Author's Note
I read an article about Awkwafina in The New Yorker magazine and Twilight Sparkle naturally came to mind. The cover art imitates the magazine, and my writing style imitates the first-person storytelling in the article. It just seemed like a great, albeit experimental, way to delve into a very complex character with indirectness and finesse. Though completely standalone, the story sits squarely in the chronology of The Enforcerverse and Twilight references events that could have happened as described in Sisters in All but Bloodas well as in an unwritten take on the episode It’s About Time. I’ve linked the pertinent stories at the points referenced.
Article
HOMECOMING DEPT. THE CANTERLOTTER Vol 119 Issue 7
TWILIGHT SPARKLE COMES HOME
The librarian and ardent student Twilight Sparkle twice found herself standing up to terrifying monsters, but she refuses to the accept the role of hero.
Twilight Sparkle stood at Princess Celestia's right rear leg like a sad puppy. A half-pace behind her, ears down and gazing at the princess' right golden horseshoe, she chewed on a sprig of laurel. Probably primal instinct had made her strip it from a manicured shrub and she seemed oblivious to how uncultured it made her look. She looked disconsolate or nervously ill. I couldn't tell which.
Today had dawned gloomy and overcast, with scudding pink clouds raining what brave ponies confirmed was chocolate milk. Canterlot smelled of unevaporated puddles of it going sour. Spectacular magic subsequently vaporized the labyrinth hedge maze on the north castle grounds before the perpetrator moved on. Day and night changed rapidly and it ended in a royal audience hall packed with ponies hailing the saviors from Ponyville.
The purple pony that led the herd looked singularly unremarkable. Her darker mane had a ruddy stripe, and it displayed the bowl cut the children of the poorer ponies of lower Canterlot often sported because a hair stylist was an extravagance. Nevertheless, she was an adult in her early twenties, though undersized and noticeably dwarfed by the Princess' long-legged stature. The title the librarian of the Golden Oak Library in Ponyville fit Twilight Sparkle better than the savior of Equestria. Yet here she was, having burst on to the scene.
Princess Celestia answered, "It was a return of harmony. That's all the detail you need to write." She gave a curt dismissive nod and clattered towards the castle. When Twilight Sparkle started to follow, the princess told her, "You can talk to Rightsalot. He wants to know who you are. You'll feel better after you tell him."
Twilight Sparkle sighed loud and long. I met her deep violet eyes momentarily and she smiled when I did. She sighed again, blinked, and walked down the steps of the audience hall.
I followed.
I had asked the princess, "How do you defeat a concept like discord? It is only a concept—?"
I had had barely enough time to check with Records when my editor had sent me to the ceremony. All I found was a brief bio and a photo. She'd been a top student at Canterlot U before being assigned the drowsy library post. In between, she'd served a brief stint as Crown Representative Twilight Sparkle, the pony who'd have run Equestria had something happened to the princess. This had happened the previous time Equestria had experienced daylight problems—when the night had lasted most of the day.
The photo I'd found had been clipped from Pony magazine. Taken some months later, it showed the same herd of mares honored today, with their pet dragon, at Donut Joe's. That's right, the glorious dive diner seven blocks down from Cliffside on Ponyville Way. The photo showed Princess Celestia holding a half-chomped glazed chocolate donut, crumbs on her muzzle, and a mug of coffee steaming in her magic.
"Had I been honored today," I told Twilight Sparkle, "I'd not be so sad."
"I'm not sad, per se. I'm happy. Really, I am. Things turned out okay."
"But it almost didn't?"
She continued walking, head down, through a courtyard adorned with red roses and a fish fountain.
I asked, "Perhaps you could show me some things on the castle grounds? You seem to be Princess Celestia's friend."
"She's my teacher."
"I'm just trying to learn who you are."
She stopped and looked at the spiral pad and the yellow no.2 pencil I levitated before me, then into my eyes as if seeing me for the first time. I shivered, pierced by an intellect cautiously hidden within her diminutive presence. She went from being dominated by her teacher to letting out her alpha mare. She smiled disarmingly and glanced away.
And then she flushed. That highlighted a purpling bruise on her cheek. My eyes flicked to the other bruises I saw around her barrel as if something had clamped on to her. I realized she favored her right rear leg with a slight limp.
Twilight Sparkle had fought a battle she hadn't won by magic alone.
"I'm nopony." She'd addressed my comment, then corrected, "Nopony special. Follow me if you'd like."
Strolling in the princess' private courtyard had been a privilege, but now Twilight Sparkle turned back toward the castle and trotted in the nearest door. As she led me to a worn stone stair that spiraled upward turn after turn, she added, "I'll show you what I am."
Though her what should have grammatically been a who, I would come to appreciate she'd meant what as in less than a person.
A minute later, we galloped breathlessly along the crenellated battlements. We could see the city, the ponies in their elegant evening clothes and wagons rolling home and restaurants filling with patrons. Baked goods and the scent of cinnamon spiced the air. She pointed out one of the dozen tall ivory towers that dotted Canterlot on and off the castle grounds. The purple onion dome glittered in the westering sunlight. She told me that the princess had given it to her and told her she needed to live there, to be available day and night—and she had, alone, though she had a newly minted cutie mark and had been barely twelve. "'To tame my raw abilities,'" Twilight Sparkle explained, "And the other thing."
Our hooves clattered along a flyway, over the circular promenade parade ground just southeast of the castle, between the two turbulent Canterlot cascades. She pointed over the Canterlot Drop down toward the Ponyville plain just as the sun slid down. The sky went from orange to blue to dark. The moon rose. When I remembered that I was interviewing her, I looked down. Lights began to wink on in the hamlet in the distance. It looked peaceful. Her new home. In the library as the librarian by royal decree.
"Quite a demotion from Crown Representative," I noted.
"What do you know about Nightmare Moon?"
I told her that my colt was looking forward to Nightmare Night in a few weeks.
That didn't satisfy her. When I later found newspaper articles on it, I discovered that Nightmare Moon was the name of a phantom that had proven all too real, one that had been responsible for the night that had lasted all day, which in turn had been linked with a time when Princess Celestia had vanished, leaving the peerage and the royal guard in enough of a disarray that the newspapers ran a lot of mostly uninformed speculation. Curses and whatnot. It was also the day that the princess announced her sister and co-ruler. That revelation had drowned out everything else. And Twilight Sparkle was connected to it all? For a half-dozen hours, Crown Representative Twilight Sparkle might have in fact ruled Equestria.
After showing all these things and more, she linked them together in a strange narrative. "I was born a singularly unmagical unicorn," she began as if confessing a crime.
She had evidenced no baby magic, like the tricks my colt had done like to grab things or to make noise to summon attention. With both her parents making their living from the written word, Twilight Sparkle had learned to read almost before she learned to speak, and, when she did speak, she'd insisted she had no interest in magic at all, just in how the world worked. Science. Physics, geology, biology, astronomy—didn't matter, so long as it didn't involve other foals or magic.
Twilight Velvet—yes, that Velvet, the adventure-romance author whose well known purple-striped white mane and gray smiling visage graces many a back cover—took her "little horned earth pony" with her on her travels. "I saw much of Equestria, albeit foal-sat from inside a library or a museum, where I could be counted upon to stay out of trouble all day." By the time she was old enough for school, she understood other foals so poorly that she got repeatedly beat up. It didn't help that she was somewhat of a runt. "Everypony told me so."
Her parents homeschooled her.
While her socialization left a lot to be desired, her study habits would have thrilled any teacher. Her father, the deputy archivist at the Canterlot University Library, found himself hard pressed to find books she hadn't read and kept bringing her more advanced reading, including biographies of ponies who made the science she admired. By the age of eight, she'd begun experimenting. Dropping lead and wood spheres off of a tower. Using levers to lift the foundation of a building. Sea monkeys. Then her mother bought her a chemistry set.
"What I had in knowledge, I lacked in judgement," she told me as our hoof beats echoed down a cobbled working-class street in the Lower. Plaster peeled on walls. A smelly ashcan was overturned in a muddy alley.
"That's the truth, Twili," a voice spoke behind us. He was a stocky white unicorn with a blue mane and a pearly smile, wearing a royal guard uniform with a shiny silver first lieutenant bar. "But you've definitely improved."
"I wonder," Twilight demurred and pointed upward at a bricked-in balcony cantilevered over the street.
"Yeah. That. She blasted the wall of her bedroom into the street; broke half the bones in her body. I was partially responsible. I'd bought her the rubber chips she'd made the explosive from. That was the first time she used magic."
"Did not."
"The doctors said she had to have instinctively cast a shield spell; a family specialty. Small, enclosed room. Not an earth pony and nevertheless survived. Do the math."
"Didn't happen. Fortunately, the flying bricks didn't kill anypony."
The whole moment screamed dangerous, more so when the denial came in Twilight Sparkle's squeaky girlish voice. It made sense due to something she'd already told me about, which, as I encouraged her mother to talk about it over dinner, started with her strung up in a hoof-and-body cast in Cliffside General. Her father convinced her to read a biography about an obscure empirical thaumaturgist who applied the scientific method to create the mathematics of violation physics to explain and apply magic.
Star Swirl the Bearded had been Princess Celestia's teacher.
That led Twilight Sparkle a year later, still limping, to go to witness the ancient mage's star pupil raise the sun at the Summer Sun Celebration. Her infirmity got her into the front row.
While her brother rolled his eyes, Twilight Sparkle gushed and talked in endless jargon about witnessing the magic and the forces of nature at work, and realizing that magic had rules just as strict as gravity did. With the fiery image in mind of the Princess leaping into the sky as she pushed the sun above the horizon, young Twilight Sparkle devoured any book on magic her father brought her.
She cast levitation the first day. Within months, she'd read most every pre-university textbook on the subject, had invented a machine to measure her increasing magic horn power, and had begun assembling the mental mathematics necessary for a teleport spell, a spell few beyond the princess could cast.
Velvet Sparkle volunteered over her delicious garlic-squash croquets, "We had to get her into Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns before my little dare-devil teleported herself onto the face of the moon for missing something a teacher would notice." She urged me to take a second helping of hay hash as she added, "Night Light finagled it one evening when the Princess asked him for a book."
I munched on still hot, salted sweet-potato chips as the blue middle-aged stallion tapped his jaw. "That was... Rising Dough's Conjuring Strudels, Palmiers, and Puff Pastries, I think."
The day of the entrance exam, Twilight Sparkle found herself blacked out for the second time in her life.
She had been called away from hours of "fun" written maths and history tests with a throng of mostly older colts and fillies for an unexpected solo practicum just before noon. Faced with using her magic creatively on an unexpected task—hatching the egg of what would prove to become her dragon pet—she found her horn unexpectedly congested and uncooperative. She made herself sick, waving her hooves, desperately chanting like the zebra witch doctors she'd read about. Her heart had wanted to explode. She had eventually admitted failure, only to suddenly gasp awake in a collapsed heap—not in the hospital to stabbing pain and her worried brother's face, but to a looming astonished Princess Celestia who insisted she look at her flank.
She had earned her cutie mark, a doubled six-point star with orbiting little white stars, and had pranced about maniacally. Princess Celestia offered to make her her personal student. But in the frenzy of it all, Twilight Sparkle still noticed the angle of the sun had changed to late afternoon. Five hours missing. She remembered a flash of rainbow light... The Princess assigned her that ivory tower she'd pointed out and told her to live there, to be available 24-hours a day for lessons. It was weeks before she saw her family again.
Something wasn't right.
Another student had been in the room during her practicum, spying. Sleuthing in Records allowed me to later piece together that it had been one Sunset Shimmer, an earlier and now missing personal student of Princess Celestia, who, from what was written about her imperious attitude and intemperance in various newspapers and tabloids, was probably sizing up the competition. Gossip leaked out and got back to the introverted filly soon enough.
On her castle grounds tour, Twilight had pointed to a tall white tower attached to a University Hall. "Luna Tower, where I stood my exam. Note the column of newer bricks." Even in the moonlight, it was whiter, like a repaired fissure. Part of the purple conical roof looked repaired, too. She rotated and pointed to a garden, which, after a moment of looking, resolved into the stonework foundation of a ruined building. Beyond, stood a massive old oak blasted in two that, though gnarled and burnt, was flush with greenery turning rosy red for autumn. Beyond that I could see the castle gate portcullis and the bright lights and flashy white buildings of Alicorn Way.
The tower, the former arboretum, the portcullis, and the boulevard all lined up, and it made sudden sense. Canterlot citizens still remember the mysterious chasm ten pony-lengths deep and five wide that had thrust open, some said, all the way to Tartarus, but definitely off the edge of the mountain. Boulders were strewn against storefronts, carriages overturned, windows shattered, ponies flung onto rooftops, water mains cut and fountaining, and north-south traffic snarled for days.
"You?"
She nodded. "Nopony was hurt. I am a unicorn and it was unicorn magic, after all. A flare. Princess Celestia was right, I needed to tame my abilities through focused study. From here, my magic blasted down Alicorn Way to the edge of the cliff. No wondering why the princess sequestered me while she fixed the damage and spoke to ponies not to speak of it to me—it helped that I had no friends. It would have shattered me to see the destruction I'd wrought, and made me fear magic forever."
Sunset Shimmer obviously made sure she learned of it, and it did shatter her, which was the point she was working toward. Tutored by the princess, she learned magic, but rarely used more than the household sort outside school because of her history. "A good thing. You can quote me on that."
She transformed into a model student, able to handle any workload. Craving the burden mostly to learn how to control herself, but in essence she strove to become a magic researcher or a professor—nothing applicable to the fragile outside world that intuition and experience insisted she would damage.
"Not what the princess planned for me, and in retrospect I suspect it was a test that I found that book and acted upon it. Or the princess' unfounded confidence. And, of course, I made a bad decision, or rather the least optimal one, anyway, true to form. I had a brain. I could organize cats. I had contacts in the royal guard. I had already made friends, though I thought of them as classmates. I attended university, for Celestia's sake!"
Taken aback at her unintended pun or the snarl in her voice, she explained the truism that hindsight was 20-20. She had discovered a magical prophesy that foretold the arrival of Nightmare Moon, the restrictions of which explained why the princess couldn't directly address the threat—properly analyzed. The coincidental timing of finding the book and a scheduled birthday party with her university "classmates," whom she thought arguably more brilliant and definitely more steady-hoofed than herself, seemed now like a plea from the princess to do what Twilight Sparkle eventually wouldn't. The situation, Twilight Sparkle argued, required Princess Celestia under guard and Ponyville's City Hall and environs cleared of innocents before the Mare in the Moon's return, with her and her university friends solving the problem.
Twilight Sparkle had made none of that happen, but it had worked out in the end.
Instead of gathering her five university friends—the "brain trust" is what they called themselves—together ("Moondancer, Minuet, um..."), she'd confronted the princess with her discovery—not deducing the geas that bound the princess like chains, implicit in the prophesy. The princess redirected her to Ponyville, away from all her resources and from the optimal solution, and ponies were needlessly hurt when Nightmare Moon rampaged in the City Hall.
"The five friends I made that day are true friends; I'm not denigrating them and would give my life for them. But a solution to a prophesy doesn't matter to a prophesy so long as the solution fulfills it. I had already had the five friends, the elements I needed to fulfill the prophecy—but hadn't valued them enough to realize that I didn't have to go it alone. I've been learning lessons in friendship ever since, mostly the hard way. I let my pride drive me to my first solution—impressing my teacher—instead of using my intellect to think beyond the obvious." Her hoof made coconut sounds against her temple. "Think, think, think. Ugh!"
Which brought Twilight Sparkle to the current day, before the ceremony with trumpets and bewildering praise, her facing an audience of confused peerage and merchant ponies who had thought they were visiting the castle for business or for an audience. On her castle tour, she'd pointed from the ramparts at Ponyville. Princess Celestia had lowered the sun. The hamlet looked peaceful, stereotypically normal with threads of chimney smoke, lamps flicking on in windows and lanterns lighting pony-carts rolling down streets of alpine-style thatched-roof buildings. You would have had no idea something horrifying in Twilight Sparkle's telling had happened there but hours ago.
"Houses floating upside-down, hills turned to quilts, roads slicked with soap, rain transformed to chocolate milk, clouds woven into pink spun sugar, rabbits warped into stilt-legged lupine antelope, and ponies... The ones that didn't get a chance to run..." Her throat visibly constricted.
It took a few minutes before she continued, pointing at the moonlit pit northeast of the twinkling lights of the castle towers, empty duskiness in the gathering mist below the bustling gas-lit neighborhoods of Terrace Heights and Edgepeak that dominated the mountainside. How could you call the royal hedge maze "devastated" if it was simply gone?
Princess Celestia had summoned Twilight Sparkle and her friends to use a magical device to repel a foe that could destroy all harmony in the world and sow discord between ponies. He stole the device. Twilight Sparkle was still so upset, she couldn't say his name, though maybe she wasn't allowed. But even a chaotic creature made of magic was bound by its rules and he offered clues to his own undoing.
"A Sphinxian riddle, and a quality one, too." She had let herself be distracted by his serpentine antics when he appeared as a living geometric caricature in the stained-glass windows adorning the throne room. He had intentionally presented a view into the green labyrinth of the hedge maze. "I grabbed the first solution. I didn't think it through. I got caught up in an elaborate game of deceit with our very minds at stake. My impatience put my friends at risk. Had he not cheated his own rules with Rainbow Dash...
"He de-harmonized each of my friends with meanings scoured from deep in their souls, which broke the harmony between them, and within me. My hastily committing to the game freed him to play with Ponyville, where he de-harmonized my soul also. It made my friendships feel like they'd been fashioned from cheap brown wrapping paper. Made my loyalty to the princess a sick joke. Made me want to leave Equestria and all her ungrateful ponies behind, so much so that I packed to move to the Griffon lands.
"I lost the kingdom."
I told the purple unicorn that she obviously hadn't, but she shook her head so vigorously that her mane slapped her neck.
"Princess Celestia saved us." The princess used dragon magic to send back the correspondence Twilight Sparkle had sent her since being made the librarian at the Golden Oak Library. All the friendship lessons she'd learned, always the hard way. Stories about how some friends were destined to be together, how friends could help you be brave, and how sometimes you had to accept friends (and hardship) just as they were and learn to be a better pony. It restored her confidence and allowed her to discern the key to the de-harmonizing magic: "The princess made me remember myself and I made my friends remember themselves in turn. Remembering who we were and what we were together... Together we... We restored harmony."
"So you did do it! You saved—"
"No." She shook her head and turned away. I had to follow to hear her murmur. "No, I didn't. I hadn't learned my lessons after all those mistakes." The explosion, the chasm, Nightmare Moon. "In any case, you don't thank your tools."
"Princess Celestia would disagree."
To this assertion, I received no answer. And I didn't get one all evening. That I didn't push my luck probably explained the invite to supper and allowed me to piece together the puzzle of her life. I didn't bring it up at the dinner table, nor did I discuss it with her brother who probably knew enough to poke holes in her self-effacing arguments.
My interview and research paint a portrait of more than a weary warrior pressed into unwonted service because of her talent, despite her demonstrated flaws. Twilight Sparkle wants nothing more than to be like everypony else, but her repeated assertions that she "is like everypony else, nopony special" would be disingenuous if she didn't believe it so very much it hurt to listen to. She praises everypony—her parents, her more-competent-than-she-was university friends whose names she forgets, her Ponyville friends who are "more genuine and more friendly" than her, even Princess Celestia who "hoof-picked her" and who "fixed her mess-ups"—never herself. This is a pony who excels at whatever she decides to do, because it is in her nature to excel, and therefore discounts it as unearned, regardless of outcome. Her missteps overshadow her successes in her estimation. I hope her friends and family will eventually disabuse her of her illusions. The princess' impromptu victory celebration was an attempt. Her assuring Twilight Sparkle was surrounded by supportive friends was another.
I'm the least of Princess Celestia's efforts in this matter, but I'll do my best here.
I for one see a filly who's still growing into her hooves. A filly who's taking on fearsome tasks that would destroy me, if not most ponies. A filly who not only battles a hard world but her own impossible standards. Twilight Sparkle is...
There are words that describe it, but I'll relate the following instead.
Twilight Velvet piled the dirty dinner dishes next to the sink. Twilight Sparkle bounded up to do them, but her brother floated her back, hooves pedaling air, to her chair with his ruddy magic, then set a meringue pie with subtly toasted snowy peaks down in the middle of the table. The sudden smell of burnt sugar and the banana creme below it made my mouth water.
She said, "Hey! The dishes are still my chore."
He said, "Princess Celestia sent us pie."
I could see her visibly cool as if she sat on a block of ice.
He levitated a tarnished pie-cutter as he continued, "The princess said, 'Make sure she bucks up,' and gave it to me."
"It's been a long day," the visibly bruised filly said. "You have no idea—"
He'd cut a few slices when he interrupted. "Don't I now? Who helped keep all of Canterlot out of a panic when the Captain of the Guard spooked and I was the highest ranking officer left? Field Brevet Captain Shining Armor at your service."
She smiled and blinked rapidly with glistening eyes. "That's my B.B.B.F.F."
Their parents looked on with growing grins.
"Princess Celestia told me to tickle you if that's what it takes." The pie-cutter clattered down as he reached out shiny blue fore-hooves at her.
She shrieked when touched, rocking her chair and batting aside her glass of strawberry water. The liquid dripped to the floor.
A piece of pie sailed up and splatted in her brother's face.
"Oh, who's the soldier, Miss Hero?"
Another slice took flight.
"Don't you dare!" screamed Twilight Velvet. Her husband whisked the dessert away in his blue aura, which is how I missed what the novelist had done at the same time.
Orange potato chips flew through the air from the half-eaten bowl, plinking against each of the combatants' horns, dispelling their auras.
The siblings stopped, looked at their mom, and said simultaneously, "Really?" Shining Armor chuckled while Twilight Sparkle descended into giggles.
"Potato chip fight!"
The chips flew, no thought of what an onlooker might think, or maybe certain that some family moments should be shared. Everypony screamed and laughed, dodging behind chairs and under the table, until naught but crumbs of potato dusted the entire kitchen and every mane. Now-wheezing Twilight was laughing, rolling on the floor until she squeaked, "Washroom!" and dashed out.
Don't fear. Night Light had protected the pie with the same tenacity Twilight Sparkle had protected Ponyville earlier that day.
It was delicious.
