//------------------------------//
// Echoes of the Moon 
// Story: Drops of Luna 
// by Glen Gorewood 
//------------------------------//

After Luna's return, Castle of the Two Sisters

Princess Luna in her diminutive younger form stares up at the ancient statue of herself.  Time has worn away the features, but she knows at one time her visage was evident.  The courtyard around her is overgrown and alive.  Crickets sing a tune as night birds carry a song of their own across the skies.

From here she can see her Moon above, her prison for so long when she was Nightmare Moon.  While she was trapped up there, she had heard nothing but the sounds of the space around her moon and beyond.  However she remembered a sound, one from shortly after her banishment.  A tune of love and mourning from some creature below, one that had promised a light in the darkness.  Many time she had sung it in her prison, and though other ballads had somehow reached her for a short time one day they had all stopped.

In her madness she had thought that Celestia, her sister, had killed the one who had sung to her.  The one with the power to bring music to the moon, from wherever he had been.  Now she knew better, but still she wondered why the music had stopped.  Why had her light that could reach her in the sky disappeared?

But even after that voice had gone, one song had always reminded her that his intent and love was pure.  Whoever that stallion had been, he had hoped to ease her pain and give her a light in the darkness of her madness and the moon.  She hummed the tune before the statue of herself in the moonlit courtyard, wondering who he had been.

Luna could have tried to sing the song aloud, but she feared doing so would ruin the memory of his voice singing to her while she was trapped up there.  Ceasing her hum to appreciate the light of her stars above her, she wondered aloud; "I wonder why you stopped singing down here."

As the words leave her lips a glow grows from the base of the statue.  The princess of the night turns and stares at the silver magic that ripples the stone around it loose.  Seeing the edges of a hidden space in the glow, Luna uses her magic to remove the long sealed away stone.  It's seal opened, the glow intensifies before fading away.  A long held protection and preservation spell unlocking for the one whom the caster had loved alone.

Reaching inside with her magic, Luna levitates out a bag filled with what feels like many scrolls and books.  Teleporting them away to her room for later, she looks into the hidden space once again.  Her eye catches sight of a tome far in the back recesses of the hidden nook.  Carefully removing it from its resting place of over a thousand years, she looks it over; and almost misses the note falling to the ground after being displaced from the book itself.

Catching it in her magic, she reads it to herself.  

Tears begin to fall from Luna's eyes as the answer to her question concerning her light has been answered.  For within the note are the final words of an unknown stallion lost to time, lamenting his inability to continue to sing for her.  A ballad writer whose life's work is now hers, kept safe by his magic long after he was gone.  A singer and a musician who had loved the moon with all his heart and soul, but never managed to tell her before it was far too late.

Her light who sang to her as long as he lived, his words reaching the moon from Equestria so far below her.  A stallion whose song had planted the seed of hope the elements of harmony would use to free her from the Nightmare.  Whose last words were as pure as his songs had been.



"My lovely moon, I must leave soon.
Remember the light I promised for you.
My heart and my soul, I give now to the moon.
The works of a lifetime is all I can do.
My lady Luna I never forgot, the promise I made you on this very spot.
My love I'm sorry I can't continue on, for I am a mere mortal with the gift of song.
The pale horse is coming, my time is done.
You'll always have my heart, my Luna my love."



At the end of the note was the only hint of his name.  A hoof drawn cutie mark of a lyre's shadow on a full moon.  The signature of the unknown stallion, who had loved the mare in the moon with all his heart.  Whose song had bridged the great space to comfort her in her prison above; and who to his dying day had sung to his beloved Princess Luna from far below the stars.

Luna stares at the note as tears fall from fresh from her eyes, droplets of crystal spiraling towards the ancient stone ground at her hooves.
In a voice tinged with sorrow and mourning, one that only those who have found the truth of that which they have lost but never realized that they had till it is far too late can truly use; she speaks softly to one long gone.

"You were real, and thou loved us even after we were banished to the moon..."

Another tear drops from Luna's eyes.

"Thou sang to us for all thine life each night.."

The tears touch the ground with the sound of breaking glass.

"Yet though thou loved us truly, we will never know.."

Her watery eyes look down at the letters upon the page, written by hoof so long ago with forms reminiscent of sheer music turned into letters, that sing those last words into her heart and soul.

"I... do not even know your name."

And now centuries later in the very spot where he had sung to her seven days after her banishment, Luna weeps for one whose name is unknown.  One who loved her truly even after her fall, and whose song she will always recall.  As she cries beneath her beloved moon she hold close to her chest that weathered tome.  Whose title is embossed in silver inlays and a star map of a night sky from a thousand years past. 

The name of the tome glows in the moonlight, as if filled with the very life and soul of the one who crafted and wrote it so long ago.

"Drops of Luna"' 

The gift that one stallion had desired to present over a thousand years ago to his beloved moon.  A work of love and appreciation, a ballad for the Princess whose art and life stole his heart and soul.  For the love that would cause him to spend his life singing each night to Luna sealed away in her Moon, till the last of his breathe left his body.  The princess who only now, after being freed from the Nightmare over a thousand years later; holds that gift in her hooves.

And as the tear drops continue to fall from Luna's eyes, she mourns the one whose name she shall never know.  The stallion whose love she felt so keenly from afar, but whose face she can never hold.  Whose voice she can remember so clearly, but can never put a face to.  She cries for the one who loved her truly without fail till he passed so long ago, and mourns what could have been but never will be.

She stays under the moonlight sky and cries the truest of tears for that stallion with no name.
The unknown Bard who loved the Moon, whose passing was centuries too soon.