Noble birth, centuries of experience, immaculate beauty, and the occult synthesis of draconic blood-pacts and hippocampic choral magic – all these elements of Adagio Dazzle’s person harmonized as one to orchestrate the magnificent concerto which was the siren’s life.

…Though, to be frank, the piece was going in a rather experimental direction at the moment, which Adagio had not the palate to appreciate. With her bloodstone heart ripped from her neck, the only things that remained to distinguish Adagio from the dull, uninteresting humans around her were her pride, her memory, and the bonds she shared with her siren sisters.

And there was one mare more responsible for this fall from greatness than any other…

…

Adagio never imagined that, on the day she finally stood over her nemesis-among-nemeses, Sunset Shimmer – the last and mightiest foe to stand between the sirens and their glorious return to Equestria – as she lay sprawled across the floor in a pathetic heap, bawling her eyes out, all on her own… that it would be at a moment as infuriatingly inconvenient as this. This whole time – five years, very soon – the siren had thought she would wield the choice of the time and place in which, by her own two hands, her vengeance would finally be wrought.

But instead, Adagio was otherwise preoccupied with a completely unrelated errand. Those once-scaled arms of hers – that should have been clutching her restored heart-necklace and perhaps a chalice of brandy – were laden down, instead, by half a department store’s inventory worth of shopping bags. The inability to cross her arms and laugh wryly at Shimmer’s apparent defeat at another’s hands made it all the more disappointingly difficult to savor the sorry sight before her, on the food-court floor of the Crystal Empire Mall.

The enemy was too lost in her grief to even notice her. Adagio still had the element of surprise, at least. She debated, briefly, whether she’d have time to walk her bags to the car and come back, but time was probably of the essence.

So she walked up to Sunset (heels clicking on the tiles with every step) and toed her in the ribs with her boots, uttering a sultry, “Well, well, well. What have we here?”

Shimmer didn’t even look at her – didn’t so much as gaze upon the golden visage of her foe. She just kept sobbing into the linoleum, like she was attempting to mop the floor with the ragged shudders of her torso and the half-apron about her waist.

“…Excuse me,” Adagio insisted, kicking Sunset a little harder…

…to just as negligible an effect.

“Ugh!” She leaned over to growl in the ear of the flame-headed maiden at her feet. “Sunset Shimmer. Acknowledge my presence at once.”

Finally, Shimmer responded, between choked sobs, “…Adagio? S’at you?”

“Do you mean to imply you’ve forgotten the face of your oldest enemy?”

“Nooooo…”, Shimmer whined. “I just– I didn’t notice you! I’m sooooorry!”

Adagio was taken aback by the apology-wail, but pressed on nonetheless. “Why in the world are you lying here, so wretched and…?” She didn’t bother coming up for another adjective. This wasn’t turning out to be very fun. Just kind of annoying.

“I don’t know…! I’m just… sad as hell! For no fucking reason!” Saying that seemed to open the floodgates of her eyes even further.

Adagio stepped back, wary of getting her shopping wet, but after setting the bags down, she dove back in to grab Shimmer by the collar. “Oh, for Luna’s sake– Pull yourself together, you miserable little girl! I am a dignified woman, and it reflects poorly on me to have a nemesis as pathetic as you are behaving here.”

“I caaaaaaan’t!” After a few sniffles and heaves, Shimmer then asked, “Wait– What do you mean, ‘nemesis’…?”

Adagio reeled back, dropping Shimmer back into the puddle of her own tears in the process. “What do you mean, ‘what do you mean’? In what realm of discourse are we not mortal enemies?”

“I thought– I thought we moved on from thaaaat!” The sobbing intensified. “You even said so!”

“I have no recollection of saying any such thing!”

“It was in– In a time loop. I went after you three because I thought you were being evil again but you were just minding your own business and I’m still so soooooorry!”

Adagio squinted. Part of her wanted to inquire as to under what circumstances she would deem it advantageous to pretend apathy towards Shimmer, but the smarter, better, rest of herself decided chronomancy was a subject best left to the whelk-heads.

So instead, she revisited an earlier tack.

“Moved on? From having everything taken from us? Perhaps Sonata might forget and forgive like that, but I have been dreaming of my vengeance for five long, rotten years,” she hissed.

Shimmer froze mid-sob and propped herself up on trembling arms. Tears still streamed from her puffy, cyan eyes, but in the darkness of her pupils an ember of wrath gently smoldered, which no waterworks could extinguish. “So you’re the one who did this to– to me,” she accused, as calmly as she was able.

Adagio tutted. “Please, Shimmer. The pleasure of this whole revenge thing is in taking it yourself, which is how you can be sure that this one wasn’t me. Do you really think I would still be so displeased as I am now if I had actually achieved what I’ve wanted for so long?”

“I know I was.” She heaved a remorseful sigh, then shook her head. “Which is why I can’t take you at your word–!”

And then Shimmer lunged at Adagio. The siren barely had time to flinch before Sunset grabbed her by the arm, rolled up the sleeve of her jacket, and clamped her hand around her wrist.

There was no time to demand of Shimmer what in Tartarus it was that she thought she was doing. The words were strangled in the back of her throat by the… psychic seizure? – for lack of better word – that took hold of her.

The train of her thought had been hijacked, flitting from memory to memory without her say. There was Adagio in her coat closet, putting on her puffiest, spikiest, warmest purple jacket in anticipation of the dreary chill of Foalbruary (or, as the humans called it, Footbruary). There she was, driving her car to the mall, swearing under her breath at the slush on the roads and the drivers who sped on like it wasn’t even there.

There she was at the jewelry store, sparing a longing glance towards the garnets and rubies but settling instead for the diamond necklaces she planned on all along: something blue for Sonata, something pink for Aria, and a little something yellow for herself. At those prices, they were certainly laboratory-manufactured, but they were still more expensive than they would have been in Equestria, where diamonds and other crystals just grew in the dirt like seeds. When the clerk asked if she wanted them wrapped, she, of course, agreed.

And then there she was buying some other things for her sisters at other outlets in the mall, slowly accumulating shopping bags until the moment she was passing through the food court, en route to her car, and discovered Shimmer there.

At that point, her assailant let go and relinquished control of her thoughts back to its rightful owner. Then, she curled up in a ball and started wailing even louder. “You were literally just shopping for your sisters! That is so sweet I can’t–” Her faculty of speech completely gave out at that point.

“You just… read my mind, didn’t you?” Adagio stepped back, rubbing the spot on her wrist where Shimmer had touched her like it was dirty. “Sunset Shimmer, don’t you ever do that again.”

“I can’t believe I did it to you a-fucking-gaaaain I’m sooooorry!”

Obviously, Adagio wasn’t about to accept her apology, but there was a desperation in the tone of Shimmer’s grief that touched the muse in Adagio. This was more than mere misery; it was the despair of thinking she’d finally found the solution to her troubles, only for it to be a false lead.

That very despair painted so many of the siren sisters’ years in this world: every rumored magical artifact they chased down, only to discover a hoax and a piece of overpriced garbage; every fairy-circle Sonata stepped in, hoping Pedestria’s fay-folk would abduct her back to, inexplicably, Equestria; every alchemist and occultist they’d charmed into their service, only for the so-called ‘expert’ to turn out to be either a huckster, or simply deeply deluded.

“…So you believe yourself to be bound by a spell,” Adagio inferred.

“I literally can’t stop crying for no reason and it suuuuuuucks! I don’t know what else it could beeeee!”

Adagio nodded. “And presumably your cohorts are on the case as we speak?”

“No…”

Adagio scoffed, “Isn’t that what friends are supposed to be for?”

“It’s not their fault! I haven’t told them yet! I just… Every time I pick up my phone, I think about, ‘What if this spreads to them!’?”

“I see.”

Adagio retrieved her gilded phone from her purse and redialled her most recent contact. Technically, it was a shortcut for a three-way call to both of her sisters, but Aria hardly ever picked up the phone unless Adagio called her directly.

Sonata Dusk, however, picked up right away. “Yellow?”

“Sonata, I need you to call Shimmer’s pink friend and tell her that her friend is having a…” Now that she was talking aloud instead of hissing and whispering in hushed tones, it became somewhat necessary to mind what she said around the bystanders. “…A serious emotional crisis at the Crystal Empire Mall, that’s going to need all of her gang to solve.” Adagio had had what little fun she could extract from this encounter; now it was time to dump this problem on someone else.

“Oh, okay! I don’t even need to call Pinkie, actually; hold on–” And then Sonata hollered, “Hey, Pinksies! Sunset’s probably crying her eyes out, too!”

And then Sonata put her phone on speaker-mode, whereupon the pathetic lamentations of Sunset’s normally-bubbly friend carried unpleasantly into Adagio’s ears.

“I don’t think she’s good to help right now, to be honest,” commented Sonata.

“Are you at her hou– Nevermind.” Sonata had been consorting with the enemy for a few years; Adagio had better priorities than to deride her about it for the umpteenth time, especially when her fraternization (sororization?) happened to be useful right now. “New plan: get ahold of all of her other friends and confirm whether they’re just as grief-stricken as she, then report back to me.”

“Awww, come on. Do I gotta talk to those jerks? Pinkie’s the only one I like!”

The crying in the background got even louder. “Why won’t you give my friends a chaaaaaaaaance?!”, Pie wailed.

“Ack! Okay, okay,” Sonata pleaded, clearly not to Adagio, “I’ll check in! I just gotta steal your phone real quick–!”

Adagio hung up there, to save time.

“Well, Sunset Shimmer, the good news is, you never had to worry about transmitting your sadness to your little friends. The bad news is that they’ve already got it, from the sound of things.”

Shimmer reached a new pitch of anguish, slamming her hands against the linoleum as she wailed inconsolably.

“Unfortunately for me, this means I can’t just hand you off without looking like an utter banshee in front of all these people. So what we’re going to do, Shimmer, is you’re going to get up, follow me to my car so I can drop these off,” – Adagio picked up her shopping as she spoke – “and you’ll tell me a little more about what’s going on.”

“I– I still don’t trust you. What if you– While we’re alone–”

“Shimmer, at least one of your friends knows for certain that I was the last person seen with you. I would be nothing less than a moron to try getting my revenge now. Now, come along,” Adagio instructed, awkwardly extending a bag-laden hand to her enemy, who used it to clamber just as clumsily to her feet – without any mind-reading this time, thankfully.

“Okay…”

Author's Note

These things never happen when you want them to.

I like the sirens. It's a shame that I like the Shadowbolts so much more that it keeps me too busy to write about my favorite fishponies.
They're all fun in their own way; I don't think I can claim a favorite siren. This story's only about Adagio because Sunset needs to be shipped with someone for the contest, and Adagio's the only siren who I feel has potent chemistry with the fiery unicorn.

The hints of siren backstory here are something I intend to get into with the Season 1 finale of my Empathy is Magic series... when I get there. I still have to finish the season premiere.