In all honesty, Cadance expected to find herself dead. Instead, she was frozen in wonder at the base of a mountain, a spiraling pathway leading up to a castle at the top, holding itself up against gravity through some miracle of magic, not a single crystal in sight. No smoke, no snow, no red glow on the horizon, the sun bright and pleasant in the sky, even the chirp of birds signalling the kind of syrupy day she’d enjoyed as a foal, before her ascension.
First things first. She sent a broad dispelling wave in an encompassing sphere around her, blunt and traumatic on the magical weave, something even the defest illusion should buckle and shatter at. She infused her hooves with the strength around her, old oaks and just-fallen leaves filling her with unexpectedly potent life, like nothing she’d experienced before, and flung it at the encroaching abyssal clawing its way into reality. The snakelike abomination withered with an aborted scream, utterly dissolved, along with a swathe of land large enough to act as a landmark.
She blinked.
Apparently, she needed to sit down, stand back, and revisit several of her assumptions, because right now, nothing was making sense. The omnipresent winter of the wendigos was entirely absent, life was sprawling and plentiful about her, and an entire castle she had no knowledge of stood proudly before her. She stood surrounded, not by the last dwindling gasp of civilization, an Empire in a sea of entropy, but by life, light, and mystery.
Or an illusion so strong or sophisticated it could stand up to an unravelling of base reality, but at that point she may as well posit the existence of gods.
She stretched her field out to the sun above, expecting the usual messy patchwork interface tangled with the ghosts of unicorns, spirits, wendigos, all below Sombra’s massive, messy control scheme. Instead, she found … nothing. No interface fields, no interlaced magical threads fighting for control of the single most powerful source of magic on the planet, only pure, unadulterated heat and health. Absentmindedly, she stretched her field around it, greedily sucking power like a starving foal, revitalizing her Presence in an instant. In mere moments, she felt powerful enough to match Sombra hoof-to-hoof. Ticks after that, she was confident she could take him down without a mortal blow. As time stretched on, her field unfolding from a merely mortal frame into the fabled alicorn stature of times long since gone, more magic than flesh, she finally wondered where he was. There was no concealing the Presence she now was, not in the magical weave she sensed around her, unbent by eldritch forces, harmonious but for the single chaotic bent she’d punched in reality on arrival.
A state of affairs that would’ve taken hundreds upon hundreds of years of uninterrupted healing to achieve.
With full access to the sun above, Cadance would’ve been content to lie there until she grew bloated on power, able to fight an entire cohort of elder alicorns through sheer magical might.
Of course, such a thing wasn’t meant to be. An unsecured power source of that size meant magical predators she couldn’t even comprehend, which she would’ve immediately understood if she weren’t dazed and discombobulated, sent through some unknown process to a world absent of any other apparent Presences.
So it was with a dazed, slow-motion sense of horror that she observed a tear in reality open up before her, depositing an unknown alicorn with a serene expression and a Presence that screamed eldritch horror right at her hooves.
They ended up having tea.
Cadance watched, agape, as the self-proclaimed Princess of the Sun conjured up table, pillows, and china into existence straight from the ether, tethering her very self to the material world solely for the sake of setting an atmosphere.
Bold, dangerous, idiotic, reckless, stunningly confident, Cadance couldn’t decide what to label that kind of action.
Said Princess took a sip. Cadance did the same, despite every instinct screaming trap. It tasted delicious.
“You have me at a disadvantage,” said the mass of power and poise sitting before her. Cadance said nothing, waiting for the punchline. “You know me, I expect, yet I have no knowledge of you. I know better than to assume the worst. So, educate me. I am, as ever, a faithful student.”
Right, well, if ever there was a time to put her cards on the table—or flee—it was now. Cadance sighed, shook out her wings, drew deeply on her still, for some reason, uninterrupted link to the sun, and spoke. “Last I knew, the world was dying. No light save for what we could scavenge from the sun and moon, generations of crystal magitech giving us only one last dying breath against the cold, and a former companion subverting everything we’d worked for all for the sake of personal power. It turned to pitched battle, every move on either side drawing sparse resources away from the Crystal Heart, a situation where we both lost more and more the longer it drew on. I know nothing of you, or this world.”
The other alicorn drew forward, tea forgotten beside her, sun gleaming off her crown, entirely disregarding Cadance’s grasp on her source of power. “Really. There are records of those times, of an artifact and civilization as you described, lost in the Frozen North. You’d be Princess Cadenza, I expect, and your counterpart the alicorn known as King Sombra. All quite before my time. You can call me Celestia, and dispense with any formalities.”
As it happened, this idyllic seeming world wasn’t quite as it appeared. Celestia quickly took Cadance into her confidence, explaining a dizzying list of problems held at bay through slapdash, last-minute solutions, quick thinking, old artifacts with potentially subversive motives, and allies turned enemies. The moon actively fought against Celestia’s control, with Cadance unable to even touch the chaotic source of power, and about a million millenia-spanning threats were about to crash down all at once, among them the Crystal Empire itself, bound to appear in that stretch of land now termed the Frozen North in only a few short decades. An alicorn reportedly more powerful than Celestia would break free of her lunar prison just before, a demiplane known as Tartarus had frequent prison breaks, and a strange species known as changelings were constantly abducting ponies all across the nation. It was a state of affairs Cadance was entirely unequipped to handle, even with the older alicorn’s steady tutoring.
Along with Cadance herself, the other alicorn held dual classes with her other pupil, a unicorn known as Sunset Shimmer who took an instant dislike to her, taking every opportunity to needle her. It left her baffled.
The one saving grace of the entire situation was a lack of time to think, to dwell. Cadance found herself overwhelmed with things to do, things to learn, mental mountains to climb as the coming apocalypses loomed nearer and nearer. Sunset ended up blowing up at them both, fleeing through a portal to another dimension, and leaving them both in the lurch. The other alicorn in the moon partially slipped through her magical bonds ahead of schedule, sending a steady stream of nightmares down to torment the ponies below. Some devoured those they tormented before either Cadance of Celestia could locate them in time, in one instance consuming an entire rural village.
One changeling ended up heading the swarm based out in the Badlands south of Equestria, dominating her subjects with an iron will and subverting several outposts before the operations were discovered, spiking up to the level of a weaker alicorn before deftly slipping back into hiding.
Everything was spiralling out of control, every minor problem given just the barest attention to keep it from blowing out of proportion before they had to head to the next, and the next, and the next, an exhausting deluge that made Cadance wish at times for the simplicity of her face-off against Sombra, before she had to go to on to avert yet another disaster.
She could see why Celestia would throw up her hooves and rely upon instruments as unreliable as the Elements of Harmony, as corrupted as the Alicorn Amulet, as impossible to find as the Staff of Sorrow. Find a tool, any tool, that might keep whatever was coming their way from spiraling into an unstoppable wave of destruction. Did it work? Perfect. Done. Keep it in the arsenal, task the overburdened research sector with keeping it from blowing up in their faces, and keep the Pony of Shadows confined to the Everfree for another year.
Cadance wondered, as she often did when she had a spare tick to think, whether Sombra would wind up as yet another blip on her radar. There for an instant, until Celestia dredged up another artifact from ages past, blasted into space or Tartarus or stasis, resolved for the moment, and then left to dwell uneasily in the ‘sort-of-resolved’ category along with Grogar, Discord, Luna, Tirek, and so very, very many others.
Then Celestia found the next Sunset Shimmer, a precious little foal whose instant grasp of magic and towering intellect made Cadance feel downright small in comparison, and suddenly that was her entire world. Then that became her and she became Twily, Celestia deftly taking on the entire world at once while Cadance found herself foalsitting.
After everything leading up to that point, she couldn’t say she minded.
