Our story so far: I had cast a Star Swirl the Bearded spell in conjunction with the Cutie Map to send me back in time to stop Rainbow Dash from creating a sonic rainboom. I had left behind the spell scroll as bait so that Twilight would travel in time behind me just in time to see me crush any hope of her and her friends earning their cutie marks because of the same event. Unfortunately, she was nothing if not persistent, triggering the spell over a dozen times, though my superior street magic made outmaneuvering her a breeze each time. Now she's decided that fighting isn't working and is apparently about to surrender. But, no…
Twilight had baited me.
As I screamed at her about her sun-sized princess ego, I almost missed Rainbow Dash racing by. I punctuated my diatribe with a zap that sent the blue-coated foal tumbling out of the sky, trailed by a rainbow afterglow.
The loudly ticking green time nebula opened above her. The gears of time ground on with relentless precision, rolling around the bell's lip, the pendulum movement clattering alarmingly.
Twilight's face reddened; her eyes narrowed further as she realized that Rainbow Dash's scream meant she needed to attempt another temporal loop. Anger registered all over her body: her fur puffed and muscles tensed as she flared her immense alicorn wings to hold herself in place. She lost hold of Spike and her glare turned particularly cold.
This was the same knife she thrust into my heart when she convinced my townsfolk that I had somehow betrayed them by retaining the magic that made pony equality possible, that I was somehow evil for making it possible for all ponies to be friends. I'd now thrust that knife, bloody from my heart, squarely into hers. The word for what I felt was schadenfreude, but to the extent it fell short of glee it felt strangely hollow, despite a year of planning the achievement.
She yelled, barely holding herself to the cloud, "I don't know how important other ponies' friendships are to the future, but I can show you what the world is like without mine!"
She leapt with a powerful downstroke of her wings, aiming well below me, but the gravity of the time nebula—which affected only her and the dragon—changed her trajectory. She struck my hooves, breaking my magical horseshoes spell. Sudden weight and her upward momentum tangled me with her limbs and wings, and we both tumbled upward. She smelled strongly of chamomile and… my nose was buried in her sweaty mane. I kicked, trying to trigger a repelling spell, but couldn't get the math to balance as we hurled upward. I tried to bite, but her agile alicorn neck allowed her to dodge and retain her hold.
Beyond the rim of the nebula, with the green sides of the time tunnel flashing by, I landed a kick to her flank to release myself. Despite the past fading away below, I much preferred the thunderstorm smell of the magic to her horsy one.
And she had done this to what end? I looked at her whirling above me. She had given me a free ticket back to the present; I'd been prepared to live in the past, to keep my foal-self oriented and working on bringing equality to all of Equestria, earlier and more efficiently than I had... but so be it. The mare was reputed to be book smart, but without her friends she acted like a moron.
Anger led me to foolishly forget to prepare a force spell. The time nebula spat us out. I landed with rib bruising force on the cutie map table and bounced to the ground, the air knocked out of me. I heard the alicorn and dragon's complaints as they landed in…
…the dirt.
Huh? No castle. Well, that was interesting…
Grit hit me in the eyes as I scrambled upright. A cloudy brown dusk surrounded us. We'd landed in the middle of a dust storm, with a wind strong enough to blow my mane and tail aside. The dirty illumination sucked the color from everything. I could see skeletons of a dozen trees that had died years ago, and nothing more to the edge of visibility. What had Twilight done?
I shouted, "Where are we?"
Twilight, in a voice much older than her years, said, "The future, or rather, the present without a rainboom."
The wind howled as I did a three-sixty. No Ponyville. No Canterlot mountain. No Everfree forest. I stood in a desert, a cold desert judging by the temperature. "But, there's nothing here!"
"I wish I could say I was surprised. But every present I come back to is worse than the last. I don't know why my friends and I are so important to Equestria, but we are."
"What about my contributions? They're not important? Nopony is more important than anypony! I don't believe you!"
The dragon growled. "Come on, Starlight. This is the map. This is all because of your spell. Where's the castle? Where's Ponyville?
The creature was right. The spell required the castle of friendship's cutie map, so this had to be the map. Unless she had found some way to transfer the map from the castle to some desolate windswept plain…
Which she might have done, but that would have required an instantaneous heavy mass teleport spell upon release from the time nebula. Possibly, she'd been returning to the same place after each failed attempt and had had a chance to make it over.
To convince me.
And then she proved it all fake by saying, "—this might change your mind."
Change my mind? I'd spent years perfecting equality therapy. Our town was well balanced. Ponies had adapted. Everypony had been happy. I had been training Double Diamond and other true-believers to proselytize equality around Equestria, to convince evermore ponies to accept a better way. I had been able to visualize a day when I might have even converted Luna, who still obviously lived in her sister's shadow and been able to convert or depose her tyrant sister. I'd dedicated my life to helping ponies never have to know the hurt of somepony thinking she was better than another. My entire life!
Oblivious to her abject failure, Twilight continued, "—what happened that led you to make your village without cutie marks, and I'm sorry my friends and I had to take it away."
Take it away? She had taken nothing—she had ruined the fair and the kind and the good I had brought to this world with total conniving ignorance, tragically destroying what she didn't know, pissing on a concept and way of life that could have freed the pony nation, and perhaps the world, and have left everypony happy or let anypony become friends. "You want to know what happened to me?! I'll show you how I learned the real truth, how cutie marks obliterate friendships!"
My voice cracked on the last word; my throat burned from shouting, but it provided a clarity almost supernatural in extent. The chaotic calculus necessary for a unicorn's brain to warp the time axis of the magic pulse flowed like water in a brook after a storm. I had built the spell I'd embedded in the scroll and the mathematical equations were burnt into my soul. I jumped on the cutie map table. The obviously faulty artifact powered up as if its magic and mine were perfectly aligned. In my mind, numbers and symbols ranging from burning orange to flaming red whirled in a sphere of writhing gears and black smoke. I could use the time spell because the day I needed was the same; I only had to change the location on the map. Green magic sprayed from my horn toward my childhood home. The map lit in the same color.
Time transmogrified to gravity. I reflexively meshed the alicorn and the dragon in a secondary tractor spell so that the new time nebula sucked us down through the map.
And like that we fell into the wealthy town of Grin Having, in a valley west of Horseshoe bay. Green hills, fields of fragrant daisies and roses of every color sold to florists all over the pony nation, prosperous stone-sided homes with tall well-trimmed cedars were here and abouts. I spotted my red-shingled sandstone and brick two-story house where I lived with Proper Step, my guardian and keeper of my trust fund. I dashed over. Twilight followed as if she were leashed like the dog she was. I had never known my parents, only about them, that they had died in the service of the crown and that Celestia had done nothing to save them. After news of Nightmare Moon and Luna, I had begun to suspect I lived on Celestia's blood money. It had caused me to toy with the idea of time spells when I had learned of Twilght's break-in to—and the contents of—the Star Swirl the Bearded wing in the royal archives of the university library. By then I'd left the university because I'd learned so much alone. Celestia, the fool, had not warded the library from a hyper-teleport such as I.
As we approached, I cast a brand new don't listen don't look don't see spell as a dragon, or worse, an unknown alicorn, would be remarked upon. I also didn't want certain foals dear to me to notice me.
Twilight asked, "Where are we?"
"That map of yours is connected to every part of Equestria, and this part is my home."
I reared and looked through a picture window into the study. Twilight joined me as I saw my foal-self done up in ponytails tied with chartreuse ribbons and—and my heart skipped a few beats and my throat constricted—and I saw ever-beautiful Sunburst.
My soul mate.
My timing had been preternaturally accurate. We had been—no, were playing a game of Jenga with books, all of them hardbound tomes, texts and arcania for my home study. The stack almost touched the dark-wood exposed beams. Sure, I could have bought a wood block game, but this allowed us to discover by luck what the two of us would then study together.
I said, "Sunburst and I did everything together. In fact, I don't remember us ever being apart. Until today."
Tears welled in my eyes as Sunburst finished his turn and foal-me clapped hooves together, a hollow sound I thought as a biased observer. I glanced over my shoulder but there wasn't a cloud in the sky from here to the nomad city of Cloudsdale hovering on the far horizon. Storms undoubtedly troubled the waters of the bay and were hidden by the house. Inside, foal-me had picked a book, stuck her tongue out to the right, and infused her horn with glowing magic. I could sense the proud child-class numbers and the balanced sturdy equation of an intermediate telekinetic spell. She started easing out an arguably challenging book, but a logical choice I still would make without foreknowledge.
I cringed.
A moment later, crack!
I whimpered as my vision went monetarily red.
The thunder clap hadn't been particularly loud, though it rattled the glass faintly. It proved disastrously, heartbreakingly sufficient.
At nine years old, I had learned none of the shortcuts to spell casting, like simplifying equations or memorizing pre-loaded matrices of approximate solutions—or fast-draw street cheats.
No.
Foal-me flinched pulling the book. Friction and angular momentum did the rest. The entire book stack collapsed toward her. I remembered the moment clearly. I had thought first that Proper would kill me for disobeying him again, then in heart-stopping shock thinking that it was too late; I would already be dead. I could have at least dodged or put my hooves out to protect my head, but, again, no. I had not run away from home multiple times yet, nor learned to survive in the rough and tumble streets of Baltimare or Hooflyn or Lower Canterlot.
Foal-me sat there frozen like a stupid fool ready to be crushed.
But beautiful Sunburst, with his lustrous red Mohawk mane and safflower coat, stood instantly. Without a thought as was so often possible with a cutie-mark talent, his horn lit and every book in the room stopped moving as if it had hit stone. An instant later, he floated into the air—which would later clue me into developing my pegasus-simulation spell—and the books began orbiting him in a vertical circle. As the shock and rightness of his talent registered, he channeled his telekinesis and shoved the books separately but en masse into the bookshelf, over a hundred of them.
By now he had begun to glow with an aura as bright and golden as the sun. My foal-self had seen the orbiting and shelving of the books, and noticed with shock—again freezing—as a cutie mark composed of a whirl of books orbiting a sun and three tiny four-point stars appeared on my friend's flank. The books probably symbolized a unique talent to levitate himself and things at the same time. The stars represented a general magical talent comparable to their size, which in his case was small though significant. I had a large four-pointer doubling over a white four-pointer. Twilight an enormous double six-pointer. Talent and skill were often two different things, however, as I had definitively proven.
Foal-me stared as Sunburst lost consciousness and drifted slowly to the ground. I remembered being overwhelmed with pride and fear at the same time. I fleetingly remembered thinking of what fun it would be exploring his new magic.
But I remember being stunned.
Unable to move.
Unable to even to express my happiness, turned into imbecilic mush by the sight of a stupid cutie mark.
Moments later, he awoke and saw his cutie mark, giving a whinny of pure joy. He glanced up and looked outside through the door we had left open to cool the warm summer day, there to see his family walking by.
With foal-me tongue-tied and, in all senses of the word, struck dumb, nothing stopped him from dashing out of my house. I craned my neck and could see Sunburst levitated by his father and bounced in the air. His sister and mother trotted up, and then, like that, they departed.
Foal-me unfroze and ran to the door. Proper Step had told me not to leave the house. Foal-me obeyed. She just stood, staring.
The sight figuratively ripped my heart from my chest. Had it in actuality floated before my eyes, pumping a bleeding, I would have felt no more destroyed.
It was all I could do to keep from choking up as I told Twilight, "And just like that, my friend was gone. His family recognized his magical talent and sent him off to Canterlot. I never saw him again."
The dragon piped up in his sweet kiddie voice, "Well, why not?" Twilight nodded.
I rediscovered my rage. I felt my face darken. Could they lack all empathy to be so incredibly blind!? "Because of his cutie mark! He got his, and I didn't! He moved on, and I didn't! I stayed here and never made another friend because I was too afraid another cutie mark would take them away, too!" I all but roared, dripping tears. I ran away again and again until they stopped looking.
Twilight, completely oblivious, said, "That's ridiculous. A cutie mark can't take your friends away."
I starred at them, dumbfounded that they could not understand. Shaking my head, beyond anger, I had to turn away in shear disgust. I said, "Not everypony's lucky enough to get her cutie mark at the same time as her friends!"
I began to calculate the recall phrase of the spell, but heard a voice I didn't remember hearing so many years ago. I glanced up the street and saw Sunburst. He was still swimming in his father's magical aura, but faced me. His green eyes were directed toward foal-me's violet ones as he beckoned with his right hoof. I missed what he'd said, and it seemed foal-me had also.
She stared until he faced around and his family continued toward their home. When they disappeared down another street, she looked down.
I—
I—
I hadn't followed Sunburst when he wanted me at his side? To myself, at myself, I hissed, "Starlight, you clumsy foal!"
Celestia on rollerskates! I had lost Sunburst not because of his cutie mark but because I failed to stay with him?
All.
My.
Fault!
And like that all the malice, the venom, the hate, and the fury bled out of me. Tears streamed down my cheeks as foal-me continued to stare forlornly. Inside, I screamed in agony. Maybe outside, too...
"Starlight?" Twilight asked insistently.
"You win," I said between gasping sobs.
"What?"
"You win. I've learned my lessons. You can't change ponies if they don't want to change and—" My voice cracked and I all but squeaked "—you have to fight for your friends."
"What! You—what?"
Blithering idiot.
I grabbed the scroll from the dragon's backpack, finished the recall spell and directed it only at the alicorn and the dragon, simultaneously casting magnetic-horseshoes on me at the same time. The time nebula reappeared and sucked my former nemesis back to her world where the rainboom would have happened, where she would have ruined my equity work. I still believed that ponies needed to be equal, but the original reason... Well, any heat in that had now cooled below ambient.
I dispelled my active spells.
That got foal-me's attention. She gave a dainty squeak. Her ponytails twirled as she turned and bucked the door closed.
The time nebula appeared of its own accord. I starred at the closed door with the same stunned stare my foal-self had affected until the green tunnel engulfed me in its ticking maw.
And spat me out unceremoniously on the cutie map, where I collapsed in the center. I peered past a fuzzy Canterlot castle on a fuzzy Canterlot mountain out at a riot of black thorny animated vines that curled and clutched of their own accord. My knees were bruised, but I hobbled upright. Above a bright sky peeked through a canopy of intertwined—
Vines from the seeds of Discord. I remember reading in the Rural Post-Dispatch about them.
I could see no castle. Eight stone thrones lay tumbled over, cracked and spalled, spattered with sap from the attack of the vines. Somehow, the cutie map table remained unscathed and protected by a force.
I went cold. Twilight had told the truth. Every present she had returned to had been worse than the previous one. In this one, if I understood what I had been able to piece together about the Everfree Incursion, the mythic Tree of Harmony probably lay dead.
I began shivering.
My past with Sunburst had occurred before the rainboom. Rainbow Dash would have won the race in the temporal reset that I had sent Twilight forward to.
I stood blinking, aghast. The simple presence of the apparition of her future-self had somehow affected my foal-self and this—
I mattered?
I examined the scroll I had stolen from the Star Swirl the Bearded wing and later annotated with my superior revisions. It looked perfect, other than a brown ring where possibly Star Swirl himself had put down a cup of cocoa.
I understood Twilight's despair and rage all at once, and for her I felt a loathing for my stupid self that the frustrated alicorn must have surely felt dealing with me. I had not saved Equestria from the tyranny of cutie marks; instead, I'd destroyed all of pony-kind.
I could fix this.
I annotated the scroll while sighting down on where Grin Having stood underneath a mat of black fibers, then triggered the embedded spell with a magic burst. Precision in casting; everything I'd read claimed that to be Star Swirl's motto. The outrageous ticking sound of the clockwork time nebula formed above. Gravity flipped me upside down and sucked me in.
Pegasus-simulation stopped me short of a face-plant in a neighbor's ivy a good three blocks away from my home. I flew as quickly as I could to my house, no care as to whether I might be seen, and just in time, too. Foal-me had stuck her tongue out of her mouth decisively and began to tug on her chosen book near the bottom of the Jenga stack.
I reached telekinetically for a book much higher up than hers so that my intervention might not be noticed.
Crack!
The pulse of thunder rumbled through the house and me. For a few instants, my vision tinged red. Like my foal-self, I flinched.
I pulled too hard on the stack. The books came tumbling down. Perhaps I had been too hard on my foal-self because Sunburst froze looking up as the majority of the books fell his way and a token fell on her. And perhaps I hadn't distilled out the ability to feel shock and lock up. Before I could sweep my telekinesis field down, the books fell, pummeling my friend, crushing bones from the sounds I heard. My aura held but one book.
Sunburst screamed only once.
The time nebula appeared instantly above, announcing itself with its mad insistent tick-tick-tocking. My mouth fell open as my weight became negative and I lifted upward. What I had done began to register and my vision dimmed until I passed out.
I woke with the sour sharp taste of charcoal-burnt toast in my mouth. I coughed and choked, eyes tearing as I spat and fought not to vomit. With every breath, I inhaled in acrid air that smelled of smoke. Wiping my eyes, I managed to see the world to whence I'd come.
I no longer saw vines. The scroll spiraled in a black ash dust-devil above the cutie map table. Beyond, ash blew in streamers, hiding a scoured desolate landscape empty of all but distant whirlwinds, some of which were on fire. The breeze whistled across the stone of the table. Above, a disconsolate moon hung dimly in a firmament of cold twinkling stars.
I shivered, but not from the cold that condensed the breath before my face, despite the ashes that floated by. I had killed Sunburst and the horror replayed over and over again as I stood coughing, caught in my own personal Tartarus.
When the spell scroll fluttered out of the dust-devil, reflex made me snatch it before it blew away.
It was about time, and thanks to Star Swirl's prolific writings and my anger issues, time wasn't the issue. I whimpered and said, unconvincingly, "I can fix this."
I zapped the scroll.
I landed bruisingly, hacking and coughing. I levered myself up, spitting coal-tainted phlegm across grass so green I almost cried.
I recognized the fence and the yellow siding, and the marigolds Proper Step had liked to plant. I looked up from my coughing fit and gazed into the window of my study. I saw two foals, one with a red mane and another with a chartreuse-striped purple one, done up in ponytails.
Nopony would get their cutie mark today. Nor would they die.
Crack! went the thunder. Red flashed across the window pane as the foals glanced upward. Tick-tick-tick went the time nebula. I shook myself and released a cloud of char. Still coughing, the magical apparition sucked me upward.
I cast a repel spell just in time to bounce off the table top encased in a greenish bubble. I landed and rolled across what at first sight looked like a checkerboard floor. I rolled head over hooves twice until I popped it.
The air was absolutely still and the scroll see-sawed to the ground at my hooves. The checks were pony-sized and red and white, and rubbery to the touch. A vinyl smell filled the air. I coughed some more and removed the last of the ash from my eyes to look at—
I staggered at a sudden sense of vertigo. The undifferentiated flooring marched toward a horizon a half mile away then curved up and over and came back, twisting but becoming the sky. The tiles glowed, I realized. Looking another way, I saw a different horizon, with spiral hills and folds that might be mountains at a visually difficult to assess distance away. In it stood the cutie map table, the eight thrones perfectly intact and shining as if new. I could see Twilight's and Fluttershy's cutie marks pulsing, and noticed one of the thrones was smaller, probably for the dragon, Spike. I couldn't see the other cutie marks, and didn't care as I grabbed the scroll and jumped on the featureless table. Well, not exactly featureless. A checked tablecloth covered it and slid as I hit it. And, all around, the world, sky, and horizon warped. Were it not for some sort of weird gravity, I would have been thrown into the chaos of the world's paroxysms of change as it remapped itself to the map surface.
Dizzy and shaking with fear, I nonetheless froze when a sinister male voice said from every direction, "What in the world? Another pony! Looks like we might be due for a big ol' storm of chaos!"
I shot a zap at the scroll but missed. I winged a corner on the second try. It was enough.
As I tumbled up into the the mouth of the time nebula, I heard, "Oh poo!" An instant later, the face of a draconequus stared up at me, but try as he may, the physics of the nebula refused to let him follow. As the view dwindled below, a smile curved across his face and he waved.
I cast pegasus-simulation just in time to keep from crashing into a red-shingled roof. I settled to the toasty surface of a wide copper-surfaced dormer and just lay there shaking, my eyes tightly shut. How had Twilight kept her sanity through her half-dozen time loops? I could concede then and there that she was made of tougher stuff than I. I lay there, the summer sun beating down comfortingly on my coat, just wanting desperately for it all to be over.
But it wasn't.
Crack! I opened my eyes. For a moment, the metal surface of the dormer underwent a prismatic effect. My eyes tracked along the line of the roof and recognized the distinctive carved spiral whirl where the eaves met at the corner.
My house. I'd landed on my roof! No, no, no, no!
I scrambled and slipped and fell hard enough to knock the air out of my lungs. I slid further until I was on the steep roof and instinct made me flatten and claw to stop my descent. Disoriented, it took me a full half-minute to remember my flight spell was still in effect.
I flew down to the ground to the window into the study and canceled the spell. As I peered in, the levitating scroll reflected beside my face in the morning glare. The room lay vacant, the books neatly shelved. Heart-racing, the fear of returning to yet another horrific cutie map table nightmare spurring me on, I trotted quickly to the front door.
There foal-me stood dumbfounded. In the distance, beyond a tree that partially hid me from his view, I saw Sunburst—his red mohawk mane glorious in the sun and the aura of his father's magic—turn and call to his filly-friend, "Hurry, we're going to have a party!" He waved.
Foal-me just blinked as if her eyes had ceased to see and her ears had ceased to hear. And they had, as I could now correctly remember. Stupid, stupid, stupid—us.
"Well," I said. "What are you waiting for? He called you."
Foal-me jerked. Her violet eyes focused on me as her ponytails snapped against her head. "Who are you?" she breathed in a near whisper.
"Didn't you hear Sunburst? He invited you to a party and you'll lose him if you don't go now. Nothing Proper Step can threaten you with will amount to anything compared to that."
She crouched slightly, eying my mane, tail, and coat before glancing at her tail. She demanded, "Who are you?"
"You're going to lose him forever—"
"Who!"
"I—I'm you. From fourteen years in the future."
In a telekinetic burst of green, she slammed the door so hard it rattled the house.
Oh, it wasn't going to be that easy, young filly! I teleported into the study. She shrieked as I appeared in the doorway leading into the kitchen. "Look, S—Starlight, I used this scroll to travel back in time to save you from making a terrible mistake."
"Go away!"
As she leapt backward toward the door, I teleported in front of her again. She skidded to a halt at my front hooves, violet eyes looking up into mine. I said, "You must do this."
A familiar anger colored her pink features a darker red. Sarcasm I could relate to dripped in her voice as she said, "As if the fate of Equestria depended upon it?"
"It does!"
Her voice lowered. "Are you really me?"
Finally; warmth flooded through me. "I am."
"Argh! You're crazy!"
She squeezed her eyes shut and I sensed a magical frisson of numbers balancing. An aura spread out from her tiny horn and with a magnificent pop, she teleported from the house. I knew because I heard the exit pop out the front door and heard an excited yes!
My jaw dropped. She'd copied my spell having seen it once? I'd certainly studied it before this day, but hadn't successfully cast it until I ran away to Baltimare three years later.
I threw open the door, but in my haste forgot the five front steps. I stumbled, tilting to the right. I might have broken my knees on the sidewalk had I not managed to throw my weight sideways to roll into the grass with a jarring thump.
I heard two successive teleports, each further up the block toward Sunburst and his family. I heard shouting which could only have come from the throat of a youngster. Not screams. Though unintelligible to me, I heard the sure-of-herself tone foal-me had used when she had demanded answers of me. I levered myself up and looked to see green flashes as a pink and purple pony teleported again and again, each time gathering other foals who had heard the initial commotion. Nonplussed mares and stallions watched as a suddenly eloquent Starlight Glimmer spoke and engaged a veritable crowd of her peers with her words. She teleported past me to another block and attracted more foals. She stopped and pointed at me as I turned to watch, unable to fathom what ran through her head.
I noticed movement back toward Sunburst's family and saw Sunburst himself, encased in his unique golden aura, fly at the lead of the foals my foal-self had summoned. In less than a minute, foal-me advanced up the street with a myriad of friends until the two groups coalesced into an army surrounding me.
This new Starlight Glimmer smiled with a confident smirk I knew all too well from too many mornings rehearsing my speeches in a mirror. She began to glow faintly yellow as an ethereal wind blew upward from the ground to float her in the air. She held her gaze as the effect tussled her mane and tail, and tried to bow her spine so that her head lifted high.
Nothing could break her intensity, not even the appearance of a cutie mark on her flank. A big purple doubled four-point star formed, followed by a spray of white glimmer stars roughly in a comet tail. As she settled to the ground amid the oohs and aahs of her cohort, she glanced at the new cutie mark, then at me. She narrowed her eyes and said, "You're not future-me. We don't share the same cutie mark!"
"Not anymore," I admitted, magnetized by her poise and a tangible charisma, a tear of pride rolling down my cheek.
"Go away!" she yelled; the children echoed her in a thunderous chorus. Her horn lit. I flinched as I sensed her force spell, but I needn't have worried she was as bloody-minded as I had recently become. She proved too smart to shoot me.
Instead, she zapped the scroll.
***
I awoke, everything having gone black. My jaw hurt where my head had struck stone. The thoughts of two ponies fought like cats and dogs in my head with voices and images, leaving me confused and dizzy. A loud buzzing in my head drowned out all sound. I remembered seeing myself as a foal, but how could that have been?
"Uhh!" Had I fainted?
The cutie map table. Had I— I opened my eyes and looked down. I had landed in the sea east of the Isle of Dragons. I screamed, "No! Not another time loop!"
I jerked back and saw that not only was I in a castle, but that I was surrounded by a particular set of pastel ponies and a green-frilled purple baby dragon who had jumped on the table to get a better look.
Twilight and her friends looked at me in worry and surprise. As the buzzing subsided, I could hear them asking if I was okay and what had happened. Fluttershy flew up and over the table, to land beside me and gently push me back into a stone chair. "There, there," she said, "It's going to be okay. Dashie, get a glass of water."
Rainbow Dash, the mature reserve-Wonderbolt 23-year old Rainbow Dash, saluted and shot out of the throne room. In her shock, Twilight too had climbed on to the table and approached me, worry and concern painted across her features.
My rabbit brain had noticed that Twilight's cutie mark had changed, and it now slammed the realization into my consciousness. My heart pounded in my throat as ice filled my veins. It had to be another time loop.
Twilight's cutie mark now had six white stars.
I began to hyperventilate. I never wanted to travel in time again. I blinked as the wake of Rainbow Dash's return stirred up the ashes of a burnt scroll.
"I said, are you okay, Starlight?" Princess Twilight Sparkle demanded in her I'm-a-princess-and-you're-not-listening voice.
"No. Not at all. Everything's changed."
Fluttershy lifted the glass of water in her hooves. The largest and most lithe of the mane six, even sitting she was tall enough to lift it to my lips. The ice in the glass clinked as I sipped, too shocked by her demonstration of kindness to use my magic. A radiant smile graced her lips. In a memory that did not suddenly seem real, she had thrown a bucket of water at me, trying to wash away the makeup equal sign I had hid my cutie mark with. That warred with an different memory of us laughing, enjoying a pot of tea under the trees behind her cottage just yesterday. I blinked at the dissonance in my head, then smiled my thanks to the now worried yellow pegasus.
The castle looked as it did when I'd broken in following Twilight's seminar—after a quick tour of the archives to confirm the date of the rainboom and Twilight's magical tantrum that had cracked a fissure clear from Canterlot University to the gates of Tartarus. I counted six large white thrones, one each emblazoned with apples, butterflies, balloons, diamonds, a rainbow lightning bolt, and a collection of stars. Plus one small unmarked throne for a baby dragon.
That wasn't right. If I accounted for everypony's throne, then whose was the white stone throne I sat in?
I gasped and twisted around, nudging Fluttershy aside. Behind me blazed a large four-point purple star trailed by a comet trail of white star-like glimmers. I gave a little scream and jumped from the throne to the map, causing Twilight to flutter out of my path. I looked at my flank.
It was the cutie mark that had appeared on past-Starlight's flank. My head began to spin again. This time Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash lifted me and returned me to my—I was shaking my head because there were only six elements of harmony.
"Not possible."
I breathed slowly and steadily until my head cleared. But the double-vision of memories continued. There was stuff I didn't remember but also did remember and other things I had never done that I now knew I also remembered doing. I was simultaneously a villain and a hero—and I had become the hero when... I had sung the lullaby, weaving the words that put the timberwolves to sleep; I'd supported Twilight as one of her six new Ponyville friends when she'd stood up against Nightmare Moon. Her newly discovered friendship magic had transformed one-seventh of the shards of the old elements into a four-point star emerald.
I took a deep breath and let it out, remembering rainbows. Awed, I blinked as I looked around.
Everypony stared.
"What?"
Twilight said, "You conjured a scroll without warning. It burst into flames and you passed out."
I said, "I've seen stranger, much stranger. But stranger yet, you're actually all my friends."
Pinkie Pie laughed. "Silly… Are you trying to out-random me?"
I had hurt them all, ripped their cutie marks out of their very hides and souls. But that had been another time. A desperate bid to save a good that might have not been what I believed. And now, it hadn't happened. "I've just learned another lesson."
"What?" they all asked.
"It's not safe to play with time."
"It's about time you learned that one!" Twi answered. "Didn't I tell you not to trace that purported future-self you told us about?"
She had and I remembered her tale of future-Twilight. And apparently, I had argued last week with her when she realized I had visited the Star Swirl wing and filched a specific scroll, one with a cocoa stain I had recognized from fourteen years ago...
"Um, seriously, I'm okay, now. Much better than I can ever remember." I needed to minimize while I figured out what was now real versus what was from another ought-be-forgotten timeline. What I did know was that this Starlight like that Starlight didn't like being weak or vulnerable. We both liked being in control. "What were we talking about?" I asked, smiling.
Twilight fluttered to her throne, sat and faced me. "Cutie marks earned simultaneously. You were saying how the earning of cutie marks at the same time or because of the same event made otherwise wildly different ponies more equal. As an example, you used you and Sunburst—"
"Sunburst!"
I shrieked and jumped out of the throne before the logical part of my brain could control the reflexive part. The fur along my spine raised and prickled. Unremembered images of my friend flooded through my head, nearly blotting out my sight as I stumbled to the double-doors. I twice fumbled a simple telekinetic spell to grab a door lever, the second time cracking out a stained glass panel. I used my hooves to open the door and began desperately trotting down the hall, looking, looking, looking until I heard voices I kind-of recognized.
I stopped and gazed into a grand dining room with a chandelier formed of fanciful tree roots hung with multicolor crystals, each displaying a holographic photo. At the table sat a blue-maned white stallion I recognized as Twilight's brother Shining, uh—something. But I could not remember because beside him, two magic tomes floating in his safflower aura, stood a magnificent golden stallion with a remarkably beautiful red mohawk mane. He turned and smiled, his green eyes glittering and white teeth shining. "Ah, Madam Mayor, my Pure Honey Sweetness, O lovely Element of Charisma, Countess Grin Having! What can I do for you?"
My breath caught.
Shining, um—somepony, pointed a hoof at Sunburst and said, "What's with this dude? He makes me and the honest-to-goodness Princess of Love look like an old married couple. You've been married longer than us! Sheesh."
When I stood frozen—I seemed to have a natural proclivity for doing that—Sunburst dropped the books. They banged on the floor as he trotted up to enfold me in an embrace. "Dear heart, what's wrong?"
Oh, but now I understood. The red I had seen after every thunderclap had been Rainbow Dash's sonic rainboom. Cutie marks earned thanks to the same event were magical and forever intertwined…
As Sunburst's warmth burned deep into my heart, I dissolved into a sea of tears.
Author's Note
A really big Thank You! to Docontra for pre-reading and general confidence building.
Please feel free to leave a critique, but be sure to tell me what you thought I wrote so I can compare it to what I thought I wrote. Typo reports are gifts.
If you like timey-whimey stories, be sure to read my stories Pinkie (re)Curses A Lot, Cuts Too Deeply, and No Fault of Her Own. For a gritty alternate Starlight Glimmer redemption story based on events of the episode The Cutie Map, please also read Lesson Learned.
Update: 12/21/15 - Small oopsy. Starlight Glimmer's friend was named Sunburst, not Starburst. I also had issues with the details of his and her cutie marks. I've revised the text accordingly. ~~12/25/15 - Changed the time between the present and the rainboom to 17 years to make the math work better in the sequels.~~ 2/28/15 - Because I'm writing a coming of age prequel, which may be named Enforcer, I changed the name of Starlight's home town and that she got her cutie mark before running away. Spoiler: she didn't. 3/21/15 - The prequel is The Enforcer and Her Blackmailers and I changed the time since the rainboom to 14 years.
Sorry, Mayor Mare, you've been replaced.
Starlight Glimmer: the first married member of the Elements of Harmony. An imperfect mare and a charismatic politician with questionable ethics (not entirely unlike generous Rarity with her propensity for lying.)
Sunburst: a stallion, tied by his cutie mark received as a result of a rainboom to the group of friends who discover and wield friendship magic.
They all repeatedly save Equestria.
There may be more stories, here. (Update: There are! Bedroom Interlude)
