//------------------------------// // Interlude 2 - Stolen // Story: If Chaos prevails... // by The Marshmallow //------------------------------// Twilight Sparkle was stressed. She was walking in a circle in her own room over and over while looking at her carefully crafted checklists, seemingly intentioned to wear the floor with her steps. "Give instructions to Moondancer, check. Leave my notes to the research team, check." Her hair was uncombed, her face tense, her eyes wide open. "Leave a summary of my notes to the research team, check" "I was wondering what Sunset meant by saying you were doing no worse than usual..." The warm, kind voice and a subsequent giggle brought the lavender mare back to reality, making her blush. Se quickly turned towards the voice, seeing in front of her the well known royal figure "P-p-princess!" She quickly turned towards Celestia, and a for a brief moment she lowered her head slightly in a bow. but then, quickly, she raised her head back up and looked at her mentor with worried eyes. Celestia's posture wasn't the dignified facade she put up in front of the others, it was that of a tired, weak mare. Slouching a bit, almost unsteady on her hooves. And yet, her eyes were still ignited with an indomitable will. "You should be in bed!" The princess didn't even flinch at being scolded by her student and kept on her face the same ambiguous smile. "If you are worried about that, you are not going to like what I'm going to say next." For about four seconds she looked intently in Twilight's eyes "I wanted to go for a walk" One second and a half. Celestia had mastered dramatic pauses. "In the open air." Twilight froze. It took a few moments to fully process the request, as it was just too outlandish, and Celestia took advantage of those moments. Before Twilight could deny her wish, she was hit by Celestia's puppy eyes. It defied reason how a mare twice her size and more than fifty times her age could look like that and awake in Twilight such feelings of compassion. "I... Ok." A blush, she already regretted her moment of weakness. If Sunset was there she could have had dissuaded her, but Twilight simply didn't have the strength to do so. "Why, though?" She took a few moments to think, then she settled on "I don't know when we will have another chance to just... Take a walk." And then again, that smile. Twilight knew her mentor well enough to understand when she was happy and when she was sad, when she needed comfort and when she wanted to offer it. But that? maybe she was plotting something. maybe she had something on her mind. even after all those years Twilight couldn't tell. "Fine", she sighed. "Let me take the ointments..." A flash of light preceded their manifesting in a small, mostly unkept garden. A quiet, hidden place surrounded by rocks on all sides. The only place she could do this, as showing the others the full extent of Celestia weakness would have been disastrous. The morning sun had just started to hit it, creating a pleasant warmth balanced by the slight breeze coming from the north. Celestia barely remembered the feeling of being teleported. Conceptually, she knew it perfectly, but feeling it again on her own skin was enough to create a rush of adrenaline in her whole body. That helped to make everything that came afterwards more bearable. For just a moment, the princess could feel the pleasant breeze and the sun on her skin, and it was amazing. She could also look for a small moment at the sun, the beloved star over which she ruled a millennium earlier. Even Discord couldn't sever the special link she shared with it... But he certainly could steal everything else. A small tear appeared in her right eye, then one in the left, then her smile started to become stiff. With her right hoof, she tried to muffle a scream, only partially succeeding, while due to the pain her already weakened limbs became unable to sustain her body. She fell to the ground, and only due to her extraordinary force of will she avoided started convulsing in front of her student. The sun she loved, the sun that loved her, was burning her body, making her suffer terribly, and neither could do anything about it. For Twilight, it was simply too much to bear. She waited a few seconds, as her teacher wished, but then she teleported both back to Celestia's room. B On the floor besides her was Celestia, still in pain, but at least instead of screaming was just breathing heavily. "A-are you happy now?" The young mare was on the verge of crying herself, but now she had a job to do. She had to take the ointment and put it on Celestia's body, to hopefully soothe her pain. "Thank you, Twilight." There was sincere gratitude in Celestia's words. Enough to break Twilight's heart. "I don't mind Discord taking away my magic, or weakening my body, or my wings..." Such was the curse she had lived with for a thousand years. She that was once the embodiment of the magic of all three races was now a powerless husk. The magic was still there, but she had hardly any way to manifest it. "But stealing the sun away from me... I didn't think he would be capable of such cruelty." As she started spreading the oily substance with on Celestia's back Twilight barely knew what to say. Seeing her teacher suffer like that was just too painful. "W-we will Stop that monster, Princess. I promise!" in those moments, she really understood Sunset's hate for Discord. She, after all, had been much more exposed to chaos and is consequences than Twilight had. The only manifestation of that terrible magic she was really familiar with was the curse in front of her. "Isn't it ironic?" A small, slightly forced smile found her way to the old mare's face "In a thousand years, we found no magical artefact to stop him and just one meagre spell to defend from him... And now our best chance comes from appealing to his more pony-like qualities..." "Ironic?" that was not the word she would have used, but she understood the feeling behind it "I guess so..." Celestia kind eyes looked at her students with an unreadable expression. There was sadness in there, maybe some melancholy. Nostalgia? it was possible. Then there were warmth and a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that even Twilight couldn't really place "It's still a few hours before the train. Would you mind spending some of that time with me?" The lavender mare was caught by surprise at the request, but she certainly wasn't against it "Sure, princess!" A well calculated moment of pause. She was learning from the best "As long as you don't ask me anything as crazy as... That!" A shiver, as she looked at the horrible burns on her teacher's body. "I promise."