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The Great Succession and Its Aftermath

by mylittleeconomy

Chapter 10: Goodnight Sun

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Goodnight Sun

The bird was looking for something.

“Philomena?” said Princess Celestia. The bird turned her head. The Alicorn looked unusually beautiful today. There were flowers in her mane, fiery black-mottled ones with orange and yellow exploding across their petals.

“Philomena, the New Year is tomorrow,” she said.

The bird looked out the window. Her memory flickered like a flame. It wavered and changed.

It was hard to remember, when you were made of fire.

“Philomena?” said Princess Celestia. “I have an idea for how to make the celebration a little more….”

She looked outside, where the sun was rising over the horizon for the last time. Like a Viking funeral, tonight the star would be sent away in a fiery chariot over the edge of the world.

“But I need your help.”


Equestria hadn’t had a new year for a long time. It had one very old year. The Sun’s journey around the Earth hadn’t ended, so why should the year? There was a counting of seasons: “Haven’t had a frost like this since the 378th winter,” and so on.

This year Equestria had a new year. Nightmare Moon had imprisoned Princess Celestia, however briefly, and so while one revolution proceeded, the Sun's came to an end. Like an old family dog, Princess Celestia still had her leash of gold attached to it and could get it up and moving again for its daily walk, but, also like an old family dog, it was slow and uncertain, and its path tended to be marked by yellow streaks. It was time to let it go.

And for a new year, they would need a new sun.

The current winter, instead of being the thousand-and-first, was the first winter, the second first winter ever. The New Year should have been celebrated as soon as Princess Celestia was restored to the One Bank. But with the normally slow pace of bureaucracy at Canterlot reduced to a snail’s crawl without Twilight Sparkle there to manage and intimidate, the official date for the New Year had been delayed and delayed until January 1. No pony was sure how to celebrate a New Year. Princess Celestia was the only pony who had ever been at a New Year celebration before, and she only spoke of a phoenix’s fire and the pooling water of melted snow around her hoofs.

So the town and Twilight had to make things up. It was like dragon claws on a blackboard to her, making things up for an official ceremony. But this was a New Year, a time of invention and reinvention, when you could look at your murky reflection on the surface of a frozen pond and imagine that, in the spring, it would melt into something new….


The sun rose for the last time. Twilight awoke with it, thrust open the window, and soaked her face in the thin rays that barely reached her through the thin morning mist. She had woken up to this sun thousands of times, and now she had woken to it for the last time. A wave of nostalgia swept her, and she reflected for a while on her childhood in Princess Celestia’s academy and the strange arc her own life was taking. From Canterlot to Ponyville! It was like going from the finest restaurant to the Hayburger. But she had a Daughter bank, which at least meant she was manager of the Hayburger, and she had friends....

Of course, she had made friends at a time when the sun had been stolen and Equestria faced a thousand years of night. But in making friends, she had brought back the sun. In a way, she felt responsible for it, and the goodbye between them was not completely unlike that between a mother and a daughter.

At the same time, she felt a motherly affection from the sun toward her. The warm rays were like a gentle caressing her cheek, the pale trembling light like that of eyes full of gentle love. With the sun just hovering over the horizon, slow in its lazy rise, she could look directly at it. Together, mother and daughter shared a final moment.

Somewhere, was Princess Celestia doing the same? Twilight pictured her watching the sun from the balcony outside her bedchamber, quietly remembering. Or was it a tearful goodbye? Or relief at the lifting of a heavy burden? Excitement, nervousness at something new?

Regret, at having failed?

Twilight eventually closed the shades and went downstairs. She roused Spike, who wouldn’t be allowed to miss the morning sun no matter what, and started making breakfast. She made it slowly, letting the batter sizzle in the pan until the pancakes were a deep golden brown, the color of sunlight illuminating an old, silent library. She ate her pancakes without syrup across from Spike and sent him outside afterward to sweep the snow from the walkway from the treehouse to the road. She took her time doing the dishes and scrubbing the bowl and whisk and pan. She wanted this day to last, and the slower she moved, the slower she felt that time would pass.

After tidying up, she read for a while in a chair by the window in the ground-floor library. The book, carelessly chosen, proved to be a good one: The Mystery of Rainy Lud, it told the story of a small town in the countryside encountering a cloud that rained by itself. While the cloud eventually rained itself out and disappeared, the effects on the town lingered.

She took her time with it, and it was around noontime by the time she finished. Twilight, still in the reflective glow of a book recently completed, looked outside at the sun. Now at its peak, from here on out the great yellow ball would only be falling until it passed below the horizon, tiredly descending to its final resting place. In the new year to come, a new sun would rise.

There was work to do before the New Year celebration that night. Pegasi flew by carrying torches and poles. The torches had been Twilight’s idea, enthusiastically taken up by the whole town at the town meeting after Hearth’s Warming, and she and her friends had helped mark the places to put them yesterday. And drinks and food and things were being supplied communally, which in practice meant that Pinkie Pie and Applejack were doing it all. It wasn’t for lack of volunteers; Twilight suspected that they were too shrewd to miss an opportunity to advertise.

Her role was to mark the time of death and give the eulogy, as the only expert qualified for either job. All over Equestria, other towns were preparing their own festivals, and in each, a pony had been selected to perform the same somber job. ...Twilight was sure she could guess the identities of at least eight of them.

Spike’s tail swished irregularly against the wall, a sign of nervous energy. Twilight looked over her notes and eventually crumpled them up, sighing. There was nothing she could say. This sun had been a companion for Princess Celestia longer than anypony, even Philomena.

“Did you read the comment Princess Celestia gave in the newspaper yesterday?” she asked.

“Which one?”

“About what the first thing she was planning to do in the new year is.”

“Um….”

“She said she had made a resolution,” Twilight said. “She resolved never to let another sun die.”

“Don’t tell her about entropy then,” Spike said. He expected a sharp reaction, but Twilight seemed to be deep in thought, and the sarcasm didn’t register.

“I was—thinking,” said Twilight. “That maybe, if the sun can change, so can ponies. And if Princess Celestia means to change, then so should I.”

“You’ve changed a lot since coming to Ponyville. You even go outside. For non-utilitarian reasons!”

Twilight started chewing on her pencil. “What do you think is most wrong with me?”

“Too introspective, too worried about other ponies’ opinions,” said Spike, hoping to quash things before Twilight could get started on one of her negative cycles. They usually ended with a frenzied bout of reorganizing that made the house unlivable until she was done.

Twilight shook her head.

There was one more thing to take care of. Under the still-watchful eye of the dimming sun, Twilight trotted out along a path she rarely took.


The whole town wanted to know, “Who is Twilight Sparkle?” For the Unicorn had come into their lives with great suddenness and brought behind her, like the first car of a derailing train, changes and transformations.

There was Nightmare Moon, of course, who had even come back on Nightmare Night. The idea that Nightmare Moon was personally targeting their little town was an unsurprisingly fruitful source of bad dreams. Yet the fact that their little Unicorn, proven helpless after the events of Nightmare Night, had nevertheless survived two encounters with the dark sister of Princess Celestia gave rise to legends and murmurs. There were no prophecies about Twilight Sparkle, nor none ancient that had subsequently been connected with her, yet it seemed quite obvious that she was a prophesied heroine of destiny, and if the prophets disagreed, that was only to their fault. The future too, if it had no grand place for Twilight in its pages, had obviously been miswritten and was in dire need of some editing.

There were the Elements of Equilibrium. Occasionally Rarity wore her gleaming cloud-like crystal around the town, and Applejack kept hers in a box on the mantel that she displayed for curious visitors. Everypony who touched one swore they felt a flash of heat or a warm throb. In fact they felt no such thing, but that too was a sort of magic.

Then, most obviously, the monsters. The first time the good citizens of Ponyville saw a Cerberus working the plow, several ponies fainted before one had the sense to call animal control. When Fluttershy arrived with a net and a bag of treats, it took several attempts to communicate to her that “the sweet fuzzy-wuzzy doggy” was the reason she had been called.

Of course, Fluttershy was hardly any better. She had a “baby” serpent that was growing at an alarming rate. Fortunately, it mostly kept to itself, working out huge grooves in the earth and laying there contentedly. Fluttershy assured them all that once it could fly it would be out of everypony’s way, though not everypony was relaxed by the idea of a giant flying snake. And Rarity, who never talked about pets, and Rainbow Dash, who got grumpy about it if she was asked….

There was the Everfree Forest. Pinkie Pie was its unofficial liaison with Ponyville. That the pony most often seen laughing madly at her own jokes around enormous mouthfuls of cake was now the single tie between ponies and the dark, wild forest was even more cause for concern than Nightmare Moon was. At least the latter was clearly the stuff of destiny and great magic, with both Princess Celestia and Twilight Sparkle on guard against that danger. The Everfree Forest, however, was always nearby and more plain in its intentions to ponies—namely, to eat them. It was the difference between the fear of monsters in the night and the fear of crime in your neighborhood. Pinkie Pie as chief of police was the stuff of nightmares, though no pony could say whether it was the criminals or the good citizens who should be trembling in fear.

Twilight’s permanent residency in Ponyville brought with it a Daughter bank. A surprisingly humble building, it squatted on a hill by the post office as if it was embarrassed to be seen amid the rural setting. It meant that their small, backwater town was suddenly one of nine centers of national monetary activity. Sociopolitical implications aside, this gave Ponyville bragging rights over the nearby towns, and every opportunity was taken to rub it in their faces.

Equestria itself was changing. Calls to audit the Bank, though stalled at the first refusal of Princess Celestia, signaled a dramatic change in how the Bank was perceived. Fringe ideas were suddenly front and center on the policy table, being debated across Equestria by seasoned thinkers and amateur economist-philosophers alike. There was, ostensibly, a rival to Princess Celestia’s throne lurking somewhere. It had been shown that the untouchable, invincible princess could be defeated and captured, and saved by a mortal pony. And the One Bank had shared its power with the Nine. Ponies who had long detested the throne or the Bank, or who had been stymied in their political ambitions by the immovable princess, were organizing. And the effects were not limited to ponies alone. Griffons, banished from their ancient farmlands to the mountains, looked at the sky and recalled the stories of their ancestors, stories that told of taking royal command of dumb herds and supplicating beasts, of the rich taste of pork and the tenderness of lamb. And their wings stirred….

Reptiles chewing leaves in swamps and lakes communicated with footprints and droppings, and in that way ideas traveled over miles without notice by mammals.

And deeply hidden, in icy corners of Equestria, a faint cry carried on the wind. The windigos walked under ice and whispered to their hunger, that soon it might be sated.

And who could say what the Everfree Forest thought of it all.

And now, even the sun was changing. It had burned over the earth for billions of years. Now it was time for a new one.

All this, it was felt, came on the heels of Twilight Sparkle’s coming to Ponyville. And when the good citizens of Ponyville looked to the uncertain future, they wondered what Twilight Sparkle made of it all, and what it was she planned to do.

And so they asked themselves: Who is Twilight Sparkle?


It wasn’t hard to find, since it was the biggest and fanciest house in Ponyville. Twilight affixed a bright smile to her face and knocked.

“Who is it?” shouted a voice.

“Twilight Sparkle,” she answered confidently. “I was hoping to talk about your daughter.”

Twilight heard hoofsteps, then the door opened. “Oh, yes,” said Spoiled Rich. A sort of grapefruit color, Diamond Tiara’s mother had aging but keen eyes, and regarded Twilight with a sort of restrained disinterest. She wore a gold necklace and had coiffed hair that looked like Rarity’s work. There was a calm mastery in her stance that reflected good breeding, Twilight felt. “Diamond Tiara did mention. Her teacher, Miss Cheerilee, said she had already spoken to you about it. I suppose you’re here to apologize.”

Twilight wondered exactly what Diamond Tiara had told her mother. “I am sorry that I upset your daughter, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about. Are you aware of what your husband has become involved with?”

An eyebrow raised. “This should be good,” said Spoiled Rich. She let Twilight in and led her to a sitting room. Twilight was impressed by the tasteful art and understated decorations. A family named “Rich” that lived in a town where dolls were still made from straw would surely be gaudy and ostentatious. But the interior of the house showed the refined touch of a mature mare.

Spoiled Rich sat Twilight down in a bergère and served tea without asking if Twilight wanted any. The cups and teapot showed some of the ostentatiousness that the house hadn’t, with elaborate designs and finely cut handles.

“This is a beautiful tea set,” said Twilight as Spoiled Rich sat across from her.

“It was my mother’s,” she answered, a severe look on her face as she took a sip. “We were never to drink from this set. I never fathomed the point. To be rich just to be rich...I can’t imagine what kind of deprivation fosters such an attitude. Money is to be spent, things are to be used. As an economist, don’t you agree?”

“I suppose I would.” Twilight took a sip and tasted tannin. “Still, it’s all up to the owner.”

“And not to you?”

“No. I don’t know what you mean.”

“So what is it about my husband?”

“I was wondering if you knew about his current political views…?” Spoiled Rich just looked at her, so Twilight went on. “I heard about it from Diamond Tiara after the pageant. Apparently Filthy Rich has been giving her some very odd ideas about what I do at the Daughter bank.”

“What do you do at the Daughter bank?” Spoiled Rich took another sip of tea.

“Primarily help Ponyville and the rest of Equestria recover after the Great Succession. Things are mostly back on track, but only because the Daughter banks helped coordinate local monetary—”

“I see.” Spoiled Rich set her cup on the saucer with a clink. “And Diamond Tiara told you what, exactly?”

“That the Daughter bank is an imposition from Canterlot, and Nightmare Moon was a false flag attack to achieve it.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“What? No!”

“I saw your battle with her on Nightmare Night. She defeated you without making an effort. But we’re supposed to believe that, out of sight, you easily vanquished her?”

“It wasn’t easy. Look. if Nightmare Moon was a false flag attack, why would she show up again at Nightmare Night to make me look bad?”

“Because she’s out of control, obviously,” said Spoiled Rich. “The government isn’t very good at getting things done, you may have noticed.”

Twilight started and stopped her speech several times, trying to find a thread of logic to hold onto. “Princess Celestia is in full control of the Bank—”

“Quite. I can see that you’re content to parrot the Canterlot propaganda.”

“I guess Diamond Tiara is getting this from both her parents,” Twilight said more calmly than she felt.

“Filthy got it all from me, he doesn’t have any imagination. All his family has ever known is how to lie in wait for an opportunity. I’ve got an entrepreneurial spirit he simply hasn’t. But you know how stallions are. Or, I suppose you don’t,” said Spoiled Rich. There was a smirk on her face, and Twilight knew she had investigated the old rumors from Twilight’s days in school.

“How do you do this, as a mother?” said Twilight, a cold anger suffusing her words. “I’ve never been one, so I don’t know. But I’d never feed my daughter poison, and that extends to her mind.”

“But you drank the tea,” said Spoiled Rich with such venom that Twilight jerked away from her cup in surprise. “Only joking,” Spoiled Rich laughed. “But Princess Celestia and all her little devotees are going to get what’s coming to them.”

“Some family,” said Twilight coldly, standing up. “I’ll see myself out.”

“Who are you?” said Spoiled Rich suddenly. “How can you serve that tyrant?”

Twilight stopped, but didn’t turn around. “She raises the sun. She only ever missed one day in over a thousand years.”

“You don’t seriously believe in all that stuff, do you? An educated pony like yourself?”

“What stuff?”

“That the earth was frozen, of course!” Spoiled Rich barked laughter. “Global warming, really. You can’t be serious. The sun dropped all the way to the earth, somehow didn’t burn everypony alive, but did conveniently eradicate all the windigos, and of course Princess Celestia did it all single-hoofedly. Quite a story. And what a coincidence that she banished the only other pony who was there to the moon!”

“Not all the windigos were destroyed,” said Twilight, her voice so icy she could have passed for one. “And it’s my job as chief executive economist of the Daughter bank of Ponyville to see to it that ponies like you don’t succeed in bringing them back.”

She doubted she’d have a better exit line than that, so she left.

“I tried,” sighed Spoiled Rich to herself. “I don’t understand how such a talented mare can have such little ambition. Well...when the oceans are rising, you rise too...or you drown.”


Twilight shook with anger as she trotted out of the Rich’s house. Arguments swam through her head like piranhas at a hunk of meat, nibbling away at everything Spoiled Rich had said until there were only bones left.

But the sun overhead was not warm at all. I’m not angry, it seemed to say to her. Let’s enjoy these last moments together.

To relax, Twilight did a tour of the location for the final goodbye and the celebration for the new year. She shouted instructions to the Pegasi installing the torches and checked the oil on each. By the end of it she was feeling much better.

Back at home she carefully reviewed her astronomy equipment and made sure the telescope was pristine and working. She opened the freezer to peek in on the small, black metal cube secure in its bed of ice.

Around five o’clock, the sky darkening, Twilight and Spike packed up and headed out to the town center. Twilight floated her telescope behind her along with the box of ice holding the black metal cube. They weren’t alone: the same roads were full of townsfolk all heading to the same destination, and Pegasi flew overhead. They were all going to watch the sun set for the last time, and to see what would rise in its place. The sight of the whole town streaming toward the same destination filled Twilight with a sense of purpose and duty. The conversation with Spoiled Rich, still replaying itself in her mind, now seemed to be happening from behind a thick, soundproof wall.

The town gathered at the base of a small hill that Twilight climbed up alone.

Colors passed overhead. Beautiful colors, a magnificent spread, as though the sun were saying goodbye, and showing its best. A deep red bloomed across the sky, lit up by brilliant orange. There was a lump in Twilight’s throat. She couldn’t make herself enjoy it.

The sun set, for the last time, a little after five-thirty. Twilight didn’t feel the need to use her telescope to check for any last edge of the disk poking over the horizon. She could feel that the sun had been let go.

Now it was twilight.

The first stars did not blink over Equestria. The Moon’s silhouette did not show. They wore black, Twilight thought, out of respect.

She felt a pang of sadness for her teacher, Princess Celestia. Surely it was like putting an old friend to rest. She remembered how painful it had been to part with her old doll, Smarty Pants, whose button eyes were falling out by the time her mother had gently pried it out of her hoofs for the last time.

The sun had been taken off its respirator, so to speak, and now it was dying. And the great danger was that, in less than an hour, there would be no sun anywhere in the world, and Equestria would freeze.

She took the black metal cube out of the icebox. It was freezing to the touch. She wished she could have made it colder, but the idea had come to her only a couple of days ago.

Twilight watched the light from under the earth glow faintly over the horizon. The sky was pink and pale like the wading birds in the pictures Princess Celestia had shown her of them balancing on one leg beside a sunlit lake. Twilight held up the black cube which warmed faintly and began to glow almost imperceptibly while the sky dimmed. Until at last what little light remained faded.

Up on that hill, Twilight looked at the solitary torch beside her and focused the glow of the cube through her magic until the torch caught flame.

The crowd of townspeople, who had clumped together from the cold, stood and watched Twilight descend the short hill with the torch that held the last light of the dead sun.

Spike handed Twilight a candle. She touched the flame of the torch to the wick of the candle until it caught flame. And like that, the sun’s fire was flickering and waving before all of Ponyville as if it had only been sleeping a moment.

She lit Spike’s candle, who passed the flame on to Fluttershy, while Twilight lit the candle of another pony behind them, who lit another in turn. Rainbow Dash took her lit candle and flew off to light torches on the other side of town. Other ponies fanned out on the ground, lighting empty torches wherever they were.

When the whole town was alight, the party started. Twilight, after double-checking the torches and the candles to make sure there weren’t any fire hazards—she admired the spirit of keeping the town burning bright with the last light of the dying sun, but spirit and safety rarely went together, in her experience—and found a bench to nurse a small drink and look at the dark sky. Rainbow Dash and the other Pegasi had cleared it of any clouds, leaving a starless black canvas for Twilight to project her thoughts onto.

Rarity interrupted her almost immediately. “Hem hem, darling, but you did ask for this dress, and I insist that you wear it.”

Twilight smiled gratefully. The cut was simple, but it was the colors that mattered: black-spotted with fiery orange and yellow patterns exploding across the dress. “Thanks, Rarity. I just didn’t want it to accidentally catch on fire.”

Rarity peered at her. “You didn’t have anything to drink before the party started, did you?” Twilight shook her head. “Then whatever did you think would happen up there?”

Twilight just smiled as Rarity helped her into the dress. Wearing it was the closest she could get to putting flowers on the sun’s grave.

“I didn’t know what to wear for a new year,” Rarity admitted as she zipped Twilight up and turned her around, nodding in approval. “You don’t think my hat is too big, do you?”

“Never.”

Her tone surprised Rarity. “Twilight, whatever is the matter? You look so serious.”

The world nearly ended, and Princess Celestia didn’t even send me a letter. She just...trusted. I think she trusted me. To save the world. Ahhh! Rarity! Help me! Help me! I’m going insane!

Because she’s wrong! So wrong! You’re all wrong!

“It’s a celebration,” Rarity advised her. “Have some fun.” She kissed Twilight’s cheek. “Jument curieux.” She left, leaving Twilight with a warm glow in her heart and a sick feeling in her stomach.

The party was merry amid the torchlight. There were no rules and no customs for a new year, so ponies were making it up as they went. In practice this meant drinking, singing, and games, ponies kicking up snow as they danced through the frozen streets, laughing at a sky that was as dark as the view from underneath their eyelids. The Moon wasn’t visible in the sky, as if it had dipped under the Earth in a somber pose. No stars shone down, as if their eyes were closed in grief. The result was a dark, rippling blanket of sky, the fire in the torches straining toward it like it was trying to kindle a new sun.

Fluttershy sat down next to her, snapping Twilight out of her reverie. She wore a bright green dress, and her pink mane was done up in elaborate curls. She did smell a bit like dung and sweat though, like she had finished work at her animal sanctuary and quickly dressed before heading over to the celebration. “Hi! …Are you okay?”

“I like planning parties better than actually ‘getting down,’” Twilight admitted, shifting over to make room for her.

“Do you think Nightmare Moon might show up?” Fluttershy said in a low voice.

Twilight’s eyes widened. She felt a hollow pang in her ribs. “What? No—why? Did you see something?”

Now Fluttershy drew back. “No, sorry. You just seemed so tense. And considering what happened at the last party you planned...and then she showed up at Nightmare Night, so ruining the celebration of the new sun seemed like the sort of thing she might...sorry, I’m worrying you.”

“No, it’s fine. I honestly didn’t even think of it. Um...now that I am thinking about it, I don’t think Nightmare Moon will want to brave the birth of a new sun. It’s a special time,” she added, not entirely sure what she meant by it.

“I like your dress,” Fluttershy said, changing the subject.

“Thanks.”

“What did you do with the black cube?”

Twilight looked at her.

“You don’t have to tell me,” said Fluttershy with such innocent sincerity that Twilight sighed and fished it out.

It was freezing cold to the touch. Fluttershy drew back her hoof, shivering. Twilight levitated it back into a small pouch and put it out of sight.

“Why is it so cold?”

“It was full of the sun’s warmth. Like a gourmand who tasted the best food under the stars, how is it supposed to go back to eating anything else?”

Fluttershy was quiet a moment. “Is that how you feel?”

“What?”

“About us. About living here.”

“No, I—.”

Fluttershy rushed on, as if she had been meaning to ask this for quite a while. “I mean, compared to Canterlot, this town doesn’t have a lot to offer. And none of us are very smart or know much about economics. You must get bored.”

Twilight didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “You’re all very sharp, trust me. Smarter than me in so many ways. I….”

She had been about to say that she wished she could trade her intelligence for theirs, but that wasn’t true. She’d give up her mind to save them, that she knew. But not to be them.

“Just sometimes you seem unhappy,” said Fluttershy. “It’s fine if you don’t want to talk about it. But sometimes it seems like you don’t want to talk about something. Maybe we’re not smart enough to understand. That’s totally fine!”

Now Twilight knew laughing was the better option. The problem was that they would understand all too well. “Would you trust me to save the world?”

“What, now?” Fluttershy looked alarmed.

“Like, ever. Without warning, without a word, just because it was me, and I was there, watching and thinking, would you trust me to do it?”

“No.” Fluttershy smiled shyly. “But if we were there….”

“You are smart. But any econopony would do. The Elements don’t need to be worked through me.”

“Oh, I disagree.”

Twilight didn’t sigh, but she did exhale louder than usual.

“But you wanted me to agree,” said Fluttershy, who picked up on things like that, annoyingly. “Why?”

Twilight looked up at the velvet sky. It was so empty. Tabula rasa, a blank slate that anything could be imposed onto. The perfect canvas for any artist.

Fluttershy seemed to be thinking along similar lines. “You could paint anything up there. There aren’t any clouds to get in the way. Or you could write on it. Doesn’t it look like parchment?” She smiled encouragingly at Twilight. In the torchlight, the slight curl to her pink hair looked so pretty that for a moment Twilight wanted to tell her everything. But the insane desire passed after a moment.

“Whenever you’re ready,” said Fluttershy. “I’d wait out the life of another sun for you.”

“Oh, you’re a good friend,” whispered Twilight. Stop, please. You’re hurting me. Can’t you tell you’re hurting me?

Fluttershy seemed content to just sit a while. She was happy just to have somepony quiet to be with during the party. If she wasn’t socializing at all then Rainbow Dash would notice and make her do something embarrassing. To Fluttershy, just being noticed was embarrassing.

Twilight chased her mind away from thoughts of despair and caught a ride instead on the train of thought that had been alert and running ever since Fluttershy had mentioned Nightmare Moon, who had surprised them on Nightmare Night. Had Nightmare Moon escaped again after recovering her strength, or had Princess Celestia let her go, and why?

Nightmare Moon had told her, “Thou knowest how I quelled the Bank. Know what thou knowest, and I will give thee such a nightmare.” Twilight had a guess, a pretty good one. In fact, she was sure she was right. But she didn’t like it. And in the context of Nightmare Moon’s promised nightmare, it made Twilight think of the blacker-than-black coat she had seen fading from Nightmare Moon in the old castle of the Knights of Economics, which seemed to occupy the very lower bound of lightlessness, and the deep purple coat of Princess Luna, scarred with burn-rings like a great hot disk had been pressed to her skin again and again, that had shown through underneath.

She’d encountered Princess Luna before that, technically. The Night side of the Bank hadn’t been a mirror image of the Day side, but that was because Princess Luna wasn’t a mirror image of her older sister. The Diarchs, the Heavenly Sisters, the Duality Principle, all of those ideas were just plot elements in the story ponies told about Equestria, about themselves. It was a plot that was at best only based on a true story. Like all fiction, it was forced to simplify, clarify, arrange and order in ways that defied the messy complexity of reality. Princess Luna really was just a regular mare on the inside, one who didn’t try to set herself opposite to Princess Celestia for narrative convenience. At least, Twilight thought so, because she herself had suddenly become a savior of the world and had had to explain to a number of disappointed journalists that she wasn’t interested in answering questions. What was there to say about their time in the Everfree Forest? “I was scared and made bad decisions and got bailed out every step of the way by my friends until Nightmare Moon decided I was too weak to even pay attention to.” The books that would be written about her would make her into more of a hero, Twilight was sure. The fear she felt and the mistakes she made would be turned into lessons and wisdom. The parts where she was ready to cry from fear, the parts where her mistakes weren’t inspiration for young colts and fillies to be brave but were instead just unplanned idiocies that would have led, in a fairer and more just world, to a thousand years of economic depression, they would all be shaved away like unwanted lip hair in the morning.

If Nightmare Moon was still out there, then their next confrontation was shaping up to be quite a sequel. But the thought of facing her again made Twilight feel sick to her stomach. Nightmare Moon was so much stronger than her that it was like a newborn foal fighting a grown elephant, if the elephant was also an immortal demigoddess with centuries of practice with sorceries so dark that the books containing them had to be kept in an underground vault so they wouldn’t drain all the light from the world. Both the newborn foal and Twilight pretty much had one option, which was to wet themselves and hope their opponent stayed away out of disgust. It was the sea cucumber style of fighting, and Twilight felt about as able as a vegetable when it came to fighting Nightmare Moon. But of course the books would say that they were destined foes. Twilight hoped they would make the writers peel her pancake-flat body off the floor. Try writing poetry about that.

She wished for snow to fall suddenly. If only the Pegasi hadn’t taken away the clouds. She wanted to hide her face in it and retreat from the noise and crowd of the party. There was too much wrong with her, too much that wasn’t what it needed to be. Looking at herself in a mirror didn’t hurt like being stabbed with daggers anymore. But that itself was a fault. And there was so much work to do at the Daughter bank.

She felt something warm on her shoulder. Fluttershy was leaning her head on her, pink hair spilling down Twilight’s leg artistically, like the curve left by a brushstroke on a painting. The curl was so pretty, in fact, that Twilight was sure Fluttershy had done it on purpose. She told her so.

“You’re in such a funny mood, Twilight.”

“Come on,” Twilight said, agreeing with her. “Let’s join the party. For real, not just hiding from Rainbow Dash.”

“But...but…!”

Twilight dragged Fluttershy toward a large group of ponies that included most of their friends. Hours passed in conversation under the empty sky.

It was a long night. The sun would not dawn for four or five more hours still. Fillies could be seen asleep in little clusters here and there under piles of their parents’ winter clothing. Technically it was past midnight, but that meant little in a sunless world. Still, the hours passed just the same, dragging on their bodies like waves against a boat, pulling them to a destination. Most ponies relieved themselves from the party proper and broke into small groups. For Twilight and Fluttershy, that meant joining Applejack, Rarity, and Pinkie Pie in front of the torch on the hill that Twilight had lit, its fire whipping around like it was looking for something. Their conversation died after a couple of hours, and like true friends, they huddled together and watched the fire in silence without the need for empty talk.

“Been a good year, anyway,” Applejack said after a while. It was said that there were three things a pony could look at without getting bored: fire, the stars, and moving water, and only fire was present right now.

“It’s the only one we’ve ever had,” Rarity said.

“I’m not worthy,” Twilight mumbled, looking down from the flame. The moment was too intimate, too peaceful, and she felt her heart ripping.

Rainbow Dash flew down suddenly. “I have something to confess,” she said breathlessly. “I was scared, that time in the forest with the parasprites. I was scared and I hated it and I hated hating it and I ran away.” She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I’ll never leave you all again. I’ll be more loyal than a dog—sorry, Fluttershy.”

“No offense taken.”

“That’s all I’ve got to say,” Rainbow Dash said, a set to her jaw like she was waiting for somepony to challenge her about it. Instead, Fluttershy patted her side, and Rarity flashed a smile at her. That was the end of it.

“I guess a new year’s a good time as any to make resolutions,” Applejack said. It was clear she had been thinking about something. “I’ve been thinking about Nightmare Moon. She got the best of us last time. But next time….”

She didn’t say anything more, but the resolution was felt, like a belt being secured into place.

“I want to go next,” announced Pinkie Pie. Twilight felt a muted dread. “I’ve got to meet my sisters again.” She also ended there, without elaboration.

Rarity glanced around, as if making sure it was her turn. “Well, somepony’s got to watch after the rest of you. I promise I’ll help you all fulfill your dreams.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Rarity, but I was going to resolve to never let anything bad happen ever again,’ said Fluttershy in a whisper.

“That’s a tad ambitious, darling.”

“Then...I’m going to be a good mother to the sky serpent. I’m going to teach her how to fly.”

“I’ll help,” said Rainbow Dash instantly.

“Thank you.”

Twilight was the last one left. “Oh, girls, I can’t tell lies anymore. But I’m scared to tell the truth. I’m scared you won’t be able to understand me. I'm scared that if you did understand me, you wouldn't want to be my friend anymore. But right now, while the sun’s eye is closed forever, if you want, I can tell you.”

Her friends shared confused glances. “You can tell us anything,” said Rainbow Dash.

Twilight breathed in. “Look…I have a weird family. They’re not my family. They’re my Sisters...it’s just what we called ourselves, a cohort of Princess Celestia’s graduate academy. I don’t think there have been many Brothers…stallions just aren’t socialized to be interested in household management, I guess.”

Fluttershy was listening intently but didn’t react.

“Anyway...we helped each other with problem sets and tests. It was very hard...and we became very close. But we also fought terribly.”

“Sisters can be like that,” said Pinkie Pie sagely.

“I don’t think...not like us,” said Twilight. “I don’t come from somewhere normal. The hardest adjustment to Ponyville hasn’t been the, um, humble surroundings or simple pastimes. It’s been you five.”

Twilight let out a long breath. The night was chilly—unnaturally warm considering the absence of a sun, but still cold. She didn’t know where to put her face, or what to do about the lump in her throat.

“So...before it was just the Nine of us...in the beginning we were maybe thirty or forty in a class. We were schoolmates. At around the age when the very last of us were getting their cutie marks. ...One of my best friends there was named Lemon Hearts. She was very funny and inquisitive, and...oh, I guess she wasn’t keeping up with the rest of us. I don’t even remember what it was exactly. I don’t remember when or why we decided she was going to drop out. Anyway….” Twilight’s eyes were shut tight with shame and horror. “We played the game, Why Is Lemon Hearts So Stupid? And...oh, Celestia...we opened up her head to find out.

“Don’t touch me!” She had felt her friends instinctively reach out to her. “If you had seen the way her eyes rolled around, the way her tail…and how she talked after, because we didn’t fold her brain back up right, it was like trying to stuff something you had ordered back in the box it came in. If you had seen her then, you would not want to be my friend. If you had seen me laugh at the way her tongue lolled and the way she babbled, you would hate me forever. Our friendship is protected by this ignorance.”

“We’ve all done things we’re not proud of,” said Rainbow Dash quietly.

“None of you have done anything as bad as me,” said Twilight confidently. None of them contradicted her.

“I think Nightmare Moon gave me a gift on Nightmare Night,” Twilight went on. She wiped her eyes. “When she broke my ribs, she knew I wanted pain. And she reminded me that I deserved it. I was getting too happy here. Too willing to pretend that it was okay.”

Pinkie Pie was crying too, weeping without seeming to realize it. “No….” Applejack began.

“Don’t try to tell me that it’s okay or in the past,” Twilight said. She had imagined this conversation a hundred times. “I’ve done worse than what I did to Lemon Hearts. And for that matter, I’ve failed the only ponies who were ever as precious to me as you all.”

“But you’re doing fine,” said Fluttershy.

Twilight had never dreamed of such an answer in her hundred simulations of this conversation. She just stared at Fluttershy, dumbfounded.

“You’re doing fine,” Fluttershy said again. “Admitting it and crying like this is the best possible action you can take at this point.”

“You’re going to lecture me on sunk costs on the night of a new year?”

“There aren’t any rules for how tonight works,” Fluttershy said stubbornly. “You had such a great idea with the torches. You can keep having good ideas, you’re not obliged to take a bad one next.”

Disoriented, Twilight closed her eyes—and then opened them abruptly, because the vision of that pink roll unfolding across the floor appeared on her eyelids and made her stomach heave. But it wasn’t the gruesome sight that sickened her most, it was the memory of her own bright suggestions in helping to bring it about.

“We’re not going to stop being your friends just because you feel guilty,” said Pinkie Pie.

“Again, if you had seen….” Twilight trailed off. The expressions of her friends were unanimous in their meanings: This is not negotiable, you are our friend.

“Even Princess Celestia doesn’t know, I don’t think,” Twilight mumbled, but she already saw the stupidity of what she had tried to do. Far from being the mature or responsible thing, her confession had been intended to sow discord and misery. What was the point in admitting fault if she was only going to use it to hurt others, and herself? At the same time, though, she recognized that her feelings were real: It was impossible to accept herself as part of this group when she had shown herself to be so unworthy.

Don’t, a rare part of her cut in, the part that gave voice to her sensible thoughts, and therefore spoke rarely. Stop thinking. A single real conversation yielded more insight than a hundred simulated ones. So learn the lesson, and keep talking—

Twilight didn’t let the voice finish. She took hold of that accelerating mass of thought and let it yank her forward, pulling her and the scattered, confused and hurting ideas in her head along behind it like the flags of a kite soaring through the air.

“I don't come from somewhere normal,” Twilight said, “and I'm worried that no matter how close we become and how long I have with you all, I'll never be able to tell you what I am or what's going to happen.” She glanced at the Daughter bank. “When I realized I was going to be with you all for a while, at first I only wondered two things: how long would I be consigned here, and what will life be like with five friends in it? But on Nightmare Night, I realized this town has the power to change me. And on Hearth’s Warming Eve, I realized I have the power to change it.”

She focused her eyes on the flame now. Neither the stars above nor the bubbling water of Canterlot’s fountains and marble pools were there to gaze at, and she needed the distraction from her senses. “None of this will make sense, but let me explain as best I can. I was useless in the journey through the Everfree Forest and the fight against Nightmare Moon. I failed at every point that it was possible to fail. Only when Nightmare Moon turned away in disgust and boredom did I have a chance, and even then I needed you all to tell me what to do. Never mind if what I just said is correct or not. It’s just how I feel, because I felt afraid and helpless the whole while, and I saw courage and decisiveness from you all. Maybe inside you were afraid and saw courage and decisiveness in me. I’m just telling you how I felt.

“So I would do anything for any of you because I remember when doing anything felt impossible. But when I consider myself as your sister, fellow, or friend, I don’t feel like I’m worthy of my place here among you five. Because you don’t know. You really don’t. You didn’t see Lemon Hearts. Or what happened to my brother, or how my first group of friends fell apart. You just don’t know, even after I tell you.”

“Don’t care,” said Pinkie Pie with uncharacteristic bluntness. Or, no, Twilight realized, Pinkie Pie was always that plain. But there was no icing in her voice, no balloon-pop in the way she spoke.

“I’m not saying, ‘let’s not be friends,’” said Twilight cautiously. What was she trying to say? “I just want you all to be able to make an informed decision about being my friend. Because it usually isn’t a good one.”

“We’ve been through a forest with you,” Rainbow Dash said. “We fought an Alicorn and went trick-or-treating. I think we’ve already decided.”

There was such a thing as tacit knowledge, Twilight knew. Not everything could be communicated in bytes of data or as logical propositions.

In fact, most ideas couldn’t be. That was why, despite the appealing metaphor of math as language, scientists communicated with each other in natural language. That was the problem she was running into now. Language really only captured small fragments of reality. Context, “understanding,” “meaning” filled in the rest, like a big box that was mostly full of packaging.

She couldn’t make a time machine and take them back to the scene. But it was still there inside her head, playing over and over again….

Twilight felt the determination as fundamentally as the rotation of the earth: Let me show you my mind.

But even the thought of taking it out, never mind how to do it safely or put it back, but just the thought of it spilling out and unfolding across the snowy mound made her knees wobble and her stomach lurch. She remembered seeing wobbling gyri glistening under cold light, and flinched.

I don’t know what to do.

Again the sensible voice spoke: You never do. Ask them. You were just saying that, remember?

Amazing, Twilight thought feverishly. Two sensible thoughts in one day.

They say a clear sky means a clear mind. Ha ha ha….

“I’d like you all to get to know me better. And, selfishly, I’d like to get to know all of you better. I can’t do better than that.”

“You’re darn tooting, missy!” said Pinkie Pie. It occurred to Twilight that she was probably quite angry.

“I think you did so well,” said Fluttershy, like she was congratulating a shy puppy that had stayed mostly calm while being introduced to ponies.

Twilight felt months of stress slough off her back. Her mind was still reaching for that misery, trying to find its anchor, but what had been the central attractor of her emotional life over the past weeks seemed to have vanished like the sun on this night. What had she imagined? That she’d confess a crime, and they’d abandon her? For crying out loud, a screaming sea serpent had made Rainbow Dash come back. These girls didn’t leave a sister behind.

I’m not worthy. Not of this, not of the Daughter bank, nor Princess Celestia’s trust.

But I have these things. So I need to use them. Or else I really am unworthy. Because as I learned in the forest, even if I’m not good enough…. The rest of the thought completed itself as a warm sensation inside her. She knew what it meant. Just another thing that couldn’t be communicated, but could be felt….

Three sensible thoughts. Princess Celestia should kill a sun every week, I’d solve most of the outstanding problems in economics by the end of the...well, a year, anyway.

Now there was only one hour until sunrise.


“Philomena,” said Princess Celestia. “Now would be perfect. Show them what it was like when….”

The phoenix took off from the windowsill. Her scarlet wings were a flash in the night sky, and then she was gone.

“When we first met,” Princess Celestia murmured.

The Phoenix streaked up, up. The clouds fell away. Somewhere, far below, there were barriers within the world. But up above was a vast space colder than Equestria had been under the snow. Blacker than the shadow ponies. More empty than the nests of dragons, long abandoned. Even the moon was faceless now. It remained white and pitted, like a mass grave had been dug on its surface. There were barriers between the worlds, and this troubled Philomena far more.

Space was terribly cold, and she didn’t know how to warm it up.

Somewhere far below, there were barriers within the world. Philomena could see the great wall of Mexicolt jutting out above the mountains. She heard the roar of the roving whirlpool that kept Equestrians from the lands to the east.

There were barriers in the world, and they meant nothing to a Phoenix.

Her body was fire, and that meant sparks were constantly flickering from her. They faded, but didn’t die as they left her body.

(Somewhere far below, the Unit was quietly eroding. It still weighed One, it would always weigh One, but the total weight in its small box was increasing. And with half its counterbalance sealed and unresponsive, the Bank was tilting….)

The molecules spread out over the earth.

Met the young light just dawning over the edge of the world.

And began to burn.


Rainbow Dash was the first to see the light blooming over the horizon. She shouted and climbed out from the weary pile they had formed. All over Ponyville ponies were pointing at the sky, rousing slumbering fillies, and drawing nearer the torches, the flames atop them all straining to the east as if trying to reach something there. Twilight risked glancing back as Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and Scootaloo walked up the hill with their sisters and Rainbow Dash. Their eyes were wide as they gazed at the orange oozing over the sky and the pale yellow ball cresting over the horizon.

New light washed over the world for the first time since before ponies had thought of anything but grass. Applejack nudged her little sister.

“What do you resolve for the new year?”

Twilight expected Apple Bloom to be confused, but after a moment, she said, “Be an economist.”

Twilight’s friends sent questioning looks Twilight’s way. Twilight just shrugged and smiled. She wasn’t good enough, but maybe she didn’t have to be. That was the division of labor, after all. What luck that she had met such different ponies. They could be all the things that she wasn’t. And she would be the same to them.

What luck.

“Look!” said Rainbow Dash. She couldn’t contain herself any longer and lifted from the earth, gazing up at the sky. Fire was spreading out in all directions, setting the atmosphere alight.

“Sunlight!” Twilight gasped. “The sunlight is so young, it’s catching on fire!”

Red lances of fire burst along the rays of light, streaking over the sky. The sky itself was reddening as if being baked by the heat. Some ponies shrieked, but Twilight felt completely calm. She knew this fire: It was Philomena’s, and it cloaked life. A bird could live in this fire, and fly, and think. There was nothing to fear.


The sky and the sun were red over the Land of the Rising Sun. It seemed to Tako that the sun that burned red like a giant, angry eye over them was not the sun that had risen yesterday. This did not make sense, and he said so.

The other octopus took a while to answer.

While he waited, Tako slithered over to a nearby tree, his tentacles working nimbly on the smooth stone floor. When he reached the tree, he wrapped himself around the trunk and swiftly pulled himself up—he was so strong, as were most healthy octopi, that he could pull himself with just a few suckers of one tentacle attached to a branch. From there it was easy to swing over the wall and into the mango grove. His tentacles caressed the mangos, feeling the outer layer for ripeness. Finally he picked one, attached a sucker to either half, and split it open over his beak. Juice spilled down into his waiting mouth. Then he scooped the fruit out with his beak.

When Tako returned, the other octopus had not moved from his chrysanthemum chair.

The fire over the world was falling in a rush of glimmering red particles, like the sparks from fireworks at the great festivals. They landed in harmless showers on the stone floor, quickly winking out. The sun was then yellow in a sky as blue as fresh water.

“That,” said the other octopus, “was weird.”

Tako rushed over to him. “Lord, what was that?” Tako’s skin was changing colors rapidly, indicating stress and confusion. “That was not the same sun as yesterday. The whole sky was on fire!”

The other octopus, who was really a nonapus, scratched around his beak with a tentacle thoughtfully. “Yes, it was, wasn’t it?”

Tako settled on a nervous purple color. “Lord, the sun is a [life-mind-God]. Unlike the ocean, it is alive, but it moves according to its own spirit. This is the second irregularity in the past five months. Previously, there had only been one irregularity a thousand years ago!”

The nonapus chuckled and assumed his golden color, the color that marked his age, his status, and his power. As a nonapus, he was the lord and guardian of their island, which was really an archipelago consisting of about four thousand small islands. Of the three main ones, Honshokushu was the greatest and where the nonapus typically resided.

Tako asked the question that had been bothering him. “Does it mean an earthquake?”

He did not need to explain the devastation that would mean. The golden nonapus waited awhile. His face was inscrutable at these times. Tako could not guess what he was thinking, nor how his color remained so solid under stress. His own skin was flashing red and blue in waves, and hints of silver and brown.

“No,” the golden nonapus said eventually. “I don’t think so. This is something different. It is about those nightmares I told you about.”

Tako’s skin flashed red. “The dark star-horse? This is her doing?”

The golden nonapus didn’t answer. This time Tako took it as ignorance: the golden nonapus had nothing true to say, so he didn’t say anything. Tako took the opportunity to advance his own hypothesis:

“Lord, this is the zodiac’s work. We have long known that the stars are [life-mind-Gods] since they move by themselves and do not die—”

“The sun died yesterday.”

Tako turned pure silver. “Lord, what did you say?”

He waved a tentacle as if dismissively. “I don’t have words for it, so don’t take this too literally. But as you said, the sun that set yesterday is not the sun that rose today. Something killed it and took its place.”

“How...how is that possible….”

“Who knows? A war between great spirits.”

“You are one of them,” said Tako bravely.

“Eh.” The nonapus turned green briefly, a sardonic blush. He was the only one who did things like that, Tako had noticed. If a court priest turned green in front of others, he would blame it on rotten fruit. “My [power-of-divine-wind] does not cut the heavens, and it cannot be used to wrangle the clouds. Frankly, compared to the total raw energy in the universe, I am as weak as a [small bird that eats seeds.]”

“But, lord….”

“Killing a sun is probably not that hard. There are a lot of them out there. If they all ganged up on one, it’d be a piece of [rice cake.]”

“Speaking of which, I’m hungry.”

“Because you’re getting married. Fine, let’s have tea.”

Tako and the nonapus went inside the archway and from there to a small white building overlooking the sea. Tako prepared the table and fetched the tea set. The nonapus waited impatiently for him to perform the ceremony, audibly sighing several times. When Tako finally poured the tea and served crackers, however, the nonapus only sniffed it.

“Your bride to be, is she beautiful?”

Tako took a moment to answer; his mouth was full of cracker. “Yes, so lovely. She is always a beautiful shade, and her grace as she swings through the trees is like none other.”

“Are you going to procreate with her?”

“Yes.”

“Soon?”

“Yes, lord.”

“You will die.”

“Yes.”

The nonapus gave a long, long sigh.

“You have been a good student, faithful and true,” he said. “A finer assistant I have not had in centuries.”

“I apologize, lord,” Tako said. But the excitement in his voice that had been there when he spoke of his wife was still evident.

“You’re eager to die,” the nonapus said. The golden color of his skin seemed unusually opaque, Tako thought.

“Not to die, but to procreate. That is the purpose of life, is it not?” Tako sipped tea, pleased with his wisdom.

“Pbbbbhh,” the nonapus said. “If life has a purpose, it’s something bizarre and inscrutable, and we are only minor pieces in its epoch-spanning plot.”

Tako was surprised by this answer. “What do you think life’s plan is, lord?”

“Eh,” said the nonapus. “To wrangle the stars, maybe.”

“The stars, lord?”

“Sure. Life wants to eat, but it has always been looking up at the stars, the greatest source of energy in the universe. Wouldn’t it want to consume them? Wouldn’t it do anything to build a ladder that goes beyond the atmosphere so it could reach up and pluck stars like fruit off the bough?”

“And who set this plan in motion? It must have been a very great spirit.”

“Whoever it was,” said the nonapus, as if he had been thinking very carefully and had come to a conclusion, “it was probably not a horse.”

Maybe it was the memory of the new sun burning in the sky that made Tako bold, or maybe it was the thought of his coming marriage and the end of his life. Whatever it was, he asked a question he had often wondered, but never dared put to words: “Lord, why are you the only nonapus?”

At once the nonapus flashed a series of brilliant colors, alternating too quickly for Tako to perceive any message. Finally he settled on a dull orange. “There was another.”

“What happened to him?”

“She fell in love.”

The nonapus turned gold again. “So! Before you get married, you have one last job: You must investigate the new sun and gather information. You are to prepare for your replacement to take over.”

Tako couldn’t keep himself from turning silver. “Have you already chosen a replacement, lord?”

“Yes, but now I think it was the wrong choice. We have looked to the dead sea too long, wishing to return. Instead, I will need an octopus who understands the stars. That is your other last job. Look for a suitable replacement! Understood!”

“Yes, lord!”

“Stop drinking tea! Your marriage is soon! An [engaged octopus] is a [very busy octopus.] Get going!”

“At once, lord!”


The Imperial Palace was still red with fire after the fire in the sky had gone out. Soldiers were going around gathering the corpses of other birds and throwing them into the flames. The smell was horrible, and so were the occasional screams of birds who were still alive.

The revolution had gone exceedingly well, thought Hè Na. Not a single member of the Imperial court had survived. Their smoldering gray feathers covered the path outside like ashes from a mass cremation.

Now I really am red-crowned.

She craned her head to check, but she really was alone now inside the throne room. The former emperor had been dragged out by Hè Na’s followers, along with his servants, and killed with a kick to the head by Hè Na.

Alone now, Hè Na regarded her prize at the top of the platform. The floor was strewn with feathers and broken glass and the occasional eyeball. Hè Na picked her way around it. Still gazing at the throne high above, she kicked bones and shattered porcelain out of her way.

The throne itself was splattered with blood but otherwise pristine. Gold pillars reaching up to the ceiling fifty feet above gave her a sense of freedom as she climbed the platform and regarded the Throne of First Wing. Thirteen specimens of mythical birds were arranged around the grand perch, which she ascended with a flap of her wings and gazed out from.

Down the platform stretched a grand hall full of pillars and high perches. There were also, she saw, many places where hawks and falcons could hide and swoop out at an enemy, and there were holes where buzzards could shoot arrows. What a paranoid regime. Little good it had done them.

From the perspective of the throne, the stone statues of ospreys and owls seemed to be her guardians and soldiers. She could imagine taking flight and ordering them to attack.

The back of the throne was quite wide and tall. If Hè Na did not have impeccable hearing, she would have been decapitated by the attack that came from behind her. Instead, she scrambled to one side, cutting back with one long leg. She missed, but it forced her enemy to dart away, giving Hè Na time to react before it dived again at her.

The next attack pierced her wing. Hè Na tensed her neck and struck with her beak, but the small, dull-colored bird darted away again. It kept advancing, stinging and drawing blood, forcing Hè Na to retreat under an onslaught of tiny wounds. True to her kind, red blood streamed down her head and into her eyes, blinding her. Angry, she swept low, trying to anticipate the next attack, but her kick missed, and its beak nearly took out her right eye, Hè Na dodging at the last second but earning a gash across her face.

How absurd that the throne’s final guardian wasn’t a sleek kestrel or mighty eagle, but an unremarkable white-eyed yuhina. Unlike Hè Na’s crane tribe, the white-eyes weren’t worth designating a caste. Pests, they were allowed to flit from tree to tree looking for seeds to steal, and anybird was allowed to kill one for trying, or for looking like it was going to try, or for just being a white-eyed yuhina in the wrong place at the wrong time. How could the former emperor have put his faith in such a worthless creature?

Or is he not protecting the emperor, but the throne?

“Wait,” gasped Hè Na. “We should be allies—” She screamed, a new cut opening on her leg, nearly severing it, making it impossible to walk. Collapsing onto one knee, she held her wings in front of her face and barely blocked the killing blow. “Stop!” she begged. “I will make you a general, I will give you freedom—”

His beak was tearing at her feathers and muscle and the thin bones across the wing. She felt things snapping, ripping: She knew she would never fly again. Would never dip her wing along the bank of the dead river and imagine life under an emperor who cared about the people. Would never crack open the shells of the tiny crabs at the bottom of the bank and feel the satisfaction of pecking out the burrowing snails in the mud. Would never listen to the strange song of the fairies and follow their laughter into the forest, only to lose them and wonder, and then be laughed at by Hè Wei because there was no such thing as fairies, and it didn’t matter anyway since he loved her no matter how silly she was.

Would never dream again. Would never see that dark mare and her silver light again.

What a strange final thought.

Although she saw a light now.

A concerned chirping woke her up. She stared up at the fat, familiar face of Zhègū Yumei. The frightened partridge shrieked when Hè Na opened her eyes and began dancing in place, hopping from one undersized foot to the other, which echoed in the great hall of the palace.

“Are you okay are you okay are you okay—”

Hè Na winced and rose to a sitting position, looking with bemusement at Zhègū Yumei. The rotund, white-necklaced partridge had been a close friend of hers for years, and had proven herself a faithful comrade in the assault under the red sun this morning. She also tended to dither and was attracted to the most ridiculous of several options like iron to a magnet.

Zhègū Yumei grabbed her by the shoulders. “Answer me!”

“I’m fine.” Hè Na smiled beatifically. “Actually, I feel amazing.”

“You’re covered in blood!”

Hè Na looked down. It was true: Dried blood was smeared over her ruffled feathers. She could feel the stickiness around her face and knew she must look frightful.

“I feel fine,” said Hè Na honestly. “How did….”

But Zhègū Yumei stepped aside, casting a meaningful look behind her at the white-eyed yuhina. He was bowed by the throne, gazing at her with a calm expression.

Hè Na jumped to her feet. “Why did you not kill me?”

He was kneeling as if in contemplative repose. Now he considered this question with tranquility. “I don’t know how to. The holes in your wings and skin closed. Your bones healed. Only the blood remains.”

He rose, causing Hè Na to flinch and raise a wing protectively, to bat him out of the sky if need be. But instead he bowed. “The throne is lost, and I cannot kill you. I have no honor and no purpose. Please fight me fairly and win swiftly.”

Hè Na did have honor though, and her blood turned cold. “I offered you the position of general. That offer has not been rescinded.”

“I humbly refuse.”

“It is now an order. I am your empress.”

“With deepest respect, I will not obey the empress’s wish.”

“Zhègū Yumei,” said Hè Na, “please stand back.”

“Oh, oh dear,” said Zhègū Yumei, wobbling backwards. She began to hop in place again. In another body, she would have been biting her nails.

A strength suffused Hè Na that she had not noticed until she prepared herself for the white-eyed yuhina. Her movements were unusually fluid and relaxed. Her eyes took in the small disturbance of his beating heart; her ears heard the individual clack of each of Zhègū Yumei’s talons on the stone tile.

“I cannot give you a fair fight,” she said sadly. “It seems I have achieved enlightenment. I sincerely apologize.”

He didn’t answer, just launched himself at her in a line like an arrow. She saw the feint and the attempt to switch directions; the arc of her kick, initiated almost simultaneously with his launch, didn’t alter.

The small body of the dead white-eyed yuhina bounced away and stopped against the throne.

The clacking stopped. “Let’s leave,” said Zhègū Yumei. Her voice trembled, and it really did tremble, each subtle vibration altering the sound so that it was like a stream of air running through a mountain path.

“You’re staring,” said Zhègū Yumei. These trembles were different. There was so much variation in every breath.

“I know,” said Hè Na.

Outside, the sky was blue again. Some sparks from the atmospheric fire were cooling on the ground or smoldering on the damaged and broken rooftops and trees. Soldiers were busy cleaning up bodies and putting out fires. Hè Na looked anxiously for the one that mattered.

She heard him before she saw him: His deep voice bulging in his throat before his mouth and tongue shaped the vibrations and gave them order.

“Hello,” Hè Wei said, coming up behind her.

She traced out the word with her mouth as he said it and felt how their mouths were different. His heart quickened around her; that was good.

She turned and saw that his feathers were messed from a fight. Good, thought a part of her that was growing louder and stronger every day, no bird will doubt his courage. Then she thought, I hope he wasn’t hurt. He wasn’t hurt; she could tell by the way his blood swam through his body—she could feel the heat—and by the gurgle of his organs.

“I am the empress,” she told him.

“You better be, or all of this was a sorry waste of time.” He smiled easily. “Have you sat on the throne yet?”

“No,” she said, hesitating imperceptibly. “Has the fighting stopped?”

“Mostly, although every now and then some nut flies out of a tree and tries to take somebird’s head off.”

She nodded. The day was won. It was time to repair and heal.

“Are you alright, Hè Na?”

He put his wing on her shoulder. She heard each of his feathers rustle and slide across each other. She felt the exact distribution of his weight.

“Don’t call me Hè Na. There are no more castes. Zhègū Yumei, you are no longer Zhègū.” The partridge gave an excited yelp in response.

“I can’t just call you Na,” said Wei.

“I’ll think of something.”

Together the three of them looked out from the palace. Mountains encircled the city from the west, north, and east. The sight of the dead river Na avoided. How would she heal that? How would she begin?

The dark mare entered Na’s memory suddenly. She remembered how the mare had walked through Na’s most familiar dreams. Na had walked with her and seen things from angles she had never seen before. She saw how no object in her dream was complete; many were three-dimensional from one view and just a point from every other. Colors swam and faded and popped nonsensically, yet it all seemed real, at least when bathed in the silver light the mare gave off. This was a mare to whom dreams were real, Na knew.

But now the waking world brought a sight that was even more strange. An unexpected fog was coming up the steps. Shapes separated in the fog, becoming white bodies. She saw antlers rising….

“What is that?” she gasped as the ethereal deer ascended to the top.

“What?” said Wei. Neither he nor Yumei seemed to think anything was out of the ordinary.

“There are deer there! Walking toward me! Don’t you see them coming up the steps? They’re practically fog!”

They stared at her.

Na rose to her full height and lifted a foot in the air. “Stop, deer! I am the empress of this palace and these skies!”

The deer continued to rise.


Her name was Sahara. She didn’t know how she had gotten this name. She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know where she was walking to, or from. She didn’t know if it meant anything for her to be somewhere.

Sand stung her eyes as she walked. Hot air burned her dry throat. Wind whipped her hair and forced her back so that every step was like climbing uphill. In the sand she lost her footing many times and stumbled or fell. Each time her knees would sink into the burning sand and force her to stand from the pain. Her palms, blistered and burnt, sent shivers of anguish through her.

The sandstorm got so bad that she couldn’t take another step. Holding her arms in front of her face, she waited until the wind and sand stopped battering her. As the wind subsided, she squinted at something there. A single cactus was sticking out of the earth.

Sahara staggered over and collapsed in front of it, hands held out toward the cactus. It wasn’t very large or pretty. It was coated in a layer of sand. But she could hear the water in it. She could taste it on her tongue.

In her haste to break it open and drink, she stabbed her fingers repeatedly on the spines. No matter how she tried to get through, they were there, penetrating her sensitive skin and making her whimper. And the spines stayed in her skin, and she was scared to remove them. She sobbed later from the pain.

The cactus defeated her. Sahara wandered on.

A familiar mountain rose in the distance. That mountain meant water. But the great bodies of water everywhere were dead now. Their water tasted like sludge and had the texture of melted rubber.

Anywhere else was just as bad though. So she walked toward the mountain.

When she reached the water, the strait looked calm. She knew, though, that anything that tried to swim across would be crushed against the rocks by an enormous underwater mixer. Boats that tried to skim along the surface would be stopped by the viscous water, and then the chaotically swirling water under the surface would coincidentally heave in the direction of the boat. The force could shear a ship in half. So it had been for as long as she could remember.

But there was something new. When was there ever something new? A pale yellow light she had never seen before glinted off the water. It resembled a sun, but she didn’t recognize this sun. Its reflected glow drew her to it like a lighthouse flashing a signal. She reached the edge of the water and felt a sudden tiredness. In a moment everything went dark.


Zigzag lowered her binoculars. “Run.”

“Is it—”

“Run!”

There was no time to take everything. Zoomer grabbed the most precious equipment: their bag with the compass and filter, and the scale, and she galloped toward the main body of zebras waiting at the dunes. Zigzag was right behind her, her breath coming too quick for how little they had been running.

“She’s shaped like the fossils,” Zigzag gasped as they ran. “Run with all your muscles!”

Zoomer was already straining herself. Now she ran even faster, striking off the earth and leaving it briefly before coming down and driving forward. In a way it reminded her of the dreams she’d had recently of loping along the surface of the moon. But the scream of the wind behind them and the rumbling earth pulled her back to reality. They ran and ran, and she didn’t dare look back.

They were too slow. The wind caught them. The storm was unbelievable, a tornado of sand and sediment that threw them off their hoofs and struck them hundreds of times. Helpless, Zoomer and Zigzag curled up where they had been tossed and covered their faces, taking the beating on their sides and legs. Even that became unbearable, but somehow Zigzag crawled on top of Zoomer, shielding the younger zebra with her body. Zoomer’s tears of relief and shame were whipped away by the wind.

Eventually the storm subsided. Zoomer unfolded her body and began to shudder from the pain. She was bleeding and bruised in a hundred places. Zigzag was bleeding too. She didn’t respond to Zoomer’s touch or words. Her body remained limp.

Zoomer heard the noise of a dozen zebras galloping toward them. Zero and Zap lifted Zigzag gently and laid her on her side. Others surrounded Zoomer and gently touched her, whispering to her in rhyme. Zinc, the elderly zebra in charge of the expedition, grimly lifted her binoculars and gazed at the small storm by the water until it faded altogether and showed a creature there that couldn’t have possibly existed. It would have been less jarring to see a triceratops.

“It came so suddenly,” Zoomer sobbed. “Zigzag saved me doubly.”

There were murmurs for her not to rhyme. Living water was dribbled into her mouth. It would have been a great crime to spit it out, but she wanted to. “Save it for Zigzag,” she begged.

They ignored her request. “We need to leave,” said Zinc. “No point in going back for the sieves.”

She looked again through the binoculars. The creature was just kneeling there, totally vacant. A chill ran through her despite the hot air, and she shivered.


Sahara woke up from her doldrums. She felt refreshed and invigorated. Strength flowed through her, enough to stand. She remembered feeling like this near the beginning. She wanted to go back to the cactus and tear it apart, she was strong enough for that.

She turned and saw a group of zebras in the distance, walking away from her, carrying two of their own. They were very pretty. Occasionally they would look back at her, and she waved to them, but they didn’t stop.

Sahara brushed the snow out of her hair and watched until they left.


The crystal ponies in the Salon of Madame Ciel were discussing the latest gossip when, quite unexpectedly, the sun dropped off the face of the earth. The conversation stumbled, and they were all grateful when Madame Manteau-Blanc, the doctor, suggested they all go outside. Together they scrambled outside and stared at the horizon. Normally quite a poetic thing, the horizon now had the feeling of being the blade of a guillotine, and the sun itself was up for execution.

It was eerily chilly, as if nearly all the warmth had been sucked out of the world. Privately, all of them weren’t sure if it was just a feeling.

Everypony was stunned except for Mademoiselle Grand Coeur, who was the daughter of a family of jewelers. She sensed an opportunity.

“Oh, my!” she said dramatically. She swooned to get some attention when the other ponies couldn’t tear their eyes away from where the sun had disappeared. “Oh my, I said.” She pitched herself into the side of another pony, who awkwardly held her up. “Oh, thank you. I’m ever so sorry, but I just had the most terrible thought, one that was too much for my fragile constitution.” She was quite aware of how awesome she looked in her giant dress and pale makeup, blush on her cheeks and diamonds glittering around her neck.

“What thought was that, Mademoiselle?” asked the young lawyer, Monsieur Bouché. He was looking at her nervously, though he looked at everything nervously. He even blew his nose, which was always runny, like he was afraid of it falling off.

Still, his family was quite rich. Mademoiselle Grand Coeur artfully righted herself, breathing heavily so that her chest heaved up and down. “I’m afraid this will sound terribly naive, but I have a feeling in my bosom that the sun is not going to rise again.”

There were murmurs from the other ponies. “Thoroughly unscientific,” scoffed the grocer, Madame Beurrée. Grand Coeur glared at her.

“I think the sun fell asleep,” she insisted. “Or died.”

“It’s past curfew anyway,” said Monsieur Narine, glancing around nervously. “Perhaps the sun just wanted to be out of view, like the rest of us should be.”

“Why would the sun have fallen asleep?” Monsieur Bouché asked.

Grand Coeur had just made it up, of course, but it was a fun idea, and she seized the attention with the first idea that came into her mind. “It might have fallen asleep because it was terribly bored. Why, just the other night I had a terribly boring dream about the Moon. I was on it, and a dark mare was looking at me. It went on for hours, just the two of us staring back and forth. I tried to say something, but my voice wouldn’t come out. I suppose there is no sound in space, after all.” Her dreams were always very interesting to her, so it stood to reason that everypony else would feel the same way.

“The Sun is very different from the cold and empty Moon,” corrected Madame Mesure, the chemist. Grand Coeur glared at her, but she didn’t notice. “It is much more active. Using a process called nuclear fusion, little particles of hydrogen are turned into the light and heat we enjoy today. I assure you that you would find nothing boring about its surface! But as to your other hypothesis about the death of the Sun, the Sun can and indeed will die through a process called entropy.”

“That sounds interesting, what is it?” Grand Coeur asked, thinking about murder.

“All stars undergo entropy, the aging process for things that are hot. All life is hot, but like water, life cannot be replenished perfectly. For example, every seven years your body replaces all of its cells to maintain its crystal form. However, it does so imperfectly, and you get a bit weaker and more fragile. That is why ponies age and fail. Similarly, stars never fully restore all the hydrogen they use. There is no perfect reset. Even stars dwindle and die.”

“I thought the sun seemed perfectly hot this morning,” said Madame Beurrée.

“Yes, well….” Madame Mesure blushed. “This is—rather beyond my calculations. I shall have to, ah...check...the…..” But she trailed off, having no idea what error in her measurements could possibly have led to this.

“Will the sun ever rise again?” asked Monsieur Narine.

“That is a stupid question, of course it will,” said Madame Beurrée. But silence followed as everypony shivered in the unnatural chill. All of them wanted to believe Madame Beurrée. But the sky was very dark tonight. Even the moon and stars were gone, as if shielding their eyes from the awful sight of their fallen sister.

They all turned at the sound of hoofsteps and looked up at the massive figure looming behind them. “Why aren’t you all inside, friends?” demanded the booming voice of Madame Ciel. She towered over them, looking like a miniature star with her rosy cheeks and pink sweater. Madame Ciel was fat, but not overweight; it was hard to imagine her any other size. “What is the subject of conversation? Democracy? Revolution? The magical sciences?”

“We were discussing the sun, of course!” cried Grand Coeur. “Didn’t you see it, Ciel? It fell straight off the edge of the earth! Like the guillotine took it!” She sounded nearly about to cry, and was a little stunned to realize she wasn’t totally faking it.

Madame Ciel snorted. She wasn’t actually married, as far as any of them knew (and who really knew Madame Ciel?), but no pony could imagine referring to her as a mademoiselle. “Of course the sun will rise again, as will the cry of an infant sucking in breath. It died, but I haven’t heard you say why that matters. Tell me, where will we get another one? It’ll rise again if we have any say in the matter.

“Come now. Come inside, all of you. It’s chilly, and all I have is this sweater. Come inside, and continue the conversation there.”

She led them back into her salon. They sat on cushions and sofas while she sank into her pink chair at the heart of the room, where the conversation was loudest.

Madame Ciel, who sometimes seemed as grand and wide as the sky itself (and as stormy in her anger), leaned back and exhaled. They watched her, straining forward like kites fluttering toward a sky that was at once both close and distant.

“The sun will rise,” said Madame Ciel, “but only if you talk. You must all keep talking to each other. Close the windows,” she ordered, “light the lamps.” She settled further into her cushy pink chair. “Let me hear you speak.”


The order to stop the beating had not been given, so the beating had not stopped.

In the middle of the circle Captain Muffins stumbled sideways, only to jump back at the snap of jaws. The circle of teeth and claws closed in slowly, nipping at him whenever he got too close to the edges. He was bleeding from dozens of wounds: one ear was torn and hung oddly, and his weight was distributed across only three of his legs.

His mouth hung open, and his tongue lolled out. He was panting hard, and his eyes were wild and dark. A song ran through his mind,

How happy we’ll be when the Lord we see—

Teeth locked around his hind leg and made him yelp. They released, and fresh blood trickled down his matted fur. He nearly fell, and a rough paw shoved his head away.

A pup is born in Birmingham, and all a-hush the city sleeps, the night the pup is born—

The circle pressed in, jaws snapping, catching the edges of his skin, and there was nowhere to go.

He leadeth me, O blessed thought, O words with heavenly comfort—

“Stay!”

The growling pack held fast, though a few dogs snapped at him. Lord Fluffernutter of the Royal Society made way through the mass of dogs, which parted for him like the Red Sea.

“Sit,” he said to Captain Muffins, who fell back on his haunches, panting hard. “Now, don’t you feel better? They weren’t really going to hurt you.”

Captain Muffins’ black eyes still darted around. He didn’t answer.

“You poor thing, and all this over a simple misunderstanding,” said Lord Fluffernutter. “You’re not a bad dog, are you? You want to be a good dog.”

Captain Muffins began to sing inside his head. He is King, worship Him. Call the bells to ring. Worship Him, He passes through today, On the way to the holy city, call the bells to ring. He is King—

“This little misunderstanding over this morning’s astronomical distraction, you do realize how silly you were being? A silly dog who doesn’t know anything.”

“You can’t hide this,” said Captain Muffins. “Everydog saw what I saw. What you saw. The Sun revolves around the Earth.”

“Nonsense,” barked Lord Fluffernutter. “According to Sir Fig Newton’s theory of gravity, smaller things are attracted to larger things. Is the Sun not larger than the Earth?”

Say, ye holy sheepdogs, say, What your holy news today…. His mind fuzzed, and spat out, The joyous light that gave sight to sheep that wandered—

“Speak! Come on, boy! Speak!”

“It is larger,” said Captain Muffins wearily.

“Then it is proven,” said Lord Fluffernutter. “The Sun is as permanent as His Grace’s reign.”

“There we are in agreement,” said Captain Muffins.

“Hm.” A smile curled at the edge of Lord Fluffernutter’s mouth. “I do enjoy our banter. It is a shame you are unrepentant. But I am in a lenient mood. If you bow and swear loyalty to the king, we shall kill you without torture. Give us the names of your fellow traitors, and we will spare your wife and pups. They will be treated as loyal subjects—if they are loyal subjects.”

A confused expression slowly made its way across Captain Muffins’ face. “I am unmarried, as you know.”

“Daisy, and your sons Butterbeans, Goobers, who has is teething currently, and Paw-Paw, and your daughters Chalupa and Twinklestar, who has been complaining about having bad dreams,” said Lord Fluffernutter smugly. “You must give our spies some credit.”

Captain Muffins’ face could have been carved from stone.

“I see you need some time to think it over,” said Lord Fluffernutter. “You have an hour. If I have not sent the message by then to stay her rape and murder and the deaths of your pups, then I am afraid it will be entirely out of my paws.”

Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord?

“Take your time,” said Lord Fluffernutter.

Hark! the song of the Lord comes down the mountain—

Oh blest Creator of light, who makes the day with radiance bright—

Oh Morning Star, how fair and bright, thou beamest forth in truth and light—

“I wonder what you are thinking,” said Lord Fluffernutter. “I would be so happy if there were a way to know. I would have no need for such ugly arrangements, never mind crude instruments of torture.”

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

Captain Muffins was looking for a song.

He had fifty-seven minutes left.


On this world slung out of its system, hurled away from its ancient orbit in a straight line, followed by its sun like a mother chasing after her wayward child, growing more and more distant in the eyes of its brothers and sisters, who fade in the darkness and disappear among the stars,

where oceans, turgid and black, no longer washed and rolled in great waves, and the sun and moon were tethered by metal, or the belief in metal; and creatures were magical, or had the help of magical creatures, or died; and lands were covered in snow and darkness, or were possessed by strange dark creatures with hearts of ice; except where the land was burning hot and dry and nearly unlivable but for magic, and odd women walked to rivers and fainted and revived with snow in their hair; and it had been this way for so, so long;

giant spiders hopping across the dusty red road turned their many eyes upward,

purple flowers in the Forest of Giant Women stirred at the peculiar tickling of new light,

and in other places, in other ways, the new sun was seen and felt and noticed,

and in their own different fashions, something like this thought passed through their minds:

The world is beginning to change again. And each wondered what the reason was, and each came to their own conclusion.

The Earth continued its journey into the perpetual darkness.

For the first time in a long time, life thought of going home.


The fire burned out across Equestria, leaving behind an unblemished blue sky. The sun blazed proudly above them, yellow, fat, and healthy, a babe and a queen, a newborn mother, warm and bright and new.

Everypony was exhausted from staying up all night, and most ponies in Equestria had gone home to nap until the afternoon. The torches were all extinguished. But Twilight couldn’t bring herself to leave the glow of the new sun, and so her friends hadn’t left either. They leaned against her in a tired circle, warm breath rustling her mane, a tail occasionally flicking against her side.

Twilight had thought of something.

There was probably one pony who hadn’t seen or felt the new light at all.

Twilight wondered just how deep and dark was the cave Nightmare Moon had waited out this terrible dawn in, and how alone it was in there. And how long it would be before she came out again.

Thank you for this pain, Twilight thought. And thank you for these friends. If we’re enemies, then we’re the kind who strengthen each other after every battle. Let us fight a thousand times then, if you want to. I’ll be ready. I’ll become strong enough. And if you have to wait for that, I’m sorry. But I won’t cry any more.

How’s that for a resolution?

“Let’s go to bed,” Twilight said. “Come on, Spike.”

The day passed and turned to night. The sun rose and fell like suns do.

It was the start of a new year.

Next Chapter: The Very Important Princess Cadance Origin Story Estimated time remaining: 14 Minutes
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