Dissonance, The Recap

Due to my story being rather long, with multiple plotlines, I've been told that a recap of all the events would be useful. So here it is; a short summary of all that has happened in chapters 1 to 32.

THE STORY SO FAR:

ARC ONE: LOST OUTSIDE REALITY

The story begins as Obsidian wakes up in his tower. He discovers an anomaly near his prison - a construct fake Ponyville where Twilight and her friends are living the same day over and over. The construct is already collapsing, and just as the girls figure out what is going on, Obsidian's companion Verba arrives to break it down,and take them away. He takes everypony but Twilight, who repels him, and gets lost in the void outside instead. She almost dies among figments of her imagination before an unknown entity guides her to Obsidian's tower.

Obsidian introduces himself as a former bearer of Honesty, who once sealed himself away when a magical mishap drove him mad. Now he's a bitter stallion with a violent temper who quickly antagonises Twilight while picking apart her stories about modern Equestria, questioning all she thinks she knows. Among other things, he claims that her training in magic has been purposefully tuned towards limiting her potential, and that the real Celestia and Luna are goddesses, literally Sun and Moon, which means the princesses must be frauds of some sort.

Meanwhile the rest of the gang end up in the Void Passage, an ancient construct within primal chaos, designed to test prospective bearers of the Elements, and weed out the unworthy - each finds herself in a dreamlike scenario requiring her to excel at her respective Element.

Twilight is forced by Obsidian to re-learn her magic, and discovers that her powers do increase. She also learns of the Amaranthine, a magical flower that serves as the world's most powerful crystal ball, at the cost of draining the user's essence. She uses it to find her friends only to find out they're in trouble - Dash failed her test, and Rarity was about to. Fortunately Verba has received Obsidian's order to rescue them again, and he pulls them out of before any permanent damage is done. (there is very little of a pony left in him, so he tends to follow his default "programming" when not instructed otherwise - which is mostly running the tests)

Once everypony meets, Obsidian explains the situation - and offers to send the girls back to the waking world if they free him in turn - Applejack's connection to Honesty allows her to undo the spell that Obsidian had cast on himself back when he was the bearer.

On her way back, Twilight meets a mysterious mare in a dream - she's receives a vision of a book hidden in Zecora's hut, and a warning about an alicorn transformation being a trap.

ARC TWO: SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET

The girls wake up in pods in a changeling hive - they are being rescued by agent Pierce, a unicorn serving Celestia. The princesses managed to locate them once they started waking up, and are now attacking the hive from outside to provide a diversion. As the girls escape, they learn that the hive is underneath Everfree forest. They also pass by a pod containing a dead zebra... Unfortunately, the plan doesn't quite work, as the changelings use the Mirror Pool to overwhelm Celestia with numbers, forcing Luna to go help her - between the two of them they level a large part of the forest, but can't perform extraction, and by the time Twilight manages to teleport the girls out, Pierce is incapacitated with changeling venom.

The town turns out to be empty. The group divides - Dash, Rarity and Applejack take Pierce to hospital. There they meet Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle, who tell them that the town has been evacuated by the army. Also, it has been almost a year since Twilight and her friends have been missing. Meanwhile, Dash makes a discovery - even though this is the first time she's met Pierce, she recognises him - he showed up in her Void Passage vision, where he introduced himself as Pin.

Twilight, Pinkie and Fluttershy go towards the forest. They want to check on Fluttershy's animals, but then Twilight follows her odd dream, and goes to Zecora's hut. The book is really there, and it turns out to be a magic journal used to send coded reports. This is where Celestia finds them. Confronted by Twilight, she admits to having Zecora spy on her, but then the conversation mentions Obsidian, and the princess is shocked to hear of his release.

Meanwhile, Scootaloo wakes up in a secret lab underneath Canterlot. She's there with Tourmaline (Minty for friends) a filly the CMC had befriended. Tourmaline is a brilliant but sickly child, the daughter of Bluebonnet, a scientist working for Celestia. A pony named Enigma, gifted with strange teleportation powers, was sent to retrieve her during evacuation, and ended up taking Scootaloo as well, when it turned out Tourmaline let her use some inventions from the labs.

Obsidian arrives in Equestria, and finds the hospital just before Celestia arrives. He calls her Gloria, and the two trade insults and threats before Obsidian teleports out, taking Applejack with him, promising to show her the truth if she follows him for a couple hours more.

Twilight and her friends arrive in Canterlot. They meet North Star, the current captain of the royal guard. They also meet Luna, who tell them a story about Obsidian and Verba being ancient warlocks sealed outside of reality for trying to subvert the Elements of Harmony to their will.

Meanwhile, Obsidian tells Applejack a different story. According to him, the Elements of Harmony were magical weapons created by an ancient alicorn empire to win a great war. Also, Celestia is Gloria, one of the Shattered, six ponies who tried to replicate the Elements of Harmony, but ended up splicing an alien power into their souls - it is a force of pure order, inmical to magic, allowing them to bend the laws of nature to their will at the cost of robbing them of some of their emotions, making them almost devoid of empathy. They were the calamity that ultimately destroyed the empire and opposed the Elements for millenia after, named after the broken versions of the Elements they hoped to represent: Envy, Arrogance, Hate, Guilt, Deception and Vengeance.

Tourmaline keeps talking with Scootaloo to entertain her, as she expects the princesses to wipe her memory afterwards, she's not concerned with keeping secrets. She tells her of how resentful she is of her health issues keeping her chained to the lab, of her mother's experiments with pattern, a form of energy opposite to magic, allowing creation of precisely controllable phenomena, and about Enigma, who had got her mother the job in the labs. He has a power to teleport, and apparently can swith bodies when he grows old too. (this is a power of the Shattered - since their power is opposite to magic, their souls can't dissolve in primal chaos, instead bouncing back to Equestria, possessing unfortunate ponies.)

Obsidian and Applejack sneak into Canterlot to recover the Elements of Harmony. Meanwhile, Celestia takes Twilight to the dungeon labs, and introduces her to Dr Stone, her chief scientist. They show her a device created to focus magic, allowing very powerful spells to be cast without an appropriately strong wizard. They want to use it to make Twilight an alicorn in case Celestia and Luna are overpowered by Obsidian. But as the procedure starts, Twilight has a flashback to her dream, and freaks out, resisting the procedure. The device explodes apparently killing Dr Stone.

Twilight escapes the lab, just in time to bump into her friends - and Obsidian who is in the process of retrieving the Elements. As the princesses show up, he tosses the Elements to the girls, and then repeats his accusations, and as everything depends on the truth of his words, Applejack awakens to the full power of Honesty and backs up his words. This causes everypony to believe Obsidian - and Celestia immediately tries to kill them. They only manage to teleport out because Tourmaline and Scootaloo, who also escaped the lab due to the fire alarm, run into the room and distract Celestia for a crucial second.

During all the confusion, a pony looking like Enigma shows up in the room where Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom are, gives them necklaces that will shield them from magical detection, and after delivering some cryptic warnings teleports them far south into the badlands.

ARC THREE: THE EMPIRE

In the Everfree forest, Twilight suffers a breakdown, unable to cope with her mentor being a villain. After her friends manage to shake her out of it, they decide to go to the Crystal Empire, the one place that can be their safe haven. Obsidian prepares a circle for a long distance teleport, using the magical leyline under the Castle of the Sisters. While there, he shows them the Crystal Tree, the source of the forest's weirdness. Apparently it is a construct containing an amalgam of soul pieces, designed to fool the Elements into accepting it as their "bearers" to keep them dormant. The girls think on why the Elements were taken out of the tree. They consider destroying it, but it seems there are already some strange vines trying to drain its power.

The Shattered discuss the situation: Celestia (Gloria/Arrogance) Dr Stone (Evening Embrace/Deception) Luna (Absinthe/Envy) and Enigma (Guilt) argue on what to do next. It turns out that the Elements had been given to the girls in anticipation of the Sombra crisis, as a backup plan. In the end Celestia sends Enigma to the Crystal Empire, to kill Cadence and deny Twilight her protection. But because she doesn't trust him, she insists that he's accompanied by another Shattered, Lightbringer (Hate).

Envy and Lightbringer appear in the Crystal Empire, ready to play the role of villains; kill the princess so that the city's barrier can't be activated, while giving Equestria a reason to intervene with their forces. The two cut their way through security, but are ultimately thwarted. Enigma finds the royal couple to be difficult targets, and gets attacked by agent Prism, an agent of Celestia who's apparently gone rogue. Meanwhile Lightbringer flashes back to the last time he was in the Empire. He was supoosed to play a villian, and conquer it so the princesses could 'liberate' it, but linking to the power of the Empire made him drunk on power, transforming him into Sombra - the flashback causes him to rage out of control, and Enigma decides to kill him while he still has a chance.

The girls' teleport gets bounced back by the city barrier, and they have to fly the rest of the way. Thankfully Honesty's power can penetrate the shield, and they are let in.

Back in Canterlot Celestia learns of Enigma’s failure. He calls her out on being a control freak and she flips out. Tourmaline is eavesdropping on the conversation with one of her gadgets; she learns that she has a fatal illness kept inert by Deception in return for Enigma and Bluebonnet working for Celestia.

The girls meet Shining, Cadence and Spike and learn their side of the story. It turns out Shining had found some clues about the princesses themself, mostly from a clumsy attempt to destroy them, and has been preparing for trouble ever since. He also informs them that he managed to get their parents and many of the Apples out before Celestia’s guards could arrest them, but all those who used to be in Ponyville are in her custody. Finally, he introduces him to his two officers, Glitterdust, a local soldier, and Bling (agent Prism), his old friend from the military.

During the night Luna attacks Twilight in a dream, but Twilight's experience with lucid dreaming allows her to hold on until Verba arrives to help.

Celestia confronts North Star, revealing him as Shining’s spy in Canterlot. She spins another story and adds some painful truth to it - because the orders to arrest the Elements’ families had been leaked, some guards were ambushed and killed by unknown assailants. He breaks down and tells her everything.

Obsidian trains the Elements, telling them the basics of how their powers should work. He also discusses the powers of the Shattered: Arrogance can transform matter, Envy manipulates energy, Deception can alter living creatures, and Guilt warps space. Hate can control kinetic forces, but also has an unrelated power, some kind of magical entity that explodes out of him when he gets too angry. Vengenace is nowhere in sight, but she combines all the abilities and apparently is absurdly destructive.

Dr stone meets Bluebonnet in the lab, talking with her on her latest research - it looks like she might need pattern-based weapons she was working on, and Celestia had already taken some old emitters. She also notices a flower in a pot in a corner where Slinky does her tinkering. It’s a heart’s desire.

Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle try to survive in the middle of nowhere. They follow a stream, and discuss taking off the necklaces, but decide against it.

Shining receives intelligence from North Star. Apparently a group of high priority prisoners have been moved to a hidden lab in the slope of Canterlot Mountain, a cave masked by illusions, overlooking the city. Also, Luna will be out of the city, overseeing the Equestrian Army as it moves towards the Empire. Obsidian instantly declares that it is obviously a trap, but the girls are adamant to go anyway. In the end they perform a ritual to send their minds to the Void Passage (they also return to the question of who sent them there the first time). Obsidian uses the Amaranthine to map out Celestia's base, and takes her role to let them practice. He also experiments on Dash to try to help her, casting a spell that would let her inherit some of the previous Loyalties' muscle memory. Finally, he recruits a bunch of chimeras, dream-like shapeshifters that normally staff the Void Passage to serve as a diversion for the girls' attack. Strangely, his attempts to find Sweetie and Apple Bloom fail. Whoever took them from Canterlot must have been horribly good at blocking scrying.

Bluebonnet stays up late, trying to finish her work, a pony-portable pattern gun. She regrets not spending more time with her daughter. Dr Stone reassures her before ordering her to go get some sleep.

Meanwhile Tourmaline turns her heart's desire flower into a potion to boost her special talent. She then tries to sneak through the labs and meet Scootaloo again. She is stopped by Pierce and when he refuses to let her see her friend, she asks him to at least give her a gift from her - a pair of goggles she often wore that Scootaloo said were better than hers. Pierce is visibly shaken, and locks her up instead; he flashes back to his own past (Tales of a Hidden World, book I ) when he received a pair of sunglasses from his then best friend, a story that ended in tragedy.

The girls arrive at the location of the lab. As they enter, Celestia confronts them alone, fixated on solving the problem by herself after the argument she had with the other Shattered. The hostages are unconscious in cages and the emitters Celestia had brought dampen magic in the entire floor, giving her briefly a solid advantage: it is only Obsidian breaking the devices that turns the tide, bringing the fight into a stand-off.

Meanwhile, one of the chimeras wrecks the labs, taking the shape of Pierce's dead friend. It talks about him trying to atone by protecting Bluebonnet and Tourmaline before knocking him out and disappearing - and it distracts him long enough for Tourmaline to escape her cell.

There is a conflict between the Elements as to what to do. Obsidian points out that letting Celestia take a breath now is a bad idea. In the course of the dialogue it turns out that Celestia might not go with it - but she isn’t above shifting the blame to the Elements, creating a lethal spell that will go off if she falls. Suddenly Tourmaline appears, hauling her mother's prototype pattern gun. She fires it at Celestia and the princess cannot block it well enough. She is killed, and as her body breaks, there is a female pegasus inside. Tourmaline falls, the pattern radiation from the overloaded prototype erasing her consciousness. As the Elements ready to evacuate, Obsidian prepares to kill the strange pegasus they found, but Dash stops him - her implanted memories make her recognise the mare as a fellow Loyalty.

A moment later Enigma appears along with Pierce and Bluebonnet. He doesn't want to fight them, and denies being the one who took their little sisters.

Tourmaline's comatose body is put in a tank with healing fluids, but it does nothing to restore her mind - she's effectively dead. Enigma tries to take Bluebonnet away from the lab, revealing the truth about Tourmaline's illness, but Dr Stone bounces the accusations back at him, enough to make Bluebonnet stay, at least for the time being. Enigma leaves.

The Elements regroup in the Crystal Empire. Scootaloo, who was rescued along with the other hostages, is devastated by the news of Tourmaline's death. After the pegasus mare recovers from pattern poisoning enough to respond, she introduces herself as Aurora.

Luna informs ponies that the Elements of Harmony have been perverted by evil and murdered Celestia. Equestria is now at war with the Crystal Empire. Luna breaks the great hall windows depicting their earlier accomplishments.

ARC FOUR: THE LOOK INTO THE PAST

Luna meets Equestrian commanders and tells them that the situation is dire and desperate measures are called for. There is an ancient, powerful weapon Equestria could use, but it is manifest by possessing a pony, and somepony has to die for it. When she asks them to look for a volunteer among their soldiers, the leader of the Wonderbolts steps forward, stating that she cannot demand such a sacrifice from her soldiers if she herself does not make it. She becomes Arrogance’s new body.

Aurora tells Twilight about her past. Obsidian suggests taking her to the Void Passage to make it a vision instead. They take Scoolatoo along, and as Aurora sees her, she adresses her as Charcoal.

The group comes into the Void Passage, and Obsidian's spell allows Aurora to show them her life, the times when the Shattered conquered ponykind and ruled under the names of the Elements they were once suposed to represent: Wisdom, Respect, Empathy, Passion, Hope and Justice. The ponies are cramped in cities surrounded by smoking factories, primitive pattern generators that dull their magic, designed to keep away the chaos outside - monsters born of Discord's magic rule all the untamed areas outside. Ponies are screened for compatibility with the Elements to pre-emptively eliminate potential bearers, and changelings serve as Deception's secret police.

Aurora and her sister Aquila are being taken to the capital, after Aurora tried to disrupt a testing - they meet Envy on the way, and are taken to the tower of Wisdom where Arrogance resides, but before she has the time to examine them they are rescued by the current bearers of Honesty, Laughter and Kindness - the ex-con earth pony Whisper, the pegasus Jingles, and a blind zorse mare Sauti.

They retell some legends of their time: the doomed love between Deception and one of the previous Loyalties, which apparently embittered her against any future bearers, and a city of Portus, burned to the ground by Hate's rage when Discord provoked him one time too many. They also meet Bubble Burst, the resistance leader of their time. During one fight with changelings, Aquila gets a moon cutie mark for her special talent in hydromancy.

Some time later they break into one of Deception's labs trying to rescue Cristal, an experienced resistance spy. They meet Charcoal, a young filly who serves as their guide through the industrial district. They are too late, and find that Cristal has been transformed into a monster hybrid, Deception’s attempt to make possession-compatible changelings.

As they escape, they meet Discord, who mocks the bearers for their inability to change anything as he plays murdering ponies. (Obsidian comments that Discord is very much like one of his chimera's - he has constants like his name, that keep him stable, but beyond that he's in flux, and in such dark times, he'd naturally reflect them.)
Aurora talks back to him, and ends up challenged to race his monsters for her friends' lives. She performs a sonic rinboom and gets her cutie mark.

During the meeting, Discord drops a hint about the location of the other Elements. The heroes make a plan to break into the tower where Vengeance rules to get the Elements from her vault. Aurora enters the inner city, looking for a place to hide among the “chosen”, ponies who have been brainwashed insane in an attempt to make them perfectly obedient to Vengeance, only to discover Cristal hiding among them as well. She manages to bring her back to her senses and gets her to join the team.

The break in ends with the bearers being confronted by true chosen, ponies that had tested positive for Elements compatibility, brainwashed and transformed to serve as supply of replacement bodies for the Shattered, and in the meantime kept in stasis as the last like of defense against intruders. Cornered, they combine their abilities to attempt a blind teleport out of the tower, and the remaining Elements buried in the floor of the chamber respond to them, linking to Cristal, Aurora and Aquila to complete the set.

Years later, The Elements have manged to seal Arrogance in a gemstone, and temporarily kill Envy. They decide to show up on a concert Envy was supposed to give, to disrupt whatever the regime organises instead, but instead find Discord disguising as Envy to mess with the audience. Before they turn him to stone, he goes into a monologue, revealing himself to be a failed creation of Deception, plunging the world into chaos mostly to spite her.

As Discord is eliminated from the equation, the balance of power in the world shifts - in response Vengeance declares that she no longer wants ponies as her subjects and starts nuking Shattered-controlled cities. The group goes to her tower to confront her, but as they go there, they learn that Cristal was ambushed, and died killing Hate - they have to meet Venegance without a full set.

The vision of the final battle gets interrupted as Spike comes to inform them that Equestrian army has began their attack on the Empire.

Comments

[karnazom]

M8 I spoiled on my own will but thanks for the guide