Celestia regained consciousness. Not by much, but enough to remember she actually existed in a real tangible world. Enough to assess the situation she was in and accept the fact this was the dawn of a new day.
Another new day.
She was in her room. Everything was still plunged into the night, with the exception of the slightly lit shadows formed by her curtains under the influence of her sister’s moon. Those curtains were still closed, and the two windows they were hiding were closed too, but behind laid a whole world waiting for the sun to wake him up.
Her sun.
She knew very well what would happen next and smiled at the idea. Like every morning, she would open the curtains and like every morning, she would command her old life companion to rise once again and bring life and warmth everywhere its rays would land.
But first, she yawned. Then and only then, once she felt ready, she called to her magic and ordered the sun to show itself, expecting to see it through the window at any second. Or maybe a little more.
It was still early, so she couldn’t remember how long precisely it was usually taking her to perform her daily duty. She was pretty certain, however, that this time was a bit too long.
No matter. She had made the sun rise thousands and thousands of times since the beginning and it was more than normal that she would make a slight mistake once in a while. She simply stopped her spell, relaxed for a minute, laughed at the awkwardness of the situation, and then used her magic once again to raise the sun.
But nothing came.
Celestia stopped again, tried to relax and used her spell for a third time, and then a fourth time, followed by a fifth one and at each try she could hear her heartbeat increase: it was going to be one of those times…
How she hated those times…
Through the thousands of times she had raised the sun, Celestia had already encountered such a situation in several occasions. Sometimes, just as this specific morning, the sun would simply refuse to show up. Every time, Celestia had been able to reason with it and make it move again over the sky under her lead, so she was pretty confident she would succeed again on this particular occasion. And yet, some details were bugging her. For example the fact it seemed the sun had proven itself more capricious lately than ever before. Or the fact it had felt increasingly more difficulty at each occasion to bring it out of its slumber.
She didn’t have time to think about such things. She was going to be late. So she acted: she called to a new spell and made a lift appear in the middle of the room, entered into it, and then disappeared with the lift through the floor, deeper and deeper to the place where the sun was resting.
And the sun was the first thing Celestia saw when she arrived, gigantic as always, but asleep. Nopony but Celestia, not even her sister, had ever seen the sun in that state and Celestia had always felt some relief at that idea. The sun wasn’t looking wild, bright and powerful like it usually would during its sky walk. That sun that nopony could normally look directly at and which power seemed impossible to match was nothing more than a giant almost dead rock, animated only by a faint aura of light going slowly from slightly visible to almost gone to slightly visible again and this in a long never ending cycle.
“Wake up!” Celestia shouted.
And the cycle broke for a second, as the aura, seemingly from the sound of Celestia’s voice, shined fiercer, trembled, only to return to its slow steady rhythm.
“I said wake up!” Celestia ordered again.
But the sun didn’t react this time.
“Oh no, don’t you dare ignore me!”
Celestia walked near the sun, tinier than a grain of sand in comparison but more resolved than ever, and put her hoof right onto its surface, which made the aura react again.
“I know you can hear me.” Celestia told the sun. “So stop fooling around. It’s time to leave this place and come back with me to bring light to my world. It’s your duty. I’m not in the mood to argue with you.”
She expected a new reaction, but the sun straight up ignored her pure and simple.
“Is that how you want to do things now?” Celestia asked, already enjoying what was going to follow.
And she took a few steps back, only to call to her magical powers again. As her horn lit up with yellow energy, so did the whole sun and the cycle of the aura ceased completely to leave place to huge and bright flames.
“Wake up!” Celestia ordered again, focusing even more magic into her spell.
And under Celestia’s power, the sun moved, first to the left, making the whole earth shake under it, then to the right, creating another huge seism. Prisoner of the spell, the sun moved again, this time up, and the ground it was laying on began to tear apart, as its purpose was going away from it.
At that precise moment, Celestia’s eye quickly identified an anomaly on the sun’s surface, running, fleeing, contorting itself and before Celestia could react, the anomaly turned into a giant arc of fire that left the sun’s surface and ran through the immensity of space right to where she was performing her spell, hitting her directly and throwing her to the ground that had found its purpose again. Celestia crashed loudly, but found the strength to quickly turn her head back to the sun just in time to see it fall from its position back onto the ground it had just left.
A second later, Celestia got swept away by the dust storm from the sun’s impact as the ground shook, distorted itself, opened only to close again under her. A second later, it was all over. Even if it was wearing the scars from the event, the ground had gone back to an absolute stand still while the air had rid itself of all wind. As for the sun, it was right where it wanted to be, back in its place, slowly glowing by intermittence and completely oblivious to Celestia’s whereabouts.
She had literally known better days. Her head was dizzy, one of her back legs was hurting pretty badly and she felt pain from all over her body. It took her a moment to breathe normally and be able to stand up. But as soon as she achieved that, she turned to the sun and, not ready to give up just yet, lit up her horn to make a new try. Instantly, the ground trembled and the sun set its surface ablaze.
Celestia watched the red flames covering every single part of her vision’s field, ready to overwhelm and consume her, considered her chances and let go of the magical winds she had begun to gather. As her horn stopped to radiate, so did the sun that went back to its slumber, knowing Celestia wouldn’t dare try to use force again.
And she too knew she wouldn’t dare. No matter how powerful she was, there was no way she could ever overcome such a beast. It had worked, long ago, when she was young and the sun even younger. And now, it had grown more powerful than ever and tired of having to listen to her.
The sun didn’t care anymore. It simply didn’t want to move anymore.
“Why?” Celestia asked.
She convinced herself that the tears forming in her eyes were caused by the pain she was feeling from her fall. And in a sense, she was exactly right.
“Why now, why today of all day? Why won’t you move? What happened?”
The sun, of course, didn’t answer.
“Is it because of me? Are you trying to punish me for all those times I commanded you? But why? You know I’m doing it for you. Because you are meant to shine, and walk brighter than the stars in the sky, to bring light and life everywhere. This is your sole purpose. The reason you exist.”
She waited, but the sun gave no answer whatsoever. Its aura kept on glowing in the slow cycle, ignoring everything and everpony. Specifically Celestia, the one the sun had accepted to follow thousands and thousands of times, through summer and winters alike, the pony it had lent its power to and to whom it was now refusing that same power. To whom it was refusing its light. To whom it was refusing its warmth.
From the point of view of the little pony that Celestia was, the sun now looked so huge and distant that she could never reach it anymore.
“Do you despise me now?” She faintly asked, more to herself than to the sun.
But the sun reacted with a shimmer that reflected in Celestia’s eyes. It wasn’t rejecting her, on the contrary, it was inviting her, her lifelong companion, to join it in its eternal slumber.
“You still want to be my friend…” Celestia realized out loud.
Her words made the sun’s aura’s glowing cycle accelerate for a few seconds.
Celestia walked back to the sun and reached its surface with her hoof once again, but this time as a tender caress.
“What has gotten into you old friend?” She asked.
But now that she was focusing her attention on that surface, she could feel the answer from the sensations of her hoof. The sun’s crust was full of fissures and ravines. It was dry and parts of it were breaking apart from her touch. She took one of the fallen pieces and tried to put it back into place, but it fell apart again and turned into ashes into her hoof.
“You really are old, aren’t you?” Celestia stated.
She touched her own face and while hers was soft and firm, she could feel the years behind the mask, all the years in the microscopic wrinkles only she knew existed.
“I guess I’m getting old too…”
She chased the idea away. She wasn’t old. Not yet at least. And she hadn’t time to complain about the passage of time.
“Please, I understand now: you’re tired, you feel it’s time for you to stop, but it’s not! You and I have responsibilities we must take care of. There are ponies out there waiting to see you. What are they going to become if you don’t show up? What would I be supposed to tell them?”
She was lying. She knew it and the sun probably knew it too. Yes there were ponies depending on her, but they were resourceful. Life would find a way, even without her and the sun. It could come from Twilight and her magic, from Luna, from Cadance or from some other ponies, but in the end, they would reshape the world to be sustainable without her.
They would probably create another sun, maybe bigger, maybe brighter, and probably better.
“Come on now!” Celestia almost shouted while shaking away those ideas. “We can’t let them down. They are counting on us to do our best. Let’s at least try until we both really can’t move anymore. But you can still bring life to the world and if it’s too hard for you, I can be there to support you. What do you say? Don’t you want to shine over the world at least one more time for all ponies to admire your splendor?”
She waited, but obtained no answer or reaction.
“You have to do it for them!” Celestia implored. “They need you!”
The sun, obviously, had another opinion on the subject. Out of frustration, Celestia tried to push the sun as hard as she could, and failed miserably as she would have had more chance of pushing Equestria itself instead. She was just too small and the sun was too big.
“What is it you want me to say?” She asked. “You want me to beg? Well, I beg of you: please wake up, please move, please bring your light to my world!”
She pushed even harder and only achieved to exhaust herself.
“You don’t think I’m tired too?” She yelled, out of breath. “I’ve seen my friends come and go, I’ve seen stories fold and unfold in front of my eyes, so many that I can’t remember most of them. I went through so many battles, so many fights… But if I’m still standing, why aren’t you too?”
She looked at the gigantic mass of rock and saw the last flames disappear from beneath the crust.
“So that’s it then, is it?” She finally asked. “You have given up…”
She landed on the ground and lay down at the sun’s side, snuggling up against it.
It was cold now.
The aura was gone and with it all the light that was left. Celestia only knew the sun was still here because she could feel its surface against her body. It felt dead.
“Now what?” She asked out loud, to whoever would hear it. “I can’t leave you…”
Now she was probably doomed to just wait there until the very end.
Unexpectedly, she burst out laughing. She had just remembered she was supposed to have a boring reunion with a bunch of ponies from Trottingham about some quarrel over a street’s name she was supposed to arbiter. Another stupid political duty she was suddenly getting rid of by the new circumstances. It was true what ponies used to say: there is always a good side to every situation.
But yet, she was also supposed to take a few moments in her garden. She had tried for months to make a new type of roses grow and she would have loved to see it bloom at some point. She thought it would have been beautiful. She thought the sun would have found it beautiful too.
And there was Twilight Sparkle. Life had become so interesting since she had met the little unicorn back in the days. There was no telling what she was going to accomplish next. They had both gone their separate ways, as Celestia’s role as a mentor was over now and Twilight had become a princess, but she could still be there as a spectator.
And of course there was Luna. She could see how more social she was becoming with each passing day. Now Luna that Luna wasn’t confined to her sole big sister, she was truly happy and watching that happiness was reason enough, in Celestia’s mind, to want to be there for the next day to come.
“It’s not fair…” Celestia said.
She didn’t care if she was the only one there to hear her own words.
“It’s not fair at all. I shouldn’t have to give up because you have. I still have hopes, I still have things I want to see, things I want to do. But I can’t do them without you!” She yelled at the pile of rock at her side.
She stood up and hit the sun, hurting her hoof, but happy to feel that pain.
“You’re mean. You’re stupid. I hate you! I wish I wouldn’t depend of you. I wish I could be my own sun, and create my own light to see the world around me. But no, of course not. I’m stuck with you.”
She got so angered that a magical ray came out of her horn and made a few rocks explode out of the surface of the sun.
“I’m so sorry!” She immediately apologized.
But at the same time, she understood she shouldn’t be. She was linked to that sun. So if she truly thought that it wasn’t time to give up yet, she had the right to do whatever she wanted to achieve her goal. Even if that meant upsetting the sun. Even if that meant fighting it to the very end.
“I am very sorry.” She said again, while stepping back a bit and taking off.
She called to her magical abilities one last time and using as much power as she could, she grabbed the whole sun once again. It woke up violently and in its wake, it set everything on fire: its surface, the ground as well as space all around. But Celestia didn’t flinch.
“I am sorry, but I’m not ready to go right now. If you truly want to give up, you will have to get rid of me first.”
The sun roared as oceans of lava flooded its surface in a boiling storm, but still it was ascending under Celestia’s spell, incapable of freeing itself from her firm hold. Furious, the sun launched a flare that passed right next to Celestia.
“I am not letting go!” She shouted. “Now make your choice.”
The sun’s surface covered itself with explosions, releasing more energy in a split second than it normally would in a year. Its tremendous power created a new force, opposed to the one Celestia was applying to it, stopping its ascension. But no matter how hard it tried, the sun wasn’t able to lower itself.
“All I ask for is one more day. Please, you owe me that much…”
But the sun wasn’t ready to hear that plea. Everything turned red as it released a new wave of flames that surrounded the little pony. Ignoring it, Celestia held on, drawing from her last strength.
“If you don’t do it for the ponies that count on you, at least do it for me!” Celestia implored. “I don’t want to fight you: I need you. I’ve always needed you. Please don’t abandon me. Give me one day. Just one day.”
The sun finally heard her and everything disappeared in a huge flash as it opened its eyes. It was laying in its bed, in its bedroom and everything was quiet as it was still night and everypony was sleeping. The sun rolled on its left, then on its right and, its muscle heated from that little exercise, it lifted the bedsheet with its magic and put it aside. Then, the sun went to the border of its bed, put one hoof out into one of the horseshoe that was awaiting it, and did the same with the three other hooves until it would be standing.
Ready, the sun went to the unique bedroom window, opened it and looked at Equestria underneath and the night sky full of star above.
A smile appeared on the sun’s face.
“One more day?” The sun asked. “I can grant you that.”
And all over Equestria, colors replaced the darkness as Celestia raised the sun.
THE END