This is pretty much the story I wrote for my first ever write-off and later published on FiMFic. So to me it's going to feel dreadfully unoriginal, but that won't be the case for just about anyone else. I'll try to be as objective as possible.

The pacing feels off. The letter takes up a huge chunk of the middle of the story, and there's not that much of it that's essential. Then that leaves you no word count to address the story's actual content. You set up the problem, and at the end, the characters all perceive it... only to do nothing about it, formulate no plans to, don't discuss what it means for them... nothing. It never comes to a conclusion. It's just about the concept. Coming to a conclusion doesn't mean you can't have an open ending.

So I don't have many suggestions for this. The writing is good enough. It just needs less focus on the extraneous details of how this all works and more on what this means for them. That can happen through reallocating what word count you have or just lengthening the end significantly.

Twilight never does say why this has to be kept so super-secret. I understand she wouldn't want it to be public knowledge, but I don't know why Luna can't find out, and Celestia never confirms that as a good decision or unnecessary. It's just there to ramp up the mystery, only to end up being irrelevant. I don't have a sense of why all this security is necessary either. Is there a history of lesser measures resulting in messages being intercepted? Or is this purely precautionary on Twilight's part? It feels like it might need some more justification there.

A couple of stylistic things, to start:

peculiar Pinkie by her side

This felt... weird. Just not particularly like Celestia's voice, and very much like alliteration for the sake of it.

She slowly opens each one of them with her magic, noting the difficulty it takes to rip them all off, like some active force was trying to ward her off from the letter.

After the seventh seal is removed, the scroll finally unfurls.

Celestia’s heart begins to pound. It's not normal for Twilight to use two seals, let alone seven.

Why does Celestia only show signs of worry after opening the seals? Surely she would have started feeling nervous as soon as she saw the thing, not unbind every seal (with noted difficulty) and then think "hang on, lots of seals is bad news, oh dear".

Maybe she’s discovered

I think you lost your tense here...

Anyway; all of that aside, this isn't one of my faves for this round, but it's not bad. Just a little clunky in places. It's a quirky little idea in a serviceable vehicle--you might be able to make something longer and more interesting out of the core idea of this, but with the angle you took it's more "the characters are watching us oooohhh", and that's ok. And I do think it ties in to the , or even half of it picture in an interesting way.

Meta is always going to be a little divisive. Personally, I usually have trouble enjoying even the supposedly really good meta stories, just because I don't like to be reminded that I'm reading a story—it kind of ruins the immersion for me. But as far as meta stories go, the concept here felt fairly solid to me, despite its simplicity.

I think I'm going to have to note that this story doesn't do the best job of managing its word count. For instance, take a look at these sentences:

Not one seal, but seven seals.

They take Celestia by surprise.

It's unusual.

It's not normal for Twilight to use two seals, let alone seven.

This is overkill.

Any one of these sentences by themselves would have more or less conveyed the same sense of unease and strangeness. The fact that we get five actually threw me off a bit. For a little while, I almost thought I was reading a comedy, since the strong repetition almost conveyed a sense of ridiculousness.

I really don't think this is the best use of your word count. In minific rounds, every single word is precious, and you need to develop an economy of using your expository passages to tell the reader exactly what they need to know, and only what they need to know. Telling the reader stuff is important, but you need to save as many words as you can for things like mood-building (if that's what your piece is oriented towards), character establishment, and plot payoff.

Similarly, I am not quite sure of the letter really works the way you intended. It takes up a very large portion of your word count (more than half!), and these kinds of extended passages in general do usually slow the feel of a story's pace way down. I personally think it would have been best to convey more of this information in the following direct convo with Twilight, instead of relying so heavily on it.

As the story is right now, you've got some neat ideas (like the Biblical callback to the Seven Seals, I especially enjoyed), but I'm afraid that the overall structure of the story doesn't quite feel right. So my biggest suggestion would be to try to pace out your information reveal a bit to rely less on the info-dumping letter. Information is you payoff in a story like this, so be mindful about how and when you dole it out to the reader.

I had some reservations on Celestia's voicing; 'peculiar Pinkie' is nicely alliterative, but not the type of thing I recall hearing from her elsewhere. Similarly, I'm not so sure about the 'magical nothing space', although maybe that's a thing in an episode I'm not caught up on.

There are some places where the wording could be tightened, for example "Bound by seals. Not one seal, but seven seals." could be just "not one, but seven". The seven seals thing wasn't bad, though.

Twilight's voicing seemed more solid for me; I can't recall anything that particularly jumped out at me.

The meta twist isn't bad, but it's a subject that has been visited enough that it has a hard time keeping up the story as the primary plot point. There's the reveal and then just kind of ends. Granted, it's a minific, and there's not all that room for much more, but it's something that would strengthen it.

It's not that uncommon to consider 4th-wall breaking meta and having Pinkie added to the mix. In fact, the premise seems to have good intentions: Twilight goes crazy after discovering that her reality isn't "real" and then dragging Celestia along to the truth.

So it's a shame that much of the impact this story could've had is in the letter instead of something, well, more active like Celestia talking it out with Twilight in the void. The reveal and reaction would've been much better if they were less on the letter and more in the scenes themselves.

This over-reliance on the letter also shows with how much you seek to set things up in the letter. Much of it is focused on the letter (note how it's mentioned in all three sections, even the last one) when some of that focus could've been lent to the actual revelation in it. (Also, if Twilight thought that she had extremely sensitive and dangerous information in her hooves, then dumping it all in a letter isn't the best idea; something like an invitation to know the truth and then the portal appearing would've been better).

Overall, it's a fic that tries to uniquely tread on some old grounds but it falls short.

The only thing I have to add to the above is that Celestia doesn't really need to be in this story. At least, not when the story is at this length. I think if you had followed Twilight making the discovery (via Pinkie) then you eliminate a lot of the issues people are having, without hurting what they like about it (the mystery, Twilight's voicing, e.g.).

But the meta didn't bother me too much. It's probably because I personally haven't read a story like this, though. That I recall. I think it's just the focus of the story, and your perspective character, that are causing it to fall a little short of the impact you were going for.

Thanks for writing and best of luck to you!

I like this conceptually. This is another piece that walks well-worn ground, but, again, I don't have a problem with a clicheic premise, so long as that premise is executed well.

In practice, it's... well, the ending is chilling, but the bulk of the storytelling is done in letter form, and our POV character is effectively sidelined as she parses it (I also feel like the letter's contents shift, as they progress -- tonally, vocally, the writing stops feeling like Twilight's by the end). There's no real reason for that. Celestia being the focus of the story could have been an interesting narrative decision, but she really doesn't do anything that the rest of the cast couldn't have done.

So, while I think you manage to land a solid emotional blow at the end of the story, everything that builds up to it is rather wasted. I'm sorry.

I'm gonna sound pretty negative here, but I just want to clarify that it's not really the case for how I feel about this story. I think the story's core idea is a good one, even if it is overdone. With everything else added into the picture, however, I'm left feeling rather indifferent as to what this story ultimately is gunning for.

Regarding the execution, the thing about writing stories with such a limited length is that it forces you to say what you need to say with the least amount of words possible. As Bachi had mentioned prior, I'm seeing a lot of little details littered throughout the story that didn't really add anything substantial to the overall experience of the story, with some of them being a bit too repetitive. The whole focus on the seven seals in the first paragraph is the most egregious example of throwing a lot of focus and weight by harkening back to it over and over, yet at the end, the seven seals were only a biblical reference at best. If anything, it only served to hinder the pacing and stir up my frustrations a little.

Likewise, in the greater picture, the focus on having the entire middle section to be served as a letter seems to be misguided. It adds a broad stroke of progression to the narrative but it trades off almost everything else in the process. In fact, the letter itself seems to lack focus. I can't espy what Twilight was thinking when she was writing this particular letter. It's a bit disjointed and purposeless, serving only as a means to advance the story but not build upon it.

The ending is sharp and to the point, and it's probably the main highlight of this story. Cliche aside, the last line does a good job of translating the dread and uncertainty of the moment. It does lead me inclined to believe, Author, that in the planning process, you've come up with the ending first and had to yank an exposition from it somewhere.

Honestly, I believe this story suffers from the same issues I had with one of the other entries, The Butterfly Effect, in that there's too much thought put into delivering the concept and not enough into delivering a story. The concept is not as densely packed, so I came away from my first read of this story a lot less frustrated, to say the least. The core story, however, lacks focus, and thus, it lacked the urgency and immediacy for me to spend more time thinking about it.

Ultimately, I think what I wanted from this story is for it to have something more than it just being meta about the show. There's already a lot of stories on FimFic alone that already pulled this same trick, so how would this story be any different? What makes this story something worth paying attention to? Perhaps when you have the answer to that, you might have something special, dear Author. Until then, I can't honestly say I'll take some time off to read this as it is.

Thanks for writing, and good luck!