The LUNA Project

by The Equestrian Gentlecolt

Chapter 10 - Reunion

Selena. The alicorn considered the name as she followed Doctor Montgomery's directions at a quick canter. It wasn't a bad name, she mused, but she had always been Luna. The hallways hadn't collapsed. Right. Right. Pass two doors. She hoped they wouldn't mind if she kept her old name. Stairs on the left. She slowed down to take the steps carefully. She didn't want to go tumbling down these ones too, she had already embarrassed herself once today. Maybe it could be her middle name. No, she didn't have a family name, so how could she have a middle name?

Family. The pictures of the humans she had seen Celestia with came back to her in a rush as her hooves met the stone floor of a large room. No, it wasn't exactly a room, it was more like a cavern. It looked like it had been dug out after the original building had been made, and never finished. It had probably been dug specifically to make room for the two metal pillars which formed the gate in the center of it. They stood about eight feet tall, reaching about halfway to the ceiling.

Luna wasted no time. She was so close now, so close to her family, close to finally meeting her sister. She galloped to the pillars, clouds of dust kicking up from her hooves. The pedestal was there, just like the letter had said it would be. Perfectly flat on the top, except for an indentation that looked to be just the right size to fit her horn. The whole thing seemed pristine, untouched by the passage of time. She lowered her head, placing her horn into the indentation. Light flared up around her.

Her world disappeared. Five senses vanished, replaced by a sixth, unfamiliar one.

I know.

Paths lay before and behind her. Though she did not see them, she knew that the paths in front of her split outward into infinity. She found herself traveling slowly along them, going one way or another in each intersection without any conscious choice on her part. Though she did not feel them, she knew that the paths behind her flowed together, meeting and becoming one at their points of divergence. She knew that her goal was behind her, and that the inexorable flow of time was taking her further from it.

She stopped. She turned.

Paths lay before and behind her. Behind her, they split outward, continually forming new ways through the web of possibilities. Ahead of her, they merged, the threads of an infinite tapestry coming together into a single point.

The Big Bang, the beginning of everything, lay in the center of the tapestry.

Time had no meaning for her, so with a thought, she had always been there. A single path lead from that point, splitting and stretching into the infinite. She paused, examining this one event, the event which had begun the universe. Doctor Montgomery had said that she would know where to go, but the only direction available to her was the one she had come from.

Then she thought on the nature of the junctions in the paths around her. Every choice that was made. Every possibility that went one way or the other. Every event that did or didn't happen.

Every event. Even this one.

She looked up.

Two paths lead from the Big Bang. One, the birth of the universe, felt familiar and comfortable, the world she had grown up in. The second was empty, almost invisible even to her new sense, because no universe had ever been created in that path. The path was empty, but down that path lay a single junction point. From that junction point spread another web of possibilities, and somehow, this one felt even more familiar than where she had come from. It felt almost like something she knew.

It felt like her sister.

Luna reached out, and touched the Second System.

One sense faded, faint, but not gone. Five senses returned. The alicorn lifted her head, blinking around the chamber. The dust she had kicked up in her rush to the gateway still hung in the air. It seemed that only moments had passed as she found her way to the other universe.

Her thoughts were set aside for the immediate as the machine in front of her hummed to life. She felt a vicious tug at her magic, and the first sparks jumped from one of the metal pillars to the other. She strained against the voracious hunger of the void as a jagged rift formed in front of her, a tear in the universe that showed a black deeper than any absence of light.

Her horn began to glow, lighting the cavern around her, but the light was soon sucked into the black hole before her. In fact, some part of her realized as she fought, a black hole was exactly what she had created. Terror gripped her momentarily, but as the light of her magic continued to feed into the rift, it began to lighten. Soon she could see, or perhaps she was sensing it through her magic, the image of a moonlit field of grass. It was a sight she had never seen with her own eyes, but recognized immediately. It had the feeling of familiarity again, the feeling of her sister.

The tug on her magic relaxed, then, and she knew that the gateway was open. Light continued to flow from her horn, keeping it stable as she gazed at it. Then, remembering the letter's warning about waiting too long, she galloped forward.

Luna stepped across the threshold of the portal, across an infinite distance and through uncountable years.

The gateway snapped shut behind her with a sound not unlike the closing of an unimaginably large book. The dark cavern bid a silent farewell to the last sentient being on Earth. The next sound heard in the room was three days later, when the floor above caved in, as the ever-expanding sun drew close enough to begin melting the planet's surface into slag. Then it was dark no more.

---

I know... everything.

From the moment that Luna set hoof in the new world, she knew. She knew herself, how the arcane energy that swirled around her and within her changed her body. She knew the darkening of her coat into a deep midnight blue. She knew the pure white crescent and its surrounding splash of black that appeared on her flank, a reflection of her history and her nature painted in magic for all to see. She knew the thousands of pinpoints of light that speckled her mane, a nebulous cloud which flowed with a wind that she did not feel. She knew the world around her, and the humans that lived there, and the ponies that populated it beside them, and... Her.

I know that She knows.

Before Luna had even taken her first breath of the cool night air, Celestia was there. Magenta eyes stared into teal ones, blinking back sudden tears. They might have stared at each other for seconds, or minutes. Neither of them noticed the time pass, but suddenly, the white alicorn's head was over the blue one's withers and one foreleg was around her in a tight embrace. The younger returned the embrace gladly, the joyful tears forming in her own eyes as well.

No words were needed between them. Celestia took off galloping, and Luna followed. They ran through the meadows, and Luna saw the beauty of the world by moonlight. They wove in between the trees of the deep forests, and Luna smelled the fresh earth beneath her hooves and the sharp scent of pine. They flew over the vast oceans, and Luna tasted the salt of the sea air on her tongue. They wrestled together through dewy grass, a tumbling yin-yang of white and blue, and Luna heard Celestia's gleeful giggles as the younger sister discovered that the elder was ticklish. Then they lay together at the top of a snow-capped mountain, watching the coming of the dawn each with a wing over the other, and Luna felt the warmth of having another beside her. When the edge of the sun broke over the horizon and the blue alicorn's body began to tense with sudden fear, the white one reassured her with a gentle nuzzle, and Luna knew the love of a sister.

Then, when the sun had risen, they did it all again.

When Celestia was nowhere to be found that morning, Michael wondered at where she had gone. When her court was never opened that day, her people became curious at what might have happened. They wondered, but they did not worry, for there was a sense of well-being in the very air that day which told them that everything would be alright.

That day, for every human and every pony in Equestria, was a good day.

Comments

[The Equestrian Gentlecolt]

And there's the next chapter! It might be the final one - I'm not sure yet if there will be another numbered chapter, or if Luna's introduction to Equestrian society will be part of the epilogue, I'm going to have to play that one by ear. (I also want to write an epilogue in present-day Equestria. Are you allowed to have two epilogues? )

[Periphery]

Now I can't help but wonder what happens to all the humans after this. Maybe that will be the subsequent-post-epilogue?

[The Equestrian Gentlecolt]

94055

They die!

...of old age. After living long, fulfilling lives. Last chapter incoming tonight, I think, and it'll be touching on this. It's bittersweet, but that's sort of the way of stories about immortals.

[FinalFan]

If there is one thing that mars this story, to me, it's the miraculously close shave of "three days". It could be three years just as easily and not a single other word need be changed. It just feels a little too much like "action hero sliding under a closing blast door" to me.

But, believe me, this has aged well and I am very glad I favorited it so that I could randomly find it and reread it again.

[Misty Horse]

8724569

For me, what bothers me more about that is there wasn't any real sign of the sun's age from what I recall. It was just too suddenly 'sun is too big and is eating Earth'. Even with the details of the moment she feared it. I actually had one idea of the reason behind it, but now I'm pretty confused as to what I should think.