Two alicorns stood on the edge of an endless ocean painted in pale blue and black stripes. The surf roared in their ears, driven by a wind that bowed the silver grass underhoof. Were it not for the grass, this place would look desolate, for nothing else marked its landscape. The moon soared full above them. It was too bright to look at. It was almost near enough to touch.
The familiar shape of the Canterhorn broke the eastern horizon, but there had been no ocean like this in the world. Nor was there any place in all the world where the moon was so very large and bright, or the sky so blank. There were neither clouds nor stars.
The ground plunged before Twilight, becoming a dark pit from which chains rose like charmed snakes. Although they didn’t move towards her, she stepped back from the pit, sidestepping as she did to put it directly between her and Nightmare so neither one could surprise her. “Lunacy? Those old superstitions about the full and new moons causing madness?”
“Superstitions!? Do not joke with me, ‘Princess’. Surely ponies cannot have forgotten so much!” said Nightmare with an angry stomp of her hooves. Bits of silver grass around her hooves rose into more snaking chains, then faded into blue mist. Two more pits full of chains formed at the edges of Twilight’s vision, and she wheeled about to see the entire plain of silver grass was irregularly spotted with them. Some of the chains were hissing as they slithered through the undergrowth.
Twilight focused on Nightmare’s questions to avoid panicking. “It’s not forgetting. It’s academic research! The... the theories of lunacy used to hold up, but a few hundred years ago, they j-just broke. Nopony knows why!” Twilight swallowed and kept going, closing her eyes as she focused on something she knew. “Since no sociocultural factors point to an applicable change in mental stressors and it corresponds to a period of academic reform, the change is generally considered to be the product of changing research methodologies. Older works were riddled with biases and most of them have been thoroughly deconstructed in the intervening period.”
“Don’t close your eyes when dealing with me, foal.”
Twilight stiffened reflexively and opened her eyes again, abruptly finding herself suspended by animate chains over a pit. They were all over her, binding her hooves, her barrel, her wings. She could feel the touch of cold metal all over her. They weren’t pressing into her, but she could barely move at all. “Ahhh! How did I get here! Why didn’t I feel the chains?”
Nightmare laughed and brought Twilight’s trapped form nearer to her. “You didn’t feel the chains because you’re dreaming, and I’m controlling the dream. As for what I’m going to do to you... Why, I do believe I’m going to help you.”
“I don’t want your help!”
Nightmare hissed angrily and raised a hoof as if to strike Twilight. After one tense moment, she held back and set her hoof down again. “Be GRATEFUL. Tonight’s exertions will cost me THREE YEARS of power!”
“They will cost more than that!” said a loud voice from outside of Twilight’s vision. The shout was shortly thereafter followed by a blue blur as Luna tackled Nightmare out of Twilight’s field of vision.
“You’re here to save me!” Twilight turned her ears about to follow the sound of the two tussling goddesses and wriggled against the chains. Her enthusiasm was damped when she found she couldn’t turn her head to watch.
“Get off me, you bombastic blue blunderer!”
“Nay! We will not let you harm our friend!” There was a nasty sounding thud that made Twilight wince sympathetically.
“Luna! Are you okay?” called Twilight, squirming again to try to look, only to be surprised when the chains suddenly slacked about her. She hopped free to the edge of the pit and Luna landed next to her.
“Pray forgive us our sloth and distraction,” said Luna to Twilight, before turning immediately towards Nightmare. Luna appeared unharmed. “Nightmare! Hast thou taken leave of thy senses? These chains are foes, fears, and trophies! Why use them in this manner?”
“Have I no rights over my own home? Are you trying to rob me of my last security?” said Nightmare. “We spoke with one voice once. You know where we stand! We spent a thousand years imprisoned because the stars so loathed me they could not be moved by their love of you. I am trying to undo a fraction of the harm that wrought.”
Luna stared coldly at Nightmare. Her eyes closed and opened shining with white fury. Twilight found herself edging away, breaking into a gallop across the pitted plains as soon as Luna began to speak in a thundering voice. “In all thy wretched life, thou hast—”
A blast of magic interrupted Luna. Twilight skidded to a stop and wheeled about in time to see the smoke clearing and hear Nightmare’s retort. “Wretched?! Go jump in a pit!”
“We have wings!” shouted Luna, rising out of the pit that Nightmare’s magic had knocked her into. Twilight got a hideous sense she knew where this was going, and she closed her eyes tight to avoid watching it. She gathered her magic to herself. It felt so far away. Her magic was so far away.
“‘We’ have chains. Go away!” A clamor of chains extracted a yelp from Luna and a descending yell came from the pit as the chains dragged their victim out of earshot. Twilight tried to block the sound out with her thoughts.
Thinking about magic had nearly shattered Luna’s dreamscape. What was different about Nightmare’s? Twilight doubled down on her efforts, visualizing the entire pattern of Luna’s floor and mentally reciting a dozen variations on the standard sleeping charm along with countermeasures thereof. A mournful whistle started up around her sounding like winter's wind in bare trees. Twilight didn’t open her eyes. Just more dreaming weirdness. Focus on the magic.
“I think that won’t be happening,” said a voice that Twilight ignored. A counterspell started weaving into Twilight’s work and died in the tangle of it without Twilight lifting a hoof. “What?”
Another effort intruded on Twilight’s spell and she swatted it aside reflexively. The arcane swat yielded an unregal grunt, and then a snarl. “You have no power here, child!”
A surge of energy crushed Twilight’s spellwork, and she opened her eyes. She wasn’t surprised to see that a spreading pattern of gems and moonstone underhoof had started killing grass all around her. Slightly more odd was the haze of floating equations surrounding her. They were crumbling to dust in Nightmare’s third counterspell, and the whistling stopped with them. Most interesting of all was that Nightmare was standing right in front of her... out of breath, and with the swelling around her left eye darkening already. It looked painful.
Twilight found herself staring at Nightmare’s eye. That didn’t quite fit. Fear took a back seat to pointing out something nonsensical. “How can your eye be discoloring already? You just got hit. It should barely have started to swell.”
“You’re dreaming, child,” said Nightmare tiredly. “We have a lot to do, and it’s going to take all month if I have to keep reminding you of that.”
“Stop calling me child. My name is Twilight Sparkle.”
New chains rose up around Twilight to grasp her with painful tightness, and she squeaked and yanked against them. Nightmare roared, “Your name ought to be Broken in Chains, you—Ragh!” Nightmare took a deep breath. The chains loosened. She took several more until she had calmed herself again. The chains dropped off. “You will never understand how lucky you are. Never! You are just another sunloving wretch to me, yet I know I will have to deal with you for a very long time. Fine. You are Twilight Sparkle, and I am helping you, so make this no harder for me than it needs to be.”
A wide paper halo twisted into existence around the head of the fuming Nightmare. The inked symbols on it were in the same harsh font as what had been on the ‘plants’ in the ocean where Nightmare had come from. These ones weren’t nonsense. Twilight started to read them, but she dropped her gaze when she saw that Nightmare’s halo was covered with insults apparently directed at her.
She turned her attention wide-eyed towards Nightmare. Just what was Nightmare doing that was so hard for her? “You know,” she said, “your generosity would be more believable if it didn’t start with chains.”
“Insolence!” said Nightmare, lunging at Twilight.
The world warped around the two and they were elsewhere.
“We’re calling it the Incandescence,” said Magus Ten Seed(?) as she gestured at a viewing hole for a pair of visiting scholars. Not that they were in any rush to look inside; the light streaming out was blinding. Much more interesting was that the beam of light shone on a patch of ground that was absolutely overgrown with greenery, in stark contrast to the barren surfaces beyond its reach. Ropy green vines had cracked the stone underhoof and sprawled out so far that their tips were buried into snowdrifts distant from the heat of the Incandescence’s stone container.
“Have you overcome the warmth issue?” asked the first of the scholars. Ten Seed(?) couldn’t remember either of their names. She recalled that they were studying dream magic. They both had alarmingly draconic eyes.
“I think they have, judging by how hot this area is,” said the second of the scholars.
Ten Seed(?) shook her head regretfully. “We’re not there. If we were on plan, it wouldn’t be ‘hot’ this close. It’d be ‘lethal’,” she said. “I think at this point we need to focus on the greening effects more than the heat.”
“How are we going to make use of the greening effects? I was under the impression that attempts to make, err, ‘Incandescent’ effects smaller or more controllable had... well...”
“There’s no need to beat around the bush. They failed miserably,” said Ten Seed(?). “I think at this point our best hope is to levitate the core of the Incandescence into the air as far as we can to maximize dispersion on the light. The biggest difficulty will be getting it high enough... It’s going to take every unicorn we can gather, and plantlife will choke out the entire Crystal Empire if we mess it up.”
“At least we wouldn’t starve.”
Pride(!?) watched the Crystal Empire from—
She lifted a hoof to her forehead. The world wobbled for a moment and her head ached. Something whispered to her, “Please just play along.” Twilight sighed and nodded, letting herself sink back into the dream.
—the highest point in its capitol building, the open pavillion-like structure at the peak of her Crystal School of Magic. Or was it the Crystal Magic School? Hm. It didn’t matter. The point was that it was a fine perch. When she’d been Empress Pride, she’d made certain that she ruled from the highest point in the city. When they booted her out of office and made her Archmagus Pride instead, she used her magic to ensure that her new vantage point dwarfed her old one.
It was a petty move, but the sharply uplifted building appealed to her aesthetics. It wasn’t as though she’d built the school on slavery. Why shouldn’t she live as she pleased? In any case, the best views were always from the highest points, such as right now... There was a bustle of activity around some outlying structure at the edge of town. She’d been watching for some time as ponies travelled across town towards it. There’d even been some sparks and lights.
Pride’s vigil over the structure was rewarded when the top of it opened up and something bright escaped the top. Flashes of fire and plantlife broke out in spreading waves from the structure. The ropy green tendrils of plant matter dealt much more damage to the surrounding structures than the fires. The light rose unsteadily, unevenly. It faltered. Too many of its controllers were being distracted by the side effects of having taken it out of containment.
The light was a star, but much bigger than any of the stars in the sky. Pride was... awed. Humbled, almost. How had her ponies made that? How was it possible? Why was it possible? And what did they think they were they doing with it? She remembered the weight of that one star she had made. This star was hundreds of times larger. The other stars whispered so quietly that she could only take Tyranny’s word that they spoke at all. This one shouted so loudly that Pride hoped it wasn’t deafening her little sister with its noise.
...also, her ponies were about to drop it on themselves. Pride made a snap decision.
“It’s pretty. I think I’ll call it the sun.”
Far off, in a dreaming land where no real sunlight should ever touch, a pair of alicorn fillies with moonmarks on their flanks were playing together. Right this moment they were dancing around a silver tree with golden leaves, chanting and stomping their hooves, practicing their magic together as they forced the tree to grow bigger and bigger.
Their play was interrupted when a blast front of noise knocked down Tyranny and tore the tree into a smoky remnant of itself that blew away entirely when Nightmare(!) turned away from the tree and looked over in the direction the blast had come from. A new star was rising, bright enough to drown out the light of everything else in the sky, and in the presence of two fillies sensitive to the night it shone through even into the dreaming.
While Tyranny groaned and cowered under her hooves from the roar of the star, Nightmare’s eyes turned white with divine power. “How dare she! Everything about us is ruined! Our potential is wasted, our future is gone! She has destroyed us both!”
“No! I won’t let myself think such thoughts! I won’t do this!”
“Calm yourself, chi—ugh. Calm, Twilight Sparkle. They are not your thoughts, merely my own.”
Tyranny got to her feet, shaking her head. “What? I cannot... I... what did you say?” she asked, deafened.
Nightmare turned angrily towards Tyranny. “You know well what I said. Think about what that star means! Everything we have ever tried to do is meaningless before it! To a blaze like that the moon is a useless shield, a mere pretense of light. What destiny does it foretell? What, exactly, did Pride just do to the world?”
“No... Nnnn—ow—no! She is our sister! We... we cannot permit ourselves such... We cannot think that! I refuse it!”
“Fine then! I will have anger enough for us both. I call it an abomination!”
“Before we continue, I think you should know something. I am mad.”
“If the sun was that disruptive and dangerous—which I don’t believe yet—then you certainly have cause to be angry.”
“Oh my, did I say angry? I meant mad, child. Let me show you.”
Twilight was soaring through the dark of a cloudy sky, moving towards the cloud layer. Having gone through enough bizarre dreaming already, she checked herself reflexively to see if her identity really was her own. Her cutie mark was replaced with Nightmare’s pale blue moon. Of course. At least she was controlling this part of the dream sufficiently well to check at all.
So she was dreaming of being Nightmare Moon moving towards a layer of clouds on some ambiguous night in who-knows-where. Fine. She focused on just crossing the distance and tried to ignore the sound of clanking machinery as she approached the clouds.
Twilight broke through the clouds to a starry sky in which every star was chained five times to Equestria. Countless chains shone in the darkness, reflecting light that shouldn’t have been there. Some of them were delicate golden ones that shone like the sun. Some of them were massive iron chains dimly seen except by their bulk against the stars. Most of them appeared to be made of silver. A very few of them were made of glowing embers. The sky above the clouds was crowded with chains.
A deep and rumbling sound started in the distance separate from the sound of machinery. Twilight couldn’t quite make out what it was. The more immediate mechanical sounds drowned it out. She looked around for the nearest set of chains and flew to it. She didn’t have to go far. It was a set of silver chains moving down through the cloud layer.
Twilight touched one of the chains and flew along it towards the ground. She breached the cloud layer with her hoof still on the chain. Now she could see the chains from this side as well. The particular chain she was following was leading her into Ponyville. There were a great many of the chains focusing on Ponyville. Whatever they were, Ponyville mattered. Twilight looked around. There were a few other villages visible in the distance from this vantage in Ponyville’s skies, and even taking into account their lower populations, they didn’t have anything like a proportional number of chains.
“Luna stops me everytime I try to clean this place. Not tonight,” snarled a voice, and Twilight set a hoof to her mouth, her eyes widening. She wasn’t completely in control of the dream. Not that she could expect it, under the circumstances. Twilight shook herself and continued on towards the ground. The chain she was following led her to... her library? No, it stopped outside of the Golden Oaks library, leading into an earth pony wearing a pair of saddlebags held closed with a circular orange clasp. The clasps were styled to appear as flames.
Twilight landed next to him. He didn’t pay any attention to her. The chain from the star above disappeared right into his skull. As she watched, he pulled a bottle of something out of his saddlebags and threw it at the library. It shattered on impact. “Hey!” shouted Twilight, but she still got no response. She tried poking at him, but her hoof went right through.
The pony next pulled a matchbook out of his pocket. “Oh no you don’t,” snarled Twilight, and this time it really was her own snarl. She didn’t know how she was going to stop him—her hoof moved of its own accord, swatting the chain. It resisted her for just a moment before pulling apart with the sound of a bell chiming.
That did something. The would-be arsonist startled and looked around himself spooked. He looked at the matchbook he was holding, dropped it, and ran away. Twilight turned to watch him go, but he faded and broke apart into mist as she watched. “What are you showing me now? Was he real?”
Nightmare’s voice from her own mouth answered her. “Would you even believe me? For the record, the answer is not only that he was real, you stopped him from burning down the library. That was really going to happen. Destiny is nothing so subtle as whispering stars.”
“Show me more.”
Some heavyset pegasus was fleeing the guard. All of them were chained, the outcome predestined. Twilight broke the chains to the sound of bells, a different note for each member of the chase. The guards slowed; the pegasus put on a burst of speed and got away.
There was a unicorn working with her magic on the lock on somepony’s garden shed. Twilight broke the chain binding her to the action. A deep bell tolled once. The unicorn got frustrated and left.
Here was the Mayor and Derpy arguing about something. There was a spattering of paperwork between them. Why should destiny have any part of this? The two of them were wearing several chains each. Twilight broke the chains and was rewarded with a beautiful series of bells.
The distant rumbling grew louder as she worked. It started to sound like chanting.
Here was an infant foal, already sporting a chain. Ridiculous! Nopony should live their entire life bound by some unknowable fate. Twilight broke the chain and didn’t even stop to hear the sound. There was too little time and too many chains.
There was a shop with half a dozen chains leading into it. Twilight didn’t even check who they belonged to. She flew through the chains and caught them on her wings, ripping them to shreds in her passage.
She noticed another silver chain leading into her library and felt a burst of anger in her. Meddling nonsense! Twilight poured on the speed to reach the library before whatever warping event was going on could affect her life. She struck the chain from the air at full speed, and—
With a boom like the world's biggest tower bell, Twilight rebounded off the chain. With control over her wings gone, she tumbled through the air, much faster than mere gravity would suggest, and slammed into the ground, landing in a graceless tangle of limbs. She stayed on her side where she had landed, breathing heavily.
That wasn’t a distant rumbling anymore. It was definitely a chant. It was something deep and primal, incomprehensible but undeniable.
Lightning struck the ground before Twilight had finished catching her breath. The column of light cleared to reveal an infuriated Luna, her wings mantled as she approached. “NIGHTMARE! How dare thou meddling touch the bond between Twilight and her friends? Thou swore an OATH to leave that star untouched!”
Twilight felt her body moving of its own accord, felt... Nightmare had not left her alone for a moment, after all. She got up again and heard a voice speaking as she did. “Why, sister, you wound me!” said Nightmare with a terrible laugh. “My oaths are perfectly intact. Indeed, before you accuse me of so much as meddling in Ponyville, let me say that every chain broken tonight was broken by Twilight. All I had to do was let her borrow my viewpoint for a night. She did the rest for herself.”
Twilight felt her form elongating and darkening, features of the Nightmare—No. Nightmare was already here. She was the missing element. She felt herself shortening and lightening, features of herself bleeding through into Nightmare, until she stood as a fusion of the two. Luna gaped in horror, scrambling back to put distance between herself and Twilight. Twilight fought for focus to get some control of the dream back. “Luna... What’s happening to me?”
Another flash of light filled Twilight’s vision and she was standing in the library, staring at the other end of the chain that she had just tried to attack. It was perfectly intact as it lead straight into the display case holding the Elements of Harmony. Twilight gasped, and she pulled away from Nightmare, leaving the two standing next to each other. “How dare you try to make me hurt my friends?” asked Twilight.
“All I am doing is letting you make your own choices,” said Nightmare, dismissively. “How many chains did you see tonight and not immediately break? That is my night, every night, for every night the world fills anew with the clumsily sewn whims of a stupid foal who couldn’t understand the difference between destiny and tyranny.” That last part was directed venomously at Luna.
“What matters the difference? WE HAVE RENOUNCED THEM BOTH!” shouted Luna. Twilight paused. Luna’s volume sounded perfectly reasonable. That horrid chanting was drowning out everything.
“What matters the difference, indeed,” said Nightmare, walking out towards Twilight’s balcony. She gestured in the direction of the rising sun. “We had all best flee the dawn.” Nightmare didn’t raise her voice. Twilight wasn’t sure how she could understand what was being said. She didn’t trust herself to be able to speak against the noise.
Twilight walked towards the balcony and stepped out onto it herself. She turned to where the sun would be rising.
Wherever the clouds would normally be streaked with colors, they were streaked with chains.
Wherever the ground would normally be lit by the dawn, it was piled thickly with chains.
Where the sun would normally be rising past the horizon, it was a surging horror of writhing chains spilling forth across the world.
Twilight woke with a yell in the middle of Luna’s ritual chamber and jumped straight to her hooves. She was... alone? She could see Luna lying right next to her, eyes closed and her expression smoothed in deep meditation. She could see Celestia and Cadence hovering concernedly over her. They were all statues.
Nightmare stepped in through the wall, and Twilight immediately tried to scramble back away from her, tripping over the statue of Luna and spilling onto her back on the labyrinth-patterned floor. “Wh-what do you want?! What did you do to them?”
“Peace, Twilight Sparkle. I have merely paused the tableau. Look at them. Think about the stars as you do.”
“The stars? Ahha, the stars! Of course the stars the stars the stars,” said Twilight, eyes rolling wildly as she scrambled to her hooves and backed away from the three alicorn statues. She noticed now that she’d moved away there was a statue of herself in the middle of the room. Twilight took a breath and choked back a whimper, ears straining. Although she knew not how, she knew to listen. She heard chanting again as she became aware of spectral chains attached to each statue. It wasn’t as though the chant had started or the chains had appeared. It was as though they’d been there all along and she hadn’t known how to notice them.
It wasn’t as clear as the shining chains in Nightmare’s Ponyville had been, but they were there and they looked solid. Luna had only a single delicate chain threaded around her horn. Cadence was attached to four chains. Twilight was bound by a dozen.
Celestia was unrecognizable.
There was no Celestia. There was a horselike creature made of chains wearing platemail formed of chains beaten flat, and engraved on the flank of its armored shell was a symbol of chains. Countless chains arced off of her in every direction towards the heavens. “Is that what you see when you look at Celestia?”
“Don’t ask questions to which you already know the answer,” said Nightmare scornfully. She dispersed into blue mist and flowed out the room’s door.
“No,” whispered Twilight. “There’s a difference between destiny and tyranny. There’s a balance. Some of the stars are beautiful... and Celestia is my friend.” She stepped forward and touched Celestia, mentally scrabbling for some kind of alicorn power that might make the world clearer as she willed herself to see past the armor again. “Which one is Ponaris?”
Twilight took a breath, and listened again. Amidst the chant of the stars, she heard a dim golden refrain. She could hear the answering chime, chain of the same star on Luna. Twilight tried to brush the chains off of Celestia. It was slow. The dream started to decay. She dug more frantically to expose the one star, the one chain she knew was harmonious beyond question. She finally saw it when she had exposed Celestia’s face from the chains. A slender platinum chain threaded around Celestia’s horn.
Celestia’s statue came to life, looking more disoriented than Twilight could ever remember seeing Celestia in life. “Twilight? What are you doing?”
“What is the sun? I need to know! I need to hear it from you!”
“It is the destiny of life itself. Wherever sunlight touches, it pulls life into the world.”
Twilight woke smoothly with a deep breath of air. Wherever she was, it smelled a lot mustier than Luna’s ritual chamber. She felt something cold on the frog of her hoof, drawing her eye down to where she was apparently holding a coin that bore the likeness of Nightmare. She flipped it once and saw Luna on the other side. She flipped it again and saw her own face. Horrified, she launched it away from herself as hard as she could. It bounced off the door with a thunk. Twilight looked at where she was.
She was in a dark bedroom, lying on a huge blue bed. Twilight lit her horn so she could see more, revealing some shelves and a desk. Disturbingly, Twilight could still see Nightmare’s coin on the floor. It had landed with Luna’s face upwards. She shuddered and focused on the furniture. The shelves were completely overloaded with tomes, books, and scrolls. The desk was clear in the center. The sides of it were a veritable fortress of stacked books. The profusion of paper even overflowed onto the floor over boxes of still-packed books.
Twilight looked at a few titles and didn’t see a single thing written in modern Equish. Some of these languages she didn’t even recognize. The whole room smelled like a library full of really old books. “Huh. So it really was a collection of ancient literature she was hiding.”
At that point the door burst open and Luna bounded through with a leap that knocked books over throughout the room from the wind of her passage. She landed on the bed next to Twilight and swept her straight into a hug. “Dearest Twilight, please forgive us!” shouted the great alicorn, the force of the words bending back one of Twilight’s ears and making her pull back desperately.
“Wah! Gently!” said Twilight. She managed to mostly extract herself from the hug and look over Princess Luna, and as much as her ears were ringing, she immediately regretted pushing the other pony away. Twilight reached up to wipe a tear from Luna’s eyes. “Luna... You have nothing to apologize for. You did your best in a bad situation, and I’m better off than I would have been if you hadn’t been there at all.”
“But it is our job to protect the dreams of our subjects,” said Luna, her speech hushed and distant now. Twilight wondered if she was just deafened by the point-blank shout of apology. “We failed in this most essential of our duties.”
Twilight hugged on Luna. “You didn’t fail. You kept me from losing hope when I was trapped, and you stopped a plot of the Nightmare.” She saw something pink in the corner of her vision and lifted her head to look at Cadence, picking her way through the books as she entered the room. Cadence was focused on making her way towards Twilight.
Celestia also appeared to be peering curiously into the room. She opened her mouth to say something, but Twilight couldn’t hear what it was. Mystery solved! She was deafened. Always good to know for sure.
Whatever Celestia had said, Luna reacted sharply to it. “Out!” said Luna, turning towards Cadence and Celestia. Cadence immediately turned to scramble towards the doorway, only to be picked up in a blue aura and hurried along. The door shut behind her with barely a clatter in spite of the speed with which it was shut. Luna said something, but this time it really was too quiet. Twilight gestured for her to stop with a hoof. A bright glow surrounded her ears.
Not for the first time, Twilight wished she could just memorize the entire library ahead of time instead of doing research ad hoc as issues came up. She hadn’t had this spell on hoof at Nightmare Night.
“Forgive us this, as well,” said Luna once Twilight had finished casting. Blessedly, the Princess of the Night was still speaking quietly, and Twilight could hear well enough to be certain about that. “Our—my bedroom is very private.” Then she startled and blushed, and the door once more glowed. “Not that I meant to seal you inside!”
It opened only a crack before Twilight tilted her head and held the door shut with her own magic. “I think I need to talk to you most of all right now. And I love your book collection. You didn’t need to be embarrassed about it. You really gave me the wrong idea.”
Luna laid down and sank into the bed. “Well now you are giving Princess Mi Amore Cadenza the wrong idea. She is going to tease us.”
“Cadence isn’t going to tease us,” said Twilight, hopping down from the bed to walk over to where the coin of Nightmare had fallen. She picked it up again. Once more, she flipped it over repeatedly. Starting from the face that showed Luna, it flipped once and showed her own face, then again and showed Nightmare. Twilight flipped it the other way and went back to her own image.
Luna sat up to watch. “What art—are you doing?” she asked.
Twilight flipped the coin in the air towards Luna. It landed on the bed with Nightmare’s face upwards once more. Even though the landing of the coin made a little ‘whumpf’ on impact just as it ought to, Luna didn’t track the coin. She only watched the motions of Twilight’s hoof. “Er, nothing, I guess,” said Twilight. Was she playing with a figment of her own imagination? She stepped over nearer to the bed and sat next to it. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you ever since Celestia told me that first story. When you were... well, when you came into the world, why did you choose the name Tyranny?”
“Language itself has evolved since then. My first name, as you may have surmised, was more aptly translated as Destiny, Inevitability, or even ‘She Who Walks Unfaltering Before’. Any of those would have been more apt than Tyranny.”
“Then why would you choose to mistranslate it? It makes you sound terrible. And it’s really weird to hear that word out of anypony’s mouths at all, much less describing you,” Twilight asked, more confused than ever.
“I knew not words for just rule or unjust rule. I knew only the idea of ruling itself, and I knew—” Luna shook her head “—’knew’ when I looked upon myself that idea was core to my nature. Yet when I spoke of such things, I found myself rejected. Others did not see that I should carve their paths for them. Angrily I went to the north... and ‘twas Tyranny who did that, not I, for never should it have happened and I have risked much to clean the mess I made. Tyranny lived a while longer, but she died on the day I returned to the Crystal Empire, burnt ‘neath light of moon and sun, and proclaimed myself renewed. I have been Luna ever since, and it is ironic that I am nearer to power now that I no longer consider myself inherently fit than ever I was when the idea of ruling others felt as part of my very being.”
Twilight sat quietly, considering this and resisting an inappropriate impulse to ask how the period Luna spent under the name ‘Nightmare Moon’ fit in there. She finally said, “Was Celestia’s name similar? Is ‘Pride’ also a deliberate mistranslation to repudiate some past nature?”
“I do not... believe so,” said Luna. “Her name might as fairly translate as ‘Overpowering Presence’ or ‘She Who Walks Unfaltering Aside’, but Pride is not wrong. It has more the sound of an actual name. I am unsure. She changed her name when I explained my reasoning. Perhaps she repudiated Pride as I repudiated Tyranny, but I have thought it seemed more show of support than change of character.”
Twilight walked around, looking at a few of the countless books in Luna’s private chambers. She wondered about some of the ancient languages. Which one was nearest to the primordial language where all the meanings of these names could be spoken of in one word? It was different from the modern connotations of each. Did Discord and Nightmare also have similar stories behind their names? What about Cadence? Although that last one was silly, Cadence was too young to have some mythic name.
The worst part about her musings was the realization that Luna was at the very least literate in all these languages and had been so since they were young. The same applied by extension to Celestia. It was a wonder that Luna wasn’t peppering her speech with archaicisms worse than mere outdated grammatical constructs.
No stranger to feeling inexperienced, this was definitely the first time in years that she’d felt that way about raw academic breadth. It was a shock of cold water... albeit cold water on a sweltering summer day. She zoomed back to the side of Luna’s bed. “You need to give me reading recommendations!” said Twilight eagerly.
“Certainly? Thou may findest my collection most disillusioning, Twilight Sparkle,” said Luna. She got down from the bed and cast her gaze around the room. The pool of light radiating from Twilight’s horn didn’t seem to be the limit of Luna’s vision, nor did she move to create a light of her own. Twilight didn’t feel she needed to clarify that old books could never upset her, and she was distracted wondering if there were lamps in Luna’s room at all. Could the Princess see in the dark? Was her own light just a distraction? Luna spoke again, “It is no collection of dry forgotten histories.”
That got Twilight’s attention. She smiled and stepped after Luna. “That’s the point,” she said. “These books are alive for you.”
“Some more than others. We have made a point of saving things that we thought might be destroyed. Whitewashed histories are dead when they are written, and undead when they are learned. They are no refuge to us,” said Luna. Her expression darkened.
“Refuge?” asked Twilight, and she laughed. Luna gave her a slanted glance. In lieu of answer, Twilight hopped up onto Luna’s bed and raised a hoof like a lecturer presenting an answer. “Everypony keeps telling me stories of their past. So let me tell you a story of my past,” she said, then set her hoof down.
Luna came over and sat down by the bed. The height difference between them thus inverted, “We—I would be glad to hear about your past. In a way, it's as distant to u—me, as mine is to you.”.
“There once was a little unicorn filly who was awed at the sunrise,” said Twilight. The memory of the Summer Sun Celebration where she watched Celestia raise the sun warmed her. It seemed vastly more real than the horrible image Nightmare had showed her. “She poured herself into studying magic, thinking she could get even a little closer to the sun that way, and her faith was rewarded in the greatest way imaginable.”
“But then, tragedy struck!” said Twilight. She took advantage of being upon a bed to fall dramatically onto her back much as Rarity might, and then when Luna leaned interestedly over her, she delivered the stinger. “Homework!”
“Thy homework was tragic?”
Twilight hopped to her hooves. “Yes! There was so much of it! I had to start scheduling everything just to have time enough for it. And then, just when I started to get ahead of it, I signed up for more classes!”
“That... That sounds like thine own fault,” said Luna, baffled.
Twilight nodded. “I said it was a tragedy, and common corruptions of the term notwithstanding, the classic tragic hero must be laid low by their own flaws,” she said. “The homework got worse and worse. Even in my free time I did little but think about homework.”
“How didst th—you keep from breaking under the strain?”
Every time Twilight had received one of these lessons, she had been teased by its teller in some manner. If she could forgive them that, they could too. “I didn’t! I’m completely insane, mad as a hatter, I did say it was a tragedy after all,” said Twilight with her absolutely widest grin as she pressed in near to Luna, who fell back in alarm.
Unfortunately, Twilight didn’t get the chance to laugh about it. “Twilight Sparkle! I beg of you, resist her!” shouted Luna, suddenly standing at full attention. Cadence and Celestia burst through the door into Luna’s room looking ready for a fight. Celestia wore it well; the same expression looked a little odd on Cadence.
That reaction was not as hoped for. Twilight flattened her expression. “Okay, seriously,” she said. “I fell in love with books. No madness, no tragedy. Have you two been eavesdropping?”
The presence of intruders once more in her room got Luna’s attention. Her ears stood up straight and she glanced back. “Out!” she shouted, physically chasing the other two alicorns out this time. Twilight watched from her perch on the bed.
When Luna came back and started to say something, Twilight raised a hoof again to silence her. “Every time the stress got to be too much, I read. I retreated into books. I had so much to study. I didn’t have to rationalize it to myself. I didn’t worry that I was wasting time. Sure, I may not have needed to read a book about Daring Do as much as I needed to read a book about research methods, but I knew that any little thing could be a source of inspiration. Something tells me your job involves as much study as mine did.”
“If only to catch up,” said Luna. “These are not books read to catch up. These are what I knew before, and my relief when ‘catching up’ is too impossible.”
“I read Daring Do. What do you read?”
Luna smiled and reached for the book on her bedside table. ‘Reached for’ meaning that she didn’t actually pick it up. Seeing what it was, Luna held her hoof up hesitantly, then sighed and hoofed it over to Twilight.
“Halcyon’s Thriambus! Luna! This book is a legend!” If it was an early copy, it should’ve been thirteen centuries old, but the book looked like it had skipped a thousand years along the way and been very well cared for in the other three hundred. Twilight jumped in place twice and then grabbed the book away from Luna, cradling it to her chest. It was a lost work and she was going to be the first pony to read it in centuries!
Luna smirked as she watched Twilight carry away the copy of Thriambus and crouch over it. Not even stopping to turn on a lamp, Twilight read directly by the light of her horn. For some minutes there was no sound in the room beyond the turning of pages. At first they turned fast. “Hm,” opined Twilight, her avid pageturning slowing down.
Finally Twilight stopped reading and pulled back from the book with the air of one pulling back having stepped in something nasty. “Not that I support literary vandalism, but this was 'lost' for being indecent, wasn’t it?”
Laughter was the only answer.
“Your-room-is-your-sanctum-bye!” It all tumbled out in a rush as Twilight turned to flee the laughing Princess Luna. Some absent-minded instinct made her pick up Nightmare’s coin with her magic on the way out. As the glow from her horn surrounded the coin, her legs failed her, and Twilight crashed straight into a pile of scrolls. Her wings flared and her eyes stared at nothing in particular.
Luna looked in alarm at the glowing sphere of Twilight’s magic where it hung in midair surrounding nothing she could see. She bounded over to Twilight, but it was Nightmare’s voice that Twilight heard. “Twelve chains of destiny bind your path, oh child of we alicorns. Keep this coin. Exactly once, it shall break a chain to save the life of one you love.”