When I was ten years old, I found a dusty old journal in an even dustier, older bedroom.

This wasn't an anomaly. After all, by the time I had turned ten years old, I already held the dubious honors of:

• Being the first pony in recorded history to lose control of their magic and reduce an entire wing of the Canterlot School for Gifted Unicorns to rubble.
• Being the only student at said School for Gifted Unicorns to completely misunderstand their assignment anddump enough magical energy into a dragon egg to hatch it.
• Despite both these facts, also being the first student in two decades to catch the eye of Princess Celestia and be taken under her wing as her personal student.

Suffice to say, I was used to going off the beaten track.

But this escapade - a search for a mystical library that contained the last of Starswirl's known work - had gone on for just a little too long already. Traipsing through silent hallways was much less fun that I thought it would be, and all the dust in the air was giving me a headache. I was too tiny to push open the windows, so I couldn't even get fresh air.

What I didn't realize, at the time, is that I'd inadvertently wandered into the East Wing of the Royal Palace. This was known colloquially as 'the abandoned bit', for reasons that should be obvious. That meant no inhabitants, no guards, no servants, and - by extension - not a single adult to help out when my adventure finally went south.

I screamed. I cried. I tried teleporting, but I was panicking so hard I couldn't summon a single drop of mana into my horn. Then, I ran. As hard and as far as I could, darting down random hallways and scrabbling at flights of stairs, in search of something, anything, familiar.

What I found instead was a long-forgotten bedroom - posters of old bands peeling off the walls, bedsheets that had lost all their fluff, sunlight barely visible through a gap in the drooping curtains.

And the dust. Oh, the dust. It was everywhere, billowing clouds of it making me twitch and sneeze. It was on the pillows, on the rug, on the hundreds and hundreds of books scattered in pillars around the room like an elaborate trap from a Daring Do novel.

The first rule of getting lost is to stay in place, I remembered, and began weeping.

I don't know how long I stayed there, wallowing in my self pity.It wasn't just fear that kept me there, of course. It was shame. The thought of what Celestia would do when she found me made me tremble - would she dismiss me as her student? Banish me from the kingdom?

Eventually, fear gave way to boredom, and I started perusing the piles and piles of books. Some were ancient, at least a century or two old, while others were published closer to the modern day. I recognized some as books Cadance had read to me, and others as obscure magical texts. Maybe this was the library of a different, more recent grand wizard?

I glanced at the desk in the corner of the room, and stopped. There, wedged between a pulp fiction novel and a textbook of theoretical thaumatology, sat a book with the sun on its spine.

I bolted for it. Call me naive all you want, but I'd seen how Celestia corresponded with her most loyal staff. Parchment, vellum, everything - emblazoned with that same mark.

I threw it open, scrambled for an inkpot, and began scratching out a message.

And that's how I met Sunset Shimmer.

Our first interaction was cutthroat. Sunset was not a fan of me"defacing" her journal, and even less of a fan of me taking her place as Celestia's student. Things got heated, we started comparing accomplishments...

...and that's when I admitted that Celestia had never told me about her.

If I'd have known how much that admission would hurt Sunset, I never would have said it. But I only found out years and years after the fact - far too late to take it back. Suffice to say, she went quiet for almost ten minutes; which is a very long time when you're counting the seconds.

She came back with detailed directions from what I now know was her old room to Celestia's chambers. Never write to me again, she finished.

Which is why, the second I was tucked into bed that night, I lit up my horn and scribbled out another message.

So, what was it like being Celestia's student?

I'm not going to go through every single fight, point of contention, and bad choice we made while writing back and forth to one another. That would be a completely different story, wouldn't it? The point is, despite her animosity, we kept talking. About everything. How I was settling in to my new position, the best reading nooks in the palace, gossip among the diplomats...

And, one day, the conversation turned to why Sunset left.

It spiraled out of control from there.

I shouldn't say that - it makes it sound like it was against my will, and it absolutely was not. Even now, looking back on it, I'm proud of what we did. I learned something important that day - to doubt. To doubt, and to verify, and only then to trust.

It expanded out of control from there. That's better.

From then, we were joined at the hip. For the rest of my tenure as Princess Celestia's student, Sunset remained my closest friend. We told each other everything we did, everything we thought, everything we dreamed of. We were as young and ambitious as you could get - volatile, like spilled oil.

My discovery of the thousand year prophecy was the match.

Before I'd even finished relaying my findings, Sunset had already arranged a rendezvous. It's about time I showed Equestria what it's been missing. We were to meet on a fine summer morning, in the belly of the beast - Canterlot itself.

If the thousand year prophecy was the match, then our meeting was the fire. What was to follow changed our lives, as well as the course of Equestrian history. It was beautiful, it was crazy, it was perfect - and I wouldn't trade it for the world.

Then again, it did place me, not twelve hours later, under the iron-shod hoof of a megalomaniacal tyrant. So, there's two sides to each coin. Silver linings and all.

Author's Note

I posted a story on this site in 2019, got embarrassed, then deleted it. In the five years since, I've posted almost none of what I wrote online. This all reached a head today morning, when I realized I have over a hundred thousand words worth of stories all in various stages of non-completion because I don't think they're "good enough" yet. I'm sick of it. This is going up, and it's going up in whatever state I can get it to by the time my self-imposed deadline hits. New chapters every Tuesday, I guess. Don't worry - I think I know where this is going. And hey, even if I don't, I promise to make it as fun as possible :)