Trixie Lulamoon lives inside a cage.

The cage’s boundaries extend from the tip of her horn to the end of her tail, and down to the edges of her hooves. Each tip of every hair in her coat and mane form its outer limits. Her senses form the space between the bars; her eyes are windows that let her see outside her prison, her ears let her hear echoes from others cells. But she is still trapped in her cage, and her internal world, all her thoughts and emotions, is trapped inside of it with her.

Trixie truly has made a mess of things.

A pony is often kind. They are often generous, often loyal, and often full of laughter. A pony is even, often enough, honest. Ponies are dumb herd animals that can be whipped into a frenzy at the drop of a bit. Ponies are often cruel, especially to those different from them. Ponies are often greedy, especially to those they perceive as not deserving of the same things they have. Ponies are often treacherous, especially to those who are inconvenient to what the herd wants. Ponies often lie, especially to themselves.

It was not hard to parlay her former skills into a career in politics. Many of the principals were the same. The tricks were even mostly the same. Divert and distract. Lead the audience towards what they want to think, and many ponies want to be deceived. They want to feel like they are a part of the processes that rule over them, and they want to feel like they are not tools of those who hold real power. But they do not want the responsibility themselves. They want a charismatic character who they can project upon their hopes and fears. Trixie knows this, and she also knows that those who hold power do not keep it if they do not strive to do so. She knows that anypony could achieve real power with a few simple tricks, and a dedication to the art of illusion. The greatest of these illusions is convincing the audience that one is not in the cage.

Ponies love to be dazzled. They’ll let you get away with most anything as long as you put on a good enough show. They stamp the ground flat with the thunder of approving hooves and when they’ve been beguiled, when the mundane is obfuscated and twisted into something magical. When a key part of the performance is hinged on not understanding how the trick is executed.

Most of all, what ponies love is a smile. No matter how deeply insincere, a pretty smile can sell the ugliest of words. Trixie’s smile is fantastic. You almost can’t believe it.

In her age, darkness will be called light. It has to be, by necessity. Princess Celestia was the light, and now the sun has set on her. There is no room for outdated figureheads in the age of Trixie Lulamoon and those like her. Ponies are dumb herd animals, yes, and they love a nice, simple, singular, vivid enemy. That’s not to say toppling Princess Celestia was Trixie’s true desire. If anything, it was incidental. Equestria had long been aching for a change of rule. The recent industrialization had demolished many of the long-standing traditions, upended the ways ponies had interacted with one another in the strata of society, and in this upset Trixie had found her audience. Old nobles and their families held power from the founding of Equestria, when there was a virtually infinite bounty of wealth to be extracted from the land that had been revealed when the Windego were banished. Never mind that many had already called these lands home. Ponies were here, and they were here to stay. Now those families had constructed a cage to emulate their personal cells, which were furnished much nicer than the cells of those they had displaced or enslaved. Trixie had seen the cage that living a working life was, and had vowed as a young foal to never be caught in it. Every creature has their cage, as she would find out.

They talked about it at first, the newspapers, about how baffling it was that a failed stage magician had become the tip of the spear for the greatest political upheaval since Nightmare Moon had been banished. This was all part of it, of course. Trixie had correctly, in the minds of many, identified that Equestria’s system as opaque and cult-like. Of course, as several enterprising reporters had pointed out, her answer was hardly much different. In fact, it was almost identical. ‘This weasel in pony form does not offer any substantial change.’ All that was offered by her was a populist fervor that put an emphasis on gubernatorial office, acting as if she’d been the one to come up with the brilliant idea and casting a skew on the old nobles, The Princesses, and any creature that was not a pony who dared to wish to live in Equestria. Griffons, yaks, buffalo, dragons... they all represented groups that could not be trusted. Trust in the herd, is what Trixie says. Don’t let these outsiders and pretenders let you think anything different. There is safety in numbers. Trixie had tapped into the cage that is Equestria itself. Their empire built on ashes entraps them all. Trixie is not a political theorist. She doesn’t have to be. All she needs to do is perform the trick and perform it well.

That and make peace with the cage.

Trixie wants to destroy the cage, sometimes. It’s only sometimes, but it’s frequent enough that it has become harder to ignore the truth: the cage extends infinitely inside of her, a howling void that is empty and lonely. All her ambition and grand plans for herself and Equestria are from the same source, and they go to the same place.

The cage had always been there in one way or another. When she was younger she had not identified it as such, but she sensed the cage was always there. As she came to understand that it was herself, her body, that WAS the cage so too did she realize that the entire damn thing was the cage. Her body, her limitations, was a microcosm of the cage all ponies lived in, their wonderful and colorful world built on the backs of slaves and on the bones of anything that had been living before they had wandered onto the land. There is a deep and inescapable darkness that feeds on the edge of their existence, that which encages them. The lands beyond Equestria are harsh. Ponies are right to fear them. But this fear easily extends to anything that is not part of the cage, and in identifying with their cages they build incredible and elaborate prisons.

And even now, from her vantage point in her little manor on the hill that overlooks Ponyville, a cage inside a cage for a cage, paid for by exorbitant funds from her caged fanatics, Trixie thinks back to the time that she was laid bare before the entire town of Ponyville, and how she had come to realize the truth.