Characters / Triptych Continuum Spoilers

As the title indicates, this page describes the Walking Spoilers of the Triptych Continuum, and as such, is full of unmarked spoilers. Proceed with caution.

Gentle Arrival

One of the core figures in Triptych: a stallion midwife (with an honorary doctorate from the Equestrian Magic Society) who's been active in his profession for about one generation, delivering an impressively large number of foals during that time. Notably, he has two connections to the Bearers: Fluttershy as his very first foal brought to Sun, with Pinkie coming about a year later. (Reading between the lines of several other stories indicates he also delivered Snowflake and Ratchette — which is eventually confirmed in Triptych itself). He's a stocky unicorn stallion in very late middle age: mauve coat, orange eyes, with a soft red tail and mane. He also appears to be the central conspirator in The Great Work: the attempt to find a way of turning a regular pony into an alicorn.

Cutie Mark: "outstretched hooves and a bundle of blankets held in a silver field"

• Abusive Parents: He's emotionally and physically abused his daughter her entire life in his twisted attempts to transform her into a pony that can use unicorn magic. When everything falls apart for him in chapter 52, he unleashes his repressed anger at her and calls her a useless clod while kicking her.
• Affably Evil: To all appearances, he's one of the nicest, kindest ponies on the continent, and he seems to truly care about those he's brought into the world. But at the same time, he's kept the Great Work hidden, seems willing to do some dubious things to keep it that way, and has at least one decidedly unfriendly pony potentially working dark angles for the coverup. For now, we just don't know.
  • He truly believes he's doing the right thing. Such stallions are dangerous...
• Affectionate Nickname: He introduces himself to newborns as their "first friend," and they generally feel the same way. In particular, Fluttershy acknowledges that there was a period in her life when he was her only friend.
• Bad Powers, Good People: Subverted. It's revealed in chapter 40 of Triptych that he's been using a form of necromancy to save the lives of foals who were dying in the womb, infusing them with the essence of a dead pony of another tribe, diminishing their own inherent magic but granting them special magical affinities based on their integrated essence. Shortly afterwards it becomes extremely clear that he is not a good person.
• Benevolent Conspiracy: One possibility for his involvement in the Great Work...
• Breaking Speech: Delivers an exceptionally nasty one to Pinkie because he knows her abilities are based in her emotional state and sending her into full depression will shut her down: he's clearly aware of her autophobia and jumps onto that button with all four hooves.
• Broken Pedestal: Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy's faith in him is irreparably shattered when they learn of his involvement in the "Great Work", to the point where each goes through their own version of an emotional breakdown: Pinkie suffers through an extreme episode of dimming, while Fluttershy winds up stuck on the idea that she's not actually meant to be alive. He is this to Snowflake, another hybrid, in "A Duet of Land and Sky" after he tries in vain to convince Snowflake to help him break out of prison so that he can continue the Great Work.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: On a national scale. In chapter 42 of Triptych, he opposes Clear Coordinator's suggestion that they kill the Bearers, pointing out that, even if the Bearers do not wish to assist the Great Work, they have still saved Equestria from disaster multiple times. Furthermore, not only has Equestria seen more use for them in the last few years than it had previously seen in the last few centuries (and there may be more problems coming), but, contrary to popular belief, an Element of Harmony will not simply find a new pony worthy of being its Bearer straight away. This means that killing the Bearers could doom Equestria, as it might be centuries before new Bearers arise. As things fall apart around him and he loses control of the situation by chapter 52, he pretty much abandons this mindset. If it comes down to him and the Bearers, he'll choose him. Even if it means killing them.
• The Clan: In a way. The majority of those he's delivered seem to consider him part of their families, especially with those foals who would have been lost without his assistance. Those ponies are often referred to as his, and also tend to think of themselves that way.
• Condescending Compassion: His particular flavor of Fantastic Racism, which in many ways makes him the most racist of the group we've seen so far. Unlike Coordinator, he seems to believe that it is possible to discover a cure for being an earth pony, essentially comparing an entire tribe of ponies to suffering some terrible disease. However, it's later expanded upon in chapter 40 that he's not so much anti-earth pony as pro-racial purity; he talks a lot about ponies not sharing their parents' tribe as being "broken" for their inability to live up to the family heritage.
• Control Freak: What he ultimately is. Twilight spells it out in chapter 52 "Gallery", with the implication that this makes him similar to her (though Rarity firmly denies this).
  Twilight: He's... all about control, isn't he? He controls things nopony else ever has. Whether foals are born healthy, or if they're born at all. Whether they live or die. Two things happened which he couldn't control, and he's spent all the time since trying to get control back. Obsessively, compulsively —
• Deadly Euphemism: In chapter 40 of Triptych, he talks about "sending on" foals. Which, as Applejack quickly susses out, may be a euphemism for killing them at birth; the term could come from "sending on to the Shadowlands" - aka Mercy Killing.
  • In chapter 44 of Triptych, Applejack points out that there are literally two possible interpretations of that euphemism. Earth ponies, apparently, practice a form of "sending on" that means adopting out their non-earth pony foals. But then there's the "Released to Elsewhere" interpretation... and hints given elsewhere in the story suggest the latter is much more likely, which Applejack herself suspects.
• Even Evil Has Standards: In chapter 41, it's shown that he is genuinely offended by the abuse that Pinkie Pie's father directed at her. Of course, that abuse came about due to Pinkie's lack of earth pony magic -- and who was responsible for that?
• Fantastic Racism: He refers to any newborn who emerges as a race other than their parents as "broken", and has described interracial unions as a sin. He also doesn't seem to think much of earth ponies: they have no great magic as a race, no special abilities, no miraculous talents... clearly inferior to unicorns and pegasi. On the whole, he appears to be a 'stay on your side of the fence' racist: everything is fine as long as everypony remains in their place.
  • In chapter 44, Applejack reasons out that Gentle Arrival's followers may not necessarily be all anti-earth pony, but Gentle Arrival himself most certainly is. She does this by pointing out that "blood purists" can be found amongst all three tribes, and there are plenty of earth ponies, like Pinkie Pie's father, who would have been willing to work with Gentle Arrival to ensure the purity of their own lineages, but there was not a single earth pony present at the meeting.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Being able to ignore the unicorn rule of "differentiation"^note a unicorn cannot move an object if it is inside of another object seems like a fairly gimmicky power, especially when he can only use it on unborn foals. In fact, it's allowed him to become the greatest midwife in all of Equestria, as no other pony can hope to intervene if something has gone wrong during the birth. Then chapter 41 reveals that he actually ignores differentiation entirely, which among other things makes him an incredibly dangerous foe to fight, as he can telekinetically squeeze hearts or brains as easily as another unicorn could grab a pony's leg. This even allows him to cast even when there's a restraint on his horn, though he can't control where the magic goes nearly as well.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: He is defeated by triggering a backlash of his own magic. The effect is even worse on him than usual due to his magic's ability to ignore differentiation. The backlash inflicted internal injuries — his life was barely saved by Doctors Vanilla Bear and Chocolate Bear and he has to regularly take medication for the rest of his life.
• Honorary Uncle: To what seems to be a significant portion of Equestria. A pity it turns out he's an honorary Evil Uncle.
• Hypocrite: He denounces ponies who have the misfortune of being born a different Tribe to their parents, calling them not only "broken" but also "sinful" for how they damage family legacies due to being unable to share in their parents' magic. But at the same time, he has shamelessly carried out his essence-fusing experiments for years, creating dozens, maybe hundreds of ponies who can't use the magic of their physical tribe, essentially creating even-more "broken" ponies than would have been naturally born. Rainbow winds up being the first one to call him out on this: she feels that the whole Great Work is about his daughter, and everything else has just been a side effect.
  • Twilight tries to make an extremely rough estimate of the hybrid population, and her best-guess median number is a little under a thousand, with several hundred at the low end and under two thousand for the high. As she notes, the fact that Doctor Gentle is the only resort for families with a history of problem births essentially pulls in such cases: the number of hybrids keeps going up in part because he continues to see so many of those who are on the edge of death.
• I Am Not Left-Handed: The public believes that the Exception only lets him move an unborn foal inside the mother. In Chapter 41 of Triptych, he demonstrates that it actually lets him ignore differentiation altogether — which he demonstrates by projecting his field into a member of the Great Work who's starting to have second thoughts, and very lightly squeezing his heart.
• I Owe You My Life: Hundreds of ponies (including Pinkie and Fluttershy) would have been stillborn had Gentle not been able to use the Exception to save them. When he was reported missing, just about all of them dropped what they were doing and made their way to Trotter's Falls to see if they could help.
• Mad Scientist: For all his good traits, this is a pony who has willingly performed dangerous experiments (with at least one disastrous result) on other ponies and covers them all up. Chapter 30 of Triptych confirms that he experiments on at least some of the unborn ponies he helps deliver, and this is all but called out as the reason why so many of them display strangely "swapped" magical traits or talents. Chapter 40 explains just why he's doing this, and clarifies that he experiments on any foal whom he believes won't survive without an other-race essence infusion and its resulting 'hybrid vigor'. And such foals do survive...
• Magnetic Hero: When he was reported missing, just about every pony he'd delivered (at least, for those old enough to travel alone) put their lives on hold and converged on Trotter's Falls. (Fluttershy and Pinkie were getting ready to head there when the mission came calling, Snowflake only stayed behind because he could do more good in watching the cottage, and Ratchette, who's more socially isolated, wound up a day behind on the gossip.)
• Mirror Character: His Control Freak nature makes him like Coordinator and even Twilight to a lesser extent. Enough so that Twilight is able to understand a bit of how he thinks.
  Because in a small way, Twilight knew him, and so she understood why it happened, the exact reaction. There were ways in which he and Coordinator were very much alike. It expressed itself in different ways — but in the end, it was very much about control. In Twilight's case, she had been sent into Ponyville, her life had changed, and ultimately, she'd just — gone along for the ride.
  But here, control had broken. And so had the pony.
• Psychic Surgery: In the Continuum, unicorn magic is subject to the rule of differentiation: a unicorn cannot use magic on anything that is fully inside another solid. Gentle, however, discovered the Differentiation Exception, a field tuning only he can perform that allows him to telekinetically manipulate an unborn foal inside the mother's womb. This single trick has saved literally hundreds of lives and made him a minor celebrity.
• Start of Darkness: Revealed in chapter 40 of Triptych: his pregnant wife went into a premature labor and died from the strain of it, his Talent ignited in freeing his own daughter from her dead womb... and his daughter was born an earth pony, which meant he wouldn't even be able to use magic as a way to help her connect to her dead mother. He basically snapped and became determined to change her into a unicorn: when he could find no path which led towards such a transformation, he "settled" for making her into an alicorn.
• Super Doc: Averted. While he has at least a smattering of general medical knowledge, he's explicitly a midwife and is reluctant to work outside his field.
• Tautological Templar: His reaction to finding out his experiments on Her have Gone Horribly Right? To eagerly look forward to showing her off to the rest of the conspiracy and to happily start planning on repeating the experiment on a new foal.
• Third Act Stupidity: By chapter 44 of Triptych, he's fallen into this; having locked Fluttershy up in the rat-infested dungeons whilst forgetting that, unlike a true pegasus, her hybrid magic works just fine underground. (To be fair, he had no way of knowing there was anything alive down there — and he ordered everypony's gags removed so they could access their feedbags: they couldn't survive the imprisonment if they couldn't eat or drink.)
• Villainous Breakdown: In chapter 52 when the situation spirals out of his control he loses all composure and all of the frustration and anger he's felt towards her ever since she was born bursts out.
  Gentle: YOU! USELESS! CLOD!
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Because of how often he's seen family lineages "ruined" when a foal is not the same species as its parents, and the documented likelihood of death if a pegasi gives birth to a non-pegasus foal on a cloud, Gentle Arrival is convinced that transforming such ponies into alicorns is the race's best hope to end such tragedies. (His original ideal would have been finding a way of changing a foal to the race of its parents: he's half-joked that the alicorn transformation is his idea of settling.)
• Wrong Context Magic: Unicorns in the Continuum can't use their fields to move any object which is fully inside another, with the universal inability known as differentiation. Doctor Gentle is the exception, but his trick only allows a single violation of that rule: he can move an unborn foal inside a mother. As such, he can reposition breech births, unwrap umbilical cords which have looped around newborn anatomy, sort out multiple birth tangles, and pull from his side when an exhausted mother can no longer push from hers. This trick has, over what appears to be at least one full generation, saved hundreds of foals — especially since as his reputation spread, ponies whose families had a history of problem births began to seek him out in advance. This is because all attempts to teach his trick to others have failed, making him into not just the last resort, but the only one. He's regarded as Equestria's father of modern obstetrics.
  • In Chapter 41 of Triptych, it's revealed that his trick actually lets him ignore differentiation altogether — which he demonstrates by projecting his field into a newly-recruited sponsor of the Great Work (who's starting to have second thoughts), and very lightly squeezing his heart. However, this appears to take more energy than using the Exception for a birth: the effect visibly places him at the double corona level.

Her

A strange pony mare whom the Bearers encounter during the events of Triptych. Chapter 40 of said fic all but outright states that she is Gentle Arrival's daughter.

• Abusive Parents: Her mother died in childbirth, and seeing her be born as an earth pony caused her father to snap. It resulted in him binding a Snitcher to her body, refusing to name her, and manipulating her throughout her life in an attempt to transform her into an alicorn - which resulted in her current state of hideous agony. Oh, and just to top it off, she's spent her entire life hearing him tell her that she killed her mother.
• Blessed with Suck: She has Alicorn-tier power in the magics of all three Pony Tribes, but she can't control it, she can't use it unless she's in the appropriate shape, the constant shape-changing is agonizingly painful, it's possible that the whole mess has driven her at least partially mad, and the conspiracy that created her wants to get her back.
  • It's now becoming clear that she's sane, but her perspective is that of a lifelong abuse victim.
• Brown Note: Looking directly at her mark induces a Heroic BSoD in Twilight and very nearly drives her insane. Later on, when most of the cast get a look at her mark, it's noted that Rarity and Rainbow Dash both have similar reactions to Twilight, Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie (who are his) find it beautiful, and Spike is just puzzled. ^note Applejack had just left the area.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Her trick turns out to be a time-reversal spell... that only works on paint. Discord is rather disappointed.
  • Later experimentation discovers she doesn't have to be the original painter, and the trick can be used to reverse aging effects in created works. Several pieces of palace art have been fully restored this way.
• Discard and Draw: Cyclically. She can use all three racial categories of pony magic, but each may only come when her change is fairly close to being centered on that form. We don't know exactly what degree of change is required to tap into an aspect, but once she shifts far enough away from it, she loses access. It's also possible that there are "neutral" stages, where she's not quite enough of any one thing to use any magic at all — and one of those appears in Chapter 52, when the Bearers catch her in a state where she's just about effectively left the earth pony stage, but hasn't really started to become a pegasus yet, leaving her magically helpless.
• Expy While she's mentally a single entity, the unstoppable and painful physical shapeshifting between three separate aspects might bring the Oddity to mind.
• Hulk Speak: Played with. Speech is painful for her, so her sentences tend to be clipped: no longer than five words, and anything that stretched out will probably have pauses and gaps as she tries to force words past the agony. (Twilight has to remind herself not to fall into the trap of perceiving a mind which can't communicate any other way.) However, she's fully capable of pronoun use and during the brief times when Doctor Gentle's painkiller drugs are in effect, she can speak normally.
• Involuntary Shapeshifter: She constantly, slowly shifts between the races of earth pony, pegasus and unicorn — in that order: the changes are effectively a continuous cycle, with two complete passes per day. Her mark — the only one known to move in Equestria's history — effectively serves as a clock: the rotation shows which aspect is coming into dominance, and a shifting silver fizzle moving along the Mobius loops measures the current degree of transformation. When a loop is at its apex and the fizzle reaches the top, she is, for all intents and purposes, a pony of that race — but the transformation never stops, and so the loop begins to drop as the pain builds again.
  • Chapter 41 shows that she's capable of accelerating the change, to the point where she can take on a different aspect within seconds. However, she's very heavily medicated at the time — and the transformation still produces a pain reaction, along with requiring a visible effort. (She had theorized fairly early on that such a change was possible, but believed that the resulting untreated agony might kill her.) So the cycle can be temporarily sped up: it just can't be stopped — and such speed changes are draining.
  • After Fluttershy removes the pain of the transformations, she essentially becomes capable of turning into any of the three races at will. However, such changes still proceed along the path of the cycle (meaning she can't reach unicorn from earth pony without becoming a pegasus first), they take a lot of calories to power and therefore she has a limited number she can perform — and if she isn't speeding the process, it continues to take place at its normal rate. For all intents and purposes, her form can't be permanently stabilized in a single aspect.
• Internalized Categorism: There's been some evidence that she may believe all earth ponies are "broken" and desperately in need of a cure for being an earth pony. This could be why she takes her failure to complete the Great Work so seriously: she truly believes that her failure has cursed countless ponies to remain as earth ponies. However, we have yet to define exactly what she means by "the broken" and after her failure to ascend, she counts herself among them.
  • This eventually gets cleared up: "broken" means being born as a different race from that of your parents. However, due to her central experience with earth ponies being herself, she's partially linked the term to that race as a whole.
• Never Given a Name: She outright refuses to be named, claiming that she doesn't deserve it. ^note At one point, Gentle Arrival says that "she will be presented, in all her glory..." and some readers initially believed this hinted to her name being Glory. (She also has some confusion about why she even needs a name, pointing out that she can simply be addressed by "her" or "you.") Some of this may be tied in to the belief about names granting a degree of destiny.
  "No name! Names limit! Name not earned! Never name now!"
  • It's eventually confirmed that she was never named, which Doctor Gentle felt would make her destiny more controllable.
  • Subverted when she takes a name for herself in chapter 55: Triptych.
• Not Afraid of You Anymore: After Fluttershy uses Discord's boon to remove her pain, she briefly visits what she thinks are the shadowlands and meets what she thinks is her mother. This near death experience is the final push she needs to stand up to Gentle, which gives the Bearers the opportunity to finally subdue him.
  • Word Of Fanfic Author is that she was seeing the shadows of those ponies whose essence was fused with her own. As Primatura is one of them...
• One Head Taller: She's roughly Luna's size, which makes her considerably larger than the average pony. This holds true across all three aspects. Prior to her change, she appears to have been more of a standard size: Doctor Gentle has to (poorly) make a new dress for the presentation, and she notes that her bed no longer fits her.
• Painting the Medium: Whenever she is referred to, her gender pronouns are always italicized, in order to specify who's being addressed.
• Power Incontinence: Alicorn-tier strength in all three aspects, very little control, and tends to generate spontaneous effects when she gets scared. So far, she's killed two Diamond Dogs (from an exiled criminal pack of five, who were looking at her as a possible food source) and nearly hit Pinkie with a burst of wild magic: Twilight just barely managed to redirect it. She's also responsible for the creation of the ravine first seen in Chapter 5, which she claims was made to save her life. ^note Chapter 43 finally explains what happened: her first teleport brought her out in midair — as an earth pony. Opening the ravine and exposing the underground river gave her a water landing, allowing the impact to merely nearly kill her.
  • Additionally, while she can accelerate her transformations, she cannot halt them or even slow them down.
• Secret-Keeper: Becomes the first character to be told how Luna fell to the Nightmare — by Luna herself.
• Super Breeding Program: She appears to have been raised with the intent of having her become an alicorn. Exactly how this was supposed to work remains a mystery: all we know is that something went critically wrong.
  • Some of it comes out in Chapter 41: she received education on everything Doctor Gentle could perceive as going into the life of a Princess, along with extensive magical training for workings and techniques which she couldn't actually use. Part of the goal was to make her truly want to be anything other than herself, and many of the teachings centered around creating the belief that her birth form was wrong. The snitcher helped to keep her mark unmanifested until Doctor Gentle felt she was ready, and the chaos pearls did the rest.
  • The rest emerges in Chapter 51. She was just trying to give him something...
• Walking Spoiler: She's absolutely integral to the plot of Triptych. We can't tell you much without giving away a huge amount of detail about the plot.
• Wrong Context Magic: Her mark breaks two of the most fundamental rules of the Continuum.
  • Firstly, a mark is immutable. No magic can ever alter the shape or color of a mark and any dye fades in minutes. Even physically cutting out the mark will never stop it from growing back perfectly. To see her mark move comes within a fur strand of driving Twilight into gibbering lunacy.
  • Second, a talent is always under the pony's control. The idea that a pony might lose control of their talent is so contrary to the nature of marks that it has never occurred to any pony even as a work of fiction.^note Such a situation has already occurred in-universe in A Mark Of Appeal, but Twilight had presumably not been made privy to those events. And yet her transformation is entirely outside her control — which is to stay, it's beyond her ability to stop. She suspects it may be possible to deliberately accelerate the process, but also believes the increased pain might kill her.

Original Bearers of Harmony

The original band of warriors who set out to overthrow Discord during his tyrannical reign as Equestria's resident Mad God. With details teased in several stories, mostly Triptych and Twilight Sparkle vs. The Equestrian Cutie Mark Constellation Registry, a huge teaser/spoiler array of details was released in a specific blog post at Xmas 2016. Consisted of seven members; Luna, Celestia, Starswirl the Bearded, Zephyra Hurricane (pegasus mare), Render (male minotaur), and two as-yet unnamed members; a pegasus stallion and a second unicorn stallion. Of the group, we know that Starswirl came to represent Magic, Luna Generosity, Celestia Loyalty, and Zephyra Honesty, while Render was the group's Protector (corresponding to Spike in the modern Bearers).

• Brutal Honesty: Appears to have been Zephyra Hurricane's stock in trade.
  She will always tell you what you need to know and almost never what you want to hear.
  • Celestia had stated that Zephyra's version of the virtue included the ability to perceive the truth of a pony being too dangerous to live, followed by doing something about it — without regret. Or, for that matter, satisfaction.
• Chromosome Casting: Inverted. In contrast to their succesors (and nearly all fanonical sextets), the six ponies were three mares and three stallions.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to the Mane 6, the Original Bearers were a lot grimmer. For starters, they certainly weren't afraid to use lethal force in their quest, something which might horrify the modern Bearers.
• Generation Xerox: Inverted; despite being the original wielders of the Elements of Harmony, like the Mane 6, they consist of two members of each of the three pony tribes, plus an extra non-pony ally.
• The McCoy: The reason why the pegasus stallion's paragraph in the blog entry implies he was the Bearer of Laughter; it talks about him recognizing the need for laughter as a way to heal, especially in the often sorrowful chaos that surrounds them.
• Nightmare Fetishist: The pegasus stallion implied to be the Bearer of Laughter is noted as finding a way to laugh at the weirdest things, viewing the world as crazy and that sometimes the proper response is to be crazy right back.
• Precursor Heroes: They lived over a thousand years before the present of the setting, but as the band who overthrew Discord and laid the foundations for modern Equestria, they were certainly heroes.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Celestia originally did not get on with the pegasus stallion member of the Bearers, heavily implied to be the Bearer of Laughter. However, when she talks about him to Joyous Release in A Mark of Appeal, she speaks of him very fondly, suggesting that they ultimately did become good friends — or maybe something more.

Starswirl The Bearded

The most famous and powerful unicorn mage in the land of Eris, and a member of the Original Bearers of Harmony. However, it turns out that the stories of Starswirl available to the general populace leave out one or two minor details...

• And Zoidberg: In the blog describing the Original Bearers, the paragraph describing Starswirl comes dead last and describes him more as The Dragalong than a full-fledged member of the group. A fitting foreshadowing of his ultimate fate.
  • However, this is subverted by Luna in A Mark Of Appeal, who directly states that at the moment when the sisters changed, Star Swirl was "finally and truly" her friend. It's possible that he simply took the most time to fully become part of the group, and it's been established that he was the final pony added to begin with.
• Broken Pedestal: He becomes this to Twilight Sparkle in Triptych after she learns what a monster he really was.
• Face–Heel Turn: Starswirl ultimately went on to betray the principles of Harmony and became a villain that Celestia and Luna must defeat. Or rather, they had to take out the Amulet after it had subsumed his personality — but he was the one who created it, and the existence of the mark-switching spell suggests it wasn't his first attempt to seize power.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Why would Starswirl forsake his allies and eventually fall from Harmony? Because of his envy that Celestia and Luna were chosen for immortality and supreme magic by becoming alicorns — instead of him.
• Mark of Shame: It turns out that his iconic beard was actually the result of a hex placed on him for laughs by Discord, after the Chaos Lord destroyed the magically shielded community that Starswirl had so arrogantly believed he'd succeeded at proofing against Discord's magic. He was never able to break it, and eventually resigned himself to it in a variation of Appropriated Appellation.
• Necromancer: He created the Alicorn Amulet as an Amplifier Artifact by harvesting essence from the dead and dying.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: Initially tried to turn Celestia and Luna down when they sought him out, confident that his own powers had created a safe zone that Discord couldn't breach. After being proven disastrously wrong in that assumption, he then joined the Original Bearers.
• Sixth Ranger Traitor: Played with. He was the last pony to be recruited and seems to have eventually become a full-fledged member of the group — but the fact remains that of the Original Six, he was the one who eventually turned his tail on the others. However, he didn't join simply to betray them and it's possible that if not for the sisters transforming, the group would have remained intact. The betrayal also doesn't seem to have been immediate, or even all that rapid: he at least remained with them long enough to begin researching the alicorn condition.

Starlight Glimmer

A unicorn mare (or possibly something more) who seems to be the key antagonist of Glimmer. Little has yet been revealed about her, but what we have seen implies somepony rather different from, and far more dangerous than, her canon counterpart.

• Animalistic Abomination/Humanoid Abomination: There have been hints dropped that she is something... other... than a normal pony. It's debatable precisely which of these tropes she falls under if that's the case, since ponies have the bodies of animals, but are so cognizant they function as people in the context of their world.
• Evil Sorcerer: A powerful sorceress who has spent years experimenting in manipulating and removing cutie marks (and the similar talent-magics of zebras), casually indifferent to the fact that her test subjects usually commit suicide out of sheer existential horror. By the present, she has founded a cult-like society that she rules over with an iron hoof, sealing them away behind a lethally destructive anti-teleportation barrier to prevent escape.
• Foil: Starlight Glimmer is basically Twilight Sparkle if she'd sunk even deeper into her antisocial ways... and then gone full-blown Evil Sorcerer, deciding that other beings were expendable in the pursuit of knowledge. It's led to fans theorizing that she is the true reincarnation of Starswirl the Bearded, and not Twilight.
• For Science!: Starlight's most terrifying personality trait might be her mechanical devotion to advancing her knowledge in order to achieve her ultimate goal. The suffering and death of her test subjects matters not, only the data she can collect from their torment.
• Lovecraftian Superpower: Starlight's power to erase a mark is so fundamentally anathema to the nature of ponies that the mere idea that such a thing might be possible is enough to inspire horror and revulsion in just about every pony that hears of it.
• No Social Skills: Starlight is described as speaking in a "mechanical" fashion, never responding until she's fully contemplated her response and lacking any apparent awareness of the more subtle social cues. Twilight Sparkle, self-admittedly not exactly a people pony herself, feels second-hand embarrassment at Starlight's lack of social adeptness as they interact, especially because she can see the similarities between them both.
• Screw Destiny: What little we've heard of her ideology so far implies that she hates marks because she sees them as locking their bearer into a single role, regardless of what else that pony might wish to do or be.
• Vague Age: She is described as having an oddly timeless quality to her appearance that makes it very difficult to estimate her true age.
• Wrong Context Magic: Starlight's ability to replace a pony's cutie mark with her "Equalist" mark is literally unprecedented in Equestrian history. There is only one spell known to be able to successfully disable a pony's connection to their cutie mark, and not only is it regarded as Black Magic of the worst kind, it's also borderline impossible to use: it takes a triple corona^note absolute power and maximum concentration from a unicorn before it can be cast, and even a pony as powerful as Celestia or Twilight Sparkle could only sustain the spell for about ten-to-fifteen seconds. Starlight's spell is so much more powerful that even thaumic fiction hasn't conceived of the idea of it.

SUN and MOON

The Sun and the Moon. Far from being ordinary celestial bodies, they are in fact sentient and implied to be Magitek. Celestia and Luna's talent is their direct mental link with them.

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: In the past due to being badly damaged. Their bonds with the sisters are slowly repairing them, though they still need the sisters to help direct them. SUN also has a rather unhealthy attachment to Celestia.
• Brain/Computer Interface: Both sisters are capable of mentally merging with their respective celestial body, allowing them to use those orbiting senses. The problem is getting back.
• Broken Angel: Once glorious Magitek sentient artificial celestial bodies, now in a state of disrepair and reliant on the sisters to function. The SUN is also emotionally dependent on Celestia, since being linked to her lets it forget its damaged state just for a while.
  • Word Of Fanfic Author is that in Equestria, the system as we know it is broken.
• Deus est Machina: Thanks to the sisters, although Celestia implies that they may have been less benevolent (or at least less focused) in the past due to being damaged. In the present they still haven't fully recovered, judging by Sun's broken mental speech pattern.
• Minor Injury Overreaction: Luna encasing Celestia's legs in ice during her attempt to pull her sister back makes SUN feels as if some portion of its flame is being snuffed out.
• It Can Think: The Sun and Moon are alive.
• Spy Satellites: Potentially. When one of the sisters mentally merges with their orbiting companion, they can use those senses, and we know Sun can magnify its view enough to scout the land below. However, there are limitations inherent in this. In addition to the danger involved in the merge itself, SUN and MOON possess sensory capabilities which ponies don't, making those memories difficult to interpret: the biological minds don't have anything suitable for processing them. Additionally, the orbiting movement is steady, which creates limited windows that don't necessarily open when you want them to, and any attempt to slow that passage will eventually be noticed — just before it creates a worldwide panic. But even limited access to such information gives Equestria capabilities which no other nation possesses, and Word Of Fanfic Author says it was the cause behind some of the young nation's earliest victories.
• Walking Spoiler: Talking about their mere existence gives away a massive spoiler for both A Mark of Appeal in particular and the entire Triptych Continuum in general.
• Wham Line: In chapter 12 of "A Mark of Appeal". It not only reveals that the one speaking is a character in its own right, it also hints at its true nature.
  SUN: U-USER...USER ONE ACKNOWLE-DGE-DGED...ACCESSI-NG
• Yandere: SUN is rather possessive of Celestia and is very unhappy when Luna pulls Celestia away from it.

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