Luna wept. It was an awful sound to witness, but the sight of her was even worse. She was vulnerable in the worst of ways, stripped bare of protective illusions, too-thin, gawky, there was nothing princessly left about her. She had almost gored him with her horn when she had pressed her face against his neck and Gosling was mindful of it even now, because the point was dangerously close to the soft, exposed underside of his jaw.
Having undergone what he could only describe as an emotional reset, Gosling had no idea what it was that he was feeling, only that he was feeling a great many things. One emotion eluded him though, and that was anger. The patience that his mother had pounded into his head prevailed, it had endured, it had won out, and now he found himself searching for reasons to make this work.
First and foremost, Luna was compromised and a variety of reasons existed. Perhaps the most important factor, she was ill—mentally ill—and sick ponies didn’t always have full control over their faculties. Gosling only knew of this viewpoint, this outlook due to his own time in intensive therapy. Luna might think that she was ‘grown up enough’ to be in control of her actions, but this just wasn’t true. He had married under false pretenses of a sort; not only was she of a vulnerable age, but the true depths of her mental illness had been hidden from him as well.
The faith of the First Tribes demanded mating for life, and that illness of any sort was no good reason to leave your mate. Mental illness was a sickness, Gosling believed that even if many ponies didn’t; he took a far more enlightened stance having suffered from a variety of issues himself. A sickness of the mind wasn’t something that just got better or could be dismissed by saying it was all in one’s head.
But Gosling’s faith had been smashed into tiny unrecognisable pieces. Everything that he had believed in, everything that had once given him strength and faith, it all felt so insubstantial now. The immaculate pedestal upon which his goddesses had been placed was now a ruin, a mess consisting of painful, jagged fragments that he had no desire to sort through, because he didn’t want his heart to bleed. How could faith exist in such a thorny, inaccessible place? This was awful enough, indomitable enough, that it felt like an insurmountable problem with no possible means to fix.
The sheer overwhelmingness of it all manifested as a sense of nausea and Gosling felt like puking. He couldn’t walk away, even if his faith was broken, his virtue remained—his mother had hammered into place a set of ironclad values—and even if virtue wasn’t a factor, leaving still wasn’t an option because…
This went beyond him.
Like a slap in the face, this realisation struck him and Gosling felt his knees wobble. This wasn’t about his future, no, this was about Luna’s future, and Luna’s future was Equestria’s future. Long after he was gone, long after he was little more than dust in some ancient tomb, Luna would exist, and with her, his memory would exist in some form. But which Luna? That was the important outcome here. A broken Luna now might mean a dreadful future, and he shivered from the very thought of it. The past had shown him what Luna could be when pushed into despair. Equestria’s history had been shaped by it.
Which meant that… Equestria’s future would be shaped by whatever he chose to do this day.
“Luna… you said that being lied to wasn’t my worst fear…” Sniffling a bit, Luna seemed to be pulling herself together for a response, so Gosling continued, but with much hesitation. “What is my worst fear, Luna? You know so much about me that I don’t even know about myself. If today wasn’t the sum of all of my worst fears, than what is? What could be worse than this?”
“Do you really want to know?” Luna’s voice was a vulnerable creak and pretty much every adolescent filly’s worst nightmare. It did not sound feminine, nor pretty, no, it was raspy, bubbly, and snotty with phlegm.
“Yes, Luna. I would like to know. Being able to compare the two might help me decide what I’ll do next.” Without thinking about it, Gosling gave her a comforting squeeze and then he stood there, waiting, wondering if she would be straightforward with him.
“Because you stayed with me, even though I didn’t deserve it, I’ll tell you. Normally, this is something I would make a pony face in dreams, but for you, I’ll bend the rules.” Luna drew in a deep breath and there was a great snorgling in her throat when she tried to clear her voice. It was a horrendous, disgusting sound, the sort of sound that no self-respecting filly would ever allow another mortal soul to hear.
Like a pegasus watching the rain, Gosling waited for the snot-storm to pass.
“Your greatest fear is losing your faith, Gosling, because you secretly believe that a pony cannot be good or moral without faith. Because you wear your goodness like a finely polished suit of armor, the idea that you might be left naked and exposed without your faith terrifies you. For you, immoral, corrupt ponies are those without faith—” Luna’s voice broke, she began to shudder, her words unfinished, and she let out a heart-rending keening wail.
The words were almost his undoing and Gosling wished that he hadn’t asked. Such was the cost of knowledge; sometimes, one learned something they didn’t want to know, something awful, something horrendous and profound. Sometimes, after learning it, there was no going back to one’s previous state of existence, there was no return to innocence, no stepping away from becoming enlightened.
This was one of those moments and the events of everything that had just happened pealed like hollow echoes in his mind. Of all of the things that had happened so far today, this was the worst. There would be no going back. No return. Whatever strength he had left fled from him, and Gosling felt something within his thoughts break, a tangible, perceptible sensation that left behind a profound sense of pain that was quite unlike anything else.
Of everything else that had broken this day, this hurt the worst.
“I have no faith in anything,” Luna bawled and her words bounced among the remains of the ruined library. “I am faithless! I’m immoral and corrupt and this is why none have faith in me! My sister believes and has faith in intrinsic goodness, but I believe in nothing! I have only seen the worst in life, Confessor, and it has hollowed me out! I see the worst in the dreams of ponies! Whatever evidence of good there might be is tainted by the knowledge of evil! I believe in nothing!”
“I have my own confession,” Gosling said, and was filled with dread by the words lurking on his tongue. “Today has broken my faith. I don’t know what I believe in anymore.” The calm austerity of his own words alarmed him, and he felt that there should have been far more emotion put into what he had said. One of Luna’s wings unfurled and he felt her feathers wrapping around his neck to cling to him.
She had to have realised what she had done, and that she was the cause. Gosling felt awful, but also rather relieved in some odd way. It felt good to confess, to say the truth, to bare his heart. Luna shrieked and very nearly ruptured his eardrums. Reeling, he clung to her, she clung to him, and Gosling wished that he knew what Luna was feeling so that he might know what to say. Luna had to know what he was feeling—she knew his mind and greatest fear, after all—but he had no such means to help her. He was a pegasus with broken faith and she—she was a broken goddess with no belief of her own.
“I feel terrible,” Celestia said to her two emotional companions. “I have let everypony down. The both of you, for starters. Twilight, there is so much I keep from you, but I feel that I have to. It bothers me to say that, but you are still learning, still making mistakes. It pains me that I have to withhold things and I wish—”
“A changeling posed as Moondancer right inside of my own castle,” Twilight blurted out and the firelight reflected cheery orange flames in her teary eyes. “Whatever it is you are about to say, don’t say it. When I get my own house in order, I’ll be more receptive to secrets. For now, it is best if you keep really important things from me. I have some hard lessons that need to be learned still.”
“Twilight, you’re growing into the princess that I had hoped for you to be.” Offering up a sad smile, Celestia knew that her words were cold comfort, but Twilight appeared to be basking in them anyway. Changing the subject, she glanced in Cadance’s direction, and saw that the pink alicorn was half-dozing on the chaise lounge. “I wonder how Gosling and Luna are doing.”
“You want to go butting in and rescue Luna, don’t you?” Cadance’s words were as slow and sleepy as she looked.
“No—”
“Don’t lie to me!” One eye opened while the other remained half-shut and all of the hair along Cadance’s spine stood up while a terrific growl could be heard deep in the base of her throat.
“Okay, I do.” Kicking out her hind legs, Celestia tried to get comfortable on a sofa meant for ponies, not giantesses. The wood creaked from her shifting bulk and the center of the sofa sagged, bowing beneath her weight.
“Luna needs to learn that her actions have consequences.” Cadance inhaled, licked her lips, and she began to rub her neck with one front hoof. “She is aware of consequences now, to some small degree, and how they affect her. If Luna is ever going to grow, she needs to understand how the consequences of her actions affect other ponies. Luna finally has something that she doesn’t want to lose, a toy that she can’t bear to have taken away from her. She will either come around and behave herself, or this particular toy will walk away, and none of her commands or sense of entitlement will do her any good. When I began grooming Gosling for you, Auntie, I also kept Luna in mind. It’s all part of the plan.”
“I need to step up my princess game.” Twilight too, scratched her neck while muttering to herself. “I pulled off a pretty good long play with Sumac Apple and Trixie Lulamoon, but right now I just feel inadequate. I gotta push harder and do more.”
“I don’t feel like a princess at all at the moment.” Celestia’s confession caused two sets of ears to prick. “I’ve failed as a princess, I’ve failed as a sister, I’ve failed as a wife, and I’ve done a pretty lousy job as a pony too. I’ve done pretty much all of the things that I would lecture others about, and I don’t feel good about that. Even worse, I’m not ready to accept the consequences. If Gosling walks away, or worse, if Luna drives him away, I’m probably going to fall to pieces.”
“How serious are you about this?” Cadance asked, and there was a disturbing hardness in her voice that contrasted far too much with her soft, pink, cotton candy body.
“I might unofficially step down, Cadance.” Celestia sighed, closed her eyes, and shifted her bulk once more, trying desperately to get comfortable. The ache in her back was almost as bad as the one in her heart. “You’ll be in charge of course… for a while. Keep Twilight under your wing. This will be an invaluable learning experience for her and I would be remiss if I failed to be a good teacher even as my life collapses. I don’t need anymore guilt.”
“Are we really preparing for the worst?” Rubbing her two front hooves together, one of which was wet and somewhat shriveled, Twilight began to shake her head from side to side.
“Yes, Twilight.” Now, a dreadful cramp trampled Celestia’s stomach and she wiggled in a vain attempt to be rid of it. Reaching down with one front hoof, she rubbed at her navel, hoping to rub the cramp away, but it was to no avail. Flailing her body around, she tried to get comfortable—the spiky pains in her spine were awful—and this proved to be too much for the sofa.
With a splintery crackle of sundered wood, the sofa surrendered all of its structural integrity to Celestia’s celestial mass. Celestia fell almost a foot-and-a-half to the floor, and the cushions of the sofa did nothing to lessen her impact. The stone tiles shattered too, collapsing into hundreds of jagged fragments, some of which tore into the flattened sofa cushion.
“Baiseur de la mère!” Celestia shouted, and her voice thundered through the small, private parlour. Now on the floor, she lay among the ruins of crushed sofa and broken floor tiles, looking quite annoyed, or maybe cross, or maybe even peeved.
Whatever it was that Celestia was feeling, it proved to be too much for poor Twilight, who had covered her mouth with both hooves and was staring in abstract horror at her fallen teacher. Twilight’s ears twitched, but whatever understanding she might have of the words uttered by the fallen giantess, it remained to be seen.
“Pourquoi cela continue-t-il à se produire?” Cadance replied while rolling her eyes. “Sacrébleu!” Rousing herself from her comfortable position of repose, the Princess of Love moved to rescue her fallen aunt.
Celestia, on the floor and considering well her current predicament, was thankful to have a rescuer.