When a tree falls in a forest, and no pony is around to hear it, ponies ask: does it make a sound?

Trees ask: who the hell knocked me over? Did anytree see which way he went? Argh, I think I tore my phloem!

Ponies tell the stories they know. Trees don’t tell stories at all. They’re very literal beings. Besides, something about being cut down and cut up to be turned into books for thousands of years made them averse to the whole thing. It would be like a cow smearing butter all over itself by an open-flame grill.

The stories ponies tell are stories ponies have seen. Stories get told of bold decisions and strong leadership. Stories don’t get told of gut bacteria and skipped breakfasts, of misplaced notes and reminders and bad moods brought on by traffic. In fact gut bacteria rule the world. Many a pony’s fate has ridden on whether the judge had pancakes that morning.

And other things unnoticed, like the quiet courage of deciding to set a book aside before one is finished with it….

Here is what happened: Behind a weakened Unicorn, a scythe clanged off the blade of a shovel. The scythe-edge was deathly sharp, carving photons apart into a brilliant blue-white glow that had no meaning to unmagical eyes. The blade of the shovel was dinged and scratched, and smelled faintly of dung. When the blades met, it was not fragments of metal that were torn off and scattered, but tiny pieces of magic that drifted in the particle wind. Behind the unwitting Unicorn, the invisible battle raged.

In terms of time, it lasted less than an instant. In terms of dimension, it covered all of them.

An infinity of scythe-strikes swung from every possible reality toward Twilight Sparkle. But the mare had eyes that saw in modals, and blocked each one.

(Ears, though, were another story. The mare couldn’t tell a C sharp from the flat side of a shovel. The rhythm of life was sung in a pitch too deep for her to hear.)

Each clash of scythe against shovel sent particles of magic floating into the air. Mostly this was of no consequence. It was a very small amount of magic, in many worlds caught by the breeze and blown out the window, carried here and there, doing little more than to make a frog briefly remember a fictional life as a prince, or causing a four leaf clover to sprout from the ground, only to be immediately crushed by a shoe. In some universes the particles were carried up beyond the atmosphere to be swept along in the solar wind. Mostly they got stuck in books of various kinds, and to the child later reading it for whom it seemed that the story was really happening, it might indeed have been, very slightly.

Like many monumental historical actions, such as the choice of whether to accept an eager but mediocre art student to one’s prestigious European art academy, or, indeed, whether to have breakfast on a given morning, it mostly didn’t matter at all, not for most things, in most times, in most places.

In one time, in one place, little flecks of magic so dimensionless they couldn’t be called minute settled like dust in the bag of a girl crying behind a book in her high school library. The girl clutched something inside the bag and seemed to feel better, if a little drained. And if the purple device in her bag seemed to glow slightly, surely it was just a trick of the light.

This is what happened: Twilight Sparkle, Unicorn, economist, and subject of this narrative, accepted that something in her life had become more important than economics. And the mare[1] accepted that she loved Twilight enough to give her up.

[1] The mare, as Twilight tended to think of her, was usually seen in a shovel and a sort of multicolored clown dress with lots of yellow and purple, and pink spots. She was not a god, nor exactly an equinomorphic poneification. She did not exist because of belief nor despite it. It was more as though everything else existed because of her, or perhaps her being gave meaning to existence as something to contrast with it. We are what is, and she is what would have been....

Only economists speak her name. It isn’t occult or anything. They’re just the only ones who find her very interesting.

But not to that. Not to…him. Not ever.

Twilight Sparkle had never outright asked Princess Celestia, “How does one become an Alicorn?” It would have been cheating, and besides, there was the possibility that Princess Celestia would have told her that one does not. But if she had, Princess Celestia might have answered, “First one must become immortal.”

The mare’s shovel scratched a checkmark onto the square box of the universe.

One down. Three to go.

That is what happened.

And this is what’s happening:

In a castle at midnight, a mirror cracks in two.

This is never a good sign.

It is especially bad when this mirror is in a locked room with a forbidding sign on the door. The doormaker had tried ancient invisible runes and graphic pictographs, but found they weren’t as effective as a bold-printed sign that read Do Not Enter, I Mean It.

The door is sealed, magically, in a number of ways. The mirror is covered with what appears to be a blanket, but no blanket is quite that black, as if the intention was to make sure that no light would touch the mirror’s surface.

Right in front of the mirror is a metal, spring-loaded clamp with a weight-sensitive plate. The whole thing is connected to a chain attached to a pillar that an elephant could not have moved.

It has been over one thousand years since anything has gone through, or come out of this mirror.

And nothing continues to come out of it.

In a windowsill outside the room, one that frames the full moon in the purple sky, a phoenix perches. The phoenix perches, as there is only one, just like there is only One Bank. Now the One Bank has Nine Daughters.

And the phoenix is thinking along similar lines.

We can’t say that phoenixes, being birds of fire, don’t have eggs, because, as we’ve established above, there is only one phoenix, and that wouldn’t be grammatical.

Phoenix doesn’t have egg.

She had it, once. A long time ago. Something happened to it. But she can’t remember what.

She can’t remember other things. Like ever being a regular bird. There must have been, at some point, some kindling. And to light the kindling, a spark.

But she can’t remember it. And she can’t find her egg.

Philomena spreads her wings and leaps from the windowsill. A thermal does not catch her wings. She is made out of fire. It is not about muscles and pinion feathers and bone density. Not for her.

It is about the idea of fire, and the spark that keeps it lit.

Thunder booms over Canterlot. The new weather schedule for the year is in: Rainstorms across Equestria, to give the new flowers a nice stretch after the long winter.

Philomena cannot remember worrying about the rain. It has been a long time since water could douse her flames.

She flaps anyway, for the show of things, and flies on, looking….

Pieces of mirror fall to the ground. If anything had come through and triggered the leg clamp or any number of magical detections, then Princess Celestia would have appeared in an instant, alone. One other pony would have felt the tug, but for a long time would not have been able to answer at all and almost certainly would not answer now.

But nothing came through the mirror. As nothing had for over a thousand years.

Besides, Princess Celestia would have guessed wrong. The spell was made for…her.

But this was a them.

The mirror continued to crumble. And of all things, Princess Celestia had not set a spell to detect the tinkle of glass.

It’s little things like that that get you.

In a world very similar to ours…

...but more colorful, and with proportions of head to torso that would suggest a marriage between a lymph node and a tumor in the former, and of clothes that shrunk in the wash in the latter…

...and with terrible taste in skirts and boots…

...three girls seize another and pin her against the pedestal of a statue of a horse.

I should mention that the three girl seized the other in their hands. These creatures are humans, sort of. Like how a human might draw a horse as a set of circles connected by gentle curves, and humanize their eyes and lips and noses, these humans are how ponies might idealize us, elongating our faces and legs to match their proportions, and giving us hair that more resembles wild, flowing manes.

These girls are in high school. You can tell by the way one just slammed her fist into the pinned girl’s stomach.

That girl, who can’t even fall to her knees, is named Twilight Sparkle. She is going to die.

“I never appreciated,” said Adagio Dazzle, drawing back her fist for another strike, her hair as orange and bulbous as a wild pumpkin, “that one of the perks of driving a girl to vomit after every meal is that she won’t have anything left to throw up on you.” She struck Twilight again. True to Adagio’s word, all that came up was some green bile that dripped down Twilight’s chin.

“Drop her,” Adagio said. The other two girls, whose names are Aria Blaze and Sonata Dusk, let Twilight fall to the ground, where she curled up, wheezing.

The moon was full, and the air was cold, and the grass was muddy from last night’s rain.

“It’s your own fault, Twilight,” said Adagio, leaning over her. “You became so distant all of a sudden. I felt like you didn’t even want to be my friend anymore.”

“Sunset Shimmer said I shouldn’t listen to you,” Twilight gasped.

“Sunset Shimmer isn’t here to protect you, is she?” Adagio said. “So you’re going to do what we say, or I’ll keep hitting you, and then you’ll do what I say. As much fun as it would be to see what happens to the human liver when you force it to keep ejecting, I already know.” Adagio raised her fist. “I hate to be crude, but you’re not listening to me. I hate when people don’t listen to me. Sunset Shimmer is the deafest person I’ve ever met, and now she’s rubbing off on you. Take it out, now.”

Trembling, Twilight pulled the device out of her pocket. Adagio jerked back from it like she was afraid to touch it. Then she punched Twilight in the jaw.

“I told you not to point that thing at me, you stupid girl!”

Twilight lay in a ball and wondered, vacantly, why she was letting these girls hit her. Even for public school, this couldn’t possibly be how girls her age socialized.

She had begged her parents not to move her from Crystal Prep to Canterlot High. She had offered to get up early to take the bus. She had offered to live in a tent by the school. She had asked Principal Cadance if she could live in the school. It’s not like anyone was using the library at night.

But Principal Cadance had just smiled and told her to write if she ever wanted to talk. Her parents had not smiled and told her that private school was expensive and now she was guaranteed to be top of the class, which was both already true at Crystal Prep and false at Canterlot High because a girl named Sunset Shimmer existed.

Three girls named Adagio Dazzle, Aria Blaze, and Sonata Dusk, who called themselves the Dazzlings, also existed at Canterlot High. Twilight had been drawn into their clique like a little boat helplessly pulled in by the tide. They were beautiful, with hair like the multicolored toothpaste swooshes in the advertisements, and they were glamorously fashionable, and very good at thinking of clever sarcastic things to say that made pretty much every girl who wasn’t named Sunset Shimmer afraid to talk to them. The Dazzlings had put into words a number of distressing concerns Twilight had about life in public school regarding things like hairstyles and skirts and blue-haired guitar-playing boys named Brad, and they had offered to help her become popular...and they had...and it made her miserable….

The relationship with Brad had been short-lived. After a quite pleasant first date, which had left her wide awake at 3 in the morning thinking about how nice it had been when their arms had accidentally brushed, rumors had apparently circulated to Brad and his social circle regarding her sexual history and its connection to her transfer from Crystal Prep. These disinclined Brad to further the relationship, and Twilight, distraught, had started to let things slip in school until she was approached for homework help by, of all people, Sunset Shimmer.

Sunset Shimmer wouldn’t have let the Dazzlings hit her. Not that anyone would try to hit Sunset Shimmer. She wore a leather jacket. A leather jacket. In high school!

Sunset Shimmer was everything that Twilight wished she was. Sunset Shimmer talked like a grown-up, dressed like a rebel, and aced advanced classes like she already knew the material and was retaking Honors Calculus because she didn’t have anything better to do. She even had a tattoo of a red and yellow sun on her back. Twilight didn’t know what her parents would do to her if she ever got a tattoo, but it probably involved an orphanage.

They had become friends because Sunset Shimmer had decided they would. Twilight hadn’t even had the courage to look her in the eye the first time they talked. It had started with her asking Twilight for homework help, which had somehow turned into Sunset Shimmer helping her….

“You’re smarter than this,” Sunset said as they closed their textbooks. “What’s going on?”

“Just tired,” Twilight said in a small voice.

“And hungry.”

Twilight held very still for a long moment. “How did you know?”

“Just because you can do it quietly doesn’t mean you can do it stinklessly. You remind me a lot of myself, actually.”

“I don’t.” Twilight looked at her in shock. “You’re…” tall and beautiful and have an amazing skirt and you’re even smarter tha - as smart as I am, and no one would call you fat because even if you were, and they did, you wouldn’t care….

“No, I’m serious,” Sunset Shimmer said. “You’re just like me when I was your age.”

“I thought we were in the same grade.”

“We are.” Sunset Shimmer leaned in. “I’m actually 312 years old.”

Twilight decided Sunset Shimmer was joking. She smiled. “Thanks, Sunset.”

“Hey, maybe we could hang out tomorrow? I need help on my economics essay.”

“You do not need help on your economics essay.”

“I do. I’m pretty sure the teacher hates me. It needs to be absolutely perfect.”

“Well, you did kind of take the marker out of his hand and start lecturing. Twice.”

“He was doing comparative advantage all wrong! He couldn’t even get the numbers right!”

Twilight grinned. “I know.”

“I really hate when people mess up economics.”

“I didn’t think anything rattled you.”

“You’d be surprised. Sometimes, I get really angry.”

“What...what do you do?” Twilight didn’t know why Sunset Shimmer was opening up to her like this. It was wishful thinking to think that the coolest girl in school, if not the whole world, actually felt something in common with her.

“I set things on fire.”

“Really?”

“Am I really 312 years old?”

Twilight grinned. “Same time tomorrow, in the library?”

“Is there a reason to meet anywhere else?”

Twilight laughed. She zipped open her bag to put her book inside.

“What’s that?”

Twilight glanced at Sunset. “This?” She took out the device. “Um….” Her face turned red. “Want to know something embarrassing?”

“No.”

Twilight’s face collapsed.

“Don’t be embarrassed.” Sunset sat on the table and looked at the device with interest. Twilight wouldn’t have ever sat on a table. Ever. ”What is it?”

“Well, um.” That’s a library table. It’s for books. You shouldn’t, it’s like sitting on a throne in a room full of kings. “When I get mad, I think about this...girl. She’s me,” Twilight’s face turned red, “and...oh, geez.”

“I have invisible friends too,” Sunset Shimmer said. “I write about them in my diary.”

“Next you’re going to tell me you still play with stuffed animals.”

“I love stuffed animals.”

Twilight grinned. “Well, it’s this alter ego, right? I call her - don’t laugh - Midnight Sparkle. It’s...dark me. Yes, I write stories about her. She meets a lot of attractive men. And she lives in this device I made. It helps me calm down. This is what I do when I get angry. I just hold it, and it’s like all my negative feelings just flow into it.”

“You made it?”

“It started as a crafts project. I wanted to make a kind of magic charm. To...help. Um. Don’t worry, I don’t really believe in magic and crystals and astrology and things.”

Sunset frowned. “Why not? I do. Can I see?” She took the device out of Twilight’s hand.

“Hm,” Sunset said. “Cute. It’s like a purple compass.” She gave it back. “If you’re ever feeling angry, you can always talk to me.”

“And we can set something on fire together?” Twilight said hopefully.

Sunset Shimmer laughed. “Girlfriend, now you’re talking. See you later, Twilight.”

“Bye, Sunset….”

“Hold it up above your head,” Adagio said warily. “Don’t make me hurt you.”

Twilight leaned against the pedestal of the statue to get to her feet. She held the device up like Adagio said.

Sunset Shimmer wouldn’t have.

Midnight Sparkle wouldn’t have either.

What was the point of admiring them if she was just going stay the same? It was like knowing there was a better financial strategy and then just continuing to bleed money.

And everything hurt. She was sick of this.

Twilight pointed the device at Adagio. She reacted like Twilight had leveled a gun at her.

“What’s going on?” Twilight demanded. Adagio cringed. Aria and Sonata were crouched, catlike, leaning in opposite directions like they were about to bolt. “What is this? What do you want from me?”

Adagio stayed low. She crept warily, with sudden movements like a shark in the water, a lateral motion bringing her closer to Twilight.

“Stay back.” Twilight felt her the pedestal press against her back. “I mean it!”

“You don’t know what that is,” Adagio stated.

“What what is? This? It’s a crafts project!”

“Over one thousand years.” Adagio continued to creep toward her. “In over one thousand years, you’re the first human with magic. You woke up my hunger.”

Twilight had been to the beach with her parents once. She had gotten distracted measuring the frequency of the waves and wandered out into the water past the sandbar. Nothing had touched her, she hadn’t seen anything. But some sixth sense told her there was something black in the water, deep below the murky surface, swimming toward her. She had paddled back to shore as fast as she could.

Looking back, it seemed silly. But Adagio was giving her the same feeling. Right in front of her, she was being stalked by an ancient, black hunger. Twilight held out the device like a cross and felt about as confident in it as she did in the real thing.

Adagio’s lips were spreading back. Her mouth opened, and Twilight saw her teeth. For one, there were too many of them. Second, there were rows. Rows of sharp, triangular teeth, pale and translucent, like they hadn’t made up their mind whether to exist. As Adagio got nearer, they seemed to solidify, emerging into existence.

Adagio suddenly slammed Twilight against the pedestal. She was too strong - Twilight kicked, but it didn’t seem to do anything, and Adagio pinned her arms to the cold stone.

“Do you know what the opposite of friendship is?” she said. Her voice was thick around the impossible layers of teeth. Yellow scales were spreading up her arms and across her face.

“Let me go!”

“It’s conflict,” said Adagio, squeezing Twilight’s arms so hard it felt like her bones would be snapped. “Hate and anguish and disequilibrium. Your device is full of that negative magic.” Her mouth was opening up too wide, the teeth getting closer, surrounding Twilight’s face. Then she grabbed her wrist and twisted it, pressing the device against the pedestal.

The moon overhead gleamed white. The air was getting colder.

“Do it!” Adagio raged.

For a long moment, nothing happened.

Adagio ripped the device from her hand and pushed it against the pedestal. “Come on! Work!”

Twilight stared in horror. She yelped as Adagio suddenly seized her by the hair and flung her to the ground. “You’re too useless to use!” Adagio hurled the device down in the mud by Twilight, who snatched it automatically.

“Adagio,” said Aria, sounding cautious, “it didn’t work, we didn’t have any reason to think it would. Just because there’s a bit of magic in this world. Come on, let’s go sing something. Adagio? Let’s go sing something. We always feel better after doing that.”

“I shouldn’t have expected this bitch to be good for anything,” Adagio said. Her voice was back to normal again, as if the teeth were gone.

Twilight’s knees were cold and wet. The device was caked with mud. It pressed into her palm and ached.

She wanted to hit Adagio.

So why didn’t she?

Because she was afraid.

Because there’s three of them, and one of me -

But there was one of everyone. And that didn’t seem to stop anyone else.

So it was just her, then. Because Adagio was distracted, and Twilight could be getting up now, could be balling her fists, could even be running.

It wasn’t safer, or even easier, to shiver on her hands and knees in the mud instead of doing anything. Just more cowardly.

Rage and shame and hatred flowed down her arm into the device. It overflowed. And something flowed back.

It went through her and into her and out. It wrapped around her.

There was a very dark light.

When it was over, Twilight’s clothes were different. Something weighed on her back. Muscles she didn’t know she had flexed by instinct, bring a pair of dark, feathered wings into her vision. She examined them and the horn that seemed to have appeared on her forehead. Her hair felt different: It was sticking up more, and waving in a way that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the breeze. And a purple tail made out of hair seemed to have grown from the base of her spine.

It should have looked ridiculous. She didn’t feel ridiculous. The idea of feeling ridiculous didn’t make much sense to her.

She examined her new lavender, fingerless gloves and the shiny, glowing boots.

Three girls were backing away. They didn’t seem very consequential anymore. But she shouldn’t let them get away either. That wouldn’t be right.

Anger channeled down her arm and flicked out of her fingertips. A blue bolt smashed the air where the three girls had been standing before they jumped out of the way.

There was a muddy field in the middle of the air, surrounding by a jagged purple glow like the fragment of a mirror. In the distance a white castle rose above the gates to a city.

Midnight Sparkle floated to it, dreamlike, one hand outstretched.

Movement to her side. Her hand snaked out and caught Adagio’s arm. Ha! She was so aware of it. Every rustling blade of grass, the scattered light of every star overhead, and she was strong! Adagio’s arm was a twig in her grasp.

It was also yellow and scaly. Translucent fins were rising from Adagio’s back.

“What are you?” Adagio demanded.

Sunset Shimmer woke up. Her diary on the nightstand was glowing. She stared at it like a penguin in a zoo might upon seeing a glacier.

Then a rush of energy bolted through her heart, and she was running out the door with the diary tucked under her arm.

It was freezing cold. She felt none of it as her bare feet pounded the sidewalk, heading for the statue at Canterlot High.

“Princess!” she shouted as she ran. “Princess! I’m sorry, Princess! Have you forgiven me? I’m ready! Please! Take me home!”

Across a void where distance has no meaning, something so light that it made a photon seem like a black hole in comparison crossed over….

Buried deep in a drawer in Princess Celestia’s office that hadn’t been cleaned for 250 years, a blank diary suddenly lit up. Letters scribbled themselves on the pages, most of them addressed to the good princess.

It’s a pity she was out that night.

The demon laughed. Her voice was deeper than Twilight’s, sultry and oozing confidence.

“Why, I’m Midnight Sparkle. And you are -”

Adagio howled in pain.

“- broken,” Midnight Sparkle said with satisfaction. She released the mangled, yellow-scaled arm. “A shark with a broken fin. What a shallow pool you bullied.”

Adagio fell back, her teeth and fins fading. Sonata and Aria clutched her, cowering behind her even as they supported her.

“What else?” Midnight Sparkle examined herself. “I know.” She snapped her fingers. A black cloak appeared on her, and then tightened into jacket, shiny like leather. “That’s more like it.”

“We need your help,” Aria said.

Midnight Sparkle looked at her with wide eyes. Aria Blaze, with purple hair parted like living room drapes and a redundant belt over tight pants, who had treated Twilight’s insecurities like target practice for almost a year. Adagio was scarier, but Aria was more easily bored. That boredom had been a constant source of misery for -

- for the girl I no longer am.

Midnight Sparkle crushed the anger sweeping down her arm, the anger that wanted to explode in blue violence and obliterate the three girls in front of her. She wanted it to. But it wasn’t right.

She raged at that. They hadn’t ever let right and wrong deter them. To be bound by that, it was like -

- like being a good person.

But she was the shark now!

Yes, and? Being a person is much more fun, at least until they invent a book you can read underwater.

Midnight Sparkle rose into the air. Blue sparks cascaded down her arms. Where they fell, purple rents in the earth opened up, little fragments of an alien city. She thought she saw a horse walk past -

“Please,” Aria said. “We just want to go home.”

Midnight Sparkle felt the power rush through her arms. She held onto it, held it back. “What is going on?”

Aria glanced at Sonata, who gave a nervous up-down jerk of her head. Adagio, in their arms, was making a high-pitched, pained whine. Was that how an injured shark sounded? It was more like how Spike, her dog, sounded when she accidentally stepped on his paw.

“We’re not from this world.” Aria pointed at the purple gash. “We’re from there, but we were banished.”

“You should have been banished from mine,” Midnight Sparkle said.

“...Yes,” Aria said. “I don’t know why no one did. But we want to go! We’ll never come anywhere near you again. Please, while the magic lasts, let us through. It’s been over a thousand years. A thousand years away from home.”

“I don’t owe you anything,” said Midnight Sparkle.

“No,” Aria said. “I’m begging you.”

Midnight Sparkle hesitated.

Damn! It wasn’t a word Twilight would use, but she wasn’t Twilight anymore. She had never had to be Twilight.

She didn’t have to be Midnight Sparkle either.

She could be...whatever she wanted.

Right now, in this moment of transformation, all she had to do was think, Who do I really want to be?

And she found that she wanted….

“Are you sorry?” asked Twilight or Midnight or maybe something that had crossed over, that had started to rise like the sun.

Aria’s mouth opened.

“Don’t lie,” said the changing creature of magic.

Aria closed her mouth.

The colors around the floating girl were warming. The leather jacket faded into nothing. Orange and yellow rippled across her clothes, her wings softened and folded behind her back like a robin’s; her tail turned red and bushy like a baby squirrel’s. Her hair no longer blazed like purple fire; it fell around her shoulders like a blossom of flower petals.

“Go,” said Sunrise Sparkle. Her voice was young and full of gentle song.

Aria and Sonata were staring at her with open mouths.

“Go,” said Sunrise Sparkle again, her head tilting to the side, a smile spreading across her face like the morning sun over a warming field of grain. She drifted lower and held out her hand to the purple gash in the world. “While it lasts.”

“Thank you!” Aria gasped.

“Yeah, thanks a lot!” Sonata said in a strangled voice. Hoisting Adagio between them, they hurried to the purple fragment and climbed in, scales rippling across their faces and arms, fins jutting out from their backs as they crossed the divide into another world.

Sunrise Sparkle drifted to the ground and held the gash from either side. She began to push it closed.

A yellow face lunged out, mouth wide open, acid dripping off rows of triangular teeth. It clamped on Sunrise Sparkle’s face. Teeth caught in her skin, dragged, ripped: They tightened around her skull until something cracked.

Sunrise Sparkle screamed and fell to her knees. Blood ran from her face onto the cold ground; purple flowers jumped up where the drops landed.

“Adagio!” a familiar voice shouted, but it wasn’t the same as Aria’s, it was too musical. “Hold her!” said Sonata’s voice, but with a melody. Some kind of struggle was going on. Then the gash in the world closed, and everything was silent.

Twilight bled, shivering, clutching her injured head. She needed to think. Thinking hurt. It all hurt. Curled up, she was still dizzy; she was strangely hot in her head and cold everywhere else.

She had power! There was power in her hands, power in her fingers, pale blue sparks like the morning sky. But she couldn’t think what to do with her trembling hands, couldn’t think how to stop the blood, couldn’t feel what way her head was fragmented, how to set it right.

She tried. Blue light erupted from her body and blasted away. Something heavy crashed and splattered mud on her face: It was the horse statue, a few feet from her, cracked on its side. She didn’t see the pedestal behind it in pieces.

Didn’t work. Try again.

Whoa-oh. Tipping on her side wasn’t going to help. These flowers smelled nice. When had they been planted? They hadn’t been there yesterday, or even a minute ago. They were really pretty though. What kind of flower were they? So familiar...but the name...she couldn’t remember the name….

A body was found in the mud in the front lawn of Canterlot High early that the morning. It was quickly identified as Twilight Sparkle’s despite the mangled face. Nearby was Sunset Shimmer, clutching the broken pedestal, sobbing inconsolably. When she was finally able to talk, she told the police that she had been there since just past midnight but hadn’t seen what happened. Eventually it was decided that a wild dog must have attacked Twilight, though the bite marks seemed to match a shark more than anything.

No one knew where the lavender flowers came from.

Three girls, Adagio Dazzle, Aria Blaze, and Sonata Dusk, went missing. A search was made, but no clues turned up. Eventually the police stopped looking.

Sunset Shimmer dropped out of school the day of the incident. She filled her backpack with pieces of the pedestal and vanished. When some students went to check on her at her house, they found it abandoned. Almost all her things were there, just the backpack missing, and knowing her, a book or two. There was certainly space for it on her nightstand.

The first of a rash of arsons began later that week, seemingly unrelated.

And that was that, mostly.

Across the distanceless void…

...the story continues.

Three girls wrestled on the ground. Their forelegs tangled and their long, fishlike tails slapped the mud. One yellow foreleg had a dark mark on it, and trembled, jerking suddenly when it was touched.

“My arm!” Adagio Dazzle shrieked. “My...my...oh, my! My leg! My leg! My leg my leg my leg!”

There was a moment of shocked, distant, long-coming recognition, like watching a train hurtling forward with deceptive speed from a long way away: Dorsal fins, long, equine faces, hoofs, feeling the mud squelch under their thick, slithering, scaly tails. Then the laughter started.

The merponies clung to each other, Adagio shrieking once, and then they arranged themselves to support her injured leg, hugging tight like sisters at a long-awaited reunion.

In their laughter was music.

“We’re back,” Adagio sobbed. “I’m me again!”

“My hoofs!” Aria said. “My voice!”

“We’re together!” Sonata wailed. “I love you both so much!”

Each word they spoke was a note, every sentence a measure; in their speech was a melody; their tone was a tune.

There was a long rest for countless bars as they clutched each other and wept.

Finally they untangled, but didn’t separate. Adagio wiped Sonata’s tears; Aria gingerly stroked the hoof of Adagio’s injured leg.

“Let’s swim!” said Sonata.

“Let’s sing!” said Aria.

“No,” said Adagio. “Let’s eat.”

Author's Notes:

Thanks to FanOfMostEverything for reading a beta version. They have written stories you could be reading.