News of the Crystal Empire had never reached Violet Star, nor had any of the plans that included her in them. It was unlike how she usually lived her life, she had kept a close eye on the world outside her from newspapers and letters from the princess and other royal staff. Violet lived quietly in her room, with her copious volumes of books delivered with bundles of food. Which was torn through first always changed. Sometimes, she’d eat through the shipment quickly and be left to read on an empty grumbling stomach, awaiting the next supply shipment. Other times, she’d be overstuffed and read with blurry, drowsy eyes.

One thing was for certain with this mare: Her absence in the outside world was only matched by her knowledge of it. Since her foalhood, some time before she got her cutie mark, she had begun voraciously consuming every word that she could set her eyes on. Before long, she had gone through the entire library’s stock, and then every menu across town, soon every nutritional fact or price tag on every product in every store. Nopony could stop her, nor did they want to. Sure it was strange to see a violet filly reading the price tags at the market with crazed eyes, but it was far from the need for intervention.

Life was aloof, but normal for the mare. Then came the checkup after she got her cutie mark. Her mother had skipped the day just to celebrate her Cute-ceañera but regretted it the day after the party. Violet was barely clinging to life in her bed, an illness, unlike anything the doctor had ever seen. It wasn’t unusual in the strain, no it was just the common flu, but the symptoms seemed unrestrained. The doctor concluded that Violet had no immune-system, that if any disease came her way she would likely react in this same way.

The day the fever broke was a day of both miraculous recovery and tremendous realization. Violet had always gone out to find reading material, making it somewhat of a mission to read everything. But now, the four walls of her room were her only friend and whatever lay outside the cleansing bubble around the house might as well have been on the moon. She was locked away, lest she contracts any illness and died.

The doctor had said that she was extremely lucky to have not only lived but not to have caught anything until now. Violet just wished he’d go away. She knew it wasn’t his fault that she was stuck here, on the contrary, she knew she was alive because of him and was grateful. But she hated the reminder that she was sick, that she was a glass eggshell in a cage waiting for anything from the world to reach in and shatter it.

She’d wished that the doctor would go away and come back with medical books, or something of the variety. It was on her sickbed that she relayed this to her mother who relayed it to him. He said what all adults did, “I’ll see what I can do.” That’s what the librarian said when she asked for more books, what the teacher said when she asked for more lessons, or when she asked her mother to visit her father.

Though, that was impossible. His tombstone lay somewhere between Equestria and the deer nation. She knew from military history books that somepony in the deer nation, Shattered Hoof, had said something of the matter. “One death is a tragedy, but thousands are a statistic.” Violet often looked out from her window to the town below, masked in a milky veil from the bubble, and pondered. They were wrong, it could be both. His death was a tragedy to her, one that was one of many numbing needles that peppered her body. At the same time, he was a statistic to the Generals that sent him there, just another casualty. How could she hurt so much, so personally, but they overlook it robotically and simply repeat that order somewhere else?

How could they feel anything? Somepony at a high enough level to order death en masse must have a disconnect from everypony emotionally. Some sort of psychopathy reigned over their minds, making deaths just a number that went up and not a life-altering tragedy. They cheered when their numbers were smaller than their enemy’s and were silently livid when it was the reverse. She hated the EUP, and she hated the Princess for waging such wars.

Indeed, from a young age, Violet came to hate many things from her room. When her mother left for work, she slaved away her time as a waitress by sunrise, a janitor by sunset, and a mother by evening. But when that door closed behind her, and that bubble rippled as she left, Violet was left all alone in her room. She hated the EUP for somehow misplacing her father’s pension. She hated her mother for leaving her alone, and she hated the world for making her do so. But more so, and possibly most of all, she hated herself.

Her feeble and frail body, lacking a functioning horn, could barely manage to move her own bed on a good day. Her own mind for tormenting her with doubts, casting a warped image of what she was and still displayed it even when she accepted it. She tormented herself in that small room, accepting her depressed mind’s view of herself, and days laboriously dragged themself forward, becoming weeks then months than years.

It was in the second year of isolation that word of her had reached the highest pair of ears in the land, the very mare she hated the most. When that crown stepped through her bubble, she was shocked the princess herself didn’t suddenly dissolve, the disease she saw her as. At first, Violet hated the princess with every atom of her being. She softened as the visits frequented, eventually, her hatred completely eroded away.

Then reading came back to her room, books and lesson plans designed for her exclusively made their way to her room. She became a prized student of Celestia, and with time, became a valued advisor to her, even earning herself a magic candle to send letters directly to and receive letters from the princess. The questions were never about recent happenings, political, economic, or martial in nature. Rather, they were more academic. Problems the court wizards were having, or solutions to the kingdom’s problems that could only be solved through magic. Though she couldn’t answer them in any way but theoretical, it was more than enough for any magic-minded pony to work with.

As Violet Star reached her adulthood, she was a respected pillar of the crowns as well as the kingdom. Though Violet would never be able to see the solutions she devised, she was never kept up at night as a result of that. Her mother always confirmed the changes she had made and said that most of the city was pleased with her work.

What did keep her up at night was loneliness. She hadn’t really made any friends, and on the rare occasion anypony visited her, it was for business. Even less common still was a visit from the princess herself. There were many nights where Violet cried herself to sleep, silencing her sobs and drying her bedding of tears magically.

She had company, in the form of important, regal ponies and endless tomes of the world’s sciences, but yet, misery remained. She’d pace around her room with the various lessons and problems of the day, grappling with those of Equestria’s and her own. She could solve the former’s without much difficulty, but her own?

It was when she had sat on her bed, sulking, that a letter came from Celestia. The first of its kind: A question about war. Violet knew that all the things she’d intentionally been avoiding were connected, helping in one would assist all the others. Equestria was a country built off of a war economy, the gears turned with bits and gore clogging them, and it was Generals who cleaned them out only to cram more of the same into them.

Celestia knew her objections, but she also knew that Violet wouldn’t refuse her. They had grown to be the closest of ponies in the land, exchanging letters as frequent as waves frequented a beach. The princess knew that it was at this point that her advising could swing into something that could help her more important ventures.

First, it was a victory over the deer nation. Then came the zebra nation. Then the promotion of Generals. There was something in between these two, however, that made Violet tremble in her bed. Trixie Lulamoon. She’d seen gruesome pictures from the frontlines, ponies blown apart, burned, and stabbed. But what she had never seen, was a pony’s own muscle cooked in their own pan.

She had held convictions about aiding in war, helping with questions of politics, but she still assisted knowing that her help here would allow her to further help in stopping this brutal killer. Violet and Celestia were plotting against the pony at every turn and expertly predicting her every move. It was Violet’s idea to put her into Tartarus and was beside herself when it worked.

She wanted to choke herself when she found that Trixie had gotten out, and more than that, had successfully killed the single best agent Equestria had. She almost did throw herself out of the window when she found out that wasn’t the only piece of bad news of that operation. Trixie had become more powerful then either the princess or her pupil could predict because of something calling itself Arkon.

All secrets known, it was nothing more than an amalgamation with each individual holding an untellable amount of power, but one pony stood at the top of that mountain of doom and gore: Black Ice. Trixie before this was motivated only until a certain point, one that Violet thought she reached around the time of Sterling Glint’s death. But with the addition of Black Ice into her, the limit and lengths she’d go to reach it were well beyond the population of Equestria. Trixie could kill every single living thing in the world and still not be satisfied.

Celestia was furious, more so when Trixie marched into her castle on the date of a victory and demanded an asinine pardon. When Point Blank’s death reached her, it was in the form of a newspaper, not a letter from the princess firsthand. Violet knew what this meant. She had only wanted to help but had put the kingdom in a very dangerous corner.

No news of the Crystal Empire had reached Violet Star, and that was unlike how she usually lived her life. In that grand apparatus of war, burnt flesh and cracked bones, with bloodied bits intermingling between them and the gears, Violet Star never saw herself in them. In all the replacement parts placed in the machine, she never felt herself being shoved into it. That is until there was a creaking in the stairs, a light step followed by a thump that tried and failed to quiet itself.

No news of the Crystal Empire ever reached Violet Star.

Yesterday, there wasn’t a hole in Concrete’s wall, but today was different. Yesterday, Concrete wouldn’t have ordered the death of an innocent student in a reckless, final gamble. But today was different. Yesterday, the Acting General was confident in the kingdom and its motivations. But today was different.

Concrete’s time in the EUP numbered somewhere close to three decades, two of which were spent on the frontlines. Scarcely had she gotten into trouble or had overstepped her boundaries. She’d been careful that way, not to step on anyone’s hooves, including the soldiers beneath her who were used to it. She treated them with respect, then indifference. Then she found herself at a crossroads every officer in the EUP arrived at eventually, to view their soldiers as a tragedy waiting for a stamp on their death certificate, or a number.

Usually, officers who picked the former retired early or moved away from the front, and the latter advanced in rank and pushed the front forward. Concrete was unlike either. The wizening General saw no point in gaining land for the kingdom if that territory was a graveyard. Nor could she fathom seeing ponies as anything less than a precious life. The line of work she was in, and they were in, was a dangerous one. A tightrope walked with lightning and balefire, one that threatened to give way whenever it pleased.

Beyond that, she worked for an authoritarian monarch that controlled the sun. Stepping out against her orders would result in something between the death of a reputation or a death against a brick wall. Celestia did what she pleased, and that meant you either helped or got out of the way. Concrete had always hated dictators of any stripe, kind or cruel. However, she also knew it was never her place to reposition the government, but it was to minimize the damage it inflicted.

It was in that order, made without reaching out to the princess for approval, that she became the dictator. That’s when she put a hole in the wall and cracks leading away from it. It was just before her hoof connected with the drywall that she understood she had traded a life for the stability of a monarch’s reign. She had acted against everything she stood for, and for what? An extremely brief period of peace before launching another campaign? One she’d be promoted to oversee?

That order was not alone, the phrase ‘misery loves company’ came to mock Concrete. Solar Team 12 dead in a single instant, a pack of cruel warmongers themselves but they had families all the same. A pulse, a life. Then there was Acoustic Burst, that pegasi whose remains live on in the form of a bloodstained pair of dog tags.

Concrete hated herself for what she had done, and for not realizing sooner that she was being led down this path. She’d been so singularly focused on fighting Trixie that she hadn’t taken the time to look at anything else, least of all, herself or her place and what directions they were going. She should’ve realized that when she was cornering Trixie, she herself was nearing that same corner.

She had advanced in rank while treating every death as a catastrophe, but now in her place near the top, she had to treat them like numbers. Numbers were all that floated through her mind: Those saved, those killed, those traumatized, and those otherwise affected. She was in a position to make them all smaller, by her direction the kingdom could fight a war with a hoof tied behind its back.

No, that wouldn’t do. A merciful war? How oxymoronic. She’d relinquish her rank if she did that, and blow her chances of saving what lives she could, leaving some much crueler General to take her place and disregard those below them. This task was a test of the crumbling wall that once stood impenetrable. If she succeeded, she’d keep her spot. If she failed, which she wasn’t in the habit of, she’d retire to a doomed world.

There was nothing more to do but sit at her desk, her shoulders being crushed by the weight of her stars, and wait for the report. Wait to be told that she had succeeded in murdering an innocent. A tear fell from her eye, connected and pooling on the dark wood. She was trapped in a box at the top of the kingdom, with a hole punched in the side. If she did nothing to stop Trixie here, the world may have been perched for destruction. If she did nothing in the wars to come if she stopped Trixie, more would die.

Acting General of the Armies Concrete Pie had betrayed her values but not the kingdom, and she would sooner die than betray the ponies who fight for it. Whatever they believe is justified is the sign of a working mind, a life innumerably valuable. If she should be at the top, she would do her best to ensure that an order like this would never happen again.

As a pounding came at her door, and the voice of Twilight Sparkle shakily reported the success, Concrete had hoped that one day the new princess and her friends could forgive her for Violet Star. As a tear hit the tile at the sight of Trixie imprisoned in harmonic stone, she had hoped that she could forgive herself.

Celestia knew what the kingdom thought of her. That she was a brutal, warmongering monarch with her eyes set on the world and perceived any hoof out of the line she stretched across the world as a declaration of war. That she was slipping into her mind, obsessing over the sun outside her window as though she never wanted it to set. Not only in the sense of borders, that everywhere the sun was, it was shining on a piece of her land. But also in the sense that she wanted the sun to remain in the sky at all hours.

That the princess had driven everypony away from her, advisors, officers, and subjects. Even her own sister. She understood them, and how they could come to such a conclusion, and if she was truthful with herself, would agree. In her years of power, numbering well above a millennium, she had learned that the pursuit of self-improvement, and by extension, the improvement of her kingdom stemmed from a lack of acceptance in either. She endlessly searched for a path that made her better, and life better for her subjects because she felt that both could be better.

Celestia was right in that regard, that things can never be perfect and thus always require improvement, she knew that much. What she didn’t understand was that she wasn’t perfect. In her mind, she was the peak of what all life could be, and all should do their best to follow in her hoofsteps.

It was true that the endless pursuit of improvement stems from a lack of acceptance, but Celestia accepted herself. It was in her mind that everypony else didn’t. If something is judged to be perfect, why shouldn’t it be unanimous? Everypony accepted her as their leader, her continued residence above them implied to her a continued acceptance of that fact. More than that, an acceptance that she was perfect and what she was doing, as a result, must be too.

Celestia understood what the ponies beneath her thought about her, the same way that she understood a pet thinks about their owner. It was a line of thinking only an authoritarian could arrive at, but here she was, completely at home with it. Then she remembered that in this home, she was not alone.

Indeed, it was not a home fitted for one, it was a school of thought open to those who could afford admission, with a tuition of blood, bones, sinew, muscle, tissue, souls and… Power. Kings and Generals like her also resided here, but there was one who didn’t belong to any royal blood or martial uniform. Trixie Lulamoon also found herself at home here.

Celestia knew her to be a trespasser at the most, and somepony who forged their check to get in at the least. She stole her power while ponies like Celestia clawed at it for centuries. The princess had earned her godhood and this stranger, some nopony from the street, had seized it from the subjects she nurtured! The audacity!

Celestia’s eyes widened. Her and Trixie were no different in that regard, wanting to claim the world for theirs and mend the image of it to theirs respectively. What’s more, they both wanted each other annihilated and were willing to do it themselves.

Celestia had faced death down countless times, each time victorious and each time growing stronger as a result. Trixie had done the same, but not for nearly as long. She chuckled to herself. Trixie only got this strong because of an underling’s mistake, a very valued one. The kind that wasn’t unique in their own right, geniuses are all alike just isolated to different fields. They were, however, rare in frequency. Who knows how long she’d have to wait to find another like that.

Celestia’s chuckle grew into a laughing fit. That’s right! She had several! Twilight Sparkle was a valued pupil, who even surpassed her own mortality with her actions. There would be no downtime in her plans, Trixie became somepony who could help her, but now was just a setback, an easily disposable obstacle in the endless road that the princess was paving. One that Twilight would happily assist with and had a ready-made motivation for doing so.

Twilight’s brother was in the Crystal Empire when it was wiped from Equis. She’d want revenge, and Concrete had given it to her while also expending our last resort. She would make an excellent General in the years to come. Twilight would make a fine Lieutenant herself, her entry test being the destruction of Trixie.

They had already set up a plan for just this occasion: Operation Event Horizon. There was no death penalty anymore, Celestia had submitted to her General in this regard. Though, she had done so as a trade. Concrete’s loyalty in the wars to come for something she couldn’t have cared less about. But, just because you can’t execute somepony doesn’t mean you can’t order their death.

Celestia and Twilight had developed a device to rip the Amulet from Trixie forcefully, and would put it to action somewhere far away from the planet. Celestia closed her eyes in a warm smile, pride welling up within her for her pupil. Twilight had planned to focus this release of energy on a single target: Trixie’s old brooch. Such an amount of power fixated on one point would create a miniature black hole, obliterating Trixie and then exploding outward in the process.

What came after was Twilight devising a series of barriers and wormholes around the kingdom to displace the force. Everywhere else? Celestia cackled. This grand war of hers would hit the ground sprinting, many birds with one explosive stone.

The door behind her announced a victory in three quick, consecutive knocks. A sneer stretched itself across her face. Trixie was not the first to challenge her, nor would she be the last. As the princess rose and walked to greet her cornered adversary, her grin grew wider. The sun always rose. The sun will always rise.

Author's Note

Hello again! A new chapter on the heels of Trixe day! Now I wanted to do something different for this chapter, instead of tread the same ground I've done the whole story by telling it from Trixie's point of view, I decided to write the response to her actions from every other set of relevant eyes. Show how far into a corner her actions pushed the rest of the cast and the kingdom, hence, recoil.
I hope you enjoyed! As always, thoughts below and thank you for reading this far! There shouldn't be too too much left of this story, so stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion!