely susceptible to loud, abrasive noises?"

Applejack glared at Discord through a mask resembling a baby's art project, as her Stetson hat plopped crookedly onto her sodden head. "Of all the cheap, low-down, dirty pranks."

Discord chuckled, "'Dirty pranks'. I see what you did there."

"For future reference, Drip-cord," rasped Rainbow Dash, "'saved your life' gags got old while I was in kindergarten."

"So did you." Without looking, Discord lobbed a basketball into a nearby net, the ball not even touching the rim.

Rarity was so unnerved by the plethora of substances oozing through her hide and mane that she could hardly walk. "Eugh, getting these stains out is going to be an absolute nightmare. Could you not have furnished us with some parachutes instead?"

"Well I tried but I simply could not get the colours right."

Not surprisingly, Twilight Sparkle's anger burned more fiercely than any of them, her negative emotions continuing to burgeon in lieu of her depleted love. "Oh, you ponies don't know the half of what Discord's pulled. Spike, gimme that troll. I mean scroll." Hurriedly, Spike passed the message to Twilight, who snatched it ungratefully from his grasp and shoved it in front of Discord's eyes. "What do you have to say about this, mister?"

Discord placed a pince-nez on his muzzle and peered curiously at the parchment. "Hmm, let's see. It's a parchment, with a broken seal. It's covered in ooze. There's some writing but it's smeared to illegibility."

Whipping the parchment back to herself, Twilight gave it a cursory glance before crossly flinging it aside. "It was a message from Princess Celestia."

At once, a flood of overlapping questions poured forth from her friends.

"Is she okay?"

"What's happening?"

"Does she still need our help?"

"What about Shining Armor and Cadance?"

"Is the Crystal Empire safe?"

"Were there any casualties?"

Ignoring the tumult, Twilight stepped purposefully towards the docile draconequus, gave him her most infuriated look and screeched, "DISCORD'S ALREADY DEFEATED THE DRAGON!"

Silence fell for several awkward seconds, until Discord cautiously broke it. "You're ... welcome?"

Rainbow Dash was also looking puzzled. "Yeah, Twilight, isn't that news kind of, uh, what's the word, super fantastically amazingly awesome?"

"Yeah, great news," replied Twilight bitterly. "Swell news. Peachy news. News that he could have told us in the first place! Instead, he tied us to the outside of that blasted airship, dragged us all this way through freezing gales and then dropped us three miles down into a quagmire. Why would you do that? Oh wait, don't tell me, there's some kind of lesson about friendship in here you thought you'd teach us. You know, purely out of the goodness of your heart, not for the lulz or anything. All right then, I'm listening. Do please enlighten us as to what this whole rewarding experience is meh twmm huhhh tschm engfeh mememe..."

The alicorn's tirade petered out into embarrassed gibberish, then silence, and she began to cast her eyes around for a rock to crawl under. For after patiently enduring Twilight's rant for a few seconds, Discord had reached behind his back and produced Snookie Boo.

The toy dragon he had shown them at the railway station. The toy dragon that he had quite clearly stated was a real dragon, the same real dragon who had been besieging the Crystal Empire. Transforming the beast into a marionette was admittedly not the most obvious of strategies but, as the ponies well knew, Discord was not exactly renowned for orthodox activity, and they had seen their share of instantaneous, large-scale transmogrifications from him. To push the point home, he again suspended the puppet inches from Twilight's face, only this time his mood was anything but playful.

"Two corners of Equestria under attack, Twilight Sparkle's friends and family in grave danger, and you all assumed I was just clowning around?" Discord's pouting muzzle began elongating until it resembled an enormous python, and started coiling around the ponies. Their shame gave way to fear and they retreated towards one another, seeking safety from the reproachful face encircling them. "You know, I'm trying to wrap my head around this whole friendship business, I truly am." He disappeared, rematerialising in his more usual form. "But when it comes to how friends are meant to act, you ponies keep giving out mixed signals." Discord folded his arms and turned his back on them, only to glance coldly back a second later. "Even you doubted me, Fluttershy."

Fluttershy let out an audible whimper at Discord's voice and countenance. This was no mischievous, manipulative guilt trip. This was hurt. Genuine, profound hurt. She fluttered hesitantly up to his head. "Discord, I ... I——."

"Is this how friends behave? Expect the worst of one another? Trample the feelings we have for one another?"

"It's not how we're supposed to behave, but I can't deny we do once in a great while," Fluttershy conceded sorrowfully.

"Then remind me again what is so magic about friendship?"

"To become better than you could be without your friends, to help them do the same. But mainly because the alternative is not to have those feelings in the first place. And however much you're hurting right now, I don't think you want to go back to that. Does he, Twilight?"

Twilight shook her head. She would not wish her current emotional debilitation on anypony.

"Can you ever forgive me?" Fluttershy's plea was barely above a whisper.

Discord considered refusing. His sense of injustice was consuming him, making him feel righteous and vindicated. Yet was it worth the loss of the strange, buoyant feeling he gained from friendship? Despite his best efforts, he felt his resentment ebbing away. "I suppose you have forgiven me far greater transgressions."

Fluttershy threw her forelegs around Discord's torso and the pair hugged tight.

"Well shucks, ah reckon we all owe Discord an apology," said Applejack.

"Not to mention our gratitude for dealing so promptly with that dreadful dragon," added Rarity.

The friends all expressed their heartfelt penitence and thanks to Discord, who graciously accepted.

Almost all.

"Twilight?" prompted Fluttershy.

"Sorry, thanks," the alicorn muttered through clenched teeth.

"Now, there's no need to go overboard," huffed Discord.

Rainbow Dash agreed that Twilight's response left something to be desired, but she felt obliged to come to her defence. "Aw, cut her some slack will ya, Discord? She's lost a lot of love."

"That's no excuse."

Everyone turned in surprise to Fluttershy. As much as she hated having multiple pairs of eyes trained on her, she maintained her steady, implacable demeanour.

"I beg your pardon?" Twilight was half-indignant, half-nervous.

"You shall have it, as soon as you give a real apology to Discord. And me. And Spike. And everypony else here for the way you've been acting this past week."

"Now look Fluttershy, I——."

"You what? You don't feel like it? You think it will be too hard because you don't have much love? Well, you know what I don't have much of? Courage. Yet I have gone on one difficult, dangerous, terrifying mission after another even when it was the last thing in the world I felt like doing. I had duties, Twilight, responsibilities. Well, so do you. Not just as the Princess of Friendship but as our friend. And the Twilight Sparkle I know would stop at nothing to protect her friendships, no matter how she felt. So you are going to dig deep and find some reserve, some spark, of the emotion you need to do what you have to do. Because if I can then by Celestia, so can you."

Twilight turned away, tightly closed her eyes and began breathing deeply. She was not sulking; she was concentrating. She guided her conscious mind down, tunnelling through the pallid mass of neutrality and negativity that had swollen up and filled her soul, reaching for some memory, some image, that would trigger what was left of her love.

Picnics, no. Parties, no. Need something bigger. What about adventures? Hmm, not that one. No, that won't work either. No, been there before. No. No. No, no, no, n——.

Then she saw it. The image that triggered possibly the most momentous decision she had made. Discord, the enemy turned friend turned traitor. Discord, who renounced the magic of friendship for his own shallow, selfish desires, and had nothing to show for it but his broken, laughable, powerless body, held prisoner by the treacherous Lord Tirek. Discord, who warranted nothing but contempt and ostracism, who should have been left to spend the rest of his worthless life utterly alone.

And Twilight gave up every trace of alicorn magic in Equestria for his freedom, because he was ...

Her friend.

The princess gasped, then turned her quivering eyes to the draconequus. "Discord, I-I'm so sorry. You took it upon yourself to perform a voluntary, selfless act of heroism and valour for your friends, and I was so impatient and cynical that I never even considered you might have done such a thing. I behaved disgracefully towards you." She tracked her line of sight across her other friends. "Towards all of you. Fluttershy's right, I have no excuse. Just because I don't feel love doesn't mean I can't at least try to show love. Especially when it comes to my friends." She turned back with a warm smile and looked directly at Discord. "My true friends."

Discord's eyes lit up, forcing Twilight to shield her own eyes. "Does that mean I get my own throne at Friendship Castle?"

"Time will tell." Without warning, Twilight's face fell and she collapsed, panting with exhaustion. Her friends rushed to help her back to her hooves—which wasn't easy, given that nearly all of them were smothered in mud and assorted foodstuffs—until she found herself magically elevated to her upright position, courtesy of Discord. "I'm okay. That just took a lot out of me." Like a spent firework, the dazzling but brief flash of warmth and affection that had risen to her surface was gone.

"Well, Princess, after that heart-rending speech, I think I for one can forgive you just like that." As Discord completed his sentence, the fingerlike tufts on the tip of his tail snapped and the eight friends instantly found themselves back at Ponyville railway station—all untied, and all spotlessly clean, dry and well-groomed, as if they'd just received a full spa treatment.

Discord peered northwards along the track, his eyes bulging out like binoculars. "Oh splendid, all your changeling problems should be solved soon. There's a crystal train on its way and, unless I'm mistaken, BBBFF and BSFFSBFF* will be aboard. Tell them I said 'hi'."

"Aren't you going to stay a while longer?" asked Fluttershy.

"Certainly not, I've kept Snookie Boo here in this state far too long as it is. I have to head to the badlands and restore him. Don't worry, I'll make it clear to him that this is just a sample of what he can expect if he makes any more trouble in Equestria. Besides, I'm afraid some of the ponies around here might still harbour some mistrust about that little sell-out-all-of-ponykind-to-Lord-Tirek matter. Best to keep a low profile for the time being." Sensing that his cheerful exterior had faltered somewhat, Discord bucked himself up. "Until next time, my friends." With a flourishing wave, Discord opened a nearby door then closed it behind him.

Applejack turned with a grin to her companions. "How soon y'all reckon before he realises he's stepped into a broom closet?"

The friends' laughter was cut short by an uncanny, wheezing, grinding noise. They looked in astonishment towards the closet, which gradually faded until it disappeared from view, leaving a bare wall behind.

"Ohhh-kay then, that happened." Rainbow Dash wasn't quite certain what else to say. One more bizarre exit from Discord.

* * *

The glittering, streamlined train engine screeched to a halt and let out a loud hiss. Two crystal pony stallions in military attire alighted from the only carriage and flanked the open doorway, from which Shining Armor and Cadence briskly emerged. Shining Armor dismissed the two guards, who saluted in unison then re-entered the carriage and waited for it to pull out.

"Twily!" the white stallion cried in dismay. Unlike Twilight's Ponyville friends, he and his wife had not seen his sister's steady decline, so her dour, empty appearance came as a shock to them.

"About time you two showed up," Twilight deadpanned. Even her negative emotions were weakening.

Cadance gently lifted Twilight's head with her forehoof. "What's happened?"

"Changelings," replied Rainbow Dash bluntly.

Rarity cleared her throat. "Your Highnesses, I realise that you have an urgent duty to perform but, if it is not too much of an imposition, Princess Cadance, could you please restore poor Twilight's love first?"

"Of course, right away." Cadance angled her spiralled horn towards Twilight's. A charge of energy crossed over to Twilight and coursed through her psyche, mingling and reacting with every trace of love within her. The love energy within Twilight began to swell, then surge, inundating and disintegrating the wide patches of negativity within her. She felt herself slowly rising from the platform, her eyes brightening, an irresistible smile curving her mouth. Twilight hovered in mid-air until the joy within her reached an apotheosis, and she dropped with to the platform with the landing of an expert gymnast. Tearfully, she rushed to embrace the royal couple.

"Oh thank you, thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you. And you're both all right?"

"We're fine, Twily. Much better for seeing you back to your old self, of course," replied Shining Armor.

"And the Crystal Empire is safe?"

"No breaches," smiled Cadance.

"What about Princess Celestia? She didn't say how she was in her letter."

Shining Armor grimaced. "She's been better, but she should pull through. She's in the Imperial Hospital, along with a lot of the royal guards."

Seeing the worry in Twilight's eyes, Cadance quickly added, "After ruining that dragon's gems, she thought she was done for. Thankfully, it seems he was more focused on trying to re-stock from the empire than on getting direct revenge on her. Maybe he figured that would be the best revenge."

Twilight anxiously darted her eyes around, hoping that Shining Armor's prognosis for her longtime mentor was accurate, until she caught sight of her friends. A deluge of emotions—relief, remorse, hope, worry, happiness—swamped her, and she prostrated herself. "I don't deserve you," she wept.

"Tough turnips, Princess, you're stuck with us," cracked Rainbow Dash.

The seven friends converged for a prolonged hug, punctuated with various cooing sounds of adoration. The royal couple watched with satisfaction for a moment, before Shining turned to Cadance. "What do you say, sweetie? Time to share the love?"

Cadance smirked. "I'm sure Ponyville would appreciate a royal wave about now."

"Then let's do it."

"Wait!" Again, Fluttershy uncomfortably found herself the centre of attention. "Please forgive my forwardness, Your Royal Highnesses, but, um, did-did Princess Celestia, um, tell you ... um ... you know?"

The couple looked quizzically at Twilight, who was just as lost as they.

"Fluttershy, I'm sure Princess Celestia has told them all they need to know," said Twilight.

"Including what the changeling queen said?"

"About what?"

"About all the suffering and anguish that we'll endure if Shining Armor and Cadance cast their love wave?"

The royal couple's faces made it clear that they had not heard about any such thing.

Twilight gave what she hoped was a reassuring chuckle. "Oh Fluttershy, you're not still hung up on that, are you?"

"I don't know, Twilight." Shining Armor walked towards his sister. "That sounds to me like the kind of thing we should be hung up on."

"It was nothing," insisted Twilight. "A bunch of vague threats about how sorry we'll be. One last hollow, desperate bluff from a cornered monster."

"But how can you be so sure?" Fluttershy pleaded.

"Look, suppose casting the love wave did cause some horrible fate to befall us. What good would that do the changeling queen? She'd still lose the only thing that matters to her. The only way to save her brood would be to make sure there was no love wave. If she had any leverage over us she would have used it, made it perfectly clear what would happen to us."

"Maybe there was some reason she couldn't reveal the specific details."

"Oh, for the love of Pete, do you have to question everything I do? Do you have to be scared of every single thing? There is no danger. You're just wasting time. I know this is a novel concept for you but will you please, please, stop getting into a tizzy over a big, fat pile of nothing, you yellow-bellied ninny?"

Twilight suddenly became aware that she had advanced to within a few inches in front of Fluttershy, who looked ready to burst into tears at any second. Then her own words—words that she would never in her right mind direct towards Fluttershy, and certainly not in such an aggressive tone—began to echo in her head. She turned to the dumbstruck onlookers.

"I should be ashamed of myself," she murmured.

The others were still too stunned to reply.

"But I'm not!" Agitated, Twilight began trotting in place. "It's happening again. There's a changeling around here and it's consuming my love." She lunged at Shining Armor and cast her anti-disguise spell over him. Seeing no difference, she scanned her other friends one by one, talking as she did so. "You're the only ones who've been anywhere near me since Cadance restored my love so, the changeling must be one of ..." She came to the last pony in line, who was Fluttershy. "You."

The pale yellow pegasus recoiled with a squeal of alarm.

"When we all met up at the castle, ready to set off for the Crystal Empire, I scanned every one of my friends. Except you weren't there." Twilight marched imposingly towards the pegasus, who stammered incoherently and retreated a few steps before stumbling and falling on her back. "All your hiding and your excuses and your lecturing about 'digging deep inside me'. You've just been stalling this whole time, and now you're trying to stall us some more."

The lachrymose pegasus tried to beg Twilight to stop but the only sounds she could produce were plaintive, unintelligible squeaks.

"Oh, you've done your homework, I'll give you that, but all you're doing now is showing off. The jig's up, changeling." With grim triumph, Twilight charged up her spell, guided her horn down the length of the pony's body, then looked up to see ...

Fluttershy.

Rainbow Dash whispered, "If she's the real Fluttershy, why was she so scared of Twilight scanning her?"

"I don't think it was the scan that was scaring her," replied Rarity.

Twilight was at her wit's end. "This makes no sense. Somepony here has to be the changeling. But I've scanned you all and you're all clean."

Pinkie Pie piped up, "Well there's still one pony you haven't scanned".

Twilight twisted her head wildly around her vicinity. "Who?"

Pinkie looked straight at Twilight and said nothing.

Twilight cocked her head. "Pinkie, we've already been through this. I am not a changeling." She turned to the others with a 'do you believe this' look, only to find that they, too, were staring intently and wordlessly at her.

Twilight was flabbergasted. "You're not ... you don't ... nnggh ... why would I be so keen for Shining Armor and Cadance to expel all the changelings from Ponyville if I'm a changeling too? That's completely crazy."

Applejack shrugged. "Then ah guess crazy's all we got."

Twilight threw back her head and roared with exasperation. "Fine." She adjusted the flow of magic from her horn so that the energy showered over her own entire body. "There, are you happy? I'm exactly the same shape as I——."

With a jolt, a cylindrical bulge shot out from Twilight's right flank.

"What the?"

Almost immediately, a similar bulge descended from her belly.

"Ow!"

Then another from her left flank.

"Oww!"

By now, the mysterious shapes were stretching her entire barrel, which began to swell like a misshapen balloon. Within seconds, Twilight became so top-heavy, and the outgrowths so frequent and random, that could no longer keep her balance. She keeled painfully over, her legs flailing helplessly in the air. "Help! Helllp!"

"We would if we knew what was happening," cried Cadance.

As the ponies and Spike gathered around the huge, supine Twilight, Rarity screamed and pointed. "Did you see that? Look."

They looked, and collectively gasped in horror. The jabbing, writhing masses pushed from within against the walls of Twilight's distended abdomen, their contours becoming clearly visible.

Inside Twilight's body was a seething swarm of changelings.

* Big sister-in-law former foal sitter best friend forever. Unlike 'BBBFF', Twilight herself had never used this initialism; Discord coined it to tease her.