Ponyville, Late Afternoon, 60 moons after the return of Luna
We find ourselves looking at a rather typical-looking unicorn mare named Starlight Glimmer as she trots down the High Street. Her purpose is to find a delivery service so that she can have her belongings shipped down from her former dwelling to a house or apartment yet to be decided on. As she does so, a lot of questions are on her mind.
The first question is "Who made that horrible wasteland?" The reason for this first question is one that only started to become clear to most of the residents of her new home after about a month of her taking up residence there. While at this moment, they saw her as being "pony with a mysterious grievance with the new Princess but they've patched stuff up so whatever", they'd eventually come to realize how dangerous she could be when angered. Not only would this come from their talking to ponies from where she used to live and what she did to them in order to avenge what she now had to admit had been a rather ordinary, minor tragedy that thousands of others had had, it would come from talking TO Princess Twilight about the 'weird time warp thingy' that Starlight had started up in order to get back at the new royal for getting Starlight's erstwhile dupes to kick her out of town for stealing the best part of them because she didn't feel like moving on from fillyhood like most people did. In the fullness of time, a group of schoolfillies who'd united for the purpose of helping their peers determine what cutie marks meant and how best to get them would see her as an existential threat to their friendship and take the longest time to forgive what she'd done in Our Town and what she might have done to their pasts. For right now though, she was just some new pony who needed help with friendship.
That being said, she only really saw the one alternate world really closely: the world of the death-dealing wasteland. Oh, she saw confusing glimpses of the earlier worlds where her preventing Twilight from getting powerful enough to stop her became a problem but only for a second or two. While it had astonished her to know that what she saw as a bunch of meddling ponies who came out of nowhere were actually some sort of real-life Power Ponies, she'd had to admit looking back that she only had herself to blame. After all, she'd spent most of the last six years building her screwy dream and hadn't kept up with the news. Hell, she'd thought that were only TWO princesses (Celestia and Cadence) before she'd been deposed. Nightmare Moon? Discord? The Changeling Queen? Tirek? SOMBRA?! She'd never heard of any of them but somehow, her 'fixing' the past meant that urban legends had walked the Earth and played Jenga with destiny. It also meant that she would end up being mentioned in the same breath with overpowered monsters like that. The thing is that none of them left a lifeless husk of a world behind them....which meant one terrible thing. The wasteland was probably hers.
The second and third questions were "Why is Twilight going through some sort of portal to help the pony I think of as Celestia's student with some problem and what are hew-mons?" It sort of irritated her that the other five had to help her get settled in because somepony else got in a mess with something called a sigh-twy but given how insane their lives were, it was a lesser irritant.
It was about then that she wound up reminding herself of the perils of being lost in thought. Said peril was bumping into an old, frowny-faced donkey and his wife.
Cranky talks about an old friend who'd drifted out of his life.
Matilda talks about the years of waiting.
That burning Starlight feels is shame.
