//------------------------------// // Dawn Rises (XV) // Story: Dusk Falls // by NorrisThePony //------------------------------// We lost something that day. It was difficult to successfully say what: certainly, the loss of an entire town might perhaps have qualified, but then again I felt like something else was missing entirely. It was that sensation once again. The nagging feeling one gets when they feel something very large is out of place. The one that tells you something is most certainly amiss, something large, something glaring you in the face whilst breathing its icy breath down your obliviously fearful neck— I believe I’m repeating myself. My apologies. I did not sleep that night. I cannot imagine many of the residents of Dusk Falls did either. The sky still burned red over the barren circle of death, all through the day and into the cool spring night. Even as our chariot left Dusk Falls far behind, it took hours of flight for the sky to change from red to pink and then back to any shade of natural blue. In several hour's time after it had first ripped through the sky, the white tear would exist only in Luna and my memories. There was no comfort in that thought, of course. Nor was there any comfort in the knowledge that Hydia was dead. Because if what she had told me was true, then she had been dead before. For almost the whole ride home, Luna and I did not share a single sentence of conversation nor faltering glance. On the rare occasion that our heads accidentally turned enough for our eyes to meet, contact was instantly broken without subtlety. It was difficult to tell whether she was angry with me or simply unwilling to view the regret in my expression, but I imagine it was some combination of the two. At one point, I offered a sudden, brief, and unprompted apology to her, but it did not elicit any response. Luna could have been ignoring me or she could have been asleep, I do not know for I did not break our unspoken resolve to pay each other little to no mind. I'd made a mistake, even if things had all turned out somewhat sufficiently. The tale of Dusk Falls would be told as one of loss, but not of tragedy, for the will of the town had triumphed over the evil Hydia had brought about. It would be yet another bit of incredible feats I had performed to be taught to ponies whether I liked it or not. And I did not like it one bit. Sombra’s fall had been told by our subjects as a tale of heroism. It hadn’t been. It had been a merciful murder. And this tale would be no different. How many more of my failures would I be forced to watch paraded as victories? I had assumed Luna's forbearance would cease when we returned to life in Canterville, but it did not. I rarely saw her during the days as she skulked in and out of important summits, never sitting with me and never attending when she could help it. She rarely took her dinner with me in the castle’s main dining room. She rarely accompanied me on my innocent excursions into Canterville. She rarely left her study during the nights. I would sometimes join her there—if only to assure myself she still existed at all—but our conversations came as forced and deliberate, and she did not stay for long after I had entered, acting like she were some intruder in her own private study. I often approached her bearing forced smiles and steaming tea and together we both spoke our stilted speeches, but never did she approach me in return. That is, with one notable exception: It had taken almost three full months before Luna finally approached me, but the ensuing conversation was the one I had been dreading more so than the continued silence of my sister. It was the one I had been doing my best to guiltily dance around with minced words and forced sentiments. "Why didn't you trust me?" Her voice rung out against the crackling of the fireplace I had been idly prodding. I had not been facing her as she entered my room, and the short sentence caught me by surprise. She sounded so somber, so...old. If the carefree mare I had remembered Luna as during my stay in Dusk Falls had been a ghost, then that ghost of a mare was further reduced to the mere memory of one the moment I heard her cold and distant voice. "I didn't have a choice—" "Don't lie to me, sister!" Luna snapped. "Don't you dare think I'm prepared to stand for it any longer!" "Luna..." I whispered waveringly as her voice rose in intensity to a shout. Her temperament had been predominantly hostile for a very long time—I had encountered my fair share of nearly-sobbing maids in the halls who had just endured the blunt of Luna’s irritation, their accidental breaches of her self-imposed solitude were rarely taken as any less than some act of defiance. But never before, even after all those incidents and all the berating lectures I’d given her after, did she turn that hostility towards me. Not until that moment. "It's okay, because I understand now. It's quite clear to me how worthless you think I am." "No, Luna. Please. Please don't do this to me again..." "Yes, you love me, right? That's what you're going to say?" I did not reply for a long while. Luna looked at me with frantic eyes which made her look as though she was almost begging herself to be wrong. She wasn't. The words had been on my mind and inches away from escaping my lips, as truthful and meaningless as I knew them to be to us now. "Yes, you love me. I suppose that solves everything then, doesn't it? As long as you love me, why should I care that our subjects see me as lesser?!" The room seemed to loose what little light the few candles cast as Luna yelled. She was advancing towards me, and from my spot on the floor with my book she seemed unquestionably the greater of the two of us. Certainly, the presence she was known to radiate was in spades in that moment. "You're scaring me, Luna." I finally whispered. She stopped her threatening approach without hesitation, and her gaze became cloudy as her eyes started to water. "...Well, I...I love you too, Celestia," she said lethargically, any of the previous fury in her voice now a mere memory. "But I cannot continue living in your shadow for much longer. Because it's so cold here. All those ponies celebrating your victory out there...as if it can be considered a victory at all. I could have saved them all from your solution, and yet what do I get? I'm trying so hard, but I just wish I didn't have to anymore. I wish I could find a way to end it all." I felt an odd lump in my stomach as the force of Luna's words hit me with the same force as the ground to a flightless pegasus. "I don't want to feel like this, but I can't help it. And what you did to me, Celestia..." Luna rubbed her watering eyes with a hoof, "You hurt me, Celestia. Badly." "I am truly sorry, Luna. Please believe me." "I do. I know you're sorry, Celestia, and I'm sorry that you have to be. I guess I'm still too weak, and I needed to hear you say it, as if I didn't already know it with all my heart." "You're not weak, Luna," I moved to nuzzle her, but she purposefully moved away in response. I continued trying to console her nonetheless as I spoke, "You helped save those ponies. And perhaps they don't know it, but you do. And I do. And I will never stop trusting you." Luna turned away from me, back the way she came, slowly making her way back out of the library and into the darkling corridors as the night continued to grow outside the castle. She halted in the entrance-way. I did not see her face, but I had a clear image in my mind of the hopeless expression on it all the same. "Celestia...I'm afraid your love isn't enough anymore." Luna shuffled a little and did not turn around, trying to find the lie in the sentence she had spoken and failing, as I too did the same. I could offer her no more than my promise that I would always be there for her, but what value did that truly carry? Was it anything more than worthless to the overshadowed sister of somepony as revered as I? Would it ever be sufficient enough to alleviate the shame of being feared by so many of our subjects and seen as lesser by the remainder? "How are we going to fix ourselves, Luna?" I desperately pleaded. I could not bring myself to look up at Luna anymore, not without being flooded with the mare she once was and the relationship we once had, and so I locked my gaze on the hardwood floor instead. "What else is there to help us?" Only silence answered. When I looked up, I saw only a dark causeway. Luna was gone, and I listened to the sound of her hoofbeats echo into the silence of the growing night. I would try all though the night to think of something else, something we had not tried. Therapy again, another increase in distance between us, or...or some other solution I had yet to think of. We were traveling too swiftly down an untrodden road into the direction of the unknown, but I wished dearly to be free of any heedless voyage, and to be home instead. And home wasn't a place; I was as much a tourist in the Everfree as I had been in the late Dusk Falls. I sat in motionless, thoughtful silence for much of the night, dropping in and out of sleep. I did not rise from my libraries floor for the entirety of Luna's beautiful night, but the span between when she had first left me alone and when the sun's tug prompted me to finally push myself to my feet seemed so brief it was almost surreal. But soon it would be winter again, and with it would come the long and cold nights. It was difficult for me to tell whether or not I was anticipating or fearing their arrival. A soothing, bittersweet sense of assured fate crept over me as I raised the sun. I felt as though I was powerless, and it was an eerily comforting feeling even with the dread it invoked as well. No matter what further took place between Luna and I, no matter what solution it took to mend our flickering bond, the simple and unchangeable truth was that sisters sometimes fight, and in the end, everything else would be okay. It was a wishful fantasy, but all that was left for us to do was desperately cling onto it for a little while longer.