FimFiction Link - Short ID: 59880/schemering-sintel
Published: Dec '12 — Jun '13
Schemering Sintel is a 30k sad adventure, and an exercise in futility. Spike has been kidnapped. Twilight won't rest until she's rescued him and gets answers. Spoiler. Neither of these things happen.
One night, a black dragon appears in Ponyville. Nopony knows how he made it to the heartland of Equestria, or why did he only take Spike. There are no other leads. Celestia tries to contact the dragons, but since they don't have a centralised government (lol), it's hard to extract information. Twilight will have none of that, so she leaves Equestria behind and embarks on a journey to rescue her lil' bro.
What follows are a series of vignettes of Twilight traversing foreign lands, and how she loses her equinity as she's forced to become more violent in order to survive and hunt down any possible lead that may lead to Spike.
Spoilers: When she finds Spike, he's huge due to a greed growth. He's been like that for so long, Twilight can't bring him back to normal. Also, he killed fifteen guards who were sent to retrieve him. Seeing how he's wanted and will probably hurt other ponies, Twilight kills Spike.
That's really it. There was a glaring lack of depth. You'd think the story would dwell hard on the changes Twilight undergoes and how she rationalises the loss of Spike. It kinda does, but I never felt it really explored those ideas as well as it should.
It's a fine read, but I don't feel it had any lasting impact.