The entire gallop back to the throne room, Twilight was expecting to be accosted by a guard and questioned about how her trunk ended up in the tower, or hear news of somepony who’d been rushed to the castle infirmary for projectile trunk trauma.
She did pass guards, who startled away from her rush, but called a greeting after her when she was already a dozen strides down the corridor. None of them tried to stop her, or even seemed all that interested in what she was doing rushing around the castle.
“Odd,” she said to Spike as she stopped to catch her breath and urge him to let go of her neck. “Why is nopony surprised?”
“Twilight, as often as you run around the castle looking terrified, they must just assume it’s Tuesday.”
“But it’s Thursday.” She gasped. “Isn’t it? Today is Thursday, right? We haven’t missed—” She cut off at his waving claws and exasperated clucking. “Oh.” She shot him a disgusted glare. “Don’t tease when I’m this tense.”
He laughed. “I tease because you’re this tense. You need to lighten up. Honestly, Twilight, you weren’t this bad outside. What happened? You’re thinking too much, aren’t you?”
She shook her head. “I, well.” She paused, considering, then shook her head after a moment. “No, I’m not thinking too much. I may be thinking too little. And it’s perfectly normal to be tense when going to…”
“Sure, it’d be okay if you were going to the gallows, maybe.” Spike swatted the back of her neck. “Seriously, lighten up. As often as other students have blown up the chemistry lab, it’s not like one broken window is going to do you in.”
“It’s not the same. Princess Celestia expects so much from me, Spike. I can’t let her down.” Twilight shook her head sharply. “What if…”
“For the love of—” Spike leapt off her back and dashed around in front of her. “Twilight. You need to stop. You are not a bad student. Celestia wants you to pick your own courses. Why would she ask you to do that if she didn’t trust you?” He put his claws on his hips and stared up at her, brow ridges furrowed. “Why are you so upset about breaking a window?”
“Because it’s Princess Celestia’s window.” As soon as she said it, she knew it was the right reason. “I broke something of hers. Maybe something important.”
“Oh.” He scratched his chin, eyes darting around as though looking for an answering quip. “Well, I don’t think she’ll be mad at you. I mean, how many weather ponies have broken windows of hers, too, with hailstorms? Even if it was accidental.”
Twilight shook her head and continued on through the castle. Spike followed behind, keeping up a constant chatter of things other ponies had broken through the ages.
In a way, it helped. By the time they came across a line of ponies stretched out to the main gate, Twilight found herself laughing at some of the more absurd things he said ponies must have broken.
The crowd of ponies, murmuring among themselves too quietly to be overheard above the general hush and whisper of them all, didn’t pay them any attention at first.
Near the back, country ponies with winter coats draped over their backs and furry snow shoes peeking out from underneath stood talking in hushed tones while looking at the ponies farther up the line. The townsponies, wearing flankcoats and top hats, their manes coiffed in swooping shapes held together with what seemed to be wishes and fairy dust chattered more animatedly, louder, and making cracks about country bumpkins.
Twilight wove her way past two ponies to the center of the hall, and made her way towards the guard at the front of the line. Mutterings followed her all the way, and quite a few of them offered to show her where the back of the line was. She only ducked her head, folded her ears back, and muttered “Thank you, but I have something urgent.”
Spike, being his usual helpful self, rushed ahead, holding his arms outstretched to ward off a nonexistent crowd of ponies, and shouting, “One side, everypony, official castle business!”
Twilight felt her face grow hot, certain that everypony knew what she’d done, but none of them tried to stop her. A murmur of recognition even filtered down the line, and more ponies turned to watch her. Which didn’t help at all.
The guard looked up, eyebrow arching under his silver and gold helmet, and ran his eyes down a scroll stretching so its end almost curled against the floor. “I’m sorry, Twilight, but the Princess is currently busy talking with—”
He stopped when the doors behind him opened, letting Raven out accompanied by a well dressed pony in black judicial robes. Princess Celestia’s personal scribe touched the guard on the flank and flicked a glance at the list, then Twilight.
“Good,” Raven paused briefly to stare at a clock, “evening Twilight!” She checked her clipboard. “Do you need to see the Princess? If so, there’s nothing free until a short walk from the throne room to the Royal Balconies for a late snack before setting the sun and raising the moon in twenty minutes. You’ll have to share the time with Lord Fancy Pants, I’m afraid.”
“Oh.” Twilight thought for a moment, glancing at the line of waiting visitors. She hadn’t quite thought Princess Celestia even had her walks taken up by stately duties. “Um. Well… Maybe you can help me.” She waved Raven closer, dropping her voice to a faint whisper. “I broke a window in the southernmost tower. The one with the big window. What should I do?”
Raven’s eyebrows climbed up towards her mane. She glanced along the line of petitioners waiting to hear the judgment of the Princess. “Oh dear. One moment, and I will ask Her Majesty’s counsel.” She winked and whispered low, “She’ll appreciate the diversion.”
The pony directly behind Twilight in line, dressed in a peacock gown with a peacock headdress, glowered sourly at her.
“Rude,” was all the mare offered before fanning her face with a feather fan.
“I-I’m terribly sorry,” Twilight said. “I didn’t mean—”
Spike poked her in the side with a quill. “Excuse me, Miss Twilight, what else does the Princess have for us to do tonight?” His arched brow and a quick nod at the doors to the throne room gave her the hint.
“Um.” She stared at him. He jerked his head towards the doors and poked her again.
“The list.” He hissed. He tapped the top item.
“Oh! Well, I suppose… Fixing the window in the south tower, now.” She said, trying to smile like she meant it at the mare.
“We’re fixing up the castle for Hearth’s Warming,” Spike said, puffing out his chest and shaking the scroll at the old mare far too quickly for her to read it. “We’re apprentice, uh, apprentices to the, er, maids. Head Pony Glitterbrush sent us.”
“Oh, oh my. I do apologize. Of course that is very important.” She tried to peer closer at the list. “Do make sure the heating spells in my chambers are refreshed. It does get so dreadfully drafty at night.”
Spike wrote something down and nodded. “Of course, Lady…”
“Blueblood, of course,” she said, waving her fan. “My grandson will be making his debut soon. I’m certain you’ve heard of him.”
Twilight had not, but Spike just bowed. “Of course, m’lady. I’m certain he’ll make a splash.”
“Quite!” She waved her fan again, apparently satisfied, and turned away to stage-whisper to her companion. “It does the heart good to see the youth stepping in. It makes me feel like maybe this generation isn’t a lost cause after all.”
Spike’s smile strained, and his brow ridges lowered, but he turned away from the mare to stare at Twilight. “You do know how to cancel a heating spell, right?” He whispered, so soft she barely heard him.
“We are not.” Twilight shot back.
“But Twilight!” He jerked his chin at the old mare.
“I said no,” she hissed.
For a moment, he seemed like he wanted to set something on fire.
“Fix the window,” Twilight said softly, but loud enough for the mare to hear. “Clean up the glass, and the, er… mess.”
Spike nodded, brow ridges still furrowed, but he wrote carefully, apparently focused on forming the letters. “Okay. And then?”
Twilight glanced at the grandfather clock. It was nearly five. “I don’t know. Full moon rise is in another hour. We’ll… I guess go back to my room.”
“You don’t want to go outside under the Mare in the Moon, either, do you?”
“It’s not that, Spike. It’s cold.”
He looked like he was about to argue, but the doors to the throne room opened again, letting Raven out again, a roll of parchment and a well worn key on a gold chain floating before her.
Raven proffered both to Twilight. “Her Majesty understands that it was a mistake, Twilight Sparkle, and she accepts the apology, but also decrees that you must make amends immediately,” the secretary said in the tones of a proclamation. “To aid in this task she has given you,” the mare continued, a mischievous gleam in her eye, “she grants you the boon of a key to the tower grounds and a map of the tower.”
“Er…” Twilight looked around as she caught the key and scroll in a spell, seeing that everypony else was watching her intently. “Of course.” She nodded to Spike. “Please make a note, and mark it top priority.”
Spike shot Raven a beleaguered look, and the secretary pony laughed. He smiled back, a bit sheepishly, and scribbled on the scroll.
Twilight, bemused, spared a glance between the two. “What was that about?”
Raven waved a hoof, dipped into a brief curtsie, and waved the matronly mare forward. “Lady Blueblood. Princess Celestia will hear your proposal now. Please follow me.”
Twilight, at a loss for words, stepped out of the way of the mare’s harrumphing glare.
“Thank you,” she said mechanically to the retreating Raven. She stared at the key, a golden sunburst head and a well worn, polished base. In places, the pins were worn almost to a parchment thinness.
“So…” Spike said after they had left the line and gone down a side corridor, following the map. “We’re going on a quest?”
“I hope not. I’ve had enough of adventure for one day.” She rubbed an ankle against Spike’s shoulder as they walked. “How did you know how to handle Lady Blueblood? I thought she was going to shout herself hoarse at us.”
“Oh, pshaw.” He snapped his claws. “It was easy peasy. She was just like Old Lady Weather in Storm Surge issue one. Storm, that’s who the series is named after, pulled the same trick on her to get inside Thunder Castle and rescue Princess Cloudtop.”
“Huh.” She shook her head in wonderment. Maybe she’d been wrong about comics.
“Of course,” he added after a moment, “Lady Weather really just wanted to seduce Storm. Because he’s a handsome rogue, and oh boy was she angry when he ran off with Cloudtop.”
Maybe not.
The map was an elaborate thing, hoof drawn lines in perfect alignment with each other and the course she had to follow. She could have navigated the castle with her eyes fixed only on the map. There was even a delicate gold embroidery around the edge of the scroll to prevent the fibers from fraying.
She felt a moment of awe as she realized who had drawn it. There was no signature anywhere, but she didn’t need to see one to know Princess Celestia’s hoof behind the immaculate work of art.
“Hold up, Spike,” she called to him, pulling a scroll case from her saddlebag and glancing over its contents before handing them off to him. It was her bonus history homework on the traditions of Hearths Warming and their evolution through the ages. She spent a moment committing the map to memory and spent almost a full minute rolling it up and sliding it into the protective case before capping it and putting it back in place. She could not risk Celestia’s map of the castle being damaged.
“What should I do with these?” He asked, waving the bundled scrolls at her.
“Um.” She glanced at his stuffed backpack, then at her other saddlebag, full of fiction books, and the sun setting inexorably outside. Twilight gritted her teeth and said, “Place them somewhere in your backpack, please.” No time for repacking her bags entirely.
“Okay!”
And, with far more vigor than she would have liked, he stuffed the bundle into a side pocket, crinkling most of the outer pages, and bending the whole stack in the middle.
Twilight set off again, the map firmly in her mind, Spike following behind, and tried not to think about her crumpled homework.
The map’s course, which Twilight had to check once to make certain they were on the right track, led them swiftly out of the castle and into the inner castle grounds, back around a corniced ivory tower attached to the main palace, and to the gate leading back towards the front walls, but closed off with a high wall made of alabaster stone bricks enclosing a tower stretching high into the sky.
From the grounds outside, Twilight could see the broken window, and the bust of a unicorn statue, reflecting the fading light of the sun so that its horn seemed to glow with an inner, purplish light. She stared at it, mouth dropping. It had to be Celestia. No other pony had such a long and gracefully fluted horn, nor the same aristocratic slant to her nose, or the same fullness of cheek and finely boned muzzle.
Spike was already pushing open the gate, unlocked, unguarded.
Inside the garden, Twilight saw twinkles of light come on in the distinctive golden glow of Celestia’s magical aura, lighting up a meandering path through trees and bushes still green despite the onset of winter outside.
“Come on, Twilight! It’s warm!” Spike dashed through, dropping his backpack and dropping to roll across the path and into the grass, stirring up a cloud of fireflies in his wake.
She followed more cautiously, testing the barrier that seemed to keep out the cold, and finding it clung to her as she pulled her hoof away, then bobbled back into place like an out-sized soap bubble. Shaking her head to throw out the speculation about what kind of spell Celestia had used to isolate the ground from the world outside, she stepped through and into a perfect spring evening.
The air was far warmer than outside, but still no warmer than a cool spring night should be. Or autumn. As she walked, she let her gaze wander just as much as the path did.
The oak trees, their branches laden with green leaves stirring as the wind rose and settled, loosed a few leaves to flutter to the ground. But no snow came with it, nor any hint of the winter outside. It even smelled like spring. Definitely spring, and not autumn, she decided. The smells of leaves decaying slowly was there, but the essence of autumn was missing. No woodfire smoke, no distant chill on the air promising snow. But neither were the essential parts of Spring there in full, either. No distant smell of rain and farmland being tilled, no promise of warmth to come in the wind.
It was as if Princess Celestia had frozen the garden perfectly in a balance between the two equinoxes. Why she hadn’t frozen it during a summer month was a mystery.
For a different time.
She followed the meandering path through the little wooded copse to a bridge standing across a babbling brook that rose from one side of the wall and disappeared at the other side, making a miniature moat cutting off the garden area from the rest. Crossing over it was a bridge that widened into a circular platform in the middle with a gilded ivory railing all around the edge.
“You know,” Spike said, pausing at the edge of the bridge to look back over it.
Twilight stopped at the center of the widest part and looked around at the stone around her hooves. “Know what?”
He crouched down, lifting his claws to frame a picture, then backed up higher towards the closed door to the tower. “This looks kinda like that painting of the moon you showed me. That weird one that didn’t—” He shifted his stance, leaning back, then standing on his toes and looked down through the makeshift at the surface. “Yeah, look. You can even see where the shadows would be…” He glanced up. “At night.”
Twilight sucked in a breath and held it. She turned, watching her shadow shift over the surface until the shadow of her head lay in the spot Spike was looking at. She eyed it, shifting her head up, down, left and right. Her muzzle was far shorter than the Mare in the Moon’s, and her ears were too short. Her horn almost was the right shape, but, again, too short. Everything about the Mare in the Moon’s shadow was grander and spoke of more mystery than her own.
“Twilight…” Spike said in a hushed tone, backing away from the bridge until his back was pressed flat against the door. “W-who?” He pointed up at the tower. “Who lives here?”
Twilight shook her head. “I don’t know, but it’s not who you think.” I hope. She pointed at one of the golden shapes etched into the railing, and walked over to it herself, hoping the trembling in her legs wasn’t apparent.
A miniature copy of the bridge’s surface, the moon’s surface she supposed, in bas relief shone back at her, half gold, half silver. At least, a moon without the darker craters marking out a mare’s head. In fact, the place where the craters should have been was no different than the rest of the moon’s surface: pocked by seemingly randomly spaced and sized craters of no discernible pattern. Each one of the twelve discs showed a different phase of the moon. They had the feel of old artifacts she’d had occasion to glimpse in Celestia’s presence and radiating an ancient feeling of power that tingled the base of her horn.
“Why?” She asked no one in particular. The shadow of the Mare in the Moon had been present for all of living memory, as far as she knew, and something so cataclysmic that it changed the moon’s surface forever in such a specific pattern had to be passed down through the ages. Nopony would forget something like that.
Spike clicked his claws together and bit his lower lip, looking up at her. “I, uh… I think we should go.” Even his spines were drooping, the crest on his head lowered so she could barely make out the green scales.
“No. We have to get my trunk. If this is—” She swallowed. “If this is a part of the co—” She swallowed again, going on more forcefully, “Conspiracy, then we need to know.” A thought bubbled up. “And besides,” she added, feeling the thought warm her. “Princess Celestia wouldn’t send us into someplace dangerous.” It was that thought that decided her. “Come on.”
There was another door at the base of the tower, and she could see the edge of a ramp leading up from some thirty hooves above her head. This gate did not swing open at Spikes touch, and the key Celestia had given Twilight pulsed softly against her neck when he did.
A warding spell, then. It was guarded, but not obtrusively so. Celestia almost certainly had known when the trunk had crashed in.
They key clicked in the gate’s lock smoothly, and the white timbered door swung open silently. The interior, far from being a disused mess, was made of the same pristine white stone as the outside. The floor was worn smooth in places where ponies, or a pony, had trod for perhaps hundreds of years.
She held back from entering and held out a foreleg to stop Spike.
Spike didn’t budge, and tapped his claws together, frowning up at her, then at the doorway. “Do we just go in?” he asked, looking up at her, then back the way they’d come.
The small glade was empty except for the wind.
“We have permission,” she said, casting a glance at the sky. Middle evening was chasing late afternoon with streamers of purple and navy and maroon. In the warmth of the garden, she could appreciate the beauty of it, but outside it would be another reminder that it in the depths of winter and she lived on top of a mountain.
“Permission is one thing,” he shot back. “What if this is a prison tower?”
Twilight shook her head after a brief consideration. “I think, in that case, it would be more obviously guarded if it was. Guards on post around the clock, a watchtower at a corner, and a gate that doesn’t open to anypony. No.” She put a hoof out across the threshold. “I can’t feel anything different inside. I think the,” she gestured back out across the glade, “that, whatever it is, continues inside, too.”
Feeling more confident about her choice, Twilight stepped inside.
For a moment, the mat at the entrance enveloped her hooves, then withdrew before she could feel more than a mild panic. A simple Clean Hooves spell, from Star Swirl’s Amniomorphics for Beginners handbook.
Spike, on the other hoof, was completely enveloped by the mat for the space of two screams and a break for breathing. When it let him go, he was as shiny as two hours after he hatched, scales gleaming and spines as shiny as pike-heads.
A powerful Clean Hooves spell. Twilight suppressed a giggle.
The dirt drawn from both of them had rearranged to form the words “Bless this mess” on the mat before they marched out under the edge of the gate, presumably to disappear into the glade.
“A little warning!” Spike half-shouted at her. “Would be nice.” He took a deep breath, clutching his chest and leaning on her leg. “Next time.”
“I didn’t know it was going to do that,” Twilight said, frowning at the last letters as they left. “But it serves you right. Disrespecting the Princess.”
“How so?”
She pointed at the dirt trailing out the door. “By having the forethought to take a bath today.”
He waved a claw at that. “Dragon scales don’t need to be cleaned as often as pony coats. Just one of the many benefits of being a dragon.”
“The princess apparently doesn’t think so,” she said as she looked around the small room just inside. To the right, an over-sized chair sat with well used cushions of a faded purple-blue color, silver instead of gold tassels hanging from each corner, and a moon instead of a sun stitched into each one. To either side, and in front stood tables stacked with books, and small lamps giving off a silver glow cast unfaltering light over all.
“Yeah, well…” He trailed off, shrugging and looking around, claws tapping together over his stomach. He seemed reluctant to step away from the mat.
“She’s not wrong,” Twilight finished for him. “Dragons out in the wild must…” She shrugged one shoulder and pointed a hoof at the fireplace. “I guess they must bathe in fire or something like it. You start to get a little ripe after a hard day.”
He only grunted, watching intently as she stepped farther into the room. Nothing happened, and nothing continued happening as she wandered around the room, peering at the titles on the spines of the books, but careful not to let even a hair of her mane touch them. Predictions and Prophecies, Manewallace’s Treatise on Lunar Effluvia, among others. On another table, Lunar Moths, an Observation headed a stack of moon related creatures and myths like the owlbear in Why It’s a Bad Idea to Go Out at Night, a Field Study of the Noble Owlbear, published posthumously by Magnus Owl. Wereponies, vampire batponies, and Nightmare Moon featured prominently on the cover of The Myths, The Monsters, The Moon, author unknown.
There were no bookshelves on the first story, nowhere to neatly store the books that were obviously recent reading. The walls were covered with tapestries and paintings, and half of one wall was taken up with a wide staircase leading up to a second story.
Twilight jerked her head at the stairs. “Come on, Spike.” The second story was given over to long couches for a pony of Celestia’s size and build and mementos smaller than the tapestries below hung from every wall or lay on every surface.
Here, short bookshelves lay scattered about, stuffed to the brim with tomes and doubling as display stands for oddments the Princess must have collected over her lifetime.
There was even a very old, tattered flag she remembered from every Hearth’s Warming play she’d ever seen, except this one was far more detailed, and embroidered in silver, gold, and seemingly threads made out of gemstones instead of painted on paper. It was encased in glass, or crystal, and a plaque underneath read “Cantercourt’s Founding, circa 4 After Winter”
“Huh.” She read the plaque again. “That’s… old.” The Princess was old beyond memory, but certainly not that old. Those were the days of Princess Platinum, Chancellor Puddinghead, and Commander Hurricane, not of Princess Celestia. Despite that, she had no doubt it was an original flag. The Princess wouldn’t collect something that was a fake or a forgery, and the appearance of it felt weighty, a certain indefinable air about the object that she couldn’t put a hoof on.
“Wow, the Princess is as old as dirt?” Spike blurted, looking up at it. After a moment, he forced a laugh, and he kept darting his eyes around, as if expecting a monster to jump out at any moment. “Gee, uh… I hope she doesn’t have any, uh…” He tapped his claws together and backed up until he was pressed against her hind leg. “She can’t hear us in here, can she?”
“She just might. So be respectful.”
“It was, uh, just a joke! Nothing meant by it!” Spike called out to the empty room.
Twilight resisted the urge to look around more at all the relics and memorabilia in Princess Celestia’s private chambers. She had to remind herself that she was a guest, not a gawker as her mother would say.
She jerked her head at the door leading outside again and started up the ramp leading around the outside of the tower. The strange effect of the almost spring continued all the way up the tower. As she wound her way around, she could see the strange, thin film that kept in the spring night flex slightly against the howling winter wind, slowing it until it was a gentle, faintly cool breeze against her nose, heavy with the smell of flowers from below.
The city of Canterlot and all the rest of Equestria spread out around her as she climbed, the lights coming on in a thousand points of firefly sparkles across both, flowing from the west to the east in an inconsistent wave of golden hearth light speckling the countryside, and the steadier flares of gaslight lamps outlining streets and keeps.
From the top, she could see Cloudsdale in the far-away distance, pulsing with rainbow light and flickers of lightning as the weather ponies fashioned a thundersnow storm for delivery.
She paused, one hoof on the door to keep herself steady and looked back on the castle still illuminated by the sun, its parapets and onion domes gleaming scarlet and royal purple, the stouter turrets of white stone gleaming like solid gold.
“Wow.”
Twilight glanced down to see Spike looking out into the distance. “Wow,” she agreed.
“Being the ruler has its perks. That’s for sure.”
Rolling her eyes, Twilight dragged her attention away from the vista. “Come on, Spike. We still have to clean up, and it’s almost night time.”
Another lock opened without complaint or resistance, and Spike dashed inside, stopping after a few steps.
Dominating the center of the room was a massive hourglass, slowly trickling sand into the bottom trough. A quick mental calculation of relative volumes told her the hourglass was close to being turned over again, and by the rate of flow, it would be about a week before it was time.
Unlike every other hourglass she had ever seen, this one must measure a year at a time. Surrounding it was a rail with beads glowing with the same light as the moon and stars. One bead was stopped almost an inch from its companions, still dark, but flickering with an inner glow in her peripheral vision as she took in the rest of the room.
Directly across the room was a massive window in several panels, arched with silvery metal glowing like bands of fire in the evening light. On either side, bookcases spread out in concentric half-circles around the room, forming a bullseye of the room centered on the hourglass. Smaller windows breached the walls at regular intervals, two between each broad bookcase, an upper and a lower.
One of the lower ones was broken, glass shards and splinters of wood from the frame spreading across the floor between two bookcases, and her trunk. What was left of it lay crumpled against a glass display case, one of several scattered around the hourglass at even intervals. The case had survived, but her trunk sagged, the steel bands that held it together parted from the wood. The bands that had been meant to hold her trunk to the base had snapped cleanly at the corners, leaving jagged weals of iron that had scraped bright white lines across the floor.
She rushed up to the case, peering at it, then at the trunk. The case wasn’t even scratched, though its contents were mildly perturbed.
They were medallions of some sort, most of them white, or near to it, fading from the brightest colors on the right to nearly identical white on the left.
“What are these, do you suppose?” She asked Spike, lifting him up to her back to take a look.
“Um. Rock candy?” He asked, pointing at the ones on the left. “They’re solid sugar.”
Twilight sucked in a breath and bent to peer more closely at them. In some, rudiments of color still held on, black lines the boldest, outlining what were obviously cutie marks.
“Spike, are you absolutely certain these are, um, rock candy?” She jabbed a hoof down at them, not daring to open the case. “Not, say, cutie marks made out of hardened, baked sugar?”
It took him a moment, and he fairly leapt backwards, scrabbling for the door.
“Not so fast,” Twilight called after him, picking him up in a telekinetic spell and depositing him back in front of her.
He curled up in a ball at her feet, quaking.
“Oh, Spike, I’m not saying Princess Celestia is the thief.” She shook her head emphatically. “But what if she already knows about it? What if she has been trying to stop them, too?” A thought occurred to her. “Quick! See if you can find my cutie mark!”
Before he could reply, she had leapt to the next case to her right and pressed her nose to the glass, looking at each cutie mark in turn. Then the next case. And the next.
A little more than three quarters of the way around the inner circle, she passed Spike going the other way, and they both spent a moment staring in at cutie marks almost bright enough to be fresh. She fairly pranced with excitement the rest of the way around. But when she’d reached all the way around to the start again, there had been no sign.
Spike shook his head too. “Nope. Yours is gone. Probably taken by—” He jerked a claw over his shoulder, opposite the sun. “You know who.”
“I really doubt that,” Twilight muttered under her breath. More loudly, she said, “Okay. Something to keep in mind. For right now, though, we need to do some cleanup. Do what you can to, um,” she gestured vaguely at the pile of broken planks and twisted iron, “tidy this up a little. I’m going to try to find a broom and dustpan for the window.”
He saluted and bent to the task, pulling out the unbroken planks and stacking them. She noticed as he did that he paused between each board and looked around, biting his lip.
Twilight shook her head minutely and made her way through the bookcase maze in the other direction. She let herself meander, unable to help the temptation to even look at the titles of the books in Celestia’s personal library. Her secret personal library, she thought with a twinge of guilt, but kept looking.
Most of the titles were familiar, if far older, their spines faded and cracked in places. That they were first print editions was no doubt, or even from the days before the printing press had been invented. Many had gold embossed lettering that was flaking and peeling away, fluttering even as she passed by.
In the distance, she heard him shout, “Okay! All done! What now?”
“Just wait! I’ll be right there!” With a shake of her head, Twilight backed away from an edition of Highlights of High Magic and back towards her task. As she knew there must be, she found a small closet tucked in behind a column and, sure enough, there was a broom, dustpan, and waste bin. Every library had a janitor’s closet. Even the Princess’ personal library.
It was the work of only a couple minutes to sweep up the glass and drop it in the waste bin. The boards of the trunk were a different scale of problem, as were the twisted iron bands. The one, she could only stack of a few of into the bin before it was overflowing. The other, she could loop around outside the bottom of the bin, she supposed.
“So, what now?” Spike asked from his perch on top of the stack of wood. He glanced at the big window. The sun was completely set, and the faintest glow of goldenrod was being swallowed up by the descending veil of full night.
From a high window, faint silver light stretched down to trace shadow and light across the walls and illuminating the statue she had seen through the broken window. Up close, she could appreciate the beauty and artistry of it, a bust only, of a mare, and whomever she had been, she had been a unicorn of surpassing grace, her fluted horn spiraling to a razor tip and her muzzle bearing the same aristocratic bearing and timeless beauty of Celestia. But the details were subtly off. Twilight knew her teacher’s face like she knew her parents’ faces, and that wasn’t her, though they could be sisters.
“Who do you think that is?” she asked after a moment, nodding up at the statue.
“A pony I once loved as much as you do your brother.”
Twilight spun about. “Princess Celestia!”
Celestia did not look at her immediately, instead watching the shadows shift and stretch on the statue. After a long moment and a deep breath, Celestia shifted her gaze. “Twilight Sparkle,” she said, smiling. “Thank you for taking care of your accident. And I thank you even more for not trying to hide it from me.”
“Y-yes, Princess Celestia,” Twilight stammered, lowering her head in a jerky bow. “W-who? Who is she?”
Princess Celestia only shook her head, eyes closed. Twilight caught the bob of throat as her teacher swallowed some past grief. Her own throat tightened. She shouldn’t have said anything. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
“It is not your fault, Twilight. It is… painful, even now. Remember, will you, that the past, Twilight, is the past for a reason. It has passed us by. Dwelling on it does us no good, save to learn our lessons.” A wan smile parted Princess Celestia’s lips briefly. “It is a lesson I keep re-learning.”
Uncertainty fogged Twilight’s mind. “S-should I not, um…”
“Perhaps I wasn’t as precise as I should have been,” her teacher said softly, though her voice lost some tension as it fell into a more familiar lecturer’s tone. “The past as an academic pursuit is one of the loftiest goals a scholar can reach for. The past, as a personal matter, is not as healthy to dwell on or live in. Remembrance, of course, is paramount.” Celestia waved a hoof at the display cases, at the books, and at the statue. “It has been a long time since anypony else has come up here.”
“Oh. I’m… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“No, Twilight, I’m not angry at you. Not at all.” Celestia laughed softly. “You misunderstood. I meant to say, it is good to have you here.” She nodded at the cases again. “Though I hope you won’t send me your cutie confection for a long time yet.”
Understanding dawned. “These… Your students? All of them?”
“Each and every one,” Celestia agreed, stepping up to a case, the first one Twilight had seen.
Hesitantly, Twilight followed her, looking down into the case as Celestia’s horn glowed. Color bled back into the confections, glowing brightly as they must have in her memory.
“I’m proud of them all,” Princess Celestia continued, “and happy that they lent me a piece of themselves. They are all a part of me, Twilight.” The spell, and the color, faded. “And so are you. You make me so incredibly proud to be your teacher. Thank you.”
Twilight’s eyes burned, her vision blurring, and before she knew it, she had rushed up to the Princess and wrapped her in a hug about the neck. She sobbed as memories of her in a classroom by herself with Princess Celestia patiently walking her through the steps for a transmogrification spell for the tenth time, only for her to break down and cry because she just didn’t get it. And Princess Celestia’s words, “I believe in you” that gave her the courage to continue.
“Thank you,” Twilight gasped.
Princess Celestia’s warm cheek pressed against her shoulder. “Thank you.”
Spike stumbled up to her and petted her flank gently. “Twilight?” He asked.
“I—” Twilight pulled back from Celestia, feeling a wing slip over her head as it folded back to Princess Celestia’s flank. “I’m okay, Spike.”
“I’m glad.” Princess Celestia didn’t try hide the tears on her cheeks or wiping them away. Twilight thought she seemed proud of them. “Now off with you two,” she said more strongly. “It’s almost past your bedtimes.”
She stalled, raising a hoof.
“No need to raise your hoof in private, Twilight. Ask what you wish, and if I can, I will answer.”
“Y-you know about the thief, right?”
“To my sorrow, I do.” Princess Celestia’s smile took on a wan cast, and her eyes tracked back up to the domed ceiling of the tower, spilling over with moonlight cast through the protective veil until it seemed that a sea must be about to crash down on them. “She…”
“She?” Twilight’s jaw dropped. “Who is she?”
The smile she got from her teacher dripped with sorrow. “A ghost from the past, Twilight. Off with you now. It’s bedtime, and do not worry about the thief overmuch. I doubt very much she will concern you.”
“But,” Twilight started, waving a hoof at the bin and stack of wood and iron, desperate for any reason to stay and ask more questions.
“I will take care of it. I’m always looking for spare bits of wood and metal.” She winked. “Reclaimed wood is all the rage these days.”
As Twilight was closing the door, she heard Princess Celestia speaking.
“I won’t know what the future holds for much longer, dear Luna.” Princess Celestia’s clear birdsong trilling laughter drifted through the bare crack in the door. “Isn’t that wonderful?”