Ozone tickled Sundance’s nose. Standing in the round doorway, he suffered an awkward entrance to the cramped, crowded room, and felt dreadfully out of place, having just walked in on what appeared to be a private family moment. The room was long, narrow, and the far wall was curved in an odd way that didn’t leave much head room. Furniture that could only be described as opulent stood out in sharp contrast against the steel floor and walls.
Princess Celestia lay on something that seemed to be half bed, half couch. She lay on her stomach, with her head held high, and her forelegs crossed over one another in front of her. Radiance sat on her right, while Nuance lounged to her left, with his head resting upon her withers. The trio almost seemed to be colour-coded, each of them a complimentary shade that looked splendid together.
Prince Gosling sat upon a tasseled cushion that rested upon the floor. He was far too large for this room, or perhaps this room was far too small for him. Joining him on his cushion were Corbie and Quiet. This trio was also complementary to one another, all dark shades, greys, silvers, and sooty, charcoally blacks. Though sitting on the floor, Prince Gosling’s horn almost touched the ceiling.
As for Princess Luna, the rather sleepy looking mare lounged in a hammock, and she was not alone, as the hammock was full to bursting with company. Somehow, Skyla had squeezed in, and her pale pink pelt stood out in sharp contrast against Princess Luna’s midnight blue. Hailstone was doing her best fish-in-a-net impression, with her muzzle poking through the woven hammock cords. A bundle of blankets suggested that Steadfast was with his mother.
Looking down though, Sundance saw a small unicorn filly looking up at him. She was of striking beauty, a dark, dusky, almost sooty shade of blue, with a mane and tail that appeared spun from the purest silver. Her eyes were like electric blue opals and her horn was unusually pointy—dangerously so, no doubt.
“Hewwo,” she said while touching Sundance’s fetlock.
“Hi,” he replied. “Who are you?”
“Wowa,” she said, matter-of-factly while looking up with keen interest.
“That,” Princess Luna said in a sleepy voice, “is my daughter, Aurora Australis.”
“Mama says my magic fwequency makes me a Wawamoon. I wanna be a Wawamoon. Wastwawis is a siwwy name.”
Still looking down, Sundance was suddenly quite afraid of the tiny filly looking up at him. There was something about her, some terrifying aura of raw power that she radiated, which stood out in sharp contrast with how she spoke, which was endearing and charming. Her gaze was almost mesmerising, hypnotic in some weird way, and he wondered how much of her mother’s magic she had inherited.
Prince Gosling wore a bemused, proud expression.
“Wanna pway house wif me?” she asked.
Before Sundance could respond, the room grew very large, and Aurora now loomed over him, a colossus, a giant with an unsettling grin. He blinked, trying to understand what had just happened, but failed to grasp what had just taken place. Princess Luna seemed to be a bit concerned now, her sleepy expression now included furrowed brows, and Sundance tried to make sense of the fact that he was in a room of actual giants, beings of immense proportions.
“Aurora, what have we told you,” Prince Gosling said, his words stern and fatherly. “Ponies are not toys. He is not a doll. Now put him back.”
“But I don’t wanna—”
“Put him back.” Princess Celestia’s words carried with them a firm maternal threat.
“Aww… poop.”
Quite suddenly, jarringly so, Sundance was big again, but he couldn’t tell if he was right size, which was quite disorienting. Was he bigger or smaller than what he’d been when he’d entered this room? It was impossible to tell. Aurora was looking up at him, her eyes eager, playful, and more than a little prankish.
“Apologise,” her mother commanded.
“But I don’t—”
“Apologise.” This time, the Princess of the Night’s command left no room for argument.
“Sowwy.” Aurora hung her head, kicked her front hooves together, and then she let out an exasperated sigh. “Stupid gwownups, won’t wet me have no fun. Poopoo doody-heads!” Her horn flashed with a brilliant silvery blue light and she became a stuffed toy version of herself, which flopped over on the floor and did not move.
“Aurora—”
“Luna, let her pout.” Prince Gosling turned to look at the mare in the hammock. “At least she’s exhausting her magic by doing this. Maybe we can finally get her to sleep—”
“Nein!” the stuffed toy on the floor shouted in defiance.
Somehow, Princess Celestia, Prince Gosling, and Princess Luna managed an exceedingly rare synchronised parental eye roll, and Sundance, having witnessed this rare occurrence, stood in slack-jawed awe. Hailstone started to chortle, but a squinty glare from her father silenced her right away. Nuance was far, far braver though, and chuckled in open defiance of his mother’s disapproval, which came in the form of a low, throaty growl.
Quiet, whose monstrous smile revealed terrible, terrific teeth, waved in Aurora’s direction and said, “She once turned Twilight into a wooden rocking pony. It took Twilight a while to undo the spell. While Twilight was stuck as a toy, Spike started to lecture the way he does and he got turned into a pony, which didn’t agree with him… at all.”
“Quiet, please—”
Ignoring Prince Gosling, she continued, “Sundance, you got off easy.”
“Huh,” he muttered, unsure of what to say about all of this.
“Wanna be a dwagon?” Aurora asked.
To which every adult in the room, including Sundance, replied in unison, “NO!”
“I do apologise for my daughter’s behaviour.”
Sundance, now sitting on a cushion, wasn’t sure how to respond to Princess Luna, who insisted that she be called Luna, and nothing else. Getting an apology from a princess felt off somehow, and he couldn’t help but have the feeling that he should be apologising to her, for some unknown, inexplicable reason.
The stuffed toy on the floor was remarkably silent; perhaps she was sleeping.
“We wanted a little family time with you, before the festivities began,” Princess Celestia said while looking down at her son, Nuance. “I wanted to thank you for keeping what is dear to me safe.”
“Oh, the guards did that,” Sundance was quick to reply. He hesitated, uncertain if he wanted to say what was on his mind, right now, at this very moment. Unsure of himself, he thought of the radio broadcast, the reaction to said radio broadcast, and he felt a pang of lingering doubt as he struggled with speaking his mind.
“Corbie has the most delightful, most wonderful cutie mark. As her mother, I am proud.”
Distracted by his own thoughts, Sundance barely heard what Princess Celestia had to say. His eyes glanced around the room, meeting a few eyes, and then he looked down at the steel floor, which seemed unnaturally clean; no hair, no feathers, nothing but cold, clean steel. Hailstone caught his attention, and it occurred to him that she’d have waffle pattern pressed into her body from the hammock when—and if—she ever climbed out. She didn’t seem to mind that she was completely and utterly smooshed by her mother and Skyla.
Steadfast was incapable of smooshing anything.
“You know”—he licked his dry lips, which felt as though they might crack—“any number of ponies could trace their bloodline back to you. Why me? Why recognise me as family? I don’t get it. There is nothing special about me, other than I try to do good. I have a sense of duty, sure, but my mother has that too. If anything, her sense of duty is stronger than mine. She patrols the streets day after day, doing a thankless job that she doesn’t get paid enough for. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t understand why I’m here.”
Princess Celestia’s sudden sigh filled the cabin with a minor windstorm that made several manes go whipping about, including Sundance’s. She seemed put off by this, and he was terrified that he’d offended her somehow. Frowning, he wished that he hadn’t said anything, and he became aware of the fact that Radiance was staring at him with an unreadable expression. What was the colt thinking? Was he irked that his mother was upset?
“It helps me with my own insecurities,” the white mare replied.
“I don’t understand,” Sundance said to his distant grandmother.
“Where do I begin?”
Celestia—yes, she was Celestia now, her princessly poise had abandoned her. Sundance’s growing discomfort caused him to squirm, and he grew mighty uncomfortable with how his grandmother was looking at him. So this had more to do with her, than himself? How? He found himself longing to understand, and ears pricked, his pegasus body posture showed that he was intent on listening.
“I had a student… an apprentice,” she began and her eyes grew distant. “A not so distant cousin of yours, actually. You come from a line of Shimmers, Sundance. Your mother is Sunbeam Shimmer, and her mother is Noonfire Shimmer. Well, I had a student, an apprentice that I failed to make a proper connection with. I treated her as I would a student, which, looking back, might have been a mistake. She might have needed family. Something more than the student-teacher relationship had to offer. There was so much potential there. Still is, actually.”
The big mare sighed once more.
“That’s the real tragedy of being an immortal. You live long enough that your mistakes come back to haunt you. This… this was not the first time I made this mistake. Due to things that have happened in the past, I kept family at a distance. I did not wish to suffer the pain of betrayal. In doing so, my behaviour, my actions, might have very well planted more seeds of betrayal, an act of self-sabotage, if you will. My student that I mentioned, and others like her, things might have gone differently if I had treated them as family. If I had reached out to them and nurtured their potential. Had I done more, a great many things that I regret might have turned out differently.”
In silence, Sundance tried to comprehend how all of this applied to him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Luna, and like her sister, all of her princessly poise was gone. Pain was plainly visible on her face, and dark storm clouds could be seen in her eyes. As a pegasus, he saw the lurking storm and shivered, aware of the potential fury it could bring.
“Far too often, my own worst enemies have been my distant progeny.”
Ears drooping, Sundance wished that he was smarter; he wished that he had the sort of mind that would allow him to say all of the right things that would make this better somehow. Mindful of his body language, he made his ears rise, because it was important to show that he was listening.
“But,” he said, finding his words at last, “many of us are your distant progeny. Most of Equestria. Why recognise me? What makes me special?”
“You did the work to establish the connection,” Celestia was quick to reply. “You showed remarkable potential. Legal issues, genealogy, recordkeeping, history, civic sciences, you dabbled in everything, fields that most ponies go to college or university for, and you showed competence in each and every one of these things. To be quite honest, I still do not fully comprehend your motivations. To endure such an endeavour, and to honestly and sincerely want nothing in return. I saw potential. Should any of my other grandfoals put in the work and approach me under similar circumstances, I should like to think that I would recognise them as well. Equestria needs assets… and I need family members that I can trust.”
Gulping in a little needed air, Sundance tried not to think of the eyes that he could feel on him. Celestia was baring her soul; more than that, she was doing so in front of her own offspring—offspring who would one day have families of their own, and hundreds of years from now, those distant descendents might one day approach Celestia, hoping to say hello.
“Baltimare is not so different than Manehattan.” As Celestia spoke, her gaze fell upon Gosling, who was stroking Corbie with his wing. “It is a place bereft of hope. What sense of future does it have? You, Sundance, from what little I’ve been able to gather, sought out your past because you could see no future for yourself. Forgive the intrusion, but my sister has spent much time in your dreams, trying to understand your motivations, so that we might help one another better.”
Sundance turned his attention on Luna, but her face was now deadpan, expressionless.
“You seem to know me better than I know myself,” he said.
His words caused the corner of Luna’s mouth to rise into a good-natured smirk, and something about her reaction made him feel better. How it made things better, he could not say, but he felt a little more self-assured and a little less doubtful. It was true; he often didn’t understand his own motivations, in much the same way he didn’t understand his own mark. He just sort of existed, going from one experience to the next, riding on the unseen, unfathomable currents of life.
“I never fully understood what motivated me to do this,” he said at last, saying what was on his mind as well as in his heart. “It was a compulsion. At least, it started out that way. I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point, it became an escape. I could exist on the dreary, dirty, disgusting streets of Baltimare, or I could be reading about a time when my family were lords and ladies. When we’d been landowners, and we had something. We had houses… actual houses… and not rat-infested apartments in some crime-ridden neighborhood. The escape became necessary for my sanity.”
Tears stung his eyes, and he paused whilst he tried to blink them away.
“I was angry and I hated everything, though I was too passive to show it. School was a bad experience for me. I didn’t fit in and I didn’t have a lot of friends. At some point, I grew up enough to understand what sort of life awaited me, and it… just… crushed me. That left me suicidal for quite some time, but I was too cowardly to kill myself. So I did really dangerous things, hoping that I would get myself killed. You know, by accident. But the project saved me. No matter how bleak things became, or how oppressive everything felt, I had the project. It kept me alive. The work was all I had. To be honest, I had no plans of what to do with my life when it was completed, and I didn’t want to finish it because of that.”
Turning his head, he looked his grandmother in the eye.
“I didn’t ask you for anything because I couldn’t see a life beyond my project.”
Radiance sighed, a forlorn, sympathetic sound. A moment later, Nuance sniffled. Corbie clung to her father’s leg, her cheek pressed tight against him, which left her glasses crooked. Quiet was rather Luna-esque in some odd way, if Luna had somehow been born a sphinx, and she wore an unfathomable deadpan expression that offered no insight into whatever she might be feeling or thinking. Hailstone looked absolutely miserable, and her stubby wings—pinned against her sides—fidgeted. As for Skyla, she appeared subdued, but thoughtful.
Sundance couldn’t help but feel that these foals might be getting a glimpse into their own distant futures, the offspring of their offspring struggling to survive and to have meaning in their lives. It was a profound bit of introspection, and he grappled with his thoughts, wondering if they came from intelligence or wisdom. How might this humble them? Would it leave them bitter? Or maybe hopeful? Somehow, through means he could barely comprehend, Sundance had crossed the generational divide that had sprung up between him and his distant grandmother.
Through fortuitous circumstance, he was now among the lords and ladies that existed in the books that were his escape. Though the books painted a much better picture of a much nicer life, a fantastic life of wealth and privilege. The books never mentioned crippling debt and outright servitude. He was little more than a slave to his barony, and the books, his escape, had no stories like this within them.
A shuddering sigh escaped him.
“When you look into my dreams,” he asked of Luna, “what do you see? Can you tell me? Will you help me?”
“I can,” she replied, “and I will.” Luna yawned, which proved contagious, and once she had herself sorted out, she was true to her word. “When I look into your dreams, I see a pony that has abandoned selfishness. You’ve lived in desperation long enough that your sense of self is greatly diminished. Is this good or bad? Who can say. It depends on what you chose to do with yourself.”
The answer flummoxed him, and he could not even begin to understand what had just been said. Abandoned selfishness? Was this another way of saying that he had stopped caring about life? What did this mean, exactly? Was his sense of self damaged? What did she mean by diminished? Brows furrowing, Sundance tuned out everything around him while he tried to make sense of what had been said.
“Will you allow yourself to be overcome with greed?” Luna asked. “Does power appeal to you? Or will these things remain dormant? You now exist in a precarious position. Little by little, you awaken, you grow, very much like a sunflower reaching for the sun. Now that you’ve sprouted, how shall you grow? Will you remain content to be one sunflower among many, or will you rise above your fellows, hoping to reduce them in your shade? You’ve been given sun, water, and fertile soil. What will you do with it, I wonder?”
“I… don’t know.” For Sundance, this was the only answer that felt honest.
“There is no harm in that,” Luna replied.
“There isn’t?” He raised his head and dared to hope.
“Have you learned nothing from your time with the Gringineers?” asked Luna. She tilted her head to one side, and her eyes glittered with keen intelligence. “We sent them here for your benefit. Not just to build homes and to resurrect the barony, but so that you might learn from those whose circumstances are similar to your own. Like you, they are sunflowers. Precious things. Like you, we’ve given them sun, rain, and fertile soil. We are farmers, of a sort… perhaps Gosling most of all. We’ve sheltered these little sunflowers, and given them the resources they need to grow. What do you have in common with them, Sundance?”
Biting his lip, Sundance avoided saying, “I don’t know.” because he did know. Even if he couldn’t put it all into words at the moment, he thought of his recent experiences, and the ponies he had met. He thought of Applebutter. Private Applebutter. Stenmar came to mind, and their discussion about passions, which became a talk about foundations. Fluffernutter, who wanted to do something that mattered, because something, anything, had to be done. And then there was his time spent with Skyla, Corbie, Nuance and Quiet.
Overall, he had learned much from this experience, and had accomplished a bit of self-discovery. He noticed that Skyla was staring at him with a sort of knowing expression upon her face. Luna too, had a remarkably similar expression, and there was a sort of family resemblance between the two that could not be denied.
A hot, ferocious blush crept up his neck and seared his cheeks as he thought of Eventide. They had learned much from each other. All too aware of the fact that he was blushing, he banished these thoughts so that he could bring himself under control. Luna probably knew—she had to know, it was her business to know, and she had to know that he’d done what he hoped was the right thing. At least she was kind enough to say nothing about it.
When he turned to look at Celestia, he saw her staring back at him with a raised eyebrow. Almost guilty, he turned away, unable to bear her gaze. Did she know? Was she okay with it? Perhaps he was making a mountain out of a molehill. He made the mistake of looking right at Gosling, and thought of what Eventide had said about him. It was a mistake to look at anypony right now, so he cast his gaze to the floor and left it there.
“Who’s ready for lunch?” Celestia asked. “I know I am.”
“I want something deep fried, then drenched with caramel and chocolate,” Luna replied.
“Mama, no.” Hailstone squirmed against her mother, but all her wiggling was to no avail. “That’ll make your butt-butt big.”
“You made my butt big, but I still had you,” Luna said in a voice made lively with mirth.
“Mama… awful. Besides, that was Daddy’s fault. I heard you say it.”
“Hey, what’s the big idea?” Gosling demanded.
“She’s not wrong,” Luna said in Hailstone’s defense.
Sundance could feel things escalating, and he could not help but smile.
“Let us go make our anticipated appearance,” Celestia said. “Smiling faces, everpony. Happy, smiling faces. Public appearance faces. Radiance, big smile. Nuance, no smirking. Corbie… I never have to worry about you. Luna, will you rouse yourself?”
“We shall see,” was the sleepy blue alicorn’s response.
“Aurora is out like a light, I think.” Gosling looked down at the floor, where the stuffed animal that was his daughter lay perfectly still. “What do we do with her?”
“I suggest the dungeon, it would be for the best—”
“Nuance, why I oughta… I don’t want no unicorn rivalries between you and your sister!”
“Well then, you shouldn’t have made my sister.”
Alarmed, Sundance realised that this wasn’t a joke. Disturbed, he witnessed a silent contest of wills between father and son, and was relieved when Celestia covered Nuance’s face with her wing, ending the staring contest before it became something far more serious. Clearing her throat, the big mare cast a warning glance at her husband, clucked her tongue, and shook her head.
“No squabbling. Today, we put our differences aside. Nuance, I’m incredibly proud of what you’ve accomplished. I am proud of you. Please, don’t ruin that. Please?” Then, swivelling her head around, she focused her piercing stare on Radiance. “Not a word from you. If you say whatever snarky thing it is that you are thinking right now, I will have you confined to quarters. Got me?”
Radiance, fearless, stared up at his mother without blinking.
“Let me put this another way.” Celestia’s tone was cool and measured. “Not only will you be confined to quarters, but you will get a drastic dressing down. A public one. In front of the soldiery. Do you understand?”
Flinching, Radiance turned away, nodded, and mumbled, “Yes Ma’am.”
“Now”—Celestia held her head high —“while the glue holds, let us go have lunch.”