My Very Little Ponyfics

by Lurks-no-More

On the Moon

There was a stark, clean beauty to the Moon that even the finest astronomers of Equestria scarcely dreamed of. The bare mountains and rocky hills rose to unimaginable heights, their knife-sharp peaks stabbing at the starry black sky. Below, the ink-black shadows reached across the silvery sands, soundlessly stirred by the solar winds, untouched by the hooves of any living thing. The Moon was not a dead world; it was a world that had never succumbed to the messy temptations of life, and the equally messy complications of love. It was pure and cold, alone and proud of that loneliness, looking down at the blue-green jewel of its sister world with arrogant disdain. Let the Earth keep its seas and forests, its clouds and volcanoes, its teeming inhabitants. The Moon did not need any of them. The Moon did not want them!

The unicorn astronomers had watched the Moon from afar through their telescopes and drawn maps of its surface, giving fanciful names to the mountains and the craters, and the dark lava fields that gave the Moon the appearance of the Mare in the Moon. One of the largest craters, conveniently located, had been given an especially imaginative name by one of these cartographers: the Mare's Eye. Some observers claimed to have seen a dark speck in its center, almost like the pupil of this cosmic eye, but few agreed with them. Even those who accepted the existence of this dark spot considered it nothing more than a deep chasm, or maybe the shadow of the crater's central mountain. If any of them would have been transported to the Moon, to see the Mare's Eye with their own eyes before they succumbed to the lack of air and bitter cold, their minds would have been changed.

There was indeed a mountain, and a chasm before it, but those were merely the background for the dark castle. Vast beyond the comprehension of a pony mind, its pinnacles rose far above any mountain of Earth, while the foundations of its walls and terraces lay deeper than the trenches of Earth's seas. There were towers the size of Equestrian cities, balconies the size of battlefields overlooking bottomless drops, and stairs, wide as highways, that zig-zagged their mountainous way up and down the endless levels of the castle. Yet despite the titanic scale and dark majesty of this obsidian-dark citadel, it was nothing but a nightmarish reflection of another place, a jealous echo of the living castle of a living goddess.

Only shadows flitted along the endless corridors and gathered in the empty rooms where a thousand years of moondust had covered the black floors with silvery glitter. Dark flickers of wings glided across the parade grounds and vague pony-shaped forms lurked around the grand gates. In the central tower, where the mistress of this palace of shadows brooded, the darkness grew deeper, becoming almost palpable. Here, voiceless shapes stirred in the dark, and black memories gathered to dance to the tunes of silence in lightless ballrooms. In the libraries of darkness, a thousand grudges given life wrote down the endless dreams and nightmares in black ink on black pages.

In the throne room, lit by the Earthlight pouring in through the vast windows, a court of phantasms rustled and murmured in the echoing silence, awaiting the will of their creator to stir and give them purpose and substance. Ignoring her imaginary servants, the Nightmare Moon lay crouched on her throne-like divan, her wings folded and horned head lowered.

Exiled to the Moon, trapped between dream and wakefulness, time had no meaning to the dark mare. On one level, the years and centuries of her imprisonment had passed in mere moments; on another, she had dwelled for subjective ages on the slightest insults and injuries from her past, stoking the fires of her bitterness and envy. Whenever she would drift deeper into sleep, her shadow subjects would resume their play, living out scenes of a world of eternal night where only her will mattered and where all things loved and praised her, even as they feared her.

Slowly, the Nightmare Moon stirred, and her court of dark dreams retreated into the shadows they had risen from. A green glow flickered in her half-lidded eyes, and her wings twitched, the black feathers fanning out. Something was happening; something was coming. A tremor went through the entire dark castle, as her mind shrugged free of the net of dreams and memories that she had woven for a thousand years.

"Celestia..." she whispered into the silence of the Moon, and the walls of the room shook with the sound of her voice. Her time had almost come, she could feel it. The magic that bound her to the Moon was fading fast. "Soon... Soon, dear sister."

Author's Note:

An old, old story about what Nightmare Moon's exile might have been like.

The original on my dA included lyrics from Leonard Cohen's First We Take Manhattan, only adapted for Nightmare Moon -- "First, I take Ponyville, then I take Canterlot!"

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

Incredibly evocative prose, especially the deep denial of how the Moon isn't even remotely jealous of the life and love of the Earth and the monumental emptiness of the Nightmare's palace and court.