Princesses of Equestria

Chapter 5: The Spring Equinox Catastrophe

Wind blasted. Rain poured. Fire scorched. Earth quaked. Lightning struck.

As Twilight Sparkle's Spring Equinox spell collapsed, the very sky seemed to collapse with it, a sky saturated with a roiling mélange of uncontained elemental magic. The globe was first. Twilight's hovering simulacrum of Equestria, continents, oceans, clouds and all, rent apart in one thunder strike, spraying burning chunks across the lawn.

The message couldn't have been clearer. Everypony else was next. A daunting enough prospect had only Canterlot's royal guards, staff and servants been in attendance, for the palace's usual population was hundreds strong. Today, that population numbered over ten thousand, and ten thousand Equestrians simultaneously panicking in one area was a disaster in its own right.

The mob, choked by fear, became a mindless mass of shouts, wails, grunts, shoving bodies, and trampling hooves. It took everything the royal guards had to keep anypony from being flattened in the stampede toward the palace gates, the walls, the towers, anywhere other than where the cataclysm was. But it was everywhere. Canterlot mountain would be engulfed in seconds. They couldn't escape before then!

The ground lurched. Palace windows imploded, scattering glass. Tents caved in beneath a torrential downpour. Thunderbolts reverted a score of Spring Equinox-themed food, clothing and souvenir vendors to a score of smoking wrecks. Panic gripped everypony from the smallest foal to the bravest guard, rooted them in place, froze them to the marrow, left them unable to think, unable to act.

Save for two.

"Protect our subjects from the Equinox, Luna!" Princess Celestia cried over the bedlam. "I must aid Twilight before the spell consumes her."

"Mind it doth not consume you both!" Princess Luna shouted back, and obeyed. Moonlight flared, ice congealed, and a cerulean ward the size of a big top enclosed the mob in its entirety, right before the mélange hit. Blasting winds, pouring rains, scorching flames and ruptured earth assailed Luna's ward ... and were all repulsed.

Barely.

Sending her sister a terse nod, Celestia armored herself in sunlit stone, and took flight for the eye of the Spring Equinox's storm. A lone violet star flickered there, its desperate magics parting the destruction's tides, diffusing their energy, sending the worst of it away from Canterlot. Celestia bit her lip and accelerated, accelerated till her wings seemed to burn and then lightning thick as a castle turret lashed down and Celestia's wings were burning and her armor was breaking and her instincts were screaming at her to teleport aside—

Yet the moment Celestia did, she knew she'd made a mistake. She'd been so focused on conserving enough energy to help Twilight that she'd evaded the incoming thunderbolt, and not deflected it.

Frost rent. Steam hissed. Feedback sizzled. Celestia glanced over her shoulder in time to see Luna stagger, her ward smote open. Prince Shining Armor and Princess Cadance touched horns, began casting a barrier of their own, but before they or Luna could do so, brackish water erupted beneath their feet, beneath everypony's feet, and washed them away.

"Luna! Shining! Cadance!" Twilight shouted through a throat gone raw from screaming. She hadn't seen the lightning arc past her until it was too late, hadn't been able to wrench enough of her magic away from the berserk Spring Equinox fast enough, but there was still time before the tides swept them under. Them and everypony else. Her subjects. Again, she heard their cheers. Their applause. The praise they'd showered her with only minutes ago.

"All hail Princess Twilight Sparkle!"

Oh goddess above. What have I done?

"Long live Princess Twilight Sparkle!"