The storm quickly overtook the crescent slash of the moon. The sound of roaring wind and rain engulfed Ponyville, drowning out all other sound, lulling the already dreaming populace into even deeper dreams. The occasional crack of thunder or greenish flash of lightning did little to disturb Twilight Sparkle, up late into the evening and already well into burning tonight's supply of midnight oil. The Princess of Friendship had been so busy lately, she hardly remembered a time when she had been simply been Princess Celestia's most faithful student. Back then she would stay up long into the night, often by choice, just to study so as to impress her mentor with her accumulated knowledge. Now she wore so many hats: Princess of Friends, Headmare of her own school, and last but not least Best Aunt Friend Forever to a very precocious and powerful baby alicorn, that she had little choice in what hours she had to sleep and what hours had to be dedicated to catching up on all her many obligations.

It was for her role as aunt in particular that had Twilight up so late this evening. Cadance and Shining Armor had decided that their adorable daughter would spend her first Nightmare Night in Ponyville. Partially, Twilight knew it was so the long suffering Prince and Princess could have some alone time, probably to cuddle in front of a fire with a few cups of warm apple cider, or whatever it was married couples got up to once the foalsitter took over. But she also knew that the citizens of the Crystal Empire tended to fawn over the baby princess, swarming the scene of almost all of her outings to snap a picture of various life events. Flurry Heart's first ice cream, her first trip down a slide, her first check up with the pediatrician, all of these had been events so popularized across the Empire that Flurry had almost missed out on each because of the crowd of eager would be witnesses it had attracted. In some ways, the loving populace of the empire were every bit as bad as the worst helicopter parent you could imagine, obsessing over the royal family to a ridiculous degree. It would be a nice change of pace for one of Flurry's firsts in life to be far away from her adoring fans, so she could actually enjoy it in peace.

But when Twilight realized she was going to be taking a foal, who had barely started walking, out to see all the sights and sounds that Nightmare Night had to offer, Twilight had felt a surge of rising panic. The last outing Auntie Twilight and her niece had taken together hadn't exactly gone according to plan. While Flurry was an adorable little girl, she was still an Alicorn, and when she had gotten upset she had nearly torn a children's hospital to pieces. Though her wild alicorn magic had calmed somewhat since then, thanks to her Crystaler Sunburst, she was still a baby with all of the might of an Alicorn at her disposal. Things might not end very well if she were say, to get spooked. Nightmare Night practically existed to spook fillies and colts!

So Twilight did what she knew she had to do! She embraced the panic!

The first thing she had done earlier that day was send out a royal proclamation to all the citizens of Ponyville that Flurry Heart was coming, and that while Nightmare Night would go forward as planned all spooky, scary, or otherwise frightening decorations and costumes were to be toned down for the toddlers first Nightmare Night. The response from the citizens had been, thankfully, an understanding one and most had agreed to keep the truly horrific and macabre behind closed doors for the evening. For a pony who was as prone to worry as Twilight, it had actually been a very sensible thing to do on her part. She was surprised how easy to had been to solve the problem.

Of course that just meant that she now felt it had been too easy.

That was when she started eyeing the Nightmare Night decorations in her own castle. Were those spider webs too spooky? Were the ghosts hanging from the chandelier too scary? Were skeletons really something appropriate for a foal to see? Everywhere she looked, Twilight saw some decoration or another that she was certain would upset her niece.

"Hmm, are bats too scary? They're kind of cute. Maybe not vampire bats though," Twilight mused to herself as she debated removing the fangs from a few fake bats dangling from the ceiling. "Well if they were vampire fruit bats, maybe that would make it okay?"

So here Twilight was, up late into the night, taking down decorations and putting them back up again modified to be less scary. The only problem was, it wouldn't be long before she would take them down again, still unsatisfied with the results. She was like a storm of indecision raging inside of her own castle. She didn't even notice the rain lashing the town outside.

"Ooh!" she groaned, her anxiety getting the better of her. "I'll deal with this later! There are so many rooms I haven't even started on yet!"

She was flying all over the castle, to rooms she had barely visited since she had taken on her new role as Headmare. It was fortunate that she was flying actually. That way she avoided cutting herself on all the broken glass...

"Oh no!" she gasped, as she surveyed the damage.

Twilight had a hard time processing what exactly she was seeing when she came across it. This room was one she had once spent quite a lot of time in. It had served as a makeshift library while she had been busy transferring books that had been salvaged from the Golden Oak library which, had been destroyed by Tirek what felt like ages ago. As Twilight looked at the ruined frame amid shards of glass in the middle of the room, it was like seeing the charred husk of the former Ponyville Library all over again. Only this time she wasn't looking at a place that had been home to her since she had left Canterlot, but rather the charred remains of what had once been the Crystal Mirror!

"What happened?"

The mirror was a device of Starswirl the Bearded's design, one of many that had served to link Equestria with worlds beyond. Though there were many like it, the Crystal Mirror itself had been rather special to Twilight. The alicorn remembered the first time she had passed through the mirror to the human world. Memories of exploring a bizarre place called Canterlot High School while chasing down Sunset Shimmer, who at the time had stolen her Element of Harmony, came flooding back to Twilight. Though the misadventure had seemed harrowing at the time, it wasn't long before Twilight had made friends, including with Sunset herself. How long had it been since Twilight had spoken to Sunset Shimmer and her human friends? Truthfully, Twilight had been so busy with one thing and another in Equestria that she'd almost completely forgotten about the human world.

A pang of guilt registered in Twilight's chest as she recalled the journal that the pair once used to communicate with one another while the portal was closed. She had since used it as part of a device to force the portal to be open at all times, since originally it could only stay open for a few days once every thirty moons, but that device now lay in a broken heap around the mirror's frame. Carefully sifting through the wreckage, Twilight found not one, but two books. One was the journal in question, singed but otherwise whole, and with a sigh of relief Twilight found that none of the pages had been so badly burnt that they were not still legible. The other book she had found, the former librarian at first thought had fared much worse in the explosion, until on further inspection she discovered that the tome was simply exceedingly old and worn. Ancient in fact, with yellowing manuscript and a nearly completely broken spine.

"Wow... Do I even own a book that's this old?" Twilight couldn't quite make out the title, but the book was not the most pressing mystery at hand.

Though the Crystal Mirror was an ancient artifact as well, it should not have been so easy to break. As Twilight looked at the glittering shards spread out over the floor, she thought she saw something shift and move beyond the silvery surface of each gleaming shard. A wave or foreboding stole over Twilight in that moment. It felt as if she were being watched!

Using her magic, Twilight carefully gathered up the pieces of the broken mirror in a nearby dust bin. Only after she had secured the lid did the sense of a foreign presence observing her dissipate. Finding the mirror in pieces like this had already shaken her, so she would have been happy to dismiss the feeling as nerves, but she couldn't shake the feeling that something was very wrong. The superstitious might say, after all, that a broken mirror was seven years bad luck, but this feeling she had went beyond that. No, Twilight needed answers about what could have destroyed the Crystal Mirror... and she also need to find out if the ones she cared for were okay.

"I hope Sunset Shimmer and the others are alright," Twilight cradle the journal to her chest as tears welled up in her eyes, worrying that the Crystal Mirror's fate might bode ill for the fortunes of her friends.

Deep in her gut, Twilight knew that the clue to the cause of the mirrors destruction would be found in the two books she had discovered in the wreckage. She carefully, almost reverently, set down the older tome before placing Sunset's journal atop it. With a heavy sigh, she flipped open the pages, and read what the last communication had been from the human world...

Next Chapter: Village of the Damned Estimated time remaining: 2 Hours, 50 Minutes