//------------------------------// // Chapter 3: The Moon Called Me Back // Story: For Want of a Horseshoe // by PingZing //------------------------------// "Ugh. I still have a hornache. It took Spike almost an hour to get that stupid ring off of me." "It was effective in its intended purpose, though?" "Oh, of course. Without it, I doubt I would've gotten anywhere. I'll have to remember to bring pencils next time though—mouthwriting with a quill is much too difficult when just taking notes. I have to say though; I have a lot more respect for earth pony scholars now! I might have to start a new research project on the development of mouthwriting after this…" "Twilight Sparkle, you are avoiding the question. How did the meeting proceed?" "…she was so angry, Luna. I couldn't help but see you every time I looked at her. Was it really like that for you?" "…It is difficult to recall with precision. As though t'were, appropriately enough, in a dream. By my recollection, I was…afraid. And, yes, angry. I felt slighted, judged. Isolated. Righteously furious at the world for turning itself against me. I believe that she wants, desperately, nothing more than to be loved. But she is too proud and too hurt to ever admit it, least of all to herself." "Oh, Luna. I can't imagine how horrible it must have been for you. Must be for her." "It is hardly any wonder you saw myself in her visage. If not for the grace of…well, you, I would be as she is. Take heart, my young savior, for the task that lay ahead is simple. That is not to say that it will be easy, but I believe if there exists any creature capable of accomplishing such, it is yourself." "But I don't know what to do. Where do I even start?" "You will have to act as a stand-in for the Elements. Do what they did to me the long, hard, manual way. Start by simply being a friend. To that effect, I do have some suggestions…" For Want of a Horseshoe The Moon Called Me Back Nightmare Moon finally admitted it to herself. She was anxious. It had been three nights since Twilight Sparkle had invaded her bedroom and left her with nothing but a single feather and a head full of doubts. I should have killed her when I had the chance. As if she could have. Nightmare had twisting suspicions that, despite the power bound up in the little thing, the ring around the younger alicorn's horn could no more have imprisoned her magic than mere physical chains could bind Nightmare herself. I should have thrown her in the dungeon and gagged her. But no, that was folly. To ignore prescient knowledge, distorted as it was by many years of different choices, different paths taken, was foolish. There were still certain fundamental truths that could be teased out, even if the details were different. I should have asked about her Luna— Nightmare snarled and lashed out with a forehoof, crashing into stone with a satisfying cracking, crumbling crash. She stood there for several seconds, breathing hard and staring at nothing, before she recognized the sound of multiple ponies being carefully silent in her presence. She rounded on the them, and beheld— The audience chamber of her throne room. She looked back at the object that her earned her displeasure. It was the backrest of her throne. As she watched, another piece fell off and tumbled to the ground, the sound swallowed by the surrounding silence. "Court is adjourned for the night," she growled, "I will be retiring immediately. Make sure this mess gets cleaned up," she said, and stalked out of the room. At least the petitioner had left the chamber, she grumbled mentally. She didn't have a destination in mind other than 'away'. She couldn't even remember what the last petitioner had been talking about, so wrapped up was she in her own ruminations. She needed to clear her head of this nonsense. She was a queen, and she would not be unsettled by the words of some upstart alicorn from another dimension. Not even if said alicorn wielded vast power, or knowledge of the future, or apparently had the ear of both her sister and an alternate form of herself. Nightmare sighed and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath and made a conscious effort to clear her mind. This was getting her nowhere. She needed to take a moment to actually think about all the ramifications of the things that Twilight Sparkle had told her instead of just fretting in circles. Queens did not fret. It was beneath them. And if somepony could shut up that ringing noise, it would go a long way toward ensuring her peace of mind. Her eyes snapped open. Ringing? She looked about. There was nothing nearby that could conceivably be making such a noise. Except…she had enchanted the bell in her room that was linked to her sister's prison, such that if it rang, she would hear it no matter where she was. With a thought, and a flash of brilliant teal, she vanished, and reappeared in her bedchamber. The little golden bell—conspicuous in the room of blacks and blues and silver—was ringing, its pull string swaying. It was jingling a short repeating tune. Ring di-ding ding. Ring di-ding ding. Ring di-ding ding. It couldn't be. Ring di-ding ding. When she and her sister had begun the work of creating what would eventually become Equestria, they were often apart for long periods of time. This had necessitated creating ways to stay in contact, even across the breadth of their growing domain. They had devised a number of methods of communicating over long distances, but none of them were subtle. Discretion was essential, as one never knew when one's sister might be engaged in tense negations with buffalo tribes, or stealthy infiltrations into griffon strongholds. Dragonfire was inconvenient to obtain or use, and unmistakable. Any far-speaking spell required enough power that placing its output location to within anything more precise than several feet was the magical equivalent of attempting to thread a needle with a bludgeon. Enchanted journals or papers that mirrored each other's contents were viable, but difficult to read subtly. They had needed something able to avoid detection, but still capable of communicating information quickly. What they had eventually settled on was a stripped-down variant of the most basic far-speaking spell. One of the quirks of the original far-speaking spell was that, once it established a connection between the two participants, the receiving party—and only the receiving party—would hear a small magical chirp. The two sisters had devised a small set of phrases, encoded into these chirps, that they could use to exchange basic information. 'Are you alone', 'I'm busy', 'Later', 'Are you okay', simple things like that. Ring di-ding ding. Or 'please respond'. They had never shared their signals with another soul—they were supposed to allow discreet communication, and that was impossible if a third party was able to intercept and decode them. But she had been absent for a thousand years. It certainly wasn't impossible that her sister had taught others their little trick. But there was only one being currently even theoretically capable of ringing the little golden bell in her room. And even that should have been impossible—the bell was linked to a counterpart on the moon's surface, a lonely little post with a single golden bell dangling from it. Her sister was not physically atop the moon's surface—she was magically sealed within it, bereft of corporeal form. Truthfully, she had left the bell as a sardonic little jest to herself. She had never truly imagined that she ever could hear it ring. Ring di-ding ding. She narrowed her eyes and cast her magical senses moonward. Usually, when she felt the moon with her magic, her sister's presence underlay everything, a vast, serene magical reservoir, pulsing like waves on a beach. Atop that were the powerful wards acting as bars around the prison. Then, there were the bevy of charms designed to alert Nightmare should the state of the prison be in any way disrupted. Finally, were the physical tripwires placed in the manifestation chamber. Even if her sister were to find a way to escape her magical imprisonment and avoid tripping any of those alarms, her physical form would still be forced to appear in the manifestation chamber, which was festooned with tripwires, each linked to a separate alarm. All of it was as expected; her sister's presence still pulsed out regularly. The wards were unaltered. The charms had neither raised the alarm, nor were any apparently damaged or missing. Each tripwire felt undamaged, and none were raising an alarm. She couldn't feel anything in the manifestation chamber that didn't belong. Finally, she ran a wisp of telekinesis up the string of the bell on the surface. In her panic yesterday, she had checked it too, but she couldn't help but feel a little ridiculous doing so now. Now that she'd had a moment to gather her composure, she realized that the most logical reason for this was simply the link spell finally breaking down. She had thrown it together as a twisted joke, and it wouldn't surprise her if it was simply less durable than the rest of the countermeasures. The rhythm of the ringing was merely a coincidence, that was all. Something brushed against her telekinetic wisp that was not the bell's pull string. Ring di-ding ding. She drew in a sharp breath, her fragile rationalizations shattering under the weight of reality. Disgusted at herself, she gathered her power once more, and prepared for a jump to the moon. Her horn flared, bright as a star, and her bedchamber grew cold as the void, frost forming in a circle around her. With a final flare of power and light, she vanished from her bedchamber and reappeared on the surface of the moon. A shiver rippled down her body from horn to hooves as she made physical contact with the locus of her power. She drew herself upright as the feeling of power buzzed through her veins, shielding her from the killing cold and emptiness of the void. Standing beside the incongruous golden bell on its little pole, framed by the blue pearl that was Equestria on the horizon behind her, was Twilight Sparkle. She was surrounded by a faint nimbus of violet energy, and facing away from Nightmare, watching the bell carefully. The golden bell jingled silently, the vacuum of the void incapable of carrying sound, but Nightmare's enchantment delivered the sound directly to her mind all the same. Ring di-ding ding. Nightmare narrowed her eyes and replied with a signal of her own, using the variant far-speaking spell she and her sister had originally devised for communicating these signals. Ch-chirp ch-chirp ch-chirp. 'Beware, danger'. Twilight Sparkle's head jerked up, and she was halfway through spinning around when the blast of teal magic from Nightmare's horn caught her. She was thrown off her hooves, and went tumbling, skipping across the dusty surface, aided by the low gravity. Nightmare bounded after her, crossing the distance in series of graceful arcing leaps, perfectly at home in the low-gravity environment. She followed the shallow trench gouged into the moon dust, until it terminated in a disoriented purple alicorn. Nightmare pressed her hoof against the younger alicorn's chest, pressing her into the silvery dust. She held up the little golden bell that her earlier blast had torn off its post, and held it next to her head, glaring furiously at Twilight Sparkle. Nightmare waited until the purple alicorn's eyes had focused on her face before simultaneously ringing the bell and sending a signal with the far-speaking spell. Ch-chirp ch-chirp ch-chirp.