Disclaimer: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the intellectual property of DHX Media, Hasbro Studios, and Top Draw Animation as well as the various owners and producers involved in the creation of the series.

Fair warning, the first two chapters deal with Twilight's interaction with original characters. Canon characters take over completely after that.

Rated T for some disturbing, violent imagery in later chapters.


A procession of ponies marched out from the entryway of a cathedral emblazoned with the Stars and Moon symbol of the Princess of the Night. Its body was an obsidian square, but it was alive with intricate carvings and statues of The Princess of the Night and heroes of the faith that formed an ornate façade. Four cardinal spires jutted out from its top, reaching for stars unseen in the mid-day light, deadened though it was by encroaching clouds. A wide stairway led from its doorway to a dirt path and an open grassland beyond. The group traveled down.

Twilight Sparkle watched as they passed her by, standing out of their way, and then she joined behind them. She was led away, leaving the cathedral and the city's edge behind her. In moments, a fenced field stood before them, and the mass pushed through a narrow gateway flanked by guardpony statues. Each one was erect, using his upturned sword as a third leg, his forehooves on either side of the grip, on the guard or the cross. Their rigid faces and bodies were immaculate, but the walls they guarded crumbled around them. To Twilight, they looked so perfect that it seemed that there could never have been a time when they had not been as they were, but their terrifying perfection was youth; the walls simply had to be older. She continued on, head held low, staring at the rear hooves of the pony that walked ahead of her and following them. Trees, their leaves at various stages of yellowing and browning in the dwindling warmth and light of fall, lined the path after the gate. Passing the statues, Twilight saw their backs in her peripheral vision and knew that they were pegasi. They were identical, for concealing charms rendered all living guards unidentifiable, separating them into the two groups that were visible throughout Canterlot. There were only indistinguishable stallions, sharing the same face as the statues. Of course they would be pegasi, Twilight thought to herself. Despite her many years in Canterlot, she could count on her hooves the number of times she had seen an earth pony royal guard, let alone the statue of one. Earth ponies were regular soldiers, certainly, but the gold-armored royal guards were quite literally of a different breed.

There were some who claimed that the lack of earth pony guards was evidence that pegasi and unicorn mistreated earth ponies, their cousins. They maintained that earth ponies were both disadvantaged inferiors and the victims of exploitation at the hooves of their social superiors. Consider, they said, that the fastest earth pony could not match an average Pegasus, or that the strongest and hardiest could not compete with the mystic might of an adult unicorn. Political activists and philosophers, who were almost exclusively enfranchised unicorns themselves, had claimed for centuries that the natural maldistribution of power between the three races had developed over time into a form of social inequality.

Pegasi made up the majority of Canterlot's royal guards, and were, of course, the elite Wonderbolts, revered both as soldiers and performers. They were ever in positions of power or of excess. The unicorns were governors, socialites, scientists, poets, and philosophers. They were the greatest dreamers and the greatest scientific realists. Even more than the pegasi, they shaped the world and ruled it. Pegasi controlled the skies and the weather while unicorns lived in stars and dreams. Earth ponies were the farmers, the cleaners, the construction workers, and the miners, ever dependent on the unicorns for leadership and the pegasi for fair weather. They were hardy and physically strong, but oppressed and wholly under the hooves of their cousins.

At least, that was what some believed, Twilight reflected as her group came to a halt. She had never given it much thought, beyond the cursory reading of the liberation literature found in her library. Some of it had even been written centuries ago by the famous unicorn, Hammerhooves, a pony who had adopted a new name out of a desire to show kinship with his brothers, the earth ponies. He had led a small band in collective, violent rebellion against the crown. While many earth ponies still respected his intentions and viewed him as something of a folk hero, history and polite society remembered him as a murderous brute, and his remarkably eloquent manuscripts had been banned and burned. There were some advantages to being the Princess' faithful student, however.

On this day, in a field of trimmed grass carpeted by fallen red and yellow leaves and dotted with immaculate stones, she realized the utter silliness both of the doctrine of earth pony oppression and those who held it as true. The foundations of their theory lay in shifting, sinking sand. Whether disenfranchised or not, earth ponies possessed far more power than either unicorns or pegasi.

The earth ponies patently ruled the earth. It was difficult to say if anypony else fully realized what that meant. Lords of the earth, they possessed a profound, intimate connection to the land and soil themselves, and thus the fastest pegasus and the most powerful unicorn were subject to the lowliest earth pony.

Pegasi might rule the air and command the weather, but The Sun had fashioned them from the dust of the earth. Unicorns might dream of the stars and forever reach out to touch them, but at the fall of night, to the dust they returned. The earth was the foundation of their being, and it was all to which they amounted.

Just like the unicorn being buried today, the land ruled them all.

Twilight Sparkle shifted her weight back and forth on her fore-hooves, frowning slightly as a robed unicorn, standing beside a drab wooden box, finished committing Tempest Rouser to the Princesses' eternal care. The box was simple wood, unadorned. It fit with what little Twilight could remember about Tempest, a unicorn whose simple and reserved nature had ever been at odds with her name. As the small congregation of ponies looked on in silence, and a pair of nondescript but well-muscled ponies lowered the box into the earth, Twilight started. It only now dawned on her that she couldn't recognize anypony. Not a single face was familiar. She lowered her gaze so that no pony could catch her eyes.

The stallion leading the proceedings, attired in the common vestment of the Lunarian cult, a faction which had only begun to recover from ten centuries of obscurity due to the recent return of their mistress, called for a moment of prayer. Unlike the robes of Celestia's monks, which were heavily adorned with gemstones much to Rarity's professed delight, the priest's garment was relatively spartan. A royal purple hem traced the edges of the coarse black raiment which covered the wearer from his neck to his rear fetlocks, concealing his flank and replacing the sign of his special talent with an embroidered crescent moon that mirrored the one borne by Princess Luna. Billowing out in the front and rear, falling over both pairs of legs, the robe covered equally black, skin-tight undergarments that ended just above his hooves. The priest's face was a contradiction. Gray hairs traced his lips and splashed over the sides of his square, brick-like face, offsetting an otherwise maroon coat and lending him an air of distinction, but the harsh gray led up to soft eyes.

Twilight shook her head. Staring was rude, especially when she had just been commanded to enter into prayer. Her eyes flew closed at the thought that now arose: surely all the other ponies had seen her faux-pas. She was certain that they were watching her, obviously wondering, as she was, why she was there, and they were asking themselves why she, Celestia's personal student, who had banished demigods, who had saved Equestria several times over, would attend this funeral. She could feel their open eyes on her. Her eyelids closed tighter against the sensation, her brow furrowing. It was obvious to her that everypony in the small group of unicorns, most of whom were members of Tempest's family Twilight assumed, was watching the out-of-place bookworm.

The Lunarian priest spoke out again, cutting into the silence by offering a benediction to close the official service and dismiss the assemblage. Heat blossomed across Twilight's face, tinting her cheeks an almost imperceptibly deeper shade of purple, and she kept her eyes shut to the soft sounds of murmuring voices and shuffling hooves that started up the moment the priest stopped speaking.

Seconds ticked by before she felt a hoof fall upon her shoulder. She gritted her teeth, flinching at the touch and the noise that rattled inside her skull. Turning to look at the owner of the hoof, she found herself staring at a slender, middle-aged, grey-coated unicorn. His face was black and his eyes red. She fumbled over her own dry lips.

"Ms. Sparkle?" he asked. His tone carried a question, but also the sense that he already had the answer.

She let out a huff that she worried came across too much like a chuckle. "Uh- yes."

"I thought that it was you, but I didn't realize that you knew our Tempest," he said, taking his hoof from her shoulder and maneuvering to stand before her.

Twilight blinked once and then let loose a flurry. "We worked together a few times while studying at Canterlot Academy."

"It's odd that she never mentioned it, or brought you to meet me and her mother."

Twilight sniffed and rubbed at her foreleg. Had Tempest ever offered, she wondered. It was so hard to remember things like that. She could quote from the esoteric manuscripts she hadn't read since her Academy days, and recite laws of physics and the rules of magic, but it was as if there was a blank hole in her mind. She couldn't remember actually working with Tempest, though she knew that she had collaborated with her. They were both listed as authors on her paper on the functional similarities between Chaos Magic and white alteration spells. Twilight remembered that, certainly. It was impossible for her to recall any offer to meet with Tempest's parents, but Twilight could easily rewrite the paper, even if she hadn't read it since its publication. The purple unicorn decided that, yes, Tempest probably had invited her to dinner, or the like, but the memories were simply not there. That was how memory worked; it just fluttered in and out.

"We were just colleagues, I suppose."

"Well, I'm sure she would have been glad that a mare like you would take the time to come out here." His eyes flitted about. "It's an honor," he said with a crooked smile.

"Not at all. It's the least I could do for a friend," she said, the platitude, a silly social nicety, spilling out before she had the chance to think. Social nicety was why he'd come to her. It was why she'd said it. So much of what they did came down to it. Twilight would never have considered it before she had left Canterlot. She had been too practical to care about something that was meaningless, swallowed up by history, science, magic, or any number of other things. Twilight looked to her colleague's grave, away from the stallion's darkening eyes.

She still saw it when the stallion pursed his lips, eyes focusing finally and narrowing. "Of course, Ms. Sparkle. It was good of you to come." He shifted his weight, turning to look back over his shoulder. "If you'll excuse me."

Twilight took note that it wasn't a question.

With a slight nod of his head as a salutation, the stallion's awkward steps carried him off towards a group of unicorns that had clustered around an only slightly disheveled mare and the Lunarian priest. Similar groups littered the yard, the remnants of the service now dispersed. Trickles of ponies moved between them, greeting, reminiscing, and then parting.

Watching him go, Twilight couldn't help but think that, of course, friends would have been there before the funeral, and before there was a need for a funeral.

Wind whipped up the leaves that littered the ground and caused a tremor to rock her body. Her coat prickled. She looked up. The sun had disappeared behind bulbous, gray clouds that bled into one another and passed rapidly through the sky, dragging a wall of darkness behind them. Twilight couldn't fathom the logistics of the move, or the reasons for the passage over Canterlot, but as the night was scheduled to be clear, the Pegasi must have been transporting the storm to an outlying town. No matter how much she learned, there would always be things that she could not know. Her vision was clouded like the sky.

A break allowed sunlight to pour through. It was like water held back by an ancient dam that was finally overcome. By some freak coincidence, by the action of some weatherpony whom she could not see, the light splashed over the graveyard, the purple pony, the new grave, the family, the priest, and the father joining them. Twilight squinted against the brightness. That kind of coincidence was, to Twilight, especially off-putting. To her, things deserved explanations, reasons, purposes. Randomness, chance, was revolting. She always had to factor it in to her experiments, knowing that it was a fundamental fact of nature, but she didn't have to like it.

After gazing at her colleague's headstone for some time, Twilight's eyes drifted to the Lunarian priest in the crowd beyond. The maroon stallion took his leave, trotting towards her. His robe billowed outwards, flaring in a sudden, chilly breeze, and she inclined her head to one side at his approach. A hoof scuffed along the ground.

There was no acknowledgment of her presence when he passed her, not even the turning of an eye, but something caused her muscles to relax.

The stallion stopped at a nearby tree, and Twilight frowned when he withdrew a pipe and a small bag from his robes. His horn glowed red while he moved the object to his lips after filling it, and then his aura flared. Smoke bloomed from his pipe in a burst of magic and flame. Somehow, it seemed familiar to the purple unicorn, but she could not understand why. She couldn't remember.

Once he had finished his pipe, the young mare looked away; staring was rude. While pockets of ponies still encircled her, most had either left already or were in the process of leaving, following a winding path that led through the fields and back to the main building near the entrance of the cemetery. Favoring the tombstone with one final glance, Twilight reached inside herself, focusing the lines of power that ran through her body down to the bone. Her horn sparked, sending out a nimbus of purple light that undulated between a softly wavering shell and a jagged oval. The energy built upon itself, folding over, until a white halo formed around the outer edges, and then coated her body. In a flare of purple light, Twilight popped out of existence, leaving the rapidly emptying field behind.


A flash and fizzle accompanied Twilight's return to reality. She breathed in and out, trying to calm the fire of mystic exertion that burned like lactic acid through every inch and cell of her body.

The use of teleportation magic was significantly more involved than most non-unicorns knew. On the one hand, a pony could break down an object into its constituent parts with relative ease, store the patterns without needing to understand them in a mystic field, and then recreate them in another location. However, this mode of transmission had terrifying implications. The object assembled would not truly be the same as the one with which the unicorn began. It would be something completely different, yet fundamentally the same. Given its moral, religious, and philosophical implications, such simple teleportation had been outlawed ages ago. The modern method was much more complex, as it required a weaving together of multiple spells. To teleport, a pony had to transmit herself through an underlying dimension. Certain heretical scholars surmised that this level of being was, in fact, the non-corporeal "body" out of which the Deity Alicorns formed. More mainline theorists proposed that it was the wellspring of magic into which all Unicorns dove when using magic. In their view, the alicorn served merely as a focus for an external energy source. This explained why a unicorn did not lose weight when using tremendous amounts of magic, as Twilight had done when she had levitated an Ursa Minor for kilometers; the energy did not come from burning off calories but from a seemingly inexhaustible, external source.

And the fire had cooled. Twilight pressed her shoulder blades together and looked to the distance. She now stood in low-lit room, its ceiling stretching above her head to a height of nearly ten meters. Ordered rows of bookshelves spread out around her. She could see neither the beginning nor end of them. They went on to infinity. An old smell, the smell of age itself, almost palpable enough to chew and to taste, hung heavy,oppressive, and comforting. Twilight's tongue felt as if it began to dry out immediately as it flicked over her upper lip. She gulped down air.

The young mare trotted down the corridors of shelves, never fumbling in the darkness or pausing for a moment even when she looked towards the classification marks on the books or the shelves for direction.

There was a wonderful thing about books that few ponies understood – a wonderful secret. Books knew everything. They knew everything there was to know. There was nothing new under Celestia's sun, so all a pony had to do was learn the classification systems, know the authors and their names. She just had to find the right book; navigate the infinite library. However wonderful books were by their very nature, so many were superfluous. It was impossible for there to be an end to them. Some could instruct, goad, correct, and admonish, but only those few written by the wise. Navigation was everything. As she well knew from more than her fair share of late nights spent reading, the flesh was weak. Even she had fallen asleep on occasion during an all-night reading binge. There was no energy to waste. The same was true of time.

Only when she reached her destination did she stop to scan the shelves before her. Focusing her magic, Twilight projected a beam of white-purple light that traced over the bottom shelves, allowing her to read the titles and authors of the various books as it swept along. With a soft exhalation, she plucked a book from the shelves in a telekinetic flare and then continued her search. After collecting several texts, she moved on, a trail of radiant books, some old, some new, and some at the very edge of falling to pieces, trailing behind her like rats, or children, behind the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

She repeated her process, traveling to other sections of the empty library to collect more texts, adding to the train that followed her. When satisfied, she again manipulated the energy that sparkled around her horn. The books swarmed around her, shuddering, and then piled up into one large rectangular mass. For a moment, the energy field surrounding them grew in intensity as Twilight layered a final spell over them, mirroring the one that blossomed around her body, before both she and her books disappeared in a literal and figurative flash.

Author's Notes:

I have not watched any of season 3. There may be aspects of this story which are out of continuity. It may be best regarded as a divergent narrative line which takes place after season 2, ignoring any official events after the season finale. It is not an Alternate Universe fiction, but diverges from the main continuity at one point due to a lack of knowledge on my part.

And one thing specifically about future chapters: I don't care for Cadence. I cannot help but imagine her as a lesser being than Luna and Celestia. Her nature and back-story are not well established in the cartoon, and what we do know seems at times contradictory or simply illogical. Lacking an in-continuity, definitive explanation for her existence and apparent non-existence during critical moments in the series and its history - aside from the fact that the creators hadn't yet thought her up to sell new toys - I have reduced her here to a winged unicorn, a demi-god like figure.