"Listen, I..."
She had a tone to her voice telling Sunset everything before the awkward pause two words in. Her friend had something disappointing to say that she knew she didn't want to hear. Already she could feel her own emotional walls starting to come up. Perhaps one month of trying, coming here at a tiny beach at the end of every school day was asking too much, but why did Garnet Sky feel the need to follow anyway? She was following her! What right did she have to complain?!
"... I have something to do. I don't think I can hang out with you this afternoon. Maybe not the next, either."
Sunset Shimmer kept the line of her mouth straight and her eyes cold. She couldn't think of a thing to say that wouldn't let Garnet know how hurt she felt. In times like this she had to channel her emotionally distant mother, she hated that part of her. She turned to look at the sun in its slow decent towards the glimmering ocean. She gathered a handful of words without thinking them over, perhaps a few cold quotes she heard before.
"What use are you? You're just a follower that latches onto anyone stronger than you. Without you constantly distracting me perhaps I can finally get Celestia's attention-"
"We're just foals, Sunset! You haven't even earned your mark and you keep going on about how you want to be Princess Celestia's pupil. Why can't you just give it time? Come with me to the library and we can study together."
Sunset felt disgust towards her own anger. She wanted to lash out with every cruel word she wasn't allowed to say, but behind every word was tears she wouldn't let swell to the surface. Again she called on the cold memory of her mother.
"Run to your books. Learning from others only makes you as good as them, or it makes you them. If I'm going to prove myself, it's going to be by me."
She shut out wherever was said after that. She didn't want to hear anything else. She didn't want to be distracted by emotion of any kind. Her stubborn nature was something that she simply couldn't control, a sort of pride came from that fact.
Garnet didn't say a word after Sunset coldly shot back. Perhaps she wasn't even behind her anymore. Her eyes closed and her mind did its best to focus on the task at hand. She pushed away emotion for raw sense. She felt the warm wind blowing through her mane, the mixture of sand and grass where beach met forest. Deep under the surface of everything was hidden network of power, after all, everything was molded from magic at one point. The primordial leftovers of that magic floated in the void between creation, all a pony had to do was reach out and feel it.
Her mind could make out shapes in every direction. Without even opening her eyes she could feel every blade of grass and every small beetle wobbling between them. She pushed her awareness out and traced Garnet still behind her. The sensation of moisture was numb to this sense but she could still make the shape of tears pooling on the foal's eyes. She was still there. Garnet was a stubborn pony as well. She stayed by Sunset despite her temper, despite whatever her anger forced from her.
Why did she care?
Every incoming sense was pushed away. She had to ignore the small details to expand her awareness. She allowed Garnet to fade along with beetles and grass so she could feel more. The forest behind her and the waves before her swayed under the same wind, even the air itself felt more like an ocean current. It was good to think of things in simpler terms, in a flow that swayed as one instead of so many individual moving parts. The mental strain was starting to creep in and all she had accomplished was wrapping a proverbial hoof around a massive weight without lifting.
Her sense of smell was gone. She could barely tell when it had faded but the lack of sound made her realize other sensations were starting to give in. The grass swayed and tapped at her hoof, her mane waved in the wind but the cool feeling was numb. She couldn't feel anything yet trusted, or didn't care, if she were still standing. The only thing that mattered was the small marble slowly growing smaller. She could feel the entire world and the empty space it drifted in.
Sunset couldn't feel her own body and that was what made the fear so raw. She didn't have any cold chills, any prickling on the back of her neck. All she had at this moment was a terrible realization. If she couldn't forget Equestria, if she couldn't force her mind to focus further outward then she would grip. It was a simple two-part process for any form of levitation. First one finds what they want to hold, then they grasp it. It was the difference between pressing your teeth onto something vs biting, the force only comes in the second step.
How could she hope to grasp the sun if she couldn't hold the planet? How could she fear something like this now? She had to push away fear like she did everything else, it was just another wall to keep her from what she wanted. Sunset tried to open her eyes and see where the sun was in relation to the horizon. She was blind.
Was it too late? Had dusk already come and gone? Sight, Hearing, Touch, Smell, Taste, now time was starting to slip from her. She pushed the sphere out further and further, all the while feeling nothing new before malice brushed across her. Something full of hate lived out in the middle of nowhere, something that was dreaming. The tale of Nightmare Moon came to mind and she realized just what she had found.
Something soft brushed her cheek before it walked away, crying. She was pulled back into her body for a split second before feeling the world shrink down to a grain of sand, and there it was.
How could it be so large? How far was it from the small planet it shined on? The sun could swallow her world a hundred times over yet it remained silently ruling over everything that slowly spun around it. Even the largest of the planets were nothing more than pebbles. In truth Celestia wasn't moving the sun For all those thousands of years, She was pushing against the massive thing to rotate Equestria itself.
Sunset felt the the world rush back into her eyes and ears as the worst pain her young body had ever felt swelled in her skull. She screamed and let tears soak her face as she grasped the sun. The horn above her eyes went from nothing to a blue heat-less inferno within seconds of dusk coming to an abrupt halt. She had a death-grip on the sun and sunset wouldn't be over until she wanted it. Then came a tug that turned her consciousness into a blown light bulb. One moment came glory, the next she was laying on her side with stars hovering on the edge of a violet border.
She looked at her thigh and saw the symbol of sunset branded into it. She looked up again and saw a curious set of eyes framed with a pastel mane staring back.
