//------------------------------//
// Chapter Three 
// Story: Schism 
// by Sev 
//------------------------------//

Chapter Three

“It was Celestia that found them,” Luna explained, “collecting old rumors and folklore from the ponies we'd united on our side until she had enough of a hint to go out searching. It took her three years, and while she was gone, I held the lines without her. Constant struggle, constant conflict, constant aggression. I still remember when she came back and saw me for the first time since she'd left. She looked worried, maybe even frightened. But I'd done my job, and she'd done hers. We had the elements, and our united desire to purge Discord from the world was enough to bond the elements of harmony to us.” she snorted, “compared to the years of conflict, the final confrontation against him was...comically short. With harmony and eternity on our side, he didn't really stand a chance. I remember...I remember she had to stop me from shattering the statue when we'd finished. Hold me back. She had already noticed the changes. I couldn't see them at the time, you never really...see these things from the inside. But she did.”
“She wept and apologized for leaving me to fight alone and I..” Luna laughed with exasperation, “I just...couldn't understand what her problem was. We'd won! Discord was gone, and I'd grown and learned and improved in her absence!  I could fight my own fights now. BETTER than her. I'd lived up to my idol. I couldn’t...just...figure out..why she wasn't proud of me. All I could see in her eyes was sympathy, and the anger and the rage woke up inside me and began to fester and boil and grow, little bit by little bit, like coals glowing under kindling, just moments from lighting it.” She chewed her lip now, and Twilight looked for fury in her eyes. There was none. Just a sadness so ancient it made Twilight's heart ache. Light teardrops were pooled at the corners of Luna's eyelids, and her body shuddered slightly, but her voice remained firm.
“Equestria was still in Chaos,” she continued, “We had a large number of ponies who'd stood by against Discord, but the vast population was still aimless and un-united. Earth Ponies would quarrel with Pegasus ponies and Unicorns would clam up in private keeps and use magic to lock everyone out. They needed a uniting factor, and Celestia and I set a plan in motion to provide them with one.”
“What did you do?” Twilight asked, in rapt attention.
“We broke the sky,” Luna replied. “With the elements of harmony and and eternity at our disposal we had the power to change the very nature of the cosmos around equestria. So we did.” she chuckles, “looking back at it now it was a little...excessive. But it worked. Celestia and I took over control of the sun and the moon, and shut down the natural functions of all the seasons in Equestria. We took those functions and imbued the ponies with them. The ability to move clouds, to manufacture weather, to bring on Fall with the trample of hooves, all by working collectively.”
“you mean...we didn't always do that?”
Luna grinned, “no, you didn’t. That was us. It was harsh, but we created a situation in which everypony was doomed unless everypony worked together. And it worked. By all rights, it worked beautifully.” Her smile faded. “It wasn’t without cost. Affecting compliance was hard at the beginning. Celestia and I went everywhere, showing ponies how to do things, explaining the system. We were met with...mixed feelings. Celestia, armed with empathy and steadfastness, could understand everypony's misgivings and explain the necessity while not compromising her position. Just as we'd planned, she was a perfect leader. But me...”
“You were angry.” Twilight finished. “Still.”
“Still.” Luna replied. “I tried. I had the best interests of everypony in mind. But I had been fighting too long. I couldn’t find my patience anymore. The aggression outweighed it, and when I couldn't get ponies to comply...I started making them comply. And every time I did the essence of aggression grew bigger and more prominent on my element and I fell deeper and deeper into this spiral of...just...hatred.” she shook her head. “I wasn't me anymore. Even I knew it by then. This thing wasn't me. It had become this sort of life of its own, and it was frightening ponies. I was frightening ponies. Some dark clad monster that would arrive at night and demand compliance while the new order of Equestria was laid out for them all to see. I was a nightmare.” Luna went quiet for a moment. Twilight could hear her heart beating in the stillness of the night, and floating in the back of her head were the cold, fierce eyes of Nightmare Moon. It loomed over the little pony in front of her like a specter. She opened her mouth to speak, but Luna started up again. It was just as well, she had no idea what she was going to say.
“I ran away.” Luna said, “I think it was the last actual choice I, myself, made, before Nightmare Moon became all that I was and locked the me that's here away in my own head. I ran to a place that was dark and cold and secret and I abolished the enchantments there, returning it to the state it was before we changed the seasons. I went there, and I hid, and I watched. Celestia couldn’t find me, not with her attention so needed by Equestria in its infancy. She raised the sun every day, and I raised the moon, so as not to provoke suspicion. As news came to her of the things I'd done, she went into a panic trying to find me, but I still hid, just out of reach, out there.” she nodded off to the side toward the moonlit treetops.
“The Everfree forest..” Twilight gasped, “thats why everything in there is so...strange. Thats how things were.” Luna nodded. “I sat out there and wrestled with myself, day and night, trying to contain this monster that was eating me alive from the inside out. But every time I looked out, all I saw, all Nightmare let me see, was more evidence of just how much there was to detest. Ponies were flocking to Celestia and hiding from the night I'd worked so hard to craft for them. Because thats when the nightmares came. They couldn't see, they had to sleep, and Celestia huddled them close and kept them warm during the day because it was all she could do to keep them going. This new world we'd forged was meant to be ruled by two ponies, and with me missing, she had to pick up the slack. That drove more to her side, and through the hate-tinged lens of my eyes, all I could see was her stabbing me in the back.” 
She leaned her head down, resting it on the grass. “By the time she found me, it was already too late. Luna was gone. There was only the Nightmare.” she breathed a sigh. “that was the last time Princess Celestia wore the armor that united Equestria. When she used the elements of Harmony to banish me to the moon, she erected what you all know as the castle of the royal pony sisters on the spot we fought. It's purpose has...drifted...in a thousand years. It was never a castle, nor was it in dedication to any one of us.  It was a replica of the temple we both found that contained the elements of eternity. She placed the elements of harmony there instead, where you found them, a thousand years later.”
Twilight realized she hadn’t blinked in minutes. She rubbed her eyes, as though coming out of a trance, and worked her mouth to wet her tongue again. It had been slightly agape for most of Luna's story. “Why...” she began, “Why does no pony know about this? About the fight, and Discord, and the elements of eternity and the real reason you were banished?  You didn't..I mean, you did, but it wasn't your fault!  You gave everything for Equestria's salvation!  You shouldn't be condemned for that!”
Luna smiled, and tears shimmered in her eyes. “Thank you,” she replied, “but it wasn't out of maliciousness that Celestia changed the story. You're right, I did give my all to Equestria. So did she. And to ruin that over petty matters of personal pride would've been terrible. The story was changed in order to edit out any mention of Discord to avoid somehow damaging his stone confinement. It wouldn't take much,” she chuckles and rolls her eyes, “Actually even less than we though, as was recently demonstrated, to break him free again. Had they been included, somepony somewhere, however small or inconsequential, might have gone looking for him, if his existence was public knowledge. We're eternal, if there's anything we have on our side, its time. Celestia altered the story to pin me as the villain and removed the schism from history so that no one would so much as ponder trying to track down the true root of the problem. And as I faded from memory and into legend, Celestia could focus personally on finding a way to...fix me.”
Luna had turned to look at Twilight now, “She gave herself one thousand years to get it right, because she was terrified that if she brought be back and COULDN'T stop me, it would be over. I would destroy her and take over equestria and leave the world in darkness. She couldn't fight me, not anymore, not without the elements, and they didn't work for her now that I'd been banished. To harness them again, she'd need a very, very precise set of circumstances. Six ponies, one in tune with each element, to form a collective power that exceeded both of ours. That sort of energy could disarm nightmare moon without having to shunt her to some cosmic prison or turn her to stone, and in that moment of weakness, Celestia could come in and crush the physical manifestation of the element of Eternity that was bound to me, and let me see clearly for the first time in millennia”.
Twilight's eyes had grown progressively wider as Luna had laid out the ending of her story. A shiver that had nothing to do with the cold of the night had crept up her spine. “You...mean...”
“You think Celestia just planned ahead long enough to send you to Ponyville and let you meet the friends you needed to control the elements,” Luna said softly, “but you're wrong. She tailored your parents, and your parents' parents, and the ponies that came together to form them, and the ones before those, and the families that moved from Appolusia to form the Apple family, and the flight school in Cloudsdale, and every careful, solitary step down the line, to form you, and the souls that formed your friends, each one a perfect representation of an element of Harmony. You aren't just her student, Twilight Sparkle. You are her masterpiece. And you were created to save me from myself.” Luna bit her lower lip, looking almost ashamed. “So when I tell you that I value your insight in particular, maybe now you'll understand just why that is.”
Twilight Sparkle enjoyed having tasks with solid, set purposes. She liked having a goal. She liked knowing when she had done something right, clearly, and definitively. Most of all, she liked to know, to have at her disposal all the information surrounding any mystery in her life. As she lowered her trembling head to the cool grass of the hill overlooking the lake, she realized, for the first time, she had exactly that. The information. The goal. The purpose for her existence and the meaning behind everything she'd ever known. 

By Equestria, she wished she'd never asked.