After the Elements of Harmony exposed Starlight Glimmer as the fraud she was, she barely managed to escape from the corner she was backed into. She spent the next few days wandering aimlessly through the labyrinth of caverns she fled into, with each new passage seemingly taking her right back to where she started.
But one fateful discovery would soon change everything.
As Starlight trudged through the ominous caverns, her ears perked up as a voice called out her name. Her horn glowed with magic as she readied herself for battle, only to find nopony was there. The eerie voice continued calling out for Starlight, and the unicorn could sense a vast amount of energy close by. Curiosity getting the better of her, she cautiously stepped closer to the area where the spectral voice was at its loudest. She then stopped in her tracks when she spotted a small crystalline fragment lying on the cavern floor.
Tilting her head, Starlight examined the glowing jewel before her hooves. She'd never seen anything like it in Equestria, but her horn glowed again in response to the intense energy that pulsated from the fragment. The voice called Starlight's name again, and the former cult leader dropped the fragment when she realized it was coming from the fragment itself.
The disembodied voice beckoned Starlight to not be afraid and hear him out. The unseen specter briefly explained the history of his homeworld and the Great War that divided his race into two factions. He spoke of the ancient source of life-giving energy known as the AllSpark, which had been destroyed on a distant planet of bipedal creatures. A fragment of which had brought the voice back to life after his demise at the hands of his former master. The haunting voice then proceeded to mention his second death as the AllSpark was reconstituted by his hated enemies. But through fate and circumstance, the fragment that housed the last remnants of his conscience wound up in this strange, magical world of talking ponies.
The more the voice talked, the more Starlight found herself captivated by this entity's tale. Both of them had their rightful destines robbed from them; both were seen as inferior by their peers for the majority of their lives; and both burned with the relentless drive to seek revenge against their foes.
When the voice proposed an alliance, Starlight was all too happy to agree. The fragment glowed its brightest before flinging itself right at Starlight's forehead. The unicorn screamed in agony as her body convulsed from a stinging sensation that engulfed her whole being. Her irises glowed a deep shade of red, her horn became longer and sharper, and a large pair of dark-feathered wings sprouted from her back. When Starlight stumbled back onto her hooves, she could hardly believe her eyes as she spotted her own unfamiliar reflection in the crystal-laden walls of the cavern. She stared reverently at her transformation as she stretched out her newly-formed wings. Her stunned silence soon gave way to gleeful laughter right before she fired off a burst of red energy from her horn that blew a giant hole in the wall, giving way to the outside world.
Starlight marched triumphantly toward the passage she formed and flew up into the air with a single flap of her wings, her wicked grin exposing rows of jagged teeth as the sun set in the distance. This was just a small taste of the powers that this AllSpark fragment offered her; with time and practice, she would soon master her newly-gained alicorn abilities and level the playing field with that oh-so-perfect bookworm, Twilight Sparkle.
The smirk that stretched across Starlight's muzzle was a perfect mirror of the vengeful ghost that now inhabited her psyche. The unicorn-turned-alicorn was so preoccupied with thoughts of revenge and domination that she didn't even notice her cutie mark morphing into the sigil of the spirit's faction of the warmongering Decepticons.
Amidst this dark alliance, only one question remained: will Starlight succeed in spreading her warped ideology of equality across the world, or will Starscream succeed in transforming Equestria into the seat of his new empire?


—Starlight's alicorn wings are based off MelSpyRose's designs for her Evil!Starlight AU.
—Base by: ElementBases