The Day of Hearth's Warming
Author's Note
[Based on the following prompt by TheDriderPony: “Starlight tries to help Pinkie make a Gingerbread House, but an ill-advised spell makes things go awry. Comedy, please.”]
The Day of Hearth's Warming
Starlight Glimmer laughed. It was nervous laughter, the kind she made when she was asked to do something uncomfortable or unfamiliar, or wanted to pretend that everything was all right, or wanted to convince others that she was all right.
“Gingerbread houses… oh wow, I’ve… never been good at making them. I’ll just watch. Don’t want to be a seventh wheel on this. Besides… it looks like you’ve all done this before, and to be honest I am kind of tired after today, I may turn in early upstairs like Spike did, it’s been a long day. And I don’t want to be–”
“Don’t be silly, Starlight,” Pinkie Pie said, handing her a tray with a stack of gingerbread pieces. “I brought plenty for everyone! We always do this on Hearth’s Warming. It’s a friend thing!”
“Friend… right…” Starlight replied. She laughed again, nervously. She looked over, a gigantic fake grin on her face, and saw her teacher, mentor, and friend, Twilight Sparkle, waving her over to the gigantic map table. “Come on, Starlight, you can sit with us in here!”
Of course, the table was still broken. Starlight had broken it. She had been trying to get revenge on Twilight for foiling her plans, only to have her former mortal enemy take her in as a friend and student, teaching her all the things that none of her other friends or family or teachers had ever bothered to teach her before. And she was grateful for all of it. But all that didn’t change the fact that the map table was still broken.
Kind of like me, she thought.
Starlight never enjoyed herself during Hearth’s Warming before. Not the Day, not the Eve, not the entire season. She’d convinced herself the entire festival was a waste of time, and had not bothered with it for years.
Twilight had sat with her last night during Hearth’s Warming Eve, when she had tried to bow gracefully out of joining them for a celebration she didn’t feel that she had any right to be a part of. Her teacher, instead, read her a story that she’d never heard before, and convinced her that she was wrong about that, too.
And ultimately she did have fun.
But this wasn’t going to be fun. Doing things on Hearth’s Warming had never been fun before, friends or not.
Especially not Gingerbread Houses. Especially not competing to see who could build the best.
Starlight took a deep breath. Just then Pinkie stopped and looked at Starlight, who was standing there frozen, wide-eyed, with an obviously fake smile on her face.
“Gee, Starlight, you don’t look too good. Too much egg nog? Or not enough egg nog?”
“I’m… fine.” She lied. “It’s nothing. I… just haven’t done this in, like, forever.”
“No worries! We do this every year. I’m good with building stuff! Well, at least stuff made out of sugar. Or at least with sugar on the outside. Sugar isn’t load bearing. Anyway, just stick by me. I promise we can make something fun!” Pinkie pronked away.
Starlight laughed again, more nervous than before.
The rest of the girls were seated around the table, laughing and chatting and building away. Pinkie had set straight to work, a simple gingerbread house absolutely smothered and covered in a rainbow of icing and sugar-sprinkled snow. But Starlight just sat there, listening to the others (mostly Pinkie) gabble away about everything and nothing, while trying to think about how to build a gingerbread house that would knock their sock-boots off.
Because that’s what everyone does at Hearth’s Warming. Right? Think, think, think, Starlight…
Then Starlight noticed the details on the table. The magic wasn’t working, but she could notice the details of geography, and rivers, and cities, and…
Castles. A Gingerbread Castle!
“I got it!” Starlight spoke up. Everyone else looked at her, puzzled. “I mean, I got an idea for something I want to build.” They kept staring. “I… ignore me.” And she shrank back into the folding chair they’d brought out for her. “...Nevermind,” she said with a nervous laugh, and waited for the attention to shift away from her.
When it did, she turned back to the table, and studied the design of the nearest castle etched into the stone table’s surface. It was a pile of ruins, but quite copyable, and a plan was a plan. So Starlight set to work with her magic. She put a few blocks of the hard gingerbread on the map table, then cut basic shapes with a fine magic beam from them. Then she held them in place, levitating the bag of green icing to assemble them. Working quickly and precisely, she copied the design she saw in the table, a ruined castle, jagged stone walls cut carefully from gingerbread and assembled, braced, bonded, all with magic. Then more magic, levitating bags of icing, rainbow-colored gumdrops moving in a careful ballet to become trees from the surrounding forest, sprinkles of powdered sugar snow cast from above, fine cutting spells to give the walls weathered character.
She was absorbed in her work when she heard a loud, long, gasp.
“STARLIGHT! That looks amazing!” Pinkie shouted. Starlight, distracted, lost the focus of her magic, and a stray spell shot into the table’s surface as icing bags and gumdrops and powdered sugar all fell down around her. No one noticed that the residual energy shot into the table did not dissipate.
“Pinkie!” Starlight yelped. “Please don’t scare me when I’m working with magic! Especially cutting spells! It’s dangerous!”
Rarity looked over at Starlight with a strange look, holding a bag of icing in her hooves. “Cutting spells? Darling, why would you ever need to use such a thing to build a gingerbread house?”
“I…” Starlight stammered, “... I just wanted it to look… good.”
The table burst into laughter.
“If it don’t look lumpy or lopsided or with somethinerother fallin’ off, it ain’t a gingerbread house,” Applejack proclaimed, just as her own ginger barn’s roof fell in. “See what I mean?”
“But… but I just…” Starlight tried to think of something to say, but no words came.
“It’s all right, Starlight,” Pinkie said. “I think you’re on the right track! You just need more gingerbread… and some more gingerbread… and some more gingerbread just to be on the safe side…”
Starlight watched, her stomach turning in knots as Pinkie added more gingerbread towers and walls to her carefully-but-quickly planned model castle, bringing the imitation of the ruins to the point of collapse.
“... then lots and lots of icing to keep everything together…”
Starlight watched as Pinkie’s additions made the ginger-castle start swaying.
“And then the piece de resistance–the gumdrop turret on top!”
Pinkie daintily placed a gumdrop on the new highest tower… and the entire thing came crashing down. Everyone else could only laugh, chuckle or groan. But Starlight could only blush and cringe.
“Pinkie, why do you always do that?” Rainbow Dash asked, her hooves on her hips. “You gotta let the icing dry before you add more stories. Starlight was trying to make something nice.”
“Girls…” Fluttershy asked, softly.
Rarity chimed in “In fairness, it was a bit overdone, even for–”
“Girls…” Fluttershy insisted, louder than before. And it was then that Starlight noticed that underneath the collapsed pile of gingerbread and icing, the map table was now glowing a sickly green.
Twilight shook her head. “Even so, Pinkie, you should have asked Sta–sweet Celestia what is happening under there?!?!?”
And then everyone saw the pile of sugared treats sitting on top of the sickly glowing green map table move. From underneath the pile came an unholy and very tiny skittering sound. Applejack leaned in, squinting. “It sounds like… bugs?”
As Starlight watched, the entire pile of gingerbread and icing and gumdrops seemed to consume itself, falling into the table, which was now entirely covered in pulsating green magic. What emerged was an army.
An army in miniature. Starlight used a magic magnifying spell to peer down onto the table. The soldiers were indeed insects, almost beetle-like, quadrupedal like ponies, with smooth ginger-brown carapaces, green glowing gumdrop eyes, thin sugar-spun wings, and tiny horns. They all bowed before one particular bug, who seemed to surround itself with a green half-spherical magical shield.
“W-w-w-w-w-what are those?” Fluttershy squeaked.
“They’re Changelings!” Rainbow Dash shouted
Rarity’s eyes went wide. “Wait… from gingerbread?”
“It must be the table!” Twilight gasped. “There must still be magic inside of it! Starlight…”
Starlight saw Twilight looking at her. She tried to speak, but couldn’t.
“HA HA HA!,” said the living gingerbread. Starlight didn’t recognize what, nevermind who, it was. It was like an alicorn, but its horn was bent, and its limbs covered in holes. “You foals!” It spoke with a tinny, tiny, cruel, distorted voice. “The Spirit of the Changelings lives in the map! And I, the Spirit of Queen Chrysalis, shall conquer all I see before me!”
Then a magic blast came from Ginger-Chrysalis’s tiny horn. Everyone gasped, and looked at the tiny, brown, and purely evil demon spirit, green sugared eyes all aglow, tiny laughter shaking its belly, surrounded by an army of living ginger-bugs.
“Minions!” Ginger-Chrysalis shouted quietly, ”I BID YOU… ADVANCE!!!”
The swarm advanced outward in all directions.
“Queen Christmas?” Pinkie asked. “Who’s Queen Christmas?”
“Chrysalis, Pinkie! The Evil Queen of the Changelings, remember? The shapeshifters who kidnapped Cadance and nearly took over all Canterlot!”
“Changelings?” Starlight said, afraid. “But I thought they were mythical…”
“The Tartarus they’re myths!” Rainbow Dash said, swooping down and looking like she was preparing for a fight. “They’re shape-shifting bug monsters. They nearly took all of Equestria! One of them even hooked up with Twilight’s brother!”
“Yes, Dash, that was Chrysalis,” Twilight said, and Starlight saw her rolling her eyes just a little.
“But where are they coming from?” Starlight said, growing more nervous by the second.
Twilight’s face turned horrified. “Starlight… what kind of cutting spell did you cast?”
“I… it was a custom cutting spell. Illumnio, thenEncantatis, then a matrix overlay of SimiloDuplexis and Cortarare…
“That was a cutting spell? To build a gingerbread house?” Starlight could see that Twilight was slowly losing it.
“Well, you’ve never had to build gingerbread houses the way I did!” Starlight barked, and instantly regretted it. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry… how could this–”
“This table is magical. It’s connected to every place and every time in Equestria. What happens out there happens on here!” Twilight teleported over to her. “Starlight, that castle you were building, where did you see it on the map?”
“Uhh…” Starlight pointed, “that one, the ruins.”
“That’s Padoru Keep, it’s been ruined for centuries… and legend says it was the first castle to fall to a Changeling invasion, over 1,000 years ago.”
“And if these… cookie bugs take over the map…” Starlight asked, her insides twisting with fear and shame.
“There’s no telling what could happen.” Starlight could hear the fear in her teacher’s voice. “The table could be ruined, or they could escape to the real world. I don’t…”
Starlight took a deep breath. “Then I have no choice.”
She teleported to the other side of the table, next to Applejack’s fallen gingerbread barn, and hit it with a blast of the same magic. This time, her own blue magic transformed the gingerbread, icing, and gumdrops into another army: earth ponies, pegasi, and unicorns all arranged in orderly, regimented formations, but with one larger pony, looking uncannily like her, front and center.
“Infantry, cavalry, artillery, scouts… and a hero unit.”
“What the hay are you doin’?” Applejack asked, incredulously.
“How else do you beat an advancing army? You build another army! You build fortifications! You force the enemy to go where you want them to go, and then you destroy them… or you get destroyed.”
The rest of the girls looked at Starlight, incredulously.
All except for Pinkie. “Oh yeah, like Total War Horsehammer!”
Everyone else now looked back and forth between Pinkie and Starlight.
“Come on, has nobody else played Total War Horsehammer? Big strategy board game, moving little soldier pony tokens about, conquering all your enemies, seeing them driven before you, hearing the lamentations of the players–”
“Wait…” Twilight had a sudden look of inspiration. “So we’re playing a strategy game… but in real time!” Starlight looked over at her teacher’s determined face. She understood what her student was doing, and she did what she did best: organize.
“Applejack, Pinkie Pie, we need all the gingerbread you have and we need it now! Make gingerbread fortifications to force the Gingerchangelings towards our armies! Rarity, with me and Starlight! We need Ginger Royal Guards, Ginger Catapults, Ginger Archers… and hundreds of them! Fluttershy, you’re our eyes in the sky! Let us know where the enemy is going and how many there are! And Rainbow Dash…” She tossed the blue pegasus a big bag of chestnuts, and a gigantic cooking spatula. “Long-range artillery, if you don’t mind.”
“Aww yeah!”
Within a few minutes, Twilight and Rarity had both conjured up their own ginger-armies to reinforce Starlight’s. Applejack and Pinkie Pie were constructing gingerbread defense towers that Twilight and Starlight enchanted to fire sugar-crystal arrows and flaming jelly drop artillery, while Fluttershy flew overhead tracking the Ginger-changelings, and Rainbow Dash rained down chestnuts whenever she could get a good shot in, smashing cookie bugs by the dozens with each shot.
Starlight lost track of time during the pitched battle. Waves of Ginger-changelings advanced upon them. Eventually, and with a lot of shouting, they began driving the Ginger-changelings back towards their home base at Padoru Keep. With each victory, each recaptured block of gingerbread, each fallen cookie bug, and each recovered gumdrop became resources to reinforce and regenerate their own soldiers and towers, and eventually build new ones, on a tempo that not even Ginger-Chrysalis could keep up with.
Finally, the Ginger-changelings were driven back to a last defensive line around Padoru Keep. “Out, out, damned bugs!” came the evil, tinny, gingery voice. “Defend your Queen! Our victory is yet at hand!”
Then, one resounding THOCK from above, and a pegasus-volleyed chestnut smashed open the last of Ginger-Chrysalis’ defensive lines. “There’s a gap in her defenses, to your south!” Rainbow Dash cried out. “Send ‘em in!”
“On the way!” Twilight’s artillery launched a last volley of catapulted gumdrops, and the cookie demon’s shield spell failed, just as Starlight’s hero unit rushed in, escorted by heavy cavalry.
“No! No! Nooooo! My magic! My domain! My minions!” Ginger-Chrysalis shrieked as it fell under ferocious attack.
Starlight picked up the defenseless cookie from the Ginger-soldiers surrounding it. “And now, you’re just… dessert.” She said, with a smile.
“You will regret this! Mark my words, pony, Quee-”
And then Starlight bit Ginger-Chrysalis’s head off, slowly savoring the pungent, crispy gingerbread and the minty-green gumdrop eyes.
With the Spirit of Chrysalis de-corporealized, the magic in the table, at last, faded, transforming all of the guards and changelings and towers and castles back into cookies, to loud cheers from all assembled.
Starlight savored the last bites of the vanquished demon-sweet. And then she remembered what she had done. The ginger turned sour in her stomach, and her heart welled up with shame. So while her friends cheered and hugged, Starlight took her chance, and ran.
“I’m sorry…” she said, over and over again, to everyone and no one. “I’m sorry…”
But she did not run far.
Pinkie found Starlight outside in the hallway a few minutes later. She was just sitting there, eyes glassy with tears beneath a big holiday wreath.
“Starlight?” Pinkie asked. “What’s wrong? That was the most fun I’ve ever had with gingerbread since Twilight nearly…”
Starlight looked at her with wide and glassy eyes, and started sobbing.
Pinkie just looked confused. “Uh… did I mess something up?”
“Nuh-uh.” Starlight shook her head, sniffling. “I did.”
“You heard Twilight! It’s not your fault! It was an accident. It’s just the table is broken and magically weird and sometimes it brings all the magic we’ve put into it into the real world but in gingerbread form, including ginger-changelings. It’s fine! She can fix it! She knows this stuff. And so do…”
Then Starlight started sobbing even harder. “No, Pinkie, it was me. It was all me. I used magic. That’s what caused all this. I know I wasn’t supposed to and I’m thin ice with all of you already and you’re probably going to report me to Celestia and Luna and…”
“Wait, what?” Pinkie yelped. “You think we’re all going to kick you out and banish you and put you in a dungeon in the place where you get banished to over making a gingerbread house?”
Starlight just nodded, tears running down her face. “Yes. Celestia knows you have every right to for what I did.”
“Well…” said Pinkie, a quizzical look on her face, “... we’re not. Not on Hearth’s Warming. Preeeetty sure not ever. I mean, I don’t want to speak for Twilight, but giving up on her friends is not a Twilight Thing. Trust me on that one. Been there, done that, got my personality changed a couple of times and then changed back by her to prove it.” Pinkie sat down next to Starlight. “This… this really scared you, didn’t it?”
Starlight nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“Doooo…you want to talk about it?”
“I… I guess.”
“Oh! Okay then. Be right back!” Pinkie zoomed away and returned in roughly three seconds, with two mugs of steaming hot cocoa, multiple marshmallows floating in them and all. “Empathy cocoa. Helps when you’ve gotta spill something and it’s not something silly, which is what we do when we spill tea, but it’s something serious and sad and you need to spill something that makes you feel better, and that’s when you spill the empathy cocoa. Sorry. Oh, and these too.” She handed Starlight one of the mugs, and then pulled a box of tissues out of her hair.
Starlight laughed, just a little. Pinkie was the strangest pony she’d ever met, but also seemed to know just what to say, no matter how weird. “Thank you,” Starlight whispered.
“It’s what I do,” Pinkie said, taking her mug back. “So go on… what’s all this about?”
Starlight took a sip of the cocoa, and just a bit of a smile came back to her face. “I thought… I thought we were doing a contest.”
“A contest? On Hearth’s Warming?” Pinkie asked. “Why…” she coughed. “Nope, nope, nope, nope. Nope. Not here to judge you. Go on.”
Starlight continued. “When I was growing up, everything in my village around Hearth’s Warming turned into some kind of contest to see who could be the best. Everything. Ice skating. Gift wrapping. Snowpony building. Cider mulling. Carol singing. Even snowball fights were a two-week long double-elimination tournament. Prizes for the winners, all kinds! Nothing for the losers. And pretty much every foal knew that what you weren’t good at, you didn’t try to do. Ever.”
“But gingerbread-house-making?” Pinkie asked, a look of concern on her face.
“Oh, especially gingerbread-house-making.” Starlight nodded sadly, as a flood of bad memories came back. “That was one of the few Hearth’s Warming things I was even kind of good at. I saw how the older colts were using their model-making tools to make really fancy designs. So I started doing that. Then adding in magic spells. My last Hearth’s Warming, I won first place.”
“Really?” Pinkie asked.
“Really. And… it was the worst feeling I ever felt.”
Pinkie’s face was turning several different shades of concerned now. “Really???”
“Big time really,” Starlight said, with a sigh. “It didn’t make me happy at all. I didn’t accomplish anything. A season that’s supposed to be about joy and family and celebration and being together… and our whole town was measuring how much they loved their foals by the number of prizes they won. And… that’s when I started hating Hearth’s Warming. And pretty soon, everything else about special talents and cutie marks. I mean, I’d never liked them ever since Sunburst got packed off to Magic School without saying goodbye. But that one Hearth’s Warming…” Starlight shuddered. “That was when I decided that everything about them… about us… was wrong, and had to go. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t… It just hurt. And I swore that I’d change things. I’d change everything.”
There was a moment of silence. Starlight looked over at Pinkie, who had a look on her face of utter horror, one hoof raised, as if trying to make sense of something.
“Pinkie?” Starlight asked.
“So you’re telling me you’ve never had any kind of fun or laughter or joy during Hearth’s Warming because it was all turned into competition and it was so not fun for you that you decided that pony society had to be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up with nopony having any special talents at all?”
Starlight nodded, slowly. “…Yyyeeees?”
Pinkie shook her head so fast Starlight could hear bells ringing, and not the holiday kind. “No WONDER you became a supervillain! If I’d never had fun on Hearth’s Warming because it was all turned into not-fun, I’D HAVE BECOME A SUPERVILLAIN TOO!”
Starlight’s eyes began to form tears again. “Well… when you…”
Then Starlight Glimmer was interrupted by the biggest, glompiest, hug she’d ever had. And her cocoa spilled.
“Oh, Starlight. That must have been horrible for you! An entire season of fun turned into… well… what’s the 100% opposite of fun… hmm…”
“Work?” Starlight asked.
“Even work can be fun if you’ve got the right job and you’re doing something that makes you happy no matter how hard it gets,” Pinkie said. “But your Hearth’s Warmings weren’t that. They were… they were… anti-fun. It’s like fun, but with a completely opposite spin and charge, and when fun and anti-fun collide they destroy each other and everything around them, which is something only science ponies talk about, but I was talking to Discord and he said he had some friends in another dimension who used something like that to make spaceships run and it was honestly the craziest thing I’d ever heard but now,” Pinkie took a deep breath, “now I get it. Now I get you.”
“I… I didn’t realize there was anything about me worth… getting.” Starlight said.
And Pinkie only took Starlight’s muzzle in her hooves, and pressed her forehead against her own. “I’m sorry. We should have asked you about this stuff first,” Pinkie said. “We shouldn’t have tried to make you do something that you’d only done as not-fun.”
“But…” Starlight said, turning away, “pretty much everything I learned how to do I had to learn by competing with other ponies. Which means… I don’t think I’ve had fun in my entire life.”
Starlight swore she heard something like fireworks going off in Pinkie’s head. Then her pinkest, kindest friend looked right at her. “Then hold on to your hooves, because I got an idea for the bestest present ever for you!”
As Starlight watched, Pinkie reached into her mane and pulled out, in order, a scroll of parchment, a bottle of ink, a fancy quill, and a book that Starlight had to tilt her head to read, with the title of ROYAL HOUSEHOLD CORRESPONDENCE DRAFTING MANUAL. And before she could say anything, Pinkie had filled an entire sheet of parchment with what sounded like a jackhammer, but was just the quill pen. Pinkie dropped the pen, which was now smoking with black ink-steam. Then she only said, “berightback!”
She zoomed back into the map room where Twilight and the others were, filling up trays with Ginger Guards and Ginger-Changeling cookies. Starlight crept to the door, and saw Pinkie run up to Twilight and yell “Twilight! Sign this!”
“Pinkie…” Twilight said, “I just don’t sign…”
“IT’S A SIX-ALARM HEARTH’S WARMING FRIENDSHIP EMERGENCY, TWILIGHT!!!” Pinkie yelled.
“Pinkie, calm down and…” Starlight watched as Pinkie jammed the scroll in Twilight’s face, and then watched as Twilight’s face turned from annoyance, to curiosity, to concern, to sadness, to a look of pure joy. “I see. But this… is a job for more than just me.” Twilight made her own quill and ink appear. Then she motioned for Pinkie to sign it, and then Rarity, Applejack, Fluttershy, and Rainbow Dash, before the Princess of Friendship herself signed.
And then the Princess beckoned her student–Starlight Glimmer–back to the map table. “Starlight, it looks like we have one more Hearth’s Warming present for you.”
Starlight approached, cautiously, unsure of herself, the half-full mug of empathy cocoa in her hoof. But the eyes of her friends urged her onward, not toward a pile of gingerbread houses turned into sentient armies of sugar and fortifications of spice, but towards her friends.
Twilight handed Starlight the signed scroll, which she read.
A ROYAL PROCLAMATION
OF
THE PRINCESSCOUNCIL OF FRIENDSHIP
WHEREAS, Starlight Glimmer is a unicorn of incredible magical power;
AND WHEREAS, Despite all of her talent with magic, Starlight Glimmer has never had a Hearth’s Warming, Hearth’s Warming Eve, or Hearth’s Warming Season where she has ever had or done anything fun; with all of the fun of the season replaced by competition, stress, and a whole lot of anti-fun;
AND WHEREAS, Hearth’s Warming Eve is about doing things that are fun and bring everypony joy and laughter;
AND WHEREAS, Having never had any fun on Hearth’s Warming, Starlight Glimmer (totally and completely understandably) became a supervillain who almost destroyed time, space, and cutie marks;
AND WHEREAS, Starlight Glimmer became a Student in all matters of Friendship.
AND WHEREAS, The purpose of Hearth’s Warming Eve is to be with your Friends;
AND WHEREAS, Starlight Glimmer, by her magic,not only proved that the Royal Map Table still functions, but also gave us the most excitement we’ve had with Gingerbread since Twilight’s enchanted sugar gem-making project nearly burned down Golden Oak Library her second year in Ponyville;
AND WHEREAS, We, the Council of Friendship, consider Starlight Glimmer to be Our Friend, no matter what;
BE IT RESOLVED: That Starlight Glimmer is dispensed from any Hearth’s Warming Activity, Game, Function, or Event that she does not consider fun;
AND BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED: That Starlight Glimmer is nevertheless encouraged to partake in all such Hearth’s Warming Activities, Games, Functions, and Events; without need to compete, be stressed, or be driven to use of magic solely to impress her Friends, and without Fear of Banishment, Dungeons, or Banishment To Dungeons;
AND BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED: That Starlight Glimmer is and always will be Our Friend, and will be for Many Hearth’s Warmings To Come.
IN WITNESS THEREOF, WE SET OUR HOOVES:
Twilight Sparkle
PRINCESS OF FRIENDSHIP & ELEMENT OF MAGIC
Pinkamena “Pinkie” Pie
ELEMENT OF LAUGHTER
Fluttershy :)
ELEMENT OF KINDNESS
RARITY
ELEMENT OF GENEROSITY
Applejack
ELEMENT OF HONESTY
Rainbow Dash
ELEMENT OF LOYALTY
A M I C I T I A
M A G I A
E S T
“Happy Hearth’s Warming, Starlight.” Pinkie said to Starlight, with another glomping hug.
“Happy Hearth’s Warming, Pinkie,” Starlight said, softly. “It’s just what I needed. Thank you.”
“Soooo…” Pinkie said, “how about another try at building gingerbread houses? No magic, no spells, no table enchantings…”
“And no Ginger-changelings?”
“Well, of course Ginger-changelings. And Ginger-soldiers. And ginger towers, and hero ginger units too! They were really tasty! I didn’t know you could bake so well! But can you make them… I dunno, not alive? Easier to eat them that way…”
And Starlight laughed. And this time, she really, actually, no-kidding, laughed.
