There are those who say that a mark is a portion of the soul made visible to the world. That the mark is destiny, and so cannot be denied. Equestria has existed under the influence of marks for all of its recorded history, allowing the ever-changing tide of icons to guide the way.
But it could also be said that every system contains the seed of its own destruction.
There is one who believes destiny is nothing more than a trap. And there is nothing she will not do to make the world free.
The story may be found here
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Tropes found in this story include:
- Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: At one point, Rainbow has to carry Rarity over a river during a rainstorm. The water gets under Rarity's clothes, and adds enough slipperiness for her to fall off of Rainbow's back and into the water, where she quickly gets swept away by the current. Trixie manages to save her by snapping a tree branch and putting it in Rarity's path, but as soon as she's back on shore Rarity immediately tears into Trixie for how roughly she was treated. Made particularly egregious by the fact that everyone else present quietly concludes that Rarity would most likely have drowned if Trixie hadn't acted.
- Despair Event Horizon: The prologue follows a Zebra who has just had her Mark removed. She commits suicide in less than two days. The narration implies this is a common reaction.
- The Drifter: Glimmer is a villainous example in the prologue. She's making her way through zebra lands because their kraals don't coordinate law enforcement and it's easier to find isolated individuals to experiment on there than it is in Equestria. Also because not including Zebras in her studies would be prejudiced and a poor application of the scientific method.
- Driven to Suicide: Each of the first two chapters ends with one of Glimmer's victims committing suicide in response to being stripped of their mark.
- Dying Smirk: Linchpin dies with a small smile on his face. In the following chapters it serves to underscore the intensely gruesome nature of his death and the desperation he must have experienced leading up to it.
- Entertainingly Wrong:
- The Doctors Bear specifically state that the corpse they found cannot be that of Linchpin, despite having the right height, build, tribe, and colors, because the marks are different and it's well known that nothing can change a mark.
- Linchpin's fake mark fades almost immediately after his death, and this is caught on-camera, leaving the Doctors Bear to suspect a disease that destroys marks rather than that the mark they saw was somehow faked.
- Exact Words: Trixie gets unintentionally brought along during Twilight's teleportation of the Bearers to follow the fragments of the teleportation device, because during the buildup to casting the spell, Twilight repeats to herself that she wants to bring all of her friends with her. Because the others aren't privy to Twilight's internal monologue, this leaves them believing that Trixie deliberately sabotaged the teleport by somehow attaching herself to it.
- Foil: As Twilight Sparkle interacts with Starlight Glimmer, she becomes increasingly aware of their similarities; both of them being highly intelligent magical prodigies with less than stellar social skills. Twilight even starts repeatedly offering up mental pleas for assurances that she wasn't that bad when she sees how completely inept Starlight is at social interaction, being quite disconcerted at the similarities. But even at her worst, Twilight was merely brutally blunt and introverted — Starlight's methodical atrocities would have been anathema even to a pre-Ponyville Twilight sparkle.
- Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: This seems to be part of Our Town's basic set up. It serves to counteract the aforementioned Despair Event Horizon and prevent inconvenient questions from the residents.
- Human Resources: Starlight has conducted some extensive experiments into making use of the corpses her experiments create, including learning to make glue from pony hooves, leather from pony skin, and tools such as needles and combs from the bones.
- Ignored Expert: On paper, Trixie has a combination of skills that would make her indispensable for an expedition into untamed wilderness: her frequent travels across various Wild Zones resulted in her picking up survival skills out of necessity, her knowledge of magical theory is enough to keep pace with Twilight Sparkle, and her talent as a performer makes her good at reading crowds and coming up with plausible cover stories. Unfortunately, her status as Reformed, but Rejected means most of the Mane 6 are unwilling to give her a chance to make use of these talents.
- Interspecies Friendship: Sizzler has never been able to make friends with ponies, who find his talent inherently repulsive. Since becoming aware of the existence of the small griffon migrant community in Canterlot, however, he's become very popular, and it's mentioned he may be considering moving there.
- Interspecies Romance: It's mentioned in passing that Sizzler has started dating. Given what was established about how he needed to look to griffons to find friendship, the obvious inference is that he's started dating one of Menagerie's more carnivorous species; the story is ambiguous if this is a griffon or perhaps the Diamond Dog, Yapper, who is shown comforting Sizzler in the makeshift royal coroner's office.
- Lovecraftian Superpower: The story does a very good job of conveying the utter, sanity-destroying wrongness of Starlight's mark amputation.
- Misapplied Phlebotinum: Sizzler has only ever used his trick to keep meat from spoiling. However, a chance encounter with the Royal Physicians make them realize that what he's really doing is completely arresting decomposition, making him a coroner's dreampony since he can perfectly preserve a corpse. Sizzler himself is... less than happy about this, and using his trick that way for the first time finds him spending a few hours crying in the palace's abandoned barracks.
- Mundanger: Glimmer captures and breaks new victims using primarily mundane cult recruitment and brainwashing techniques, to the point where it's unclear if any of it is magic other than the final mutilation of the soul.
- No Conservation of Energy: Discussed by Twilight's internal narration in Chapter 6. Normal pegasus magic obeys the conservation of energy: if you want to warm one area up you have to draw the heat from somewhere else, and when you want to cool an area down that heat has to be sent someplace. The Diarchs, under the other hoof, do not seem to follow this rule: Celestia can radiate vast amounts of heat without any apparent source while Luna radiates chill without apparently sending the energy she is draining anywhere.
- No Endor Holocaust: Averted. Trixie's takeover of Ponyville may not have produced fatalities, but there were damages. Rarity's flashback in Chapter 20 makes it clear she's still very traumatized from essentially seeing Applejack and Pinkie being tortured in front of her. Among Trixie's known crimes are forcing anypony who can be useful to work and attacking them should they flag, nearly tossing a cart onto Shoeshine, stabbing Amethyst with tacks, and doing something to Time Turner that required hospitalization. And even after the Amulet was removed, she still threatened Rainbow with agony. In other words, Ponyville has every right to be feel that Trixie got off easy.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: All of the Bearers except Twilight - primarily Rarity and Pinkie - give one to Trixie, calling her out for her actions when she initially visited Ponyville, the various ways she nearly killed ponies whilst under the influence of the Alicorn Amulet, her choosing to search for the Amulet in the first place, and her failure to even attempt to make amends with anyone but Twilight (which they suggest is itself a lie to try to escape the consequences of her actions).
- Reformed, but Rejected: Twilight is the only Bearer to have fully forgiven Trixie for her past actions; the others' reactions range from Spike's distrustful tolerance to Pinkie and Rarity's severe hostility. They all routinely visit the library while Trixie is staying there in order to keep an eye on her, expressly stating they believe it only a matter of time before she betrays Twilight's trust.
- As is pointed out during "The Reason You Suck" Speech, Twilight is the only one that Trixie bothered apologizing to following the Amulet incident, and is the only one who's been in contact with her afterwards. The others have no particular reason to believe that she felt any remorse at all for what she did.
- This hostility extends to the rest of the town as well; several ponies are even willing to defy a sign declaring her under Solar protection in order to vandalize her caravan.
- Released to Elsewhere: While fighting off the effects of Starlight's brainwashing, a part of Linchpin's mind notes that anytime a member of her community "leaves", the whole town simply stops thinking about them and doesn't even wonder where they went. He's too busy escaping to devote much thought to it, but the implications alone are enough to disturb him.
- Sanity Slippage: After her mark is amputated, it takes a little under a day before the unnamed charcoal-maker goes completely insane. We get to watch the whole thing from her perspective.
- Snowball Fight: Applejack and Twilight have one to let Twilight practice using truespeech, using slabs of earth to fling snow at each other. The second time, Celestia shows up and joins in to break the ice.
- Technopath: We get a more detailed look at Rachette's hybrid magic in this story. By smearing a device with her blood, she can mentally link to it, enabling her to activate, power, and control it.
- Thanatos Gambit: Linchpin uses the stolen teleport wand to teleport himself to Canterlot, knowing that Our Town's magical defenses will ensure he comes out the other side a corpse, in order to catch the Diarchy's attention.
- You Are What You Hate: Played for Drama. Rarity has enough self-awareness to recognize how she and Trixie are alike. Unfortunately, that means the events of Magic Duel were doubly horrifying for her, because it could have been her. Since she doesn't want to believe herself capable of that, she's instead convinced herself that Trixie was already a cruel and sadistic person who only needed the barest nudge to descend into mustache-twirling supervillainy.
- Your Soul Is Mine!: We get a horrifying first hand view of how Glimmer's Mark removal magic works under the Triptych Continuum's rules.
