>>42472016
This fic is thoroughly fanfiction.
The prose is pretty bad, full of punctuation mistakes and malapropisms. It seems like the author's favorite word is albeit and they'll shove it in wherever there's a hole it looks like it might fit.
It really just wants to have Twilight make friends with Thorax five seasons earlier, and that's what it's about. So many things are sacrificed to the way that this has to happen over seemingly weeks of Thorax occasionally visiting Twilight during his scouting duties. Twilight might not be as pervasively inept as moonhorse in Changeling Heart, but her inability to reply to the letter in particular is really awful. At least she offscreened her way into finding *some* food.

Those sacrifices aren't without some return, though. The fic as a whole doesn't exactly match the show, but there are a lot of small, individual scenes that do seem at home in the show. The scenes with Twilight and Thorax chatting about ponies and changelings are very indulgent, and a lot of the cozyness must be linked to the general lack of tension and extremely relaxed pacing.

I think my favorite scene in the story so far was Twilight teaching Thorax the sparkle spell. It was almost interesting when Thorax arrived at the cave in the latest chapter to find a miasmic fog: I thought Twilight had reinvented magical air conditioning for her cave, but it turns out it was just her sadness over being unable to write a letter. I wonder when we'll get to see the bug in the cave, since this fic so far has been pretty much entirely the pony in the cave.