Chapter Seventeen

Baltimare was beautiful. More 'modern' than Canterlot, at least in the architecture, but somehow having kept the sleepy charm I remembered it having centuries ago as a tiny settlement, I couldn't help the small grin on my face.

It had been a week since Twilight's impromptu 'cultural introduction' session, and the discovery that there was an entire settlement of -possibly- human origin here in magic pony land. The thought was sobering. Mostly, for the implications that despite the existence of said settlement, humans were mere myths to every known society in the world. Maybe their situation had been much like mine, cast along through time and space, or dimensions. My magical experience wouldn't have given me any better of an idea about the rift than Twilight had, and that project had long since been put on her backburner, so to speak

I was patient, but the expected time frame of months, just to re-open the dig site, weighed on me heavily. And those were under ideal conditions. Really, all I wanted to do was find out what had happened to my friend.

'There are no trees in the Badlands... a wisecracking boulder, maybe?'

Our trip toward eastern Equestria was marked by fanfare, given the party included four alicorns, various national heroes, and my awesome dragon grandson.

"-and that's how I figured out how to melt steel with my firebreath!" he exclaimed.

I swept him up in a hug. "I am so very, very proud! I have the coolest grandson ever!"

"Aw, shucks," said Spike, proving that dragons could blush.

"We're there!" called Rainbow, flitting back to the carriage. "I mean, here. Here is where we are!" She grinned under a pair of goggles, suited up in full Wonderbolts regalia. She'd insisted on being part of the guard escort. "You said by the old town hall, right? 'Cause Tia's paperpony said records put it in the north district!"

She signaled the pegasi pulling the carriage and took the lead, angling us off slightly to the left.

"Anything yet?" asked Rarity, who was adjusting her sunhat.

"What, yet?" I asked, letting go of Spike.

Twilight rolled her eyes. "You said you had a locator spell!"

"Oh! Right," I said. "I mean, I sort of have one, and I should be within range, hopefully..." I focused, and drew up a piece of vapor-script I hadn't ever had cause to use before.

To my joy, a thin beam of light lanced upward into the sky about a half mile in front of us.

"Oh my gosh we have to make a rave party with this!" squealed Pinkie. "Can you write my name on the moon?"

"Maybe," I said, listening to Luna sputter behind me.

We touched down in a courtyard that was fenced-in and filled with ivy. A thestral, of all things, was standing outside and glaring at the beam of light. It was probably stupid of me, but I felt a little giddy. I hadn't actually had the opportunity to meet with any of the palace's thestral employees, guard or otherwise. Part of the upcoming 'wargames', I'd been told.

Tia and Luna exited first, stepping out ahead of the procession. "Pardon us, sir, but could you tell us where we are, precisely? Who owns this property?" asked Tia.

"This is a Celestia-damned disaster area is what it is!" shouted the thestral, not even bothering to look back. "Look at this! It went right through my bed- I have to be awake in another six hours!"

"That is a problem," I volunteered, ignoring the snickering from behind me as I walked up next to the girls. "Is this a private residence? Public? Maybe a, uh, business?"

"It's my furry little plot! Go away- I have to call the... guard?" He finally chose to turn around, trailing off as he saw the entire group. "Oh... aw, dang."

"Bwa ha ha!" Applejack.

"Hello!" I waved. "I think my house is under here- mind if we take a look?"

The basement to the Baltimare Historical Society was large, but not large enough to hold the crowd of ponies that had crammed themselves inside. I was happy to sit back and sit with the sleep-deprived stallion, maintaining the beacon.

"Please say you'll be willing to give a talk here at some point in the future!" he pleaded. "Nearly every family in my tribe can trace their lineage to the Great Escape- your actions are entrenched in legend!"

"Neato!" I said, keeping an eye on the ever-widening hole in the floor. Dirt was being carefully banished to a spell beacon out in the courtyard. "Sounds like it could be fun. I can just picture the look on old Artemia's face..."

"Artemia... of the western mountains?" asked the stallion.

"Yep, from right above the town of Amaranth. I taught some of her flock- they were really great kids. Great babysitters, too."

The stallion began hyperventilating, so I pat him on the back and wandered over to the massive hole in the floor. I gasped, and grinned. "There it is! That's my chimney!"

Tia, Luna, and I were all carefully circling the wagon, restraining spastic grins.

"Look, look at-"

"I see, what about-"

"Do you remember?"

"Can we-"

"I remember this!"

Cue, then, three adults trying to fit into the doorway at once. Celestia and Luna instantly banged their heads on the door. I shamelessly ducked and crawled from under their barrels.

"First!" I called.

"No fair, it has gotten smaller in our absence!" said Luna.

"Girls, just do the thing!" I said.

"The thing?" asked Celestia.

Luna grinned, concentrated, and appeared at normal pony dimensions. Her older sister followed suit, and they both crowded in next to me. Frankly, doing the same myself wouldn't have resulted in much difference at all.

They had gotten it right, though- it was smaller. Before they and I had parted ways at Discord's hands, we hadn't seen the inside of our home in ten years. Ten, plus thirty, plus eighty, plus...

It was introspective moments like this, I decided, when I realized that I had no interest in calculating my own age, anymore. Time travel had made a hatchet job of it, anyway.

"This is the library?"

The three of us turned, awkwardly, but were able to see Twilight standing in the narrow doorway. The mare looked decidedly underwhelmed.

"All six thousand volumes, four hundred transcripts, three hundred theses, and one or two tax records I accidentally pulled from a burning city," I informed her. Twilight's eyebrows rose. "Magic," I explained, in lieu of explaining anything.

"Oh. Oh, my..." The purple princess went cross-eyed.

"Your highnesses?"

The four of us peered out at the guard that had addressed us. He saluted.

"Yes, Captain?" said Celestia.

The stallion nodded briskly. "We have a ten-nine-six. Asking for the Bearer of Kindness."

"Oh, shoot," said Celestia. She and Luna glanced back at me.

"What is it?" I asked. Without waiting for an answer, I stepped out of our first home and hopped out of the hole, back into the large basement.

"Mother, really, it's unimportant-"

"Mother, why don't we just leave this to Fluttershy, she will-"

"Why is everypony upset? Celestia? Luna? It's only-"

I heard the protests, but everybody's voices just... faded away. I felt it again. That pull. That damned, familiar pull. I darted forward, past the Bearers, past the guards, past the thestral who took care of the building.

I found him lounging against a fence, polishing his claws with an industrial sander. He didn't even bother to look up.

"About time, my dear Fluttershy. I found the most interesting peanut this morning, and I just had... to..."

He finally looked up, and his eyes went wide.

"Discord."

My well of magic had deepened. My control had been refined in the decades since I had been banished from my girls and needed to fight my way across primeval Equestria. My reflexes had improved.

My first 'God Killer' spell took him in the chest at an angle, tearing his body out into the open air above the city and vaporizing several tons of masonry. I took to the air at speeds that nearly burned my eyes, only to catch up to his flailing figure. He was too disoriented to fight back.

Good.

"Wait!" he gasped. "Wait, we can talk! We should talk!"

"Don't want to," I replied. A shock web sprouted out of the air behind him, capturing his body in a tangle of electric currents. The voltage usually wasn't lethal, but modifying it was easy. The mad god went charcoal black, and comical eyes blinked out at me in surprise before he crumbled into a pile of ash.

I was neither fooled nor amused.

The ash slid through the web, allowing him to escape and reform below me. But he wasn't bleeding. Not yet. I wondered if he could.

I remembered the show. I remembered Twilight and my late night discussions over the real events behind the cartoon. I remember Fluttershy discussing her 'roommate'.

But none of that was really real. Not when I remembered the chaos he brought to the tribes just when they'd settled into peace. Not when:

"You took me from my girls!"

I channeled my magic, pegasus and otherwise, into the loose clouds and sent them crushing his body from three angles. I forced the water free of its natural magic, split it into its constituent gasses with electrolysis, and ignited the entire thing.

Something like a small, orange sun blossomed for several seconds as I went into a dive, angled up, and let loose with another God Killer. Then a Starry Spiral, which I'd never used on a flesh-and blood creature before.

He tried to split into dozens of little versions of himself, running in a panic on thin air to get away from where I'd smashed him to pieces with the God Killer. Luckily, the Starry Spiral sent hundreds of tiny embers out in a target-seeking cloud. Each little Discord clone, whether one or all of them were really him, were penetrated by the embers before they ignited him from the inside out.

I remembered that he had been petrified before. Feeling clever, I began sapping heat away from the spot of sky with the legion of miniature Discords, forcing my magic to bring the space into the single digits -Kelvin- and air was liquifying and flash-boiling around the space's perimeter.

"Seriously! We could just talk. I'm reformed! Let bygones be bygones?"

I grinned. Just like I had figured, he had disappeared from -or perhaps never really been- where I'd been attacking him. I forced the air along my primary feathers into an icy, razor edge, and spun.

The smug bastard had been floating right behind me.

We both were completely still. I hovered, buoyed by the thermals as he reached up and touched his cheek. His claws came away and the demon glanced down in complete shock to see a smear of his own blood.

It was the thinnest of cuts. I'd gotten off worse from skinning my knees, back when I had them.

It was a victory, for somebody who hadn't been certain he could bleed.

Pupils shrunken, eyes wide, he glanced back up at me. "...Tamara? Don't you remember me?"

"Of course I do," I told him. My vision blurred, slightly. "I figured it out after I saw Linda die."

He was too shocked to react when I hammered him down with a crackling field of force, sending him at bullet speeds into the distant pavement below.

I dropped fast, but not quite as fast as he had. My legs nearly buckled when I touched down, and I could hardly bring myself to notice the figures clustered around the courtyard. They maintained distance from the chaos god and I, as I plodded forward toward the messy crater that had pulverized half of a decorative fountain.

"It sounds the same as it does in English," I rasped. "Discord. The syllables don't really work for ponies. They probably thought your name was supposed to be as chaotic as you are."

The chimera, still bleeding from his shallow scratch, forced himself up on his elbows. He still looked like he was in shock.

"Can you imagine what I felt like when I realized it was a pun?" I asked. "Something only four or five people anywhere could have figured out?" I lifted my head and looked him in the eyes. "Derry ISmuth CORDry. No fucking wonder you wanted us to call you 'Crazy Dan'."

He looked horrified. "But you knew... And you just..." He pointed up at where I'd done my level best to vaporize him.

"Because you knew, too," I said. "And you took me away from my daughters. I don't care how you got to Equestria, or how long you've been here. My friend," I spat, "left my little girls orphaned. You fucked with the minds of six mares who thought you were their friends, selling out to a centaur who ought to have stayed dead."

Discord blinked, then looked back at the Element Bearers. "I did? I did. Please, I didn't remember, it's always so hard to-"

I screeched and rocketed at him through the air. With a sharp crack, I found myself tackled to the ground by three bodies.

"Mother, please stand down."

"Please? Can we not talk?"

I froze, not too far gone as to thrash against Tia, Luna or Twilight to try to break free.

Several feet ahead of me, Fluttershy was already at Discord's side, trying to help him up. The demon wobbled, still staring blankly at the streak of red drying into a tacky mess down one side of his face. He looked at the little pegasus with a perplexed expression.

"Did I know you? Before, I mean?" He frowned. "I don't remember that." His body flickered, and suddenly, in his place, was a tall, broad human. "Do you know this face?" Fluttershy was too shocked to answer.

The eyes were still red on yellow, but it was the same man. Same short, frizzy hair. Same raggedy trench coat. I saw that the wound was still in the same place, too, as he turned back to look at me. "Linda died?"

I sneered. "After creating the Tree of Harmony, yes. Why the fuck was she a tree-person? Did you do that to her?!"

Discord blinked. "Wait. Wasn't she always like that? No, I mean..." he frowned again. "That was a long time ago. Why don't you remember?"

"Remember what?" I asked, suddenly feeling worried.

"I remember, now," said Discord, flickering back to his normal, chimeric self. "Tamara, you were the one who did, well..." he threw out his arms. "Everything! You kick-started it all!" He searched my face, looking for something which he didn't find. "I suppose if anybody could do it, it would be you."

"Do what?" I asked. There was no madness in his eyes. That bothered me more than anything.

"Go back, of course," said the chaos spirit. "I'd ask you to say 'hi' to myself, but I'm sure you'll have other things in mind after traveling twelve thousand years." He pointed to one of the bodies weighing me to the ground. "Sparkle herself picked up on the time rift. I can still feel it. The origin can't be more than..." He brought up his wrist, as well as the Rolex that was suddenly ticking away there. "Two weeks from now. I guess we should hang out together while we still have the time, right?"

"Two weeks, I... I don't..."

Discord shook his head. "You came back a month after you left us there at Jill's, all different and... changed. Wow, it's really all coming back!" He smiled sheepishly. "One of the downsides of existing in a state of madness: the past comes and goes. I guess I shouldn't tell you anymore, since even I can't stop the march of causality."

He turned back to the side. "Fluttershy, dear, I'm going on a short vacation."

"Oh, no, you just couldn't!" said the yellow mare. "What about our picnic? And... and you need to have that scratch looked at..."

Discord smiled. "I'll make up for it." He turned back to me. "I'll be there to say good-bye, I promise."

And just like that, and with a snap of his claws, he was gone.

I wasn't aware of how much time had passed when I came back to myself. Between one moment and the next, I found myself on a cushioned bench, with my daughters rubbing my forelegs as if to stave off the symptoms of shock.

Which, I would admit, was probably pretty appropriate.

"Here you are, Tham'ra," said Twilight, levitating over a large, open book.

"Here I am what?" I asked, glancing at the pages.

"An almanac," said Twilight. "You said you wanted one," she added, kindly reminding me.

"Oh, yes. Thank you. Maps weren't very accurate beyond the valley, back in the day..." I looked down. It was the known world. Not the world in its entirety, but... enough of it. I could make educated guesses as to what filled the blank spaces beyond.

"It doesn't make sense," I mused aloud. "The sun and moon alone are all wrong. The stars are wrong. Twelve thousand years shouldn't have done this much to change the landscape. There should have been signs, creatures... races of intelligent beings don't come out of nowhere..."

I pointed at the map. "These were the Great Lakes, once the largest freshwater bodies in the world. Now they extend east to the ocean, separating Paradise Valley and Equestria. California to the west, the fault lines shouldn't have left it its own island. The badlands would be... east of the Rockies?" I swallowed, tracing my hoof down the page. "Florida's gone. The seas are too high."

"I know this is all very confusing, mother," said Celestia. "Especially since I haven't the faintest idea what you're speaking of."

I looked up, and caught the eyes of the three mares. "I had a bit of a running debate with old Starswirl, back in the day. Does anybody remember it?"

"As if he didn't pretend he was still arguing with you, years after your banishment," said Celestia. "The notion he held that parallel worlds were just that- parallel, and not intersecting at any point."

"And I thought I was living proof to the contrary," I said, then gave a sickly smile. "Because really, where else could I have come from? Except, and I thought to myself, surely 'it was Earth all along' was too obvious. This," I waved a hoof. "This is nothing like Earth. Which tells me that something completely outside my experience effected the planet I once knew."

I would have said that it was all so obvious, but really, it wasn't. Twelve thousand years is hardly enough time to have the shore recede, let alone re-order mountain ranges.

"I'm trying to put it all in order," I said. "Over twelve thousand years ago, I woke up to find a magical book." It was then that I saw I'd caught Twilight's attention. "Yeah. It... sort of recorded spell patterns from Twilight there. It also served as a kind of 'magical fuel source'. I'd have said something, but I wanted it to be a surprise. Surprise!"

Twilight, kind mare that she was, awkwardly chuckled. "That explains how you followed me. I was going to ask, but..."

"It slipped my mind, too," I offered. "Long story short, I jumped to this present time with the book. Then, I accidentally jumped back to the time of the Paradise Estate. Discord chucked me back in time from then, nine thousand years after I found that book, until I found Linda. A sweet woman who somehow became a tree person in the nine thousand years after I left. Humans don't live that long. I think..." My gaze went unfocused. "I did an anchoring spell, so I could pull myself back. Only I never did. Linda, Jill, and Crazy Dan went on living. Because of me, I think." I only had theories, but they were fitting too comfortably for my comfort. "And by then, at least one of them was immortal in their own right, so I stayed immortal, too."

Luna coughed. "So what you mean, is that, until you became an alicorn, your longevity was because Discord kept you alive?"

"Him and maybe Jill, but I haven't seen her," I said, throat gone dry. "Linda herself claimed to be waiting for me. Chose not to die, in fact, until I stumbled across her. No injury, no illness, she just lay down and stopped."

"And the... other things that Discord mentioned?" asked Celestia.

And here I narrowly averted going back into a daze, again. "He implied that I started everything. That whatever I started, it means that there are no more human beings around." I put up a hoof quickly, forestalling any arguments. "Or maybe it was something else." Not that I believed that. "He and Linda both remembered me being there... after I left with the book. He thinks it means I go back, again. Only this time it will be all the way back. And that I'll be leaving in two weeks."

"Then we shall simply do nothing at all," said Luna, sounding smug. "We will barricade ourselves in yon rumpus room and relax until the danger has passed."

A sharp pain went through me, at the thought that it might be so easy. I smiled at her. "The last time I thought I would coast through an avoid troubling with temporal mechanics, I ended up carrying you and your sister, Luna."

The alicorn wilted. "We may be wrong. You may change things."

"Everybody changes things," I said. "Only, in this case, the change itself may have been inevitable. Will have been, I suppose." I did my best to sound reassuring, and added, "Don't worry, I'll have another twelve millenia of practice. I'm sure I'll just spring ahead again -more accurately this time- and pop up seconds after I've left. It might be... a bit longer for me, but you won't miss me for more than a minute. You two have already had to wait longer than I have, after all." Apparently, my expression betrayed more than I had thought.

"That is not the way to go about thinking these things," said Celestia. "Distance is distance. Just because Luna and I were waiting for as long as we were, doesn't make another twelve thousand years a fair wait for you. And... and coming back after what seems like minutes to us doesn't make it any better."

"Time marches on," I muttered. I closed my eyes, and centered myself as best as I could. "Tia, I think we'll need to make that trip to the Bad Lands sooner than we thought. Can you and Luna make that happen?"

"Naturally," said Luna, who deflated moments after making the remark.

"Tham'ra," Twilight swallowed, then went on, "we don't have all of the information we need. You're relying on Discord... Dan's... testimony for a lot."

"Which just means that uncovering the truth is that much more important," I countered. I thought of my plans for changing things the first time around, staging the world's greatest production to make it only seem as if the Nightmare had taken Luna. Lying to the world, for her sake, would have been the easiest choice I ever made.

And... and she wasn't really that good of an actor, but maybe we'd done some creative memory rewriting? Or something?

Maybe this time I could make it work.

Likely, I couldn't.

"The problem with digital media," I said out loud, "is that it degrades. I guess we finally went paperless, at some point."

"Are you saying these are somehow... books, mother?" asked Luna.

I sent a small disc, some descendant of the DVD, spiraling through the air into a pile of its siblings. "All the information in the world," I corrected. "Or maybe just lots of high-quality pornography. Honestly, this stuff clearly came from after my time. A couple years, going by the dates stamped on some of these pieces." Or very many years, going by a couple of others.

"I don't see how a couple of years could render your... old civilization incomprehensible," said Celestia, who was browsing through several machine casings and the writing thereon. Heavy use was being made out of translation charms, all around.

I snickered. Twilight coughed. My daughters stared at us in confusion.

"Your dear old mother's generation was pretty extraordinary," I explained. "I mean, dang, I still remember seeing laserdiscs when I was a kid." At the continued incomprehension, I added, "Suffice it to say, there wasn't much the gods of our own legends could do that we couldn't, in a roundabout way."

"Neato!" said Pinkie. She and the other girls were digging through the mountain of artifacts in the Canterlot museum's back room, while the curator Dusty watched over with trepidation and excitement in equal measure.

Twilight was the least awed. As well as having walked the Earth in my own time, she among the six Bearers had gotten a good grasp of human technology. "They were terribly advanced, for a society without magic." She winked at the two other princesses. "I think this tops any of the other origin stories going around about you two. Children of the very first precursors, no less!"

"I'm so sorry to hear about Linda," said Fluttershy. "She was always so kind when we visited. And she made the Tree of Harmony, too!" The pegasus smiled softly. "She always made such pretty things. I have that model she painted for me, still, at home."

"You call that a surprise?" asked Rainbow, tossing aside a hubcap. "Discord's the same guy who borrowed my Daring Do books. Then he went and attacked Ponyville. That is not what a bro does."

I tuned out, perusing my own pile. It was infuriating. Only the most hardy things, and the least informational, had survived. And that, I suspected, was only because the Bad Lands were so desolated that the elements that would normally rot the remains physically couldn't exist, there. There were warnings against types of radiation that I didn't understand. An advertisement for Deluxe Twinkies which, if the plate was to be believed, had been the size of my head.

A plaque had been pried off of the Jillian Memorial garden. Dedicated to 'Our last angel'. Apparently, at some point, Jill got famous.

But it still looked like the entirety of the ruins had been teleported, which further confused the issue.

"We've got permission to go to the source at the end of this week," I said, not bothering to look up. "Remnants of when the Bad Lands were a sort of demilitarized zone, only nobody wanted to pick it back up, after hostilities had ceased. That's probably why the changelings were able to gather power there, a few years ago."

"The griffons and minotaurs gave permission, yes," said Twilight. I could feel her disapproving glare. "On the assumption that you'll attend a summit the week after that."

"It could happen," I said, without much feeling. "And if not, then I'll have an excellent excuse."

"You used to be a lot more enthusiastic," said Twilight, coming loser and speaking in a lower tone to avoid being overheard. "I always got the impression that nothing could bother you."

"I worry plenty," I said, feeling a little surprised to hear that tidbit from her. "I'm only fatalistic when it comes to time travel. The last few times I pushed through time, I ran face-first into the limits of the universe. And not the physical ones, either. It's like..." I gnawed on my lip a while, thinking. "It's like the first time you ever see the ocean. Only, instead of only feeling like it must be infinite, I know it must be infinite. Whatever will happen will happen. Not because of some ridiculous concept like 'destiny', or whatever, but because it's already happened."

I chanced a glance, and saw Twilight literally droop. "I know," she said. "Is that what it will take to get you out of this mood? Will getting out of this 'loop' do that for you?"

"I hope so," I said.

The situation was complex.

As near as I could tell, I was doomed to some day -soon- travel back into the past. There, I would be part of whatever caused humans to fade away. I was seeing the future, right now, and would go back to cause it. Like the time traveler in H.G. Wells's book, only I wouldn't be able to stay in the future with my Eloi. The ponies. I would be part of it. Maybe not voluntarily, and maybe -despite what Discord had said- only as a bystander of sorts. But I would be there. Linda had said that I had come back after forging ahead to Magic Pony Land. Discord had confirmed it, for all that I didn't consider him a reliable witness.

On the other hand, I wasn't sure what would happen, and had happened, then. Me being me, I'd expect my future self to tweak my nose a bit. Leave clues here and there. Only I hadn't. Was future me preserving the timeline? Had she really skipped ahead, to reunite with my friends and family as soon as she saw that I, her earlier self, had left?

Had she died?

That notion should have bothered me more. Except, I had already long surpassed any human lifespan. Except, I had already done so much. Ever since pointing Starswirl towards Equestria, I had felt as if I'd truly done my part for the planet, if not for my original species. Or maybe I would do that, too. Maybe human kind had just... left. Gone into a fantasy reality like Twilight had visited through the mirror. Certainly, Starswirl had banished plenty of 'undesirables' there, the lazy bastard. Or they had wiped themselves out without my triggering input. Or all just turned into tree people.

Fanciful thoughts went through my head. Maybe the human race had uploaded their brains into a massive crystal server, and Linda had just been the last caretaker of the last open node- the Tree of Harmony. Maybe I was just in a mad coma dream. That wouldn't have been too bad- certainly, I'd had a better sex life as a pony than I had as a human.

'Insert laugh track, there,' I thought. Most of that was due to the sheer time scale, anyway. What was the old phrase- even a blind squirrel finds an acorn, eventually?

"Tham'ra!"

I jumped. "Bloody feathers what?" Six pairs of eyes were on me.

"Ah, it's almost dinner time, darling," said Rarity. "The princesses are awaiting us at the castle."

"The girls left?" I asked, bewildered.

"Ha! You're really out of it," said Rainbow. "What was going through that red head anyway?"

"Wondering how many humans had turned into trees," I replied, savoring her confusion as I brushed past.

"She is so random," I heard Pinkie say as I trotted toward the doorway.

The dining hall was grand, but much smaller than the one we'd been eating in before. I'm guessing that was because the girls wanted to be able to hear more without worrying about the staff overhearing tales that referenced my previous species. It would probably blow their minds.

"And that's why you never offer wine to an auroch," I said, finishing my latest story and quickly mopping up the rest of my soup with a torn piece of bread.

"That was the most horrible thing I've ever heard," said Twilight.

I scoffed. "No it isn't." A long silence lingered. "Wait, was it?"

Celestia coughed, trying to draw attention away from my tale of larceny and the accidental revolution I started in an earth pony commune back when I was fifty.

"Luna and I actually had a bit of a surprise," she announced. Looking closely, I saw the telltale signs of an alarm spell going off, no doubt with a trigger switch held by one of her guards or servants.

"Is it cheesecake?" I asked. While it probably wasn't, a girl could hope, couldn't she? I didn't know how to make it, and I hadn't seen the stuff since coming forward to this time period.

"Like... cheddar?" asked Luna, looking a bit queasy.

"Never mind," I said, sighing.

At that moment, the doors to the dining hall opened, and a pair of vaguely familiar ponies stepped through. My memory was probably better now than it had ever been as a human, but it still took me a moment.

"Shiny! Cadence!" Twilight bolted out of her chair and grabbed up the couple enthusiastically.

Luna leaned in. "To my understanding, sister adopted her into the family."

I grinned. "Another grandchild?"

Luna, I figured, probably knew exactly what she was doing. Of course, the small tweak of her lips told me that more than anything.

Still, I figured I would run with it.

"Granddaughter!" I hopped out of my chair and bowled the group over.

Now I would just have to hunt down Blueblood, and I'd have a full set of three.

"Wait, what?" Poor Shining Armor looked more than a bit concussed. With some input from my daughters, I had just given an abridged version of my story. Much more than the public would ever get, I suspected.

"I am one of the ancient and venerable precursors," I said, sticking out a hoof. He took it out of reflex. "I was a cartoonist."

"Oh stars, it makes so much more sense, now," he said, blinking rapidly.

I grinned at Cadence. "He's a keeper, alright."

The pink alicorn nodded rapidly, wearing a goofy smile. "Isn't he just? So! Tell me, what was 'grandpa' like?"

The group as a whole were relaxing around the dining table, occasionally reaching out to snag some of the desserts. It was nice, really, to have so many people wanting to hear my stories without treating me like a crazy sage. It wasn't as if nobody had ever tracked down the 'fearsome witch' for advice, help, and so on.

"Winter Whistle." I brought up an illusion of him. His form shifted from one hoof to the other, and he gave the kind of embarrassed smile he only ever gave when we were alone.

"He was an alicorn?" asked Twilight, awed. "I thought that Celestia and Luna were the first."

"Pegacorn," I corrected. "And technically, I was, by a few years, if you match our timelines together. Moreso if you don't. Winter was..." I ran through my thoughts. "He was kind, when it counted. And snarky as anything the rest of the time. Self-conscious but sweet." I couldn't help the grin that stretched across my face. "The only stallion I ever loved. And great in bed, once I trained him up some."

"Mother!"

"La la la I hear nothing!"

I carefully didn't look at either Celestia or Luna. Scarring the minds of one's children was a family tradition, after all. Or maybe it was just the tradition of all families.

"Auntie Luna looks so much like him!" said Cadence, reaching out and poling her hoof through Winter's insubstantial wings.

"Like Celestia does me," I said, and looked at my eldest's face. "Except for how we sort of switched eye colors."

I expanded the illusion, and added dimension to it. Off to one side of the dining table, Winter and myself -eight months along with Tia at the time- were walking down a dirt road between the buildings of Amaranth.

"And I'm telling you that it's impossible," said Winter.

I shook my head. "Nope! I really did it. It was... thirty years ago? I was bored, the village was on fire, and I had three apples. Balanced them all on my nose."

"What was that you said?" asked Winter, worried.

"Three apples, and I was bored," I assured him. It wasn't as if I'd started the fire myself, after all. "I once had an assistant that could do four. Terrible actress, great acrobat."

"No, seriously, you said a village was on fire?!"

I sighed, and dismissed the illusion. "See? He was a bit of a worrier."

"There was a village on fire?!"

I sighed again. "Really, Twilight?"

My Expansive Illusion was soon becoming my favorite spell. Being able to literally bring to life the past for all of my curious friends and loved ones was almost intoxicating- I had to stop myself after the desserts had been finished and the table cleared.

"Now what?" asked Twilight.

"Now you girls go home until we head out," I said. "You've got families and obligations, and I won't pretend I don't want a little bit of alone time with my girls."

The group eventually agreed, and with an overabundance of tearful good byes and promises to be back soon, we were alone.

"The cart's secure?" I asked, speaking over my shoulder and not looking away from the castle's main exit.

"Yes, mother," said Luna. "In the second barracks garage- we've had it cleared of anything else."

"Excellent," I said, nodding in satisfaction. "That thing's a piece of history. Feel free to get your stuffed animals out of it before the historians descend upon it like rabid wolverines."

Time to pick up a few things, then.

Waiting until the girls were asleep was easy. Hating myself for hoping that they would get worn out by the day's excitement wasn't.

My pack was assembled, my new cloak -I left a thank-you note for Rarity- was donned, and my body buzzed with expectant magic. It was a shame I never managed to adapt the teleportation spell, but experience had made me over half as fast as Rainbow Dashin the air, by my guess. No mean feat. It would be enough.

I wasn't completely surprised to see the two tall figures waiting on me at the castle's western, servants' entrance. After all, I'd trained my daughters well.

"Go small," I reminded them. "Tall alicorns attract attention."

Celestia looked nonplussed. "Er... isn't this where you claim to not have been doing what we suspected you were doing?"

"Or," chimed Luna, "trying to convince us not to follow you?"

"You picked up your cleverness from somepony," I said, deliberately using that fun, ethnocentric little pronoun. "Besides, this will be just like old times. Tia, take point- you were always the strongest flyer."

The older sister tilted her head. "With how skilled you are?"

"I said strongest," I corrected. A moment later, I was holding them both. "Come on. We've got six hours before we have to break and let the two of you take care of the heavens."

"I'm a bit baffled as to why we're not taking our friends," said Luna, mumbling into my neck.

"I still think we can pull this off," I said. "And it will be like nothing's happened in the interim. Besides, this is family business. You two deserve to know what happened as much as I do, more than any pony alive."

"The whole matter is still a bit much to fit my head around," said Celestia, finally breaking the embrace. "If we'd been born without you coming forward, what would we have been like as humans?"

"You'd have been born angels," I said without thinking. "Gifts from heaven. More than I could have hoped for, and every answer to my unspoken prayers." I frowned. "Wow, I've become quite the poet in my old age."

"Mother, we have centuries of age over you," said Luna, a tinge of laughter bubbling in her throat.

"You're not too old to put over my knee," I groused, despite not having knees, per se.

"And then what?" asked Celestia, grinning. I'd never once hit the two of them.

"A long lecture," I replied. "Or I could just tell you about the night you were conceived." Celestia flinched, then I pressed on. "By that, of course, I mean the week. Pinning it down to a single day would be hard, what with everything your father and I got up to during that-"

"Okay yes fine you win!" whinnied my eldest, ducking down to hide behind Luna's frame.

"I always do," I said. Then the levity went away, and I swallowed. "Let's go, girls."

We chose to walk to the edge of the city, the girls in their guises as normally proportioned ponies. I was the one who first broke the silence, stopping in front of a shop window that had long since gone dark.

"Hold on," I said. With a little bit of 'slight-of-hoof', I broke in and snagged one of the items in the front window, replacing it with a bag of bits.

"What was that?" asked Luna.

"One last thing on the checklist," I told her, then refused to say anything more.

Author's Notes:

A/N: The most hilarious thing, the most wonderful part about writing, is when your characters act on their own and get something wrong, even if you didn't intend for them to.

But sometimes, you have to just roll with the stupid.