The Mean Princess

“Come on, Twilight. Admit it. You got us lost.”

Twilight Sparkle looked up from the glowing projection floating in front of her face to shoot a withering glare at Rainbow Dash. Rainbow simply crossed her forelegs as she continued to flap her wings in a lazy hover.

"What?" Rainbow cried. "Being in denial won’t help anypony. The sooner you accept that you got us lost, the sooner we can start working on getting back on track."

Twilight set her jaw before looking back toward the projection. Bathed in the soft magenta of her magic, an overhead view of the Everfree Forest was displayed as a hologram.

Although the display looked normal up until the Castle of the Two Sisters, a little ways beyond that things started getting strange. Certain areas in the hologram were missing entirely, as if they did not exist. Other areas had some terrain overlapping the same space as existing terrain, with little red and blue arrows pointing in different directions peppered around the strange anomalies.

Biting her lip, Twilight looked away from the hologram and slowly scanned the forest around her. As her focus passed over the area to her rear, her eyes were drawn to two Royal Guards nearby, both huddled over a paper map spread out over the ground as they whispered amongst themselves. She quickly averted her gaze and finished her examination of the forest before returning her focus to the projection.

"I think we’re here," Twilight said, pointing her hoof to a section of trees just below one of the areas of superimposed terrain. She paused, hesitant, before moving a little red holographic circle over the location she had indicated.

"What do you think?" she asked, looking up at Rainbow Dash.

Rainbow shrugged. "I already told you I can’t make heads or tails of that map of yours, Twi. This is all you."

Twilight frowned before once again looking to her rear. "Sergeant Shield Wall?"

An earth pony stallion dressed in the traditional gleaming golden armor of Celestia’s Solar Guard looked up from his map. Seeing Twilight’s expectant gaze, he gave her a short nod before standing up to face her. His enchanted white coat was pristine and almost glowed with light, despite the rough trek through the woods that he had just undertaken.

"Apologies, Twilight," he said. "Our paper maps are outdated to the point of uselessness, so we haven’t been able to come up with our position or direction."

Nodding toward Rainbow, the sergeant continued. "And I’m afraid I have to agree with Lieutenant Rainbow Dash. Your holo-map is too convoluted, so we can’t help you with reading it."

"I see. Thank you for your efforts, Shield," Twilight said, although she kept the frown on her face. She turned back to face Rainbow.

"Are you sure we can’t just fly up and head back to the castle that way?"

"Sure," Rainbow said. "If you wanna fly around all this weird stuff with no frame of reference at all, we can do that. Of course, we’ll each need to carry one of the guards, and we might even be able to stick together as a group for a minute or two!"

Twilight sighed. "Alright. Well, if we are where I think we are, we just need to keep heading that way." Twilight pointed forward with a hoof. "And we should reach the Castle of the Two Sisters in about half an hour."

"You said that an hour ago," Rainbow muttered, but Twilight was already starting to move out on her own. The guards quickly packed away their map and scrambled to follow after her.

The dull orange tones of the setting sun filtered in through the canopy, illuminating the barren forest floor with a fading warm glow. Rainbow had joined the rest of the party in walking on her own four hooves, opting to give her wings a rest. Taking up position just behind Twilight, she kept her ears and eyes on a swivel, lazily scanning back and forth across the forest for any hint of danger.

However, Twilight’s constant muttering made it difficult to really listen for anything that would approach the group. Considering the length of time the two ponies had known each other, it was easy for Dash to recognize that Twilight had started going off on one of her infamous freak-out episodes a good forty-five minutes ago. She knew that telling Twilight to relax would probably just spark an argument. So she walked silently nearby, ready to support Twilight whenever she decided that she needed her.

Still, Rainbow’s wings and hooves were killing her, and it didn’t look like Twilight was about to stop walking anytime soon. Maybe it would do good to suggest a breather.

"Twi, don’t you think we should take a break?" Rainbow asked, interrupting Twilight’s muttering.

Twilight spun around, eyes wide and strands of her mane sticking up at odd angles. "Take a break? It’s already sunset! It’ll be dark soon!"

"Everypony’s tired, Twi." Rainbow pointed to the guards behind her with a wing, who were visibly sagging. "It’d be dumb to keep walking til we drop. We won’t be able to fight if we get attacked by some monster."

"But our chances of getting attacked will increase exponentially once Celestia finishes setting the sun. We need to get back to the castle now!" Twilight retorted.

Rainbow sighed and held a hoof up to her temple. "We’ve been walking around for hours. We haven’t found the castle in all that time, and we’re not gonna find it before nightfall. We need to rest."

Twilight held Rainbow’s gaze for a few moments, then shifted her head to stare at the ground.

Finally, she pursed her lips and folded her ears back. "Okay. Let’s rest for a while," she mumbled.

Rainbow nodded and started moving for the shade beneath a large redwood tree, with Twilight and the guards following after her. Reaching the tree, Rainbow fell to her haunches and leaned against it with a long sigh, finally alleviating the pressure from her legs. The rest of the group sat down similarly nearby.

Twilight laid down on her belly, supporting her muzzle with her forelegs. Her ears continued to droop as she lit her horn and brought back the holographic map, but she hardly even looked at it. Instead she stared blankly ahead, gazing straight through the projection.

Rainbow felt a twist in her gut at just how miserable Twilight looked. Groaning softly as she got back to her hooves, she repositioned herself right alongside Twilight before also laying down on her belly. She extended her wing across Twilight’s withers and pressed their barrels together.

Twilight seemed to notice Dash for the first time, and lifted her head to give her a quizzical look. Dash simply smiled back.

After a moment, Twilight let her head drop with a sigh before closing her eyes. "I don’t understand," she said quietly. "We haven’t seen a single flare, no matter how many I send up."

She punctuated that statement by bringing forth a blindingly bright magenta orb to the tip of her horn. After a moment, the orb shot up toward the sky like a cannonball. When it cleared the top of the forest’s canopy, it exploded into a brilliant purple starburst.

Rainbow could feel Twilight holding her breath under her wing as she desperately scanned the horizon in all directions. A few minutes later, and with nothing happening, Twilight’s energy seemed to drain out of her as she let out a long sigh and once again let her head droop onto her forelegs.

"There has to be a logical explanation, Twi," Rainbow soothed as she rubbed Twilight’s back with her wing. "Maybe they can’t see your flares, or maybe they can but they’re unable to send a reply for some reason. Either way, we’ll just have to navigate back to the castle on our own."

Twilight simply grunted, and the two of them remained in that position for several minutes while the sunlight filtering through the branches slowly decreased in brightness.

Finally, Rainbow spoke up again. "We should get to work on setting up camp."

Twilight frowned, but she didn’t protest. Rainbow retracted her wing and stood up before motioning to the guards. They worked together to unpack a pair of small drab green tents from their saddlebags while Twilight watched from where she lay. Inside of fifteen minutes, both tents were staked to the ground and ready for use.

"We’ll see you in the morning then, Twilight, Lieutenant," Shield Wall said as he and his partner moved toward one of the tents. "Don’t worry about staying up to keep watch. That’s what the two of us are here for."

Rainbow nodded. "Thanks guys. Goodnight."

"Goodnight."

After the two guards had finished entering their tent, Rainbow turned around and approached Twilight. She motioned toward their own tent with a jerk of her head. "Coming?"

Twilight got to her hooves before giving each of them a little stretch. Rainbow almost wanted to make a quip about how nice it must’ve been to lay down, relax, and watch her and the guards work on the tents, but she decided against it.

Briefly lighting her horn, Twilight pushed the flaps aside with her magic as she walked into their shared little tent. Rainbow followed behind her, using her foreleg to push the flaps aside as she passed them.

The interior of the tent was tiny, with only enough space to fit their two sleeping bags and nothing else. Twilight had already laid down on her back on top of her own sleeping bag in the time it took Rainbow to enter. With her head on her pillow and her legs splayed, Twilight stared up at the tent ceiling unblinkingly.

Rainbow frowned before moving forward and slowly lowering herself onto her side, facing Twilight. "Equestria to Twilight?"

Twilight moved her eyes to stare at Rainbow.

"You’ve been out of it since we stopped to rest. Are you okay?"

Twilight blinked. "Sorry. I’m trying to determine why my mapping spell is so inaccurate. There must be something wrong with the methodologies I’m using to collect data about the local space-time. Or perhaps the data itself is correct, but the interpretation is erroneous? I just know I’m missing something, so I’m going through the spell matrix step by step and verifying that each step produces the expected outputs from its given inputs."

"That makes sense." Like hay it did. "So did you find the problem?"

Twilight shook her head. "Not yet. I’ve triple checked each operation, and all of them are doing exactly what they are supposed to. Yet the map is still inaccurate, so that can only mean that the entire design of the spell is based on incorrect premises."

Rainbow hummed. "Well, why don’t we sleep on it? Maybe an idea on how to fix it will come to you in a dream."

"I suppose," Twilight sighed.

"Here, lift up for a sec," Rainbow said as she used a forehoof to grab Twilight’s sleeping bag cover. Twilight lit her horn and levitated herself just a smidge upward, allowing Rainbow to pull the cover out from underneath her body. When Twilight settled back down, Rainbow drew the cover over Twilight and tucked her in.

"There. Everything good? Do you need to go to the bathroom?"

A fierce blush lit up Twilight’s face as she quickly shook her head.

"Alright, good." Rainbow got off her own sleeping bag before scooting it closer to Twilight’s side. Spreading her hooves and arching her back, Rainbow completed one last stretch before getting into her sleeping bag and tucking herself in.

Turning toward Twilight, Rainbow gave her a gentle nuzzle underneath her chin. "Goodnight, Twilight. Give that brain of yours a break and try to sleep, okay? We’ll get out of this tomorrow. We always do."

Twilight nodded and wordlessly returned the nuzzle, rubbing her nose against Rainbow’s cheek.

On the very edge of her awareness, Rainbow Dash could make out a dull thud. Her ears made a quick flick as she shifted in her position slightly, before she rested the side of her head back against Twilight’s and once again began to slip into the darkness of unconsciousness.

"Princess Twilight, Lieutenant Rainbow, come quickly!"

The loud call shattered Rainbow’s blissful rest, and she groggily snapped her eyes open. At the same time, she could hear a soft groan come from the mare beside her, no doubt sharing Rainbow’s unhappiness about the sudden awakening.

Blinking her unfocused eyes into the darkness, Rainbow finally noticed that their tent flap was being held open by the darkened silhouette of one of their Royal Guards. Just as Rainbow was about to ask what was going on, another dull thud echoed through the forest. The sound was not loud, but it was distinct, with a sharp crack that seemed to bounce all around. The lengthy delays between the echoes told Rainbow that the source was quite distant.

"Quickly," the guard urged as he frantically beckoned with a hoof. Rainbow recognized the voice as belonging to Sergeant Shield Wall.

Twilight’s mind was the first to catch up to the situation. She quickly freed her body from the sleeping bag and scrambled onto her hooves. The sudden movement beside Rainbow jolted her into her own action, and in a moment she was right on Twilight’s tail making her way out of the tent.

When the two of them had cleared the tent flaps, Sergeant Shield beckoned them a few steps further. After they moved away from the tents and any other nearby obstacles, Shield stopped, and then pointed with a hoof toward the sky above the treetops.

Rainbow and Twilight turned their gazes to where Shield was pointing. A second later, a bright yellow ball of light rose into the sky in the distance, and then exploded into a radiant starburst. The sharp crack and dull echoing thud of the distant detonation reached them a moment later.

"The flare from the Castle of the Two Sisters," Twilight gasped.

"It’s so far away," Rainbow added.

Twilight immediately brought up her holographic map and aligned their current position with the direction the flares were coming from. Her lips pulled down into a frown.

"And it’s in the wrong direction," she said. "I thought I was leading us out of the Everfree, but we’ve actually been walking deeper into the forest this whole time."

"It’s not your fault, Twilight," Rainbow said as she moved to stand closer to her friend. "We all know that the wild magic is making this place go haywire. But at least now we have a proper direction to follow. In the morning we can start making our way out of here."

"No."

Rainbow Dash leaned back. "No?"

"No," Twilight repeated. Another bright yellow flare exploded in the distance, and Twilight pointed her hoof at it. "We’re not going to give the forest another chance to get us lost again. We’re going to follow those flares immediately and get out of here right now."

"Wha—?" Rainbow was dumbstruck. In the few seconds it took her to recover, Twilight had already started determinedly marching off in the direction the flares were coming from. Rainbow hastily flapped her wings to catch up to her and then landed in front of her.

"Whoa, whoa," Rainbow exclaimed, waving her forelegs. "We can’t just march off right now. It’s the middle of the night!"

"So?" Twilight asked.

"So it’s dangerous! You said it yourself yesterday that our chances of getting attacked would increase during the night. It’s too dark to see anything, and who knows what kind of creatures stalk the Everfree in the darkness, especially now."

Twilight responded by lighting her horn and projecting a large cone of bright magenta light forward. It was akin to a spotlight that lit everything up in front of them, piercing through the gloom of the forest.

"That’s even worse," Rainbow shouted. "It’ll completely destroy our night vision."

Twilight looked Rainbow in the eyes and gave her a gentle smile. "Rainbow, relax. I’m an alicorn, remember? I’ll be able to handle anything in this forest. Don’t worry. I’ll protect us."

Rainbow struggled to form the words she needed to convince Twilight that this was a bad idea. She glanced back toward the tents, where she spotted Sergeant Shield helping his partner out of his tent. Evidently he had been fast asleep during this whole ordeal.

"Sergeant!" Rainbow called. "Help me out, will you?"

The guard eyed Rainbow, then Twilight, before turning back to Rainbow again. "I agree with you, Lieutenant. Unfortunately, once the Princess wills something, we’re not going to be able to convince her otherwise."

"See?" Twilight gave Rainbow a pat on her withers with her forehoof. "It’ll be fine. Now let’s go."

Twilight brushed past Rainbow, once again starting toward the direction of the flares. Rainbow bit her lip as she glanced back toward the tents. The two guards hastily made to follow Twilight, apparently finding no problem with simply abandoning the tents where they were.

"Wait!" Rainbow shouted toward Twilight. "What about the tents? We can’t just leave them here."

All of a sudden, both tents glowed magenta and were lifted up into the air, stakes and all. Then they began to float in the direction Twilight had gone. Rainbow groaned, knowing she had no choice now but to follow.

Flapping her wings and kicking herself into the air, Rainbow quickly caught up to the group. She settled in to a slow flight beside Twilight, keeping pace with her friend’s gait. From the way Twilight was looking ahead with determination, Rainbow knew that there was no talking sense into the mare at this point. So she decided that she might as well do what she could to keep the group safe, and began scanning the forest for any threats.

Of course, this was easier said than done. The bright spotlight that Twilight was creating made it impossible for Rainbow to see into the darkness of the forest in any direction that the light wasn’t pointing in. In an attempt to compensate, Rainbow switched her focus to her ears, hoping that she might be able to hear the footsteps of any approaching creatures before they got too close. However, even with her ears pointing straight up and wide open, it was difficult to distinguish anything apart from the hoofsteps of Twilight and the guards, the soft tinkling sound of Twilight’s magic, and the rhythmic rush of air caused by her own wingbeats.

Not to mention the fact that Twilight’s spotlight was announcing their position to everything like a beacon. They must have been visible for miles.

"Twilight," Rainbow started hesitantly. "Please turn your light off. We won’t be able to see in the darkness, and you’re letting every creature in this forest know where we are."

"But how are we meant to see where we’re going without a light?" Twilight replied.

Rainbow sighed and decided to drop the issue. She would focus on doing her job the best she could instead of having an unwinnable argument.

She was so focused on her own senses that she lost track of time as the group continued onward without any conversation. Perhaps ten or twenty minutes of walking later, the group entered a small clearing within the forest.

Halfway through the clearing, Rainbow was brought out of her concentration when her ears picked up a faint sound on the very edge of her hearing. She flew forward so Twilight would be able to see her and then signaled the group to stop with a hoof.

"Anypony else hear that?" Rainbow whispered.

As Rainbow landed on the ground to silence her wingbeats, Twilight and the guards came to a stop and perked their ears. The night was deathly silent, save for the soft chime of Twilight’s horn light.

A moment after listening carefully, Twilight nodded her head and then set the levitating tents down nearby. The guards, however, both shook their heads in a negative.

Rainbow did her best to listen past Twilight’s magical jingle in order to identify the unknown sound. It took a while to get a clear picture since the sound was so faint, but the best Rainbow could come up with was that it seemed to be a very muffled rumble originating from the ground.

Focusing her senses to her hooves, Rainbow could just barely feel the ground trembling ever so slightly. She turned to Twilight.

"Is it an earthquake?" she asked softly.

Twilight closed her eyes and remained motionless for a few moments.

Rainbow was about to repeat her question before Twilight’s eyes snapped open and focused on her.

"It’s getting closer," Twilight spoke breathlessly. "Earthquakes don’t move."

Rainbow had been so certain in her judgment that she stopped paying attention. Sure enough, the rumble was steadily becoming more audible, and the tremor was becoming more intense.

"I can hear it now," one of the guards offered up. "What do we do, Princess?"

"Stay together," Twilight replied. She unfurled her wings and took off to hover just above the ground in front of the guards.

Rainbow followed, taking up a defensive position in the air on the opposite side of the two guards from Twilight.

"What kind of creature is it, Twilight?" Rainbow asked while she tensely scanned the clearing for any hint of movement.

"I have no clue," Twilight said. "I just know it’s coming right for us."

As the moments passed in anxious silence, the rumble steadily grew in volume until it was loud enough to make the ponies fold their ears.

Before Twilight even knew what was happening, the earth directly beneath her burst upward violently as if shooting out of a geyser.

Twilight scrambled to get a shield up to protect herself from the flying dirt and rocks, but her horn was already occupied with the light spell. She first needed to switch focus from her current spell before casting her shield, and the fraction of a second delay this caused allowed some clumps of dirt and pebbles to slam hard into her legs and the bottom of her barrel. Twilight cried in pain as she was hit, but forced herself to continue concentrating on casting her magic.

After deflecting the rest of the projectiles with her shield, Twilight gasped when she saw what the soil had been obscuring from view beneath it. Following right behind the assault from the flying dirt was a huge wide-open maw that was already closing around her.

Once again hastily switching between completely different castings with a speed only a magical prodigy like her could pull off, Twilight replaced her shield spell with a teleport spell. She then slammed all of her considerable reserves of power into the spell matrix with no regard to waste to charge it up instantly.

Before the jaws could even finish closing around her, Twilight teleported outside the mouth. It snapped closed a moment later.

Twilight’s joy at her successful escape quickly turned into alarm as she tried to flap her wings but found that she could not gain altitude. Instead, she felt a sharp pull on her tail.

"Twilight!" Rainbow yelled, but she sounded like she was behind the creature’s back.

Looking to her rear, Twilight saw that her tail was caught between the creature’s jaws. She cursed at her miscalculation. In order to prioritize the teleport’s swiftness, she had made the jump as short as possible, but she foolishly failed to take into account her tail’s positioning.

Before she could take any action to free herself, the creature whipped its head to the side with absurd speed. Twilight was launched into the air, tumbling head over hooves and flailing her wings with no control over her flight.

In the midst of her panicked spin, Twilight’s mind could only offer an irrelevant curiosity as she wondered what on Equus a tatzlwurm was doing in the Everfree.

The next thing she knew, she was crashing through trees and rolling down a hill in a violent flurry that was too chaotic to do anything to prevent. All she could do was curl into a ball and protect her head with her forehooves.

Finally coming to a stop at the base of a steep incline, Twilight simply lay there and groaned in pain. If it weren’t for her sturdy alicorn body, she was certain that most of her bones would have been shattered after something like that.

Just to make sure, she tested the motion of her legs, wings, and neck. Although she was covered in scrapes and cuts and bruises and would surely be suffering for the next few days, nothing seemed broken.

But she could worry about her injuries later. Rainbow and her guards were in trouble, and she needed to go help them.

Grunting, Twilight rolled onto her belly and made to get onto her hooves. But when she looked up, she was suddenly faced with a pair of brightly glowing red eyes. She only had time to give a short shout of surprise before consciousness left her.