Chapter Text
Make some friends, she’d said.
Hey Twilight! Pinkie Pie’s starting Pin the Tail on the Pony! Wanna play? he’d said.
Essentially, the whole thing, this whole catastrophe that Twilight Sparkle had found herself in, was very silly.
Was that it?
Was nopony (or dragon, for that matter) going to be REASONABLE here?
“No! All the ponies in this town are CRAZY!” Twilight snapped back. “Do you know what time it is?!”
“It’s the Eve of the Summer Sun Celebration! Everypony has to stay up, or they’ll miss the princess raise the sun!”
Oh for crying out loud, didn’t he know she already knew that? What was she to him, some kind of feather-brain?
Spike sighed. He fiddled with the cake hat(? Or was it a real cake…?) as he rolled his eyes at her. “You really should lighten up, Twilight,” he droned, before turning away to leave the room, presumably because he’d grown bored of this conversation. Well, that was just fine, so had she. “It’s a party!”
Twilight Sparkle watched her assistant climb back down the stairs, mocking his words once he was out of earshot.
She groaned, falling back against the pillow that she wasn’t currently clutching to her chest in the same way she clung to what little sanity she had left.
Spike had not been wrong. It was, in fact, a party.
Which is exactly why she wasn’t down there and why she most definitely was not going to play Pin the Tail on the Phony or whatever they called it; it was a waste of her time and frankly , a waste of everypony’s time.
Surely the princess must have been pulling her hoof, here.
…Really maybe she shouldn’t have been thinking that at all, because maybe that was considered a form of treason, to doubt the princess’s wishes, and maybe she’d be banished to the moon just like Nightmare Moon herself but. In Twilight’s defense, at least it would save her from this. At least being estranged from society would mean not having to face society.
I mean, heck, it didn’t even have to be the moon; just maybe some other planet where nopony was present, where nopony knew her name and where no pony could waste her time with a welcome party.
Was she just being bitter? …Yes. Did the ponies down there really deserve it? Probably not.
But Twilight was tired and cranky and confused .
How could Princess Celestia not be taking her seriously?
How could the princess seriously believe she could possibly accomplish something like…
They should have been preparing for the return of Nightmare Moon right now! She should be muzzle-deep in a book right about now, searching for some way, any way to prevent this disaster from happening. She should be learning more about the Elements of Harmony and how to…
The glint of starlight caught her attention.
* * *
When she was just a filly, she found it rather silly to see how many other ponies she could meet. Even well into her older years, Twilight had paid the idea of obtaining “friends” no mind, because who really had any time for those? Other than her BBBFF (who had left to become part of Princess Celestia’s royal guard anyway), and her number one assistant, books were her only companion—and she was determined to keep it that way.
So when her mentor, Princess Celestia herself, called on her to go to a small town called “Ponyville,” instead of taking her concerns about Nightmare Moon seriously, Twilight Sparkle knew she was doomed in every sense of the word.
On the bright side—and there barely was one, if you had asked her—overseeing the preparations for the celebration should be relatively easy.
(It beat the other task the princess had mentioned, in any case. Was it possible she just… Didn’t complete that one? Would her mentor even notice at all…?)
Plus, she even got to stay at a library during her visit! A library! So it couldn’t have been all bad!
And, this could still work out in general! She’d check on the preparations as quickly as she could, and then spend the rest of her time in the Ponyville library working on a way to stop Nightmare Moon!
It was foalproof!
…Spike didn’t seem to think so but, hey! He was a baby dragon! He didn’t understand the weight of what was about to happen—no, what could happen if Twilight wasted her time with anything other than what she knew she had to do.
The fate of Equestria did not rest on her making friends.
With a bit of optimism flowing back through her, Twilight Sparkle hopped out of the flown carriage and settled back on the earth, feeling some semblance of relief with her hooves back on solid ground. She politely thanked the coachstallions and they flew off into the sky once more.
“Maybe the ponies in Ponyville have some interesting things to talk about!” Spike suddenly exclaimed at her side, poking her with his elbow to get her attention. She tensed, following his gaze in bewilderment (and slight irritation).
What—?
Oh.
Somepony was heading towards them.
* * *
The stars floated across the night sky like sparks of magic come to life, inching ever so closer to the giant sphere at the head of the sky.
Twilight could simply watch.
“Legend has it that on the longest day of the thousandth year,” she recited under her breath, “the stars will aid in her escape, and she will bring about everlasting night.”
Was this it?
Was this what would become of all of Equestria?
Oh, she hoped the princess was right…
The sound of the door flying open pricked her attention, but Spike’s voice seemed a bit distant to her ears.
Time to watch the sunrise.
* * *
The first thing Twilight noticed about the mare trotting up to them was that she was very pink . Both her coat and her mane were pink. Twilight wasn’t sure she’d seen anypony that pink before. (Then again she very well hadn’t seen much of anypony to begin with.)
To be fair, she wasn’t all the same color; she had a Cutie Mark that was made up of blue and yellow, and her eyes were a vibrant azure blue themselves. But the pink was what stood out among other things about the mare, including the fact that the mare’s mane was the most out-of-control, poofy, cotton-candy-esque mane Twilight had ever laid eyes upon. A distant thought in her mind wondered if the mare ever brushed it, or even attempted to, but that was a dangerous train of thought in the sense that it was very off-topic and not relevant, not to mention probably rude to wonder anyway.
Animatedly, Spike gestured at the mare, as though this was the most important thing they should be doing right then.
“Come on, Twilight, just try!” he pleaded with her.
Sigh.
…
It… Never hurt to just try.
Right?
Ears flattened to her head, Twilight drew in a tentative breath.
“Uh…” she managed, with just the smallest of a smile. “Hello?”
And not a second too soon she realized it was the very worst thing she could have ever done.
The pink mare leaped into the air as though Twilight’s very words grabbed her by the tail and yanked her up. A shrill gasp leaning on dramatic wheezed out of the mare’s mouth, and as quick as the entire encounter happened, she somehow flew clear over Twilight’s head, a blur of pink dashing and vanishing past Twilight as the other mare could only watch with a gaped mouth.
Said other mare stared after her in something like astonishment.
She tried to squash down the sudden, unwelcome bubbling distantly familiar dejection, and gave in to a much more immediately familiar and welcome exasperation.
“Well, that was interesting alright,” she snarked, ignoring Spike’s sigh behind her as she turned her back and began to trot away. He rushed to catch up with her so she slowed to a walk instead, though her ears still twitched in impatience.
Essential her flank, really.
* * *
.
.
.
But the sun did not rise, nor did its wielder show.