** AU Cozy Glow based on 2016 leaks (Season 8 Antagonist)**

Cozy Glow is a six year old pegasus who lived alone in a cottage on the base of Mount Everhoof, far away from Equestria. Her cutie mark is a dark pink rook chess piece, earned when she won against an enchanted chess set designed to never lose. While she is a prodigy at chess, her cutie mark also represents that she’s an excellent strategist - however, she can just as easily be influenced by others.

Her unicorn parents Comet Haze (mother) and Nebulous (father) are absent but left her a significant amount of supplies and she is resourceful. She was waiting for them to come home when the Main 6 came at her door expecting a friendship problem. The real reason for them meeting was that the Cutie Map recruited her to their new School of Friendship, and reluctantly, she joined them.

Cozy had never experienced friendship before, and even after attending the classes and making tentative friends with the five other map-recruited students (Gallus, Yona, Smolder, Silverstream and Ocellus) she felt like something wasn’t right. It felt fake to her, like friendship was just a game people were playing and didn’t actually mean - to the point where Twilight became an alicorn from it. Her encounter with Chrysalis on Nightmare Night and the advice she got from the former Changeling Queen only strengthened and confirmed this view.

On her advice, Cozy opens her own chess club, offering to teach other students how to play and how to win. Unconventionally, though, she also drops hints about friendship being similar to chess. Everyone who attends begins to believe her, even her fellow Map-chosen students - except for Sandbar, an earth pony student the Cutie Mark Crusaders tutored and became friends with, and believes - correctly - that she is up to something.

This all comes to the climax - one day near the end of the year, seemingly out of nowhere, the students drive Twilight and her friends out of the school, and make Cozy headmare instead! And with this new headmare power, she’s going to demand them to…

…form a search party and look for her parents?

Before this can really sink in, Chrysalis comes in through the secret backdoor under the school and captures the students. She double-crosses Cozy, thinking her motive was pathetic and a waste of power. Power that could be much better used making a new hive!

The Student 5 team up with Sandbar and the Crusaders to help Twilight and co get back into the school. While the adults fight Chrysalis, the students free the others and convince them Cozy was wrong about friendship being a game and a tool.

Chrysalis is defeated, and says that friendship is a disease that took her hive. Twilight and Starlight are especially shocked at this view, and even wonder if she would benefit becoming a student herself. Chrysalis rejects this outright, as if a queen would ever need teaching, and transforms into a fly to buzz away.

They look everywhere for Cozy, but find her outside talking to two adult unicorns that have similar colours to her - her mother and father, Comet Haze and Nebulous. They’re disappointed in her, but not because she tried to take over the school.

They’re disappointed because she’s a pegasus.

It was exactly why she was left on her own at Mount Everhoof in the first place. Once she got some useless cutie mark on chess, it was over. Why couldn’t she have just forgotten about them, they ask? Nothing she could do would have impressed them. Not even if she was the headmare of a school.

Before they turn to leave, they’re met by the entire faculty. And they are not happy to hear that Cozy was abandoned, especially not for species. They are going to be having a long talk.

~

Later on, after they have been “escorted” off of the premises by the Royal Guard, it’s time to confront Cozy herself. It was wrong of her to make friends just so that she could do what she wanted. She might have thought talking to Chrysalis and becoming headmare was just a game, but it’s not. All of the students were in real danger.

They were going to expel her, but she has nowhere to go, so her punishment is redoing the entire year from the beginning, along with extra work in the summer. Starlight, seeing Cozy is in a vulnerable position, offers her specialised, one on one counselling over the summer - and to her suprise, the other Map students still want to be her friend. Cozy is hugely grateful for the second chance and apologises to everyone for making such a mess of things. Over the summer, she’ll try her best to make up for it all and realise what friendship really is.

Sandbar and the Crusaders seem relieved, thinking she was going to do something way worse than make a search party.

And speaking of parties, Pinkie decides to throw a “we defeated Chrysalis, got back into the school, the students are heroes and Cozy is starting over party”, marking an early end to the school year.

Meanwhile, in Tartarus, Tirek receives a letter from Chrysalis…

imported from https://derpibooru.org/images/3888667