//------------------------------// // Chapter 10: Luna // Story: Twilight Sparkle and the Cake Thief // by Noble Thought //------------------------------// Almost an hour into Twilight’s moonlight vigil, long after she had finished cleaning the kitchen and setting the list to rights, and then double and triple checking it, Spike began snoring quietly beside her, having almost an hour ago set aside his comic so that Twilight could dim the light from her horn. Now, she waited in a silver slice of light. The pantry she’d found to hide in had a great view over most of the kitchen, being close to the door, but built in at an angle so as not to obstruct the flow of movement in the kitchen. The sand in the hourglass before her hooves shimmered like liquid silver as it hissed quietly into the bottom reservoir. She’d already reset it three times, and it was fast approaching the midnight hour. Not long. She reminded herself as a yawn crawled up her throat, only to be strangled in a teary-eyed groan. If she yawned, there was no turning back. She wiped the exhausted tears from her eyes and resettled herself again, going over the speech she’d prepared and re-prepared in her mind for when the thief finally came out. She could see both the cake and the plate of cupcakes from her vantage point. In the quiet silver light, both shone with subtler colors that were hidden in the golden light of the sun, or even the waning molten copper of the ovens and fireplaces, and seemed frozen in the argent moonlight drenching the kitchen beyond. Above everything, the spectral moon hung, the Mare in the Moon staring down, seemingly right at her, her eye twinkling in the wind as snow or high stratus passed in front of it. The glass dome had been blown clean by a late-night gust, and not even a drift rested against the insulated plates of glass. Of the wind, she could hear little beside a faint, ethereal moaning. On the other side of the kitchen, the banked fire gave off a faint streamer of smoke, the last of the visible embers dying into an almost invisible glow before even that little light faded, leaving the tidy pile of ash and cinder looking like somepony’s crude attempt at a snowpony, fallen apart and frozen in the night air. Cold seeped in through the pile of beet and carrot sacks, all empty and waiting to be hauled down to the farmers again. Her breath began to mist before it happened. It took a moment for Twilight to notice that the faint shushing hiss of sand in her hourglass had stopped. As before, she prepared to flip it again when she froze. It hadn’t stopped. It was as though time had turned sluggish and was freezing even as the temperature in the kitchen dropped. Silver specks hung motionless just below the neck of the upper reservoir. But not quite motionless. Sparkling bits of moon dust held in stasis by a gravity one tenth of the usual. As she watched, the motes drifted down to settle, but instead of flowing down into a cone, it piled up higher and higher, a silver stalagmite, until it plugged the neck. For what felt like an hour, she stared at the hourglass, then closed her eyes and listened. Her heart beat still, and her lungs filled with air and emptied as she exhaled, but a few inches past her muzzle, the fog of her breathing crawled to a stop and hung motionless. Is this a dream? For a moment, she panicked. I didn’t fall asleep, did I? But in the time it took to think it, reason returned. She had always woken at the moment of greatest panic before, and she was curiously aware of her whole self, something not usually in a dream. She tapped the hourglass with a hoof. It tipped to an angle, the sand pillar inside dissolving into a spray of sand against the side and and froze again when she pulled her hoof back. The light of the moon dimmed, flared, and dimmed again. Twilight looked up quickly, scanning for what had caused the shadow. The moon still hung above the dome, the single eye of the Mare glowing cyanic blue. After a moment, the blue glow flickered and waned, died, and came back. The Mare in the Moon’s horn glowed gold, and a piercing streamer of light lanced down to connect the earth to the moon, and froze. After a brief flash of light, it looked less like light and more like a rope. An impossibly brilliant rope that gave off no light of its own. In the kitchen, a flicker of argent blue light drew her eyes. There, just feet away, was a young mare, her wings furled, her horn glowing the same brilliant, pale blue. Alicorn. The word flared in her mind. Like Princess Cadance. Like Princess Celestia. A powerful magic user. Living on the moon? And she had cast a time spell that halted everything but Twilight. She could still move, still think and see. She could still act. She needed a plan. None of her plans had included facing down an alicorn, immortal or not, in the castle. Think, Twilight, think! There has to be a way to stop her. One way might be to get time moving again. Time spells. Time spells. She gritted her teeth. They had covered the theory of time spells in Thaumaturgical Math, but there wasn’t anything concrete. One of the things her teacher had impressed on them was that time spells were dangerous, and they were only covered so that students would know to stay away from them. “If only-” She caught the rest of the words behind a hoof, but not before the intruder reacted. The doors of the pantry wrenched open, freezing where they were when the powerful spell stopped acting on them as the magic field redirected to catch her. Twilight clenched her teeth, waiting to be picked up and handled roughly, but nothing happened. The magic field, the same cyan as the eye, brighter than the the alicorn’s coat, halted, flowed around her as if to drown her in it, and faded. “Huh?” “Who art thou?” The voice, that of a teenage pony, did not quaver or hitch, sounding almost angry. “Who art thou that throws off our spell so readily? Be thou an alicorn?” A moment later, the aristocratic features of the face came into the light of the moon fully, her mane at first the shade of clouds in a moonlight sky, her coat the night itself, and eyes somewhere between the silver of the moon and the blue of an ocean wave. As she moved, her mane rolled like a tide against her shoulders, almost the shade of a summer morning on the mountain, a blue so clear Twilight could almost see the fading stars in them. She had a sudden inkling of the nervous churning, gut-wrenching tug of yearning that must have plagued Crunchy Crust the last few days. “Me?” “Indeed. Answer us.” “Twilight Sparkle.” She stepped out of the pantry, looking back to see Spike still sleeping, as motionless as the hourglass, as everything else. “Is this a dream?” “Dream?” The regal mare snorted. “Our realm is not known to one such as thee. This is no dream, stripling mare.” Something in her bearing, the way her head no longer rose imperiously, her muzzle no longer level, or a sixth sense, made Twilight wonder if a seed of doubt had been planted. “Our dreams are our domain. No pony may encroach upon them without our consent. It was decided when we rose to this—” The pony flared her wings and her horn at the same time. “—that it would be so.” “Are you sure? Because…” Twilight pointed at the hourglass, hanging precariously on one edge, as though perfectly balanced. “Unless you can maintain a time freezing spell for this long, it’s a dream. I don’t think even Star Swirl could do this, and he’s the most powerful spellcaster I’ve ever heard of.” “Time freezing?” The intruder’s wings slumped, folding back along her flanks, and the flare of power around her horn faded to nothing. The mention of Star Swirl seemed to put the mare at ease, though, and the aristocratic bent to her neck relaxed ever so slightly. “I—we are casting no such spell. We have never learned time spells. Our sibling said they were too dangerous. Who art thou, truly? Is this a dream we find ourselves in?” She pawed at the floor with a hoof, but no sound came of it. She frowned, first at the silent floor, then at Twilight. “Thine own dream? Did thou summon us?” “Not on purpose. So I am dreaming? Who are you?” “Our name is Luna.” Luna looked up to the moon. “This must surely be a dream. Our moon had no such mark when I…” Uncertainty bloomed in the mare’s expression. “Art thou… real? Is this some nightmare of ours, come back to us?” She took several steps closer to Twilight, stopped, and turned around to the cake. “It must be. There is our cake. This must be the academy. And…” Twilight watched as the mare flickered in and out of existence, then steadied and looked at her. “We cannot remove thee from our dream. We have always been able to control our dreams. Why art thou still here?” “I’m… here to stop a thief. A thief that steals cake every year. Princess—” She stopped from mentioning Princess Celestia’s name. If this was a ghost, mentioning a past acquaintance might upset its presence. “Our princess has lost cake for a long time, and I’m putting a stop to it.” “Noble of thee,” Luna said, glancing at the cake with its two missing pieces. “Thou hast failed, dreamling, but noble of thee all the same.” “I have not failed.” Twilight pointed a hoof at the table with the cupcake platters on it. Will a ghost be satisfied? She seems a lot more solid than any ghost I’ve ever heard of. The mare spent a moment reading the note, and laughed, a sharp sweet note of mirth. “Thou art a clever pony indeed, Twilight Sparkle. How did thou know of our plans for this night in particular? Nopony but us and our sibling knew of this night, and I doubt very much she would dream of this in such a way.” “Investigation. Reason.” Luck. “What was your plan?” “We are not a thief. Of that, we can assure thee. Tonight…” Luna turned a slow circle. As Twilight watched the young mare’s face, her heart grew heavy in her chest. She was beautiful, even as the certainty that she had appeared with faded and the stars in her mane dimmed and winked out, leaving her with a still beautiful mane of starlit cloud. Her chest ached with the need to tell Luna, but she couldn’t be much older than Twilight was herself, and she couldn’t confront her about what she suspected, and didn’t want to watch that beautiful face fall in despair. Besides which, it was rude to tell ghosts they were dead, and sometimes even dangerous. There was none of the despairing feeling about this apparition that Twilight would have expected, only an uncertain confusion that clouded her features, obscuring some of the statuesque precision of her mien, softening her cheeks and her brow as her ears drooped. “What was going to happen tonight?” Twilight ventured after a long pause of watching Luna study her surroundings, and seeing the mare’s confidence and seeming stature diminish even further. “We… I.” Luna stopped pacing to face her. “My sister and I are going to celebrate. We have graduated. We are at the top of our class.” She nodded to the cake. “We, along with every other of the twelve, were to be celebrated tonight. But tonight is not tonight, is it? And I am… My memories seem to be clouded.” Twilight hesitated, torn between honesty and a gentle lie. “Thou consider my feelings? Do not worry.” Luna swallowed. “I am… We are strong.” “No.” Twilight stepped closer, lifting the plate with hers and Spike’s cupcakes on it, letting it drift closer to Luna. “It’s not tonight. Not the night you think it is.” “Ah. We see.” Some of the cold authority came back into the voice for just an instant, and faded as Luna lifted the other plate. “Thou offer cupcakes to us?” Something about the ‘us’ felt different, as though it was less personal and more intimate than a royal plural. “I do. Will you accept them?” “I will. Will thou walk with me for a time? There is… comfort in thy presence, I find.” “Of course.” With little ceremony, Twilight followed Luna out of the kitchen, opening the door for her, and closing it behind them with a quick glance at Spike’s hiding place. From what she could see, the doors were still open in mid-swing, the hourglass still halfway towards falling over. Whatever was happening, that was a powerful effect. The thaumaturgical equations for how much power must be inherent in freezing time in even an area the size of the kitchen for so long ran into problems with unbelievable numbers running out of the range of her ability to comprehend. It would take a year or more to build up that kind of power, at the least. “Art thou a student?” Luna asked as they rounded a corner. A guard locked in mid-step waited, her eyes unmoving, her wings folded to her mail shirt. “I am. Are you?” “I was. I am graduated now, of course. But from this night,” she said, pausing to gesture towards the kitchen, “tomorrow, my sister and I move down the mountain and take up our new duties. Princesses, they say. Royalty? I’m not certain of this, but sister dearest says I must practice. I hope that my earlier brusqueness was not antagonistic towards thee.” “No,” Twilight blurted. “I mean, it was surprising is all.” “Good.” Luna paused beside the guard, inspecting her carefully, studying the lance and its head before turning away. “Curious. Somepony has laid a powerful enchantment on the school. A mishap? Considering it is a time spell… could this be an image of the future I am seeing? Thine accent and manner does remind one of the country ponies to the south, so it could be or it could not be. Thou could be a student from next year for all I know.” “I… don’t know.” Twilight considered the thought. A visitor from the past, stealing cake every year? She shook her head. It would have to be an improbably powerful spell, even more so than freezing time, and cast with even more precision, to project a pony forward in time in reliable steps. Unless it were a mishap, a million to one mistake; a time loop stuck in a one year cycle for a thousand years. “It could be.” Her heart jumped at the thought. Perhaps not a ghost at all. They passed the guard, who gave no indication of unfreezing anytime soon. “Out of curiosity,” Twilight said a few steps later, “and just in case you are a time traveler, so we don’t mess with the past, what year is it?” “1560, A.W., of course.” Luna gave her a curious glance when Twilight stumbled over her own hooves. “Why? What year is it in thine hypothetical time? My answer seems to have startled thee quite severely.” “Um…” Twilight thought, throwing calculations together. “Are you sure you want to know?” “Hmm.” Luna stopped at the main gate, considering the design of the wood and iron banding, all of it etched decoratively and painted with essence of pearl so the etchings seemed to glow in the scant moonlight. The gate was sealed for the night, and the etching and paint, more than decorative, would hold against an army. “Let me think on my answer. This gate, with so powerful a warding, makes me nervous to ask. Never was there a need for such protections before.” “A-and how old are you?” Twilight asked impulsively. “N-not that it matters much, considering the whole… you know, time thing.” She laughed unconvincingly. Luna shot her another high-brow look, and smiled with a laugh. “I will see my twentieth birthday in another week. Nineteen, then. But thou cannot be much younger than I.” “I am sixteen years old, last month.” “I see.” Luna turned from the gate and made her way down another corridor to a smaller, less used, concealed gate, and pursed her lips as she walked, glancing about her as though at unfamiliar landmarks, though it seemed to Twilight that Luna knew her way around the castle better than she did. “I withdraw my question. I do not wish to know what year it is in your time.” Twilight smiled weakly. 1560 A.W. was not quite a decade before the A.C. notation began in the histories. This mare would live through the Eclipse War, perhaps fight in it. Perhaps even die in it. She swallowed back a lump in her throat and blinked rapidly to clear her vision. “M-maybe that’s for the best.” “I am certain thy conjecture is correct.” Luna smiled at her, chuckling. “Do not worry. Whatever fate falls in the years to come, I am glad to know that our ponies will survive. Come. Let us go someplace quiet to…” She nodded to the cupcakes, a mischievous smile on her lips. “Enjoy our bounty. Celestia will no doubt be wroth with me when she finds out I have pilfered her cupcakes.” “C-Celestia?” “Why, yes. My sister. Even in your time, you must have heard of her?” The note of bitterness underlying the tone was unmistakable to Twilight’s ears, and so sharp and sudden that it seemed the world had cracked open. “Such a fair beauty, she, so regal that they fairly crowned her princess before she even knew the title!” Twilight held out a hoof to Luna’s shoulder, intending to comfort the other mare, but stopped as the cold radiating off of the apparition bit deeply into her hoof. Luna’s face had changed from the regal beauty to a sharply lined, bitterly snarling apparition, her eyes halfway towards that of a cat’s, slitted and glowing with fury. The rage passed in moments, and Luna was there again, the look of confusion etched even deeper upon her brow than before. “Twilight Sparkle? Why do thou look so frightened?” The frown on Luna’s lips deepened as she leaned closer, looking between Twilight’s eyes, thoughtful. “Has a ghost frightened thee?” Twilight stared, shivering still, thinking about the war between the Eclipse War. A war between actual sisters? It chilled her blood to think about it, to even conceive of Princess Celestia being able to war with her sister, that this Luna might have been the instigator. Nightmare Moon, the Mare in the Moon, all of it was real. But it can’t be, she told herself, starting to shake as she stared into the eyes that were changing from slitted pupils to normal, luminescent sea foam and silver. It can’t all be real? Can it? “Twilight Sparkle? Why the frightened look?” Luna reached out a hoof, and the cold that had before bit, was now warmth and comfort paired with a gentle ease that felt so familiar that it tore at her throat to leave it raw and sore. “Is something the matter?” Almost, she sobbed, but held it back and wiped at her eyes. Luna had sounded so like her mentor in that moment that it was easy to imagine them as sisters, caring sisters, loving and kind to one another. She couldn’t tell Luna what she’d heard. Not yet. So she shook her head. “No,” she said, her voice sounding strangled even to her. She needed time to think, and time to understand. She couldn’t imagine that warmth and care turning to the cold and bitter hatred she had felt only moments before. “Something disturbs thine heart, Twilight.” When Twilight didn’t answer for several seconds, Luna put a hoof to her lips to silence any confession. “But if it is a secret thee wish to keep, very well. I shall not pry.” “O-okay.” Twilight tried to smile, and almost broke down in tears again. “Come, Twilight, we are nearly to the courtyard. I shall show thee a wonder that surely has not been seen since… since…” Luna faltered, frowning. “Why cannot I remember? It is there, in my mind, but something blocks my thought from reaching it. Some…” She swept a hoof through the air imperiously. “Bah! Onward, Twilight Sparkle. The night and its many wonders waits for thee!” Twilight gnawed on the idea of Luna and Nightmare Moon being connected somehow, possibly being the same pony the entire way through the castle’s labyrinthine halls to the cistern beside the castle gate. Nightmare Moon was a myth. Some myths, as she was finding out, were true. Or had a basis in truth. But Luna, as a pony taken by herself was nice, intelligent, and articulate in ways Twilight had grown accustomed to when speaking with Princess Celestia, but for few other ponies. She couldn’t believe that Luna had become Nightmare Moon. Perhaps she had fought against the Nightmare, and lost. Maybe even sacrificed herself to trap it in the moon with her. That could make a kind of sense. The thought grew slowly, until it became almost a certainty in her mind. Luna was the hero, Nightmare Moon the villain, and Princess Celestia the grieving sister who longs for her lost sibling, her self-sacrifice living on in eternal grief. The small cistern door Luna led them to had seen little use in apparently a thousand years, but it was still maintained nicely. Only a small cobweb in an upper corner, glimpsed only because of the way it had frozen in place scattered the light just right to sparkle like a small galaxy when Twilight and Luna’s light spells fell on it. The door was sealed with waxy resin that reformed after Luna closed the door, making it watertight again. A narrow channel ran through the middle of the room, coated with ice, and the walls facing the interior had condensation dribbling past waxy runnels where mortar should have been, and the outside facing wall had ice cobwebbing the surface in delicate traceries of lace. On the far side was a hatch attached to chains that rose up into the castle above. The hatch opened upwards, revealing a rubber seal and a steel ring that led into a small stone hall that curved along the outer wall to come out a few hoofs from the main gate. Twilight had always assumed it was a part of the curtain wall, and not a duct for water, and when she looked back after the door swung shut again, there was only blank stone. Luna strode ahead into a flurry of snowflakes that drifted in her wake before freezing again as they left the strange time field surrounding her, but not seeming to touch her at all, leaving an odd wake behind her. Twilight, when she followed, felt the snowflakes melt against her coat when she brushed past them, and saw she left a pony sized hole in the flurry behind her. She focused on the difference, considering possible reasons for that to be so instead of that it was so. She and Luna must be in self-contained bubbles of time for the snowflakes to react at all to them. That must be why the thief was never caught, or even seen. That was one mystery down. But it brought a new mystery to the fore: Why am I not frozen, too? Consideration of this new problem served to distract her from the frightful idea that Princess Celestia had been doing this every year for a thousand years. For all of five steps. Why? Wouldn’t it be tantamount to torture? Does she blame herself for her sister’s… the thought went unfinished. Luna didn’t appear to be any kind of shade or ghost that Twilight had ever read about. Then again, she had never read about the kind of ghost an Alicorn might leave behind. And then there was the curious case of the moon, and the Mare in the Moon, whose eye had sparkled with the same light at Luna’s horn before she appeared. Is Luna the spirit of the moon, in pony form? The idea seemed to have little merit on its face. Princess Celestia had never claimed to be more than a pony, and Luna seemed to have memories of going to school, something she had never thought a spirit would need to do. But no, she had said her sister was Celestia, and it hadn’t felt like a metaphor when she’d said it. “Luna,” Twilight started to ask, but the mare was far ahead, and Twilight’s voice didn’t seem to reach her. She was staring off to the left, past a frozen drift of windblown snow and up at the slender cord of light stretching to the sky, seemingly touching the moon at the tip of the Mare in the Moon’s horn. “Luna?” Twilight hesitated, then touched the other’s shoulder with a hoof. Heat and bitter cold raged up her leg, and she staggered back, gasping. “Luna?” Her voice rose, cracking. “What’s wrong?” “She is me, and I am her,” Luna said softly. “I am the one who struck first. The fault is mine, but it…” Luna dragged down a deep breath, let it out as a cloud of steam that froze in front of her, obscuring the sight of the beam of light. “It was not my fault. She took from me so much…” “Who? Who took? Struck whom?” Luna looked down at her, the icy visage of a mare older than Luna looked back. Her smile was weak and shallow, and she closed her eyes over a trickle of tears that froze on her muzzle. “I took. She took. I gave in. She, the nightmare, I the victim and villain in one. She, who offered to give back what she had taken, with poison in her heart.” “Celestia?” “Speak not that name!” Luna thundered. Light and shadow flared around her horn, half black spark, half cyan fire. Twilight shrank back, heart thudding, readying a spell-shield in her mind. Before them, the golden cord pulsed, throwing back the shadows enveloping Luna, sweeping away the cold in a blast of summer wind that touched nothing and threatened to carry her away. Twilight staggered, slumping against the sudden change. In a whimper, the younger Luna was back, her eyes once again fixed on the brilliant cord, once again no more than a rope of sunlight leading to the moon. “It hurts too much. To look upon her light, to think of what came between us. But nay, ‘twas not her that offered poison, nor her who took my pride and let me see it twisted. ‘Twas I, and not I, the other, the shadow that spoke in my voice, who told me my own thoughts.” Twilight crept forward, head lowered. “The shadow? What shadow?” She was getting somewhere, but it was all so cryptic. Why can nopony speak plainly, either in novels or in reality? “Shame, Twilight,” Luna said as though Twilight had spoken aloud, closed her eyes again and turned away from the light. She walked off, hooves dragging and wings limp at her sides, and lay down on a compacted drift. “It is shame,” she said so softly that Twilight could barely hear it over the sound of her thundering heart. Twilight sat and watched the light. Its presence tingled against her horn, familiar and foreign at once. It felt like the times she had seen Princess Celestia raise the sun on Midsummer’s Morning, and felt too like the first moment she had seen Luna through the crack in the door, a thrumming beat of life and power that spoke of great control and boundless love. It made her throat ache to stare at it, to feel it, and she didn’t want to stop looking. What, she thought in her smallest voice, glancing at Luna, could be so shameful? But she couldn’t ask. She had other questions she wanted answered, and she pulled her eyes away, then turned her body. Even though she couldn’t see it, and the cord seemed to add no light to the world, it felt as though the sun were beating at her back, beckoning her to it. She pushed the sensation away and made her way to Luna, settling onto the cold snow-pack beside her. Instead of feeling cold or any kind of incorporeal distance, the mare’s body was warm against hers, and solidly there. For some reason, she had thought that Luna would be a ghostly presence up close, but she was as solid and real as the cold snow. Definitely not a ghost. Luna didn’t seem to take any notice of her except for a tensing of muscles and a slight fluttering of wings. After a long moment, the tense feeling relaxed, and Luna sighed. It could be time travel of some kind. Dependent upon the type of time travel, and the method, and there appeared to be a huge amount of magical energy involved in this sending that froze time as well. Time travel was possible, but only to the past, she had thought, to fixed points that didn’t violate, directly, causality. Perhaps it was some kind of moving time loop that moved through the years, but only allowed an exit at a specific time of each year. Maybe Luna wasn’t a victim of the war, but a victim of a magical experiment gone wrong. Maybe, she thought, the magical light was a beacon for Luna. Her cutie mark was the crescent moon, so maybe it would make sense for the beacon to appear when the moon was out for the longest time. If she wasn’t aware of what had happened to her, and kept going back through the same memories over time, it would explain the confusion and possibly even the apparent fragmentation of memory. I’ll study time spells. Okay, maybe not time spells. I really doubt Princess Celestia would let me study that if this is what happened to her sister. But maybe I can study theory and application. And history. And Star Swirl’s lectures. Maybe… I can make that my special course of study. She pulled a piece of parchment out of her bag and wrote down a brief outline. 1. Special Course of study History Time Magic theory Eclipse War Nightmare Moon IMPORTANT!!! “That… could work,” she murmured, reviewing the parchment and putting the course through her mind for a moment, imagining the books, and the few she had found that had actually been important to her studies. “What could work?” Luna asked. “Gah!” “Thy thoughts have been deep indeed.” Luna said. “As have mine. Thou art strange, Twilight Sparkle. Thine presence is comforting to me, and unfamiliar at the same time. Yet I cannot divine the reason this should be so. I have told thee of my thoughts, so tell me, what draws on thy mind so deeply that you forget I am here.” “I was thinking about what courses I wanted to take next year,” Twilight said, tucking the list back into her bag surreptitiously, faintly embarrassed that she had ignored the object of her future studies for the thought of future studies. “Very well, keep thine secrets, Twilight Sparkle,” Luna said with a laugh. “We all have our own.” “Well… no. I’m not trying to keep secrets. I don’t want to forget after I got to sleep. Meeting you has been the most important thing I’ve done.” “Surely not.” Luna raised an eyebrow, but the feeling of warmth intensified in the point of contact between them. “This is a jest at my expense?” “No. Of course not. Even you being here explains so much. But your being here also raises so many more questions that I don’t even know where to start.” “Ah, yes.” Luna looked briefly confused, as if not certain what Twilight meant. “Have we not met before? I keep circling around to this idea that thou art well known to me, but it cannot be, for I see no recognition of me in thine eyes, and there is no memory of thee in mine own mind that I can find, yet here in thine presence, I can feel that thou art known at least as well to me as my own wings.” “No… I don’t think we have. You… don’t seem familiar to me at all.” Except for the cutie confection, Twilight recalled. In all the excitement, she’d forgotten completely about it. “I don’t suppose you remember, um, celebrating some ten years ago with a piece of cake with my cutie mark on it?” She twisted about to show her flank. Luna appraised the mark carefully, clucking her tongue. “It does bear a certain familiarity… But so do many stars and constellations to many other things.” She looked away, then back and met Twilight’s eyes. “’Tis not thy flank, but thine being that seems familiar to me, Twilight Sparkle. In thee, I find a feeling of a friend I had long ago forgotten, but just now remembered upon meeting her once more.” “It could be that this is all a dream? Maybe that’s the reason for it all? Maybe I’m not really out and about in the castle—” She slapped a hoof on the snowpack, wincing as the cold and shock rolled up her leg. “Or… not. That felt very real.” “I am of the certainty that it is real. Dreams do not often proceed in so linear a fashion for so long a period as this.” Luna smirked. “Besides which, all of this feels real, and I have not yet awoken to my sister’s droning snore, so it must be real.” Twilight snorted a laugh. “C—” Twilight cut herself off and swallowed the rest of Celestia’s name. “She snores?” “Oh, that she most assuredly does. Or did.” Luna frowned faintly and stood. “Come. I feel there an urgency in my need to reach the Tower of Moonlight, and the way is blocked, though it should not be, were my memory of this place timely.” “Why?” “I know not. Yet. But some inkling tells me that I must. Come, Twilight. Let us see if there is a gate somewhere along the wall, lest we have to backtrack through the halls once more.” Almost, she told Luna of the way, how she knew of it, and why, but curiosity kept her from speaking. If she was going to find answers, she needed to stall as long as she could, and hope that the right question came to her because she had no time to sit and think of questions, or time to ask every question that came to her mind. Even though they searched for what felt like half an hour, they could find no gate in the curtain wall dividing the private domain of Princess Celestia and the main courtyard. But during the time the spent shifting snow and probing at the wall for hidden passageways, Luna talked and Twilight listened. Since the past was already set, Luna explained, it wouldn’t hurt to tell Twilight how the school used to look, and even some of the shenanigans she and Celestia had gotten up to, though Luna never referred to her by name again. Whenever she got close to mentioning it, Twilight could feel the warmth in her companion seep away, and it took a long time to work up the courage to ask the question she wanted answered. “Luna?” She asked after turning a pile of snow over and finding nothing but grass. “Why does her name… hurt you?” “Hurt me?” Luna looked up sharply, brows raised. “Why, she doesn’t hurt me, nor does her name.” “Then why don’t you say her name ever? The only times you’ve heard her name, you’ve… gotten scary.” Luna was silent for a long time. “Luna?” When Luna spoke, it was as though she had aged centuries. “Her name…” Luna lifted her head to stare at the golden cord. “Celestia.” The cord pulsed, and an answering darkness rose briefly from Luna, quashed in an instant by the warmer light. “It wakes something within me, something that fights to get free. It wants her, not me. I am but a vessel, a tool, and a fool.” She lifted her head higher, looking down at Twilight. “Do not pursue this course. It will not end well for thee, as it did not for me.” “What course?” “Fighting a shadow, with a shadow in thine heart. I thought I could save her, our ponies, myself. But I was wrong.” She sighed, turning away from the light and Twilight, careful not to meet Twilight’s eyes. “Let us return the long way ‘round, Twilight Sparkle. There does not appear to be a way through.” “Couldn’t you fly us over?” Twilight asked, glancing pointedly at Luna’s wings. Luna glanced back, then at her flanks and ruffled her wings. “Nay. I know not the rules of this spell, or place. Were it truly a dream, and I recognized it as such, I could but stamp my hoof and walk through the wall as through fog.” Luna gestured at the wall, huffing. “‘Tis not a dream I recognize, nor any spell, and so we must follow its rules, whatever they be. Thus far, walking has broken nothing, and so long as nothing continues to break, we too shall continue. Come.” Twilight followed her back through the cistern and into the warmth of the castle, silent, thoughtful. If this were a dream, writing something down would accomplish nothing. She glanced at her bag, then ahead, thinking.