The
CONVERSION
â–ºBureau
CODE MAJESTE
By Chatoyance
7. I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)
Princess Celestia paced slowly and gracefully on the marble slabs that tiled her main hall. The exquisite stained-glass windows showered the hallway in multicolored hues, painting the guardponies standing at attention by her throne in chatoyant streaks of light.
When she reached the end of the hall, before it branched out into the great reception chamber, Celestia turned and ambled back toward her throne room again. Back and forth, lost in thought and concern, she had been pacing this way since morning.
"Tia... please join me for midday meal. Thou wilt not come closer to thy goal wearing a rut into the palace floor." Princess Luna was trying to be whimsical in her approach, but the look on her muzzle indicated deeper and more complex concerns than lunch.
"She is out there, sister. Uncontrolled, uncontained. She knows to hide; her purpose cannot be good. Somehow she must be found. If she were here in Equestria the matter would be over, but out there, in the human world, I am blind and forced to wait." Celestia was being her quiet, serious self now; a facet Luna knew all too well.
"A frightened mouse always runs away from the cat; she is only a mouse, Tia. She has not used any power save to flee. If she had, thou wouldst know of it and pounce. Canst thee not consider this mouse to be without guile and driven only by the same wish to live that commands all hearts? Why cannot this new sister be embraced instead?" This was the first time Luna had directly confronted Celestia over the matter. For these ancient beings, such questioning was equivalent to an impassioned argument.
"Do you forget the reign of chaos?" Celestia had stopped her pacing and stared directly at her sister; the hue of her timeless eyes was colored by endless years.
"Beloved sister, Tia, this little foal is not Discord. I do not believe she is any kind of threat. Is there no love in thy heart for thine own unfortunate subject? She did not ask for this, I am convinced she doth desire none of it." A potentially dangerous admission; Luna calmed herself so as to betray nothing to her sister.
Celestia studied her sister intently. She felt a hint of more in her sister's words than mere speculation. She turned and faced away, the burning sun on her flank striped with hues from the windows. "When the merest whim, the faintest whisper of thought can reshape the world, innocence is less than a blessing - rather it is the very fount of calamity. Her innocence only compounds that peril which she represents to us."
Celestia turned her head back to look levelly at her sister. "The peril which she represents to us both."
The words were quiet, but the meaning they held was as weighty as the moon itself. Luna understood only too well what was truly being said.
A thousand years in the past, she and her sister Celestia had managed to conquer the great enemy, Discord. History recorded Discord's reign as lasting a thousand years; convenient round numbers were ever the comfort of the court historians. But those aged, arguing scribblers of tomes knew nothing, and understood even less.
Under Discord's reign, mountains could become pudding, and entire landscapes turn to twisting ribbons of silken lace within the time of one breath and another. Nothing was stable; nothing lasted. Space was a dream wrapped in candy, and distance a gravy-flavored snake that writhed back upon itself. Nothing material could be trusted: what was in one instant a simple home and bed could in another moment be a lake of liquid fire hanging in the sky, or a living, thinking beast made of spaghetti and doorhandles. Neither life, nor soul, nor substance, nor meaning could last for long; reality itself was constantly in flux and nothing ever remained unchanged.
Within such an insane cosmos, there could be no rational accounting of time. To say that the reign of Discord lasted a thousand years, or a quadrillion, or a mere second would all be truth; the ultimate horror of constant change had forever scarred both Celestia and Luna. They had suffered under Discord effectively forever and ever and never. Luna often thought that Discord actually wanted to be conquered, that even the tyrant of chaos was tired of his rule. He had certainly permitted his defeat to happen.
In chaos all things must exist, given enough time. Even order must occasionally spring from randomness; chaos contains all things as a subset of itself. Disorder inevitably births its own demise, because it must. In chaos is all possibility, and one such possibility is its own end.
The pony sisters had fragmented memories of something like a life, but they knew all of it may not have been real. There was no valid proof that they had ever lived before the moment they both found themselves aware. Celestia and Luna had often considered the possibility that Discord had simply brought them into being, with a fragmented memory of a fictional past to soften the blow of their sudden awakening - but there was no way to know for certain. It would be a long time before they deduced their true nature, and that of Equestria itself.
They had a vague and broken conception of having been sisters, of having lived as some kind of royalty within a castle; but neither of them could concretely recall parents or their own childhoods. The castle had always been ruins; surely it must have once been complete. Then again, perhaps it too had no actual past. They haunted it, though, for in the constantly changing world, the slowly shifting ruins offered something almost like stability. This was doubtless another game for Discord; the broken castle was a toybox into which they were permitted a meager island of relative persistence.
That he favored them as toys was clear. What they endured under his whim was beyond even their ability to comprehend entirely. That they found the Elements Of Harmony was suspicious; but then such artifacts were themselves random possibilities too, and given enough time, inevitable outcomes of Discord's ever-rolling dice.
The sisters had suffered many forms and many shapes, but their opportunity came when, for the sake of chaos, they had found themselves alicorns, growing in godly, supernal power with every passing second. Though driven essentially insane, they still had somehow together found a thread of mutual purpose, and between their own new divinity, and the Elements Of Harmony, just enough power and reason to bind and seal the tyrant Discord.
But even after Discord's defeat, the sisters struggled to refine and accumulate their sanity; to stabilize both the still-churning world and their own minds and hearts. A thousand years of chaos - a meaningless phrase, uttered by ignorant authors of empty histories.
For a literally indeterminate time, Celestia and Luna fought their every whim, every thought inside them. As alicorns, the merest daydream could instantly reshape the land or dissolve the sky. Eventually they found a peace inside, born of constant control and vigilance, enough to keep the land below and the sky above, enough to permit light and shadow, enough to grace a world with fragile life that remained and grew and finally thrived.
It took an iron will to settle themselves and thus the world into order, to keep reality itself constant and stable. Celestia, with her grim, determined mind was the undisputed champion of this terrible discipline, and she not only kept reality intact, she became the anchor for Luna, who struggled to remain balanced in time and space and meaning.
At least until that day, that terrible night, when Luna could no longer keep her own inner peace, and lost herself to her own anger and misguided passions.
Her time imprisoned as an aspect of her own moon had saved the cosmos. If Celestia had not imprisoned her, Luna knew how easily she could have dismantled reality itself, and how rapidly chaos would have again swallowed them all. A mere thought, a mere whim; this was the horror that such absolute power represented. They could not know everything, but they could do anything, and nothing could be more dangerous or terrible than that.
The generation of a new alicorn was a known possibility. The deepest secret of Equestria was that magic, despite the endless study of the unicorns, could never entirely be reduced to reason and logic. It was born of chaos, of the same mother that had spawned Discord, and patches of chaos still scarred the land of Equestia. The Everfree forest was such a scar; a permanent wound that reality itself had suffered during the original battle to defeat Discord.
The cosmos of the humans was, like the Everfree, a realm of chaos. Though seemingly orderly at first glance, it was founded on uncertainty and randomness at the finest level, and had originally sprung forth from that foundation. The dice rolls of discordant chaos shaped every event within the human's universe. Thus it was an understood possibility that an alicorn might potentially be created. Even one was too much.
Luna understood the threat such a being represented as well as her sister; but she also held pity for such an entity. She herself would not exist save for the pity of her sister. Celestia had risked the use of the Elements Of Harmony upon her, but she had been careful that Luna should not be destroyed, but only stripped temporarily of her deific power. Long enough for a second chance, long enough to feel what being vulnerable and helpless meant once again. Long enough to rediscover sanity once more.
Lillian had not tried to use her powers; Luna had seen this. The infant alicorn had diligently avoided their use, and chosen to simply hide. Another pony might have tossed the binding ring away and opened wide the fountains of creation; within hours a concerted will to power would have inevitably made such an ambitious creature no longer flesh. They would have been permanently transformed into a threat as dire and eternal as Discord himself, and thus become the ruination of two universes.
Yet Lillian had not done this. Celestia had good reason for her harsh intentions, but she was consumed by her well justified fear. Surely though, properly bound and nurtured, there was another path that could be trod with regard to the new alicorn. If only Lillian had not been created from humanity, Celestia might listen. But humanity was dangerous and self-destructive, and that was the only vision that Celestia now seemed to have of their kind. It was not her fault; humans had more than a little of the flatulent spirit of Discord within them, Luna could smell it; and the odor was intensely strong.
But Luna, if anypony, had pity for the lost, the abandoned, the disregarded. She saw in the new sister a reflection of herself, when she had been lost to everything.
"Tia... Celestia, my dear and beloved sister, I would ask of thee something most heartfelt; please consider the pity thou didst show to me, and the love thou hast found returned in kind. I beg thee to find such pity again, should thy path finally cross with that of our terrified, infant sister." It was all Luna could do, for now. Plant a seed of compassion in the hope that it would bear fruit in time.
Celestia turned fully to face Luna; her expression softened by a deep knowledge of precisely why her sister would be so strongly moved. "Lulu, dear one, you know that I..." Suddenly Celestia stopped, her face lost in concentration. Her ears panned the room, she tilted her head as if listening. Within her, Celestia saw beyond seeing, and sensed a sudden change beyond the boundaries of her cosmos. The 'northern' hemisphere of the strange, spherical, human world. The middle of the region they called the 'Northamerizone'. Celestia's vast consciousness focused in; she could now envision flat plains interrupted by a human city. Going closer still, she found a single building, and within it...
"There!" She said with quiet excitement. "Gotcha."
And with that, the room filled with blinding light, as Celestia vanished into the strange places beyond normal space, to run through the secret passages behind the curtain of reality itself.
Alone, save for the curious guards by the throne, Luna understood what happened. Lillian must have removed her binding ring, and become visible to Celestia again. Luna could also feel the presence of the newfoal alicorn, like a tiny candle seen at the edge of vision in a vast, dark room. She could also perceive the bright glare of her sister racing to meet that candle.
No. Celestia was caught up in her chase, in her passionate concern for the welfare of every living being. Certainly the danger was real and the threat was indisputably dire, but Luna could not accept that there was only one safe outcome. Celestia had taught her friendship and love; her older sister only needed to be reminded of the full scope of her own lessons.
That was something a truly loving little sister was honor-bound to do.
Well, this is not going to go well. For which alicorn I 'm not sure, but my moneys on Lillian
yes, luna takes charge!
Wonderful chapter, I like where this is going even though it might be a tad scary for poor Lillian
Can't wait for the next chapter, its always a treat.
Also, DAT PLOT. Damn Celestia, you been working out?
yay! Cant wait to see what happens next.
Great, now I have that song in my head.
*Crosses fingers* Happy ending happy ending MUST BE HAPPY ENDING
Such an interesting take about Discord's era. Great read nonetheless
FOR THE NLR
I smell an epic Alicorn smackdown on the event horizon...
Tally ho!
*gets back up off the floor where this chapter punched me*
An excellent interpretation of Discord Chatoyance, really hammers home just how truly terrifying he/she/it (since after all, would an entity of pure chaos even have a gender?) would be
Luna's characterization was awesome as well, makes me really curious what she's got up her sleeve in the next chapter.
Here's the big question: Does Lillian have the same reality-bending powers that Celestia and Luna have, or is her magic simply on the level of exceptional unicorns? I wouldn't put the long teleport that she managed beyond the panicked reactions of any normal, near-Twilight unicorn. Lillian could well simply be a mortal pony that has all three of the natural Pony magics at high levels. There's the potential evidence in the inhibitor ring actually working, since it's less likely to stop an immortal's magic. I think that Lillians mortality is completely up in the air until Chatoyance says one way or another.
Chatoyance, here's a question for you: You already know the answer to the above question, but how would your story go if the reverse were true? I know you can't answer that now, but it's still a really fun thing to speculate about.
You have indeed recaptured....
Tze magicks!
Okay so this is going to make me sound super naggy and jerkish and I really do apologize in advance, but I have to get this out here. I respect you as a writer because you come across as very, very thorough. You're intelligent and if you don't know something you do your bloody research to make sure it's at least plausible.
And that's why your, um, tenuous grasp of Luna's speech patterns comes across as fairly disappointing.
First of all, Luna is using the Royal We in all of her dialogue; the Royal We was used by rulers when they were speaking on behalf of and with the authority of the State, and always, always to their inferiors. Luna here is speaking to an equal, or perhaps if you want to be legalistically technical, even to a superior. She would use first-person singular pronouns.
Secondly, while you seem to have the thou/thee/thy subjective/objective/possessive cases down just fine, remember that English does and always has conjugated its verbs alongside its pronouns. Thou and thee conjugate the verbs that follow them: -est, -st, and -t (thou goest, thou hast).
Do not try to make Luna sound fancy. She didn't in Luna Eclipsed: aside from her outmoded pronouns and volume issues, her syntax was more or less modern. Oftentimes, attempts to sound too formal or intelligent backfire.
All of this said...
I'm intrigued by your headcanon. It doesn't line up with mine, no, but that doesn't make it wrong; in fact, in many ways, I can see where you're coming from and I can accept what you've written. I'm very very grateful for this chapter; I'm grateful for being able to see things from Celestia and Luna's point of view. I can sympathize with them more now, and that... I'm grateful for that. For all intents and purposes Celestia is the antagonist, and a sympathetic antagonist is always more appealing to me than one who is unknown and mysterious and "evil" for the sake of being evil.
So thank you.
EDIT: You fixed it! Thank you very much.
You've made her a more sympathetic version of the obnoxious tyrant that haunts Wheller's universe.
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I have taken what you have said to heart, and it is my intention to try to correct my work, though perhaps not utterly to your liking.
One of my spouses, Eldenath, is a longstanding performer with many Renaissance Faires; her grasp of Elizabethan English is outstanding. When I began reading this chapter to her she complained bitterly, just as you did, and spanked me figuratively upside my pretentious head. Ouch.
She immediately set about correcting my dialog for princess Luna, and it seems to fit your criterion. She asked me to ask you to look over her work, and if she has made any errors correcting me, to make mention of it.
I am going to retain her services for the remainder of the story; Luna plays a goodly part in the proceedings and I want to do things correctly, as you surmise.
That said, this is where I will disappoint you, I think. I know Luna is more than capable of perfectly modern speech, if she so wishes, and indeed before the second season, my expectation of her as a character was radically different that what was presented in Luna Eclipsed.
However, using archaic speech for Luna offers me a wonderful crutch, and I admit it as such; it acts as an accent does to help me easily differentiate her voice from that of her sisters, and it serves my purpose for her appearances throughout the rest of the story, all supposedly incognito, in disguise with regard to Lillian, but not to the reader. In short, her speech acts as a open declaration to the reader of a fact that the character Lillian cannot know, and that ability is useful to me.
Her archaic voice also seems to help underscore her difference of mind from that of her sister, again a crutch, but for me it feels so powerful and useful.
I hope that this effort on my part to address your entirely valid concerns, and my explanation for my continued misbehavior with regard to retaining archaic speech, may... well... make you less cross with me, and make the story better for the additional attention to detail.
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Well, you (and Eldenath, I imagine) will be happy to know that I didn't spot any errors while running through the chapter again: it seems fine to me.
Ah, but to the contrary, miss: I would rather you didn't do things utterly to my liking. No good author bends entirely to the whims of her readers, because at that point she stops writing for herself and starts writing for them, and that never works. If writing Luna that way helps you as a writer, then it's not my place to ask you to stop.
I think you misunderstand me; I'm not cross with you. I can imagine that the comments I've left for you previously might have left that impression; it's not so. I don't always agree with what you write--but in the same vein you would not always agree with what I write. That's a natural thing. Creativity is bred from, so to speak, discord. I enjoy your writing, because of your thoroughness and your realistic but not overdone cynicism. It's enough to know that you'll be paying more attention to it in the future.
... Okay..
An excellent chapter, as always.
I did read it the instant the email popped up, and noted Luna's speaking voice was a bit odd - but here we are a bit later and after a re-read, all is well.
The narrative of the time of Discord was beautiful. It is truly difficult to get such subjective imagery across to an audience outside of the head-space the story occupies - but I think you did a really wonderful job here. It was very reminiscent of Philip Jose Farmer; lush and witty imagery that has a stark and edgy reality to it - a weight that serves as the underpinnings and motivations of the characters.
Bravo!
I liked your Description of the era of Chaos. Chaos itself is self destructive and it's very nature would undermine it and lead to it folding in on itself and allowing way for order or for order to control it. I can get behind that idea, chaos either moves aside or finds a way to co-exist within Order, I'm a fan of that idea.
The story looks to be building to an epic conclusion, I just hope Lillian/Graycoat has a happy ending, I'm a sucker for those when I feel a character deserves one. And Lillian's act of courage in the previous chapter is hopefully rewarded, doesn't have to be all sunshine and lollipops but yeah she deserves a happy ending.
In the words of Adam Jensen "I never asked for this" truer words if ever spoken regarding Lillian. And Celestia's responsibilities too of course.
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I'm intrigued by your headcanon. It doesn't line up with mine, no, but that doesn't make it wrong; in fact, in many ways, I can see where you're coming from and I can accept what you've written.
That is probably the most important part of 'fanfic appreciation 101' - the ability to view the story as inspired by the book/show/whatever.
I, personally, make use of a rather simple excuse to make acceptance easy:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/math/0/a/1/0a1c02498125a255a2f5b0e58908a8ae.png
That is the uncertainty principle, the core function used in the 'many worlds interpretation', and rather than blather on about it, I'll just leave the research up to the reader.
But, it does allow me to fully appreciate and be entertained by pretty much any well-written fanfic - because I have math that states everyone's interpretation is correct. :)
Given the end of The Taste of Grass, would this place the era of Chaos before G1? That is quite a wound to the world that Chaos left in the Everfree Forrest if it has managed to persist through multiple incarnations of the universe.
@Tychomonger
I was going to say the same thing. I am kind of thinking that this is either taking place in a slightly different continuity or Chatoyance is retconning the fannon she established there. If so, I have to say that I kind of like this version better. I think it illustrates the whole gods-but-not-gods element to the alicorns that I've always really liked. They're infinitely powerful, but only in certain contexts, and they're not able to extend their knowledge of themselves beyond a certain point.
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Every incarnation of My Little Pony has had monsters and creatures and dangerous places; they have all had some kind of Big Bad... or at least a Little Bad... except maybe G3.5 which was just fru-fru pretty much. To be honest, I can't stand the previous generations; I just thought it would be cool to put them under my attempt at a Very Big Tent.
So I would place the era of Discord before G1, and imagine that some incarnation of the Everfree, under different names and/or guises being the place that monsters come from. An eternal scar in reality; somewhere at the center of which is the ruin of a still-shifting castle new and ancient at the same time.
In my Headcanon, not every generation of the pony world finds the forest itself, or the castle, but the monsters originate there, even if they have no way to know that. But also, the most powerful source of magic is that scar; I see it as a double edged sword. It is necessary that the Everfree exist, even if it is also dangerous. It is like a fire; it warms and it cooks and it serves, but it can also burn everything down if it gets loose.
In my mind, that scar that is the Everfree is rather like the chaos engine that powers Equestria.
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Philip Jose Farmer, The World Of Tiers, my eternal inspiration. You have just complimented me beyond measure. I bow to you. Low to the ground.
I accidentally read this chapter...
Quickly! Make another!
*srsly addicted*
As usual, Luna for best princess. Celestia is pretty effing great, but sometimes she forgets what it's like to be anything else, and Luna does not have that problem.
Very glad to see Luna as the voice of reason here. And while I am beginning to understand Celestia's fear a little, I believe Luna is right to encourage her to try a less hostile approach. I wouldn't go so far as she suggests and make her officially become a princess herself, but approaching with compassion and understanding at least seems the more reasonable way to handle the situation.
It seems that Princess Celestia will have a new statue. I wonder that the significance of the LunaCat and Lillian looking like Ditzy do is. Only a TimePony such as Doctor Whooves can fix this.
My sister told me to spare Princess Derpy...but I didn't listen!
Again this story shows itself to be Mich more than what all the satires describe I will follow this thread to the end
Wow... It sounds like the alicorn sisters went through a hell all of their own before Equestria ever even existed. No wonder Celestia is such a control freak. She's terrified of things that she cannot control.
In a way, in this particular case Luna seems the more mature of the two even though Celestia is her older sister. I'm definitely in Camp Luna on this one. Celestia managed to save Luna, who is her equal in nearly every way. Why can't she at least make an effort to save Lillian?
Damn, just as it sounded like Luna was talking Celestia around, Lillian pops up on the radar. That has got to be the worst timing in fanfic history.
I'm hoping that maybe, just maybe, Luna's seed took root.