Luna, speaking to her as the barren wastes between the mountains and the City speed by:
It was not long after Discord had been dealt with. My sister and I spent years knitting together the frightened, weary fragments of the realm. You cannot imagine what it is like to see such things. For you, for all the ponies of this time, Discord’s reign is a page or so in a book. It is a dim and unformed idea, an unpleasant suggestion. What do you think about? A world of chocolate rain, perhaps. Trees that grow upside down. Trivialities. The playpen of gods.
Imagine if you can a world where nothing makes sense. Where you wake up in a new house every day, where you cannot remember who you are, or who your family is--imagine, if you can, a world where nothing ever stays still. Nothing will ever make sense.
We did our best. We righted what we could, comforted who we could. The settlements on the fringes that had broken away, we drew gently back into the fold. But one city of ponies in the lands between the old Empire and the sands of the Zebrahara remained outside of our protection, and with the old Empire of the Crystal Ponies newly under the control of Sombra… Its independence was no longer possible. We could not give the mad emperor a foothold in the middle lands, and we could not abide his iron-shod hoof crushing anypony else.
But our embassies were rebuffed. We were cautious, tentative, respectful of their traditional insularity. But they would not talk to us. Or, rather, they would not talk to envoys. They made very clear that there was but one pony that the old stallions would talk to: myself.
You have seen, so you say, some of our long trek north. Any waiting would have only angered them, so we thought, for then we did not know why they asked for me to bring them our terms. The Crystal Legions were gathering on the border. Time was of the essence. So we marched in winter, ready to repel a last minute incursion.
Yes, I know you wish to know. You will see soon. But I will tell you that it was not because of any attachment to me, to myself, to what is in my heart or mind. No, they wanted what I represented for them.
A clue: their sigil was always the moon, long before my sister and I had ever crossed the wide sea.
Twilight gasped when she first saw the city.
It was as the barest descriptions had told, but none had done it justice.
The river Lunaga flowed through it, cutting the city into two uneven parts. Dark spires rose up out of the snowy plain, flanked on all sides by strange and twisted architecture. It was imposing, but it was also beautiful. It shone in the sun as a paradox: a darkness that gave light.
“We will be landing at the Kniaz’s palace,” Luna said over the wind. “I am told a crowd will be awaiting my arrival!”
Twilight nodded dumbly as she tried to pick out--there it was. The complex near the river could be nothing else than the palace of a king, or in this case of a prince. It’s fluted towers screamed power, and she could see the teeming masses already assembled at its gates.
She could see more than dark towers now. The streets were filled with color, but from above it appeared as if color could live here only in the cracks between monoliths. Where it grew, it thrived in aggressive disregard for propriety, libertine and wild. She had often thought that a city reflected the ponies that lived here. What could she tell of them from such things?
As they drew closer and closer, Twilight wondered what Luna would say to them. She had been laconic to all but Twilight herself since their departure. Would she say anything at all?
They were level with the taller towers now. Twilight saw a great ziggurat on the other side of the river, and smaller ones beside it, and they grasped her attention. She almost spoke to ask Luna about them, but then one of the ponies drawing the chariot yelled back to them that they would be landing soon, and she was drawn back into the moment.
They circled the complex that she was now certain housed the leader of the city. It was, like most things in Lunangrad, a melange of greys and black, trimmed in argent silver and the occasional intense flashes of color.
They landed.
Luna gestured for the guards in the other chariots to begin moving, and they did. Her batponies fanned out, their faces like grim masks. There was a tension there that she did not yet understand, but she knew Luna was at the center of it. There had been long talks between herself and her officers in the night, and whatever had been discussed weighed on them obviously.
Luna gestured to Twilight. “Step out before me,” she said as the crowd’s noise began to swell. These were less cheers and more a thousand voices bursting into frenzied conversation at once, or like the braying of hounds on the chase. “Step out quickly, and stand at attention beside us as we approach the kniaz and his dias. Speak no words, Twilight of Ponyville, and move only as I command thee.”
Twilight nodded, and stepped out onto the hard stones. She stood beside the chariot, her legs locked.
As Luna rose, all sound ceased. It was not that it died down to a low murmur, or that the crowd was simply distracted with something new. No, it was an absolute dead silence. Twilight herself felt almost as if she’d had a bit stuck in her mouth and couldn’t say a thing.
Luna had prepared for this moment. She knew that. But there is a difference in knowing and seeing.
She wore armor that Twilight had never seen before, and upon her head was a silver circle with a crescent moon. Her eyes suddenly shone with an unbearable white light, and Twilight’s knees almost buckled beneath her. Where was this weight coming from, this weight on her back? Where--
She stepped down, and without instruction the masses beyond the gate knelt in a wave. Between Luna and her subjects, a wooden dias covered in finest furs hosted the seat of the prince of the city himself, and he rose only to bow before her.
Luna stalked towards him, her every footstep like an earthquake in of itself. No, she wasn’t Luna. Luna was the mare who played chess and told stories of her sister with a charming smirk. Luna was the mare who wrote letters to scholars tongue-in-cheek in a dozen languages half-lost to time. Luna was the one who made music and enjoyed wine and flying. This was another pony entirely, and when this pony looked back to her and bade her march on with only a look, Twilight obeyed in terror. Twilight followed at her heels, her head falling almost against her will. Was this what it was like for Luna to let her aura loose? Was this only a taste, or all of it at once? She did not want to know. Knowing would have only made it more alien.
Came Luna then to Lunangrad properly and at last, and mounted the dias. She laid a hoof on the prince’s head, and he shook.
She spoke, and her voice was like a dozen unearthly voices layered atop each other. “Rise, keeper the sacred city. I shall take back mine seat, and thou shalt sit beside me until such a time as I may judge they works. You may speak.”
“T-thank you,” said the stallion, pale as the snow. He was massive, scarred and fearsome in his own right by the standards of any of the tribes of Equestria. But beside this towering goddess he was like a foal.
Luna paused, as if not sure how to respond, but then sighed. “Do not thank us,” she commanded, and he straightened as she approaches his throne.
“Have it turned, that I might see the assembled,” she said.
He nodded and hurried. Twilight saw now that it sat on a small platform that rotated, and as he pushed, the chair was repositioned.
Luna sat on it, and then surveyed the mass. Her brow furrowed, and as Twilight took her place on the opposite side of the kniaz of Lunangrad, she found she could not read the emotions in that once familiar face.
“You have endured,” she said, her voice amplified for perhaps the whole city to hear. “You have survived. Like lichen in the darkest of the mountain’s caves, you have clung to your existence in unforgiving harshness.”
More silence.
“I am proud to see it.” Like that, some of the weight was lifted. She could almost feel the ponies outside the gate sagging in relief. “The ancient pact between us shall be renewed,” Luna continued. “I have not forgotten it. Whether or not you have is something that remains to be seen. I shall visit the ziggurat. What I find there shall be what I find there. If it has been touched, I shall know who has trodden upon holy ground.”
She held her hoof up, and they rose as one.
“Depart in peace, and return to Us upon the morrow. There shall be feasting upon these grounds, and I shall sit in judgement over you in your works and days as I did long before. Go!”
Silence continued as the ponies outside began to disperse, but it did not last long. Soon she could hear their buzzing from just out of sight, a thousand ponies set to talking in brief excited oveflows of anxiety.
Luna turned to the prince, and the amplification was gone. “You shall take me to the ziggurat. I will inspect all of them. What is your name, prince of the Lunaga?”
“I am… I am Nevsky II in the language of the North,” he said, and his voice faltered.
“Speak without dawdling,” Luna said with a flat tone. “Stand up straight. Do not cower in my sight, nor in anypony else’s.”
He nodded and took a breath. “To the Equestrians, I am Frozen Lake, for that was the name my mother chose in their tongue, Night Mother.”
Luna frowned at the name he gave her, but if it displeased her she did not say. “I shall call you by the name you bear in your own tongue. Nevsky, rise and take me to them.”
He did rise, and Twilight again followed at Luna’s heels.
Luna, an aside upon the march across the Lunaga, as Twilight began to lose her mind:
We had seen such tragedies, such sorrow. Often had I been sick in the depths of my heart and cried bitter tears, and that was before I saw what Discord had done. I had held the malformed children of a hundred sobbing mothers and given them what peace I could. Every single one that we saved was a blessing, and we had few blessings in the days after he was defeated.
But it was here that I lost what hope I had. I tell thee the truth, Twilight, when I say that here in this mine city did I truly begin to hate as I had never been able to hate in all my wandering. I had mourned, but only atop the great ziggurat of Lunangrad could I despair.
See it! Do you not see it rising up above us? I tell you that it is nothing now compared to how it was that first night, when the masters of this city bid me and only me to a feast in my honor. It is nothing now to that night that that I made my solitary way down into Hell.
Twilight stumbled, but righted herself.
Luna was definitely losing some of the control she held over herself. Her emotions spilled into Twilight, and now there was no confusion as to what was happening. If this despair was anything like what Luna contended with inside of herself, it was a miracle that she had come at all.
Luna may have looked to others as if she strode imperiously in the city that served her with every breath, but Twilight knew that within she was like a mare led to the grisly sight of her execution.
Guards went before them and behind them, her small honor guard supplemented by a full platoon of the city’s guards in strange furred hats and segmented armor. Their captain had asked from his prostrate position before the princess if his ponies might be allowed to sing on their processional, and with a sigh she had granted him his request. Twilight had watched it unfold with confusion, and even now she wished she understood the words of their odd lilting, off-kilter song. It was a coarse and yet reverant chorus, unschooled and uncultured men singing a song meant for grand halls.
Luna seemed aware of Twilight’s struggles, for she spoke out of the side of her mouth. “You feel it. You feel as I do. I do not know how to apologize, or if I even can.”
“It hurts.”
“I know that it does. I will not tell you to rest, or that it shall pass, for it has not yet passed for myself. But you will not fold beneath the weight. If you falter, ask, and I shall bear what I can for your sake. When we reach the top of the ziggurat, there will be… I will not call it rest. But there will be time for you to collect yourself.”
Twilight nodded.
Across the river there was a great avenue, and along it quiet neighborhoods where ponies peeked out at them or stood transfixed in the streets, unable to tear their eyes away. But not a one looked at her. It was Luna who held them all spellbound even after she had passed. She did no waving, no smiling. But it was perhaps for the best. For Twilight had the idea already that her smiles would have only alarmed them. This was a city gripped in a fear older than any Twilight had ever imagined.
There were brief, frightening moments where Luna’s emotions threatened to devour her whole, where she was Luna, and not herself at all. To be Luna and walk this street was beyond her ability to bear. She was terrified. She was filled with resentment Twilight, twenty summers all, could not fathom. It was as if every stone was the pressed remains of a child and ever tower built with the bones of her lovers. It was like the moment of mourning she had witnessed in the dream, but stretched out and out until it was not even a moment anymore but a mood, a state of being. It wasn’t something that Luna could walk away from, and now it was something that Twilight could not walk away from. She had only ever used the phrase “heart broken” before in irony, but here was the grisly truth of it.
The ziggurats were behind yet another gate, and this one Luna opened by herself, and guards fanned out in her wake. Others, all of them in furs and with grim faces, lined the lone walkway up to the prime ziggurat. Paths branched off to half a dozen others, but they were small affairs. Twilight tried to summon up something beyond misery. Curiosity about their make, their purpose, placement, anything at all, but she just kept returning to her own borrowed dread that lanced through every step.
They ascended, and the guards to a pony did not touch the structure. Even the kniaz himself seemed loathe to touch the steps, but he did.
“Who tends the temple?” asked Luna.
“Your Order does, Night Mother. The Duskwatch supervises the selection of the temple’s keepers for the year, and each is made sacrosanct and purified.”
“How?” Her tone was dangerous now, not merely flat.
“W-With water, Dread Lady, with water and then later anointed with oil.”
She hummed. “As it should be,” she said, in the manner of one throwing a dog a bone.
The climb was long and dizzying. Each step, Twilight swore she would slip and tumble back down to her death. Yet she found Luna walked close to her, not quite touching, as if to say that she would not be allowed to fall.
A part of her suddenly wanted to. A part of her--she did not know which part--daydreamed of falling, of slipping on the worn stone and rolling on sharp edge after sharp edge, her bones cracking and her body breaking--
“Keep your eyes up, sweet Twilight,” whispered Luna. “Eyes up.”
Twilight swallowed and obeyed.
They reached the top.
The top was flat, with four stone pillars with covered basins for fires. In the center was a kind of house-like structure with no door but rather the open-wound-like opening through which she could not see a thing. All of it looked ancient, worn down to perfect smoothness by the trodding of a thousand years or more of hooves. Here, the kniaz prostrated himself again.
“Please do not ask me to go further,” he said. “I beg it of you.”
Luna looked down at him and nodded stiffly.
“Sit at the foot of the steps, looking out over the city, and meditate upon the sins of your forefathers.”
He retreated, and Twilight struggled to keep up with Luna’s long strides as she ducked to enter the strange house-structure.
When her eyes had adjusted, Twilight found what could only be an altar. Luna sat before it.
“There are stairs beneath,” said the princess. “Twilight? Come and sit by me.”
Twilight sat.
“What is this… this feeling, princess?”
“Call me Luna.” Her voice sounded so strained.
Twilight’s breathing, too, was ragged. She didn’t want to be here. “What is it? Why does it feel so heavy? I don’t understand.” Luna continued not to speak, and Twilight prodded, afraid that if she stopped asking she would be lost in Luna’s warring feelings. “What happened here? What makes this city so awful? Who is this altar dedicated to?”
“Me,” whispered Luna. “It was dedicated to me. It is still dedicated to me.And in a better light, you could probably see the bloodstains.”
Twilight had no answer.
“I told you that you would find out everything,” Luna continued hoarsely. “And you shall. They invited me--
To a feast. I went, smiling as I crossed the bridge, delighted by their revelrous songs. I did not know their tongue. Had I known then, I would have not been in such high spirits as I was! But I was ignorant.
When we came to Equestria there was an ache in me, Twilight. It rested here, in my breast, beside my heart, sleeping soundly in the cavity of my chest. It grew so slowly. It opened its eyes in the wet, always-raining plains beyond in the West, as my sister and I won our respective celestial spheres, but then it slept again. But it never goes away. What is it?
A wound? But it is a wound that never healed. It is like a knife that our bodies have grown over. It is an infection.
But it slumbered. Discord’s madness stirred it, but victory calmed the growing cancer of my spirit. When the world was righted, we could breathe easily once more. My sister and I could laugh and live. I could dream of a time when I might be happy.
Happy! Truly happy, as I was when I was a child, with friends and lovers, free in my joy. Not a carefree life with no responsibility, but a life that I could be proud to live. One buoyed by hope.
I had been dreaming of it. I had finally let myself hope that all things could be set right, if only I tried hard enough.
We feasted and we feasted, and the night drug along and after many casks of wine I began to sense that a strange mood had overtaken them all. Space was cleared, and the ponies of the city cheered as two of their number were pushed into a ring of howling spectators. I was beyond drunk, Twilight. I was so far beyond it--they had brought me entire barrels of spirits when I boasted, and I had boasted until my legs were weak beneath me.
Those poor ponies fought and fought, and this was no honorable combat. It was nothing like the boastful play-fighting I had seen in the barbarous eastern lands we call Equestria today, or the solemn displays of prowess in Jannah and Valon, and it was not the sparring tinged with laughter and betting upon the western veldt. It was panicked, fearful, ugly struggle. They bit and spat and kicked. A unicorn, so small and frail, used his horn like a spear and I saw it bathed in blood. I tried to rise, but they would pull me down and offer more wine, more mulled wine, and I took it and told myself that surely this was pageantry. I saw none of them breathe their last, for the crowd absorbed them again. Fight after fight.
And then we ascended the steps, and I flew and the ponies of Lunangrad hailed me. I stumbled into this place and was welcomed by their prince and a figure in a robe.
She took the robe and cast it aside, and she was covered in blood. The smell alone… Gods, the smell alone. She reeked of death and refuse. Her hair was a matted heap, her face was torn and mended and torn again.
And there lay a foal, and she bowed and held a knife of onyx and told me that the last of those prepared for the Moon’s welcoming was mine to slay as I saw fit.
Twilight wept. Luna wept.
“Celestia. Oh Celestia, they…”
“There were more below,” Luna said.
She summoned magic into her horn and before Twilight could say anything or stop her or take refuge, she destroyed the Altar with a scream. Twilight was thrown back, and the force was like a kick in her face. Stone tore into her cheek.
She laid astonished, and when she could rise again she found Luna with a heaving chest standing over the ruins. She had injured herself as well, and Twilight watched in mute horror as her cuts sealed themselves.
Luna tore off her armor. Her magic balled every piece tightly and then tore them all asunder. The sound grated on Twilight ears and she covered them with a wince.
“I descended!” Luna said loudly. “And now must we both! For this was only the beginning, and there is nowhere else to go!” She turned and Twilight shuddered. “We shall see all there is to see. I do not know who will come back up from that place. I do not know. I do… I do not…”
She slumped and then mounted the stairs cut into the hole beneath where the altar had stood, and Twilight limped after her.