Surprise was numb.

So, this is how it feels to be a lie, she thought. She was not angry. Or sad. Or anything at all.

“That’s not true!” Pinkie’s voice cried. “You’re my sis--”

“Don’t say it!” Surprise hissed. Oh, there’s some anger in me after all.

Pinkie’s eyes went round and filled with tears.

“How come I can still see her?” The question was addressed to Discord.

The draconequus watched her carefully. “Who knows? Perhaps Nightmare Moon could see Princess Luna the whole time she was rampaging. All that matters is that you are the one in control.”

“Control,” repeated Surprise. Her voice was colorless, void of emotion. “Yes.”

It was true. Pinkie hadn’t been able to do anything to stop her from receiving her Element of Ruin from Discord. She had begged and pleaded and cried, but Surprise had donned the black necklace in spite of her.

The Element of Treachery.

She didn’t feel like a traitor. That’s not why she wore it. As far as she was concerned, she was the one who had been betrayed. She flexed her wings. She knew they weren’t real. One of the first things she had tried to do after finding out the truth was take off and fly away. It hadn’t worked. She had beat her wings furiously, reached for the sky with all her might. But it was impossible. Her wings were as much of a lie as the rest of her.

She couldn’t fly.

Hmm, looks like there’s some sadness in me after all, too.

Discord took her before Trixie’s throne and presented her as the last Guardian of Ruin. Surprise looked at the others who wore the black emblems. The Chaos Mark Crusaders watched her with curiously dull expressions. The musician, Octavia, sat to one side, crying to herself. Trixie looked down on Surprise. Those silver eyes held a chilling depth, a frozen infinity that made her want to avert her gaze.

“This is the one?” Trixie asked. “A Guardian of Harmony?”

Surprise felt his clawed hands on her shoulders as Discord stood behind her. “Harmony? Not anymore. Tell me, Princess, do you notice anything familiar about her?”

Trixie peered closer. A wide smile spilled across her features. “I seem to remember you telling me that this one was yours…but she’s not, is she? She’s mine.”

“Oh, she’s both of ours. But mostly mine. Her substance may have come from your Outside, but here she was born out of chaos. Allow me to introduce her…” And he began to sing in a voice like dripping poisoned chocolate:

Trixie’s stared at her. It made Surprise uncomfortable. “Tell me, little one. What are you?”

“I am…nothing,” said Surprise.

“Yes…yes you are. And such a beautiful nothing, too. A shadow with more substance than the one that casts it.” She turned back to the draconequus. “This one will be perfect. You have shown yourself quite useful, Discord.”

“Oh, Princess, your praises make me blush.” A note of warning slipped into his voice. “Just remember our bargain.”

“Yes…about that…I would step away from him if I were you, little one.”

Surprise did just that.

A bolt of silver magic flashed from Trixie’s horn, and Discord, his face contorted in an almost comical expression of mingled hatred and dumbfounded shock, exploded. A fountain of confetti rained down on everypony who was gathered there.

Discord was gone.

Then the sound of his dark laughter seemed to come from every direction at once.

“Ah, Princess…I should have expected no less from you,” Discord’s disembodied voice hovered over the crowd. It was already fading. “But chaos is eternal. It cannot be destroyed. Before this is over, you may find yourself…surprised.”

Trixie smirked. “Chaos may not be able to be destroyed just yet. But by tonight, when the last star falls, the great Seal will break. Then, anything will be possible.”

“Yes…anything…”

Then Surprise heard his voice in her head, barely a whisper, snatched away by the wind. When the moment comes… he began to say. Then it was silent.

Surprise was on her own, which suited her just fine.

Trixie sized her up with a cold glance. “Did that bother you, Surprise?”

Surprise shrugged. “I had no loyalty to him,” she said. Which was true.

“Yes…the Element of Treachery. But what about those sweet, colorful ponies, the Guardians of Harmony? Do you feel any loyalty to them?”

“I don’t think so.” Which was also true.

“Then come, I have a task for you…”

“All right, everypony,” said the Doctor. “Next stop, Canterlot, second year of the Age of Harmony.” He threw switches and pushed buttons on the console of the TARDIS.

Homecoming. It was a word filled with a particular emotion. It was not like any other feeling one experienced. Anypony could feel it in course of everyday life. You come back to your house after a long day at work. There is a drop of that feeling. The farther away you travel, the stronger you feel it. There is a depth of feeling to a homecoming after going away to another town or city, and there is another, even deeper, after returning from another country. But all of those pale to the sheer emotional power of returning through time to one’s own era. Twilight and her friends were surprised, knowing the danger they were about to face, to find themselves strangely elated.

Then it happened.

“What does this one do?” asked Ditzy. [We must call her so, especially after this.] She flipped a switch, the shiniest one on the console.

“No, wait, not that one!” the Doctor tried to say.

The whole TARDIS rocked. Fluttershy was flung halfway across the chamber, right into Applejack. Twilight almost fell over the railing, but steadied herself with magic. The Doctor frantically worked the controls of the TARDIS, trying to fix whatever had happened. The whole vessel shuddered.

Then everything went still. And the stillness was more terrifying than a crash would have been.

“Where are we?” Fluttershy asked, picking herself off of Applejack.

“Don’t ya mean when are we?” said Applejack, climbing to her hooves.

The Doctor swallowed. “The future…” he said.

“That’s good, right?” said Twilight. “That’s where we were going, isn’t it?”

He examined a screen above the control deck. “No…that can’t be right.”

Twilight felt that something was very wrong. “What is it, Doctor?”

He looked at her. “We arrived almost a hundred years ahead of your time. Only, there’s no readings outside the TARDIS. I mean, we should be right in the center of Ponyville and--”

“Ponyville!” cheered Ditzy, and flew toward the door.

“No, Princess, don’t!” the Doctor cried.

Too late. She opened the door of the TARDIS, expecting the blue skies and green pastures that glittered in her fragmented memories.

Instead, the door opened on The Dark.

It was a vacuum, an open maw gasping for the light. Everypony grabbed whatever they could to keep from being sucked out into the darkness. Ditzy screamed as she fell toward it. She flapped her wings with all her might, which slowed her fall into the abyss, but she still slipped out the door of the TARDIS.

“Doctor!” she cried.

The Doctor gave one look at Twilight, then let go of the railing they were both clinging to. He fell out, grabbed onto the threshold with his hooves. Ditzy clamped down on his tail with her teeth. They dangled together.

The wind roared around them. Applejack saw a loose cable and tried to use it as a lasso, sending it to them like a lifeline. The Doctor grabbed it with his mouth, just as his hooves lost their grip.

Then Applejack started to slip.

Twilight tried to grab onto her friends with magic, but something awful was happening. Her magic couldn’t reach into the darkness beyond the TARDIS door. All she could do was help to steady Applejack. Fluttershy bravely offered a hoof to the earth pony. Twilight tried to hold on to Fluttershy too.

“Twilight,” said the doctor through clenched teeth. It sounded more like ‘Twirigh,’ but she was good at understanding earth ponies talking with things in their mouths.

“What?”

“The blue lever with the black handle. Pull it!”

Twilight looked up at the console. She couldn’t see a blue lever. It must be farther up. She would have to climb.

Fluttershy and Applejack pulled. Ditzy Doo and the Doctor hung on. And Twilight climbed. The force of the black emptiness pulled against all of them. Twilight felt it the least, because she was furthest from the door, and because she was using magic to keep her grip, and because she had something she was climbing toward.

The others couldn’t help but glance down into the abyss.

What they saw there, in the heart of the darkness, was different for each of them.

There is a darkness that is nothing more than the absence of light. Everypony has seen this. Then there is the other kind, the darkness that is a thing in itself, a substance, a force that pushes back against the light. That is what was waiting outside. That is what they gazed into.

To Fluttershy, it looked like dragons. She could see them, without number, coiling and writhing in the darkness, a mass of black scales and claws and awful wings.

To Ditzy, it looked like a night without stars. She could almost hear Stella’s cold laughter riding on the wind that was whirling all around them.

Applejack saw Death, the thing that didn’t belong in their world. And she was every bit as beautiful and terrifying as she was in her nightmares. Those kind eyes looked out from the darkness. Her lips formed a single silent word. Come.

The Doctor saw a mirror. And standing in the center of that black looking glass was the only thing he feared: the shadow standing at the center of Time, like a spider on its web. The oncoming storm.

They shuddered as one. Their will seemed to fail them, and they might have lost their grip and fallen into the darkness, but at that moment Twilight reached the blue lever and threw it with her magic.

The TARDIS rocked as violently as it had when Ditzy had thrown that shiny switch. They were thrown back into the vortex of Time. Applejack and Fluttershy pulled the Doctor and Ditzy back into the TARDIS and slammed the door shut perhaps harder than they needed to.

They were safe.

“What was that?” Applejack asked between heavy breaths.

“The future,” said the Doctor. “Our future.”

“Does…does that mean we lose?” asked Fluttershy.

The Doctor smiled crookedly. “I don’t know. Some things you can change, some are fixed. Things that have to happen. I just…don’t know.”

“It was…scary,” said Ditzy.

They all agreed.

Except Twilight. She was thinking to herself. You see, after she had pulled the lever, right before the TARDIS was yanked out of that future, she had looked back, just for a moment. She had seen into the shadow as well.

And what she saw was quite different.

What did Twilight see? Nothing frightening. Just…sad. She saw her opposite. If you could look into the soul of Twilight Sparkle, you would see the white light of friendship, the spark of magic blazing eternally. It was her Element. When she looked into the abyss, she saw the darkness for what it was: the dark power that stood against friendship. Friendless. Forever.

And it broke her heart.

“Don’t do this,” said Pinkie Pie.

Surprise ignored her.

They were heading toward the cage where Rainbow Dash and Rarity were imprisoned. Trixie had given Surprise a simple task, her first mission as a Guardian of Ruin. And it was something she had been wanting to do anyway.

A Guardian of Ruin…she let those words wash over her mind. It was funny…she had wanted to belong, to be a part of something for so long, had entertained fantasies and daydreams about her, Surprise, the Seventh Guardian of Harmony. Bitter tears welled up in her eyes. If she had known then what she really was, how impossible her stupid dream had been, she would have laughed. Just like the Element of Laughter, she thought darkly, and then she did laugh, though there was no joy in it.

“They don’t deserve what you are about to do to them,” said Pinkie.

“Yes they do,” said Surprise.

“They loved you.”

“No…they loved you. Only you.”

Trixie stood outside the bars of the cage where she held Rainbow Dash and Rarity, beaming at them. “Are you well, my little prisoners?” she asked.

“Better than you’re gonna be when our friends get here,” said Rainbow Dash.

“What have you done to my sister?” asked Rarity.

“Just given her what she wanted. A purpose. A destiny. Speaking of which, have you seen your friend Pinkie Pie?”

Rainbow Dash grinned. “Haven’t caught her yet, huh? Well, that’s Pinkie for you.”

Trixie only smiled, which unnerved both ponies, though Rainbow Dash put on a brave face.

“What are you going to do with us?” asked Rarity.

“Kill you, eventually,” said Trixie. “I can’t yet, of course. There are still a few stars in the sky, and a few star ponies holding out against the dark. But soon.”

Rainbow Dash looked at her with disgust. “What happened to you, Trixie? You were always a bit of a jerk, but this…this is just…”

Trixie leaned in close to the bars. “Do you want to know a secret, Rainbow Dash?” She pointed a hoof at her head. “Trixie doesn’t live here anymore. I am just her rider. It’s so hard to get anything done in your world without a body. To be completely honest, she was not my first choice, but Celestia would not yield to me.”

“Of course she wouldn’t! She’s our princess!”

“Ha! You saw how much good it did her in the end.”

Rainbow Dash glared at the thing that wore Trixie’s face. “What are you?” she whispered.

“I have no name,” she said. “I don’t need one. After tonight, there won’t be any names anymore. Can you even grasp what my victory will mean? This world, this tiny light, sits at the center of All Creation, and once it goes out, every shadow it casts will fall. The emptiness between worlds will bleed into everything. Whole universes will shudder and die, and those that remain will sink into the nameless void.”

“It’ll never happen,” said Rainbow Dash. “Harmony will defeat you.”

“That’s right,” Rarity agreed. “We’ve taken on enemies like you before.”

“I know,” said Trixie. “I sent them.”

“And they lost.”

“Because your circle of friends was whole,” said Trixie.

“It still is!” said Rainbow Dash. “Our friends will come for us, you’ll see.”

Trixie nodded. “And when they do, all five of you will face my Guardians of Ruin.”

“What do you mean, ‘five’ of us?” asked Rarity. She was suddenly very afraid.

This was the moment Trixie had been waiting for. She threw her head back and laughed. “Pinkie, you can come out.”

Of course, it was not truly Pinkie Pie, but Surprise that stepped into view, but her friends had no way of knowing that. All they saw was Pinkie, standing next to their enemy, wearing the black emblem of a Guardian of Ruin around her neck.

For a moment, nopony spoke.

“What are you doing, Pinkie?!” demanded Rainbow Dash.

Surprise smiled at her. “Changing sides,” she said.

Rainbow Dash took a step back. “What?” There was pain on her face. For a moment, Surprise felt like taking it all back. There was still time, wasn’t there?

“Yes!” said Pinkie, heard and seen only by Surprise.

“I’m through with you,” said Surprise. She didn’t know if she was talking to Rainbow Dash or Pinkie.

“Oh, Rainbow Dash, they’ve done something to her, like my sister!” said Rarity.

“No, they haven’t,” said Surprise. “They had to trick the little ones into joining them. I’m with them because I want to be.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Rainbow Dash, crossing her hooves over her chest.

“Pinkie Pie is a Guardian of Harmony,” said Rarity. “She would never betray her friends!”

“A Guardian of Harmony…” Surprise tasted the words. They were bitter. She showed them her Element of Harmony, the blue jeweled necklace that represented Laughter. Then she dropped it at her hooves.

It rested on the cloud-ground as if it were spelled.

“That’s…” Rarity’s keen eye recognized the Element for what it was.

“Here is what I think of your Harmony,” said Surprise. She raised a hoof…

“No!” Pinkie shouted.

…and brought it down on the Element, shattering it. Blue light flashed, and the sound of fillies laughing joyfully spilled out into the air. The light and the noise of laughter faded, and when Surprise lifted her hoof, only the broken shards of the Element remained. They turned into stone and sank into the clouds.

The Element of Laughter was no more.

Rainbow Dash and Rarity stared, mouths agape. “What did you just do?” said Rainbow Dash.

“Broke Harmony, I guess.”

“But…why?” If there had been pain on her face before, it was anguish now.

“Why,” repeated Surprise. “You want to know why?” Her eyes were flashing. “You never saw me! None of you! You didn’t even know I existed!”

“But Pinkie…” said Rarity.

“Don’t call me that!” shrieked Surprise. “That’s not me!”

Trixie watched this outburst with amusement.

“But…Sweetheart…”

“But nothing! You could have seen it. You should have, if Pinkie was your friend, you should have known something wasn’t right! But you didn’t and I went on like a fool, trying to be your friend when you didn’t even know me!”

“What are you talking about?” said Rainbow Dash. “We are your friends!” She was near tears by now.

“They don’t understand,” sobbed Pinkie.

“Not mine,” said Surprise, shaking her head. “I have no friends.”

“Don’t listen to her!” cried Pinkie. “She’s not me! I love you!”

Nopony heard her but Surprise.

Rainbow Dash and Rarity were both trembling, hot tears spilling down their cheeks. They didn’t understand, but they felt the pain behind Surprise’s words, how honestly she believed they had hurt her. What had they done wrong? They couldn’t know.

“Shut up, Pinkie,” Surprise whispered. Then, to Rainbow Dash and Rarity, “Maybe when the light of our world goes out, It’ll be like coming home for me.”

Then she turned and galloped away before they could see her cry.

“Pinkie!” Rarity called after her.

“Surprise!” Pinkie cried.

Both names were lost on the wind.

Trixie’s eyes gleamed with triumph. “You see, without her Element the rest of you won’t be able to harness the power of Harmony. There’s nothing left that can stop me. I’ve already won.”

And that was the moment when a big blue box came flying out of nowhere and crashed into the golden cage.

It was the TARDIS! Its door was open and a lot of screaming was coming out of it, sprinkled with some swearing and shouting of the name Ditzy Doo. Applejack, Fluttershy, and Twilight were dumped out of the flying time machine.

“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” the Doctor’s voice called after them. Then there was a whiny screeching, and the TARDIS vanished back into Time.

Trixie was caught off guard by this. All she could do was watch with shock as Twilight and her friends fell right in front of her.

But they didn’t have any cloud-walking spells cast on them, so all three of them fell right through the cloud-ground of Cloudsdale and plummeted to the earth below.

The crash of the TARDIS had broken open the cage. Another moment and Trixie would have noticed it and used her magic to stop her prisoners from escaping. But Rainbow Dash was nothing if not fast. She saw her opportunity, heard the screams of her friends who were falling, shook her tears away, grabbed Rarity and shot like a bolt of rainbow-colored lightning from the cloud city.

Trixie recovered from her surprise and walked over to the edge of the clouds and looked down. It was too much to hope that the fall would kill them. No, she could feel the stars above. A few were left. Death could not touch anypony in Equestria yet.

Twilight Sparkle had returned. Trixie would have known it even if she hadn’t fallen right in front of her. She could sense her, just as she could sense the stars in the sky that made up the Great Seal. What was it about the unicorn?

She had not told Rainbow Dash the full truth when she said that Trixie was not her first choice. The truth was, neither was Princess Celestia. It was Twilight. It had always been Twilight.

Magic incarnate. The very light of Friendship wrapped in the body of a purple pony. It made Trixie shudder just thinking about it. Twilight was her opposite, the Power that withstood her, that had thwarted her for generations. Oh, she remembered Twilight Sparkle. She remembered the one who kindled the spark of friendship in two filly princesses and broken her power. For a thousand years she had wandered, a shadow, a voice. And Celestia, the faithful student of Twilight Sparkle, had kept her at bay. Then, once her powers had been restored and she could move the stars once again, she freed her old puppet, Nightmare Moon. And who did she find in this era, born to become the Guardian of Magic, but Twilight! And of course Nightmare Moon was defeated. Worse, Princess Luna had been restored. Twilight, who even defeated a minor constellation. And the truth was, with the power of friendship she could have brought down an Ursa Major as well. The pony that freed her friends from the touch of the Outside that Discord had corrupted them with. The one that withstood the lord of chaos himself. At every turn Twilight Sparkle had been there to stand against her.

Trixie had not been able to reach Twilight. She was as unyielding as Celestia. Or perhaps Celestia had been as unyielding as Twilight Sparkle. But at least she had been able to turn the Princess of the Sun into one of her silver sentries. Every star pony fell under her sway eventually.

All but one.

Twilight Sparkle was a star pony. It was right there on her cutie mark. So why didn’t she fall? Her princess had fallen. So had her brother. Even her mother had eventually fallen into Trixie’s hooves. So why didn’t Twilight? Perhaps it was the Element of Harmony she wore. It was the most powerful of them all, the one that tied all the other Elements together. Just as Twilight did with her friends, and the princesses. She was the one that stood at the center of it all, the final star in the Great Seal.

Trixie cooed softly, “Tonight, the last star falls.”

Rainbow Dash swooped down and rescued her falling friends. She even had to rescue poor Fluttershy, who had been so surprised at being suddenly shaken out of the TARDIS that she had forgotten that she could fly.

They landed in the Everfree Forest.

“Where did you guys come from?” asked Rainbow Dash, once they had caught their breath.

Twilight explained about the Doctor, and traveling to Old Canterlot, and the Traitor Princess, and the shadow from the Outside.

“Trixie,” said Rainbow Dash. “It’s using her somehow. It’s using all of the ponies with stars on their cutie marks. They’re, like, it’s slaves or something. Even…” She looked at Twilight, wondering if she should mention this part. No, it was too important to leave out, no matter how much it might hurt her. “Even Princess Celestia. She does whatever it wants. I don’t know how any of us are going to be able to stand up to her.”

“There’s only one thing that can save us now,” said Twilight. “The power of Harmony. The six of us need to face her together and…” She trailed off, noticing the look on Rainbow Dash’s face, the way she wouldn’t meet her eyes. “What is it?”

“It’s…Pinkie Pie,” said Rainbow Dash, her voice a soft croak.

“What about her? Where is she, anyway?”

Rainbow Dash shook her head. How could she tell Twilight about Pinkie? If she hadn’t spoken to her face to face, seen the pain and anger in her, she wouldn’t have believed it herself.

Rarity answered for her. “Pinkie is…with them.”

“What do you mean?” asked Twilight, a new fear dawning within her.

“I don’t understand it, but it’s true,” said Rarity. “She’s gone over to their side. She’s left us. She doesn’t even want to be our friend anymore.”

Twilight felt this revelation like a hammer to her heart. Without Pinkie, they could not call on the full power of the Elements of Harmony. How could they defeat the shadow behind Trixie? The dark future they had glimpsed out the door of the TARDIS would come to pass. Dread pressed its cold hoof down on her.

But even the end of the world was secondary to this: Twilight had lost a friend. Why wouldn’t Pinkie want to be friends anymore? Twilight trusted Rainbow Dash and Rarity, but she couldn’t understand any more than they could. It didn’t make sense. But, like every pain that made no sense, it still hurt. She could feel herself going grey inside, fought the despair. No! There had to be a reason, and if there was, then she could fix this. She would find a way.

Somehow.

“So…what are we gonna do?” asked Applejack.

“Fight,” said Twilight.

They ventured out of the Everfree Forest. It was sunset when they reached Luna’s camp, where her army gathered to stand against the silver ponies. Cloudsdale was drifting toward Canterlot. In a few hours, the forces would meet in actual battle, something Equestria had not seen in centuries.

Luna brightened when Twilight and her friends arrived. “Twilight Sparkle! You have returned. The Elements of Harmony are together again.”

“Not all of us,” said Twilight. “I’m sorry, Princess. I’ve failed you. I know what our enemy is, and I know how to defeat it, but we can’t.”

“Then…all is lost.”

“No,” said Twilight. “I’ve seen what this thing is, what it wants to do to our world, and I won’t let it. Somehow, I will find a way to stop it. I will never give in to it. Never.”

Luna looked closely at her sister’s prize pupil. Even when things were at their darkest, she would not give up on the power of friendship. Just seeing her brought Luna hope. It reminded her of something she had seen once, a vision reaching out to her in a storm of colored light, bringing her back from the nightmare, back to her sister, back to Harmony. Now Twilight stood there, a pony with a star on her cutie mark. The last one, as far as Luna knew. Could the enemy take her too? Luna didn’t know. But there she stood, and no matter how long Luna stared, she refused to vanish.

The Princess of the Night gave a weary smile.