So. There we are, in the ruins of what was once the crowning glory of the Solar Dominion. The Citadel is a fragment of what it used to be, crumbling stone and metal melted, cooled, and remelted into bizarre twists. The air is thick with the smell of ash and wild magic, a throbbing pain at the base of my horn a reminder of how torn apart this place is on how many levels. I remember my beating of the guards earlier and gulp. Seems like small potatoes now. Though doubtless, the city was largely evacuated after the first explosion, there's no way everypony escaped in the two-some hours we spent in the castle. Emptying a city takes longer than that. Even thinking optimistically, there's no doubt that there's a lot of blood on my hooves.
Dash seems just as shaken up, and Flit is utterly beside herself. Remember, she's a healer. Seeing this kind of destruction and death must be driving her mad. Even with my terrible vision, I can still see her quaking.
When Dash speaks, her voice shakes audibly. "L—Let's get out of here, Twilight."
Shuddering, I nod and begin to hesitantly trot north, stumbling over rocks and other assorted debris, towards where we came from. My horn still aches and I still can't use magic, but as long as we can get out of here, I should be able to start fixing my eyes up. [1]
The two pegasi follow me, easily catching up to my shambling mess of a body. I grumble for a moment about how uninjured they are before shutting up and letting them guide my mostly-blind self back towards the mountains. I can't help it; I don't have the wherewithal to complain as much as I wish I could. The world around me exists in a faint miasma of strange purple and green lights, and white noise fills my ears, a faint static that's maddening to listen to, and that I can't even begin to escape. I grimace. This whole situation is giving me some nasty flashbacks to the Chasmlands, and from there, my mind begins to wander to the whole point of this exercise:
So, Luna gave us some explosives to blow up Celestia's headquarters that were absolutely too strong to just blow a hole in a wall. Even told Mena to plant them exactly there, on the north wall. Stupid, I swear to myself. You should have noticed. The north wall is where all the nexus pipes split off, the perfect place to destabilize the magical system running under the whole city. So why?
Luna didn't strike me as the type to recklessly endanger innocent ponies; that's more Celestia's thing. So what was the point? It wasn't to destroy the troops; the whole barracks had been emptied entirely. I grind my teeth as we continue on into the mountains:
I'm sick of misjudging ponies, damnit![2]
---
[1]: While no real healer, I'd still been on battlefields. Of course I'd know some medical magic. What do you take me for?
[2]: Definitely not the last time.
---
As soon as I step out of the range of the magical feedback from the Citadel [1], I feel the magic in the world around me come racing back into my neural circuits and I let out an involuntary gasp as the headache recedes almost as quickly as it had arrived. Before I do anything else, I set to work fixing my eyes, and space once again bleeds into existence out of a blur of nigh-incomprehensible colors. The pain abates some, but no matter what I do, I can't force it to recede entirely, nor can I remove the slight blurring that still nags at the edges of my vision. I sigh. Time will fix those, if nothing else.
The sun in the sky above us no longer burns with unrestrained rage. Instead a weight seems to be pressing down upon us, a sighing misery that forces us into melancholy and pessimism. On the horizon, a great plume of smoke writhes up into the otherwise-spotless sky, casting a shadow over the already depressing sun. I close my eyes and, for a moment, the world falls away from around me. I take that moment to clear my mind, to think over things rationally like I seem to be having so damn much trouble doing recently.
Okay. What do I know about everything that's happened since this whole mess started:
Celestia sent me to the Sovereignty to retrieve a false relic in hopes of making me fail.
Luna interceded. She monitored me throughout my little stroll by using Marks as her eyes and ears. My eyes snap open and I frown.[2]
Something about that suddenly seems so...convoluted. Unnecessarily so. If she wanted to recruit me to be a spy like she did, would it not be easier after the bombing of the first town with the Solar Effigy? I've been so caught up in this whole madness that I've never really stopped to think about what Luna would gain from letting me go through with the mission and nearly die half a dozen times in the Chasmlands instead of sending an envoy there to meet me directly as soon as I arrived. Yet, there was always something, wherever I stopped...It was almost like...
"She knew exactly where I was going to go, at what time..." I mumble aloud, an idea beginning to take shape in my mind. Without moving, keeping my eyes firmly locked in my thoughts—I'm so close to finding out what's going on—I call for Rainbow. She comes slogging gloomily out of the shadow of a nearby rock where she'd been resting, inclining her head in curiosity in lieu of speech.
"Rainbow. When did Luna ask you to be my contact in the Dominion?"
She cocks her head. "What do you mean?"
I sigh. "Did Luna seek you out before or after I was already here?"
Comprehension ignites in her eye and she nods. "Oh, I gotcha. It was before. Way before. I had to fly almost half as fast as I could to get here," she preens. My watering eyes narrow, and she notices. "Why? Something up?"
I nod absentmindedly, but I'm not listening to her at all at this point. My mind is racing back along all the different stops, trying to recall what characterized each one. And somehow, they all felt...
Felt...
Planned. [3]
That's it.
Above all, there was always a feeling of prescription to what I was doing. Whenever I was about to die, there was a miraculous save. Whenever capture threatened, I managed to escape. Even when I was running from echoes in the Canterlot ruins, it all felt...acted. Like I was a character in a play.
A play written by Luna.
My lips part ever so slightly and I hiss in a horrified breath. What had Marks said?
"Instead of stars, Luna calls them her Oculi."
"She sees pretty much everything."
"Some say they can even look through time."
Everything that I did in the Sovereignty—which led to what I'm doing over here—was planned. Which begs the question: now that the Citadel is rubble and ash...what now? What happens next? Because I can't stay here. Ponies know my face, and that I was involved in the Citadel's destruction. Celestia will have seen that. If somepony sees me, there is going to be blood spilled, and I've already killed too many.
Convenient, then, when the air warps and splits around me and I'm back in the Lunar throne room, hurling my guts all over the polished black marble floor. Rainbow and Flit appear to be in roughly the same straights. Because you probably shouldn't use planar travel spells without ponies knowing they're coming first, Luna.
Speaking of Luna, she's sitting in front of me.
Smiling.
She knows.
---
[1]: Which, by the way, I'm nowhere close to done with. Don't worry, things are just going to go downhill from here.
[2]: I'm going to need to address Marks' hypocrisy sooner or later. Next time I see her, she's getting a Twilight Sparkle-style hoof kick right to the logic.
[3]: I don't know why it took me so long to come to this conclusion.