The Taste Of Blood

by Shrink Laureate


5. What a princess must

The sun washed gently across the balcony, reflecting off the freshly painted banister and the recently washed and quickly drying flagstones. It shone through Princess Celestia's hair as it was lifted by the breeze, and picked up highlights in the intricately painted teapot. The wooden table under Twilight's forehoof and the teacup held in her aura were reassuringly solid and real.

But Twilight had just one priority item on her checklist for the day. She gathered her strength and asked, “Princess Celestia, have you … have you ever killed somepony?”

Celestia's teacup paused in the air for barely a moment before she set it down. “So that's what it is. I’ve had an inkling that something was amiss from the tone in your letters recently. I take it this question has been troubling you?”

Twilight nodded, not meeting her mentor's eyes. “I've been—” She stopped, looking away, as if confessing a crime. “I've been having nightmares,” she whispered.

Celestia looked on kindly. “Nightmares? You know that's nothing to be ashamed of, Twilight. Everypony has nightmares. Tell me, what are they about?”

“They're about each the villains we've defeated. Nightmare Moon, Discord, Chrysalis …”

“You're worried they may come back?” Twilight opened her mouth to reply, but Celestia interrupted her. “It’s all right. It's quite normal, after experiencing conflict like that, for the memories of those emotions to remain with you. You aren't an emotionless statue, Twilight, and nor were the heroes we remember as having done great things in the past. Lingering fears are to be expected, and it doesn't make you any less courageous for having faced them. But I promise you, they are gone.”

Twilight still hadn't met her gaze. “That's not it, princess. It's something else.”

“Oh?”

“They're not dreams about losing, or the bad ponies coming back, they're about, well … winning.” The Princess frowned. “And then what happens after that.”

“After that?”

Twilight forced the words out of her. She could keep nothing from Celestia. “What happens, or happened, to those we've defeated. Whether they're trapped in stone, or imprisoned, or …” She swallowed. “… or dead.”

“Ah, I see,” said Celestia. She'd been prepared to comfort Twilight's fears, as she had for the filly before, but victor's guilt was a very different subject. She took a moment to let Twilight talk, and to consider the right approach.

“I'm being silly, I know,” said Twilight quickly. “I mean, Discord isn't even imprisoned any more. I saw him just the other day at Fluttershy’s cottage, laughing and messing with the gravity. Which, let me tell you, is less fun than it sounds when there are animal droppings in the room.”

Celestia chuckled.

“And Nightmare Moon was actually Princess Luna, who's alive and well and joining us for dinner later. But it's got me thinking. In just the last couple of years, we've had to face a bunch of different threats like that.”

“You have. And you've all done extraordinarily well,” Celestia reassured her.

Twilight frowned. “But before that, you had to deal with things like that alone. Any number of them in the last thousands years. And before that you and Luna faced them together.”

“We did.”

“And I can't help … wonder if you always had the luxury we did, of reforming or saving the villains you faced.”

“I think I understand. You're concerned about the price of victory. You're worried about what exactly my sister and I may have had to do in the past – what I've had to do,” she corrected herself, “in order to safeguard Equestria.”

Twilight nodded. “That's right.”

“Well, you've read the histories, Twilight. You should already know the answer to your question.”

“I know,” admitted Twilight, tapping her hooves together nervously, “but I always, kind of…read around those bits.”

“Because you didn't want to read anything negative about me?”

“Uh-huh,” she confirmed.

Celestia paused, considering. “Tell me, what can you remember about the Nightmare Wars?”

The name sounded ominous, but still Twilight perked up. A history question! This she could handle. “Well, it's the name given to a cluster of minor wars and rebellions that all occurred in the early years AC – which is to say, around a thousand years ago, give or take,” she replied promptly. “They don't represent a single concerted campaign, but rather a short period of a few months or years marked by a number of otherwise isolated conflicts.”

Celestia dipped her head to her student. “Broadly true, but missing some vital details.” Twilight's face fell slightly – she hated being wrong. “These conflicts didn't simply happen a thousand years ago. They began immediately after my own banishment of Nightmare Moon. In fact, the Long Night and our battle at the Castle of the Two Sisters could be considered the first of the Nightmare Wars. The first military action between city states began just two weeks after that.”

Twilight was surprised. “The books I read didn't say anything about that at all! They described each of the local campaigns as happening on its own, for some other reason. Reports from the time often disagreed over the exact cause of each conflict, but they each appear to have arisen out of purely local grudges.”

“That isn't entirely surprising. History is written by the winners, and there were no winners in the Nightmare Wars. Tell me though, what drives ponies to wage war?”

Despite some trepidation over where this conversation could be headed, Twilight endeavored to answer her mentor's question. “Well, no sane pony would go to war on a whim. The cost of war, in money, casualties, and lost production and culture, inevitably outweighs any practical benefits, so it should only be possible when ponies believe the consequences of inaction to be worse than that cost of action. This typically happens only when they're responding to an outside threat.”

“That would be true of a single rational pony, but again you're missing a key aspect of it.” Twilight pouted a little. “Very rarely is the decision to wage war made by just a single pony. No ruler can declare war without the support of their population, or a large portion of it at least. It simply wouldn't be possible. So?” she prompted.

Twilight picked up the cue. “So, what would cause a population of ponies to think war was necessary?” Celestia nodded. “Um. Large groups tend not to think as rationally as individuals, so…the same thing, but on a less…rational level, I suppose? Ponies would have to believe that there was a threat of some sort. A threat that must be faced, or else they’d face worse consequences.”

“Fear,” clarified Celestia. “For war to happen, there needs to be an atmosphere of desperate fear in the population. It matters little if the cause of that fear is rational, or even true. And a particularly skilled public speaker can change the mood of a group to their advantage, stirring up fear and creating an environment suitable for war, but they need something to work with first. There needs to be an undercurrent of fear amid the population that they can dredge to the surface.”

“But some wars are necessary, princess! There are times ponies have had to defend themselves.”

“Some are, yes. But fewer than you imagine. Most wars do not have a clear good and evil, an aggressor and a victim, but instead occur between two forces that each believe themselves to be defending what they must.”

Twilight felt increasingly uneasy. This wasn't a topic the princess had ever talked to her about, nor one she felt prepared for. Yet the desire to learn and to please her mentor kept her attentive.

“With that in mind,” continued Celestia, “what do you think may have caused the Nightmare Wars?”

Twilight obediently connected the dots. “A lot of ponies, all across Equestria, must have been afraid all at once. After Luna turned into Nightmare Moon, and you banished her, they…lost confidence that you could protect them?”

“That’s right. Much of the mistrust was stirred up by troublesome ponies who saw a chance to profit from the conflict, but the seeds of that fear were planted during the Long Night.”

“Was that really enough reason for … millions of ponies to feel so afraid? Was that all it took?”

“Think of it from their perspective, Twilight, and remember that the Long Night was in fact nearly a week long. A whole week of darkness across all Equestria. A week during which the certain, regular motion of the sun and moon across the sky, that they'd taken for granted all their lives, simply went away, with no explanation. A week when warm autumn turned suddenly into frozen winter, threatening their crops. A week when they couldn't travel or spread news. A week of huddling together in the cold, unsure of what was happening or if it would ever end.”

“But you brought the sun back, princess! You put everything right.”

Celestia shook her head. “Not everything. I had the power to put the sun and moon back in the heavens, but I could not restore the trust that had been lost. Ponies no longer believed that I could protect them. Some feared invasion from the gryphons, or the yaks, or the arimaspi, or the return of the Crystal Empire. Others feared the avarice the saw in each other, even as a reflection of their own.”

“But those fears were unfounded!”

“Were they? The gryphon invasion of Cloudsdale in 314 AC would suggest otherwise.” Twilight grumbled quietly acknowledgement. Celestia continued, “And so, each kingdom felt the need to defend itself. They gathered up arms and armour, recruited or conscripted or hired soldiers, and began preparing for the worst.”

“Wouldn't that just mean they each sat waiting for the other to act? A stalemate?”

“It would, but when a bow has been pulled so tight it needs only the slightest touch to release it. Each kingdom saw the preparations their neighbours were making and was nervous about what they were planning. Each city divided saw the other side preparing for conflict. It took only a single pony to voice the thought that ‘we need to strike them before they are ready to strike against us’. The defending nation called on their allies to help them hit back against the attacker, while the other side called on its own allies in turn. One by one the dominos fell, and before long, sides and alliances were forgotten, as the whole of Equestria descended into war.”

“But you stopped them, right? You must have done. It's been centuries since there was a war in Equestria.”

“Indeed I did, though it wasn't easy.”

“What did you do?” asked Twilight. She almost expected a magic artefact or spell to restore faith in the power of friendship.

“I issued a Royal Decree that no armed force was to leave its own territory, no matter the circumstances, without the agreement of a council of kingdoms. Any army found leaving its home land to attack another would be stopped, with lethal force if necessary.”

Twilight was disappointed. “That's it?”

“The decree served a dual purpose: not only to prevent any kingdom from launching an invasion against another, but more importantly to mitigate the fear of invasion from other kingdoms. Without that fear, the desire and conditions for conflict would eventually subside.”

“And they all followed it?”

“I'm afraid not. Nor did I truly expect them to, though I'd hoped the truce would last at least a little longer than it did. In fact it was less than a moon before my bluff was called, and in my own back yard: the armies of Cloudsdale led by General White Lightning, and those of Canterlot let by Prince Nebula, marched to face each other.”

“What did you do?”

“I had no choice. If my decree was to mean anything at all, it needed to be seen to be enforced decisively. I had to act.”

“So your own army engaged them?”

Celestia shook her head. “No. Remember, Twilight, if the rule of law is to protect anypony, it must apply to everypony, without exception – even for a princess. My own army were subject to the same law as all the others, which is why they had to stay at home in Everfree. Besides, they were tired out from their own recent battles. Instead I flew out to stop them on my own. It took some persuading, since many of my soldiers wished to defend their princess.”

“You faced both armies without any force of your own? All alone?” asked Twilight incredulously.

Celestia nodded, and picked up her teacup. With an even voice, she calmly stated, “I killed fourteen thousand pegasi and eleven thousand unicorns that day.”

Twilight was dumbfounded. Her world dropped away. She sat there, unable to speak or move, caught between shock, incomprehension and a growing terror. Every detail of the garden around them snapped into focus: the wooden table, the tea set, the smell of flowers and tea and earth and pony, the breath in her nostrils, they all flooded into her brain as it sought something, anything to think about beyond the horrible truth of that statement.

Her eyes flicked from the floating teacup held in a golden aura, to Celestia's long, tapered horn. Magnificent compared to any mere unicorn's horn, Twilight had always admired it. She had such fond memories of embracing the princess, and feeling that horn rest against the side of her head. It was the instrument she used to raise the sun each day. The same instrument she'd used to kill thousands upon thousands of ponies. So many of them, so quickly, that she couldn't even have been aware of each one.

She thought of all the ponies she knew in Ponyville, passed by every day, waved ‘good morning’ to. She thought of all those lives ending, suddenly, all at once. She tried to think of that a hundred times over, but she couldn't. The number simply didn't feel like a real thing.

Worst of all, Twilight realised with rising disgust that a part of her was still curious about it, that she wanted to know why Cloudsdale had fielded the larger force, how their forces had been arrayed in the field, exactly where and when this battle had happened, what socioeconomic forces had driven it, and what magic the princess had used to…

To kill. To slaughter. To decimate. To murder. To indiscriminately end so many lives.

She felt sick. The tea sat uncomfortably in her stomach. Across from her the princess still sat, calm and unmoved, with that same classic smile. The smile that Twilight Sparkle loved. That she now realised she hated. Bile gathered in her throat, threatening to block it.

“Excuse me,” she mumbled as she staggered out of the chair and along the path leading through the palace gardens.