To whom do I owe my life?

That’s a question I ask myself more than is probably healthy because I sure as shit don’t owe it to myself. If I’d had my way I’d have been roadkill on the front step of Canterlot High two years ago, posthumously traumatising an entire school’s worth of kids because I couldn’t emotionally handle being friendless, homeless, and destitute all at the same time.

That last part, at least, I can almost find it in me not to hate myself for. I hate that I chose to run away—to give up—again, but even I’m willing to acknowledge that at the time I had a lot of cards stacked up against me. I’m smart enough to know what a statistic looks like and it looked like me at the time.

None of that really changes the fact that I chose to die, and that over the course of whatever amount of time actually passed in the Trials, granting the nature of the place, something in me changed.

It just didn’t change me, if that makes any sense.

Every day is a struggle just to wake up, and by wake up I mean step back into the skin of Sunset Shimmer and give up my claws and the feeling of omnipotence that comes with being nothing more than a cold-blooded Killer.

Well, hot-blooded in my case.

So I don’t owe myself my life, that’s right out.

Do I owe it to my friends? To Sour Sweet, Starlight, and Redheart? Or to my family? To Aria and Adagio and Sonata?

Or do I owe it to the Old Stain? That last one is a tempting conclusion given that Its intercession is the only reason I’m still around. It snatched me from freefall and dragged me into a nightmare realm that, paradoxically, reminded me what it felt like to be in control.

For the first time in too long… I was the one who made the decisions.

Then I became a Killer and, once again, it’s tempting to say the Old Stain made me into a Killer but that’s not true. Sonata and Adagio know that just as well as I do.

It never forced us to choose. It gave us a choice and we took it.

We chose to make our hearts cold. To give up the real world and submerge ourselves in our darkest memories and allow them to transform us into something powerful.

Do I owe the Old Stain my life?

Maybe.

The Dreamtime splits and fractures as I step into the shadows of a verdant canopy. Enormous, old-growth trees stretch upward like arboreal claws trying to tear the stars from the sky for the hubris of their light. The depths of the Everfree are filled with dark places. Places that exist on no map, because no one comes out this far, or at the very least they don’t do it on purpose.

Well, no one human comes out here anyway.

I follow the tight, narrow path through the trees, and the further I go the darker it gets. It’s already night in the dead of winter, and yet somehow there’s even less light here.

It’s the sort of darkness that swallows the soul.

Deeper and deeper I go, following the instinctive pull like a noose around my neck dragging me inwards.

The Fog swallows me whole as I take one more step, and the world rocks away from me. I leave behind the Real. I leave behind the Dreamtime itself. Right now, I’m don’t want to be in this world, and even though I know I’ll have to go back, I just can’t right now.

There are too many things gnawing at me; Rainbow Dash’s nature as the Blight and one of the murderers I’d been hunting for half a year, the possibility that my choice to drag the Crusaders into my Trial as bait created Killers, the fact that I’m now, even by proxy, working for the Old Stain again.

So I let the Fog swallow me, and I step through the shadows and the formless space between spaces for just a moment before emerging on the other side.

Bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum-bum-bum bum bum bum bum bum…

Mister Sandman… bring me a dre~am.

Make her the cutest, that I’ve ever se~en.

An old song crackles over the P.A. system that is, I would assume, somehow wired into the walls of my Trial. Well, what’s left of it anyway. It’s not nearly the size it was when the Entity congealed it for me.

Call it my grand prize for beating the Old Stain at Its own game.

My own little marble of reality. A place where I’m as good as a god.

“Itty bitty living space,” I mutter as I walk down one of the hallways, scrapping my claws lightly along the bank of lockers and savoring the tinny shriek of metal on metal.

I’d stolen so much from the Old Stain, and most of it is collected right here. About a dozen or so hooks, still in perfect condition, frozen in time along with the rest of this timeless realm.

Only one other living person knows this marble still exists. She’s the only one I trust to know about it because she understands this side of me better than anyone else.

I pause in front of one of the hooks and rest a clawed hand on it. The hook is cold and heavy under my palm, and the metal is grim with unwholesome purpose. This marble is mine. If I wanted to I could be so much stronger. All it would take is a few people on hooks, one or two… maybe three. I could complete a bastardised and narcissistic ritual to myself, drink their Fog, and…

“I wonder what would happen.” I give the chain a solid push, sending it rattling.

A Killer drinking all of the Fog in a person for themselves could be impossibly dangerous.

Or, for all I know, that’s how the Old Stain got Its start in the first place. The Thief and I both proved beyond a doubt that the Stain’s power isn’t immutable. It can be moved and shifted around… stolen. It can be harnessed by anyone with the will and the means, so who knows. Maybe, once upon a time, the Old Stain wasn’t just some cosmic avatar of despair… maybe it wasn’t even the first ‘Entity’.

Turning away from the hook, I make my way towards my ultimate destination. The place where I always end up when I come back here to brood and be miserable by myself.

The basement.

Steps curl downward into a cramped room whose darkness is barely held at bay and I let out a relieved sigh as I take a deep breath of the blood-muddied air that constantly fills the room. Here the Fog is thickest, even if it’s not visible. The power inherent in the Fog saturates the walls, floor, ceiling, and the very substance of the room, and stepping into this place is like finally clearing my sinuses after descending a mountain’s worth of elevation.

Because this place is closest of all to the Old Stain’s realm.

“I could get back to you,” I say as start walking widdershins around the four-post shrine of hooks in the center of the basement. “There’s still a few drops of the old magic left in the book… I could do it.”

My little secret that no one knew. Sure, I’d played my last card in terms of my Journal, and sure it was basically just solid dark magic now, but there were still a few droplets of pure Equestrian magic left to it.

Enough to pass all the way through the Wall one last time.

I never told anyone that it still works for a very simple reason; because I am an unrepentant, cowardly hypocrite. Because if, one day, I just can’t take it anymore, it’s my way back to the one place that I know I still wants me.

The one place I know I belong.

It’s my final measure.

“No wonder Tempest left,” I say bitterly as I turn my back on the posts, swatting one of the hooks angrily as I do and sending it swinging with a deafening clatter.

“You’re a bitch,” I snarl as I glare at my reflection in the polished blades of my fingers, “and a worthless piece of cowardly shit, Sunset Shimmer!”

I didn’t deserve her. I don’t deserve any of them. They’ll all realise it eventually, just like Tempest did, but until then I have to do my damndest to keep them safe.

Whether or not I owe them my life, I owe them all that much.

I’m halfway up the stairs leading out of the basement when I hear someone knocking on my door.

I say knocking. Really it’s more like the metaphysical equivalent of someone gently tweaking my nose. That’s the other problem with this place: it’s not just a reflection of me, it’s an extension. I can sense everything in this pseudo-trial realm as if it were at my fingertips, so having someone go to the entrance and prod at it to get my attention can get irritating.

Good thing I already know who’s at the door.

“Why can’t people just let me be miserable in peace?” I grumble as I storm towards the Terminus and step into the bordering nothingness of the Fog.

I don’t emerge into the Everfree though. That’s not where she is.

“I knew you’d be here.”

I pause in the midlands of nowhere and sigh raggedly as Sonata Dusk, the kindest, gentlest, and silliest of my sisters congeals out of the Fog.

She looks now as I remember her looking back when I first met her, back when we were enemies, although here she looks a little older. She’s taller, and some of the softness is gone, replaced with limber beauty. Her face is full, though, and she’s smiling. She looks nothing like the gaunt, barely-there girl who’s asleep on the second floor of Canterlot General.

Here, Sonata’s raspberry eyes are sparkling and her arctic, two-tone, hair is lush and long and colorful.

The only thing that really marks her out is the old, outdated nurse’s blouse and long skirt she’s wearing that looks like it was pulled in from sometime circa seventeen-hundred.

“I guess you heard?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

I wrap my arms around myself and shudder.

“She left me, ‘Nata.” The words come out brittle and edged with tears. “She… She really left me.”

Her arms go around me, and Sonata pulls me into a gentle hug. I return it, burying my face—horrible as it is—against her shoulder as quiet, wracking sobs spill out of me.

No one, not Aria or Adagio or even Tempest, ever gets to see me like this.

No one but Sonata.

She kept my secret and helped me save a dozen souls from damnation two years ago. She scoured the aether for my wandering splinter of reality for time-beyond-reckoning just to light a little lamp of soul-burn to give me a beacon home.

It was Sonata who saved me.

Maybe she’s the one I owe my life to, then.

“You should put your claws away,” Sonata says as she pulls back, and I wipe at my cheeks with the backs of my hands. “You’ll feel better.”

“I won’t,” I say, a familiar spark of anger lighting in the back of my throat.

It’s petulant, I know, but Sonata endures it with her usual vapid patience. My temper just rolls right off of her, and it always has.

“Sunny,” Sonata says, her voice taking on an odd, cold quality. “I mean it.”

“Seriously, ‘Nata, it’s fine,” I snap. “I’m in my realm, okay? I’m not going to shed my skin in the middle of the Fog! That’s dangerous!”

“Not while I’m here,” she replies softly. “You know that.”

My fingers clash together as I grit my teeth. Sonata has never approved of how much I use my power. She doesn’t understand though. She and my other sisters? They have millennia worth of mental inertia giving them a foothold against the darkness. I can barely keep my head together on a good day!

“You know I’d never let the dark take you,” Sonata says, putting her hands in mine regardless of the sharp edges. “Just… put the knives away, okay, Sunny?”

“I said—” I spit through gritted teeth—“it’s fine.”

“It’s not,” Sonata replies, her tone hardening. “The Fog is making you cold and empty!”

“MAYBE I WANT TO BE COLD AND EMPTY!” I scream, my temper suddenly boiling over as all of my grief instantly ignites into rage. “MAYBE THAT’S FUCKING EASIER!”

Metal screams on metal as square my shoulders and flick my fingers, dragging the Fog to me as I turn my back on Sonata to return to my Trial.

“Sunset come back!” Sonata says, an edge of worry curling through her words. “Sunset! I’m really serious, okay?! You’re in danger! The Fog isn’t just energy, it’s memories! You can’t just soak in it like this!”

“I can do whatever I damn well want!” I snarl without looking back.

“NO!”

I’m almost to the Terminus when my body locks up. All of the power in me, all of the Fog, all of what makes me strong suddenly goes completely berserk as I spasm and jerk in place.

And behind me, Sonata drags in a ragged breath that rattles with sickening stridor.

Against my will, I’m dragged backward, and the Fog that forms my body starts to peel off of me like dead skin as I choke and gasp for breath. It feels like dying. Like drowning. Like someone is smothering me with a pillow in my bed as I lay helpless.

The force gripping me turns me back to face my sister, but the girl I knew is gone.

Sonata is stretching her hand towards me, curling her fingers into an arthritic claw. At the center of her palm is a flickering light like the last ember of a dying candle, and the Fog in me is being drawn to it like a moth.

But it’s costing her.

Her cheeks are sunken and her eyes are no longer glittering but gray with cataracts and cloaked by a veil of thin, dying hair while an ugly bruise forms in a break-neck ring around her throat.

“S-Son...n-nata… s-stop!” I choke the words out, but not for my sake

For hers.

She never uses her power full-tilt anymore and for good reason. She’s too weak. There’s not enough soul left to her. If Sonata were to fill all of that empty space with Fog then I don’t know if she’d ever really come back the way Adagio and I do.

“S-STOP IT!”

“Let. Go.” Sonata croaks through a neck that’s breaking in slow motion.

Her nurse’s blouse and skirt going are aging and rotting like a time-lapse; browning, and growing ragged as she tightens her grip.

She’s really doing this. She’s crazy.

“ST-TOP IT!” I wheeze. “IT… IT’LL T-TAKE YOU!”

Sonata’s grim eyes blaze with lambent, ghostly light as she clenches her fist harder, dragging more and more out of me. I can hear thunder in the distance. I can feel the claws of the Entity at our throats.

“Let—” she squeezes the words out between cracked lips and through an ever-constricting throat— “go!”

“FINE!”

I let go of my grip on the dreaming powers of the Nightmare and banish it all back to the Fog. Sonata staggers backward, suddenly bereft of anything to hold onto, her pallid and sunken features warping with confusion for a moment as the loss of her balance leaves her unsteady, but a moment later she finds her feet.

And slowly, my sister comes back.

Her face regains its pallor, her hair colors into its familiar arctic strand, like a breath of spring air, the age fades from Sonata’s clothing and takes all the sickness, cataracts, and bruising with it.

And I, Sunset Shimmer, fall to my knees in the Fog.

Sonata breathes out a heavy sigh of relief as she drops to her ass on the ground beside me and starts laughing and wheezing through winded lungs.

“Wow, Sunny, I really thought you were gonna let me do that for a second,” she says, grinning at me as she sits up.

“That was nuts,” I say, turning to glare at her. “You could’ve been lost, ‘Nata! Are you crazy?”

She smiles at me again. It’s a weird thing, her smile, and not in the common colloquial sense. I mean weird in the old way.

Wyrd. Fateful and knowing. Eldritch and strange.

There’s something subtly inhuman about her smile. Something fae and otherworldly that makes the expression feel somehow ominous more than comforting. That’s the real smile of Sonata Dusk, and I think she knows that’s what it looks like and that that’s why she smiles so vacuously all the time.

Better to look dumb than look wyrd.

“Crazy?” She laughs and nods. “Yeah! I think so!”

I can’t help but laugh with her as I collapse onto my back. It’s absurd. Completely absurd. Sonata just played chicken with her soul and she’s acting like it was nothing.

The all-pervasive grey of the Fog surrounds us as we laugh, and against my better judgment, I actually feel a little better. Maybe because Sonata reminded me just how far she was willing to go—how far my real family is willing to go—for me.

I shouldn’t need the reminder, and they shouldn’t feel like they have to prove that they’ll have my back but… it’s nice to be reminded.

Sonata turns onto her side as her fit of giggles dies down, and leans on her elbow as she faces me.

“Sorry.”

“For what?” Sonata asks.

I shake my head and gesture around us.

“For this,” I reply. “For being a brat… for always making things ten times harder than they have to be. And for not coming to visit you nearly as much I should.”

“I’m usually asleep anyway,” Sonata says with a chuckle. “Technically I still am.”

“You’re astral projecting,” I correct.

Sonata answers with a noncommittal shrug then reaches out to brush her fingers over my face, then up to push a few strands of red from my face.

“I miss the gold streaks,” Sonata says.

“Me too.”

I miss my original hair, but more than that I think I miss who I used to be. I miss being confident in my actions. I miss being strong. I miss being able to hold my head up high without having to prop my chin up on the blades of a Killer.

I miss me.

“Hey ‘Nata, can I tell you a secret?” I ask, turning over onto my side to face her properly.

“Another one?” She asks.

“Yeah.” I smile weakly. Sonata carries a few too many of my secrets. She’s stronger than anyone gives her credit for though.

“Sure.”

She puts her hand in mine, and I’m a little surprised at how small it is. Sonata has always been willowy, but you only really notice when she’s right next to you and quiet because her personality is so hard to miss. She’s a little like Pinkie Pie in that way, which I think is one of the reasons I like her.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” I say softly.

Sonata laughs quietly, then scoots closer and wraps her arms around me, pulling me into her arms and holding onto me while I curl up against her. She’s soft and warm, and here in the Fog she feels strong again. For some reason, Sonata is the only one that I feel like I can tell the whole truth to because I know she won’t judge me for it… it’s that wyrd that’s about her. Telling her the truth feels a little redundant because it’s almost like she already knows.

Who knows, maybe she does.

“You don’t have to do everything, Sunny,” she says quietly. “You can let us do some of the work.”

“Adagio wants more than just this, though,” I reply. “And so does Aria, even if she doesn’t say it. ‘Dagi and Timber want to get married… Aria wants to go on vacation with Redheart somewhere warm and maybe stay there… and I know that Sour and Starlight wish they could just live normal lives.”

Sonata nods along as she cards her fingers through my dyed, two-tone red hair, and sighs quietly.

“You don’t want a normal life?”

I laugh bitterly at that.

“What would I do with it?” I ask. “I’m dead and buried, remember?”

“You could go somewhere else,” Sonata suggests. “Maybe start a new life, go to university, get a job, find a nice girl, and settle down with a family.”

“Maybe have two-point-five kids, a dog, a cat, and a white picket fence while I’m at it?” I ask blithely.

“Why not?” Sonata asks with a grin.

“Because I’m a monster, ‘Nata,” I reply. “Nothing can change that… I drank from the Old Stain’s cup and now, whether I like it or not, that’s just what I am now.”

“So what?” Sonata pulls me a little closer and buries her face in my hair, pressing her lips to the crown of my head as she smiles. “We’re all monsters here.”

Considering the poor set of cards that Sonata’s life has dealt to her over her many, many years, it’s a little intimidating how unassailable her good cheer is.

That said…

“Rainbow Dash is one of us too,” I say, and Sonata draws back from me and looks down with wide eyes.

“She’s…?” Sonata nods around to the Fog.

“Yeah,” I say. “A Killer, and a real one, not like the Legion. The Stain made her, probably before the Thief stole Its power, but the weird thing is that she’s on our side… kind of. She says she’s working with another Killer, one that the Stain sent through to reclaim what the Thief took, I don’t know who it is but Rainbow says they’re both going to work with us to bring down the Legion, that gunslinger, and the Thief.”

With the backing of the Entity, we might actually have a shot of coming out of this without losing anyone. Two more Killers on our side meant that we were one for one against the Legion and their handler, and better yet, our Killers would be fully-fledged. The newblood Legion can barely keep their heads on straight in combat, so between me, Adagio, Rainbow, and her mysterious ally, we’ve got the advantage.

The only wild card now is the Thief themselves, but I’m willing to bet that they can’t act directly. With the theft of the Entity’s powers came all the same rules and laws that bind that thing to its realm. If the Thief were capable of reaping its own power, then they would certainly be doing that. The fact that they’re acting through intermediaries suggests that while they can manipulate the Fog, conjure hooks, and even potentially create Trials, they can’t kill anyone.

Not with their power anyway.

“Do you trust her?” Sonata asks.

Do I trust Rainbow Dash? That is a loaded question. Do I trust the girl I used to think might be my girlfriend one day only to have that particular dream met the cold, hard truth of reality in a head-on collision?

The simple and unpleasant truth, though, is: “Yeah… I do.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s too stupid to lie,” I say with a small, bitter laugh.

That is the clear and unvarnished truth. I trust what Rainbow Dash says not because I like her, but because I know her, and I know that she’s too thick to try and pull one over one me. For better or worse, she’s just too bald-faced with her emotions.

Sonata chuckles, and nods, then stiffens for a moment before relaxing and looking down at me.

“Hey, Sunny.”

“Hm?”

“Aria is with me and she needs to talk to us,” she says quietly.

I sigh against Sonata’s shoulder, then groan as I hug her tighter. Aria and I have some things we need to unpack, namely some things regarding a certain ex-friend of mine, but just because it needs to happen doesn’t mean I’m looking forward to it.

“Do we have to?” I ask.

“Probably.”

I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave the Fog and go back to the place where Sonata’s real body is. It’s half the reason I find excuses not to visit her more often. I hate seeing Sonata like she is now. I much prefer her this way… the way I remember her.

“Okay,” I say as I sit up begrudgingly. “Thanks for talking me down, ‘Nata… sorry you had to go that far.”

Sonata shakes her head as she sits up beside me.

“Don’t be sorry, silly,” she says, nudging my side gently with her elbow. “You’re my sister. I love you.”

I swallow back a thick lump in my throat as I nod and lean to the side to rest my head on her shoulder.

“I know,” I say shakily. “I love you too.”

Together, we stand up, and Sonata holds out her hand to me. I take it and she smiles that odd, wyrd smile of hers as she raises her other hand out towards the nothingness of the Fog.

“Hold on tight.”

I nod as Sonata tightens her grip on that nothingness, invoking that dead-ember flame in her palm and grasps a point in space that’s far from here, and in an instant, the shadow of the Killer she used to be falls over her.

Sunken, hollow cheeks. Empty eyes. Cracked lips.

With a scream choked by a rattling stridor, Sonata rips the Fog apart and whisks us both towards Canterlot General.

Author's Note

She searches where others will not go... and sees what others will not see.

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