Sunset Shimmer had a gag between her teeth and a burlap sack around her head, through which only the tiniest, most useless grains of light penetrated. She couldn’t see a moon-banished thing.
But she could feel, beneath her hooves, as she was led by the rope tied around her barrel, the way the mud dried into dirt a few feet before it gave way to gravel, crunching like snow and jabbing her frogs. They didn’t let her put on horseshoes for this.
It would be, of course, trivial to remove the bag – were there not a nullification band hammered down snugly at the base of her horn and chained to the bit that muzzled her.
She had tried, once.
Null rings couldn’t cut off magic to the entire horn, for there was a sliver of horn embedded too deep in the unicorn’s skull to reach without surgery, where magic from the heart pooled in the moments between charging a spell and casting it. Sunset pumped as much juice into her kelemic basin (as the anatomy textbooks called it) as she had, and she had more magic in her day-to-day reserves than some unicorns worked in their entire lives. There was a reason she was the Royal Student.
Null rings work by siphoning raw magic out of the horn before it can reach the tip and be shaped into a spell. Unworked magic outside the body rapidly decays into heat.
These rings are also wrought from metal. The composition of the alloy depends on the grade of criminal it was meant to restrain, but that didn’t matter beyond Sunset’s ego. Anything but the highest, most resilient grade of nullifier would have been an insult.
But the point is, null rings are made of metal.
Cushioned, of course, because Equestria treated its prisoners with equinity, but rubber melted in scalding black tears down your face at only a few hundred degrees Pferdenheit. This would loosen the ring, but the chain connecting it to her muzzle ensured it would stay on.
It fell far short of the – at-minimum – thousand degrees needed to melt the ring itself.
But Sunset never got there, did she?
Once that ring was hot enough to brand her forehead and fill the hayssian sack with the sour smell of her own burning hair, it was hot enough to set the burlap itself ablaze. And despite its looseness, the nullifier still did its job, trapping her head in a blinding, suffocating inferno.
And she had done their job for them.
She hadn’t tried again.
Sunset hazarded a guess where the first bare-plank step onto the platform was, but…
Bonk. Her cannon bone throbbed, and her guide did not give her a single moment to recover.
She had an uncanny knack for getting it wrong, as though her guide was purposefully leading her just far enough astray to bang her leg on it too early, or stumble when the step wasn’t where she expected it to be. One last humiliation, repeated over and over.
The old, dry boards thunked underhoof until her hooves met the drier, crumbly straw piled at the base of her destination. That same length of rope with which they led her here was used to tie her up, withers-to-wood, against the platform’s central post, tight enough she could only take the shallowest of breaths.
Only at this point did they take the bag off her head.
So who was it, this time? Who had gathered to burn the witch?
It was always hard to tell. The midday sun was unbearably bright, and it didn’t pass with a few blinks and a squint like it was supposed to. It never did.
The crowd was a bunch of blurry faces, but she knew the colors, and she knew the shapes. A bunch of fillies, barely into their growth spurts – one figure, blue-on-yellow like a brick of cheddar sprouting blue mold; two splotches like wads of chewed mint gum (one blue, one teal); one, like a tub of melted neighapolitan somepony scraped the chocolate out of; and the last… eh, Sunset was out of gross food comparisons. Red-and-violet mane on cream fur. Maybe Sunset would be able to see her better if she stole the filly’s glasses.
These were the soon-to-be underclassponies Celestia had persuaded to try and befriend her, a couple weeks back, during orientation. Sunset was by this point a graduated alum simply continuing to use the school’s resources, as was her license as Royal Student.
Apparently, the Princess had given up on trying to push adult friends on Sunset, so now she was pressuring moon-banished twelve-year-olds into it instead.
The Princess wasn’t present when these five confronted her, but all the signs were. An ambush and offer of lunch, right as Sunset had just finished demonstrating a trick she’d picked up to her old professors. They were trying to take advantage of her pride and the good mood she was in.
The only one of these squirts who was even vaguely noteworthy was that Moon Dancer foal. She probably had a future. She wasn’t on Sunset’s level – nopony who wasn’t an alicorn was – but she had the commitment to get, like, halfway there.
But now, these children held torches in their levitative grips.
This was stupid.
Even in her stupor, she was conscious of how ridiculous this all was, and yet she had to sit through it, anyways, waiting for these noponies’ torches to hover closer and closer, as slowly as ponily possible. It should have taken a matter of seconds, but it always felt closer to half an hour for them to come near enough that she could feel the heat coming off of them – and it was even worse when her executioners had earth ponies and pegasi in the mix, because then they had to actually come up to her, taking even longer.
But any second now, just before the flames could first lick the straw under her hindhooves, somepony would come swooping in with orders from the Princess to halt the execution. Ever since Sunset was twelve, those orders came from the mouth of the Princess herself.
Any second now.
Any… Any second now.
Celestia would cry “Stop!”, and the beat of her wings as she landed beside Sunset would extinguish all the flames. She’d give a cloyingly-sweet speech about mercy and patience and then she’d cut Sunset free. It would be over at last, and Sunset could get on with her life until next time.
Any moment now.
Lemon… whats-her-name, Zest? Gem? Hearts? The yellow one– The sap-soaked pine of her torch suddenly crackled and spat a spark right into the bedded kindling. It may as well have been a gunshot, so loud as it was.
So lethal as it was.
A wisp of sweet smoke rose up to meet Sunset’s nostrils, and her heart skipped a beat.
Where was Celestia?
Everypony was still holding their torches away from the straw (not that it made a difference at that point), heads craned to watch the horizon. They were all wondering the same thing. Somepony was supposed to tell them to stop by now.
Where was she? Was she late? Did they start early? Was there a miscommunication as to when Sunset Shimmer’s mock immolation was scheduled? Was Celestia going to show up tomorrow, to a field of scattered ashes, wondering where the hay her actors were?
Her hooves were getting hot. The smoke stung her throat. Sweat beaded on her brow.
“Hey,” Sunset tried to say, but even if she weren’t muzzled, her voice barely left her barrel. “Hey, put it out.”
But nopony seemed to hear her, even when she reduced herself to begging. “Please!”
Her murderers just watched the empty horizon.
After several more pleas for release, the cinders finally caught their cradle alight. Candlesque flames tickled Sunset’s frogs with their needle tongues. The squirming came unbidden, ropes creaking and stake groaning with every futile movement to climb away.
Sunset wasn’t scared of fire. She loved fire. It was her favorite answer to any magical problem.
But burns still hurt. She was only a unicorn.
It was then that a new pony, whom Sunset did not recognize, arrived to the scene: a blue mare, with a short bob of violet. She may have had a horn, but Sunset’s vision was too blurry to be sure.
Though she could barely breathe, Sunset did let out a sigh of relief. Princess Celestia must have been busy with Royal duties, so she sent an aide to call the execution off in her stead.
Sunset tried to smile at this new pony. Hopefully, it was visible through the gag.
But the new pony didn’t say a word. She just stood there, staring at Sunset. Between the oppressive sunlight and the shimmering distortion of the fire, her expression was utterly unreadable.
But she did not intervene.
Soon, Sunset couldn’t see the executioners anymore, nor the stranger that had joined them. The smoke was too thick.
The serpents in the straw slithered up her hindlegs, shredding her hair with their coppery scales, and blackening the flesh wherever they sank their envenomed fangs.
Her tail was a candle’s wick; her tallow, the wax.
Her blood was known to boil at the slightest provocation, but never before was the steam that billowed from her crackling ears and bubbling eyes so pink.
The worst part was, she couldn’t even scream, even into the muzzle. She didn’t have the breath to do so. Every cry she might have made was smothered in the bed of her lungs. All that came out was a low groan that, before long, curdled into coughing, hacking gurgles.
…
Sunset lay belly-down in bed, with all her legs pinned at odd angles beneath the weight of her barrel. Her face was buried in one pillow, which was the only thing preventing her from kissing the headboard, and another pillow apparently rode down to press against her throat.
Immediately, she became aware of the pins-and-needles sensation in all of her limbs, and, with a yelp of pain, rolled over jerkily enough to flop out of bed, half her sheets along for the ride.
When the numbness in her legs subsided, she left the quarters provided by her office as Royal Student and made her way to the breakfast hall, where Princess Celestia awaited her with a stack of fresh-baked pancakes.
“Good morning, Sunset,” she oh-so-warmly greeted. “I hope you slept well?”
Of course the bags under her eyes betrayed her. Sunset saw them in the mirror, but she didn’t bother to waste any daylight masking them. She’d gotten up late enough.
“Yeah,” Sunset lied, and stuffed her face before she could be pressured into elaborating.
“You haven’t been staying up all night with your research, have you?” There was a tone of warning in her voice, but there was always a tone of warning in her voice. Celestia was a nag.
Sunset shook her head, still chewing. That was also a lie. She was, in fact, doing research–
–In a locked, guarded, high-clearance section of the archives–
–From which Celestia had expressly forbidden her.
The subject of her interest, as always, was the nature of alicorns. Most of the legally-accessible texts on the matter were filled with conjecture and claims that could be easily disproven by, say, living with an alicorn for a decade.
The forbidden archives honestly weren’t much better. Most of it was just Alicornite heresies that were not only also patently wrong, but advocated violence in the name of their ignorance. Again, living in Celestia’s palace disproved a lot of what Sunset had been raised to believe as an Alicornite (of the state-sanctioned variety, of course) herself. The experience shed a lot of the chaff from her thinking and really got to the core of why alicorns are great.
Meanwhile, these assorted heretics, distanced as they were from Celestia’s material, demonstrable greatness, were so off-base at points it was funny – until it wasn’t – and then around 3:30 AM, it got funny again. These morons kissed the ground Celestia walked on with the same lips that called for bloodshed in her name, and they really thought she wouldn’t have a problem with that.
Of course, it’s not like they had any historical examples to learn from the examples of. So new sects would keep popping up and making clones of previous sects, without any idea that they weren’t the first to think of that!
Look. You had to be subtle. Couldn’t even rely on dog-whistles, because Celestia kept her ears to the kennel – in part, because she barely tolerated her worship at all. Alicornites got a level of scrutiny that she never leveled at Harmonites or Faustians.
She insisted that Sunset drop a lot of what her upbringing insisted was essential etiquette for conducting one’s self around Triune Princesses. No prostration, no grovelling; just… treat her like she would any teacher. How humble.
Alicornity was wasted on Celestia.
Anyways, after wasting the entire night on that drivel, as the 4 AM changing-of-the-guard approached (her last opportunity to sneak back out), Sunset happened on something actually interesting:
Observations on the Parallels of Royalty Through the Looking Glasses, authored by Star Swirl the Bearded, left just sitting on a book cart. This wasn’t going to be yet more religious tripe. This was something.
It had a mirror on the cover, just like the one Celestia had shown Sunset, in which she saw…
Well, herself as a Princess. It was the most magnificent thing she had ever seen. She was–
“Sunset?”
“Huh? Wha–?”
Celestia feigned a giggle and a smile. “You were deep in thought, my diligent Student. I’m sorry to have delayed your train, but I had to speak with you about today’s lesson.”
“Mh, yeah,” Sunset grunted, sticking a bite of pancake in her mouth. When did they get cold? “More kelemadynamic studies?” The math was hard, but rewarding. How magic flowed in the body, the horn, and through air – these were fascinating things.
“Actually, I’m afraid that it’s been cancelled. Something has come up. We’ll have to reschedule for next week.”
Sunset scowled. “What the hay is so important it can’t just wait an hour or two? Why do I have to wait a whole week? How’s that fair?”
The Princess hummed, smiling as she made up an answer. The Princess knew how to lie without giving off tells; she was doing this on purpose. “Guard-Captain Armor has been apprised of a credible threat to my safety, which he wanted to discuss with me quite urgently.”
Yeah, right. Sunset wasn’t really privy to matters of palace security, but Celestia had dismissed her guards’ concerns countless times before for the sake of Sunset’s lessons. What made this time special?
Sunset saw the real reason. This was punishment for Sunset trying to pry her answers from the official source, her Royal self, wasn’t it? If she wasn’t happy with the drip-feed she was getting, surely she’d come to appreciate it if the water got shut off entirely for a while.
“Fine.” Sunset meant it – both the word itself and the venomous begrudgement with which it dripped. Sunset didn’t need her answers anymore, anyway. She had found a book that was happy to divulge everything she could possibly want to know.
“I’m glad you understand.” She did not sound glad. What, did she want an argument?
“Mhm.” Sunset got back to her plate, making a show of no longer caring for the conversation, while she thought about how she was going to spend her new free day.
New plan: sneak back into the forbidden section and find that book before the librarian put it back on its shelf. –Assuming she hasn’t, already, in which case: try and find that book again.
Once she had her answers, once she unlocked the mirror’s secrets, she wouldn’t need Celestia anymore: not to teach her, not to pretend to parent her, and not to save her from the fire.
Once the alicorn within her was brought out, Princess Sunset Shimmer would burn hotter than any flame.
Author's Note
A little prelude to a larger work, but I think it's a fine story all on its own.