With Zecora chasing me, I had ran away to a cave hidden by the forest at the foot of the Canterlot mountain. I wanted to be alone, but I knew too many creatures cared about me to let that happen. With Princess Luna herself coming to me in person only hours after I arrived in the cave, I wound up striking a deal with her.
She would decree I was to be left alone, using the excuse of my late punishment for falsifying the need to take life force to heal as a reason for me being in the cave. It met loopholes, but in reality, it was the closest compromise we could come to in exchange of me complying to her regular visits and a promise I'd take care of myself physically. Of all the creatures I didn't want to see, she was an exception. It wasn't her calm understanding smile, or her patience with me that I welcomed.
It was the fear her presence brought that I secretly wanted.
As much as I wanted to sort this all out, I couldn't do it alone. I needed someone else to get my mind together enough to make any progress on my thoughts. I mentally knew I needed a counselor, not a torturer, but my heart, gut and everything else wanted to say the opposite. She was the compromise between the two that I needed.
It was the compromise I had to take if I wanted to get back to a level mind. I wasn't trying to justify anything. I didn't even want to justify my actions. I just wanted to sort my thoughts out and figure out my next move. Be it punishment by Equestria, long term self imposed exile, or something else, I needed to meditate and figure it out.
It took a few weeks to convince Princess Luna I wasn't going to try to off myself or do anything stupid, but I wasn't going to just "get over this" or "forgive myself," either. Eventually though, she caught on. I was doing my best to be open with my hasty action, analyze it, and then act appropriately. This wasn't about punishing myself, as much as my gut feeling was to do so. It was about addressing the many issues that were sure to come from the aftermath of what I had done. After that, I could move forward with absolute resolve, whatever that resolution was to be.
I spent Countless hours in the dark, but I had nothing else to do but my task, and entertaining Princess Luna with my progress when she came to check in on me. The progress on my task was slow, however, and I often found myself just going over my early adventures when I had ran out of things to say to Princess Luna during her regular visits. Pragmatically, those tales were only a distraction to keep talking, and occasionally helped me reset myself and to find a new angle to analyze with when I was stuck. It was a distraction that wound up long enough to write an entire book about, mind, but a distraction nonetheless. When she was gone, I tried my best not to focus on them and stay on task.
During her visits, she also told me of outside events to give some semblance of time passing in that cave. She told of how Dalock had been captured more easily without his magical armor or anti detection amulet and they had him secured with new measures. She also told of how the Summer Sun Celebration was also going to be honoring Speaks with Talons, the other servants, and the team that initially stopped the plagues from being even worse.
She also had informed me that she acted quickly with the guards to make sure my actions had been masked. The ponies involved were sworn to secrecy. Fluttershy was reported to be only dying, not dead, and that I had saved her with a spell that incidentally activated some latent thestral ancestry within her.
Normally, I would have objected to such a lie, but given the secret we were trying to address I conceded it was best the public didn't know. Maybe eventually... maybe, but the servants of the Animus Mundi and the royal family needed to weigh their options and get a grip on it before we even entertained the notion at the very least.
I wasn't sure if I had actually resurrected Fluttershy or created somepony new with her memories, and I was working through the implications of both scenarios. What should I call this new pony? Should I treat her like Fluttershy? Should I treat her like her own pony? Or should I do neither and just walk away?
I honestly didn't know, but what threw me for a loop was about mid way through my recovery I had a visitor against the wishes of the princess. It was her, whoever she was. I nearly struck at her, forcing my wand away at the last moment and went to a blithering mess. I wasn't ready to face her yet. I was barely able to keep myself together at her expense when I shouted, "I don't know who you are! Please, just go away."
Regardless of who she actually was, she probably did believe herself to be Fluttershy. It nearly broke my heart having to strike at hers like that, but she took the hint and managed to leave before pushing me over the edge.
When I next saw Princess Luna, I was genuinely grateful that she simply asked if I was ready to continue and didn't press me when I simply continued story time to calm myself. If she had, it might have given me that final shove over that edge.
After that, my progress with Princess Luna's did manage to pick up some, and I eventually found myself coming to the conclusions I suspected I was going to end up to. But going through all the thought processes and double checking my logic instead of taking a quick shortcut and presuming made my decision final. The nuances were too numerous to count, and each scenario of what the repercussions of my hasty actions were had multiple possibilities for solutions. But in the end I found every separate scenario finally had one acceptable solution in common.
One, I hated myself for what I did. It was like chopping my own foot off. There was no undoing it and "forgiving" myself wasn't going to make it all better. There was no denying it happened. I'd have to just learn to live with it.
Two, best case scenario, I was to live with the shame, but that would be about the same thing as I had done in the past about my kind's history anyway. So I was prepared for that.
Three, worst case scenario, I was to live with the guilt, but once again that would be about the same thing as I had done in the past about my kind's history anyway. So I was prepared for that too.
Four, even though I likely had no right to happiness anymore, I still had a job to do. I had issues to address, now that I had decided how, and when those were done I needed to keep going. I need to keep putting one step in front of the other, then just repeat and keep repeating. For now I still had breath in my body. Whether that changed the next day, or several decades into the future, my job wasn't going to be finished until that happened.
* * *
And then the final night of Princess Luna's visits came. I needed to put the first part of my plan into motion: Facing my own inner demons. Instead of laying them to rest, however, I planned on fully accepting them emotionally as I had logically, instead of hiding from them as I had been doing.
By previously refusing to stay asleep long enough for my nightmares to play out without Princess Luna's presence, I kept the more counterproductive thoughts at bay. But, finally having decided on my path, I let it come at me full force.
I didn't fight it, and did my best to let my emotions flow, knowing she was nearby and listening in. At one point, my focus wavered, as would happen in dreams, and I found myself falling into the emotional traps. Not as poorly as I might have when I first ran, but falling none the less.
And then, when I thought I was finished, Princess Luna came and her presence gave me that last boost of lucid dreaming I needed to see it through to the end. Having finally accepted it emotionally too, I sat there in the dream realm and cried in her embrace until the morning. Just before I woke, I asked her to meet me as soon as she could.
After I returned, I worked on recovering emotionally for about two days in a cell in Canterlot castle, though in a cell at my own request. I found it oddly comforting.
I found out that Dalock had bypassed the need for somatic or verbal components. This enabled him to shock himself to death, and reform outside of Canterlot. It turned out that while the Plague Artifact had acted as the catalyst for his lichdom, it was his staff, sitting unrecovered in the thick rocks, that was his actual phylactery.
Had... Had "Fluttershy" not reported this shortly after I had ran away, Dalock would still be on the loose. While Scraps had seen her, he did so at a distance and had no clue what Fluttershy was seeing in the rocks. It was believed by the princesses that Dalock used the power word kill spell on her specifically to keep this a secret in desperation. Scraps surely would have been killed too, had Discord not stepped in.
As such, capturing him when he reformed was not only possible, but quite easy. Without his armor or large stockpile of spell slots, he was not nearly as menacing. With Starlight finishing her fine tuning of the up casting technique, her and the two princesses on duty at the time were able to easily counter everything he tried to throw at them. When he attempted another wish spell to get him out of there, Discord quickly countered it himself, being the strongest arcane caster among them all, and they quickly subdued him.
They also managed to keep him from casting any more magic. With the shards of an old changeling artifact that they said would absorb his magic as he casts it, even with his ability to do so while restrained, they ensured that he was unable to finish casting another spell, making sure he couldn't get out of his new prison.
Due to legalities, they couldn't just execute him. He had to stand trial, but translating proved problematic.
I looked at Dalock's lawyer, whom I pitied, and asked, "What do you mean, you need me to translate for him in court?"
"Nopony else is sufficiently fluent in his language except you, and while the translation amulets will allow us to hear him, it will not work the other way around for him hearing us. No translation amulet will work for him while he is in his restraints. I had applied for having them removed for the hearing, but due to his violent history, the court refused. I'll be able to hear you speaking to him just fine with my amulet though, as will most officials and guards in the court room, so formalities on risking a biased translation will not be an issue."
This was not developing as I had hoped. Regardless, I had planned for a similar scenario, and did have a solution for it. I pursed my lips, and gave a quiet groan to myself. Furling my eyebrows, I looked at the lawyer.
"I can do it, but first I need something in exchange. I need a favor from Princess Luna."
He looked at me odd. "The courts can certainly try to ask her to accommodate, I suppose, depending on what you need. What was this favor?"
I steeled myself for a moment then said, "I need her to perform an Astral Judgement."
"Out of the question! We are not at war anymore! To even imply doing this before he is convicted, if he even does get convicted, is utter-"
I quickly got in the lawyers face and screamed to get his attention, "It's not for Dalock, alright!? It's for me!"
Blinking in shock, the lawyer looked at me like I was crazy for a solid five seconds after I backed out of his face. Without losing even a shred of confusion, he asked, "It's for you? But I read your file. You've already been through an Astral Judgement and were fully acquitted. Why in the blazes of Celestia's sun would you want to go through that, again?"
I folded up my arms in stubbornness and gave a firm, calm reply. "That will be between me and Princess Luna after she's already started it. It's not negotiable. Either she does it, or I am willing to sit and rot in a cell for the rest of my life in contempt of court."
I had to be one hundred and ten percent convicted to the move, or he'd see right through me. This is why I had to be absolutely certain before I left the cave. I had no room for doubt as I was no good at bluffing, especially when I wasn't certain about something. Like a person in love, I had to be fully committed, ready to risk it all like a mad man and potentially condemn myself, or I had a zero percent chance of success anyway.
I stared into his eyes as I saw him stare back into mine. In the span of a few more seconds, he stared into my abyss and made up his mind. He then straightened himself up to show that while he understood me, he wouldn't stand for the intimidation. With a nod, he calmly replied, "I'll see what I can do."
A few days later, I was taken to a medical area and restrained for my own safety. Quickly nodding off with a mild application of sleeping gas just to help me go under, I found myself on that familiar dream island yet again.
"Now that we are here, what do you actually need from me, Moss?"
I turned around and saw Princess Luna looking at me, worryingly.
I put my head down and called to her mournfully, "I actually do need an Astral Judgement. More specifically, I need to use it to remember something from my past. If I think of it, can you follow that thought to the memory and help me view it again? There's a specific detail I need to retrieve. I've tried to do it on my own, but the memory is too faint."
She gave me an uneasy frown. "Moss, I will support you whether you back down or go through with this, but you know what an Astral Judgement will do to your mind. You've lived through it once already. On top of this you are still healing from an emotional wound as it is. You are not just doing this to punish yourself, are you? What could be so important to merit doing this?"
I shook my head. "No. I'm not just doing this to punish myself. I'm doing it because the fate of Equestria might depend on if we can extract this exact information from my memories or not. And maybe, since I've done this before and I'm cooperating this time, then if we are fast, we might get lucky and I won't have a lot of trauma from this."
Another question started to form on her lips, but she soon enough found the answer to whatever question it was in my eyes. She raised herself on her back hooves and made her entire body radiate energy as if a star was being born within her.
"Reveal thine secrets!"
I could practically remember the magic reaching out to my mind, only this time I reached back to it with open arms instead of resisting.
With the plan in motion on her simply following my thoughts, I stitched a path for her to the memory, and she drove the magic to it. Almost immediately, I felt the strain start to come back. We needed to hurry.
"And the next guest we have here with us tonight on Dice Tumble almost needs no introduction. Lets give it up for the mind behind the Ork that flipped the wilderness on its head! Leeroy Peterson! So tell us, Lee, what kind of cha-"
The online video of the nerd channel I watched played in the background as I went about cleaning my room back when I still lived with my parents. I was a typical twenty year old guy who the school system hadn't actually prepared for the world, and who also happened to still slack off on cleaning if not told to.
Despite the strain of the judgement slowly growing like a migraine in the presence of a high pitched noise, I felt a slight wave of nostalgia kick in, seeing the old dwelling.
The scene moved forward a bit with the unimportant parts being skimmed over, until a stomping up the stairs could be heard.
"I hear that computer your uncle got you playing. When I get up there, I had better see a clean room, mr Da-"
Immediately, the room faded away and both Luna and I took a step back from the shock. She had forced the Astral Judgement closed.
"I'm..." She looked at me with a sorely apologetic look. "I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to. I'll try not to tell anypony else."
I could see it in her eyes. Even though she tried to cut it short, she had heard the whole thing.
She heard the words that would cripple me, or indeed potentially any outsider. She heard my true name.
I brought myself across the island in the dream realm, and opened my arms in a wide hugging motion. Slowly, with her feeling rather confused but not fighting, I brought her into a hug and said, "It's alright. You know what it's like to be a monster too, so I trust you. That's why I needed it to be you and not some other dream walker. Tell whomever you feel needs to know, and don't tell me who you tell."
With this, my fear of princess Luna was finally over. I had taken a very delicate treasure of mine, and placed it in the care of the one I had reflexively feared for so long. The instinctive desire to panic simply vanished as I came out of the hug. "Now I don't have to worry about if I ever turn crooked like the rest of my kind. Somepony I trust has what they need to stop me."
I had completed the final part of my second step in the plan: Get over my knee-jerk fear of Princess Luna by facing that fear and overcoming it with a more powerful token of trust. Now I was equipped and readied for the third step: Ending the threat Dalock posed before he hurt anybody else.