Here is what Luna told us:
Father died before I was born. I am told he starved so that mother might eat, instead, and have a healthy foal. I was born in the second year of Discord's reign. Many ponies starved. Celestia once let slip that my littermate was stillborn. I wonder if it was my brother or my sister?
As a twin, my birthweight was low. I was fortunate to live beyond infancy. Medical magic was crude back then, and the germ theory of disease still controversial.
Mother and I lived alone, in a one-room hut in a town. I played with other fillies and colts. I was normal, very smart, but otherwise nopony special. I remembered my elder sister, Celestia, and my elder brother, Mars. They were different than mother and I. Mother and I were unicorns, but Celestia and Mars were something special and different and wonderful.
Mars would levitate me to his back and fly with me. To a four-year-old unicorn, what could be greater?
Discord ruled Equestria. If one can call that 'rule.' Healthy food was scarce, and cotton candy and chocolate milk left me emaciated and sickly. Mother worried but tried not to let me know. But I knew.
Ponies pledged fealty to Discord. Ponies pledged resistance to Discord. Civil war wracked the land, and Discord's sense of humor made it worse. Sometimes, I wondered if he even knew there was a war going on around his ears. He certainly didn't care.
Water became polluted with sewage as ponies lost their fastidiousness. Mother gave me beer, often, because it was more antiseptic. I avoided dysentery, which killed so many of my friends and peers. I lived, but I developed early-stage alcoholism. I have craved alcohol every day of my life since. I blame myself—other foals drank, too, but they did not become addicted. I do not know why I fell into addiction when my peers did not. I suppose I am just weak.
Celestia and Mars became the core of the resistance to discord: Free Ponykind's leaders. They fought under nomes de guerre, as Commander and Captain, and mother and I fled to a cave in the wilderness, that we should not become hostages to use against them.
Mother's magic was sufficient to keep our cave dry and prevent frostbite, but we were forced to share our blankets and body warmth every night. We suffered lice and fleas.
I was five. I thought snuggling with mother to sleep every night and foraging in the woods every day a grand adventure. We had no beer, so I whined like a little filly. At least the water in the forest was clean.
We had only the mattress, a table, and a few cooking pots, and some magic books. Mother taught me to read, and praised me for how rapidly my magic was coming in. I read with assurance quickly. I memorized the magic books. I attempted every spell. I succeeded at most. Teleportation was beyond me, alas.
I turned six.
When I was six, stallions came to our cave and took mother and I. They wanted Celestia and Mars.
"Tell us where your son and daughter are," said their leader, a white unicorn, "or you can't imagine what will happen."
"I don't know!" mother shouted. "I forbade them to tell me!"
"Liar," said the lead stallion, and kicked me, breaking my left foreleg both above and below the knee.
I screamed and writhed in agony. I voided and vomited all over myself. My magic went wild, blankets and leaves swirling around our cave. The cooking pots rattled.
"Tell me where they are," the stallion said to mother, "or we'll do worse."
"I don't know! She's a filly, she's only six, don't hurt her! Do your evil to me, not to baby Luna!"
"We'll do to you, soon enough."
The nine stallions raped me in turn, forcing mother to watch, offering to stop only when she told the secrets she did not know. I was entirely innocent of the differences between mares and stallions before that moment, and my education was unpleasant. They broke my other foreleg, and then my nose for good measure. Then they raped mother in front of me. I lost consciousness.
They placed us in a dungeon. Mother splinted my legs, but I healed badly and could hardly walk. After a month, they ceased trying to interrogate mother. I suppose they realized she had no information.
So, for the next year and a half, they used mother and I as toys. We both suffered terribly.
Mother would have killed one, I think, out of simple intransigence, except that they would have killed her in revenge, and then I would have died of hypothermia without mother to curl around me in my sleep. I was but bones and sinew, no fat at all, and I shivered constantly. We had not so much as a scrap of blanket.
One day, while one stallion raped me and another stallion held a sword to mother to prevent her intervention, I teleported for the first time, teleported away, and found myself in the deep Everfree Forest, near a camp.
I crawled into the camp and the Commander was summoned.
The Commander was, naturally, Celestia. My teleportation has never failed me, although it often surprises me.
Celestia held me and cried as I told her the story. Her magic was able to clear me of the venereal diseases, but she lacked the power to fix my misshapen and ruined legs.
They gave me wine and opium to deaden the pain. In retrospect, I should have kept the excruciation. But I was too weak, and my addictions worsened.
Celestia's band was at the forefront of the fighting. She passed me to another band, where I would be safer, and I travelled with them.
To justify our keep, pay for the food we ate and the water and wine we drank, several other fillies my own age and I serviced the soldiers. They were kinder and gentler than the barbarians who had locked mother and I in the dungeon, but it was still... sub-ideal. I reacquired the venereal diseases.
Because I drank much wine, I had to service many soldiers to balance my account. I paid the price gladly. Wine was preferable to dignity. I see my shame in the mirror to this day; alcohol made me a willing whore.
By then, I was eight.
Every few months, we crossed paths with Celestia's or Mars's bands. Their magic cleaned me and the other fillies of our diseases. Celestia apologized that she could not reunite me with mother and that I had to earn my keep with my body, but times were hard and the fighting against the ponies who followed Discord was brutal, beyond anything modern ponies can understand.
The war had no laws, no rules, no quarter, no mercy. In over a decade of fighting, I do not think one single prisoner was taken, by either side.
We were animals, then, more than we were sapient beings.
War is hell. Equestria' Civil War is still history's worst.
Those were my most formative years. Is it any wonder I am how I am?
My magic came in strong and fast. I remembered every word of the books. Starswirl tutored me when our bands crossed paths. I was soon working in the medical tent, and spent less time servicing the stallions. I could levitate heavy sledgehammers and drive in tent stakes faster than the largest earth ponies. I was still crippled from my misshapen forelegs and I could hardly walk, but I learned to teleport precisely in lieu of walking.
I consumed alcohol at a rate unmatched by even the largest stallions. I lived in agony every day, and the alcohol deadened the pain of my mishealed leg bones and infected genitals.
In the winter, we were forced to hunt animals for food. I would tandem-teleport with our best spear thrower, bringing him point-blank to surprise and take the animal before it could scent us and flee. Without my magic, many more of us would have starved.
When animals were not available, we ate our own dead. That is why I am nearly vegan, to this day.
My closest friend was Bloom Tender, an earth pony filly my own age. I used my magic—which by then was second only to Celestia, Mars, or Starswirl—to sooth her pain after a liaison with a soldier; Bloom Tender carried me when my broken legs hurt too much to walk. We shared a tent, and would look into each other's eyes in commiseration while soldiers mounted us.
During the worst hunger winter of Discord's reign, my band and Celestia's band made winter quarters and laagered together. Food was unobtainable and starvation allowed disease to scythe through us.
We ran out of alcohol and opium. The pain in my legs was terrible, but my desperation for alcohol was worse. I was weak. Many of the soldiers were wounded, but they endured their pain. I whined like a little filly.
Bloom Tender died. They cooked her body. I refused to eat. I decided to die, instead of endure pain and disease and starvation and horrors unnameable.
Celestia took me into the falling snow, outside the tent, and I hobbled in the thick snow on my crippled legs. Celestia wrapped a wing over me.
"Luna," she said, "do you think mother is still alive?"
I thought for a few minutes.
I said, "No."
"Think of what she endured so that you might live. Think of her sacrifice. Will you make her sacrifice meaningless by dying?"
"Sister—how can I endure the unendurable?"
"We'll lay Discord low, Luna, and we'll found a new land. A land where ponies love each other, and work for each other, instead of against each other. Mars and I will rule. That will make you a Princess of the Blood. You will be a scion of the Royal House. You will have many obligations, and to fulfill your duties, you must be alive."
(Parenthetically, I add that Celestia was the single pony unsurprised when I eventually sprouted wings.)
Celestia said, "If you die anywhere but in battle, you'll insult mother's memory. Father's memory."
I ate. I endured. I lived. I turned nine.
As my frame grew, and my ruined leg bones lengthened, my bones weak from malnourishment, I became entirely unable to walk, and was forced to teleport myself everywhere.
"Try to drink less," Celestia often told me.
I tried. I failed. I blame myself.
One day, in the late spring, the officers of our band discovered that one of our allies, a powerful spellcaster, had betrayed us and pledged fealty to our enemies and Discord. He had delved into the black arts of necromancy, and was ensconced in a walled keep on top of a mountain. He knew our code words, our weapons caches, and our larders. His mouth had to be silenced. Celestia and Mars commanded our band bring forth into the castle and kill him.
Our leaders debated whether to attack by siege or by stealth. Neither approach had any possibility of success. His castle was guarded by both ponies and the animated dead. There was discussion of tandem teleports, and although no names were spoken, only one filly in our band possessed that skill.
I teleported myself up into the branches in the crown of a tall tree and looked across the valley. The keep stood on top of a mountain, perhaps fifteen miles away.
White stone glistened in the sun. The walls were high and thick, and the lands around the mountaintop clear and without any cover or concealment. It seemed obvious to me—for I was well tutored in war by then—that most of our fighters would be dead by the next day. I would be alone and helpless again.
What would a nine-year-old filly, who can barely walk, do without her patrons and protectors? I glared my hatred at the keep, and felt my anger and my wrath wax. My horn tingled. A fell sensation came over me, and the hatred made my magic strong. The very air became as thick as blood with my magic.
My horn discharged.
Fifteen miles away, the mountaintop exploded.
A billowing fireball lifted into the air, flattening into a mushroom. The flash parched my face and burned out my eyes. The airblast knocked me out of the tree, fifteen miles away. My head hit a branch on the way down. I do not remember the remainder of the fall, or the remainder of that day.
I awoke the next afternoon, with my cutie mark and my wings. Everypony called me 'Princess.' I was blind from the flash, vitreous humor matting my face, but my eyes healed within hours. Five others of our band were permanently blind, and most were sunburned. My forelegs flamed with pain as my new magic healed my misshapen leg bones, and my privates burned as the scar tissue inside my reproductive tract healed, and as my venereal diseases were driven out. The blanket I convalesced upon had to be burned, because of the vile discharge it collected from my genitals.
I have not had so much as a head cold since that day.
The spell I created entered the history books as "The most forbidden spell." Celestia expunged it from the archives and grimoires of this land. My name, thankfully, is not attributed to it in those few histories that remember it. The only copy that remains is in my head. Even when I was Nightmare Moon, I declined to use that spell for fear of the collateral damage to the kingdom I wished to usurp.
I later learned there had been over a thousand fighters, and several thousand farmers and other innocents, in the keep and its surrounding lands. I had killed them all to get one necromancer. The mountain itself was become a crater, and the next season's rains turned it into a lake.
To this day, I loathe necromancers.
I was nine years old, I had the blood of four thousand or more on my hooves, and I wasn't upset at all. I was pleased to learn how to fly, and to walk without agony in my forelegs, and to pass urine without agony in my loins.
I became leader of that band, and forbade the soldiers to rut the other fillies, and put the fillies to more moral work, such as washing laundry or changing bandages. I took all the soldiers' rutting onto myself, because I was immune to venereal disease, and far too young for pregnancy.
My alcohol consumption was reduced, slightly, as the pain faded. Then it increased as my new metabolism took hold and a given amount of drink produced far less effect.
Years passed. Discord murdered my brother, Mars. Celestia and I found the Elements of Harmony and deposed Discord. Equestria was re-founded. We fought many battles to rout the ponies that did not wish to acknowledge the new order. Celestia commanded I give quarter and parole and take prisoners. I obeyed, but it was not natural to me.
I spread my wings and alighted on the ground in front of the castle mother and I had been imprisoned under. I blew its door to splinters and entered.
Stallions recognized me. I recognized my rapists. They drew their weapons. I flung my magic, and their deaths were slow and horrible. I tortured seventeen to death, tortured them to the point their minds broke, and then I freed mother and the other prisoners.
To bring mother out of her bondage was the best day of my life (until the Elements freed me from Nightmare Moon).
I was so pleased to reunite with mother that I did not lose a moment of sleep over the acts I committed. And that lack of regret terrifies me. I think that was the seed of sociopathy that allowed Nightmare Moon inside, later.
I was twelve years old.
I ruled Equestria with Celestia. We caged Sombra and lost the Crystal Empire. I turned fourteen. I became Nightmare Moon. I was banished, a thousand years was but an eyeblink to me, I returned, Twilight and her friends saved me, and Celestia forgave me.
Until a few months ago, I drank uncontrollably. At seventeen, Celestia had me incarcerated for cause for three months in Juvenile Hall. The civil servants were disconcerted to have a princess as prisoner, but the psychological treatment was good for me. I stayed willingingly, and I was sad to be freed on my eighteenth birthday to return to my grim duties. I returned to drink, however, after my first 'sanction' after my release.
My Ponyville friend, Starlight Glimmer, whom I met through the Friendship Map, stands as my Sponsor to Alcoholics Anonymous. She has been sober several years and sets a good example for me. I am abstinent of alcohol for the moment, but I do not know what tomorrow will bring. I will never be free of alcohol, no matter how long I abstain from it. I am weak. I will disappoint Starlight Glimmer and Celestia, sooner or later, I am sure.
I rut any pegasus stallion I can find when I am sober, and any stallion at all when I am drunk. I cannot control myself. None of my rapists were pegasi; my psychiatrist thinks that relevant, but I retort that I simply like the feel of feathers.
I wear the crown, and that means I have duties and obligations. Along with Twilight and Cadance, I am among the most powerful pieces on Celestia's chessboard, and she moves me around Equestria where she must. Celestia takes advantage of my unmatched talent at combat and killing. I both love and resent Celestia with all my heart. I wish I had never sprouted wings, but as I did, I must fulfill my obligations.
I usually regret my killings; make no mistake.
But, when I am sent to deal with a necromancer, or when I can find a rapist in the dark of the night, or one who gives foals addictive substances, I smile as I take their head. I was not born that way: I allowed myself to become that way.
And that is why I hate and fear myself. Because, sometimes, I smile when I kill. Because I have learned to smile when I kill.