Twilight’s eyes quickly scanned across her notes, reading through the holographic letters and hoof-written scrolls. Copies of treaties, agreements, and legal precident were laid out in front of her, and the quants kept bringing more, reading it as well and assisting in the analysis.

She reached the part she had been looking for and stopped, holding it close to her face in her magic. Her eyes rushed across it and, finding nothing of use, she suddenly screamed, turning the heavy crystal table over effortlessly and nearly crushing one of the equidroid quants. In her rage, she threw most of the materials across the library room, many of them igniting in her toxic violet magic.

“Of all the things to do to me, Starlight!” she screamed. “YOU DO THIS!”

“Princess?” said a voice entering the room. Twilight turned sharply to see one of her Priestesses standing beside a breeder servant. As soon as Twilight’s gaze fell on the Priestess, Twilight saw the girls’ breath catch as she took a step back in fright. The breeder remained more composed, but Twilight knew that she felt the same way.

Twilight paused and took a breath, calming herself. She was normally very careful to keep her anger in check, this set of circumstances was unusually stressful. “Midnight Lime,” she said. “What is it?”

“Princess, the Terran Empress is contacting us through the long-range communication relay. She claims that the matter is urgent.”

“Ah,” said Twilight. Her momentary outburst had been just that; now instead of range, her mind was racing, attempting to find solutions to the problem at its source and contain the damage before it spread. “Tell here that I’m busy…” She paused for a moment before an idea occurred to her. “Tell her that I am currently embroiled in a minor scandal. One of the nobility is spreading rumors that I am a cannibal, and my subjects are becoming nervous.”

“I see,” said the Priestess.

“You will be the one to handle her. Remain noncommittal but not obviously so.”

The Priestess looked nervous. “Me?”

“Yes you. You are one of my Priestess. So few can claim that title. You and your Sisters are like daughters to me, and I know that your training is more than adequate to handle this.” She paused. “That said, the Empress can be…challenging.” She looked to the breeder. “But GR447 will be there with you.”

“I shall, Lady Twilight,” replied the white Pegasus, bowing.

“Stand beside her. Triumph, togather. I am counting on you both.”

“Yes Princess.”

“Yes Lady Twilight.”

They both bowed and exited the room at a trot, and Twilight turned back to her overturned table. She stretched out her magic and lifted every object independently, lifting all of them at once and returning them to their original positions, cursing herself for losing her temper especially in front of one of her beloved Priestesses.

With the table back in order, she sat down and once again tried to look through the documents. As she opened her holograms and unfurled her scrolls, though, she stopped. She already knew the answer. There was nothing there that could help her. There was no way out and no way back, no loophole to exploit, nothing to leverage.

“Damn you, Starlight,” she said under her breath. “I should have killed you when I had the chance…”

“Exactly,” said a disgusted voice that caused Twilight’s head to jerk upward. She looked around the rows and columns of books and past her quants, but she already knew where the voices were coming from and who they belonged to.

“You should have,” said the other identical voice. “Why didn’t you?”

“It’s all you’re good for.”

“She gave you everything, and you took so much from her.”

“Why not kill her? It’s what you do. It’s what you DID. She’s outlived her usefulness to you.”

“That’s all she ever was. Your feelings for her were never real. You CAN’T FEEL. She was always just a means.”

“You can never love. You can only destroy.”

“So destroy. Kill her. Solve the problem.”

“No,” said Twilight, putting her head between her hands and taking a breath, forcing the hallucinations back. The quants looked at her, concerned, and Twilight did her best to focus on them: machines with hearts of crystal and the skin of formerly living ponies. They were real. The voices were not.

“I didn’t mean that,” she said. “I didn’t. Please forgive me, Starlight. I didn’t mean it…”

She felt terrible for having for even thought about killing her best and only true friend. The other two were wrong. Her friendship with Starlight was real. Even then, though, she could feel the violence welling within her. It felt cold, a sensation of blissful and terrifying emptiness that used to be all-too familiar.

Twilight took another deep breath, and then looked down at the table and around at the Library. For a moment, she did not touch anything; instead, she tried to realize her situation and face it logically. Breaking down now without Starlight present to pull her back could doom the Empire.

Fortunately, the library was something that had always brought Twilight a great deal of comfort. It was not like the digital codex-type systems used in the Milk Path, but instead a repository for millions of actual paper books. The size, quiet, and warm desolation of being surrounded by so much text was relaxing, even if Twilight barely ever read. She had never taken to it, the problem stemming in part from her great difficulty in understanding the Equestrian language. The few nonfiction books she had read in Terran Proper, though, she had somewhat enjoyed. It was not the books, but more the library itself that calmed her.

“Okay,” she said, turning back to her reports and analysis. “Two hundred and seventy years of my life spent nurturing our political position, and it’s still this fragile…There has to be a way to fix this. There just has to be.”

The situation was somewhat grim. The four-way alliance with the two nations of the Milk Path galaxy, Equestria, and the Crystal Empire was one of Twilight’s proudest achievements. It had taken her a great deal of time, effort, and sacrifice to accomplish. The relationship to the Crystal Empire was not in danger, luckily, due to Twilight’s blood-relation with the ruling Princess Flurry Heart. Even that alliance would come into question though if the situation with the Milk Path were allowed to decay.

“If I lose the Alliance, I have two options,” said Twilight, speaking more to herself than the quants. “I can back the Council, or pull out entirely. Just let the galaxy burn.”

The second option was tempting, but anything but ideal. Part of the reports sitting before Twilight were the lists of the trade relationships between Equestria and the Alliance. It had taken her decades to negotiate those deals while taking exquisite care to keep similar deals with the Council in place. The relationship built on what had formerly been a weakness: that Equestrian technology had advanced in an entirely different direction than that of the races of the Milk Path galaxy. They specialized in high-grade technology- -ships, weapons, heavy machinery, and so on- -while Equestria’s economy was split between traditional agricultural production and the technology that was formerly known as “magic”, including quants, biomatrixed eezio, and advanced medical knowledge.

If the trade deals with the Alliance ended, the effect would be felt throughout Equestria. There were inherent oppositional forces within Equestria that would be emboldened and that Twilight would be forced to crush, and Flurry Heart would no doubt leverage the situation to renegotiate parts of her treaty. Severing the Council would only compound the problem, destroying hard-won gains fought for by generations of diplomats going as far back as Rarity herself.

“Or if I support them,” said Twilight. “War is a profit-making business. Maybe…” Except she could not. Twilight was not a fool. The Council was a political body, not a military one. They would rely on the Governors to fight their war for them, and what little resistance they could offer would be insignificant in the face of the Alliance and the Empress. Maintaining the alliance with the Council would only put Equestria in the crosshairs of the Alliance; the best Twilight could hope in that case was to avoid all-out war in favor of isolationism. Even then, though, she knew that it was only a matter of time before the Alliance came for Equestria. It could take them millennia, but unlike other politicians, Twilight did not have the luxury of considering the far-future as somepony else’s problem.

“Damn it, Starlight,” swore Twilight, pounding one of her silver-horseshoed hooves against the table. “There’s not a way out of this, is there?”

That was not true, though, Twilight immediately realized. There was a way out. There was only one simple solution- -a solution that Starlight had known since the beginning.

Twilight pushed herself away from the table, shaking her head. “No,” she said. “I won’t. I can’t.” She then froze, looking at the guaranteed failure written in so many eloquent words that was strewn across the desk before her. She then cried out in rage and punched the desk. “Damn it!” she shouted. “Why does she have to be so damn smart?!”

Disowning Starlight would solve the problem. It would remove part of the legitimacy of the Alliance’s case against Equestria by expelling Starlight from it, and the remaining situation would be far easier to stabilize. Except that Twilight understood the implications of that course of action. She had worked with the Empress for over two centuries, and though she respected the woman, she knew that there was a reason why Babylon had gained rule while all of her opponents lay deceased. No doubt the Empress would push Twilight to eliminate not just one but two heretics. Twilight had already been forced to order Scootaloo’s execution; now she would need to have Starlight removed as well. What made that even worse was that she was sure Starlight would not attempt to escape or fight back, but to sacrifice herself for her friend’s sake.

“But…it has to be done,” she said, her vision blurring and her mind growing distant.

“Yes,” said one of the now visible pair of alicorns on the far side of Twilight’s desk. “You can’t escape it, can you?”

“You exist to serve the THEM.”

Twilight slowly returned to her seat and looked at the desk. “It…it’s the only way. All of this work, all of the prosperity that we brought Equestria, the advancements we’ve wrought…I can’t lose them…”

“You can’t escape it,” repeated one of the alicorns.

“Just like you can never escape us.”

“Because we ARE YOU.”

Twilight looked down at her holograms and reached out with a hoof, and then shook her head. “N…no,” she said, trying to force the thought away from her mind. “No! I can’t do that to her! Not to Starlight! I won’t! I’ll die before I let her come to harm!”

“So be it.”

Twilight looked up and felt her entire body freeze. Both of them were standing barely feet from her, just on the far side of her desk. Their bodies were no longer blurred or distant. Now, for the first time, Twilight could see their faces: large, violet eyes stared back at her from over smiling mouths full of long, pointed teeth. They stared back at her with two exact copies of her own visage.

Except that she also saw what was below that image. It seemed to split, between her own face and from their true faces and bodies- -the ones that Twilight had last seen them with. The one on the left stood staring back from a pair of empty, bloody eye sockets. Her horn had been torn away along with half of her skull, exposing her ruined brain. One of her wings had been stripped of flesh and the other hung limply where it had been twisted and broken. Her sister stood with her neck at an odd angle where it had been snapped, her jawless and badly burned face grinning back with a pair of dead, terrified eyes, her body misshapen and cut from where it had been crushed and reaved.

Twilight gasped and tried to scream, but no sound came out. Her throat felt like it was sealing closed with the realization that there was no way to escape them, no matter how far she went.

“Your time is at an end,” said the one with an intact jaw, her smile revealing her broken teeth and causing a stream of blood to spill from her mouth onto the floor. “The Goddess will rise, and you will die by the hoof of the one you were foolish enough to once trust. Just as we did.” Her sister’s eyes turned to the table, on which sat a pair of long and beautiful wings, the sinew still attached from where they had been torn out and the blood soaking into the scrolls. “And just like she did.”

“Goddess Twilight?” said one of the quants, noticing her distress. “Are you alright? Your blood pressure and pulse rate are rising do dangerously high levels.”

“I am fine,” said Twilight, even as she was staring into the face of the alicorns who simultaneously looked like her and like death itself. “I’m fine.”

“Oh. That is good to know.”

Twilight just nodded, and closed her eyes, listening as they began to scream into her mind.

“Please, Starlight,” she whispered. “Please hurry. I don’t know how much longer I can remain…”

Author's Note

If you haven't read Mass Core 2 yet and still haven't figured this out, well, I'm amazed you got this far without knowing at all what is going on.