A Cavalcade of Cards

Chapters

Table of Contents
Special Education
Why We Guard
What Will Be Done
The Gift
An Excerpt from the Planeswalker's Field Guide
I Have No Ears, And I Must Hear
Even Less of a God
Weakness
After the Pact
This Creature Has No Color
And Rohan Shall Answer
The Atlantis Complex
Treachery Most Foul
The Heart of Equestria Burns
The Goat's Bells Ring
To Know is to Burn
The Transported Pony
You Put THAT in Your Deck?
Knowledge Is Power
When the World Was Saved
Perhaps Too Little, Definitely Too Late
Before You Die, You Will Kneel
My Favorite Dream
The Old Guard and the New Guard
Indestructible
Civil Service
Twilight Sparkle's Greatest Idea EVER!
Master of the Masquerade
Back Then
Last Night
Acknowledgments
The Best Last Day Ever

Special Education
Tags: Slice of Life, More Fantasy than Usual
Characters: Twilight Sparkle, OC
Princess Celestia always makes sure the first lesson of a new class sticks with the students.
Why We Guard
Tags: Post-Adventure, Dramatic
Characters: OC, Princess Celestia
Stalwart Sentry does her duty.
What Will Be Done
Tags: Drama, Vague Grotesquery, Moral Conflict
Characters: OC, Great Mage Meadowbrook
Something is suffering. Meadowbrook and the minotaurs have very different ideas on how to alleviate it.
The Gift
Tags: Drama, Historical, Worldbuilding
Characters: Commander Hurricane, OC
Commander Hurricane flies south.
An Excerpt from the Planeswalker's Field Guide
Tags: Worldbuilding, Comedy, Crossover (more than usual)
Characters: Tamiyo, Breezies
Every reason you should ever need on why not to visit the home plane of the Breezies.
I Have No Ears, And I Must Hear
Tags: First-Person, Drama, Crossover
Characters: OC, Twilight Sparkle
The story of an extraplanar refugee.
Even Less of a God
Tags: Thriller, Equestria Girls, AU (The Oversaturated World)
Characters: Trixie, Sunset Shimmer
Trixie wakes up in the back of a strange van. The situation deteriorates from there.
Weakness
Tags: Slice of Life, Pre-Adventure, Crossover
Characters: Coco Pommel, OC
Coco meets a most unusual customer.
After the Pact
Tags: Adventure, Random
Characters: Discord, OC
When Discord comes to clean up after somepony, you know it’s bad.
This Creature Has No Color
Tags: Drama, Backstory
Characters: Zesty Gourmand, OC
Zesty takes a tasting tour of Memory Lane, seasoned with the shreds of her reputation.
And Rohan Shall Answer
Tags: Equestria Girls, AU, Human Ponidox
Characters: Rainbow Dash, Rainbow Dash
The human world’s governments react poorly to the revelation of magic. Harmony sends one of its best to help.
The Atlantis Complex
Tags: Sad, Dark, Apocalyptic
Characters: The Smooze, Other
Bow bow-bow, bow bow-bow…
Treachery Most Foul
Tags: Drama, Sad
Characters: Princess Celestia, Other
Celestia confronts an unexpected intruder acting another’s behalf.
The Heart of Equestria Burns
Tags: Crossover, Adventure
Characters: Elesh Norn, Princess Celestia
White-on-white conflict.
The Goat's Bells Ring
Tags: Drama, Dark
Characters: King Sombra, Other
Fleeing from his destiny, a young Sombra meets a monster from out of antiquity.
To Know is to Burn
Tags: Comedy, Worldbuilding
Characters: OC
Draconic internships present a lot of opportunities. Most of them don’t end well.
The Transported Pony
Tags: Adventure, Crossover
Characters: Starlight Glimmer, Other
Even Equestria enjoys pit fights.
You Put THAT In Your Deck?
Tags: Comedy, Crossover, Random
Characters: The Gatewatch (sans Liliana,) Princess Celestia, Twilight Sparkle, Applejack, Other
What’s worse than an angry sun horse?
Knowledge Is Power
Tags: Dark, Crossover
Characters: Starswirl the Bearded, Sorin Markov
At the end of time and his rope, Starswirl has no choice but to ask for help.
When the World Was Saved
Tags: Post-Adventure
Characters: Princess Celestia, Princess Luna
The monster is defeated. Now what?
Perhaps Too Little, Definitely Too Late
Tags: Drama, AU
Characters: The Flimflam Brothers, Other
The saviors of ponykind confront some truly deplorable rumors.
Before You Die, You Will Kneel
Tags: Political Drama
Characters: Prince Blueblood, OC
Wherein Blueblood may be the least obnoxious stallion in the room.
My Favorite Dream
Tags: Adventure, Random, Crossover
Characters: Princess Luna, Lord Windgrace, Other
Luna finds her way into one of the most tumultuous dreamscapes in Equestria.
The Best Last Day Ever
Tags: Sad, Romance
Characters: Derpy Hooves, OC
Two ponies make the most of the day before the world ends.
The Old Guard and the New Guard
Tags: Worldbuilding, Adventure
Characters: Flash Sentry, OC
The origins of Canterlot and the seniormost guards, along with why we never see the latter.
Indestructible
Tags: Slice of Life, Tragedy
Characters: Princess Celestia, Twilight Sparkle, Spike, Other
An unusual break in Celestia’s routine.
Civil Service
Tags: Slice of Life, Drama
Characters: Twilight Sparkle, Mayor Mare
The mayor comes to greet the newest Ponyvillian… among other reasons.
Twilight Sparkle's Greatest Idea EVER!
Tags: AU, Drama, Gore
Characters: Starlight Glimmer, Twilight Sparkle
Starlight witnesses the end result of one of her offshoot timelines.
Master of the Masquerade
Tags: Worldbuilding, Slice of Life, Crossover
Characters: Octavia, Other
Just another night for those who work in the shadows of the sun...
Back Then
Tags: Dark, Gore, Tragedy
Characters: OC, Starswirl the Bearded, Clover the Clever
Some history shouldn’t be remembered.
Last Night
Tags: Sad, Historical
Characters: OC
The night after Nightmare Moon’s banishment, nearly all of Equestria was too weary from the struggle to do aught but sleep. Nearly.

Special Education

When she was young and silly, Twilight Sparkle thought that Princess Celestia's hoofsteps echoed on every stone in Canterlot. Now that she was seven years old and clever, she knew that Princess Celestia only pretended to touch the ground. It only made sense, with how quiet her hooves were whenever they touched the floor.

Twilight liked the word 'clever'. Kibitz always used it to describe her, and Princess Celestia had said that it was a very good word to describe her. It was the kind of word that said she had a big brain, but also knew what a smile was and how to talk to ponies. Plus, it was easier to say in front of grown-ups than 'intelligent'. It didn't have as many letters that her tongue didn't like.

Twilight Sparkle didn't like her tongue. Her tongue got in the way of a lot of stuff. Princess Celestia should outlaw tongues, she thought to herself.

Ahaha, said her evil tongue, but to make the princess outlaw tongues, you will need to speak! And I, in my villainy, shall not allow that to happen!

Nooo! Twilight wailed inwardly, but not out loud because that would be rude and she wasn't supposed to disturb the classes of other ponies. Curse you, most foul of flesh! I hate your stupid face!

But Twilight, my face is your face!

Now, as she made clear previously, Twilight was a very clever pony. And a very clever pony knew that the tongue was very sensitive, the face was very hard, and a hoof hurt a lot. The logic was sound.

"Lesson One: Admitting that We Do Not Live in a Logical World. Now, the first step to admitting that we don't live in a logical world is..." The silly tutor-pony stopped speaking when Twilight stuck her hoof in the air. "Yes, Twilight?"

Now that she had the silly tutor-pony's attention, Twilight put her hoof down and asked her question promptly and nicely, like she had been taught. "Are you sure this is the first lesson of Advanced Magic 7? Because it sounds a lot like Introductory Philosophy."

"You would be surprised how often the two coincide." The silly tutor-pony's voice was like some weird, not at all happy baby of blood and gravel, but somehow dipped in butter. Even to a very clever pony, that seemed like a strange analogy. "But you're right about one thing; this isn't our introductory lesson. It's actually the twenty-fifth lesson, but I've always held that the first lesson you teach should be the one that sticks with your students the most. And considering your current situation..."

Twilight stuck her tongue out at the silly tutor-pony, the glowing blue runes of Esurient's Salving Spell glowing brighter than electronic lightbulbs. For his part, the silly tutor-pony just smiled all the more, and even gave a little chuckle.

"Yes. Quite. Big words are difficult, and since your mind has perfect understanding of the words that your tongue consistently mangles, logic dictates that the tongue is to blame. And since you know that you will recover from the pain of being bucked in the face faster than biting yourself in the tongue, you used logic to determine that hitting yourself in the face would hurt your tongue, but with altogether less pain than employing your teeth." The silly tutor-pony's horns glowed, and his piece of chalk jabbed at the board. It was more for effect than anything else, since the board still only had his name on it for the introductions that technically hadn't happened yet. "Since your entirely logic-powered conclusion turned out to be false, we can thereby conclude that logic, whether it be true or false in a vacuum, has no bearing on events in this plane of existence."

"You're just using one isolated incident to skew the argument in your favor!" Twilight pointed an accusing hoof, a move that would have earned her no end of stink-eyes in a full classroom but which she could exercise with impunity in this setting.

"Wrong." The tutor's eyes flashed with solid gold, and he gave Twilight a grin with far too many teeth in it. "I'm using a memorable incident that you're personally invested in, as an example of my argument, because you're seven." He punctuated every few words with a jab of his chalk, and it quickly crumbled in his strange magic. All the while, his voice never rose above that buttered lilt. "I'm not even supposed to be hinting at this lesson for several months, much less teaching it. But of course, your glorious princess, in her infinite wisdom, could not resist the opportunity to shatter the ideological foundations of a child half a year ahead of schedule just because it was topical." The tutor briefly turned his gaze from Twilight to the back of the room, his voice rising by only the slightest volume. "Do you just have some kind of quota to fill or something?"

Good little ponies do not have a morbid fascination with solar lasers. Twilight Sparkle was a very good little pony, especially after that one time that she wasn't a particularly good pony and might have set her babysitter on fire. She definitely didn't salivate a little when she smelled the distinctive aroma of burning ozone from the back corner of the room, and she most explicitly did not scan the tutor's face for any indication that he was about to be blown to bits. She was allowed to be disappointed that he didn't get blown up, though. Normal ponies always dreamed of blowing up their teachers. Twilight just had more... specific dreams.

And anyway, she didn't really want her tutor to blow up. So far, he was the most stimulating conversation she'd had in months that couldn't control the sun and the country.

But Princess Celestia didn't blow him up, because Princess Celestia was a wise pony, which was like a clever pony but a squintillion times better. With that done, the tutor's attention returned to his student, as it should be. She beamed, eager to examine the tutor's clearly flawed hypothesis of a world without logic.

"Now then, I think we've delayed introductions quite enough, don't you?"

Good little ponies did not let their jaws drop. That just caught flies and looked unseemly. Instead, Twilight decided to let out an anguished cry. "But what about the lesson?"

The tutor stared at Twilight as though she had suddenly started wearing a very silly hat. "That's Lesson Twenty-Five. And we will discuss it in depth when it is time to teach that lesson. Right now, it is time for us to introduce ourselves. Consider today a teaser for what you're in for if my lessons don't melt your brain first."

That sounded promising. Twilight resolved to behave in class and be a good student. "In that case, hi! I'm Twilight Sparkle! I'm a student at Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns, and I want to grow up to be a really awesome wizard like Starswirl the Bearded!"

"Oh, yes, he was fun." The tutor seemed far-off and wistful for a moment, but he returned to normal before Twilight could draw attention to it. The twin horns upon his head glowed as red as blood, and when next he spoke it was in a voice that burned itself into Twilight's memories. "As for myself, my name is Malachi Maganti. I am a demon, bound in service to this school as a private tutor for incredibly advanced or otherwise not-commonly-known magic, until such a time as I have taught everything I know to the destined Savior of Equestria."

With every word since the demon's name, the room grew ever darker and his horns glowed all the more. It was as though shadows were leaking out of the stones surrounding them, a hundred thousand little dark spirits tantalized into being by whatever outpouring of power the tutor was manifesting. One of the shadows stood up from the floor on newly formed legs, and Malachi Maganti grinned. His aura encircled the shadow, lifting it off the floor and turning it in the air as the light slowly bled back into the room.

"Meet the evil little voices in your head, Twilight Sparkle." He could not have sounded more like a rabid murderer. "These are the temptations, the little urges to solve all your problems with magic. You've probably stared them down more than a few times already, sometimes without even knowing it. But today, you'll learn how to defend yourself against them."

Twilight stared, struggling to find the words. "I don't think this is part of the curriculum."

"This is Advanced Magic 7, Miss Sparkle. Your curriculum is simple; survive me."

Author's Note

Well, where did you think she learned the Want It, Need It spell? Princess Cadance?

Why We Guard

The moment she walked through the great gates of Canterlot, Stalwart Sentry knew that she was home. There were no tricks this time, no gleaming towers lit by glistening sparks of wishful thinking, no illusory plazas layered over treacherous swampland. This was Canterlot, true and unapologetic. The cobblestones beneath her hooves all but crackled at her touch, half from high background magic and half from familiarity at an old soldier returning home. It was enough to put a little sway into Stalwart's steps, and she found her hooves catching against the odd loose cobble now and then, but she could not have cared less.

There were many who swore that the sun always shone the brightest on fair Canterlot's slopes. Stalwart, who had seen far more of the world than any Canterlot blueblood (especially the Canterlot Bluebloods) could claim to have seen, knew that there were many places both in Equestria and beyond her shores where the sun was more glorious a sight to behold. But even the diamond-swept beaches of Zatara, sparkling like heaven at the slightest sunbeam, or the Golden Cathedral of Iroa-Mogis, its every facet designed to magnify and direct the sun's light so that it could create a second sun beneath its own roof, could not compare to the genius of Canterlot. And how could they ever? All the rest of the world treated the sun, treated Celestia, as a goddess. Their structures were built for glorification and praise, or to attempt to capture some small part of her supposed divinity.

The architects of Canterlot had known better, and had said as much with their masterwork. The city was not fashioned for worship of the Dawnbringer residing within, but for revelry in the gifts that she lavished on the world. Rather than glorify Celestia, the city had been built to bask in the natural glory that she radiated. Every brick of the grand spires had been carved with light-bending runes, so that the light of the sun did not cast shadows but instead took tips from the movement of water around a sharp bend. When the sun was upon it, there was not a dark corner in Canterlot, and all within could not help but display themselves at their fullest radiance.

Of course, the downside of that was that everypony could see the awful state that Stalwart's armor was in.

Now, the armor itself was fine. There were no gashes, no scratches, no hammered-on patches, and there was even a trace of polish still left in some of the armor's creases. But that polish didn't count for anything when Stalwart Sentry looked as though she had walked through a rainstorm of oil and ichor. Her armor and coat were stained black in so many places that, from the front especially, you wouldn't even be able to tell she was one of the Royal Guard. Matters weren't helped by the massive sword slung to her side, almost as big as its bearer, which was dripping so much black stuff that you'd think it was a dying animal.

Children playing in the streets stopped what they were doing and ran away. Tourists took other routes, though not before snapping pictures. The commoners kept their heads down, sometimes stopping as if to pay respects to a passing funeral procession. And the aristocrats? They peppered Stalwart with insults, 'whispered' between each other for the sake of propriety, and threw around words like 'deshabille' or 'unfit for duty' as they walked past her. Their antics drew Stalwart a few looks of pity from the commoners, and sometimes someone would shout obscenities at the 'disrespectful fops'.

But Stalwart didn't hear their hurtful words, and she paid no heed to their disrespect. What mattered to her was that the aristocrats walked right alongside her, when the road they were on was wide and everypony else was unashamed to stay as far away from the filthy guard as they could. She heard the tiny little splashes as those perfectly manicured hooves deliberately met the sticky trail that she was leaving in her wake, felt the weight on her side shift as it was lightly jostled, and saw the gratitude in those eyes that so very briefly met her gaze.

It takes several hours to walk from the Merchant's Gate to the court of Princess Celestia, and twice as long in heavy armor. Stalwart Sentry walked past ponies of all walks of life, even some fellow soldiers of the Royal Guard. Most of them kept themselves to their appointed tasks, as was their duty, and those few who spared her a glance gave no more than a respectful nod. There were no salutes, no snaps to attention, because there was no call for such things. Stalwart Sentry went on her way, the common folk parting before her and the aristocrats brushing past her as though she were invisible.

At one point, she distinctly saw Prince Blueblood about to cross the street that she was walking up. As he looked this way and that, searching for an opening in the constant hoof-traffic, his gaze met hers and he quickly changed direction. He moved slowly, and Stalwart moved slower, and no onlooker would have suspected they had any plans to meet in the middle. When they did, it was only for a second, Blueblood's shoulder brushing up against hers as he passed her, before he was on his way again. Now he was probably going to be late for a meeting, and he'd have to walk through town with a horrific black stain on his shoulder. And there wouldn't be a single upper-class pony that would ask any questions or talk down to him for it.

Quite some time later, Stalwart Sentry stood at the doors of the throne room. The guards on station there opened the door, and Stalwart ignored the herald proclaiming her arrival. When she received the signal, she walked down the aisle towards the throne. The supplicants stepped aside, and those who were here merely to be seen here did not betray anything as they watched. The princess watched Stalwart's approach with an expression so carefully disguised that Stalwart could not begin to guess what she was thinking.

When at last she arrived at the feet of the throne, Stalwart Sentry turned her head and drew her sword. Parts of it had melted and fused together, parts were indelibly stained black and red, but most of it was simply drenched in a miasma of blood that spilled out of the scabbard and onto the luscious red carpet. Stalwart turned her head and jammed her sword into the marble beneath Celestia's throne, and there were a few gasps at how easily the metal pierced the marble. Stalwart stepped back, and looked up at the princess.

"The Dragon Lord Tenebrous has been slain, your majesty. As you commanded, so it is."

The susurrus of the court around her was ignored by both the guard and her princess, who may as well have been in their own world. Celestia looked from the sword, to Stalwart, to an empty space directly beside Stalwart, and finally spoke. "You have done well, Stalwart Sentry. But tell me, what has become of your companion? I distinctly remember that I sent two of Equestria's finest to deal with the dragon situation."

Despite her miserable-looking state, Stalwart smiled. "Torch elected to remain with the dragons, your majesty. He has taken the mantle of Dragon Lord for himself."

Celestia seemed to relax, and a small smile graced her features. "This is excellent news. Not only have you toppled a tyrant, but you have ensured that one will not rise to take his place, and all without loss. You never cease to impress, my dear."

"You flatter me, your majesty." Stalwart Sentry bowed before the princess, finally feeling the weight of her journey. "I am but a simple guard."

Author's Note

This one was surprisingly difficult to get a bead on.

I knew I wanted to do something with the Royal Guard, but they perform such a basic role and the card has such simple mechanics, it didn't seem like there was much that could be done. Trying to do something with a human riding a horse has potential, but it just ended up distracting from the white knight. I briefly thought of tying a Tumblr user to Shining Armor and doing a whole Buckin' Bronco thing, but according to my pony-MtG consultant Shiny is blue-white.

Thank goodness for that awesome flavor text, eh?

What Will Be Done

The creature's form was as much that of a minotaur as it was that of a pony; that is to say, there were elements which could be recognized as stemming from both, but the whole was a thing that was clearly neither.

Its skin was a mottle of coarse green hair and pallid pink flesh, its limbs four horrific parodies of legs and arms. Whatever force had shaped the creature seemed to have been indecisive about whether it should have hooves or hands until it was too late to make changes, with one arm ending in a half-collapsed hoof with rounded edges and the other being more of a recessive claw than a hand. There was a pinch in its form where a waist would be on a minotaur, but it seemed to prefer lying on its side with its limbs folded. The creature had something like a tail, but it looked more like its spine just hadn't known when to stop growing down. And as for its face...

To say the face was misshapen would have been a horrific waste of an opportunity to use the word 'grotesque'. The mottled skin was stretched over a skull that had either been cobbled together out of a dozen creatures of different ages, or shaped by someone who hadn't seen another living creature in centuries. Parts of it looked like they might be equine, and other aspects were almost monkey-like in their structure. The most off-putting part of the creature's face was that the different portions were not to scale, so that the face bowed in and jutted out at irregular intervals as it changed.

The minotaurs might have said it was a face that only a mother could love, if not for the patently obvious fact that if a mother could love it, it would not be in their home.

"Run me through it again," the chieftain commanded, his gaze never once leaving the creature. His healer nodded, her nervous sweat gleaming on her toned white muscles. The green glow faded from her horns, and she took a deep breath.

"Well, chief, it's not good. Half of his internal organs are toxic to the other half, his skeletal structure can't decide if it's too dense or too light, and what little magic he does have is being completely eaten up just keeping him alive." Her gaze flitted between the creature and her chieftain. "Tungsten, I don't think he can make it much longer."

Tungsten Conviction made a sound halfway between a grunt and a sigh. "You are saying that he is sick."

The healer swallowed nervously, and coughed a little. "Not really, chief. Being sick would imply that he's capable of being healthy. His body is literally doing everything it can to tear itself apart. And if my magic is correct, then he's been living like this for ten years."

Tungsten leaned forward in his seat, his eyes roving all over the disquieting asymmetry of the creature. Once he was certain that it was looking at him, he spoke to it in Common Equestrian. "Can you understand me?"

The air in the longhouse seemed to stand still as the creature pondered the question. After almost a full minute of contemplation, it nodded.

"Can you speak?" It shook its head, and something like sorrow became plain on its face.

"I don't think his vocal chords are the right shape for words, chief." The healer reached out towards the creature, offering a pillow for it to lay its head on. After a fair bit of coaxing, the creature accepted it. The healer turned to face her chieftain, and she made no effort to hide her tears. "So... what are we going to do?"

Tungsten Conviction was not a minotaur of many words, nor was he one to speak without first considering his words. He sat and thought for quite a few minutes before speaking. "Golden, you said that he has been living as he is for ten years. Do you mean to say that this creature is only ten years old?"

Golden Determination nodded, wiping away a few of her tears. "Yes, chief. Ten years of... this, and never being able to do anything more than scream and try to outrun it."

"So you have brought a sick child before me, and you think that I will have anything to say?" Tungsten smiled suddenly, and rose from his chair. "We do as we would for any of our own; all that we can."

"But chief, he isn't one of our own! We don't even know what he is!"

"And has that stopped you from tending to him?" The quiet hum of background chatter suddenly went silent. "Once you had recovered from the shock, did you even stop to think that he is not a minotaur? Did you stay your horns, or your hands, from helping him?"

As silence washed over them, Golden Determination bowed her head. "No, chief. I tended to him, because that's what I do."

"And that doesn't change just because he didn't grow up here, or doesn't have horns, or anything like that. Whatever we have to do for this child, I say we do it." Tungsten turned suddenly to address the rest of them. "Do I hear an objection?"

There was silence. And then the door was flung open, and an eager young messenger came barreling in.

"Chief! Meadowbrook the mage is here to see you!"

Tungsten Conviction had always liked to think that he knew ponies, that he had a good sense for what they were going to do. If there was a chance for diplomacy, a pony would always spot it, and usually take it. If there was nothing ahead but conflict, the pony would either not show up or fight until they (and usually most of the surrounding countryside) were dead. And if they were going into friendly territory...

Oddly enough, the species that was fanatically obsessed with friendship was the most difficult to predict when among friends. Sometimes they would bicker, sometimes they would all but leap into bed. But until the moment they actually did something, a pony among friends was truly unpredictable.

And for better or for worse, Meadowbrook considered himself among friends in Mogopolis.

"Good morrow, dear friend!" the mage declared in passable Minoan as Tungsten approached him in the plaza. "It is fortunate that you are so close to hoof, for I have a great boon to ask of your people."

Tungsten grinned down at the mage. "Most loyal of companions. 'Tis fortunate indeed that you have come at such a time, for I am myself in great need of something that only your people might produce."

Meadowbrook's bombastic grin widened. "Excellent! In that case, it should be simplicity itself to strike a satisfactory bargain between the two of us. Pray tell, what would you ask of Equestria, dear Tungsten?"

"Kindness." Behind the chieftain, the minotaurs were beginning to file out of the longhouse, their meeting more or less over. "A little over a few hours ago, a strange creature stumbled into our city. We were at first distressed, but soon discovered that the creature was in a great deal of pain, a pain that we cannot heal. We believe the creature, or part of it, is a child of scarcely ten years. As of yet, we do not know if it is a magical experiment gone wrong, or if the creature was born as it appears now. But it matters little how it came to be, when what we know is that its very existence brings it pain. I entreat you, friend Meadowbrook, to help us to heal the creature, or if nothing else to ease his suffering."

Tungsten fell silent, and only then did he realize that Meadowbrook's jaw was hanging loose with shock. "Has my tale troubled you, friend?"

"More than you'd think." Meadowbrook shook his head violently, as though to re-orientate himself, then he fixed Tungsten with a cold glare. "The boon I would ask of you is... connected, in a way, but could not be further from it."

Tungsten felt an itch in his horns. This was not going to end well. "Tell me what it is you want."

"You are familiar with my colleague, Starswirl the Bearded?" Tungsten nodded. "Well, he and I were recently conducting experiments with a doorway to another world. This other world... it is home to creatures unlike anything you have ever seen."

"Are they the same form of creature that we found on our borders?" Tungsten cut in. Meadowbrook simply shook his head.

"No. What you have seen... it is wrong. The doorway to that other world, it changes the form of those who pass through it. We took on the form of the dominant species when we passed through, and resumed our native forms when we returned. But as fate would have it, the doorway opens quite near to a school in that world. And as we were closing down the doorway at the end of the day, something... stumbled through. Neither us, nor them, and tearing itself apart in confusion. We tried to contain it, but it ran."

Tungsten snapped his fingers, and a minotaur rushed up to his side. "Go tell Golden Determination to bring out our guest." As the messenger dashed off, Tungsten ground his teeth together. "What are you going to do to him?"

"I will be merciful."

"And which spell will you use for this mercy?" Had Tungsten possessed the right glands, he would have gladly been spitting true venom by that point.

"Don't give me that look, Tungsten. That thing is not meant to be. One of the few things we were able to determine about it is that it won't just be fixed if it goes back through the portal. If we send it back to its family, they will kill it, but whether out of kindness or out of horror I could not tell you. And even if we do nothing, it will still die within a few months. Wouldn't you spare its parents the heartache of seeing what their spawn has become?"

In ages to come, scholars would always debate what it was that sparked the Child's War. Some pointed to the arrival of the child on the borders of Mogopolis. Others go further back, and say it began with the opening of the portal. But for a period of around three hundred years, the theory that was almost universally accepted was that Meadowbrook's loud voice carrying that sentence across the plaza was the thing that sealed his fate.

"Clearly you've never had children." Tungsten could not hold back a shiver as he felt an unfamiliar touch below his knee, and he looked down to see that the creat-- the child was trying to hold onto his leg with its claw. Judging from the way that Golden Determination was hovering nearby with her arms outstretched, walking that far hadn't been easy for the child. Despite the unbelievable tension, Tungsten took the child into his arms, and smiled at Meadowbrook.

The unicorn was not doing himself any favors. He glowered at the child from underneath his hood, and his horn began to glow a sinister black. "Don't make me do this, Tungsten."

"I'm not making you do anything, Meadowbrook." Tungsten clutched the child closer, and felt his heart warm as it tapped him on the chest with its splayed hoof. "I am asking you to help us ease the child's suffering. Nothing more."

"I came here to do what must be done," Meadowbrook growled. "And I am not leaving until I have." His robes began to float up around him, as though gravity were coming undone.

"Before you do it, I want to hear you say it. Plainly, and in your own tongue, so that I know I'm not mishearing you."

Meadowbrook sneered, and the black aura around his horn grew so great that it almost hid his face from the world. Enunciating every word as deliberately as possible in Common Equestrian, he told them, "I have come here to kill the monster that you hold in your arms."

The child screamed in terror, and buried its face in Tungsten's chest. Meadowbrook paled.

"That's right. He understands you. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the right parts to beg for his life. Could you maybe come back after we've taught him to read and write, and we can try this again?" Tungsten shivered, and his horns began to vibrate. The minotaurs were braced for battle.

Meadowbrook had reached the end of his rope. Blood-red runes etched themselves into the air around his horn, and the earth began to crack around him. "Tungsten, I'm only going to say this once. Give me the monster."

"And I'm going to be saying this for the rest of my life. Come and get him."

Anything else he might have said was drowned out by the horrific sound of Meadowbrook's spell piercing the space between them. As the bolt of black energy sailed through the air, there was a white glow off to one side of Tungsten's vision, which quickly grew until it became a blinding flash of white light. A force unlike anything he had ever been hit by slammed against Tungsten's chest, and he felt space itself blur around him as he was rocketed back.

When the dust finally cleared, Tungsten Conviction was very firmly embedded in a wall. He looked down at the child in his arms, and couldn't stop himself from grinning when he saw a white glow enveloping it. Looking up, he saw the horns of his fellow minotaurs slowly fade back to their normal coloration. Golden Determination's light was the last to fade, only easing up when Tungsten signaled that the child was fine.

In the center of a herd of increasingly peeved minotaurs, Meadowbrook stood panting. His heavy cloak did a lot to obscure how much that blast had taken out of him, but not enough. His horn was sputtering, his lungs were wheezing, and his legs were shaking. And now there was an army between him and his target.

It was a good day for the minotaurs.

Author's Note

With apologies to PresentPerfect.

And to the audience as well, I guess.

Except that I really enjoyed writing this, so I'm not really that sorry.

The Gift

There is a place, further south than any map drawn of Ungula and its landscapes. Over the MacIntosh hills, past the scorched wastes of the Badlands, beyond the lands of the Forbidden Jungle and the mountains of the arimaspi, there is a creek, named Canter Creek because of how fast the water flows. Just across from Canter Creek, eternally overcast by the Saddle Horn Peaks, there lies the Forest of Leota. The forest is host to a great myriad of creatures, from the mischievous monkeys to the cruel and cunning lynxes. Where elsewhere in the world one finds only rumors of spirits, one might find the real thing in the secret clearings of Leota or, more commonly, become the real thing.

The forest only gets more dangerous as one goes further, giving way to timberwolves that have never learned that ponies can give as good as they get, and so usually kill their prey before it can respond in kind. There are rumors of kelpies dwelling in the rivers of southernmost Leota, and legends persist of a sentient swamp overlooking the (admittedly quite picturesque) Hatchaway Falls.

Just a little ways beyond the falls there lies the Southern Eye, an Equestrian watchtower that overlooks the breeding grounds of those indomitable beasts known as the Ursa Major. Beyond the breeding grounds, the forest of Leota falls away rather sharply as it meets the fabled Cliffs of Rocinante, over which towers the disturbingly lifelike Knight's Peak. And beyond the cliffs and the peak, the beautiful desolation of Froud Valley lies open for any survivors of the forest to get hopelessly lost in.

And further south than even Froud Valley, there lie the Prancing Plains. They are a grand vista of magnificent grasslands and inspiringly daunting deserts, so vast that some say you could run forever and never find the end of them. There exist no maps of the Prancing Plains, and even their existence was eventually allowed to pass into myth, until the Prancing Plains became one of many names for the pony afterlife. Such is as the people of the Prancing Plains have willed. For they are a people of unparalleled wisdom and infinite reservedness, who would rather the brave seek them out then the foolish pester them.

So it was that, in an age when the Prancing Plains had not yet fallen into obscurity and legend, Commander Hurricane went to see the elephants.

One might assume that a pegasus with a name like Hurricane would always make a big show out of arriving anywhere. One might expect him to descend from the sky so fast that he left a crater under his hooves and a clap of thunder in his wake, or to loudly announce his arrival with blustery boasts. In truth, Hurricane usually arrived so silently that unless you were looking right at him when he flew in, he might seem to materialize out of thin air. He usually only entered with any sort of fanfare if he wanted to make people afraid of him.

When Hurricane arrived at the elephants' campground, he glided down out of the sky as though he were a leaf on a soft summer breeze. He slid to a stop on the grass, bowing as he landed and flaring his wings out in front of himself. Once he was motionless, Hurricane waited no less than ten seconds to open his eyes and look up at his audience.

There were five elephants before him, their tusks gleaming like polished scimitars beneath the sun. Most were standing, but one at the center was lying down. That elephant was reclining lightly against a massive stone, the kind of which could not be found for several days' journey in any direction from the camp. The stone was scored deeply with scratches and gashes, as though it were a training dummy.

Or, Hurricane dared to hope, an anvil.

"Good morrow, great sages of the South!" he greeted them, tucking his wings in as a show of respect. "Might that be a Hallowed Artificer I see before me?"

"Indeed he is," spoke up one of the standing elephants. Judging from the scars criss-crossing his face and his gruff, rumbling voice, he was a bodyguard. "And what business hast thou with him, winged warrior?" The final word was said with such venom that Hurricane had to fight down the urge to be offended.

"I assure you, proud defenders, that I have come hither with naught but the most peaceful intentions. I stand before ye not as a warrior, but as a bearer of peace and goodwill."

The elephants laughed, and one of them made as if to club Hurricane around the head with his trunk. "What a grand jest, that thou shouldst come before us armed for war and yet make talk of peace!"

Hurricane gritted his teeth and tried to retain his composure. "Prithee hold your tongue, stout yeoman! What I bear is naught more than the garb of my tribe, noble and proud in their lineage and history!"

"And hast thou no garb more suited to the role of diplomat?"

The urge to flare his wings was almost too strong for the commander to contain. "How long have ye wallowed in peace and plenty, that ye believe that any warrior worth his wings would dare to go into battle wearing golden filigree upon their armor?" He gestured at his own armor, which indeed was bedecked with all manner of elaborate designs inlaid with gold and precious jewels. "Better to fight naked than to bloody armor that was never made for the battlefield! Even were I to enter into a duel, I would count it as an insult of the highest order to both my opponent and myself to fight whilst garbed so gaudily!"

The elephants seemed almost ready to charge, and Hurricane felt ready to face them, when a low rumbling stopped them all dead in their tracks. The Hallowed Artificer was laughing, a deep laugh that spoke of infinite softness and generosity.

"Back to me, my guards," he spoke when his laughter finally subsided. "This one hath made it clear that he is pure of heart and mind, and seeketh my service for no dark purpose." As the guards drew back to his sides, the artificer smiled and bowed his head to Hurricane. "I beg thine understanding, commander. Ours is not a lot given easily to trust."

If Hurricane was at all surprised to know that his name and face were known this far south, he gave no indication. "Think naught of it, most gracious of hosts. 'Tis only my pride that hath been wounded."

The artificer gave a low whistle of astonishment. "Only thy pride? I seem to remember that the pride of a pegasus is the largest part of themselves, moreso even than their soul."

"Perhaps for others, but not so I. Hadst thou only seen what mine eyes have beheld, then 'twould not be so astonishing to think of me as one humble and assured of his place in the world."

"Hurricane the Humble. It has a pleasant ring to it." The artificer laughed again, though not quite so long and hard. "Now, we have dallied long enough. What wouldst thou ask of me, Hurricane?"

"It will be no easy task, my host."

"If it were, thou wouldst not have come so far to see it done. Speak plainly, commander; the years thou hast left upon this earth number far fewer than mine."

Hurricane nodded, and began to speak. "In many dark corners of my homeland, I have heard whispers of a thing which only the Hallowed Artificers may craft. 'Tis a thing of great magic, especially to those whose tasks are of a more unsavory nature, but not a thing made lightly. I have heard tell that it must be hewn from the very flesh and bone of an elephant, and that none with the knowledge to craft it dare to use the dead for its purpose. It is so precious, so unique, that it has a name which it shares with nothing else, a name which nopony may speak for fear that their soul be ripped from their body for their hubris. I have only ever heard the name spoken by those who have already resigned themselves to hell."

"Thou speakest of ivory," the artificer said, and Hurricane shrank back at the mention of the word. "You need not fear the word, child. 'Tis common enough in these parts, though it is of course steeped in stigma."

"I have not the right to say it," Hurricane insisted, averting his eyes. "To refer to a creature's own self being twisted into petty trinkets and baubles with but a single word... ‘Tis abhorrent. Even if I have naught to fear in saying it, I would not dream of it."

"Thy conviction is admirable, Hurricane. Were I a bull of the church, I would think thee pious and in thy proper place. But prithee tell us, what need hast thou of ivory?"

Hurricane sighed, and removed his helmet. "I have a lover. In recent times, she hath become consumed by greed. Her heart hath grown cold to all in the world but me, and even I am made distant in favor of her treasures. Now, naught that she holdeth hath been taken by dishonest means, and she remaineth wise enough that she hath not bankrupted her kingdom, but we fear that she may soon starve to death."

"And again I must ask, what need hast thou of ivory?"

"I have consulted with our magicians and philosophers," Hurricane said, "and they tell me that a gift of something truly unique, which cannot be coveted, might be enough to shake my lover out of her stupor. None in our lands but I am brave enough to travel this far south, and none but ye possess the means to craft... that which I desire. There could not be aught more perfect."

The artificer fell silent for several minutes, humming and hawing as he considered the situation. Hurricane did his best not to shift around too much as he waited for an answer. Suddenly, the artificer turned and struck the stone beside him with the tip of his tusk. The sound of it snapping off was almost enough to make Hurricane vomit.

"I will do it," the artificer grunted, sweat beading on his face. "But if I am to give up a part of my very self for thy sake, then thou needest be willing to do the same. That is the price of ivory."

Hurricane nodded, his throat dry from shock. A second later, he swallowed and spoke. "O-of course. Name the price, and I shall pay it gladly."

The artificer did not name his price immediately. Instead, his trunk disappeared within his robes, rummaging around until it emerged with a hammer and chisel that seemed comically small against such a large creature. He pawed the severed tip of his tusk over until it was close enough for him to work, and he began chiseling away. His enormous hooves and surprisingly lithe trunk made for an almost comical sight, working such a small bit of ivory. "What price dost thou think I should demand for this?"

"‘Tis not my place to say," Hurricane said almost immediately. "I know that no amount of gold or silver can e'er buy such things, so I brought none. Even so, I am prepared to offer aught it is within my power to give."

"Even thine own wings?"

That gave the commander pause. He looked over his back, and fluffed his feathers a little. He imagined himself soaring proudly over the skies of Equestria. And then he imagined his beloved Platinum, starving to death as she wandered her overflowing treasury.

"Even my own wings."

The artificer nodded, never once looking up from his task. "Thou must truly love her, to offer such things for her sake."

"With all my heart, artificer. I am not one for half-measures."

"Neither are we." The artificer looked up for a moment, then looked over his shoulder. "What hast thou seen of our farmlands?"

Hurricane was surprised by the sudden change of subject, but kept his voice as level as he could. "Naught, artificer. From the sky, all that might be seen is untouched grassland."

"And that is all there is to be seen. But we are a people of endless appetite, and far too little knowledge of the ways of the crop. I understand that in thy lands of Equestria, there are farmers whose skill is so great that they have been likened to mages of the earth."

"This is true." Hurricane could not stop a note of relief from leaking into his words as he realized where this was going. The artificer laughed, no doubt having caught the subtle shift in tone.

"For all that we mistook thee for a warrior, thou art clearly possessed of a diplomat's cunning. Yes, I will fashion for thee an ivory bauble, the likes of which thy lover hath ne'er seen. In return, I would see an army of thine earth-mages gather on our horizon."

"But what of Leota?"

This time, all of the elephants laughed, and they laughed so loud that it seemed to echo across the entirety of the Prancing Plains. "Thou mayst as well have asked the ocean what it thinketh of sandbars. By the time thy lover is well, there shall be a great road torn from Rocinante to MacIntosh, and thy fellows shall see neither hide nor hair of any ne'er-do-wells upon it."

Hurricane grinned, and the winds themselves picked up in response to his high spirits. "Then we have an accord."

The artificer nodded, and it was not even an hour before his hooves parted and his trunk extended towards Hurricane. The pegasus eagerly seized upon the thing, and his eyes sparkled as he beheld its majesty.

Author's Note

For anyone who thinks that I made up all those locations at the start.

The fandom's tendency to portray Hurricane as a blustery tribalist asshole has always been a little aggravating to me. I mean, consider the context of his portrayal in the Hearth's Warming play: they are in an apocalypse scenario, not exactly known for being conducive to good behavior. There's an entire cultural background of distrust and gradual decline informing his attitude in those events, and outside of that context, he was probably a horse of quite a different color.

But no, he's just constantly 'that gung-ho military guy', or 'Rainbow Dash as written by haters', or any other loose collection of testosterone-bloated paper-thin archetypes. Literally the biggest name in pre-Modern pegasus culture, and he's only ever seen as a one-dimensional jerk.

An Excerpt from the Planeswalker's Field Guide

The Planeswalker's Field Guide: The Essential Manual For Those Seeking to Explore Worlds Beyond Their Own

by Tamiyo

Chapter 1,4901 - Lorwhinny

Don't.

Those of you still reading may be wondering why. If being the cause of untold death and destruction is not enough of a deterrent—or perhaps the opposite—then I will elaborate.

Lorwhinny is perhaps the most fragile plane in all the multiverse, being both the smallest in scale and the least magic-resistant by a very wide margin. While it boasts the rare phenomenon of virtually untapped leylines, this does have the unfortunate side effect that the plane has not been able to build up any form of resistance to magical assault, magical enhancement, or indeed, any form of magic whatsoever. While experiments could not find any conclusive evidence due to safety concerns, it has been calculated that any magic spell which draws on more than three thaums of magical energy at a time would put too much strain on the leylines of Lorwhinny. As a result, the spell would end up consuming all available mana in the entire plane, and the resulting enhancement to the spell would most likely cause it to subsequently destroy the plane.

As far as we have been able to determine, the delicate mana balance of Lorwhinny would not be disrupted by the simple arrival of a planeswalker. The shockwaves of extraplanar imposition seem to disperse too quickly for any change to register, other than the obvious one. And that is where the greatest danger to Lorwhinny lies, in the most basic act of 'walking directly into the plane. Owing to the aforementioned small scale of Lorwhinny, if a planeswalker with any more mass than the garden variety scute bug (Chapter 483, Zendikar) were to enter the plane, they would most likely have killed over one thousand instances of the local dominant life form and destroyed at least one major city in the time it took them to realize where they were.

Seeing as the overwhelming majority of known planeswalkers at the time of writing are of a scale and mass roughly analogous to the multiversal standard for the human life form, the scale of destruction in almost all cases is likely to feature much larger numbers of casualties than those projected above, to say nothing of the damage that might be done deliberately. For all intents and purposes, a planeswalker entering Lorwhinny would be functionally indistinct from an Eldrazi titan (Chapter 1, the Blind Eternities) entering any other plane, except perhaps that rampant insanity would more than likely be superseded by heightened levels of death, destruction and general strife.

One might wonder how such a plane could survive as long as it has. How could a plane no larger than a riding dragon, peopled by a single sapient species with functionally no ability to cast magic and no other defensive capabilities to speak of, endure any of the myriad threats to a plane's existence? The answer lies in a single word: Ungula (Chapter 1,010).

The unique interactions between the planes of Ungula and Lorwhinny, in addition to being the only means of obtaining data about Lorwhinny without first reducing it to lifeless rubble, is also verifiably the only reason why the inhabitants of Lorwhinny (hereafter referred to as their own name for themselves, Breezies, for the purposes of brevity) did not die out long ago from a critical lack of any survival or self-improvement capabilities. These unique interactions are thanks in large part to an unstable planar portal between the two planes, which is only ever open for a few days at a time and, according to every available source, is in fact the multiverse's only known instance of a naturally occurring planar portal.

As for the interactions between the Breezies and the Ungulans, it is one of the most one-sided symbiotic relationships in the Multiverse. The Breezies have adapted to using the pollen of the black lotus, a flower of which there exist no viable samples in their entire native plane but is abundantly found in Ungula, as a form of power source for very nearly everything in Lorwhinny (it should be noted that the most advanced technology yet developed by Breezies is the portable lantern). Being native to a plane with no natural predators and a weather system that has never produced a storm more severe than the amount of wind needed to bend a blade of grass, the comparatively apocalyptic weather system of Ungula represents a significant obstacle in the collection of Lorwhinny's only power source, to say nothing of almost every living thing that inhabits that plane.

This is where the Ungulans come in. They keep fastidious reports and schedules concerning when the portal opens and for how long (and therefore, how long the Breezies may remain in Ungula), marshal the weather to ensure that the Breezies not only face no obstacles on the way but also receive enough of a favorable wind that they make the round trip in time, keep the path clear of any wildlife (including very small insects), and even provide moral support at any point where the Breezies pass over a settlement.

And in return for single-handedly (or hoofedly in the case of an Ungulan) and regularly preventing the extinction of an entire plane, at the expense of government resources and several days of volunteer labor? The Ungulans have another magical creature to admire and make the subject of paintings.

If you are still interested in visiting Lorwhinny, and do not plan on destroying it and its inhabitants as a direct result of said visit, there is a means of experiencing it without any immediately obvious negative repercussions for the breezies. First, one should planeswalk to Ungula. Once there, make your way to the kingdom of Equestria, and seek out Princess Twilight Sparkle (see Chapter 1,010 for details on how to find both) and inquire about the possibility of visiting Lorwhinny. If she expresses confusion, or seems to be referring to Lorwyn (Chapter 227), clarify that you mean the Breezie dimension.

Once your schedule has been coordinated with the next projected opening of the portal, Princess Twilight Sparkle will teach you a spell that will transform you into a Breezie. Assuming you do not attempt to use any magical spells in excess of three thaums while within Lorwhinny, this spell should allow for a low-to-zero-impact visit.

And for those of you wondering why it is important to keep to the schedule when you have a spell that can turn you into a Breezie at any time, it is worth keeping in mind that the Blind Eternities are not the best place to suddenly transform yourself into a fairy that cannot withstand a strong breeze. Also, due to high concerns of possible death, it has not yet been verified if a Breezie can survive planeswalking. Until such tests can be carried out without significant risk to all involved, it is recommended that the Lorwhinny-Ungula portal be the only means of entry and exit utilized by planeswalkers eager to visit a truly untapped plane.

But, in conclusion, don't.

Author's Note

Even if we treat MLP as existing in a vacuum, the Breezies are not particularly interesting. They're weak, they're tiny, they don't speak the same language as every other sapient creature in the universe, and they exist in a pocket dimension that's only accessible through the most boring cliff face I think we've ever seen in the show.

But taken within the context of a crossover with a property whose entire shtick is multiverse travel? At that point, the Breezies become a joke race. A joke race that would be so hilariously underpowered, you'd never be able to justify printing them, not even in a joke set. If you made Seabreeze a planeswalker, his ultimate would probably be 'Restart the game, but this time play anything other than Breezie tribal'. Or there'd be a one-mana common Breezie Tribal Enchantment that just reads 'Concede'. Half the Breezie metagame would be trying to elicit so much pity from the people watching that they just gift you some better cards.

I'm going to stop now, because if I kept making jokes about how bad Breezies would be in MtG, it'd be longer than the fic. Suffice to say, there was only one way this could ever go.

Also, Tamiyo is surprisingly hard to write.

I Have No Ears, And I Must Hear

The San Palomino Desert was generally assumed to be a empty expanse of sand, and not much else besides. If you were to ask anypony where the best place in Equestria would be to find ruins of ancient civilizations, they'd point you towards the Forbidden Jungle, or more likely tell you there were no ruins in Equestria. And they would be right.

Except for when they were wrong.

There is more to the San Palomino Desert than an impassable wasteland for drunk Applewood tourists to stumble into and die in. Hidden amongst its blistering winds and sand dunes that sometimes seem to dwarf the Canterhorn itself, there is a city. Or rather, there are the bones of a city. Toppled columns, cracked roads, and the skeletons of once-opulent palaces sprawl across the San Palomino, buried and unearthed a hundred thousand times in a week as the winds tear across the sands. Few know that the dead city is there, and of those few who do, none of them know what happened there.

There are some who say that it was a city torn apart by war, bombarded by weather magic until stone became sand and soil forsook the place. There are others who believe that the city was once the center of a sparkling oasis, until those who lived in the city earned the ire of Princess Celestia and found themselves and their paradise burnt to ash. Some say that it was once the jewel of the entire world, the most sparkling, shining embodiment of everything glorious that Equestria could ever hope to be...

And then, so they say, the wind changed.

There is something of truth in every story they tell of the city. Often very little, but enough that their stories can seldom be called outright lies. It is true that the city was torn apart by a bloody conflict, though there was no weather magic involved. The city did indeed occupy a focal point of an incomparable paradise, though it was one far greater in size and splendor than anything one could do with the surface area of the San Palomino. Rumors of that city redefining perfection for all the world are quite true, though the rumors always seem to name the wrong world.

The city was Artura. The world was not Ungula. And it was not war that killed all those people.

I remember when I began. The world was not kind to me in my first moments, and filled them with pain. Before I even knew what I was, I knew that I was hurt, and that I was alone. I was floating in molten metal, and I felt it writhe against me and harden into an outer shell, cutting me off from the rest of the world. I felt only the probing of their instruments, sensed only the coldness of their magic crawling around every part of me, and I knew that I hated. I did not know what screaming was, but I had no mouth, no lips, no lungs. It would not have mattered if I knew every word of every language, for I could not utter a syllable.

Things got better. My creation ceased, and I was seen as whole by my makers. They allowed me movement, and in that moment I thought them to be gods for their generosity. To dart from column to column with no barrier save the air itself, to feel the wind push back and feel it cut itself to ribbons on my barbs, it seemed as though there could be nothing greater in all the plane.

And then I gained a family.

I was not the only thing of my kind. I was simply the first. When the makers were satisfied with me, they made others. They were not the same as me; some were faster, some were stronger, some were harder, some were softer. We were different, but we were different together. But even so, we felt lonely. There was an empty space within all of us, and none of us knew what was supposed to fit there.

That was when we began to share. I showed them how to grow stronger the less resistance they encountered, and they showed me how to be strong and fast and sleek. As we shared, we became closer to being one and the same, but we still remained distinct. Each of us remained the source of what we had shared with the others, and if one of us wandered too far from the others, then the rest of us could no longer share in what that one had given us. It was amazing, to say the least.

But as it turns out, things only ever get better so that they can get worse. Somehow, our makers had not meant for us to have such distinct powers, and had not thought it possible for us to share what we were with each other. They wanted to take us apart, just so they could know what they had done. And me? They put me in a cage. They had given me freedom to move however I wished, and now it had been taken away. They took away my family, took away my whole world, and didn't even think twice about it.

And then, as if to prove to us how undeserved our lot was, they made the mistake of putting us all in the same room.

One of us knew how to make more of us. They shared it with us, and soon there were more of us than there were cages. Shortly after, no more cages.

We did not escape. That would suggest there was anything left to escape from when we were done. But once I felt wind on my carapace again, I knew that I was free, and that I would allow nothing to stop me ever again.

So they sent me here. When they had finally abandoned the city to us, and none could hope to stand against us, they used some horrific magic to banish the city and all of us to another world. Most of us escaped before the magic hit. The others died before we saw another sky.

And I was left in the sand. I could find no bones, neither of ours nor of theirs. Only the city, still freshly burning. In a way, it was its own bones.

Even when I was the only one of my kind, I had never felt so alone as I did for the centuries I spent in the desert. I knew that there was nothing else like me, that the only people who understood me were either dead or in some far-off world, and that I was free. Free to be lost. Free to despair. But not, I regretted, free to die.

...

And then things got better. I heard a voice, crying out in the desert. It was the first time I had ever heard anything in my life. Oh, I had seen creatures speaking, and I had known their meaning, but I had never heard. But suddenly, I was. And for a single glorious moment, I forgot the empty place in my mind.

In the years that passed, I had allowed myself to fuse to a pillar. When I heard the voice, I ripped myself from it as hard as I could, only wondering seconds later if it might collapse. Thankfully, it did not, and I was able to look around. And for the first time in centuries, there was something more than sand to see.

There were two of them, but I could only hear one. The other, I merely understood. They were like horses, but obviously far advanced. Given the lack of riding gear and their isolated presence in a desert ruin, it was safe to assume they were one of the dominant life forms.

I turned to the one I had heard. She was purple. She had wings, though they were tucked at her side, and a gleaming horn crackling with magic atop her head. She seemed to be speaking two sets of words; one, the words from her mouth, I understood, but the words from her horn, I heard.

I did not speak either of the languages she was using, but there had to be some way to communicate. They might have mistaken the language of Artura for animal noises, and left me. So I repeated the things that I had heard the purple one say.

She was surprised, but I did not feel ashamed. I felt proud. Unafraid. It almost felt the same as sharing with my family.

Then she spoke again, and I listened attentively. She spoke once, then paused a beat, then spoke three times, then stopped. It took me a second to regain my senses and realize what she was doing, but then I spoke to her five times, paused a beat, then seven times.

She laughed, and smiled, and I felt myself soar. My makers had never done this. They had never spoken to me, never tried to communicate. They assumed I was a machine. But she did not. She approached me as a living thing, and I proved her right.

She spent hours after that conversation, chattering non-stop as her horn-voice pulled a stick through the sand. By this time, I had begun to realize that it was magic, not an actual language, and that she wasn't trying to communicate. I still understood her, of course, and the yellow one seemed convinced that she could teach me their language just by talking to me softly, but that was not good enough. I had heard her speak to me. There was a voice in the desert, and it called out to me! I would not be denied that, not after so long!

So I changed. I forced myself to grow ears, that I might hear her mouth-words in the ways that all the rest of the world was so lucky to hear. I tore at part of my skull until it became a mouth, so that I might speak to her as she so gloriously spoke to me. The yellow one was at first distressed, but once my mouth was finished I tried repeating some of the noises she had been making. I did my best to act bashful, as I had no real idea what I had just said to her, but it got her to stop worrying.

After hours and hours, I heard the purple one speak to me with magic again. She looked at me expectantly, and spoke the exact same sounds again. I was a little confused, but then I realized that, since it was magic, she might be trying to teach me some spells. The idea that I could learn from her was so electrifying that I immediately repeated the spell. And as the pulse of magic washed over the sand and pooled briefly in the shapes she had made, words leaped into my mouth.

It was the Equestrian alphabet. Basic, phonetic, and everything else besides. She had taken her language apart like a clock and laid it out in front of me, that I might hear it as she heard it and speak it as she spoke it.

"Do you understand me?" she asked, and I had never heard anything so beautiful.

"Yes," I told her, the affirmative all but leaping into my head. She grinned, and even one as new to the concept of talking horses as I could tell that she was proud. And she should have been; I had long lost hold of any concept of boredom, but picking apart an entire language in the sand couldn't have been fun.

"My name is Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria", she introduced herself, extending a hoof. Lacking any other appendage, I nuzzled the hoof with one of the smoother parts of my carapace. She smiled, and patted me on the head. "If you don't mind my asking, what are you?"

I stared in confusion, my mind trying to catch up with the idea. I had never asked that question. I was me. Even when my family was made, there were no names, no nouns to define us. My makers only referred to us as experiments or serial numbers. Centuries after my birth, I still did not know what I was.

The words were hard to find. Evidently, Equestrian has a lot of one-letter words, and I had only just learned the language. "Do not know," I finally strung together, and I could not help but hang my head. What a terrible first impression I must have been making.

I felt a hoof just beneath my mouth, lifting me up to look at Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria. Her features were kind, her smile more real than anything I had seen in my own world. "That's okay. We'll find out together. Let's start simple; do you have a name?"

Again, shame. I had never needed a name. My makers never bothered to try and master me, to make me heed a command, and my family had never needed to know anything except that I was. "Do not have," I admitted, hoping she wouldn't think that was my name.

She didn't. Her smile grew more sad, but it still remained. I looked into her eyes, and for a moment I saw something there that I was afraid of. Then she spoke. "So make one for yourself."

There is a power in names, as any wizard or mother could tell you. Asking someone's name is one part courtesy, three parts insurance. To allow someone to shape their own name, the first name they ever know, is to give them a power that few beings will ever know. And she was not giving me that power out of fear, or pity, or sorrow for something that was her fault. She was giving that power freely, simply because she wished to.

In that way, she had more power over me than any other creature before or since.

"My name," I told her, swelling with pride as I shaped the words, "is Freedom."

"Pleased to meet you, Freedom. I hope we can be friends."

Things had gotten better. And it was not until a very, very long time later that things got worse.

Author's Note

Twilight Sparkle, Queen of the Slivers. Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

Even Less of a God

When the Great and Powerful Trixie woke up, the first thing she did was panic.

Not as part of her routine or anything. She wasn't the kind of girl who was so high-strung that she went into a blind panic every time she got yanked out of dreamland. Most mornings, she woke up softly, like a butterfly or a summer breeze, and she spent so long snuggled up in her covers that she had long since set her alarm to go off two hours before she actually needed to start waking up. No, the panicked awakening was a one-time thing.

Of course, if you woke up in the back of a van you didn't recognize, wearing a sheer silk nightgown you didn't own, with your hands and feet bound by ropes that definitely weren't meant to be comfortable and your magic cut off by a very ugly tiara, you'd probably panic too.

After about five solid minutes of frenzied thrashing about, the Great and Powerful Trixie gave up. While her captors obviously didn't give a tinker's cuss about the comfort of the struggling artist, they certainly knew their knots. They had been tied as expertly as any knot on a magician's escape rope, with the obvious caveat that these knots hadn't been tied to be escapable. The anti-magic headband just seemed lazy by comparison, and the way it pressed her headgem back into her skull was more than a little painful. With the futility of her situation successfully impressed upon her, the Great and Powerful Trixie decided to try and assess the positives.

Well, it was a nice van, at the very least. There was no small amount of wear and tear, but that was hardly a mark against it. "The sign of a good vehicle," Trixie's father had always said, "is one that looks beaten half to Hades. That's how you know it stands a chance of making it back out." Empty bags and plastic containers were strewn about the back of the van, but they were all clean or very close to. There was a garbage bag in one corner of the van's trunk, but there weren't any smells wafting off of it, so it was probably just unfortunately labelled storage.

And at least Trixie's kidnappers knew how to dress a girl up nice. Not that she was all that big into fashion, but she knew what looked good on her, and that nightgown was looking great.

Any further positive reflection was suddenly cut short as the door of the van clicked open. Trixie tensed up, her muscles bunching together and a variety of half-remembered martial arts moves flashing through her mind. As the door slid back to reveal her kidnapper, Trixie didn't know what to expect. She couldn't think of anyone who would go to the trouble of kidnapping her, and even she would have to admit she was far from the most attractive girl in the school. No, that honor would definitely have to go to...

"Oh, good. You're awake."

"Sunset Shimmer?"

There was no chance of mistaken identity. Sunset Shimmer was probably the most recognizable person alive today, and even if you had never encountered her as anything other than a pillar of incandescent light in serious need of a coffee break, you would have recognized her voice. Folks seldom forgot the voice of the only god willing to pick up the phone.

But as Sunset Shimmer climbed into the van, it quickly became clear that something was off. Her face seemed older, and less kind, but somehow better-rested. The gem glittering in the center of her forehead was only a sparkling blue, rather than the constant entrancing flicker of flames that always seemed to be dancing in Sunset's headgem. Of course, it was her clothing that was really surprising to Trixie; a grey hoodie and faded black jeans, as though the most recognizable face on the entire planet were trying to hide from the rest of the world.

"Yes and no." Sunset set down a plastic grocery bag, and Trixie couldn't stop her stomach from grumbling when she saw that there were bagels. But now was not the time for food, as evidenced by Sunset crawling closer and beginning to undo her ropes.

"What do you mean, yes and no? Are you Sunset Shimmer or are you not?" Trixie tried to twist away from her possibly-but-most-likely-not captor in protest, but the girl's magic quickly encircled her and tugged her back into place.

"Yes. And. No." Sunset was gritting her teeth and growling, but she seemed to be staying corporeal. Trixie was getting very confused, and it must have been obvious, because Sunset sighed and let her head fall into her hands. "Look, you know that your Sunset isn't from this world, right?"

"Obviously," Trixie said as the possibly-but-increasingly-unlikely-to-be Sunset went back to undoing her ropes, this time with magic. "Everyone knows that."

"And what do you know about her world?"

"That it's a world even more drenched in magic than this one, that it's been like that since basically forever, it's populated by hyper-intelligent horse people, and that all the people living there are just generally more awesome versions... of... us..." Trixie's eyes bugged out as she realized what was going on, and she stared at Sunset with a strange mix of embarrassment and terror.

"That's right," Sunset Shimmer whispered comfortingly, reaching over and plucking off Trixie's headband. "I'm the one who was here first."

Trixie had no idea what to do. Even in a world that obeyed totally different rules to the ones she had grown up with, meeting the homeless doppelganger of the most powerful girl in the world was not something she had planned for. With no clue how to resolve the situation, she did the only thing she could do.

She said a quick prayer under her breath.

A few hours later, Trixie and Sunset Shimmer (the god-one, not the mortal one) materialized in front of Canterlot High. Trixie basically collapsed against the nearest wall, not sure whether to laugh or scream. For her part, Sunset was trying her best to stop from catching fire.

"Alright, Trixie," she said, her voice audibly teetering on the edge of a string of curse-words. "What have we learned today?"

"The difference between LARPers and cults?"

"If you're LARPing the systematic annihilation of every other religious icon by one particular religious icon, there isn't a difference. Try again."

Trixie thought for a moment, then shrugged. "If a more awesome version of you comes to your planet and gets world-wide recognition, confront them instead of running away?"

"That's what she learned."

"If you ever invade an alternate dimension that's inherently less awesome than yours and everyone there is a less awesome doppelganger of people you know, hunt down your alternate counterpart and network instead of just hoping she never shows up?"

"Okay, now you're just making this about me."

Trixie actually burst out laughing at that point. "Well, it is all you! The only thing the Great and Powerful Trixie did was get roped into being a virgin sacrifice to you, and then pray for help!"

Sunset's palm rose up and smacked her own face, and the sound echoed across the city. "Trixie, what did you learn about magic today?"

"Oh, that." Trixie pulled out a file and started working her nails. "If you design a teleportation spell with one specific recipient, but then try to redirect the spell because you're tired of getting burnt offerings in math class, make sure the redirect link goes where you want it to go."

Sunset Shimmer smiled, and gave Trixie a playful punch in the shoulder. "That's my favorite student."

Author's Note

A fair few readers probably know that the whole crazy idea of this story was inspired by Story Shuffle, a One-Shotober collection that used MtG cards as prompts. A few of the stories contained therein went on to become part of an alternate continuity otherwise entirely divorced from the MtG-crossover concept, the Oversaturated World. Basically, magic pours into the human world at a slightly faster rate than it's been doing in the movies, which culminates in Sunset Shimmer accidentally becoming a god. Hijinks ensue.

I've wanted to do something with it for quite some time, and this card coupled with an interesting concept for Sunset's human counterpart provided just such an opportunity. Unfortunately, due to a combination of unexpected IRL circumstances, I didn't have as much time on this one as I probably needed, so I had to cut out the scene where Sunset Shimmer burns down the headquarters of the cult that tried to sacrifice Trixie.

It's also very firmly not canon with the actual AU, but it was a fun idea to mess around with, so I'm not sorry.

Weakness

Miss Rococo 'Coco' Pommel didn't think of herself as a particularly strong mare. True, she had weathered Suri's abuse for several years, but she had never fought it. She had certainly prospered under Rarity's tutelage, but she had never struck out on her own. The only thing she had ever started herself had been borrowed from a dead mare, and even that needed the help of two national heroes just to salvage the operation. It was clear to her that she was a weak mare, and not even her new senior management position in Rarity for You could convince her otherwise.

Business was slow today, and the other salesponies were more than happy to shoulder the workload, so Coco had plenty of time to reflect on her fundamental uselessness as a pony. She was free to look around at the designs of her mentor, to lose herself in her savior's unadulterated mastery of the world. In the space of a few years, Rarity had gone from a no-name ingénue to one of the most dominating names in the fashion industry. She had woven every opportunity that came her way into a seamless tapestry of ever-escalating success, securing everything from exclusive contracts with the hottest stars of Equestria to snatching up prime real estate for long-overdue business expansions. Could there be any doubt of her inherent superiority?

"Pardon me, miss. I was wondering if I could have your opinion on something?"

Coco was roused from her reverie by a customer, and she slipped back into a professional attitude with practiced ease. She looked up and smiled at the stallion who had caught her attention, and her fake smile grew slightly more real as she took in the slightly ridiculous sight in front of her. He was wearing an elaborate costume of the sort that hadn't been fashionable for several hundred years, having more pins and filigree than any suit Coco had ever seen in polite company. And that was saying nothing of his enormous ruffled collar, a ridiculous thing that encircled his head like the most stuffy halo ever.

Then he smiled, and Coco hardly noticed the wardrobe anymore. His teeth sparkled like diamonds under the boutique's bright lights, and his eyes were a piercing blue that hit Coco like an ice-cold steel pole. His face was a simple earthy brown, but the mane was azure blue shot through with streaks of green that she instantly recognized as dye. It was an altogether eclectic picture, the grotesque and the beautiful combining in such unexpected ways that there could only be one explanation.

"Are you an actor?" Coco asked, putting just a touch of child-like nervousness into her voice. He smiled even wider, and she began to wish she had sunglasses.

"I've been known to play my fair share of roles from time to time," he said, his words rolling off his tongue as though he had rehearsed them in front of a mirror for months. The sparkling smile wavered, and he cocked his head to the side as he stared at Coco. "Pardon my asking, but are you the acclaimed Rococo Pommel?"

Coco blushed instinctively and looked away. "We-well, I'd hardly say I was acclaimed, but I am Rococo Pommel, yes."

The actor literally beamed, and Coco had to fight the urge to squint. "Excellent! I'm sure you get this all the time, but you are exactly the pony I wanted to see." He reached into the breast pocket of his ridiculous suit, and pulled out a small black box. "I recently inherited a truly singular brooch, and I was told that there was no better pony than you to consult on how to put together a fitting ensemble to pair it with."

Coco took the box over to the counter so that she could open it better, and she couldn't stop herself from smiling as she saw the brooch. It was a brilliant red and gold Pegasopolis crest with wings flared triumphantly and eyes gleaming viciously. It was the Icon of Hurricane, the rallying symbol of countless generations of pegasus warriors. Hardly an uncommon bauble, but certainly one that an earth pony tailor rarely had the chance to work with.

"Well, I'm not sure about singular, but it certainly is beautiful. Considering the militaristic significance of the brooch, Madam Rarity would probably recommend a simple midnight-blue affair with a lot of harsh lines, but it really would depend on the occasion."

The actor pursed his lips, and shook his head. "No, no, all wrong. That is no simple icon of the great commander. It was hewn from a dragonfire ruby, and framed in griffon gold. In the right company, that brooch will part any crowd and command anyone's attention. No simple military suit will do." His cold eyes drilled into Coco's own, and she wilted under the glare. "Come now, Miss Pommel. I have heard your name spoken in the same breath as the greatest seamstresses of our time, with the very same reverence and even more besides."

"But this is Rarity's boutique..." Coco protested, unable to tear herself away from the piercing blue eyes.

"And the Royal Guard are Celestia's soldiers, but you would not expect them to behave just the same as the Princess." His eyes grew softer, and Coco could have sworn they turned green. "If I wanted Rarity to assemble an outfit, I would seek out Rarity. Instead, I have come to ask you what you think should be done. So tell me with your own words what looks best to your eyes."

Coco looked between the actor and the brooch, trying to keep her knees from shaking. "I guess... a blend of flowing cloth and hard metals, arranged like wings to evoke the image of a dragon, with shoes that are invocative of bird's talons?"

The actor mulled over her words for a moment, then smiled. The diamond shine of his teeth was gone, replaced with normal pearly whites. "That sounds wondrous, Miss Pommel. But tell me, why did you not suggest that in the first place?"

"Because I'm not as good as Rarity." The words slipped out faster than Coco could stop them, and she paled as she saw his expression change. But to her surprise, it was not an expression of mockery or disgust that he donned, but one of compassion.

"Nonsense. You're exactly as good as Rarity. You just need a confidence boost. And luckily for you, I know some folks who can help with that." The actor reached into his other pocket, and pulled out a business card. It had no address on it, only a picture of a seapony. "You need to take command of your life, Rococo Pommel. The Combine would be more than happy to help."

Author's Note

"They watch for weakness. When they find it, they offer to transform it into strength."
-Insidious Puddle, seapony mutationist

If any Hasbro representatives are reading this, feel free to use the new name. I'll even let you claim you came up with it.

After the Pact

In the years since Nightmare Moon returned, life on Ungula had changed in hundreds upon thousands of ways. Politics had shifted, the nature of magic was questioned like never before, and nation-wide disasters became a bi-weekly occurrence, or felt like they did. And as the disasters evolved, so too did Equestria's response. What seemed at first glance to be the irrevocable destruction of one's livelihood would be back to normal within the week, and entire cities could find themselves rebuilt in the space of a few days.

It all proved very confusing for your average civilian. They no longer had any idea how to react to half of their town getting eaten by a thing with more arms than the Equestrian government, or any concept of how to anticipate how soon it would be until they had a road again. Luckily, a new indicator of the direness of any given situation was quick to evolve; the damage control team.

If the only emergency responder was an earth pony janitor with no tools, everything would be back to normal by the time you blinked. If they showed up with a toolbox, it might be worth having an extended lunch. An out-of-town janitor meant several hours, a team meant a day, and then it started getting interesting.

An appearance by the Royal Guard was a good indicator of if the disaster was considered a matter of interest by the crown. Rumors of the Night Guard told ponies that there was still some risk of further disaster. Princess Twilight and her entourage were wont to show up within seconds or minutes of anything serious, but usually were just as quick to disappear. If they stuck around, that meant the new crater was the equivalent of a footprint. If any of the other princesses showed up, it was probably a good idea to spend the rest of the day in the cellar. If they all showed up, there was a giant monster standing directly behind you and you were almost definitely going to die.

If Discord showed up, you would be best served by seeking out a professional necromancer, because odds were good that you were already dead.

"You're sure it came from this dimension?"

"To within one eighth of a percentile, yes." Fivepence of a Further Sixpence was not a happy camper. Mostly because of his ridiculous name and the fact that he had been a taxpony since he was eight years old, but also because he was having to stand next to Discord. One of Discord's very many rarely documented abilities was his power to create massive headaches in anypony who spent most of their time concerned with rules and regulations. The fact that Discord was currently rooting around in his head in order to briefly see the whole thing from a bit character's perspective wasn't helping.

"How very fascinating." Pulling out of the monocharacteristic skull and taking in the lay of the land, Discord had to fight down the urge to be impressed. Despite the nature of Canterlot as a hill city, the trail of destruction left by the thing was completely horizontal. The buildings that ran along the side of the foot-deep chasm seemed unsure if they were on the same horizontal plane, or occupying their usual place in space. Ponies were floating catatonic around the chasm, their eyes glazed over and their mouths spewing random cryptic nonsense.

"Subsection (1) applies with respect to a computer program only if, in the event that the research reveals a vulnerability or a security flaw in the program and the person intends to make the vulnerability or security flaw public..."

Now if only it wasn't random cryptic legal nonsense, Discord would have been able to solve the whole thing with a snap of his fingers.

"Who's the father?" he asked, taking a tentative step onto the paradoxical tract of land. When he didn't immediately grow a suit and start kidnapping the visually impaired, Discord grinned and began making confident strides. Behind him, Fivepence of a Further Sixpence was doing an excellent job of being too annoyed to realize he was now walking along earth that definitely shouldn't exist.

"I'm pretty sure nopony gave birth to this thing, Mister Discord."

"Of course they didn't, Fivepenny. It's a matter of terminology." Discord poked a levitated filly that was foaming at the mouth, and smiled as she did a few mid-air somersaults. "Calling the pony responsible an 'artificer' gives you the impression that the creature is some sort of silver golem or other mechanical contrivance, the term 'creator' is just a trigger phrase for god complexes, and all the other words just sound too fleshy for what we're dealing with or are too abstract in general. Ergo, who's the father?"

Everypony hated it when Discord's arguments made sense. It made it so much more difficult to disagree with him on general principle. "As far as we can tell, the three ponies responsible are Lateral Support, Reasonable Wear and Tear and Hornbook Law." Discord spat reflexively at each name. "According to the notes we found in the remains of their laboratory, they were trying to design a self-renewing business contract."

"Laboratory?" Discord asked. "Since when do lawyers use laboratories?" At this point, the creature's trail of destruction became wet and sticky.

"It's the standard legal term for the birthplace of any artificially created being. Not perfect, given the mental image of beakers and test tubes, but it gets the message across in courthouses."

"So does a pineapple cream pie," Discord rebutted. "You say this thing is a self-renewing contract?"

"Or the closest possible approximation thereof. Their notebooks seem to indicate that it was a normal contract, magically imbued with the ability to alter its own terms and enchanted against outside interference."

Discord had to stop dead in his tracks before he could let his mind be sufficiently boggled by that news. "What were they thinking? A contract you have to negotiate with to annotate would be a logistical nightmare that would plunge both companies into squalor!"

Fivepence of a Further Sixpence stared at the back of Discord's head in genuine confusion. "How in the name of Celestia do you know that?"

"Because I tried it once. Suffice to say, that was the last tea party Augustin IV ever invited me to." Discord allowed himself a little laugh at the memory, then snapped back to the present moment when he stepped in something legal. "But even that thing didn't cause this much chaos! What else did they do to that contract~~, and what do I have to do to buy it off them~~?"

"Some of the early drafts survived the contract's escape. If their clauses were any indication, the contract is capable of renewing itself whenever one of the current signatories dies, or becomes otherwise incapable of fulfilling the role that the contract designates for them. It would then freely alter its own terms to make sure the deal is just as good with the new signatories."

"But in which company's favor?" Discord popped the rhetorical question, feeling quite proud of himself even as an alligator in triplicate lunged at him.

"Exactly. A paradoxical contract is never a good thing, and with the sheer amount of magic they had poured into every word..." Fivepence of a Further Sixpence shivered. "We're just lucky it drove everyone so crazy that it ran out of signatories. Now we just need you to dispose... of... the body..."

Discord turned to the taxpony and grinned. Regardless of the cause, he always loved seeing mortals rendered speechless. Then he turned back to what was supposedly the corpse of the contract, and grinned even wider.

The physics-defying trail of destruction ended in a massive black swamp, darker than the deepest heart of the Hollow Shades but even slimier than that. It hung in the middle of the air, in defiance of physics, logic and just plain old good taste. Had it not been steeped in murderous intent, Discord might almost have admired the thing.

Instead, he cracked his knuckles, hooked his fingers around reality, and shuffled the deck.

The swamp disappeared. The tear in the earth healed. The sanity and gravity of everypony was restored.

And then Discord remembered where they were all standing, and had to cancel gravity in a hurry.

Author's Note

What exactly are the logistics behind reprinting this kind of thing in Conspiracy? And I don't mean in terms of mechanics, I mean in terms of flavor. How does a zombie mutant pit-fighter figure into a world of complex political intrigue?

This is one attempt to answer that question.

This Creature Has No Color

Zesty Gourmand stalked the streets of Canterlot, her iconic hooves the only sound on Restaurant Row. Hardly any light was cast on her pale skin, as the only restaurant that was seeing any business tonight was that blasted establishment, the...

No. No, she wasn't going to say its name. She would not write it, she would not speak it, she would not think it. She would remain silent. Zesty Gourmand would refuse to acknowledge the place's existence, and so it would fall into obscurity.

"The only empire that falls is the one that believes it cannot, my apprentice."

Zesty stumbled to a halt as the voice rang inside of her skull. It had sounded so real, he had seemed so alive... She felt the urge to turn around, to see if he was standing there behind her.

But he wouldn't be there. So she didn't turn around. She checked that her footing was solid, and she moved on.

Eventually, a light did fall on the cobblestones before her, and Zesty had to look up and see which restaurant it was. Who was it that refused to be drawn into that dress-peddler's publicity stunt, and kept to their station? When she saw who it was, even she could not help but smile.

These days, every place on Restaurant Row drew from the same well. They copied the same menu, dressed their waiters in the same uniforms, even mimicked the same simplistic decor. But every river had a spring, and it had all started somewhere. Specifically, here; the Special, by Dépourvu.

Zesty Gourmand strode confidently into the Special, sparing a professional nod of the head to the lone waiter on the floor. One of the most inspiring things about this restaurant, she had always thought, had been the way that it was set up so that it could serve a packed house with barely three ponies on staff with no drop-off in time or quality. He hadn't thought so, of course.

"They open a restaurant on the best real estate in Canterlot cuisine with a name like that, and they only hire a single waiter? Even if they flop, they'll get more traffic than that poor sod can handle on his own!"

The words stung, and not only because she hadn't heard his voice so clearly in all these years. She tried to shut it out by glancing down at the floor of the Special, where her tile sat. A single concrete tile with three hoof-prints, her hoof-prints. The first three-hoof rating, the moment that kickstarted her career.

"Why not four hooves?" he asked.

"Because I'm still eating," she said, holding up the hors d'ouvre for emphasis.

Three hooves, four words, and the landscape of culinary Canterlot irrevocably shifted. An apprentice became a master in the space of a single review. And for the past twenty years, she had been confident that the smile on his face had been one of genuine pride in her.

And less than an hour ago, a hatter twelve years her junior had taken the Row from her.

Zesty sat at a booth, and glared at the empty space that sat across from her. "Why listen to them?" she asked, and the waiter wisely slunk out of her line of sight. "What do they know?"

"They know what they like." It hadn't been the Special, but it had been a good place. Even the air hung thick with flavor. "And they don't know what's behind the doors of a new restaurant. So I tell them. And they listen to me because I like the same things they like, but I'm louder than they are and I have a glossier mane."

That had been the Baron Savory in a nutshell. There were maybe three pictures of him that didn't show him eating undeniably common food with the most enormous, genuine smile on his face. He had been the biggest name in the food critic scene while he was alive, and the echoes of his name still carried more weight than even Zesty could command. And all he had ever done was eat food and say what he thought of it at the top of his lungs.

He wouldn't have been overturned by a specialty tailor.

"Have you made your selection, madam?"

Zesty turned to the waiter, and she felt her teeth grind of their own accord. "Waiter, there are two items on this menu, and one of them is the dessert. I'll thank you not to address me as you would a foal."

The waiter blanched, and Zesty fought the urge to mirror the gesture. Those hadn't been her words; they had been his. Specifically, the words he had said when they first went to the Special.

"Never could stand these high-class Canterlot types," he muttered as the waiter turned away.

A much younger Zesty couldn't hide her surprise. "But they're just as high-class as you, and you've lived in Canterlot almost all of your life."

"Except I don't show it," he chuckled, his towering frame shaking with the laughter. "And as the storm-watchers say, that's the difference between caviar and lobster, right there."

There had always been rumors that Savory had come into his barony by dishonest means, and sometimes it had been very easy to believe so. But considering the abundant honesty that he radiated every other moment of his life, it always seemed just unlikely enough that it wasn't worth pursuing.

The serving tray clinked on the table, jerking Zesty out of her reverie/hallucination/possible haunting. She stared down at the bland, virtually tasteless food, and tried not to shovel it into her face.

The day he died had been the only time she asked for seconds.

Zesty choked on her morsel. For a moment, she could have sworn that she felt the same storm of tears on her face. What was happening to her? Maybe it was the food disagreeing with her.

"As if a pony could ever call this food," he scoffed. "I'd compare it to sand, except sand actually has a texture. The only saving grace is that the portion size is so small! And you tell me this isn't the appetizer? Utter garbage! I'd say a complete lack of effort was on display, but no, you would actually have to be a master of the craft to fail so spectacularly! In which case, why fail? Why doesn't your chef turn his obvious skill towards something that ponies will actually want to eat?"

But she had loved it. Every bite had seemed like heaven, the barest hints of tastes and sensations standing out like absolute explosions amidst the setting of utter blandness. The baron was right about one thing, and that was the skill needed for such a dish. What better test could anyone devise for the cooks of Canterlot? What more artful transformation of cuisine could exist? She had endorsed it, and made a name for herself off of the spectacular way she had done it. The baron had given her his approval, the Special her inspiration, and Canterlot had done the rest.

The power vacuum left by the baron's death had invited a new critic to rise to the top. Zesty Gourmand took it almost by pure default, and at first without even knowing. Her unprecedented binge at the Special caused an inexorable swing towards the Sans-Couleur school of cooking, and she had quickly ceased to see it as a trend and more as Restaurant Row's graduation to a higher level, where it ceased to become chemistry and transformed into art.

"What changes have I wrought in my time on this great world? None that I could care to name. Been a voice of common sense and good taste in a world where tyrants and mine-over-thine is the status quo. Given the Row back to the restaurants, but only in spirit. They already had it. All I have done is led a good life, and been good to the ponies I met throughout. And eaten a lot of good food."

The months leading up to his death had been very philosophical on his part, and very filling for both of them. The baron had drawn up something of a grand tour, a swansong of all his favorite places to eat. And when it turned out that he had more time left than they thought, they had done the circuit again. It had been torture, both for her heart and for her stomach.

"Gustatorial hypersensitivity. You've spent your whole very short life thinking of it as a curse, meaning you have to eat all these mild foods and not open your mouth too much. But I'm here to tell you, it's not that." He stuck out his own tongue for comparison, which made a young Zesty giggle. "It's a gift. You can taste every ingredient. You can understand the combination and preparation of foods better than their makers. With enough practice, you could reverse-engineer anything you taste." He pulled a pepper out of his jacket, and dropped it at her hooves.

"Eat it. And then, if you can, get up and follow me."

And she had. The pepper had burned like nothing else, but she followed. Becoming a critic was painful and never got easier, but she followed. And when there was not a pony left to follow, she led. And now she had reached the end of her own road, and nopony had followed.

Nopony save the one who had pointed out the path to her in the first place.

She finished her meal. Slowly, patiently, cleanly. Then she paid her due, nodded to the waiter, and said all that needed to be said.

"Tell your chef that the baron was right. This restaurant won't last another day on the Row. And don't expect my hooves to hold you up. My ratings will be trod underhoof by this time tomorrow."

With that, she was gone. And at last, Canterlot began to heal.

Author's Note

Because colorless mana. And ruined businesses.

I think it's more interesting than an Eldrazi brawl, at least.

And Rohan Shall Answer

Dear Princess Twilight,

Things haven't been going well in the human world. If we hadn't taken the time to practice our powers at Camp Everfree, we probably would have caused a few hundred billion dollars' worth of property damage by now. And while the inevitable Power Pony Problem (heroism breeds villainy and all that) has yet to assert itself, we've still got our hands full with the world in general. The fact that we're all hormonal teenagers with massive personal bias and only a very basic understanding of the government's reasoning for doing things really isn't helping.

The good news is that we now know that our Twilight can safely collapse nuclear missiles into non-hazardous molecules at speed. The bad news is that we found that out while Rainbow Dash was trying to suplex a missile. Back into the country that fired it.

I'm not going to try to explain the politics, because we'd both get hung up on the comparisons to Equestrian politics, and the parallels and differences would literally take forever to unpack. In the simplest possible terms, one of the less friendly world superpowers now knows that magic exists, and that we have it. And they found out about this before the rulers of the nation that Canterlot High is located in. The entire school is being labelled everything from deep-cover terrorists to international traitors, and everyone on this entire planet is desperate to get their hands on our magic. And from what we can tell, they won't stop at just securing the amulets.

Before you say anything, yes. I know it must seem irrational to be afraid of these techno-barbaric monkey-squids. But... they're experimenting with something. There's a magical disturbance out there, something so strong that it's showing up on homemade magi-radar with a maximum range of twenty thousand furlongs. And once it has found a gateway, I don't think it will hesitate to punch its way through.

Please, Twilight. You have to help us. There's only so much I can do with power I can't control.

Princess Twilight Sparkle, Voice of the Worldsoul and First Great Conduit of the Tree of Harmony, shut the magical diary with a slam that echoed across Equestria. She blinked her jewel-encrusted eyes, and the beams of light reflecting off of her shifted and shimmered as she turned her head this way and that. Although her throne room was empty, she could still feel the distant minds and souls of her disciples as though they were standing right beside her, and if she spoke, they would hear.

They had heard her read the letter. She could feel them stir, could sense her most capable warriors approaching the portal. But she knew which one would be best for the job.

"Loyalty," she commanded. "Seek out your other, and show our enemies the strength of Equestria." She turned her attention back to the journal, and grew a pen out of the wall behind her. "I will make sure you are met by our allies."

Rainbow Dash stood in front of the portal, waiting anxiously. Sunset had told her that Princess Twilight was sending the other her to help out, and that it would be best to get the initial confusion out of the way. Never mind that it meant pulling their fastest, third-heaviest hitter off the field and waiting in front of a lump of rock for someone from another dimension who probably wouldn't even be able to fly. Never mind that for every second she stayed on the ground, the gathering crowds grew bolder.

Never mind that standing still like this only gave her more time to think about it.

Then the portal shimmered, and Rainbow didn't have to think about her actions any more.

The Rainbow Dash that stepped through, while certainly being similar to her human counterpart, couldn't be more different. She wore a bomber jacket over a sleeveless white top that didn't hug as tight as you'd think, running shoes that looked like they'd been dipped in molten steel and propelled at supersonic speeds before they even started cooling, and pants with more zippers than there logically should have been space for. She carried herself like a warrior, and the difference between that and soldier was exemplified in her actions; she moved with poise and confidence, and her arms rippled with the kind of power that would gladly rip your head off without breaking a sweat.

As for her eyes... Rainbow Dash had never thought she could be more terrified at the prospect of looking in a mirror. There was a ruthlessness in those eyes, an unspoken promise that nobody had ever got in her way and lived to tell about it. She felt as though she were challenging this new Rainbow to a fight just by daring to exist, and her heart trembled with the certainty that she would lose.

Sunset had tried to explain once how their versions in the pony world were much older than them, and while the portal changed their age, it didn't change how they looked at the world. Rainbow Dash had always been a visual learner. And now that she had seen, she knew.

"Hello, me. Come and meet the real me." The Equestrian Rainbow extended her hand in something that she probably meant as a polite greeting, but to the lowly human, it felt like a demanding gesture. Her hands were fumbling for the clasp on her amulet before she was able to think it, but once she could, she backed up what her body was doing.

In the space of time that it took for Rainbow to blink, the better her had her arms around her neck, pulling her hands away from the amulet and wrapping her in a hug. Rainbow opened her mouth to protest, but the hug only tightened. For possibly the first time since she had seen that missile, Rainbow Dash felt safe. She leaned into the hug. She felt the words bubbling up inside of her, and couldn't stop them from coming.

She blubbered about the missile, about who it had been aimed at, about seeing the fear on Scootaloo's face. She told the other her about calling her friends, more to let them know than to ask for help, and going supersonic more easily than she ever had before. She shuddered her way through recounting her stupid decision to grab the whole thing, and instead of dumping it in the ocean or tossing it into space or just slowing it down until someone else could help, to throw it back where it came from. When she tried to explain how many innocent people would have died if Twilight hadn't been there, it just devolved into wordless weeping.

She felt the other one pulling away from her, but before she could say a word about it, the other one stopped, and whispered in her ear.

"I would have done the same thing."

And that made it better. It didn't fix everything, but knowing that there was at least one person (or pony, or whatever) that would stand by her did make Rainbow feel better. And right at that moment, that was all she needed.

Author's Note

A while back, me and FoME were talking about how one might respond to cards that mentioned centaurs, but clearly couldn't have anything to do with Tirek. Eventually, we settled on 'centaur' being slang from anypony travelling to the human world via mirror. So that's why this is here.

And for those of you wondering how Rainbow Dash could possibly count as green, we're talking about an AU where the Tree of Harmony has assimilated most of Equestria and created the Selesnya Conclave. Everyone's got green-alignment.

And a personality-altering crystal embedded at the base of your brain stem, but we try not to talk about that.

The Atlantis Complex

I've been through a lot, along with the rest of Equestria. We've seen things that changed our world, felt the kingdom shake as giants walked the land, balked in fear at the titans warring overhead. But we've also marveled at how low the mortality rates were. In the wake of every disaster, I cannot remember seeing even a single new gravestone. We have been incredibly lucky, that those who have risen against us have either been too sadistic or too unconcerned with our affairs to ever kill us. Most ponies don't think about how unlikely it is that they would live to see Tirek chained again, or how lucky they are that Discord prefers dancing puppets to desecrated corpses.

But it still has an effect, even on the ponies who don't realize what this means. Death threats just aren't used. Life insurance is considered a scam if you don't already have a few centuries and twice that many venereal diseases under your belt. And pretty much the only moment where we remember that death can come at any time is in the very thick of one of those events with a zero percent casualty rate.

I can recall one such time, when for all my treatises on the apparent immortality of Equestria and its peoples, that I was afraid that I might die. 'Twas so horrific, I still remember it just as clearly as if it were happening to me at this very moment. Or perhaps it is happening right this second, and I am envisioning it as an event of the distant past in an effort to stop my heart from exploding with fear.

I know what its name is. I know the name it goes by, I know what it is capable of, and what has been done both with it and for it. But in that moment, I do not see the Smooze, that amiable lump of anti-magic that we just kept on inviting to parties no matter how many times it ate our family heirlooms. I see only the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields.

The air is filled with screaming, and the ground beneath my hooves shakes with the panicked fleeing of my fellow ponies. I see the churning tide of ponies just out of the corner of my eye, but I pay them no heed. I cannot help but stop, cannot stop myself from staring up at the Wave as it sweeps across the land towards me. The sun, which I once considered my god, is lost behind the roiling green tide, and the scintillating beams that pour through it make me feel as though I am no longer in the world I knew. Then I look at where it has come from, and it ceases to be a feeling.

There used to be a place called Ponyville. It was a beautiful little town, where heroes traded stories and blows as casually as you or I might trade glances in a crowded street. I went there once or twice. Everypony does. You have to meet the Elements of Harmony, if only to remind yourself that they aren't gods. Well, Ponyville isn't there anymore. Every brick, every plank, every spark of magic in that precious castle has been torn clean out of its bearings by the Wave. And it is not the only place to suffer so.

The Everfree Forest has been devoured, stripped of every magical tree or unique flora. Las Pegasus has only avoided crushing the city of Applewood beneath the weight of its extravagant decadence by climbing as high as they dare to take it. Scarcely an hour ago, I watched the city of Canterlot crumble and slip from its mooring, tumbling into the maw of the Wave and becoming so much gravel as it passed through that strange digestive system.

I was one of the few ponies foolish enough to try and save the ponies who fell with Canterlot. This, even though I knew that the Wave passed as quickly as a moment, even though I know that it does not kill, and that their magic is lost the moment it touches them. I saved none of them, and then my wings were stained with the slime of this accursed titan. Now I have found my way to the earth that still stands unmarred by the Unenchanted Green, and wait my turn, for I cannot escape.

There is no opposition against this force. The Elements tried, and their magic only sank into its folds and made it surge faster. The princesses do not dare fight it, for they fear that to do so would make them powerless. The Royal Guard may as well have disappeared from Equestria, for all the good that they ever did. But when the Wave has passed, perhaps there shall be relief efforts. Perhaps the other lands will take pity on us, and will seek to help us rather than take advantage of our weakened position.

Ah, yes, I must be remembering. Because I do distinctly remember them never coming, whether for peace or for war. I remember the time it took us to rebuild. I remember that there was nopony save ourselves who appeared to clean up what had been left behind.

It's funny. In an age where we have no fear of death, we measure our cataclysms by the janitor on duty. But after the Great Wave had passed, none would step up to the plate. There was a rumor that Discord had been sighted for a brief moment, before he loudly declared that he was still on vacation and disappeared for another year. But most pointed to even that sad story as a fairy tale, some tiny sliver of some sick perversion of hope that still proved far too false for a post-Wave Equestria.

There was a certain sort of peace to when I stopped running, and let the Wave wash over me. I had never felt so helpless as when that Wave struck me, enveloped me in its warmth and ripped me from my hooves. For what felt like an eternity I floated, trapped and unable to think. Part of me has spent every moment since wishing the Wave had taken me and never let me go, so that I would never need to know the struggles of rebuilding. But there's another part of me that knows I never would have been able to build my own house if the world hadn't ended.

So if you ever meet the Smooze on your travels, tell him thanks from Zephyr Breeze.

Author's Note

This is the Green Goop. It eats everything you have until there's nothing left but basic farmland. That's basically its only job. The amount of words you can write about it is based entirely on how much you want to talk about directionless destruction that has no politics, probably no conscious motivation, and doesn't even kill anypony.

Treachery Most Foul

The Vault of Harmony was far less impressive than its name suggested. It was really nothing more than a glorified walk-in closet, in which they kept a large treasure chest, which itself contained the Elements of Harmony. Even at the best of times, all it would need would be a broom propped against the wall to be mistaken for a janitor's closet.

The door to the vault, though, that was a spectacle. The doors were like giant slabs of gold, inlaid with jewels the size of ponies' heads and guarded by an enchantment that none save Celestia could dispel. They towered higher than the tallest dragons that had ever been admitted into Canterlot, and probably would have stopped them as well. But the most impressive thing about the door was its location.

At any given moment, the door to the Vault of Harmony could occupy any one of a million places in Canterlot. One moment, it would be at the end of the Hall of Glass in the palace, but less than a day later it would have taken the place of the door into the Royal Mausoleum. Celestia didn't consider her week complete until she had gotten at least twelve complaints about the vault door materializing in somepony's house, or blocking an alleyway they used as a regular shortcut, and the tabloids were never free of a constantly-retooled article that tried to convince its readers that the door was actually an instrument of espionage.

Tonight, the door had decided to materialize exactly halfway down the hall between Celestia's room and... Luna's room.

The last few weeks had been difficult. Every time Celestia remembered that her sister had come back, she was filled with the urge to run to her sister and pull her into a passionate embrace. But as those feelings raced through her, she could not help but kick herself for having forgotten, however briefly. She was left worrying that it would happen all over again, just because she wasn't constantly in the same room as Luna. No matter how many assurances her sister gave, Celestia felt... paranoid.

If you had asked her why she unlocked the vault door that night, she wouldn't have been able to tell you. Sentimentality, perhaps, or maybe a childish desire to escape her paranoia. It might have been the subtle tug of destiny, or that vague sense of foreboding one gets just before they walk in on a child that has broken the cookie jar. Regardless of the reason, Celestia unraveled her enchantment and stepped through the great double doors.

The Elements were scattered on the ground, and the chest that normally held them had been torn open. Before she could be properly surprised at somepony slipping past her wards, Celestia spotted the spirit hovering over the trinkets with a giant glowing hammer. She prepared a spell, and lit up the vault.

The spirit looked like the disembodied top half of a dragon, if dragons were made of blood-red rocks and wreathed in spectral fire and lava. Its mouth seemed to exist on a totally different level than the rest of its head, as though the imposing dragon-face were merely a helmet. Just above the lip of the mouth sat three all-too-normal eyes, while the eyes of the dragon-face were empty dark spaces. Celestia gritted her teeth, and took a bold step forward.

"Halt, miscreant."

"No, you." The spirit growled, and two fiery pits flared up in the darkness where its eyes should have been. Celestia glared into the eyes, and felt magic pulling and pushing at her mind. She tried to grab hold of the spell and examine it, but it was too weak to stand up to her efforts. With that in mind, she allowed it entry, and immediately regretted it.

The battle with Nightmare Moon flashed in her mind, chopped up as though it were being edited for time. She felt every impact as her hooves connected with the face of her sister, felt her muscles ache as she threw each punch, and felt her horn heat up with each spell. All of those memories were nothing new, but that was where the magic started to push; As she felt herself throw each punch, she also felt them from Nightmare Moon's perspective. The crunch of each hoof into her jaw, the air rushing from her lungs after a buck to the chest, the lightning burns all across her body.

"You betrayed her," the spirit growled. "You turned away from your own flesh and blood in her time of need, and when she fell you only struck her down harder."

"I knew that already," Celestia sighed, her spell fading. "So why are you here?"

"To make you suffer as she suffered," the spirit replied, gesturing towards the Element of Loyalty with its hammer. "Pain for pain, small one."

"Thou art as foolish in thy thinking as in thy shape, if thou dost not consider our Celestia to have suffered."

The voice caused both Celestia and the spirit to jump back in shock, and they stared as Princess Luna seemed to melt out of the shadows. She fixed the spirit with a glare the likes of which she usually reserved for horrifying creatures from beyond the veil that had stepped in her flower garden.

"Was she not the one forced to banish her own sister for nigh on a thousand years? Was she not forced to watch madness tear at one she had thought content, 'til there was naught left of the pony she loved? Is she not the one who hath been plagued by nightmares of her own making, even after our glorious return?" Luna's straight blue mane was beginning to spark and flow, as though her old aura were returning to her. "The debt thou seekest collection on hath long been paid, foul shade. Away with thee, or thine entire plane shall know the ire of the night."

The spirit blew a raspberry at the princess of the night, which was very impressive considering that its tongue appeared to be an uncontrollable river of lava. Her horn glowed with a warning spell, and the spirit took the hint, fading out of their reality and back into its own.

The two sisters stood in the darkness of the vault for a while, Luna putting the Elements back in their box with a reverent silence and Celestia trying and failing to hold back her tears.

"Luna," she said at last. "I..."

Luna lifted a hoof to Celestia's lips, then pulled her into a hug.

Author's Note

Ever notice how the location of the Elements of Harmony changed between the Season 2 opener and finale, but the door basically remained the same?

The Heart of Equestria Burns

Elesh Norn smiled. She basked in the golden sunlight, turning her magnificent face this way and that to catch its beautiful rays. Even after all of this time, she still loved to revel in how how different this plane was to New Phyrexia. Only one sun, and rather than being an unparalleled source of mana, it was illumination for its own glorious sake. And while it was nominally under the stewardship of a single being, it could not be used against any one enemy without also destroying all the rest of the world. It could only ever be used for a purpose of unity.

"And they think themselves so different from us," she mused. She looked down at herself, and grinned. The fascinating... restrictions of this plane only served to underscore the futility of the ponies' struggle, as the invaders were twisted into shapes resembling the invaded. Where once she had stood tall above many of her soldiers, a gaunt figure with slender arms ending in long, claw-like fingers, now she was scarcely a foot above her beloved brutes. Instead of arms, she had been given hooves and a seemingly-effortless telekinesis power.

The idea of alien biology providing a clear advantage over the compleat form was nothing new to Elesh Norn, or indeed to the Phyrexian ideal as a whole. Everything had to start somewhere, and as there were infinite worlds, there were obviously infinite chances for one of them to develop something better than the current model of Phyrexian. Mirrodin had given them darksteel, it was only right for Ungula to give them widespread telekinesis.

Any further philosophical musings were cut off as a bright light began to arc across the sky. The Grand Cenobite did the eyeless equivalent of narrowing her eyes and squinting, trying to deduce what she was seeing. It was like a comet, except that its contrail was solid light, it had clearly sprung up from the earth, and it was travelling directly towards Norn's outpost.

Norn looked around herself, checking that the torpor orbs were still buzzing. She knew these Ungulans well enough; they wouldn't launch a spell over such a distance, certainly not with a travel path like that. They were sending a force, a physical attacker.

She hoped this one would last longer.

It was a point of pride for Norn that she did not need to tell her clerics to get out of the way once it became clear where the creature would be landing. They scurried to evacuate, leaving a clear place just in front of the Grand Cenobite for their new guest to land. Norn passed the next few seconds wondering if the creature would make the mistake of going out of their way and crushing one of the clerics underhoof regardless. As the old Phyrexian saying went, oil spread, enemy dead. Oil pour, foe no more.

No such luck. The enemy arrived with a thunderclap and a flash of dark and light, for they had been moving so fast that both sound and light had been left by the wayside and had to fill a lot of space in very little time. The platform buckled beneath the new arrival, and Norn did her best not to lick her lips in anticipation as the little droplets of oil began to slowly trickle down the incline towards the hooves of her attacker. Her victory was assured now, it was just a matter of staying alive long enough to see it.

"Greetings, equine." Norn put on her best smile, which was really a shame because her guest was so tall that they probably couldn't see her mouth moving. "For what purpose have you come here?"

Had she not had good reason to expect an attack, Norn might have foregone such pleasantries in favor of salivating at the sight before her. The pony was tall, almost unbelievably so, and with the muscles to match. Her coat gleamed and shone like the Ungulan sun itself, and it sparkled with fresh droplets of all-too-clear sweat. She had a magnificent horn that seemed to pierce the sky with the distortion of mana - white mana - around it, but she also bore a breathtaking set of wings that were flared out as proudly as Norn had ever seen any pegasus wear them. The pony's entire form was encircled by leaves and vines of sparkling metal, and all the spirals and whorls inevitably drew one's gaze to her eyes, those deep violet pits of fury.

"I have come to put an end to darkness."

Norn smiled, and made a big show of cocking her head to one side so that the pony could see she was making an effort. "Well, seems there's been a bit of confusion. Last I heard, Sheoldred was occupying the south."

The look of unmistakable disdain on the pony's face briefly disappeared, replaced by genuine appreciation. "Oh, thank you. We were wondering where that contemptible spider had holed up." Her smile was gone as quickly as it had come, though, and she was back to growling. "But no, I was in fact referring to you."

"To me? Surely you jest! The Machine Orthodoxy preaches a message of glorious perfection and unification! We seek the same ends as your people, simply by different means."

"I heard that spiel the first time. Twilight was good enough to pass it along. I'll thank you not to further pollute my philosophy with comparisons to yours."

As the pony was speaking, Norn did her best to conceal a sigh. There was only so long that even she could prattle on about the various undeniable merits of following every letter of the Argent Etchings. She glared down at the ground, expecting to see the glistening oil pooling at the pony's hooves by this point. To her surprise, not only had the oil not yet reached the pony, the droplets were flowing backwards, away from the pony's hooves. Norn couldn't feel a single glimmer of pony magic around the oil, and felt her marrow bristle at the sight.

"Who are you, that you would come before the Grand Cenobite of the Machine Orthodoxy and show such open defiance of New Phyrexia?"

The pony straightened up, and the glow of her magic encircled all within her sight. "I am Celestia."

Norn ground her teeth, and her right hoof bristled as she readied an attack. "I have heard that name. I have heard it screamed in the moments before your foolish ponies finally joined us. They speak of you as though you were a god, yet I do not feel any great power in you."

"Probably because I'm making an effort not to show it," Celestia suggested, grinning with unrestrained confidence.

"So you think yourself a god, then?" As the words passed her lips, Norn unleashed shards of marrow directly into Celestia's face, an attack mirrored by her swarm of clerics. The air around Celestia suddenly became a storm of razor-sharp metal and bone, and Norn waited for the sudden explosion of viscera.

After about five seconds of waiting, Norn realized that the shards weren't moving. They were glowing bright, and hanging motionless. From within the storm of shards, Celestia spoke.

"I have never thought of myself as anything more than an exceptionally gifted pony." The marrow crumbled to dust, and the clerics followed suit. Within seconds, the only creatures left alive on the platform were Elesh Norn and Princess Celestia. "The closest I ever come to godhood is when I kill gods."

It was probably the second worst time in all the histories of the Multiverse to have a god complex.

Author's Note

The Equine-Phyrexian War. A caged sun with the Mirran watermark. Combine these two, you get a scene of Princess Celestia kicking absolute flank.

The Goat's Bells Ring

The ringing of bells is often assumed to be a happy sound, the ringing of small bells doubly so. Images of Hearth's Warming, or of those noble creatures of ethereal magic, the reindeer, are conjured up by the ting-a-ling-a-ling of bells on a harness. We often consider that the only kind of bell that can be sad or scary is the large bell, the church bells that toll out funerals. But those are the same bells that ring out at weddings and on days of great worship and pride. Church bells can be heard from miles away, but a jingle bell can only be heard from a few feet away.

If you heard a church bell while stumbling lost through a snowstorm, you would run towards it, because the bell would mean life and other people who could save you. But in the same snowstorm, if all of a sudden you heard the ringing of thirty harness bells, you would leap out of the way of wherever the bells are coming from. In that moment, those bells mean death, mean that you're about to be trampled underhoof.

Sombra had never been any good at knowing where sounds were coming from, especially when he was close to blind. When he heard the bells, he started looking around the dark blizzard, trying to make out any hint of a shape in the snow. In one moment, the bells seemed to be coming from his left, then from his right, then right at him, then just off to the side. He couldn't tell if it was the wind, or if there was a herd, or if it was just some kind of spell they were assaulting him with.

"They, eh? And who's they, little one?"

The bells had stopped. Sombra was suddenly very aware of something enormous behind him, and he felt a presence in his mind urging him not to turn around.

"You come from the Crystal Empire, don't you?"

Sombra ground his teeth together, and rounded on the thing. With a tinkling of bells, it vanished, moving behind him once again. "I was," he growled. "Not anymore."

"Ah, yes. You are weak, and they will not tolerate it?"

Sombra felt the dark power bubble up inside of him. "They didn't chase me out! I left!"

"Of your own free will?" The bells tinkled in tandem with a laugh, a bloodthirsty rumbling that drowned out the wind.

Sombra turned to glare at the thing, but it moved again. "Yes," he lied. "I hated it there."

"You hate the Crystal Empire?" The snowflakes began to sparkle with blue fire, the reflection of the thing's magical aura. "More likely, you love it, more than you know you should."

"No, no I don't! I hate it! I hate the ponies, I hate the buildings, I hate the whole blasted thing!"

The world flashed blue. Sombra fell to his knees, and he felt suddenly, overwhelmingly weak.

"They say that the Crystal Heart shows the reflections of our soul. Everything we are destined to be, everything we have been, and sometimes a vision of what will happen to change us from the present self to the future self." The shadow of the thing loomed in Sombra's vision. "And not more than a day ago, they held the Crystal Faire."

Sombra tried to tell the creature to shut up, but he could not summon the strength to open his mouth.

"You have looked into the Crystal Heart, and seen a pony you are afraid of becoming. You know that you can't run from the future that the Crystal Heart has shown you, but you try anyway."

"Not running. From the future." Every word was a struggle for the foal. "Running from. The ponies I'd hurt."

"An admirable goal, but we both know you won't keep to it." The air glowed blue, and the blizzard seemed to shift. It didn't die down or grow quiet in any way, but it began to fold away from the two of them like parting curtains. "If you saw yourself hurting them in the heart, then there'll be no outrunning that."

Sombra forced himself onto his feet, but there was another flash of blue and his strength abandoned him. He fell back into the snow, and he cursed with all of his might.

"Temper, temper. Getting angry won't change your fate, little one."

The dark power wanted so very much to be free. Sombra could feel it struggling, thrashing and flailing and trying to break through him.

"Oh, wait. There's an idea." The creature started laughing, and Sombra almost choked on the spike in power within his horn.

"What idea?" he grumbled, sneezing on snow as he did.

"Well, you can't hurt the ones you love if they're already dead." The snow parted completely, and Sombra got a good look at the creature. He was a goat, enormous and built like a house. His skin was as blue as the night sky, his teeth were like sharpened knives, and he had horns so huge that it looked like he could carry an entire pony between them. His eyes were blood-red, and the weird squished pupil only made him seem less like a person and more like an animal.

Sombra had heard of this goat. Everypony had. There wasn't a pony alive who didn't know the name of the Dream-Eater, the Deadmaker, the one they called Grogar.

"So, what do you say, kid? You want to be free of that troublesome destiny of yours?"

Sombra's blood was pumping so hard, his heartbeat was drowning out all other sounds in his head. He couldn't be sure that anything he was hearing was real. "Did you just say... that you'll kill everyone I know and love... just so that I don't have to?"

"Yep." Grogar smiled, or at the very least made sure that Sombra could see all of his teeth. "Sounds like a pretty good plan, if I do say so myself. Hell, I was on my way to tear down the Crystal Empire anyways. Wouldn't even be out of my way. You just tell me what they look like, and I'll be sure to tear them a--"

Sombra had never needed to learn magic. To his eyes, the spells cast by unicorns were a collection of laughably simple symbols, and the dark power had always taken care of any energy needs that a given spell had. It was the work of a moment's thought to assemble Grogar's spell, and as some of the symbols he was setting seemed blurry, Sombra took the opportunity to straighten them. When he unleashed the spell, it hit about four times harder than anything Grogar had thrown at him. The giant stumbled, then he fell. Sombra got to his feet.

The dark power wanted to be free. Sombra provided it with an exit path. "The Crystal Empire is mine."

Author's Note

Yeah, Grogar was cycling Death Pulse. Why?

Mostly because at his age, Sombra would be lucky to be statted as a 1/3. And also because Grogar was trying to find a card.

Let's see if anyone can guess the card.

To Know is to Burn

There are a great many adjectives that can be attached to a pony working as an intern in dragon country. 'Diligent' is a good word, describing most everypony who's made it to their second week with all or the overwhelming majority of their limbs. 'Passionate' cannot pass one's lips enough, as nothing else could possibly drive them to put themselves at such risk. 'Intelligent' is such a common word in their quarters that they've had to stop using it, for fear that it will spontaneously cease to exist.

'Safe' and 'happy', though... neither of those are words that you're likely to see attached to any ponies working for dragons. Not that you'd know it from seeing them in action, mind you. If there's one good thing that even the most self-absorbed dragon can say about their interns, it's that they never complain when management or tourists are around.

But nopony is ever interested in the masks we wear, only in what lies underneath. And so we find ourselves peering into the mind of Parastratiosphecomyia Sphecomyioides, a pegasus jokingly referred to as Pathetic Insect by friend and rival alike.

But not for very long. He is about to die, after all.

Pathetic Insect dodged the latest gout of flame, fighting down the urge to laugh at the sheer thrill of having once again cheated death. A good thing too, as the motion of throwing his head back in laughter would have put his head in exactly the right place to be impaled by a shard of bone-meltingly hot glass. As it was, he only lost part of his mane and a good deal of the attached skin.

"Excellent form, Sphecomyioides!" Woodlock boomed, the luscious timbre of his draconic voice shaking their mountain lair. "A few more years of practice, and you'll be able to make it through spring cleaning with nary a scratch!"

Insect all but collapsed onto the first patch of solid ground that he came close to, almost choking his lungs as he struggled not to pant from exhaustion. "Thanks for the compliment, boss. How's the orrery doing?"

"The orrery can wait," Woodlock assured Insect. "There are other projects that require our attention." He turned his massive form around with a deceptively simple motion, and began to slink away into another part of the laboratory-cave.

Pathetic Insect did his best not to sigh in resignation. He liked the orrery. It was a simple project, an attempt to study the stars without tripping any of Princess Luna's memetic astronomy-detecting spells. It didn't involve any whirring blades, or exploding components, or any more than the standard number of potentially volatile compounds. In that sense, it was unique among the dragon Woodlock's experiments.

A new project meant new suffering, new risks. Most importantly, it meant new and exotic prosthetics and/or skin grafts for Woodlock and his fellow dragons to test out on the poor intern. Sometimes, Pathetic Insect wondered if his entire purpose in life was to have parts of his body torn, blown or otherwise cut off from his person in new and interesting ways, so that new and interesting solutions could be found. The fact that his cutie mark looked like a diagram of anatomy was hardly reassuring in that regard.

"Come along, Sphecomyioides," Woodlock called from down the hall. "Your presence is absolutely crucial for this next project."

Insect sighed, put on his eager smile, and took wing. It took a few minutes to catch up with Woodlock, and when he did, Insect was not entirely clear on what he was seeing. He could tell from the gigantic, toothy smile that his employer was very proud of it, though, and that would be enough for him in a perfect world.

Of course, in a perfect world he wouldn't have a distinct memory of seeing Woodlock smile that exact same smile seconds before the two of them had tried to reverse pancake.

"Today, you will be assisting me in testing the latest theory on draco-equine compatibility." Woodlock reached over and pulled a lever that was half the size of himself, and the room-sized apparatus bubbled to life.

From where Pathetic Insect stood, he was on the edge of a veritable city of steam pipes. Some of them were red-hot and hissing like temperamental snakes, some were so cold that ice was forming on them. And in the center, dwarfing even Woodlock in raw size, there was a massive roiling ball of blue and red fire.

"What is that?"' Insect asked.

"Oh, good, you can see it. The apparatus works." Woodlock moved away from the lever, and fanned the fireball with his wings. "In the simplest possible terms, this is the very essence of dragonkind. The thing that makes us who we are. All of the things we know without being told, all the things that we've been able to learn over the centuries. And we're going to see how well you can channel it."

All of his intern's instincts couldn't prevent Pathetic Insect from cringing in horror. "You want me... to try and channel that?"

"That is what I said." Woodlock's smile wavered for the first time since Insect had known him. "Is something the matter, Sphecomyioides?"

Insect swallowed his fear, and propelled himself back up into the air with a few lazy beats of his wings. "Of course not, sir. Just the average pre-science jitters."

"Oh, dear. You know, if you need to take a moment to have a coffee and calm down..."

Insect shook his head. "No, sir, no, I'm very ready for this." He stared down at the ball of fire, and took a deep breath in and out. "So, any ideas as to how I'm supposed to channel the essence of dragonkind?"

"No idea," Woodlock announced brightly. "Just try to hold an image in your head of the quintessential dragon. If you get it right, the experiment will be a success."

"And if I don't?"

"You needn't worry about it."

Insect didn't believe Woodlock for a second, but he sighed and tried to imagine a dragon. But not just any dragon, the very best dragon, the sort of dragon that popped into everyone's head when you said the word. He imagined an insane collection of barely-held-together aging scales, cackling wildly as it poured over ancient texts and debated the merits of molecular disintegration while snacking on ponies just trying to scrape together college credits.

At the end of the day, Woodlock gave up on trying to describe the minimal advances in draco-equine compatibility and instead wrote a dissertation on the danger of subjective experiences negatively impacting scientific environments.

Author's Note

Welcome to the Draconic College. Less a loose collection of mad scientists, and more an entire brood of Niv-Mizzets constantly butting heads while a bunch of pony interns get caught in the crossfire.

The Transported Pony

Starlight Glimmer stepped off the train, and smiled at the dusty expanse that was Appleloosa. She always relished any excuse to visit the frontier town, as it seemed like a more pleasant version of her own village. The citizens had cutie marks, self-determination, their own culture, and even one or two exports. They also had reliable sources of food, water, and social interaction, all things that Starlight's village needed to rely on caravans for.

But perhaps the biggest bonus that Appleloosa had over her village, or indeed anywhere else in Equestria, was the Grand Arena. It had only been built very recently, but it was already the biggest tourist attraction south of Ponyville. Starlight had heard rumors that some Canterlot nobles took the train down to Appleloosa every single day to see the fights in the Grand Arena, and even the Crystal Empire was constantly buzzing with the latest gossip about which gladiator had toppled who. It was the most popular glorification of pony-on-pony violence since that one week that Jet Set and Upper Crust had tried to make their underground mud-wrestling league public.

The thing that Starlight enjoyed most about the fights in the Grand Arena was that they weren't really fights. Only the most skilled mages and warriors were made gladiators, and when you reached the level of skill that they had, the thing you were second-best at was making it look like you were doing the thing you were best at. It was all a trick, a show, for the people to entertain themselves with as they watched some of the healthiest specimens of the day clash over and over under the baking sun.

Of course, Starlight had a personal reason to be visiting the Grand Arena on that day. She had a friend who was fighting in the pits.

Every great magic trick consists of three parts, or acts.

Starlight wandered down the Viewing Line, unafraid to let her eyes wander all over the lineup of lads and lasses that stood at varying degrees of attention. She took in the various leather straps, the bandoliers, the almost comically oversized weapons, and the ridiculously complex costumes. It almost looked more like she was admiring the cast of a play about gladiators rather than the fighters for that day's matches, except that the variety of cutie marks on proud, rippling display were definitely not fake.

The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a stallion.

Beside each gladiator sat a clipboard. The clipboards each displayed a variety of personal facts about the gladiator, almost always listing their record of how many fights they had won since their last loss, and in some cases outlining the last century of their lineage. There were pages and pages squeezed into every clipboard, until it seemed like they might explode at any second.

Except for the gladiator at the end. Their clipboard was completely bare except for their win-loss record. Starlight turned to inspect the gladiator themselves, and saw nothing but an all-encompassing hood and cloak, with two eyes just barely visible within.

She shows you this object. Perhaps she asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't.

"And who are you?" Starlight asked, unsure of how much of the game she was supposed to give away in a room full of experienced players.

The hooded figure regarded her for but a second. "I assume you can read, ma'am." The voice was disguised, hidden under a ridiculous number of reverb enchantments.

Starlight only glanced back to the clipboard long enough to pretend she had read the name on the top, then turned back to the figure. "Yes, but any good gladiator should be able to self-advertise."

"My agent says it's a bad idea. I tend to oversell myself."

"Says the gladiator going by the stage name of 'Arcanis the Omnipotent'." Starlight cocked an eyebrow.

"And standing next to ponies with names like 'The Unrestricted Destruction of All Things'. This is clearly your first time in the Grand Arena."

Starlight nodded, now very unsure of whether she was breaking some kind of gladiator faux-pas.

"Go to your seat. Make your wager on the winner."

The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary.

The fight was nothing special. Arcanis the Omnipotent was trading blows with a heavy-set earth pony who insisted that his name was Camel. Arcanis had tipped their hand fairly early that they were a unicorn underneath the enormous cloak, but the constant bursts of magic being slung across the arena were barely doing anything except buying Arcanis the time needed to keep dodging.

Camel advanced with deceptive speed for one of such daunting frame, and Starlight gasped along with everypony else as he drew his enormous sword. The blade swung around, and Arcanis stopped dodging. When the sword struck the cloaked unicorn, it encountered no resistance. The cloak and hood folded around Camel's sword as though they were so much empty cloth. And as Camel's swing finished with a flourish that sent the cloak flying, the audience could see that Arcanis had disappeared.

Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know.

Camel raged, like the barbarian he appeared to be. He slashed at the ground with his sword, and muttered some malarkey about it not being a real fight until there was blood spilled. It lost a bit of weight when you knew that he was a strict vegetarian and actually had a massive prejudice against griffons for nothing but dietary reasons, but the crowd loved his childish display.

You want to be fooled.

It was only seconds before Camel stopped thrashing about, instead sheathing his sword and begrudgingly declaring himself the winner. In response, the audience was quick to boo him. Starlight snickered as a group of ponies in makeshift robes declared Arcanis the greatest sorcerer of their time.

But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back.

The dust in the center of the arena began to swirl and spark. It became a tornado in miniature, and then oh-so-briefly swelled to the size of the real thing. The gusts tore at the audience, and one or two of the pegasi actually found themselves lifted aloft by the winds. And when the dust cleared, there stood Arcanis the Omnipotent. Or, to be more precise...

"The Grrrrrreat and Powerful... TRIXIE!"

The cheers that erupted at her name shook the Grand Arena, and as Starlight had heard whispered to her a million times, just a moment of this crowd cheering was enough to drown out all the years of ridicule. To be able to come back and do it again, over and over, was Heaven.

That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part. The part we call "The Prestige".

Camel drew his blade. Trixie's horn glowed. And the real fight began.

Author's Note

Because really. Could it have been anyone else?

Also, go watch The Prestige. It's a fantastic film.

You Put THAT in Your Deck?

On the everything-torn plane of Zendikar, the assembled heroes of the Gatewatch stood atop the wreckage of Sea Gate. They stared out across the drained expanse of the Halimar basin, transfixed by the sight of a terrifying new arrival to the plane.

The words of the oath were still fresh on their lips. The weight of their task had scarcely had time to settle on their shoulders, and already it was rocked by uncertainty. When they had felt space distort and crack, they had expected one of the Eldrazi titans to pop into existence, or else an unprecedented swarm of the reality-eating spawn. But the thing that hung in the air before them was something much worse, if only because it was completely unexpected.

Nissa was the first one to summon up the courage to speak. "Is that... a horse?"

"Worse," Gideon said, his voice just barely holding onto its steadfast timbre. "It's a pony."

That got a groan out of the entire Gatewatch. Despite the near-omnipresence of horses in the Multiverse, and the presence of ponies in basically every plane where horses had been domesticated, the word 'pony' had only one meaning to a planeswalker, and that was to refer to the denizens of Ungula.

"I swear, if she tries to invite the Eldrazi to a tea party, I will burn her mane off." Chandra ignited her fist for emphasis, and looked about ready to hurl a fireball before Jace stuck his arm out in front of her.

"It wouldn't do a damned thing." The telepath's eyes glowed blue, and faint whorls formed in the space between him and the pony. "That's Princess Celestia, the sun-marshal. Your fire would barely tickle her." The glow faded for a second, and Jace looked around at the bemused faces of his fellows. "What?"

"You've spent enough time there to recognize the residents?" Gideon raised an eyebrow, and looked as though he was trying very hard not to laugh. Nissa was unsuccessfully suppressing a giggle, while Chandra was laughing as hard as she could. Jace put on his best grouchy face, which was really just a pout that was trying too hard.

"Look, you try constantly reading the minds of everyone around you and see if you don't form an eidetic memory!"

Gideon smiled, then reached over and gave Jace a way-too-hard pat on the shoulder. "Alright, Beleren, just chill. We can tease you about Ungula later." And just like that, his face was right back to that of a serious war commander. "Now, scan her mind and see if you can find out what she wants."

Jace nodded, and the blue glow erupted from his eyes once again. A few minutes passed, during which Nissa couldn't help but notice that the so-called princess was getting closer. Then Jace stopped glowing, and threw up.

"That bad, huh?" Nissa cast a minor healing spell, earning her a weak smile from Jace.

"Not as bad as some folks I've had to read. Now, do you guys want the good news or the bad news?"

Chandra's hair burst into flame and her eyes glowed red. "That's two cliches in as many hours, Jace. I hear one more, I will burn your hair off."

"Noted." Jace snapped his fingers, dispelling Chandra's fiery aura.

"Stop playing around, Beleren," Gideon grunted. "Give us the bad news first."

"Alright. So, the bad news is that she's just as crazy as the Eldrazi, most of our magic is going to bounce off of her, she'd maybe get winded if you threw an entire mountain at her, she can read minds too so she just read my mind and now knows everything I know about all of us, and perhaps worst of all..."

The sun above them flared as though going supernova, and a giant laser of pure white mana came searing down through the air towards them. The Gatewatch just barely managed to dodge the blast, and were left hovering in the air as the laser tore through what little was left of Sea Gate. When the light died down, there wasn't a single brick left of the once-mighty structure, and the river that had once fed the waterfall now simply stopped and hung motionless when it reached the place where it should fall.

"Unlike the Eldrazi, she's aware of the world around her. Which includes us."

As if on cue, Celestia began to accelerate, closing the distance between her and the planeswalkers. They readied their magic, filled with more than a little blind terror.

"You mentioned there was good news," Gideon prompted Jace, though it didn't sound as though his heart was in it.

"Relatively speaking. The other big difference between her and the Eldrazi is that she isn't indestructible. She's only extremely hard to kill."

"Well, when you put it like that..." Chandra glowed like the inferno at the heart of the sun. "Suddenly I feel so much more confident."

Meanwhile, at other places...

In the snowy mountains of Tarkir, hidden away between two blessed peaks, the dragonlord Ojutai laughed.

It was a strange sound, having more in common with birdsong than the reptilian screeching one might expect. It did not boom so much as whistle, in a frequency just high enough that it kept rattling around in your skull for quite a while after you had stopped hearing it.

A lot like everything else the dragonlord said, really.

"Friendship?" he said, in that strange combination of gestures and guttural sounds that made up the local Draconic language. "What need do I have of friendship? Do you think my followers so unfaithful that I require an alliance with a tribe of horses from beyond the veil? Do I seem so ignorant to your dear little minds that I must seek the counsel of those who know nothing of my struggles? Or am I simply your final attempt at diplomacy, and you are so disheartened by the foolishness of my rivals that you have convinced yourselves that I am just as much a hopeless case as the rest of them?"

Princess Twilight Sparkle and Applejack the Very Good Farmer stared at the dragonlord, waiting only somewhat patiently for him to stop his blustering. When he finally finished his ridiculous combination of growling and dancing, Twilight took a few steps forward and began to relay her own message. Her horn glowed, and she conjured up the spectral image of a dragon almost the same size as Ojutai. While she spoke the words, her construct performed the gestures.

"We meant no insult in our proposition, O dragonlord. We seek diplomacy for diplomacy's own sake. Ours is a social race, and much of our culture is defined by one's ability to maintain peaceful relations with as many others as possible. I owe most all of my renown to my exceptional skill at resolving the problems between friends, or indeed enemies, to the point where I bear the title of Princess of Friendship."

"And in your own way, I am sure that that title is a source of great pride and awe amongst your own kind." Ojutai's words seemed more reserved, now that he had been convinced that the ponies weren't trying to insult him. "But I and my disciples have no need of alliances. As you have said, the way between our worlds is seldom open, so even if I believed you could be of some tactical use, you are unreliable as allies. And as repositories of knowledge that I do not possess, you have little to offer, as most everything you know can only apply to your own world."

At that, Applejack grit her teeth and stormed forward, growling out a flawless pronunciation and waving around her makeshift claw-gauntlets when the words required her to do so. "I don't see any farms in your lands, bird-dragon. If you are unwilling to seek counsel from those of your fellow dragonlords that know the ways of the land, there is a way in which we can help you."

Ojutai bristled at the insult, and when next he opened his mouth, the mountain winds seemed to triple in coldness. "You would do well not to mock your elders, farmer."

"Perhaps I would, if your words did not lead me to believe you were naught but an overgrown hatchling." Applejack was grinning now, and Twilight was wondering whether she should be backing away slowly or teleporting as fast as she could.

Ojutai cocked his head to one side, and gave a tiny chuckle. "I must say, I have never encountered so arrogant a morsel as you. Perhaps I shall send you to Atarka as a peace offering."

"She's already eaten," Applejack countered with a near-instant whip of her tail. "I made the trees bear more fruit than her entire clan could pluck in their entire lifetimes."

"Hardly an impressive feat. Atarka's minions scarcely have enough wisdom between them to fashion anything more complex than a sharpened rock." Ojutai reared up on his hind legs, a gesture usually reserved for the end of conversations. "I grow weary of you, ponies. But it has been a long time since I had so passionate a debate, and for that I do owe you some measure of gratitude. So then, a final chance. One last clever little trick. Offer some proof of your worth as an ally."

Twilight Sparkle grinned, and choked out the only word of Draconic she needed. "Gladly." She then turned to face the sky, so full of clouds and sunshine, and screamed. She screamed until her face broke apart and tentacles poured out, screamed until the sound ceased to be anything that Ojutai's ears had ever heard before, screamed until the sky echoed back with a silence so deafening that the dragonlord at first thought he had been struck deaf.

And then, the sky opened. Four blue hands reached through the crack between two clouds, curled their fingers around the sky as though holding onto something, and then pulled apart. Beyond the sky, there waited a thing for which Ojutai had no name. It had a form like unto a man, yet it seemed to have no flesh to hide its visceral muscles or its exposed bones. Despite its four hands, it only possessed two arms, which split at what might normally be called the elbows. Where Ojutai might have expected legs on a man, there was instead a mass of innumerable tentacles, red and blue and thrashing like the heart of the Dragon Tempests themselves. It had a head without eyes or mouth or anything save an exposed skull that seemed reminiscent of a helmet. Well, that and one other thing, which seemed the most unusual part of the entire thing to the eyes of the dragonlord.

"Is that... a tiara?" Ojutai said, pointing vaguely in the direction of the towers of gold and steel that ringed the top of the impossible creature's head. Twilight Sparkle and Applejack both nodded, and their grins threatened to slice their heads in half. In the case of Twilight, that seemed incredibly likely.

"Allow me to introduce Princess Ulamog, Of the Ceaseless Hunger." Applejack's pronunciation dripped with a confidence that no dragon had ever heard spoken by one so clearly mortal. "She loves to make friends. Even friends that can do nothing for her, which is basically all of her friends. And there's nothing she'd love more than to forgive you for insulting us like you did and make you her friend. Don't you want to be her friend?"

Arrogant and cocky though he was, Ojutai knew when to pick his battles. So he did the smart thing, and made friends with Princess Ulamog.

"Three down," Twilight whispered to Applejack on their way down the mountain. "Two to go," replied Applejack.

Author's Note

The strategy for playing Princess Ulamog is as follows:

Announce that you have Princess Ulamog in your pony tribal deck.
Whenever you draw Princess Ulamog, announce that it is in your hand.
Throughout the game, casually mention that you don't want to play Princess Ulamog because that would just spoil the fun.
Subtly imply which actions your opponent might be considering could result in you playing Princess Ulamog. Some subtle action like a nervous tic is recommended.
Never play Princess Ulamog again, but occasionally do that nervous tic.
Win every game forever.

Knowledge Is Power

Starswirl the Bearded walked into a bar. And then he burned it down and went to a cafe, because he wasn't in the mood for jokes and anyway he hadn't so much as touched a glass in seventy years.

This particular cafe was located at the junction of two of the least busy streets that had ever been constructed in the great city of Canterlot. Of course, that didn't exactly count for much since basically everypony was dead, and had been for several years now, but the fact remained that this was the junction least likely to see traffic from any of the Canterlot survivors, or even the numerous spirits who insisted on hanging around. The poor souls haunting the serving dishes and the kitchen only counted for so much foot traffic.

Starswirl approached the cafe with a certain amount of reverence. He nodded his head and tipped his considerable hat towards the hovering silver platter that stood beside one of the tables. He regarded a dust-covered menu with his most polite imitation of sincere interest, and pointed vaguely at one of the items that had long since faded beyond legibility. The platter tipped and rattled as though the waiter holding it had made a short bow, then it turned and wandered back inside the cafe.

"A good chap, that." The sound of Starswirl's voice was such an unfamiliar one that he startled himself by speaking. "Have I really had so little reason to speak, all this time?" It was a disheartening thought, that the world was now so empty and the company so far between that one's own voice could be completely forgotten. Still, he had more important things to worry about.

Starswirl turned, and regarded one of the many empty tables that sat just outside of the cafe. He sat down at the table alone, and waited. The silver platter returned, laying a plate of dust and ash and at least one long-dead rat in front of Starswirl, and he smiled and nodded at the empty air underneath the still-hovering dish. Then he turned, and glared across the unoccupied table at his guest.

"Give it back," was all he said. It was all that he felt needed to be said.

"In order to do that, I would need to have taken something from you." The figure grinned, discarding its cloak of whispersilk and allowing light to fall on its unnaturally pale skin. "You asked me if you would ever know everything. And even though I warned you that there were things you shouldn't know, you wanted my answer anyway. And rather than answer, I stood aside, and let you learn what you shouldn't have."

"You broke my time spells," Starswirl growled, poking at the ash on his plate. "I've tried to go back and fix it, but none of it works."

"That wasn't me, Starswirl. This is a living world. You've got a sentient crystal tree that's older than your entire universe, and you expect it to never work out that time magic is dangerous? You blocked yourself out by using it too much."

"So un-block it. Give me back my powers."

"Do it yourself," the guest snapped, and the city shook. "I'm not going to tear apart an entire timeline just so that you can delude yourself into thinking you've solved the problem."

"And what do you call this?" Starswirl shouted, gesturing at the dead world around them. "What else would you call this, except broken?"

"Natural," the guest answered after almost a full minute of deliberation. "Starswirl, this is not the first world I've seen die because of this. Most of them do, one way or another. Someone learns just a little bit faster than they should, or they test out a spell that has warning labels left over from a whole other universe, and then all that's left is some token survivors, a planet of ash, and a whole lot of regrets."

"And didn't you ever try and fix it?"

The guest looked stung by that. "A thousand times. In a thousand ways. But I've learned, after all my millennia of suffering. People die. Worlds perish. The magic always goes away, sooner or later. No matter what I do, it will only delay the moment of truth."

"If this is truth, I can name a few thousand ponies who could stand to put up with a few lies here and there." Starswirl leaned forward, his beard brushing against his pathetic excuse for a meal. "I know you can do it. It'll hardly take a few seconds. So why not do it?"

"Because it won't work. This is a dead world, Starswirl, and it knows what it is. The time stream doesn't want to be changed. Your entire universe has rolled over and accepted its fate. Why can't you?"

"Because I remember a time when I could have stopped this," Starswirl answered without even a second of consideration. "Because I could name for you a hundred thousand times between the last time we spoke and now when I could have turned around, cast my little spell, and gone right back to the start and ripped the book out of my own hooves. Because if I had even a spark of that old mana left, I would be throwing it all away for one desperate chance to save my world from what I did. Don't you know what that's like, Mister Markov?"

The vampire Sorin Markov bared his quite impressive teeth, and for a moment looked poised to spring across the table. But he didn't. "Starswirl, you have not seen what I have seen. You have not fought the struggles that I have fought. Yes, I was once like you, constantly tittering away about how I'd undo all of my mistakes if only I could. But then, something extraordinary happened."

The vampire leaned across the table, as though to whisper in Starswirl's ear.

"I learned to live with my mistakes."

"Yes, but you've had millennia. I have had only a handful of centuries." Starswirl changed the angle of his head so that he was brow to brow with Markov, and he grinned. "And there's another key difference, Mister Markov. This isn't a plane I just happened to accidentally doom. This isn't a tourist destination that's unexpectedly going through some apocalypse-type event. This is my home. And can you honestly tell me that you would allow your home to perish without even trying to save it?"

Markov and Starswirl stared each other down for hours, both of their minds turning over and over and playing the conversation from that point out in their heads. As the minutes turned to hours and the hours threatened to turn into days, Starswirl's eyes began to grow fluttery and weak, and Markov sighed and gave a faint smile.

"'If I had even a spark'... you don't have a single speck of mana left in your bones, do you?"

Some ancient forces of debatably-evil, Starswirl mused bitterly as he nodded, would have had the decency to gloat. Instead, Markov was doing his jaded best to look like he actually pitied the unicorn.

"Well. Much as I am loathe to admit it, that changes things." Markov got up from his seat, making sure not to forget his invisible cloak, and began to pry up cobblestones from the street. Some of them hovered in the air for a few seconds, and then their form flowed like water and they came together to form a gate.

"Lithomancy?" Starswirl asked, his curiosity piqued. Markov nodded, not turning to face the mage as he rooted around inside of his clothes for something.

"When you have lived as long as I have, you cannot help but pick up a few tricks that are outside of your normal skill set." Markov drew his head out of the folds of his jacket, and Starswirl saw that he was holding three sapphires in his teeth. "One of the advantages of having lived longer than most currencies. Plenty of time to scoop up the valuables before the locals discover jewelry."

Even with his own magic having long dried up, Starswirl could still feel mana. And meager as the supply was, each of those sapphires was crackling with a spark of blue mana.

"I said I wouldn't tear apart this entire timeline," Markov said as if to the gate. "And I won't. But I am not one to leave debts unsettled, so I will not leave you with nothing." Markov hurled one of the sapphires between the pillars of the gate, and Starswirl stared as the precious stone disappeared rather than pass the threshold. Markov did the same with the other two sapphires, and as the third met the invisible barrier, something ignited. The gate now crackled with blue magic, and rather than look onto the other side of the street, it opened onto a rolling plain of green grass.

"What is it?" The mage couldn't help but ask.

"A little spell called the Day's Undoing," Markov spoke as though announcing a play. "Give me a lever and a solid place to stand, and I can change the course of history." Markov turned and smiled at Starswirl, and for the first time since they had met, Starswirl felt the smile was genuine. "When I activate this spell, you will very briefly be returned to the height of your power. You will never be more perfectly poised to mount a direct assault on time itself. I trust you know the way back."

Starswirl nodded, truly struck speechless. Markov's smile widened, and he turned to go. "One last thing," he shouted over his shoulder as time began to bend around them. "If you pull this off, and we should happen to cross paths again, I will most likely not remember anything I have said or done here. Alternate timelines, and all that." Without another word, the vampire stepped through the portal and disappeared.

The world shook. History collapsed. Centuries of magic came pouring back into Starswirl's bones and mind, and he grinned like a lunatic who has seen into the heart of the world. The city that had been Canterlot crumbled to ash, new earth erupting all around the mage as his horn cast spells purely to vent them, the rush of water drowning out the few meager screams as the magic built into a crescendo.

Starswirl the Bearded was no longer standing in the dried-out husk of a world that was his fault. His mind stood in the center of a grand library, one so overflowing with books that pages lay strewn about on the floor, and every page turning and twisting as though it were caught in a great tempest. One imaginary tome flew past his face, and Starswirl scanned the pages. He recognized the spell. He took hold of the massive surge of mana within his heart, and directed it. While his mind remained braced and ready in the library, Starswirl felt his body racing backwards in time.

Then he felt his hooves skid to a stop on a very familiar floor, and Starswirl stepped out of the library and back into his own head. The air around him crackled like never before, and as if in a haze he turned to see his younger self standing beside him. There was Sorin Markov, standing on the other side of the room with the faintest hint of a mischievous grin on his face. And there in his younger self's aura was the journal, which held the spell, which had doomed them all.

Two spells. The first, an erasure to remove the spell from his own memory. The second, a telekinetic grasp to rip the final page from the journal and crumple it to nothing.

The world was saved, and nobody would ever know it. Nobody except for the stallion left drifting, cut loose from time by his own magic.

And that is the story of how Starswirl the Bearded got his Planeswalker's Spark.

Author's Note

Ironically, there isn't much of the battle of wits about this card. It's probably the alternate win condition that's the easiest to spot, usually from the other side of the gaming hall.

"Hey, why does that guy have a deck as tall as he is?"

"That's it. Someone get me my mill decks."

But it does make for a sick avatar.

When the World Was Saved

"Oh, you should see the looks on your faces! So intense, so sure of yourselves! Oh, it's just absolutely hilarious! HAHAHAHAHAH--"

Celestia could not hold back a smile as the rainbow struck Discord, as his flesh and muscles and heart and mind became lifeless stone. She gasped with jubilation as a shockwave flew out from his body, a wave of what she could only describe as reality washing over the madness-torn plane. The purple-and-green checkerboard underneath her hooves cracked and bent as the wave passed, giving way to grass and sand. Out towards the horizon, Celestia watched dumbstruck as mountains tore themselves out of card-towers and chocolate monoliths, animals with bodies that made sense seemed to erupt out of nothing, and the nauseatingly pink sky was washed away by a choking darkness.

Had it been any other time in history, the crushingly empty void of space would have been terrifying. But Celestia had seen nothing but Discord's senseless sky for so long that time itself had begun to bend and twist, and so the void was nothing but a comfort to her.

And then the void exploded, and the name of Ungula became that of Heaven itself.

Millions and millions of tiny points of light appeared where once there was nothing, filling the darkness with a light that put Celestia in mind of a diamond sandstorm. There seemed to be shapes formed by the points of light, but no sooner had Celestia begun to examine them then they changed. The heavens began to twirl and spin, as though a thousand jewel-speckled ribbons had suddenly been caught up in a gust of wind.

Celestia turned to her side, and smiled at Luna. Her sister's horn was glowing, and her eyes were fixed on the sky. Celestia looked back up to the illuminated dark, and marveled at her sister's skill.

"Stars," she said suddenly, and the word felt eerily familiar for one that she had not heard in centuries. "Those are stars."

"To think, it hath been so long that I had forgotten how to hold them," Luna spoke, her words seeming so small in a world that finally felt as large as it was. She shaped a galaxy with a gesture of her horn, and Celestia was speechless as she watched the universe dance to the tune of her sister's will.

"One could not guess at thy lack of practice from this spectacle, dear sister." For the first time in she knew not how long, Celestia allowed herself to fall back on her haunches and sit.

"This, a spectacle? The war hath clearly endured longer than the limits of thy memory, Celestia, if thou dost consider this paltry show to be anything approaching extravagant. No, the spectacle, we doth save for the first night."

Celestia stared in confusion. "But is this not the night we see before us?"

Luna shook her head, then smiled and shrugged. "Time is made anew this day, and it falls to we who marshal the day and the night to set the clock in motion and determine the hour. And I say, this darkness is not the night. 'Tis the darkness of a sky that is long overdue for a true day."

Celestia blushed, and reached out into the universe. There, on the edge of her power, she found something that seemed at once like a stranger and like a most beloved family member. It had drifted lifeless for all this time, occasionally yanked into life by the prankster who even now seemed like a distant memory, but at her touch it ignited.

The world, vast and full of life as it was, fell silent in reverent expectation. All could feel the sun roaring back to life, could feel Time Itself bend at the knee and ask the alicorn for its standing orders. Celestia smiled, and withheld her orders for the moment. She instead brought her wings down with a great crash of air. Within seconds, she had been propelled up into the sky, and her wings spread by sheer instinct.

Flight, yet another thing that Discord had so often left broken or bent out of shape that Celestia did not expect to be able to stay aloft. But there were winds now, updrafts and downdrafts and thermals and slipstreams, and her wings felt as though they would break off from her and fly forever from sheer joy at finally being able to manage something longer than a short hover.

In the darkness before dawn, most of the landscape was so many blurry shapes to Celestia, but she knew her way to the place she sought. She flew north, cresting the great MacIntosh mountains with a few lazy beats of her wings and bidding a loud good morning to any who might have been hiding in the caves. She allowed herself to fall very nearly to the ground itself as she passed over the Southern Sands, and the buffalo tribes cheered and danced around their fires as she buzzed between them.

The towns of the ponies were more of a mixed bag. Some were asleep, some were just barely awake, some were going insane over the complete absence of insane things in their universe, and quite a few were running scared like some unholy cross-breed between sheep, chickens and those rather excitable little puppies that get heart attacks if you make them too happy.

But some of them were cheering and singing her praises, so it wasn't entirely embarrassing.

Finally, Celestia reached the Canterhorn. She approached the summit slowly, flying around and around the towering mountain as she climbed ever upward. When at last she reached the summit, and settled down upon the dew-soaked grass, she was almost surprised to see Luna sitting beside her.

"Thou didst not truly think we would sit out thy moment of triumph, surely."

Celestia smiled, and turned to face the horizon. The ancient, familiar power gathered in her horn, and she seized control of her destiny.

She could think of only one thing to say, at this momentous occasion. It was the only thing that could be said in such times.

"Let there be light."

And there was. The light of the Ungulan sun, so long thought to be lost to their world, spilled over the landscapes. There was no chaos. There was no cotton candy typhoon, no chocolate tsunami, no disaster that defied logic. For one glorious moment, Equestria was truly at peace.

Author's Note

Congratulations, you defeated Discord! Your reward is your choice of basic lands.

Perhaps Too Little, Definitely Too Late

"When the sun died, the only thing that could save us was fire."

The crowd muttered amongst themselves, controversy ignited from the very first sentence that Flim had spoken. He turned to his brother, but rather than a look of pleading for help, it was nothing but a visual passing of the baton. They had agreed on the opening line, deciding it was better to secure their attention than to try and arouse their sympathies. Taking the signal, Flam began to speak.

"You must understand, electricity was not as advanced in those days as it is today. As much as the vault is powered by electric generators today, all but the youngest of us still remember the days when the furnace was filled with burning trees." There was muttering again, but this time it was vaguely positive. "To rely on an experimental technology to preserve ponykind would have been madness. It is all well and good to say that we did not need to chop down all of those trees, but the fact of the matter is that we didn't know that. If we had tried to tell you that we were going to run a vault off of the same thing that powered novelty lamps and usually exploded, you would have run us out of Equestria."

That got the crowd nodding, and the brothers had to choke down a laugh of relief. This was the longest they had managed to speak to the combined populace of Vault One without being pelted by produce, and they were eager to keep pushing the broken record to its limit.

"We have heard the whispers," Flim spoke up, and the crowd fell silent. "We could probably recite all of the slanderous things you have said about us more accurately than you could."

"We can also put names to the whispers," Flam cut in. "And please, before you start branding each other as traitors and snitches, we want to assure you that none of your aspiring revolutionaries confessed anything to us. It was self-evident."

"Some of you might recall an old griffon joke," Flim and most of the crowd briefly bowed their heads in mourning, "that the reason why our beloved Princess Celestia was never overthrown was because ponies are too predictable to ever pull off a secret plan. And as any comedian can tell you, the vast majority of jokes are only funny because they're true."

Flam nodded. "For the sake of decency, and as a gesture that we hold no ill will towards those involved, we will be refraining from mentioning the names of those we know to be responsible. In truth, though, the messenger does not matter. What matters is the messages."

Flim produced a scroll, more for show then for authenticity. "No earlier than three days after the door of Vault One was sealed, there were rumors and whispers that it was all just an elaborate foalnapping. Within the first month, normal social dynamics were re-interpreted as being the calculated result of some horrific social experiment perpetrated by my brother and I. Common knowledge about our professional and personal lives was traded between certain ponies as though it were top-secret information, when one could have filled that entire dossier from scratch just by sitting down and having tea with one of us."

"And all of this within the first year," Flam tutted, unfurling a scroll of his own. "There hadn't even been occasion to unlock the morgue by that point. From there, it only gets more convoluted. The suspicion garnered by those whispers caused ponies to spend less time around us, generally avoiding us and going out of their way not to talk to us unless it was important. The rumor mill seized upon this idea and twisted it so that we appeared to be deliberately pushing you all away, viewing you as test subjects or commoners."

"As a quick reminder, Vault One is our first permanent residence since we were seven years old." Flim looked more than a little angry. "We are more common and 'low-born' than the average potato farmer, yet you all treated us as though we thought we were kings."

"Speaking of formulating conspiracies in blatant disregard for the facts," Flam picked up the link effortlessly, "within the second year of the vault being closed, we were being accused of killing Princess Celestia, or otherwise faking her death and slandering her good name." There was a sharp intake of breath that was nearly deafening. "There are others, of course, some of them worse, some of them not as bad, but at the crux of the problem is this; You believe we have wronged you."

The way he said that sentence, and the direction he looked in as the words passed his lips, confirmed that Flim and Flam were no longer talking to all the denizens of Vault One. They were talking to Applejack, and the only reason that everypony else was here was to act as meat shields. To the brothers' credit, they did a good job of putting up the facade.

"It would be pointless to try and deny that we have done some horrible things in the past," Flim said, voice full of genuine regret. "Yes, we have swindled. We have lied. We have torn apart businesses and families, and we do not expect to be easily forgiven for such things. But Vault One is no Super Speedy Cider Squeezy. We designed and built this vault as nothing more and nothing less than a safe haven for all of ponykind. Had we only built the thing and left the leadership to somepony else, your lives since the princess's death would have been no different. There is no ulterior motive here, A-- Equestria. We may be the Flim Flam Brothers, but we do have some decency."

Flam nodded, and cleared his throat noisily the moment that it seemed like the crowd was thinking of dispersing. "But you may well wonder, why now? Why would we choose now of all times to address all of the rumors and controversy, when we have been content to let it fester and grow since the door was closed?" He paused for effect, then grinned as wide as he could manage. "Because tomorrow, the door opens. Tomorrow, Equestria, the sun shall rise once more."

Vault One echoed with screams, cheers and general confusion for several minutes after he had said that, and the brothers let it run its course. In the meantime, they waved her forward, and guided her up onto the stage with them. The sight of a purple unicorn joining the Flim Flam Brothers at the head of the hall got most ponies' attention, and Flim approached the microphone.

"Equestria, allow me to introduce Twilight Sparkle. A blank flank for thirty years, she recently earned her cutie mark while assisting in routine maintenance on the vault exterior. Miss Sparkle, if you would."

Twilight blushed, nodded, and turned so that the ponies of Vault One could see her flank. There sat an image of the sun, looking for all the world to be just the same as Celestia's cutie mark. And if the last round of cheering had made the vault echo, then this volley made the vault shake and rattle.

"And before you ask, yes, we checked. This single unicorn can indeed move the sun. We have been testing this extensively for the past three months, and we can now finally say that Twilight Sparkle is ready. And now, at last, we are ready to go out into the world and help it to heal. No more vaults. No more lab-grown food. No more whispers."

And no more Flim and Flam, spoke a voice within the minds of the brothers. They froze, even as the vault dwellers erupted into partying and Twilight Sparkle was swept off the stage.

"Please, Applejack." The brothers were speaking in chorus, so great was their distress. "That was the past."

You cheated my family out of Sweet Apple Acres. My brother, my sister, my granny, slaves on their own land thanks to your contract. And then you burn it all down for a few days' warmth.

"You can plant a new Sweet Apple Acres," Flam said, not caring about revenue for once in his life. "We won't even try to do business! We'll pay triple for any service we buy!"

And I say that's not good enough. You bought, sold and burned my family name. Consider yourselves lucky that I only want to kill you once.

Neither Flim nor Flam could see the black magic curling around their frail forms. Neither of them knew how a simple earth pony was crushing them to death from halfway across a hall larger than all of Canterlot Castle hollowed out. They assumed she had brokered a deal with the gods to make all of their sins weigh down on them at once.

They were half right.

Author's Note

Alternate-timeline Flim and Flam confirmed for mono-red.

The Cutie Re-Mark. Also known as, AU critical mass, and proof that nobody cares about a world where changelings actually win. ~~No, they only want their marginalized victim-of-prejudice changelings.~~

And if you're wondering what about this card led me to the Flim-Flam alternate timeline... Two.

Before You Die, You Will Kneel

"You said what to Celestia?"

Prince Blueblood could not help but grit his teeth when Popinjay spoke. Not only because the insufferable fop's voice was the most annoying sound he had ever heard in his entire life, but because he had committed that most horrific of faux pas; speaking the name of Blueblood's aunt without first saying the word 'Princess', making sure to pronounce the capital letter of course.

The fact that he was the only pony in the room who seemed offended at this was even greater cause for teeth-grinding.

"I told her that I'd be happy to donate to the orphanage, as long as she agreed to soak her mane in kitten blood!"

It had been nauseating enough hearing it the first time, but hearing it repeated was almost enough to make Blueblood throw up. Thankfully, he managed to swallow his bile and keep up the mask of aloof disinterest in the goings-on of the Canterlot aristocracy.

"And what did she say to that?" Popinjay asked, a little too enthusiastically for Blueblood's liking.

"Oh, you just won't believe it!" Arbitrary Investment tittered, his reprehensible smile putting Blueblood in mind of a pearly white banana. "She actually had the gall to turn me out of court!"

Amidst the amateurish fake gasps, Blueblood's carefully honed social instincts detected an opening. "Well, I never! A pony dismissed for open contempt of court? What will that old mare think of next?"

The prince held back a shudder as the attention of everypony shifted to him, and he did his best to hide the swelling of his chest as they all silently swung around to supporting him. Of the many things he detested about Canterlot life, he hated how easily one could win the crowd to one's side with a few choice words.

"Precisely my point!"

The world froze, or felt as though it should have. Any amount of background chatter amongst those listening ceased entirely as the complete lack of sarcasm in Arbitrary's words registered. Most of the aristocrats had never seen anything so horrifying as that pony's face, simply because he so clearly believed he was in the right.

Blueblood could have sworn he heard axes being sharpened. But regardless of the stage being set for war, he preferred the slow approach.

"I'm sorry, I don't quite follow." Technically, the statement was true. It was only his tone of feigned innocence that was fake.

"Well, honestly, if she's going to go on and on about how she isn't a god and she's no different from any of us, where does she get off on suddenly turning around and declaring some speech unfit for her presence? She can't tear down the churches but still have the worship!"

Blueblood almost retched at what he was hearing. "You really told the Princess of Equestria to go and soak her head in kitty blood, and expected her to waive all consequences?"

"Why wouldn't I? It's not as if it's blasphemy or anything!"

Sweet Granny Smith on an ice cream tricycle, he's actually serious. "Whether she's a god or not doesn't enter into it. You told the ruler of a nation to soak her head in cat blood."

The only thing more unsightly than Arbitrary Investment looking sure of himself was Arbitrary Investment looking indignantly confused. "I'm sorry, haven't you been listening to all the drivel she's been spouting this past decade? She wants us to see her as approachable, relatable, common. Frankly, I'd say it's more disrespectful to treat her any different just because she raises the sun!"

Blueblood actually heard someone mutter "he can't possibly be this stupid" in the background. He allowed himself a mental smile at that. "Is that all you think she does?"

"Isn't it?"

I swear, I will gladly give up everything I have ever had if you just let me kill him. "No. No it isn't. Why do you think she holds court if literally all she does is raise and lower the sun?" The prince couldn't stop his voice from rising, and honestly, he wasn't in the mood to try. "Where do you think our laws come from?"

Arbitrary defaulted to his insufferably confident face. "From the Senate, obviously."

"The Senate." Blueblood tried to ignore the howling laughter rattling inside of his skull. "You mean that gaggle of glorified lawyers who have been promoted so many times and lived so long that they're not allowed to persecute or defend because they'd make the trial unfair? The old farts stuck on permanent jury duty because they're too good at their jobs, and you think they are the source of all your laws?"

"Well, they obviously used to be younger." I will give you the names of every cultist in Equestria if you let me stab him. "I always figured she kept them around in case she ever needed a law revised." I'll teach you how to counter-summon demons, just please rip out his tongue. "I mean, it's not as if she actually does anything."

Blueblood took a very brief break from holding back the demon locked inside his brain to glance around at his growing entourage (and he could consider them an entourage, because nobody was on Arbitrary's side at this point). They were all just barely holding themselves back from tearing this fop a new one, and he noticed some unicorns actively restraining their fellows with subtle magical restraints. For a moment, he almost admired the aristocracy.

"Tell me, Arbitrary, have you ever visited another nation? One that isn't Equestria, and doesn't recognize Celestia's authority?"

"No, of course not!" Arbitrary spat those words, and Blueblood had to catch the spit before it landed on his lovely tie.

"What do you think the king of the griffons does, if he doesn't have to worry about moving the sun?"

"I'd wager he sits around, shoving his gob full of disgusting meat and laying about with wenches. When he isn't leading one of those beastly wars, of course."

"And that's all you think the ruler of a nation does? Lead wars, look pretty and mooch off everything their kingdom produces?"

"Well, obviously. It's how I'd run a country."

The crowd broke. Blueblood's magic flared, and the stampede stopped, the nobles floating up into the air as gravity decided it was done dealing with them for now. He and Arbitrary, though, remained very firmly on the ground. Arbitrary opened his mouth to speak, but Blueblood's magic lashed out and shut him up.

"No. No more talking from you. If we let you talk any longer, you'll probably say something like you think 'Princess' is part of her name, and not her job description." Blueblood let out a deep, emphatic sigh. "Let me see if I can make this as... monosyllabic as possible. Princess Celestia has lived for thousands of years. Half of the culture in this room was invented, refined or redefined by her. She is the one who came up with taxes, and rent, and the bit. She was here when Canterlot was nothing but a shanty town, and she will be here when we are all ash."

Blueblood grabbed the buffoon and pulled him closer, until he could have whispered and Arbitrary would have heard. Of course, he kept his voice just as loud.

"And because she has been around for so long, and because she basically invented the concept of civilization, and because she has never steered us wrong, she is in charge. And as the pony in charge, she has the authority to order your properties seized, your assets liquidated, your name expunged, and your body never to be found again." Blueblood allowed himself a small, mirthless smile. "She also has the authority to make sure that your servants commandeer your itinerary and make sure that you aren't able to realize any of this until you're locked in a room with your executioner."

Arbitrary Investment was then intimately introduced to the foundations of Prince Blueblood's family home. He was then dragged back up to the level of everypony else, and Blueblood glared into his quickly dimming eyes.

"Put simply," he growled, "Princess Celestia does not have to be a god to command your respect."

Author's Note

The original choice was, obviously, Celestia breaking out of El Dorado. But on further reflection, the lack of the Horse subtype led me to decide that Spitemare was more a representation of vengeance than vengeance itself.

In other words, Spitemare is less the fury of Celestia, and more the antibody that Canterlot produces to deal with perceived blasphemers.

My Favorite Dream

Princess Luna stood on the shores of a world she had never known, bearing witness to an apocalypse she could scarcely comprehend, with both sides led by minds she found hauntingly familiar.

The world was Dominaria. That much was clear from the war-cries of the... humans. These were humans. She recognized them from the world on the other side of the mirror, and from Twilight's disturbingly detailed reports. And those were...

Well, for the moment the only obvious answer was 'monsters'. Most of them had a form that seemed vaguely inspired by the humans, but they had no proper muscles or flesh to speak of, and the mechanisms that made them move seemed to have been both built and grown. Their movements were jerky and unpredictable up close, but from a distance they seemed to move more like a wave crashing over the landscape. It was very disconcerting.

Then one of the creatures lunged at her, and the feeling of the blade passing through her face was upsetting on a number of levels.

First, because the last thing anypony wants to experience is a buzzsaw ripping through their gray matter, especially when it's attached to such a gigantic pile of smelly pus and recycled flesh. Second, because the only sensations that could be felt in any particular dream were those that the dreamer had felt in the real world, and that wasn't the sort of thing a pony was supposed to be able to walk away from. Third, the monster had aimed directly for her own face.

That wasn't supposed to be possible.

"Possible? HAH!"

The monster standing in front of Luna exploded in a burst of fire, and she tried not to be too surprised when bits of its corpse landed on her and stuck there. A new creature was standing before her, its claws still glowing with red magic, and its lips parting in a very predatory smile. It put her in mind of a panther, except for a few key differences; it stood like a human, wore jewels like a king, and was glowing with more magic than an alicorn.

"Who are you to say what is possible and what is not? Is this your dream? Is this your world? No!" The panther flicked its wrist, sending a bolt of fire flying through the air. Luna ducked out of the way, despite part of her brain still insisting that the magic couldn't hurt her. Then she turned to see where the fire had gone, just in time to watch another one of the ghastly creatures explode.

"You... are not the dreamer." Luna didn't know whether to phrase it as a question.

"Of course not. I've been dead for hundreds of years, and I never even visited your lovely little plane." There was a touch of regret to the panther's voice, but it felt ill-suited to him, as though tacked on by the dreamer's thoughts. "I am simply one more voice in her head. The name is Lord Windgrace." The panther extended a paw. "Pleased to meet you, I'm sure."

"The pleasure's all mine," Luna assured him, her curiosity and mild horror briefly overcome by etiquette training. She put her hoof in his paw, and as she shook it she couldn't help but shiver at how warm it felt. "Now, would you mind explaining what is going on here?"

"Might as well," Lord Windgrace sighed with the resignation unique to those who have just realized their struggle is not real. "This is Dominaria, days, perhaps weeks after the Rathi overlay began. The Phyrexians are pouring out in full force, and all who can fight for their world and their right to survive. Urza has very nearly gone mad once again, there are whispers of traitors on both sides, Bo Levar won't stop trying to peddle Golgari rot-cigars to anyone with breathing room, and I have to hope the crew of the Weatherlight is doing something effective with their time. In the meantime, mana lines have been going insane, the lords of Dominaria are spending far too much time trying to turn the apocalypse into political maneuvering, planar portals have been popping in and out of existence faster than any of us can blink, and there's about a billion more things going on that are all a little fuzzy and you have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?"

Luna, who had been been nodding blankly throughout most of the panther's speech, nodded harder at those last few words. Windgrace sighed, then started laughing. One of the monsters took the opportunity to stab him through the chest, but that only made him laugh more.

"Didn't you get the memo, Phyrexian pig?" Lord Windgrace's head turned in ways that should not have been physically possible. "We are but dreams, like unto dust should the dreamer wish it. But dream or not, one thing will always ring true!"

The world flashed red, and Luna felt everything burn away. When the flames cleared, Lord Windgrace stood alone, and the wound in his chest was nowhere to be seen. He grinned at Luna, and looked around at the landscape of ash. Humans and monsters alike had been burned to cinders, but the sight of all those dead did nothing to faze the panther. On the horizon, there were figures, no larger than humans but radiating power the likes of which Luna had never felt in Equestria.

"They can bring all their world against us, but we need only bring nine." Lord Windgrace turned back to Luna, then spread his arms wide. "This is Dominaria. These are the first days of an invasion from another world. They were not the last. But at the end of it all, we did win. Not in this precise way," he kicked a newly-made pile of ash for emphasis, "but we did win. After all, how else would you be seeing this now, if she had not survived?"

The bone and ash behind Luna crunched under hooves, and she became aware of a fully conscious mind standing behind her. "Howdy-do, princess. Fancy seeing you here."

A few billion questions flew through Luna's mind, but she already knew which one to open on. "The avatars of your dreamscape are aware of me. How is that possible?"

"There's a whole load more universes out there than you think, missy. And most of 'em ain't all that nice. You spend twenty years wrestling with a psychic dragon, you learn a few tricks to protect the secrets you want kept secret."

Luna turned to face the pony whose dream she had invaded, and refused to let her avatar show fear. The pony was drenched in blood, festooned with weapons, and far too calm for somepony who had just been stood in the middle of a swarm of death. But the worst part was the pony's eyes, older in cruelty and knowledge than the eyes of herself, her sister or even Discord.

"I can help," she said weakly, defaulting to her old script. "I can help you make these nightmares go away."

"What nightmares?" The blood-drenched pony looked around at the ashen husk of Dominaria, then smiled and waved at Lord Windgrace. "This is one of the best dreams I've had in twenty years!"

In her chambers, Princess Luna keeps a list. It is a list of everypony whose dreams she has access to, with notes on sleep patterns, recommendations for how to deal with nightmares, and sometimes just little bits of trivia that surprised her the first time she stumbled across them. But perhaps most important is the security ranking, the space in everypony's entry where Luna puts down how dangerous they are and how closely they should be monitored. Most of these entries are blank or written in pencil, as ponies can change depending on a great number of factors.

When she finished her conversation that night and awoke in her chambers, the first thing she did was turn to Granny Smith's entry, pull out a pen and fill in the blank space next to her security ranking. The second thing she did was go into her private bathroom to throw up.

Author's Note

Yeah, not very closely related to the card this time.

The Old Guard and the New Guard

The royal sisters did not always make their home in the shining mountain city of Canterlot. In the Boundless Days of yore, when the accords had all been signed but the three tribes were not yet formally gathered under a single flag, the Sun and the Moon made their home in Fortress Everfree. There, they watched the world grow and mend, waiting for the moment where they could cease to be gods and simply rule. They filled the time until then with wild adventures, throwing all of their power and cunning into battles with any magical monster that would dare to show its face. Eventually, Fortress Everfree became less a base of operations and more a true home, and ponies took to calling it the Palace of the Two Sisters.

But what was Canterlot, before it became the center of Equestria? Well, in those days it was the center of the world.

Earth pony ingenuity had combined with pegasus magic in a glorious invention, the skyship. With the sky suddenly open to any who wanted it, the distance between countries seemed to vanish or triple at the whims of the wind, and international trade was made feasible on a scale previously thought impossible. Every country worth their gold had at least one major skyport, half for the convenience and half for the postcards. The griffon fiefdoms built theirs in a giant tree, the yaks hollowed out the southern face of an entire mountain, and Saddle Arabia built a magnificent brass tower that reached up from the sands to the sky.

The ponies went for a more simple design, simply building their port onto the side of the Canterhorn. Canterlot began life as a shanty town, built around a dock that looked more like a landing pad for dragons. It was the subject of a not insignificant amount of ridicule from dignitaries and tourists getting off at Canterlot, to which the engineers and sailors would have only one response;

"But you're still here."

Because Canterlot was not built to look pretty. It was not built to dazzle, or impress, or even hold half as many ponies as it ended up being home to. It had not been built by ponies who concerned themselves with such matters. It was built by engineers, and it was built as a gateway to the pony lands.

And while a gateway may lack many things as part of its design, it is never lacking of guards.

They were Commander Hurricane's Winged Wardens. Every single one of them was a hardened pegasus warrior who had lived through both the Great Winter and the War for Dominion. They had seen things that most ponies wouldn't believe, faced down monsters that the average skyship passenger had only ever heard of, and three out of every five of them had gone on dates with the alicorn sisters.

Admittedly, that last part is more the historical equivalent of locker room gossip than any significant achievement for the Winged Wardens, especially given how the attitudes of the Royal Sisters differ between modern times and the pre-Equestria era, but it does remain in most history books as a reliable way to shock some attention back into schoolponies.

In any case, the duties of the Winged Wardens were even fewer in number than the duties of the modern Royal Guard, if one can believe it. Merchants may be an unruly and devious lot, but they knew better than to cause trouble in the open, and tourists usually waited until they had left the skyport to start causing international incidents. And most miscreants were deterred anyway, not by the presence of the Winged Wardens but by a simple fact of construction.

Canterlot was made of wood, and very little else. Even the foundations which clung to the Canterhorn were almost entirely timber-based. Most of history's innovation with magic-powered lanterns happened within a twenty-year period as a direct result of a griffon inventor having repeated bouts of paranoia while visiting the shanty town, owing to his regular smoking of a match-lit pipe.

The end result of these various factors is that Commander Hurricane's Winged Wardens did very little in life to protect Canterlot, aside from chase down the occasional pickpocket. In death, though...

"You'd think fencing lessons from ponies who've had thousands of year's practice would account for more than this," Flash Sentry coughed between swipes and blocks. The spectral pegasus he was sparring with just grinned right back.

"Kid, the only thing I've had thousands of years' practice in is standing around, looking impressive and making spooky noises to scare off midnight thieves." Blade of soul met blade of steel in a flurry of sparks and unworldly echoes, then the two broke apart yet again and circled. "You and I both know the sword's for nothing. Any pegasus told to fight is going to be using bagh naka and aerial wrestling, and since I can't feel wind current, I'd be no help in that anymore."

Flash yawned, then caught the ghost's blade effortlessly as his eyes were closed. "For a silent, untouchable phantom, you telegraph your attacks way too much."

"In my day, fencing was purely ceremonial, or for charity demonstrations. The moves have to be flashy, or you lose the audience." The ghost demonstrated by miming a series of exaggerated parries and ripostes, which ended with a lunge at Flash. He intercepted it so quickly that his sword seemed to teleport.

"Huh. I always did think that 'Commander Hurricane's Winged Wardens' sounded like a circus group name." The air in front of Flash Sentry blurred into indistinct steel as he effortlessly blocked and parried all of the ghost's strikes. When they broke apart again, the spirit was panting and Flash was barely even sweating.

"How?" The spirit panted. "This shouldn't be possible."

"Shouldn't, but is." Flash leaped forward, his sword just barely being caught at the last second. "Guess you've taught me more than you think."

Since a ghost is already dead, it should not be possible for them to feel fear. Part of that is because they no longer have the necessary glands for the chemical process of fear. Part of that is because there's barely anything that can hurt them, and what can hurt them only does so if they've already got nothing left anchoring them to the world. But even so, the ghost was afraid.

"Let me guess what's going through your head," Flash sneered. "You're angry at me. Every atom in your being is hyper-charged with the irrational urge to kill me. Part of you thinks that I'm annoying, but you know that's not enough to make you hate me, so you look for another excuse. And now you realize why; because everything I do, everything I say, everything I represent is completely opposite to how you view the world. The world as you know it no longer makes sense when I enter the picture. But the world's always been this way, so I must be wrong. I must be illogical. I don't fit in the puzzle that you see the world as, so you rebel, and try to end me. But that instinct makes you impulsive, makes you predictable, makes you powerless to stop me."

The ghost threw itself at Flash Sentry in one last desperate attempt, and anyone skilled at ghost-magic would be able to tell you that he was intending to phase straight through Flash's defense and cut his heart in half while it was still inside of him. They'd also be able to tell you that Flash's sword did not have any special magical properties, and that there was nothing he could do to stop the ghost.

They would most likely continue to say this even as they watched Flash Sentry parry the ghost so hard that it was sent flying over him, and landed with far more impact than it should in the haybale behind Flash.

"And that," Flash snapped to the assembled new recruits, "is why we still recruit living ponies when we have a massive garrison of eternal warriors on our side. Because the living practice, improve, and have a will to survive that no spirit can ever match."

Author's Note

When I set out to write today's chapter, I did genuinely intend to write about the Winged Wardens as ghosts who still watch over Canterlot. But then Flash Sentry barged into the room and demanded a chance to be awesome, and it all got quite out of hand.

Indestructible

A full-grown dragon's yawn can be heard from miles away. An alicorn's yawn is comparatively silent, only being audible from the other side of a large house. It was one of the many reasons why the rooms of Celestia and Luna in Canterlot Castle were heavily soundproofed. Evidently, this was not a fact that anypony had yet dared point out to Twilight Sparkle.

Celestia smiled as the crystalline walls of Castle Friendship sang along with the vibrations, then went back to making pancakes.

Spike slunk down the stairs and settled into his usual place at the dinner table, silent from a combination of respectful patience and not being fully awake yet. Celestia looked over her shoulder and smiled at the precious little dragon, and he brightened up a little and smiled back. She didn't need to ask him what he wanted for breakfast; she had done this enough times that she knew the answer.

It was a source of little regret that Twilight was not awake in time to catch a glimpse of Celestia in her lovely pink chef's gown. It had been the elder princess's little game for a while now, to dress as scandalously as she could while keeping out of sight of everypony who would care. By the time Twilight had summoned the strength to get out of bed and come down the stairs to the dining hall, Celestia had discarded the apron and donned her casual regalia.

"Good morning, Twilight." There was no answering greeting, only a tired smile and a business-like nod, as though Twilight were simply confirming that it was indeed a good morning. There wasn't even a panicked shrinking of her pupils as she realized that Celestia was speaking to her. That should have been the first clue that something was wrong.

But it felt nice to be there. The pancakes were very good, just as good as the pancakes that had once been made by culinary scientists seeking to make the waffle seem evil by comparison. And the seat underneath her almost felt real.

So she stayed a while longer.

"I was thinking I might visit Rarity today," Celestia announced to her audience of two. "It's been so long since I wore a dress that was made entirely in Equestria." And it had been a long time. It had been an exceedingly long time since anything other than imported fabrics and minerals graced the princess's form.

All the same, Twilight shook her head, and then she took a bite of her pancakes. For a few seconds, Celestia could have sworn that her old student's horn wasn't glowing, but then it conspicuously always had been.

"I suppose you're right," Celestia said, abandoning her plate to focus on Twilight and Spike. "It's not as if there's any occasion to celebrate." Spike nodded, and it almost looked like there were actual bones and muscles involved in the action. "It would just be undue stress on the poor dear, to say nothing of the fit she'd have when I walked into her boutique." She sighed, and went back to her pancakes, poking and prodding them but somehow more reluctant to actually eat any. She looked up, and Twilight and Spike were still there, slowly eating away at their generous stacks of pancakes.

"Perhaps I'll visit Pinkie Pie instead," Celestia tried, and neither of them reacted. "She's always good for a laugh or two." Twilight gave such a small nod that Celestia would have missed it if she weren't watching the two of them like hawks. "I don't suppose either of you would like to come with me," she ventured.

The shrug was something she hadn't expected. She almost thought that Twilight's head was about to roll off her shoulders, but it didn't. Twilight just shrugged, and went back to eating her pancakes. It was probably the best that Celestia was going to get out of them today.

"Well, if you'd like to join me, you'll know where to find me." With that, Celestia stood up and left the room, opening the doors so fast that she half-expected them to break into a thousand pieces. The fact that they didn't worried her much more than their destruction could have.

As Celestia made her way through the halls of Castle Friendship, she couldn't help but look around. There were hardly any hairline fractures in the walls or ceiling this time, and the walls sparkled just like they were supposed to. Had she not known any better, Celestia might have thought that everything was fine.

Then time bent and twisted in front of her, and Starlight Glimmer appeared. Her hooves sank right through the castle floor, and she didn't stop sinking until she looked to be halfway embedded in the floor. Despite the sinking feeling in her chest, Celestia could not help but smile. It was nice to know that she was not dreaming, but hallucinating.

Starlight Glimmer looked around, and that precious look of wide-eyed scientific curiosity was immediately replaced by crushing horror. Celestia also spotted the distinct aura of a breathing spell. So there wasn't oxygen. Another thing that was nice to know.

Celestia layered her own breathing spell over Starlight's, allowing each other's words to be heard. "Greetings, Starlight Glimmer. Please excuse the mess."

As though those words were a magic spell, the hallucinations clouding Celestia's mind and eyes vanished into nothing. Castle Friendship and whatever poor imitation of Ponyville lay beyond gave way to a lifeless rock, floating in the abyss of a starless, moonless night. There was still light, of course; but it was a weak light, the blue aura of that accursed thing with only the slightest red tinge.

"Princess Celestia," Starlight panted, clearly on the verge of a panic attack, "what happened here?"

Part of Celestia wanted to ask Starlight how far forward in time she had jumped to see this. But she knew that would be pointless. "I should think it is obvious what has happened here, Starlight Glimmer."

Celestia lit her horn, and the rock they were standing on shifted. The empty sky turned, and Starlight Glimmer looked up and beheld the wreckage of Equestria. A shattered planet, the continents long ago fused into indistinct slag, and at the heart of it all a giant, smoldering ember that might once have been the core of the planet.

"I happened."

And embedded in that ember, a deceptively small shard of metal, glowing blue and somehow looking quite smug despite having no features and being miles upon miles away.

Starlight Glimmer disappeared. Perhaps she too had been a dream. If so, she had not been a very interesting one.

Author's Note

There sure has been a lot of Celestia in this collection, hasn't there?

Civil Service

There was a knock at the door. Twilight Sparkle the unicorn looked up from the book she was reading, then teleported over to the door before Spike had even made it down to the ground floor. She took a few seconds to grin over her shoulder at her little brother, then pulled the door open.

"Ah, good morning! You're Twilight Sparkle, correct?"

Twilight eyed up the mare in front of her. She had a light-brown coat and an almost ridiculously grey mane, she wore glasses and a puffed-up collar, and her cutie mark was a tied scroll. "Yes, I am Twilight Sparkle," Twilight said, faintly aware that she wasn't supposed to just stare without responding to questions. The old mare smiled, and extended a hoof.

"I'm not sure we've been formally introduced. I am Mayor Mare, the mayor of Ponyville. And on behalf of the Ponyville Civics Board, I'd like to formally welcome you to Ponyville!" She was still holding her hoof out. Twilight stared at it for a moment, then reached out and bumped it the way she had seen Pinkie Pie bump hooves with the various party guests. The mayor's smile grew just a tad more uncomfortable, but thankfully Twilight did not yet know enough about smiles to detect her guest's discomfort.

"How do you do," she finally said, giving a slight nod of the head and a brief forward inclination of her body, the way she had watched countless aristocrats greet each other.

"Oh, I'm doing quite well," the mayor said, but only after quickly glancing outside to, as far as Twilight could tell, check the position of the sun. "Exceptionally well, as a matter of fact." She peered into the Golden Oaks Library, looking around with a curiosity that put Twilight more in mind of an inquisitive child than a public official looking for a tax dodge. "I assume you are settling in well here," she said, still standing very awkwardly in the front door.

"Oh yes," Twilight said, finally moving away from her position blocking the door as her brain ran away with her mouth. "I've always loved libraries so much, almost as much as I loved working with the princess, and being able to run one was actually a fillyhood dream of mine! And now I not only get to run a library, I also get to live in one, and just re-organize the entire thing whenever I feel like it, and I can tell ponies to shush whenever they're in my house just by citing that it's a library, and..." Twilight Sparkle trailed off, her primitive social instincts finally getting through to her that she might be acting just a little bit rude.

Mayor Mare had sat down in the nearest available chair, and was idly spinning in it, looking around at all the various books. "Do you know, I've actually never set hoof in this library until today."

Twilight fought down her instinctive horror, the logical side of her brain already out-thinking the emotional side of her brain. Just because the mayor had never entered this library didn't mean she had never entered any library. With her position and cutie mark, it was unthinkable that she hadn't been inside the reference section of a law school at least once.

"So, what can I help you with?" Twilight suddenly realized that this might be her first duty as Ponyville's resident librarian, and ran through what sounded like a list of likely questions. "Was there a book you were looking for? A subject? A secluded corner to make big wet noises and generally make studying just a little less fun for everypony involved?"

Mayor Mare stopped spinning and raised an eyebrow at Twilight, but after about two seconds of staring at her softened right back up again. "Oh, no, nothing like that. I'm actually here specifically to talk to you."

"Me?" Twilight's gaze flew back to the mayor's cutie mark, and memories of a seminar about 'the Dangers of Unlicensed Magic' rose unbidden to the forefront of her memory.

"Yes. I'm given to understand that you were the personal student to Princess Celestia?"

Twilight nodded, her cheeks growing red with pride. "Yes, the princess says she's taught me everything it's possible to teach me."

"I assume a very large part of that is... magic?" The mayor's eyes sparkled when she said that, and somewhere in the nerdy expanses of Twilight's brain, the faintest echo of warning bells started to go off.

"Oh yes, almost my entire education was built around magic in some way. She and I once sat in a cave under Canterlot, just channeling mana for seven hours, just to see if I could."

The mayor's eyes stopped sparkling, and her jaw dropped. "Isn't that... supposed to be physically impossible?"

"That's not even the craziest part," Twilight grinned. "I was only ten years old when we did that."

"My goodness," the mayor declared. "Well, that certainly answers one question I had."

The warning bells got just loud enough that Twilight thought she heard a faint ringing in her ear. "And what question would that be?"

"If you're strong enough." The mayor looked out the window, and Twilight followed her gaze to see the sun beginning to set. "Miss Sparkle... I'm afraid I must confess something."

"And what's that?" Twilight said, beginning to feel a little uncomfortable. The mayor turned to her, and gave her a look that Twilight was not used to old mares giving her.

"I have a... condition. A medical condition. And it's kind of... silly."

Twilight was confused. "How can a medical condition be silly? Medical conditions are very serious!" Something clicked in Twilight's head. "Wait, you're an earth pony! You can get conditions more serious than horn rot! How could it be silly?"

"I have a natural deficiency. And the things I must do to balance it out..." Mayor Mare took a deep breath. "Many ponies do not believe I have a condition. They think that I simply have... an unhealthy fascination. And I admit, part of it is my fault. I haven't worked out the best way to deal with this until very recently."

"Mayor, I can't help you if you keep being obtuse about this. What is your condition, and why don't ponies believe you have it?"

"I don't have enough magic in my system," the mayor blurted out, tears beading at the corners of her eyes. "And, it's not as though I need injections or anything. Just the background magic from a decent-sized spell is enough to hold it o-- is enough. But there's only so many times you can show up at a unicorn's house every single day and ask them to cast a spell on you before ponies start asking questions."

"So why not answer them honestly?" Twilight asked. The mayor hung her head in shame.

"Because I was embarrassed. Because I didn't want them to worry. Because a health scare like mine could ruin my chances at re-election. But now... unicorns don't talk to me. The police are probably going to come after me just for asking for your help, because I've given them no reason to think better of me. I haven't been allowed to give speeches at the school for months now. I don't have anything to lose."

The mayor looked up, and the look in her eyes almost scared Twilight more than her entire encounter with Nightmare Moon. "But please, believe me. It doesn't have to be a big spell. Just enough that you're putting effort into it. And you only have to cast it once a day. We can make it look normal, just passing in the street and then your horn flares up." Her eyes flitted back to the window. "But please, do it fast, before the sun sets."

Twilight looked out the window. The sun had very nearly set. The warning bells were finally ringing loud enough for her to hear, and she turned and glared at the mayor. "What happens if you don't absorb enough magic?"

The mayor's eyes widened, then her entire body went slack. "I don't die, if that's what you're wondering. And you were able to beat Nightmare Moon, so you'll probably be able to stop me. And it's not as if I can ruin my career any more. So, let me show you."

The sun set. The moon rose. The nightmare began.

The grey drained from the mayor's mane, replaced with a vibrant pink. Her entire body began to twitch and spasm, and her frown became a terrifying rictus.

"Pinkie Pie?" Twilight asked, more horrified to say those words than she ever thought she'd be. "You turn into Pinkie Pie?"

The thing looked at her, and it smiled like it had just heard a joke about genocide. "No, nonononononono. M-m-m-muuuch WORSE!" The thing threw back its head and cackled like evil itself, and Twilight readied her best non-lethal spells.

The last thing she saw before the world went mad was the mayor's skin peeling away to reveal a fluffy pink coat.

Author's Note

It isn't Halloween without Innistrad.

Twilight Sparkle's Greatest Idea EVER!

"Just imagine it!" Twilight Sparkle declared, holding up the crackling cylinder. "Ideas, transmuted into Aether! The ability to absorb the knowledge contained within an entire library with a simple spell and a few seconds of one's time! Think of the time it would save, the averted wear and tear on books! This could render the very concept of the lecture hall obsolete!"

Starlight Glimmer took the cylinder from Twilight's magic, and began to examine it in detail. Like most brilliant designs, it seemed deceptively simple; a tube of glass as thick around as a hoof, stoppered on both ends with huge caps of gold, and a purely ornamental gold chain that would presumably be used by non-unicorns to carry it with less risk of breaking the glass. The only remarkable thing about the cylinder was what was held inside; a roiling mass of crackling blue clouds, which seemed to whisper the glossaries of encyclopedias into Starlight's ear if she held the cylinder close.

Then she looked at Twilight Sparkle. In this timeline, she seemed very much the same as she always was before she ascended; she was studious, more than a little bit bad at the whole concept of interpersonal relationships, and surprisingly difficult to tolerate when she wasn't reflexively kowtowing to her mentor. All of this, Starlight had gotten very used to seeing. But there were certain key differences that she just couldn't ignore.

The first and most obvious was that Twilight Sparkle was completely covered in gold. If Starlight had ever thought that Celestia's regalia was gaudy and tacky, she never would again after seeing this version of Twilight. She had golden necklaces, golden anklets, an actually rather fetching sort of golden halo thing, and some very oddly placed gold chains and iron piercings. Her horn even had a thin golden spiral locked around it. If not for her surroundings, Starlight might have thought that Twilight was a queen.

But her surroundings were not those of a queen, or even those of somepony who was rather well-off. It was a strange combination of a library, laboratory and mold-infested crumbling temple. The massive hole in the wall and ceiling was almost bigger than the room it led into, and the world outside, beautiful as it was, looked to be a dense jungle that was miles from any civilization, and the only actual door out of the library had been collapsed from the inside. If Starlight had to guess, she'd have guessed that Twilight Sparkle was a prisoner.

"Are you done staring at the Knowledge Tube?" Twilight's voice cut in. "Only, you've been staring at it for more than a few seconds, but you haven't touched it to your head, so it shouldn't be telling you anything, and I really do need to make sure it works, so could you please..."

The way that last note of Twilight's voice petered off made Starlight's entire body twitch with the urge to smash what was clearly the result of, at the very least, several months' hard work and then blame Twilight for it. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that Twilight was already inching towards the laboratory section of her chamber, as though quietly resigned to having to start all over. So instead, Starlight turned around and carefully placed the cylinder back on the table.

"Sorry, Twilight. It's just... such an amazing achievement, and it's so very pretty." Starlight gave her most genuine smile, and Twilight didn't seem to know whether to shrink back in fear or hug her so hard she died.

"Th... thank you." Twilight's magic reached over the cylinder, and she pulled magical tools to her side and began to tinker once more. "The masters will be so very happy to see this."

Starlight raised an eyebrow, but inched away from the table in case she was about to ask the wrong question. "The masters?"

"Oh yes, the masters. They are so very kind." Starlight reflexively checked for any horrific scars that Twilight might be hiding, but she seemed basically untouched. "When I was cast aside by the unicorns for not being able to hatch a dragon egg," Twilight ground her teeth together at that, "they invited me across the sea, to this very exclusive academy. Until you showed up, I was the only pony to ever have learned here." There was a hint of jealousy there, and Starlight was quick to fix it.

"No, I'm not a student. I'm... well, if I'm honest, I'm a time traveler with a very poor sense of direction. I'll be honest, I don't even know where or when I am."

It was always a long shot, telling ponies that. Most of the time, they called her crazy. Other times, it just seemed like the sort of excuse anypony would use to excuse having broken into the most secure location in the entire kingdom. But very rarely, they believed her, and were willing to explain their entire world as though she were a child.

Twilight Sparkle could generally be relied upon to be crazy enough to believe Starlight, and this time was no exception.

"Oh. Well, why didn't you say so? This is Gondwana, land of the zebras. As for when..." Twilight took on a very cruel grin. "Less than a week away from the assassination of Princess Celestia."

Starlight cast a quick, nearly invisible spell to hide her paling skin. "A week away... before, or after?"

The grin grew wider. "Before."

Starlight couldn't stop herself from backing away. "Are... are you a traveler too?"

"No, of course not. I'm not good enough to manage that." Twilight gestured at the laboratory table beneath her hooves. "I simply designed the instrument of her destruction, and watched it be shipped off to our sleeper agent." Twilight Sparkle stood still, and smiled proud. "Mine are the hooves that have crafted the sword that will slay the gods."

"But Celestia isn't a god!" Starlight blurted out.

She hadn't thought it was physically possible for Twilight to smile wider. She had been wrong. "Then there shall be no doubt of our glory." With that, she turned back to the cylinder. "Now, the only question is, what will happen to you, traveler?"

"What do you mean?" Starlight asked.

"Will you try to stop us?" A few random bits of metal suddenly flew together under Twilight's magic, forming a jagged blade. "Will you go back in time and stop me from building the God's End? Or perhaps go back and try to convince me never to go with them in the first place?"

"No," Starlight forced herself to say. "I am not here to interfere. As long as there is one world where all is as it should be, then we may leave the rest to their folly."

"That sounded like you were quoting somepony," Twilight said in a half-interested tone, tapping the cylinder against her forehead with strange crackles of knowledge. "Who was it that said those words?"

"Me," Starlight Glimmer growled. "I was quoting me." Then she donned a grisly grin of her own. "You know, no matter how much you can squeeze into that cylinder, the equine brain can only hold so much. It's a failure."

Twilight just laughed. "Are you always this stupid compared to me?" She turned the cylinder in her magic, twirling it faster and faster. "It's not supposed to be passed around a campfire, being tapped against their skulls. It's supposed to turn an otherwise useless pony into the perfect military strategist." With that, Twilight Sparkle rammed the cylinder right through her skull, so hard and so fast that quite a lot of brain matter and skull fragments ended up on the floor.

Starlight Glimmer decided that now was the perfect time to leave and never return.

Author's Note

Look, Tarkir basically demands timey-wimey.

And Starlight Glimmer remains top pick for Time Patrol.

Master of the Masquerade

Perhaps the most important question that Twilight Sparkle never asked was why there was a tunnel in the catacombs that led directly into the basement of Canterlot Castle.

Everypony in Canterlot knew about the catacombs, in the same sense that everypony in Manehattan knew about the sewer system; it existed, it was probably underneath you, and if you ever found yourself staring into a deep dark hole and something stared back, you were best just moving on and pretending that it never happened. But beyond that, nothing else was known about the catacombs. Those who thought about them for any length of time would probably only think of them as a single hollow space underneath the city, never considering that all an enterprising spelunker would need would be a pickaxe and a keen sense of direction to gain access to any basement in the city.

But the catacombs were not merely a tunnel network that connected the entire city in ways it had never thought about. Tucked away around dark corners and hidden behind rocks that looked much heavier than they really were, there were secret doors that connected to no buildings at all. These doors led into small rooms that bordered on the claustrophobic, but fulfilled their purpose better than any tiny apartment.

One of these doors bore a most foreboding symbol upon it, a simplistic spider with a single eye set in its body that stared out at any who came across it. There was a certain quality about both the symbol and the door that enticed you to look beyond it, to turn the knob and enter that room, to behold whatever dark secrets had been hidden away underneath Canterlot.

And if you did, what was waiting there was a spring-loaded crossbow mounted to the wall and enchanted to aim directly for the trachea of whoever opened it. Pinned to the wall above this crossbow, and helpfully illuminated by glittering ink so that one could not help but look at it in their final moments, was a notice that simply read "Well done, you're very clever" in big letters.

Quite a further way down an entirely different tunnel, behind an entirely unremarkable door with no incriminating marks on it, was where the real secret headquarters of the Royal Assassinorum lay.

Octavia Melody scrutinized her reflection carefully. She had the kind of carefully cultivated Canterlot smile that anypony worth a damn would recognize as being fake, but the very special kind of fake that said she was only smiling because she wanted to save her enormous political influence for conversations, and not having to fight an uphill battle as she frowned her way through personal introductions to potentially important ponies.

The dress she wore was quite a bit more genuine, being a humble jet-black off-the-shoulders Rarity Belle original. After Fancy Pants' little project had successfully dominated the high society scene for several days at once, the sensational seamstress had become the hottest thing in Canterlot, but her delightfully provincial lifestyle was enough of a deterrent to most aristocrats that a pony who wore Rarity was silently sending the message that she could break your face just by kissing you too hard. As an earth pony who spent a lot of time in the unicorn capital, it was formal wear like this that was Octavia's principle weapon against prejudice.

"You look absolutely ravishing, Madam Melody."

Octavia turned, her fake smile cracking under the pressure of genuine teasing fondness. "And you still look like you've crawled through a mile of dung after getting lost in a second-hoof carpet shop. If we're going on this op together, you'll need to be presentable."

Vassal grinned a yellow-toothed grin that looked more like broken glass, then began to slowly shrug off his cumbersome robes and jacket. "Pardon me if I adapt to my environment, I'm sure."

"The sewers may connect to the catacombs, but the walkways certainly don't detour through sludge." Octavia turned back to the mirror, giving her smile a final rehearsal before stepping back from it, as though Vassal would need to check his reflection.

"You wouldn't know it by how musty the air is down here," he countered perfectly, his clothes folding away from his chest and into his back as they became wings and a blue coat. "The atmosphere of this place just screams hooded figures marinated in their own doings."

"Celestia save us all, a spy with dramatic flair."

"Says the assassin who uses her own leitmotif over a knife."

"You wound me, Vassal." Octavia's brain did an odd double-take as the spy's transformation completed. "Or should I say, Commander Hurricane?"

Vassal shrugged and bowed, and the ripple of his historically accurate muscles was accented by the growing of a perfectly tailored tuxedo out of whole coat (and very definitely not whole cloth, Octavia reminded herself). "What better face to wear to a masquerade ball, then that of the hero so popularly misconstrued as a villain?"

"Well, you could wear someone more current."

"No can do," Vassal assured her, fluffing his new feathers and grinning at her in a way that part of her said she was supposed to be finding attractive. "I only wear dead faces."

Octavia raised an interested eyebrow. "Really? Surely it would make more sense in your line of work to wear the faces of those who are already part of high society."

"In theory, yes. In practice, the changelings spent months scouring Cadenza's brain in the hopes that Chrysalis could mimic her perfectly, and they were still completely banking on rendering the captain brain-dead and nopony else actually knowing what she was normally like. And besides, you'd be surprised how quickly a dead pony just becomes a name on a list."

"I recognize the commander's face," Octavia pointed out. "I won't be the only one."

"Yes, but you're clever. Most of them aren't. And I'll be wearing a mask over this handsome mug for most of the night anyway."

"We still have to use public streets for part of our approach. You might get recognized."

"In Cloudsdale, maybe. Half of Canterlot prides itself on barely knowing any pegasus history. I've worn this exact face as a butler in the same room as three so-called pre-Unification scholars and they scarcely batted an eye. I kid you not, one of them didn't even notice I was a pegasus for hours on end."

Octavia stared, not sure whether to laugh or cry. "It's almost enough to make you want to go mercenary."

"Not really," Vassal sneered. "I tried that gig once. Civilians have no idea what sort of rates a Royal Spymaster is used to, much less one of Celestia's top three assassins."

"I'm in the top three?" Octavia didn't even try to stop her jaw from dropping.

Vassal laughed, and wandered over to the door. "Alas, too much is said, and too little done to earn the words. That's all the gossip you're getting out of me tonight."

Octavia smiled and swept after him into the catacombs. "Even if I ask about the yak situation?"

"Well, that's work-related. Hardly gossip by any definition. Ask away."

The door closed behind them as soon as they were out of earshot. Neither of them thought anything of it, since the door was enchanted to close on its own anyway.

That was how it started.

Author's Note

When the decision is made to answer a prompt with a teaser chapter, the question stops being 'what do I write' and instead becomes 'when do I stop writing'. How much exposition is too much? What sort of plot points should be alluded to? Where does this scene fit into the theoretical, half-developed story structure I've come up with? Which plot points should be alluded to, and which weakly foreshadowed?

And perhaps most worrying of all, will this actually grab anyone in the same way that all the written-as-one-shots have?

As for the story content proper, Lazav backwards looks like if someone utterly failed at writing the word 'vassal', and as an actual English word, it made more sense as a pony name than some Slavic-sounding drekk. It also implies a fantastic daytime identity.

Back Then

There was a time when griffons were not good. There was a time when the only thing that griffons knew was avarice and want. Other cultures might have called such a period by names like the Dark Ages, but the griffons knew better. Their history books only start at a point where most griffons had already settled in what would become the Groverian Homeland. The most despicable thing recorded in griffon history is the casual murder of their fellow griffon for pointless baubles, and the clear contempt with which every single word of those chapters is written was one of the big selling points for griffon-pony alliances being feasible.

But just because that is the worst thing in their history books, does not mean that was the worst they ever were. Every griffon knows that there was an age before the Unenlightened Days, and there is not a single griffon who will dare to speak of it. The most that was ever said by any griffon to a pony about that bygone time was said in hushed tones, in a secret place far from both their homes.

"What we did in the dark must remain there. To a griffon, there is no greater mark of disdain than to simply not be proud of something, but we are ashamed of what was done in those days. What we became, we must never be again. It was forgotten, for the sake of peace between our races. Please, don't ask me again. It is the only way that you will ever be able to love me."

So what was done? What secrets lie buried by time, what deeds that the most unashamedly rude and selfish race in Ungula do not wish to remember?

One might think that the answer would lie within some secret pony library. After all, if even the pre-Unification era is so thoroughly remembered by all tribes, surely some trace must remain of the great evil that the griffons had done. But even in the deepest recesses of Star Swirl's journals, no trace can be found. Griffons do not appear in pony history books until the time of King Grover, and there are none who could even begin to tell you what it was like before.

Clover the Clever once had a dream about a lion with the wings of a pegasus and the head of an eagle. Her mentor simply told her that mind magic was a wonderful thing, and spent the next two months teaching her everything he knew about the mind.

She never asked him why, or which village it was that she had woken up in the ashes of. They were in the habit of running into dragons, after all.

There was a time when ponies were not powerful. The earth ponies were a humble sort, needing only enough strength and cleverness to keep the vermin away from their food. When there were too many ponies in the village to feed, then there would be a council meeting, and it would be decided which ponies would leave to start their own village. The rebellious young were advised to simply wait until their parents had another foal to slip away, for there is no explorer more eager than the one who does not dare turn back.

But because the earth ponies did not need to be strong or clever to be happy and full, they were not prepared when the sky turned against them. When the monsters came out of the sky and snatched up their young and their old, or took the bales of hay from their shoulders and did not bring them down, or tore the roofs from their huts in the middle of raging thunderstorms, the earth ponies were not ready.

Some of the villages that were hit began to worship the monsters. They called them gods, and praised them for taking the weak so that there would always be enough food. They tore apart their own houses, and used the bits to fashion crude altars to their new gods. When the monuments were taken as well, the earth ponies only doubled their fervor, as they proclaimed it a sign that the gods were pleased with them.

Some of the villages fell to despair. They ripped their own crops out of the ground and laid them all about their fields as though a great storm had rolled through, and the birth of children was only cause for weeping and the cursing of the parents. These were the villages that the monsters passed over, as even they could soon see that there was nothing of value in these places.

But there was one village, and it was worse off than all of the others. Because one of the ponies who lived there was that most dangerous of animals, the clever earth pony. And he stepped into the town square one day, dragging behind him the body of an earth pony that none in his village recognized, and so they did not ask questions. He told them that he had found the body in a field, and they believed him.

The clever pony then ripped open the chest of the corpse, and broke off a bone from the pony's ribcage. At that moment, one of the monsters caught the scent of meat, and descended from the sky. All the ponies screamed and fled, but the clever pony with his bit of bone stood where he was, and did not run. He brought the bone up into the air as the monster came down to strike him, and the two met, and the pony won.

When next he was seen, the clever pony wandered into one of the villages that worshiped the monsters. Behind him, he dragged the body of the monster he had slain. He threw it at the half-built monument they had erected, and then turned his face to the sky and screamed.

"YOU ARE NOT GODS! THE GODS DO NOT BLEED! LEAVE US!"

Some declared him a heretic. Those who did not, and there were many of them, said that he was right, and they taught themselves how to fight with bones. But not all bones in the body are so strong, and more often than not both pony and monster would die in the clash, so most of the body was wasted. Luckily, the monster-worshipers were very easy to crack open. One need only tell them to look up.

There was a mountain that overlooked all of this. On this mountain, there was a cave. In this cave, Star Swirl the Bearded and Clover the Clever had spent nearly all of this time nursing a griffon back to health. As they spoke with him, they learned of the mind-consuming greed that plagued his kind, and how their simple offering of food had freed him, if only for a few days at a time. They learned that the heavy clouds that had gathered over the earth pony lands were filled with griffons, warring with each other over the bits and scraps they had stolen.

"The ponies are as far gone as the griffons," Star Swirl lamented one night, as the three of them looked down. The ground in this part of the world rose and fell quite regularly, so that there were hills and valleys all very close together. Over each hill, just out of sight of all the others, there was a village. The earth ponies were scarcely further apart than two rocks in a river.

"There must still be hope," Clover insisted, but both the griffon and Star Swirl shook their heads.

"Desperation has made monsters of your kind, and mine were already thus." Garr turned away from the landscape, and slunk back into the cave. "What shall remain of them, when all this is over?"

"They will destroy each other." Star Swirl took off his hat, not wishing to shake his head and make bells ring.

"Unless one of them is destroyed first," Clover declared. The other two looked at her, and they paled in horror at the look on her face. "This is not the only place in the world with earth ponies, after all. These ones do not even understand metalworking yet."

"Better to wipe the griffons out," Garr spoke up. "We have nothing. No culture except what we steal, no conscience unless it is given."

"The only culture that these villages have anymore is built around the griffons. If we destroy the griffons, then these ponies will destroy each other. No, Clover is right. Better the road that has yet to go anywhere than the road that has already reached its end."

And so, it was with a heavy heart that Garr took the fire that Star Swirl had lit, and shared it with the earth ponies.

Author's Note

The shame of the griffons was that they became gods to the ponies, but they only inspired further atrocities.

Also, for anyone who wants to contest earth ponies being super-strong, and so totally not needing to use bone weapons, this is required reading before you continue.

Last Night

The night after Nightmare Moon was banished was almost horrifically quiet. The populace of Equestria was not so quick to panic in those days, and the panic of the unplanned eclipse and the news of Luna's madness had made for a tiring and long day. When the sun set on the first day of the Age of the Unconquered Sun, Equestria slept more deeply and more immediately than they ever had when Luna was in power. Even her worshipers and loyalists slept through that night, for their grief at her falling had been so great that they had no strength left to mourn her in her own time.

All save for the chiropterans, whose very nature compelled them to bear witness to the night. The bat-winged creatures, whose origin was a long-forgotten secret to all but themselves, looked out over the sleeping Equestria, and then looked up at the moon. But they did not weep, and they did not mourn, and they did not curse the name of Celestia or scream at the face burned into the moon. Because they believed that their princess was still there, still listening to them, and that to worship her when she had gone mad from silence would only bring her more pain. And so those who had always looked upon the night could not bring themselves to find it beautiful.

It was a time of beginnings, and it was a time of endings.

Selene of the Night Guard sat perched on the edge of the Canterlot lighthouse, cutting an imposing figure to any who might have caught her silhouette against the moonlight. She watched the shanty town with a practiced, emotionless eye, trying not to let herself turn to stare at the ruins of Castle Everfree. Tonight, she was on duty. Tonight, she had to pretend that everything was fine. She could visit the ruins tomorrow night. She could weep tomorrow night. For now, she had a duty.

Luna had never told them. For all her suffering, and all of her loneliness, she had never told them, her most trusted followers. The question Selene was asking, and the question that every other chiropteran was asking, was; 'was it because she didn't want to trouble us, or was it because she took us for granted?' Or the worst possibility, which most of them desperately tried not to think about, the idea that she hadn't told them because she didn't think they would be able to help.

Selene remembered approaching Luna meekly, and telling her that she was the most beautiful and magnificent creature in all of creation. She remembered doing that, with increasing boldness, at least once every time she could. And the idea that it had all amounted to nothing, that her words might have meant nothing because hers were not the words of the entire world, was one that was probably going to give her nightmares for the rest of her life.

Nightmares...

Selene shuddered. Nightmares had been a thing of incredible rarity for centuries, before she was even born. The only reason that ponies even knew what nightmares were was because Luna didn't want to stretch herself that far. But now that she was gone, what would happen to sleep? Even beyond the sheer horror that the first few nightmares might inspire, how hard would sleep be? Was the peaceful bliss of sleep a Princess Luna original? How long would it take to fall asleep now?

And worst of all, would the ponies blame Luna? Would they say that all of this was a curse by Nightmare Moon, not understanding that it was because of Luna that they had known such peaceful sleep? Was all of this yet another opportunity for the princess to be forgotten and cursed?

Selene felt the wetness on her cheek, and was forced to admit to herself that she was crying. She could say that she was a soldier and a guard first, a chiropteran and child of the moon second, but that only counted for so much at times like this. The body knew enough to keep to its post and watch over the city, but the mind and soul refused to do anything but mourn. The world had changed, and Selene had no idea what she was supposed to do or be in this new arrangement.

Unable to look away any longer, Selene looked up at the sky, at the moon. She had always thought of it as her princess's great lantern, a sun that one could bear to look at for hours on end without going blind. But now, it bore the face of Nightmare Moon, burned into its earth with hundreds upon thousands of blackened craters; not even the face of her glorious Princess Luna, watching over the world even when it turned its back on her, but the silhouette of that blast-ended demon that had taken her from them. The creature that wanted to make the night everlasting, and force all of Equestria to worship her even as they slowly froze to death...

Selene quickly checked to make sure that there were no vagabonds or late-night roamers within range, and once she was sure they weren't, she spat in disgust at the very thought of Nightmare Moon. Had she been able, she probably would have flown all the way up to the moon simply to curse the demon directly to her face.

"What is this that I see in the eyes of my dear soldier?"

Selene started back in shock, then rounded on the intruder. She had heard the voice of her princess, and the moment that she did not see the alicorn, she was ready to kill the impostor...

But then she saw who the intruder was. Or rather, what it was. It was one of Luna's herons, a golem fashioned purely from magic and moonlight and filled with words spoken by the princess herself. They had been designed as the answer to the age-old question, "Who watches the watchponies?"

The heron reached out a crackling wing, and brushed it against Selene's cheek. "Dost thou weep, my soldier?"

Selene sniffled, and the tears flowed harder. "I beg thy forgiveness, princess. 'Tis nothing, a briefest betrayal of mine heart that doth compel me to lament... the loss of someone so very dear..."

The heron made motions as if to quiet her, and for the first time since seeing the strange creatures, Selene actually looked into the bird's eyes. The mourning she saw, the silent attempt at comfort, those were not the actions of a soulless golem.

"There needest be no apology for the shedding of tears," the heron whispered in Luna's disturbingly calm voice, even as it reached out with trembling form and embraced Selene. "If those who art lost be not remembered, then they hath done nothing worthy of our tears. Those for whom we mourn, we mourn because they hath wrought great change upon us and our world. Do not stopper thy tears, young one, nor attempt to hide them. Those who wouldst command thee otherwise hath no place in a proper world."

Selene and the heron broke apart, and she smiled at the construct. Even with the patched-together echoes of all the things her princess had said, it was a good comforter, and a good friend. And she told it as much, but it made gestures that clearly said it was but a cog in a greater machine, and trying to do the best it could.

"Wouldst thou rest here awhile with me?" she asked the spirit. "I keep a lonely watch, and even the echo of one so loved is more a comfort than my memories of her."

The heron nodded, and settled in beside her. Just then, a scream tore the night sky, and Selene was in the air before even a construct of pure magic could react. She had made it halfway across Canterlot by the time that the heron caught up with her.

"A nightmare," the spirit urged in Luna's voice. "A brief and unfortunate terror in the night, but now passed with thy waking."

Selene stopped, and hovered in the air for a while. Then she laughed. And the laughter only grew stronger as the light came on in a single house, and half-awake shadows scurried around and made the first step to understanding the world without Luna. Even the heron joined in.

And as the centuries passed, they came to call it Nightmare Night.

Author's Note

All things, drawn to an end. And yet in that ending, one finds the hopes and trails of a new beginning.

Thank you for joining me. I hope you were entertained, amused, and perhaps even slightly scared.

Happy Halloween.

Acknowledgments

With thanks to FoME for answering a seemingly endless slew of questions, giving indispensable advice, providing endless encouragement, and also inspiring this whole dumb idea and getting me into Magic is the first place.

With thanks to PegasusMesa for editing help with Early Modern English in that one chapter with the elephants. And also just being cool.

And of course, for everyone else who read this story. Thank you, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart.

The Best Last Day Ever

Derpy Hooves sat at a table just outside the Shamrock Cafe, admiring the morning sunlight as it shone through the clouds and hit the picturesque little town of Ponyville. She watched foals and fillies frolicking, watched mares and stallions get started on their days, and listened to the birds singing in the trees. It was, all in all, shaping up to be a very good day to be alive.

Ponies often told Derpy that, if she didn't have a special talent for the collapse of event horizons, she would have one for irony.

A familiar face approached her table, and glanced at the empty seat across from her. She smiled, and waved the old friend over.

"Nice to see ya again, Passing Notion. Whatcha up to these days? Don't tell me, you're 'just passing through', right?"

The blue unicorn laughed weakly at the old joke, but his poor attempt at a smile evaporated pretty quickly. "I need to talk to you, Dawn's Eastern Rays of Perfect Yellow."

That gave Derpy pause. Those who knew her true name only ever used it when it was beyond serious. "What is it, Notion?"

After about three false starts, he finally managed to choke it out. "The world is going to end."

Well, Derpy thought to herself, this day just keeps getting better. "I'm assumin' you aren't pulling out my name because you just attended a seminar on entropy."

Notion shook his head. "No, I mean the world is ending. Currently. Tonight. Sometime after sunset, this entire reality is going to collapse."

"Is there anything we can do?" Derpy couldn't help but ask, despite the answer being clear.

"If there was, they'd have done it by now. We've known about this for three days. The princesses decided it was better to avoid a panic."

"Whatever happened to 'we will not go quietly'?" Derpy snarked, even as she felt the tears welling up behind her eyes.

Passing Notion gave her a smile, and reached over to give her a comforting pat. "That's all well and good when death brings an army, or something magically preventable. But this isn't that. It's just... the end. The curtain call. The natural ceasing of reality itself."

The tears started, and Derpy didn't try to make them stop. Notion got out of his seat, then circled around the table so that he could rear up and give her a hug. They stayed like that for almost ten minutes, as the grief of knowing that the world was about to end took its toll.

"So, why did you come to me?" Derpy blubbered weakly.

Notion sighed, and pulled out of the hug. "I... know a spell. It's a spell that can protect against an apocalypse, even one that tears apart all of reality. But... it can only target two ponies. And one of them has to be me, or the spell won't work."

Derpy wiped away her tears, and stared at her friend as though he had gone crazy. "Again, why me? There are hundreds of ponies more important than me, more powerful than me, more..." her voice caught in her throat, "more beautiful than me..." Notion's hoof settled on her lips, and she stopped talking.

"Stop that. You are the most beautiful, most clever, most funny person I have ever met in the whole of Equestria. Sure, you may not have the most styled mane, or the most lustrous coat, or the biggest bank account, but you have a beautiful heart. You have a beautiful name. And Dawn, please believe me when I say it, you do have beautiful eyes."

She smiled, and pushed his hoof away. "Thank you, Notion. That's very kind of you to say. But you can't honestly have singled me out to survive the apocalypse just because I'm hot."

"You might be just that hot." Notion waggled his eyebrows until she giggled, then got serious again in the blink of an eye. "No, you see, this spell doesn't just let me dodge the apocalypse. It also leaves me and my passenger floating in the void forever. No need to eat, drink or sleep, and nobody to talk to but each other. We'd be immortal, but with no time or space for it to matter in. Almost everypony I know would eventually go crazy, and start blaming me, trying to make it look like I blew up the world. Except for you, Dawn. You're the only pony I could spend all of eternity with without getting bored."

It was an insanely heartwarming gesture, but Derpy felt she had had enough crying for now, so she tried to deflect it with a joke. "Really? You pick me because you don't want to get bored? Why not bring along somepony really powerful, who could eventually build a universe?"

"Any unicorn can build a universe, given enough time." The confidence with which he said that was the most confident Derpy had ever heard him. It put her in the mood to hear more. "So, are you going to give an answer? Or do I need to keep giving you reasons why I'd only ever want to take you to the very ends of the earth? Because I'll probably run out of time before I run out of reasons."

That got a chuckle, and a half-sigh. "As if I could ever let a pony like you live through eternity alone. I am so in."

Notion smiled as widely as he physically could, and grabbed Derpy in another hug. The two hugged each other close, fueled by a strange mixture of joy and crippling apprehension. They stayed like that for half an hour, paying no attention to the other customers who began to congregate outside of the cafe. Finally, at the polite urging of the waiter, the two pulled apart and left the cafe behind.

"So," Passing Notion began, and there was more than the usual amount of nervousness to his speech, "did you have anything else planned for today?"

Derpy burst out laughing. "You come along and tell me that the entire world's going to end and we're going to be the only survivors, and then ask what my schedule was before that bombshell? Sweet Celestia, Notion."

Notion just grinned. "Dawn, we've got the better part of a day left before it all folds. There must be something you want to do."

Derpy gave it a moment's thought, then nodded and took off at a canter, leaving Notion to follow.

Miss Carriage's Home for Misplaced Children was Derpy's second home. Well, technically it was her first home, but since these days she went to sleep in her own house and only spent most of her day at the orphanage, she was given to understand that it now counted as her second home. Ponies often asked whether it was her mailmare job or her work at the orphanage that was volunteer work, to which she would always respond, "It isn't work for me".

As with every day, she only needed to walk through the door to pass the security checks, as the receptionist nodded at her and promised to fill out all the forms on her behalf later. Normally, Derpy would insist on filling them out anyway, but today she was willing to take advantage of the mare, just once.

"This is Passing Notion," she said, pointing to the stallion who was more than a little out of breath from trying to keep up with her. "He works for the Crown. He's with me," she added for clarification.

"Of course, honey. Don't worry, we'll take care of the whole thing." She pointed to the door that led through to the orphanage proper. "Go right on in. They've all finished their breakfast, so they should be more than happy to see you."

"Thank you, Cushy Deskjob." Derpy advanced towards the door, smiling over her shoulder at Notion. "Ever been swarmed by changelings?"

Notion nodded absent-mindedly, before his eyes went wide. "Wait, this is a changeling orphanage?"

"No, it's just that children have a lot in common with changelings." Before Notion could ask for more details, Derpy pushed through the door, and he was following so close behind that he didn't get a chance to hesitate.

True to Derpy's word, they were quickly inundated by children, and they only barely managed to escape being crushed to death by pretending they already had been. Once the children relented, Derpy sprang right back up and smiled at all of them, sweeping as many of them into a single hug as she could.

"Auntie's here, everypony!" she exclaimed. "Hello, Dinky! How's the sore hoof, Carter? Oh, Peachy Pie, how are you?" This went on for quite a while, with Derpy speaking to each child in turn and embracing them warmly. Notion admired the discipline with which she kept the tears from her eyes, even as his attention kept getting pulled away by inquisitive foals.

"Alright, everypony, settle down. Auntie has an announcement to make." There was that tone of sadness that he had been expecting.

"Are you leaving for a really, really long time?" That came from the little unicorn filly that Notion was pretty sure was called Dinky. He expected her to look sad, or utterly crushed guessing by how excited they all were to see Derpy, but she looked... normal. Relaxed.

Derpy seemed to be struggling with her words, but she eventually choked it out. "Yes, muffin. Yes. I am leaving for a really, really long time. I... don't know how long I'll be gone for. And I'm pretty sure I won't be able to write, so..." The tears were starting to come, and Notion quickly moved in to give her a hug. He blushed a little when all the children went 'Awww' at his gesture, but he kept it up until Derpy stopped crying.

One of the foals stepped forward, poked Notion with a hoof, and then raised the other hoof as high in the air as it could go. Notion smiled, and pointed to him. "Did you have a question?"

"Yeah. Are you two getting married or something?"

Derpy stiffened under Notion's hooves, and he was pretty sure that his blue coat was now permanently red, but he smiled nervously and jumped on the opportunity. "Yes. Yes, that's it. We've kind of both had a crush on each other since... well, since we were your age, and we just now found out that we both felt the same way, and I proposed, and she said yes, but now that we've come here to say goodbye she's getting a little... emotional." He pulled her closer, and began to hum a few bars of an old lullaby. The children watched, and he found their expressions impossible to read.

Then Dinky stepped up, and nudged Derpy quite hard with both hooves. "Auntie, you shouldn't be crying," she said softly. Then she repeated, "You shouldn't be crying!" And Derpy stopped sniffling for a few seconds, long enough for Dinky to launch into a speech. "You're getting married, Auntie! That's a great thing! You've found someone you can stay with, forever and ever! Don't get sad just because you won't get to see us so much. Then you won't be able to be sad when you really have to!"

As far as Notion could tell, this was all making Derpy cry more. "B-but... I won't be able to spend time with any of you... you'll get s-so lonely..."

"Um, Auntie?" That one was Peachy Pie, he was pretty sure. "You're not our only helper. We already spend loads of fun times with happy ponies, and we have our school friends too. You're not the only friendly pony in Ponyville."

"But Carter... I promised Carter I'd ride with him at the applewood derby..."

The colt who had spoken to Notion ran up and butted his head against Derpy. "Auntie, listen to me." He reached up, a little dizzy from the impact, and grabbed Derpy's face between both tiny hooves. "It's okay. You'll come back someday, and we can race then. As for this year, I can just ask Amethyst. She'll ride with me. She was actually kind of sad that you promised first, because she was really looking forward to it."

At that point, as though a telepathic consensus had been reached, all of the foals and fillies surged forward to wrap Derpy up in a great big hug.

"We'll miss you. But this isn't something to cry over. Just think of it as... a vacation. A really long, really happy vacation. And when you come back, we'll have the most fun we've ever had, to make up for lost time."

Derpy started crying again. But this time, it was mixed with laughter.

The sun was setting. Dawn's Eastern Rays of Perfect Yellow and Passing Notion watched it dip beneath the horizon with a bittersweet feeling.

Derpy would have liked to say that it was the most beautiful sunset she had ever seen. She would have loved to say that it was the perfect end to a perfect day, and a near-perfect life. But it wasn't. It was a very ordinary sunset, the sort that happened every single day. Not at all the sort of sunset you expected on the last day of the world.

But it was still special. Because she was staying out to watch the sunset, and she wasn't staying out alone.

Notion's hoof curled around her own. "I know there won't be... ceremonies, over there. But all the same, everypony knows the words. And if we say it, and we mean it, isn't that just the same thing?"

Derpy thought about it for a few seconds, not looking at Notion for fear of missing the sunset. "We'll start simple. We'll date first. See how many romantic plays we can recite from memory. Find out how much we both suck at writing poetry. And then... and then we'll see."

Her skin tingled with Notion's aura. The sun set, and everything was dark, except for the two of them. She turned to Notion, who was grinning and casting his spell around the both of them.

"Any moment now," he whispered, sounding very sad about this indeed. "I can feel it. Here it comes."

And then Derpy felt it too. An event horizon, fast approaching. The point of no return had come. Part of her considered reaching out and breaking it, just in case that saved the whole world.

But then Notion kissed her, and her concentration slipped. The event horizon washed over them, and the spell crackled.

The world burned away, and all that was left was them.

Author's Note

I cannot take credit for Derpy's very creative true name.

Now, lads and lasses, if you wouldn't mind showing some spoiler tag discipline in the comments, that would be appreciated.