Synthetic Bottled Sunlight

by NorrisThePony

The Roots That Anchor the Trees (XXIV)

Fine Line had cried at Princess Celestia’s funeral.

She supposed it was a strange thing for her to do, but she couldn’t help it. She'd been witnessing little else but the last rites of what more or less amounted to her old boss, but the Princess had never truly felt like such. There’d always been... a strange aura about her. Of authority and of commanding presence, but of comfort as well. Like an elderly aunt, or an old schoolteacher preserved in her nostalgia. 

She’d been off for maternity leave with her first foal when Celestia’s health had started to drop. Most of the courtiers were off during the dark days of Equestria, as Princess Celestia herself had personally decreed that ponies staying home with their families was infinitely more important than them serving her Day Court during her personal ongoing efforts to find and put an end to Lord Tirek’s rampage.

Fine Line had never seen Celestia as she had during those weeks. Fine’s room in Canterlot Castle overlooked the promenade leading into the main entrance of the castle, and she would watch from her balcony as Celestia would set out on or return from her hunts for Tirek. Dressed not in her familiar golden regalia, but instead in shimmering armours of carefully moulded heavy metals. Her one tired eye glaring out from a nest of metal, and her crooked horn kept safe with thin strands of enchanted lace. Her heavy hoofsteps announced her presence to the entire courtyard, and she walked flanked with a dozen royal guards behind her.

Until one day, she didn’t return.

Or, she hadn’t returned how everypony in the castle had expected her to.

They’d brought her to her chambers as discreetly as they could, but everypony had seen the Princess’s bloodied, beaten form. Fine Line hadn’t been able to get the sight out of her brain for weeks, and it came back in full force as she looked at the closed lid of the Princess’s ornate casket. 

She’d been victorious over Tirek, but he’d been victorious over her, too. The details of the story varied depending on who Fine spoke with, but the general narrative remained the same. Tirek had struck a magical university outside of Baltimare, absorbing power from over a hundred unicorns in one horrific visit. It was a bold act and one that quickly put an enraged Celestia on his trail. The two of them had fought violently, Celestia flying ahead of the guard squadron to engage Tirek directly. By time the guards reached her, she’d been burned half-to-death and was somehow still standing. She only collapsed after Tirek had, in a heap of gnarled oak and cracked stone where a university had once been. 

And now, the world had opened up once again and swallowed another soul. Fine Line had known they’d been living in hard times. She hadn’t known they’d been times dark enough to kill the Princess of the Sun herself. Her funeral had lasted days—each separate little cult of the Princess having their individual times to grieve, and Fine Line had done so alongside dozens of other courtiers and maids and castle staff and anypony else whose relationship with Princess Celestia had been framed by royal affiliation. Nobles who hadn’t a kind word to say to her during her Day Courts had been there with courtiers with decades of experience, all brought together for the common goal of saying farewell to the Princess who had given her life defending them.

Yet Equestria did not die with the Princess, it seemed. A rising of the Sun a week later confirmed what Fine Line had so desperately wanted to be untrue.

The Industry had been right about her. Flim and Flam’s claims of solar orbit, once slanderous and far-fetched, had been proven. Now that the Princess lay beneath six feet of cool November soil in some royal burial ground, how could the Sun possibly have ever carried a connection with her if it had returned again?

Only weeks after she’d been killed in battle, the Princess’s reputation had begun to backslide. Her legacy eroded into lies and her claims to the Sun and to Equestria exposed themselves as fraudulent. As Celestia decayed, so too did Equestria’s perception of her.

Fine Line had just been happy to still be needed, to some capacity. Celestia may have been dead and buried, but her nation hadn’t been. The government that had kept it running hadn’t been, either. They simply had new ponies to answer to.

Flim and Flam had claimed the reins of Equestria through charismatic and stirring speeches, touring across Equestria with them. Great, sweeping changes were promised, but internally small shifts and tweaks were instead being made. A congress had become a Board of Directors, and Day Court had been abandoned. Too time-consuming and unproductive, Flim and Flam had claimed. An empty show of compassion from Celestia, allowing her to reap the glory of worship simply by listening to her ponies instead of acting for them. Ponies like Fine Line, still of use as servants of the nation, were to be re-educated and kept around, instead of being discarded as relics of a bygone rule.

That, she had supposed at the time, had been a relief.

Now, though, she wasn’t so sure. Twelve years... what she could have done with herself in that time. If only she had known the truth... or, if only she hadn’t believed the lie that a sunrise without Princess Celestia had implied.

And that didn’t even touch upon the immense guilt Fine Line felt, knowing she’d served a government that had been torturing her ex-Princess right under her snout. Had she turned a blind eye on anything that could have led to the Princess being found sooner? She supposed she would always wonder that, even if the less emotional part of her knew that finding out about Celestia meant being silently disposed of by the Industry. It was a worry that didn’t matter, she supposed, as most worries of the past usually wound up being.

For here she was now, waiting in terrified anticipation, for the same nightmare to happen once again. Waiting to put on a black dress once more, and for the second time in her life say farewell to Princess Celestia. After a future had been teased in front of her, and after the idea of once again serving a proud nation--instead of acting as a tool to a corrupt one—and here she was once more in fear of winding up in the same place she’d been.

It had been a tempting thought--Princess Celestia meeting her off the Air Taxi in the morning, instead of the mare desperately pleading her case on the other side of the double wooden doors to Fine Line’s left.

Fine Line sighed and took a long draw from her cigarette. She didn’t normally smoke, but her husband did, and she’d found herself sneaking a pack into her own purse to quell her own nerves. The courtroom guards were both glancing at her, no doubt wondering what she was doing on the wrong side of the preceding that nearly half of New Canterlot had arrived to witness, or listen to themselves over the radio in the shelter of their own homes.

In a few minutes, she’d be called in to testify before them all, about what she herself had seen and done during her service to the State. Several of the other high-ranking members of Flim Flam Industry had preceded her, and several more would follow, too, as the Courts struggled to make sense of what had taken place in their nation—in both models of the SunTrotter, not simply the one that had recently been exposed. 

It had been quick and a tad unorthodox to call for a hearing so close to the actual event--the SunTrotter Explosion had only occurred twelve days ago, after all--but Equestria’s fury had been unambiguous. Faced with threats of civil unrest, the Industry had little choice but to quickly call for Spoiled Rich and the SunTrotter crew’s statements to be entered into the public record through cross-examination and investigation. 

Snuffing out her cigarette, Fine Line made her way back inside the courtroom once again, weaving her way back to her seat and keeping her head as low as possible.

“...crew of at least thirty over more than a decade...” A mare was in the midst of testifying. A unicorn, dressed in Royal Guard Captain’s armour, and standing at the witness booth and being cross-examined by Florina. “Amongst those thirty, we have identified perhaps half, and their confessions have already been entered into public record by my late superior, Captain Shining Armor. Who, I might add, is not here delivering this testimony as a direct result of Spoiled Rich’s and by extension the State of Equestria’s actions.”

The Judge stirred, looking as though he had been contemplating offering a remark to the Royal Guard Captain but ultimately deciding against it and instead of letting her carry on. Fine had been expecting Judge Lawful Rule—he had overseen the preliminary hearing with Princess Celestia a year ago, and Fine knew that he had his own personal affiliations with Spoiled Rich. The mare bought judges as frivolously as she did jewellery and airships, Fine thought disdainfully. 

Standing some distance in front of the Royal Guard Captain was Florina Harshwhinny. Fine Line figured ponies loyal to the Industry were becoming fewer and fewer, and at the very least Florina had some manner of experience and some measure of success in contextualizing the worse of the Industry’s sins. Though, Fine Line figured even Florina’s involvement had about it a certain level of reluctance. 

“Anyways...” The Royal Guard began again. “The ponies affiliated with the First SunTrotter Facility that we have identified are all employees who entered the facility long after it had been constructed. Their records don’t go back further than a few years, and then virtually no employment record from that point on. Meaning the ponies who worked there before have vanished, or any trace of them having worked there has. Or perhaps it’s both. Regardless, our investigation still contains one other unanswered question and it implies another group of ponies aware of the construction of the First SunTrotter Facility: what became of the ponies in charge of constructing it in the first place?”

“An answer I hope you have for us, Captain Aura Gleam?” Florina asked thoughtfully.

“Well, no. Not exactly. But we have learned that certain members of the Second SunTrotter Facility were actually disguised changelings. The Equestrian government has been bargaining citizenship in exchange for indentured servitude for the better part of a decade now, and while the timeline for the Changeling Reform Program doesn’t entirely line up with the construction of the First SunTrotter, it seems at least possible that they served some role in it all the same.”

“A bit of a far fetched theory, no?” Florina tilted her head. “No evidence besides speculative?”

“I don’t believe it is a far fetched theory at all. Changelings from twelve years ago wouldn’t have had Equestrian residency tags, yet. There would have been no record of their existence as citizens of Equestria, and there were still nearly three dozen changeling POWs being held in Canterlot at the time of Princess Celestia’s supposed suicide. And I have seen changeling caves with my own eyes during raids performed with the Royal Guard during those skirmishes twelve years ago. They are capable of burrowing accurately and quickly, and I don’t have a doubt in my mind they could have constructed the elevator shaft and underground chambers the Princess had been kept in. To assume that Flim and Flam bargained their freedom and anonymity in exchange for doing their dirty work is not a far fetched theory to me at all, considering we have continued to use changelings to this end for more than a decade. Additionally, I have interviewed the changelings involved with the Second SunTrotter in private, and they have echoed their own beliefs that my theory is correct.” 

“And these changelings haven’t been called to testify... why?” The Judge asked, glancing between Aura Gleam and Florina. 

“Because I felt that doing so would compromise their identity and thus put them in danger of persecution,” Florina piped up, glancing in the Judge’s direction for all but a moment before turning her attention back to Captain Aura Gleam. “But to clarify further, that is still speculative evidence, yes? Theories of the changelings you interviewed?”

“It is the best we can do with the information we have,” Aura Gleam replied. “The absolute truth died with Flim and Flam. While the SunTrotter was being constructed, they were the heads of their Industry. They would have been directly responsible for Celestia’s imprisonment as a result, though I have my suspicions they anticipated doing such a long-term solution.”

No?” Florina frowned. “Elaborate.”

“I wasn’t with the platoon that had fought Tirek with her, but I spoke with them at length after. They all said that while they were bringing her back to safety after the battle, she was... a danger. She had expelled so much magic, and Tirek himself had attempted to steal it from her so many times, that her horn was quite literally having trouble containing it. Strong, destructive bursts of energy meant that she had to be, well. Sealed away. And I believe this was the point in which Flim and Flam, or Flim and Flam’s Industry, stepped in. I believe, and such has been vaguely corroborated through additional testimony from ex-employees from the First SunTrotter Facility, that they likely did not anticipate her survival. What they had initially intended to be Celestia transferring her sun-raising powers before her death very quickly changed when Celestia returned to lucidity and managed to stabilize her condition herself.”

“These employees you mention... none of them had been employed since the facility’s construction twelve years ago?”

Aura Gleam shook her head. “No. But ponies talk, and if word doesn’t travel, general feelings of unease at least do.”

“Perhaps. But ‘general feelings of unease’ make for unconvincing points of evidence towards your theories.”

Aura Gleam narrowed her eyes. “When in Tartarus did I say they were supposed to be? I’m only sharing what I know and heard.”

“Captain Aura Gleam, there’s no reason to get defensive.” The Judge spoke up, frowning. “You’ve been called to present evidence, not theories.”

Aura Gleam sighed. “Then if you want evidence I implore you to listen to the interview tapes from our encounters with the former crew of the SunTrotter. They are unambiguous. The employees we spoke with were terrified. One of them was visited by members of the Industry Police prior to our intervention, who gave her reason to believe her life was in danger. She also stated in no unclear terms that problematic coworkers had vanished without a trace and they were told not to question it. If you expect there to be simple paper-trails leading to precisely which ponies are responsible when that was the norm for those ponies, I don’t know what to tell you. You’re living in a dream.” 

The Judge frowned. “Captain Gleam. That is twice now that I’ve had to ask you to lower your tone.”

There it was. The judicial intervention Fine Line had been expecting for some time now.

Aura Gleam scoffed. “Then ask me more questions and I’ll answer them.”

“I do think that just about covers the questioning I had in mind for you regardless,” Florina spoke up, her voice calm and collected. “It wasn’t my intention to put you on the spot, Captain Gleam. Thank you for your time.”

Aura Gleam nodded, hiding the reproach from her expression as best as she could as she shuffled out of the booth and over to an empty seat someplace off to the side. The hearing soon dragged on for Fine, none of the ensuing testimonies seeming as spirited and as personal as Aura Gleam’s. A few officials from the State followed, who gave Florina non-specific declarations of the unknown that did little to answer any of the questions she presented them with. Fine Line shuffled in her seat the entire time, waiting for her turn to come in nervous anticipation. She felt herself on the verge of yet another panic attack as time crept on, but she knew she couldn’t exactly dismiss herself a second time. She’d just have to hold on and wait it out until--

“Miss Fine Line.”

She perked her ears and brought her snout up from the floor to see that everypony was staring at her.

“Ahem...” Florina spoke again. “I’d like to call forward Flim Flam Industry’s former Secretary of Finance, Fine Line, to the stand.”

She rose on shaky limbs, making her way over to the booth where she’d been watching the Guard Captain make her own little private stand. She probably looked considerably feeble by comparison, far from the proud stance and gleaming armour of a Royal Guard, and hardly the picture of the ‘star witness’ she knew she technically was.

She was sworn in over a copy of The Three Tribe’s Declaration and made the empty little vow that everything she’d say would be the truth. As if the truth had ever been a prerequisite of the State before.

“Can you state your name, age, and occupation for the record?” Florina asked, giving Fine a little greeting nod that felt distinctly personal.

“Fine Line. Thirty-seven. I’m currently working as a waitress.”

“Thank you, Miss Fine Line. I’ll try and be brief and to the point in my questioning,” Florina said, and Fine felt a tinge of gratefulness. She supposed it should have been expected; they’d been working together for years and there was little doubt in Fine’s mind that Florina knew about her panic attacks. She just hadn’t ever imagined that Florina had actually cared.

“Of course,” Fine said, nodding and taking a deep breath to steady her nerves.

“We’ll start with the most recent and most obvious question. Why did you resign from Flim Flam Industries? You walked away from a rather large severance and voided your employment contract through doing so.”

“I did not feel morally comfortable continuing to work for them.”

“You did not feel morally comfortable,” Florina repeated verbatim. An underlying request for clarification.

“Yes. It did not sit right with me. What we were doing to Princess Celestia, to the forests and the thestral tribes within, to our factory workers and their families... I felt I was an accessory to something that I fundamentally disagreed with, and I wanted nothing to do with it any longer.”

“And this change of heart just coincided with added stress piled onto you from the worker strikes, right?” Florina tilted her head. “Just a coincidence between the two?”

Fine Line bit her lip. “Obviously not.”

“You were the mare in charge of overseeing the Industry’s overall internal and external economic growth, correct?”

“Yes.” Fine gave a single nod.

“So you would have had to have a rather complete understanding of the Industry’s total expenditures.”

“Of course, yes.”

“So, all of those apparently morally uncomfortable things you mentioned feeling responsible for, you’ve been aware of them for years. So, why would you pick now to step down, then?”

“I didn’t know the extent. I... was ignorant, whether willingly so or otherwise. I rarely left New Canterlot. I most certainly never ventured into the Hollow Shades or the factories, and only on rare occasions did I witness first-hoof the destruction of the Equestrian forests.” Fine Line’s ears sunk against her head as she spoke, realizing as the words left her mouth what sort of mare would feel justified in saying them as a defence. “After the Hollow Shades incident and the ensuing riots, the media’s coverage became much more dramatic. And as a direct result I... I became much more aware. It is... surprisingly easy to desensitize yourself, when you’re only looking at the numbers, over the ponies they affect. I decided that the longer I waited for things to change for me, the less time I would have to change them myself.”

“And so you resigned.” Florina gave her a smug smile. “Okay. Next question, then. Over the course of your tenure with Flim Flam Industry, did you notice any obvious signs of monetary corruption? Some sort of pattern that might come to mind?”

Fine Line nodded. “Yes. Something like a million bits, annually, had been disclosed as ‘Other Expenses’ without a lot of clarification therein.”

“Really.” Florina raised an eyebrow.

“Mhm. This is... not exactly uncommon. In any industrial sector, a certain percentage of annual expenses fit into some manner of ‘Other’ classification, because industry itself is not always predictable. Incidents or worker accidents or equipment malfunction or fuel spoilage... there are dozens of factors on every level of management that slip through the cracks upon classification.”

“But a million bits isn’t exactly a small sum.”

Fine Line nodded. “A million bits annually. The cost of running the facility keeping the Princess imprisoned, I imagine, now that I have a retrospective angle.”

“Nonetheless, you didn’t exactly report any discrepancies.”

“I did, actually.” Fine Line shook her head. “What happened to them in the filing room from that point on, I don’t know. I’d like the Court to keep in mind that Flim Flam Industry’s upper management has an unspoken totem pole of power, and bean-counters such as myself rest pretty close to the bottom. I can report discrepancies and request clarification all I want, but whether or not anypony bothers to hear those requests is entirely beyond my control.”

And besides, Fine thought... Spoiled Rich had made her own stance on that affair quite clear. To interfere would be to make enemies, and Fine Line hadn’t earned her position through cutthroat politics and confidence so much as quiet complacency and competency.

“What do you mean by that?” Florina tilted her head thoughtfully in a way that showed there was no way she didn’t already know it herself.

“I mean that if a majority votes within the Board of Directors that I am to be let go, then I am let go without question. If I start intentionally trying to interfere with their greedy business, it would be quite obvious what they would decide to do with me. I answered to Spoiled Rich, who—and I believe such testimonies have already been offered numerous times already—was quite... direct, in her dealings with me. If I threatened her with litigation, she would respond by assuring me that she could easily ‘tilt’ any such actions in her favour. I was owed a severance when I resigned and it was withheld from me without any given reason why. So, you asked me if I saw corruption during my time with Flim Flam Industry... Florina, we were corruption. It was so ingrained into us that it was normal. It took just about the entire working class rioting for us to realize it.”

Florina looked at her for a solid ten seconds, her expression as neutral as she could make it, but Fine Line had known her long enough to know otherwise.

“Thank you, Miss Fine Line. No further questions.”

Fine Line returned to her seat on shaking hooves, her heart pounding in her chest as she felt the eyes of everypony on her. No doubt, they were internally passing their judgment on the mare who’d been complacent in the Industries sins for so long and had just admitted to being too damned stupid to have realized it. Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic…

There was a brief recess not long after Fine Line’s testimony, to give Celestia’s representative some time to prepare her own line of questioning against the witnesses. A familiar-looking unicorn named Twilight Sparkle would be doing the questioning, which Fine Line figured made the most sense. There weren’t many other ponies who seemed to have as close a relationship with the Princess now like her, so it was hardly surprising she would have been the mare to speak out on Celestia’s behalf. Sparkle stayed at her table as a few ponies, the judge included, shuffled out the large oak double doors leading into the lobby and waiting area of the New Canterlot Courthouse. Fine stayed in her seat herself, watching as Florina trotted over first to Twilight. The two shared a brief conversation, Florina chuckled at something Twilight Sparkle had said, and then turned tail and trotted past Fine Line, giving the unicorn a brief nod of acknowledgment as she vanished out the doors with everypony else. 

Fifteen minutes later, and everypony was back inside. Fine noted that Twilight Sparkle hadn’t bothered wearing a suit or dress, although her mane had at least been styled nicely for the occasion, and she was wearing a cracked old tiara atop it. She seemed fidgety and nervous to Fine Line, whereas Spoiled Rich exuded confidence as she strode up to the same witness booth that Fine Line had been occupying. 

Spoiled Rich had been non-vocal during the recent chaos of Equestria’s Fourth Longest Night. Even as testimony after testimony had begun to trickle out about her actions, she hadn’t offered a reaction. A wise decision, Fine Line supposed, considering the current climate of fear and confusion across Equestria.

“Spoiled Rich,” she was saying, speaking into the microphone clearly and confidently. “Fifty-four. Chief Executive Officer of Flim Flam Industries.” 

“Thank you, Miss Rich,” Twilight Sparkle said. “Now, there’s been a lot of conjecture offered forth by various parties. I was wondering if you wanted to respond to any of it before we got into things?” 

“I would. Firstly, I would like to state that the changelings in service in the SunTrotter I oversaw were not members of ‘indentured servitude, as the Royal Guard Captain claimed. They were members of a Wonderbolt-funded military reserve, with handsome paycheques and full pensions. Secondly, the rest of her theories frankly reek of changelingphobia, and I do hope everypony else realizes such. And finally, Miss Fine Line’s claims that I blackmailed her into complacency are ridiculously unfounded. The mare is prone to panic attacks and I believe she suffers from some manner of anxiety disorder, so do take everything she says with a massive grain of salt.” 

Fine Line felt a surge of fury killing away her shell-shocked nervousness. What she wouldn’t have given for a chance to respond! Anxiety disorder her flank--as if her experiences and opinions didn’t matter as a result! 

Miraculously, though, Twilight Sparkle seemed to feel the same. “I don’t know, she seemed rather confident in her claims to me. I’ve suffered from an anxiety disorder my whole life and I’d certainly be upset if somepony told me my thoughts were untrustworthy as a result. But that’s for the jury to decide. My first question, then… you were the mare predominantly responsible for resurrecting the SunTrotter Project?” 

“Yes, I was.”

“Why?” 

Spoiled Rich frowned. “Why? Contingency, that’s why.” 

“Contingency why? Hadn’t the State, at that point, proven the Sun’s orbit did not require intervention?” 

Silence. Fine Line could have sworn she had heard a fly buzzing somewhere in the room, for all the breathlessness that had swept across it. After several seconds, Twilight Sparkle continued. 

“In fact, for twelve years, such was the commonly held belief. So, why were you searching for contingency against a problem that didn’t exist?” 

“The SunTrotter is only several months old, Miss Sparkle. Construction began shortly after news had spread that she had escaped.” 

“Uh huh, sure. But the research didn’t, right? It’s years old. It most certainly predates Princess Celestia’s escape.” Twilight Sparkle had taken to pacing--so much of her demeanor seemed to Fine Line as though the mare had learned it from reading too many courtroom dramas. Or perhaps she was simply as nervous as Fine had been.

“Perhaps.” Spoiled Rich waved a hoof.

“And you revived it. You would’ve had to have been aware of it before. Ponies don’t just pull twelve-year-old research out of the blue like that.” 

“They do if the fate of their nation relies on its success,” Spoiled Rich replied. “I do not know if you noticed or not, but Miss Celestia is hardly a spry and able-bodied mare. And she has made no plans on assisting Equestria in the event of her passing. She has tied our survival to hers. I was seeking to avert that.” 

“She was recovering well until she interfered with your attempts to do so.” Twilight Sparkle stomped a hoof on the ground. Across the courtyard, the Judge struck his gavel once, narrowing his eyes at Twilight. 

“Miss Sparkle, you are here to cross-examine on Celestia’s behalf, not to badger witnesses to your heart's content. Do keep your questioning limited to actual questions.” 

“My apologies.” Twilight couldn’t have sounded less sorry if she was physically trying. “Questions, alright. Miss Spoiled Rich, why didn’t you ask Celestia for help with your SunTrotter? Why did you blackmail my brother into helping instead?”

“Firstly, I did not blackmail your brother into helping--” 

“That’s not at all what Commander Lightning Dust and Miss Moon Dancer said in their testimonies.” Twilight Sparkle cut in, earning another gavel slam from the Judge. 

“Last warning, Miss Sparkle. Do not blow this for yourself.” 

Spoiled Rich rolled her eyes. “As I was saying. Secondly, I did ask for Celestia’s help. I offered her partnership with Flim Flam Industry, and she declined.” 

“Did you tell her about the SunTrotter?” 

“Yes.” 

“Miss Rich, she never mentioned any of that to me. Only that you offered her a chair at the Board of Directors and she declined.”

“What she tells you and does not tell you is hardly my concern.” 

“Uh huh. Why, in your opinion, would she withhold such information from me, then? Under what motive?” 

“I have no idea.” 

“Offer me a theory, then.” 

Spoiled Rich’s eyes narrowed into a glare at Twilight, who herself had defaulted to a smug smirk. 

“No,” Spoiled Rich said. “I don’t believe I have any obligation to do that.” 

“Suit yourself.” Twilight shrugged, glancing first at the jury and then at Spoiled Rich again. “Moving on. The SunTrotter’s failure has been catastrophic to Equestria. Didn’t you anticipate this being a potential side effect?”

“I did not anticipate the scale and severity of its failure, no. That was a poor judgment call on my part, and I accept full responsibility for having done so. I was told that the risk of the chimneys combusting was minimal.”

“Really. With the fuel compound they used? Who told you that?”

“Oh, various individuals.” Spoiled Rich waved a hoof as if it sufficed as an answer. Fine Line felt the urge to buck the mare in the teeth once more rising to the surface in vicious intensity. 

“That doesn’t exactly jive with what Moon Dancer and the crew of the SunTrotter have already testified towards… are you suggesting they lied in their testimony?”

“Not at all. But I don’t doubt that perhaps they were mistaken, or speaking of events that panic and shock might be clouding their judgment of.” 

“Uh huh. Miss Moon Dancer has testified that she attempted to delay the test and you ordered otherwise. This is corroborated by a log kept by one of her scribes. Is that correct?” 

“Yes. Again, I was under the impression that doing so would be safe.” 

“And it was not. My question then is… why did you risk it? If Moon Dancer, a highly qualified and experienced professional, had already expressed her worries of failure and had already claimed that doing so ‘was not safe’, in her exact words, then why did you risk it? Why not just delay the test until conditions were normal?” 

Spoiled Rich fell silent. The same deathly hush swept over the courtroom again, and Fine Line found herself glancing back at the gathered company, reading the expressions of curious and cautious looking ponies, who all seemed to be gazing at Twilight with some sort of admiring intrigue. 

“Miss Rich,” Twilight said, her voice soft and patient. As Celestia’s might be, Fine thought. “You stated already that the SunTrotter’s purpose was a contingency, and yet you put the entirety of Equestria at risk by rushing the test instead of delaying until a safer time. For what reason did you do so?” 

Even the Judge seemed intrigued enough not to object to Twilight Sparkle’s contextualizing entrapment. Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity, Spoiled Rich had no choice but to reply. 

“I worried that public support for the SunTrotter would dissolve if Celestia were allowed to return to power, which seemed a legitimate possibility as her political momentum grew. I worried that, if we were to delay, the contingency that I sought to free Equestria from the burden of alicorn reliance would be stamped out by Celestia herself. I don’t deny that it was an act of fear that motivated my actions, but I would like the jury to please consider the source of that fear.” 

Twilight Sparkle’s reply was non-verbal. She lit her horn instead, and Fine Line felt her blood go cold. 

For, through a skylight at the roof of the courtroom, an impossible sight was occurring in the void of black night suspended there in the elevated glass. The Moon had been eased into place there, guided slowly into position as Twilight Sparkle’s horn cast blue and purple light across the courtroom. The crown atop her head had begun to glow, too, dimmer than Twilight’s horn but noticeable all the same. 

Amidst gasps of awe and amazement, Twilight extinguished her horn and cleared her throat, lifting the crown off of her head and holding it up in her telekinesis. 

“I’m not an alicorn. And I might not be able to raise the Sun, either. But Celestia has been training me to, for the exact same purpose as you claim the SunTrotter to be. Contingency. It’s a slower process, to be certain, and it requires the usage of age-old magic to develop, but so far… well, you can see the result.” 

“That is not possible…” Spoiled Rich breathed out. Even the Judge was staring with an incredulous look, at the unicorn mare who had just risen the Moon. 

“You say Celestia hasn’t shared contingencies with Equestria, but what you’re really saying is that she hasn’t shared them with you. And why should she? Would you, after all you did to her? You really expect the mare you tortured and imprisoned to involve you in her own contingency plans?” Twilight Sparkle shook her head. “You could’ve learned it yourself, though! If your Industry hadn’t destroyed every other library in Canterlot. If you hadn’t been so busy trying to turn mine into a shopping mall instead of reading the books inside of it, maybe you could have learned about the contingency Celestia was planning. It’s there, after all! There’s a record of it, much unlike the records of anything Flim Flam Industry have done not even twelve years ago. And sure, it’s a solution that would have taken time, perhaps, and effort. But it wouldn’t have done that to our skies and soil, either.” 

Twilight pointed a hoof out the windows at nothing in particular. Not that she had to. As she spoke, she lit her horn again and calmly returned the Moon back down to its original position, looking a little winded from the gesture. Nonetheless, she recovered herself enough to glance over first to the courtroom audience--Fine could have sworn their eyes had locked for a brief moment--and then to the judge and finally the jury. 

“I… don’t know,” Twilight said, a sad, longing tone to her voice. In three words, Fine Line thought she was the spitting image of Celestia’s world-weary wisdom. It was no wonder Celestia had flung her fate behind this mare. “Maybe I’m wrong. Old Arcane Traditionalist that I am. I just think maybe learning from the past and the present for our contingencies instead of bulldozing our way forwards is a bit of a comfier thought. That’s all.” 

Silence, for all but a moment, before murmuring quickly flooded through the packed courtroom, crescendoing in intensity with alarming speed. Eventually, the Judge had no choice but to slam his gavel, the gesture failing to silence the room but his ensuing voice fulfilling such. 

“Quiet! Miss Sparkle, do you mind explaining what the blazes that was?” 

“Right, not a question. Sorry.” The unicorn gave a sheepish little laugh. “I, ah… I did have more, though? Questions, I mean. Just a few.” 

Across the room, Spoiled Rich let out an audible sigh. “Oh gods, there’s more?” 

To Fine Line’s incredible surprise, the Judge sighed and nodded. “It seems you have the court’s intrigue, Miss Sparkle. I suppose we’ll hear you out.”

“Okay. I’ll be quick, I promise,” Twilight said, trotting back to her desk for a moment to hurriedly glance through her papers, as though she hadn’t expected to get this far. “O-okay. Ahem. Miss Rich, are you afraid of Princess Celestia?” 

Spoiled Rich bit her lip. “In a broad sense, I am unsettled by the idea of her, yes.” 

“The ‘idea of her’?” Twilight tilted her head, expression growing more confident by the second. “But not by anything specific that she’s done?” 

“No. I do not doubt and have indeed seen myself that she is a generally pleasant mare. Nonetheless, it is her power and the arbitrary nature of it that does indeed unsettle me.” 

“So you are more afraid of the potential to do harm over any specific harm she has actually done.” 

“I suppose that is one way of seeing it,” Spoiled Rich said quizzically. 

“Okay. Two more questions. They are, admittedly, a tad unrelated to the recent accusations levelled against Spoiled Rich, though…” Twilight Sparkle glanced over at the Judge. “Is that okay?”

Spoiled Rich looked to the Judge, too. Fine Line hadn’t usually seen fear in the older mare’s eyes, but she saw it in the nearly-begging look Spoiled Rich had given the judge. 

“I’ll allow them,” he said. “But only two, Miss Sparkle. Don’t make me regret allowing this.”

“Thank you, your honor.” Twilight breathed out a sigh of relief. “I just figure I should give Miss Rich a chance to answer them before something comes along to prove them anyways. Miss Rich, how long have you known of Princess Celestia’s imprisonment?” 

Spoiled Rich looked as though the question had physically struck her. It took several seconds for her answer to come, and when it did Fine Line had to tilt an ear just to hear it as it was near-incoherently whispered into the microphone. 

“Eight years.” 

The fury and vitriol returned to the courtroom in a moment. Fine Line had known it for only eight months herself, and yet hearing it spoken by the mare herself sent a fresh jolt of energy into the realization. The alarmed murmuring from earlier had given way to audible jeers, and it took several more slams from the Judge’s gavel for them to dim. 

Or, perhaps, it was Twilight speaking up again that did that. Fine Line supposed it could have been both, for they happened nearly simultaneously. 

“Thank you, Miss Rich. Last question. Was it your fear of Celestia that contributed to you keeping her imprisoned, as well?” 

In a voice that could have come from a corpse, for all the life it contained, Spoiled Rich murmured out a single, “Yes.” 

“Alright.” Twilight Sparkle said, trotting back to her desk and taking a seat, as though nothing had happened at all. “No further questions from me.” 

Twilight felt marooned.

She wasn’t different from anypony else, anymore--they were all residents of an Equestria drifting off course. They were all fearfully listening to the same radio broadcasts and reading the same headlines, and though Twilight herself had been contributing in no small part towards said headlines herself, it felt like a small gesture compared to the cosmic helplessness that had overtaken Equestria.

After her shocking appearance at the SunTrotter hearing, she’d found it hard to leave Fluttershy’s apartment. She didn’t want to venture out into the public streets and answer the public’s questions, even if they were ones of curiosity instead of scrutiny, now. She’d said her part, and there was nothing left to do now but wait. 

The fires of the SunTrotter had been put out, after all, but that was a reactionary measure taken against a cataclysm that stretched much further. According to the crew of the SunTrotter--whose testimonies could be heard frequently on the radio through clipped excerpts of the ongoing trial of Spoiled Rich, continuing to verify Twilight’s own statements and expose Spoiled Rich’s own lies--their concerns extended far past the pollution rampant in their skies.

The Sun’s orbit with Equestria had followed a specific and ancient orbital pattern. Every morning and evening, Princess Celestia had tweaked and corrected its orbit relative to Equestria, ensuring the two great celestial bodies moved in tandem with each other. Repetition and experience on Celestia’s part had ensured the drift between the two bodies had been minimal. Now, though, without anypony present to continuously grasp the thin, invisible tow-line between Equestria and the Sun, it would continue to drift further from them.

Every sunless week pushed them further down a path that, given enough time, there would be no returning from.

The SunTrotter Project itself had been presented as a solution, but Twilight knew it wasn’t a particularly popular one. Equestrians were not exactly eager to fling support and optimism behind the thing that had brought about the same crisis in the first place. Certainly, it would be a hard sell and an even harder construction project with nearly all of the nation’s industrial sectors ground to a halt following the intensified striking and worker walkouts.

Twilight knew that if it ever passed the hypothetical stage, she’d be the mare the Industry would have turned to for help in doing what they had forced her brother to do. What other gifted arcane traditionalists were out there to help, besides herself?

And so, Twilight felt marooned. There was nowhere she could go within Ponyville that offered much reprieve from the overbearing darkness overhead, and nothing the Industry had said had been much comfort to anypony. Everypony wanted Celestia back, and nopony felt placated by any of the empty words the Industry had to say about how dreadfully sorry they were for everything they did to her.

Fluttershy and Tree Hugger and their friends had done far more than Twilight could ever have asked at making her feel welcome, but there were things even their friendship couldn’t entirely help her with. As much as she had detested her life in Old Canterlot, Ponyville was no more her home.

Most of all, Twilight missed Nightmare Moon. She wouldn’t have thought the black alicorn’s snide remarks and cynical attitude would have been something she had been pining after, but there had been a certain side to Nightmare Moon that Twilight knew had been taken from her just as she was beginning to appreciate it most. She hadn’t been afforded anything resembling closure--Nightmare Moon hadn’t even had time to share the final transfer of power that she had been implying.

Twilight was getting tired of lying awake all night or all morning or whatever she could call her days now. She was tired of hoping Nightmare Moon would find her, only to wake disappointed by another dreamless night. The dreamroot that Fluttershy and Tree Hugger had been given to care for hadn’t withered and died, yet, but it wasn’t anywhere close to the same potent flowering affair Twilight had encountered in the Hollow Shades.

She doubted her Old Canterlot attempts were doing any better, but she knew she had to check. She owed that much to Nightmare Moon, to the thestrals, to anypony who’d given a damn to remember and repeat Luna’s name over the past thousand years. For if Equestria truly was dying, Luna at least deserved to be there for it.

And so, eventually Twilight had decided she had enough.

“You’re going where?” Fluttershy had looked incredulous when Twilight had told her, in private, while Tree Hugger had been out. 

“I know it’s off-limits. But there’s some stuff I need to get there and I’m not just going to wait around for things to keep getting worse before I do. How much more eternal night are we going to put up with? The Industry obviously isn’t doing anything, so I’m going to.

“That’s… good. It is. B-but alone? What if you get caught? Trespassing to get soil samples is one thing, but you know they’re just looking for an excuse to arrest you, now. After all that stuff you said about Spoiled…”

“I don’t care, Fluttershy. I’m going. So if… if you don’t hear back from me, I want you to call a mare named Raven Inkwell and tell her everything.” 

“No, no. You don’t understand. I want to help you.” Fluttershy shook her head. “I’m just telling you it’s, ah. Dangerous. But if you need help, I’d be happy to offer it.” 

Twilight blinked. “Wait, really?”

“Yes, really. Give me until the end of the week? I’d like to talk to my friend Applejack about things. She’d probably be able to help you sneak in. She works in the factories there.” 

Twilight gave a single nod, “Alright. Thank you, Fluttershy.” 

As it turned out, Applejack herself was a truly fascinating mare.

A disgruntled employee from the Industry, she had taken to some of the more vocal members of the striking ponies after the Hollow Shades incident. Fluttershy herself had been dragged into the tempest through association with Twilight Sparkle’s papers, and it seemed as though the trajectory had eventually driven Fluttershy and Applejack along the same path. 

She had shown up less than a day after Twilight had conversed with Fluttershy. 

Indeed, she had arrived before Twilight had even left to visit Celestia, rapping firmly on Fluttershy and Tree Hugger’s apartment door. Fluttershy had already been up, preparing tea and breakfast for as many ponies and creatures as possible within their immediate vicinity, and Twilight had been easily jostled into consciousness by their ensuing conversation. 

She’d felt a little sheepish, greeting a room of already-awake ponies from a heap of blankets in a corner of the room, her mane all manners of unkempt.

“Mornin’, Twilight.” A bright orange-coated earth pony, with a battered Stetson hat atop her head, had greeted Twilight as she stumbled to her hooves. “Pleased to meet ya.  Fluttershy here says you gotta get into Old Canterlot?” 

Twilight nodded, levitating her comb over from her little corner of the living room and doing her best to make some sense of her mane. “Yeah. I didn’t think it would become a big, uh. Production. I was just going to walk there…” 

Applejack frowned. “They’ve got the roads up the mountain fenced off, and I wouldn’t be goin’ there on hoof right now even if they didn’t. What with the forests the way they are right now and all. If you stick to the railway, you might be alright, but there’s some long tunnels along the way that I wouldn’t risk trotting up in the dead of night, myself.” 

“Then is there a train I can hop? I can teleport up to the mountain if I can get close enough, uh… horizontally. If that makes sense...” 

“Think so.” Applejack nodded. “And there is. Work train, leaves every weekday at seven. I should know, I’ve been taking it for just about eight years, now. They inspect the boxcars before driving off, but if you stay close, I can probably get you aboard. Provided we find some way to keep your horn covered.” 

Twilight blinked. “My… my horn covered?” 

“Uh huh. Mostly earth ponies who work in the factories. Unicorns get put under more scrutiny goin’ in.”Applejack affixed Twilight’s horn with a smug smirk. She lifted the cowboy hat off her head and shoved it down firmly on Twilight’s, making sure the brim was angled down to hide her protruding horn.“‘specially ones with a vested interest in overthrowin’ the State.” 

Twilight instinctively straightened the hat in her magic, not removing it and doing her best not to think of how ridiculous she must have looked in it. “Fair enough, I guess. But aren’t they going to realize I don’t work for the Industry once I get on the train?”

Applejack shook her head. “I know the mare who’ll be greetin’ us at the Ponyville station. She trusts me. The train itself’ll bring you as far as the Industrial District outside New Canterlot. Still a distance away from the top of Canterlot Mountain, I reckon, but at least a bit closer than here.” 

“Enough for me to teleport.” Twilight nodded. “Just, uh. Leaves my getting out of Old Canterlot, then.” 

“If you do your business quickly and get what you’ve gotta get before noon, you can probably hit the same passenger car ‘fore the train even leaves the station on the way back to Ponyville. I can even stay on for the ride back to make sure ya make it.” 

Twilight blinked. “You’d do that? You don’t even know me.” 

Applejack laughed. “‘Spose I don’t. Met the Princess, though. She seems worth trustin’. And Fluttershy here says you’re goin’ back there to look for a way to help her.” 

Fluttershy blushed. “I, ah. May have blabbed more than you asked me to, Twilight. S-sorry.” 

“No, thank you. Both of you.” 

“We’re happy to help, Twilight.” Applejack replied. “If you’re ready now, we can catch the train up this mornin’. Can have you back here before supper.” 

“Give me a moment…” Fluttershy said, trotting over to her and Tree Hugger’s bedroom and returning a few seconds later with a deep blue raincoat held in her wing. “I doubt Tree Hugger will mind my lending this. It’s about your size, and it’ll cover up your coat and cutiemark.”

Every part of the scheme seemed brazen and impulsive to Twilight, but she supposed anything was better than her own plan of trekking to Old Canterlot on hoof. Into the moonlit morning they headed out, Twilight trailing behind Applejack as she led the way towards the Ponyville Train Station.

“Right, so… recently they’ve been lookin’ for anypony willin’ to work the coal factories—ponies need power mor’n ever now, and they haven’t really been asking much questions ‘bout who’s doin’ the work.” Applejack spoke without slowing and without turning around, and Twilight had to double her pace a little just to keep up with her. “Only thing is… you’re a familiar face. So, keep the hat on and your mane and horn tucked under it, and let me do the talkin’. If anypony does ask ya anythin’, it’s your first day on the job and I’m showin’ ya around. Got it?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.” Twilight lit her horn, adjusting the hat so that her defining unicorn feature was safely concealed beneath the shadow of the Stetson hat’s prominent brim. “What if they ask my name or ask to see some ID or something?”

Applejack laughed. “Y’really think them Industry goons give a damn what any of our names are?”

Twilight sighed. “Point taken. Alright.”

“Once we’re on the train, we find a private compartment and we ride it as far as you need to. Easy as zap apple jam.”

“As what?”

“Never mind.” Applejack shook her head, looking a little sheepish. They were at the station now anyways, the lumbering grey-and-red form of the Ponyville Express waiting for them on its perth of rail shining in the moonlight. There were guards on the platform, but not many, and Applejack gave the one closest to the open passenger car a single nod and brief greeting, which was lazily reciprocated by the uniformed mare. Once they were aboard, Applejack led on past another guard who seemed to be scrutinizing Twilight, but apparently not finding anything worth wasting his time questioning.

The rest of the train was largely empty. They passed through two passenger cars without seeing a soul, Applejack leading the way and Twilight trailing nervously behind.

“Where is everyone?” Twilight murmured. “I’d... think they’d need the factories running now more than ever, right? Like you said?”

Applejack gave a little nod at all of the empty passenger compartments. “Uh huh. But try’n motivate folks to do that, during this whole Endless Night business. Hardly able to keep ‘em motivated before, ever since your Princess friend got ‘em picketing.”

“What about you? Why are you going in?”

Applejack laughed. “’Cause end of the world or not, I still got rent to pay and I ain’t lettin’ them kick me and my little sis out to the curb.” Shaking her head, Applejack pointed towards a passenger compartment at random and opened the door for Twilight, before shuffling in herself and taking a seat. The train had already started to rumble to life by the time they did, and in a few minutes, the decaying paint of the Ponyville Train Station had begun to move away from them as the train picked up speed.

“Still...” Applejack said thoughtfully, peering out the window at the trees beginning to blur. “Your Princess has got some changes in mind, hasn’t she? She seems a mare of her word, but I figure I’d ask you, as well.”

“Yes. She wants to put an end to mandatory factory work entirely. Reform the whole thing so that it’s safe and fair and necessary.”

“Nice daydream.” Applejack’s smile was worn and weary, but hardly dishonest. “Hope she pulls through long enough to make it come true, then.”

“I don’t know what I’d do if she doesn’t. Seems to me like we’d be good as dead.”

“Yeah?” Applejack tilted her head, her smile turning to a thoughtful frown. “Y’think?”

“You don’t?”

“Nah. I think it’d be harder. I think more folks would die, and we’d have less time overall to enjoy our little slice of home we call Equestria. But I also don’t think what you and her have set in motion would just up’n stop outta the blue, neither. Ponies ain’t stupid. They know there’s a better way to live than hunkerin’ down in fear, and eventually, ah reckon they’d put themselves on a course that the Princess woulda liked to see ‘em on. Even if it won’t last long.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I’m... I’m just a reporter. I’m responsible for what happened, not what happens.”

Applejack chuckled. “Can’t exactly have one without the other, though, now can ya? That’s how we got into this here mess in the first place. Thinkin’ we’re above history, and all that nonsense. Thinkin’ the best way forward is to ignore our traditions and such on the grounds that they’re old ‘n irrelevant. What a load of hooey that turned out to be, eh?”

Twilight pursed her lips, searching for a response and failing to find one. When she had met Applejack, in Fluttershy’s apartment back in Ponyville, the last thing she would have expected from the gruff, steely-eyed workmare would have been articulate words of wisdom, and she found herself a little at a loss on how to properly reply to them.

So, she settled on a question, instead. Something optimistic, to drive a dagger in the oppressive worry she couldn’t stop feeling.

“If it does work out... if Celestia wakes back up and ponies don’t just turn their heads to her again... what then?”

“For Equestria?” Applejack tilted her head.

“No, no. For you.”

“And, assumin’ them Corporate bastards get what’s comin’ to em and I don’t gotta go fightin’ for that first?”

Twilight couldn’t help but chuckle. Where had these ponies been all her life? “Y-yeah. Assuming that, too.”

“Shucks, I don’t know. I’d like to... I’d like to work in an orchard again. Been... somethin’ like a decade since I’ve so much as walked through one, much less had a hoof in the goin’-ons of one. It ain’t easier work than the factories, but it’s... better work, I guess. I guess it’s nostalgia or whatever—some fillyhood memory up and gone all rotten and sour--but I find myself missin’ when you could breathe in the air without a bunch of crap muddying it up. I know the soil ain’t what it used to be an’ all that, but I’m sure that ain’t a problem we can’t do somethin’ about.”

Twilight smiled. “Is... that how you know Fluttershy?”

Applejack returned the smile herself. “’ Dirt scientist’ sounded like an interestin’ mare to make friends with. Ah got you to thank for that, y’know, Twilight Sparkle. Somethin’ to think about, next time somepony starts goin’ on ‘bout how your articles don’t mean nothin’.”

Twilight’s focus drifted a little on her, once again. She looked at her hooves, and realized her eyes were watering. “I wish I’d met her a long time ago.”

“I think a lot of ponies wish things had gone different ‘a long time ago’, Twi.” Applejack mused thoughtfully, a contented smile on her snout as she pondered the landscape speeding out the train window. “We’re comin’ up on the Industry Way station soon. If you’re going to teleport, I think now’d be as good a time as ever.”

Twilight rose to her hooves, levitating off the cowpony hat and offering it back to Applejack, who donned it gratefully. “See you soon?”

“Sure. Go get your magic drug, Twi. I’ll be here.”

Zap.

The momentum from the teleport caught her off guard for a moment, and she had to plant a hoof for balance. The train she’d come from was a dozen miles away now, blocked by the stacks and the old buildings of the Equestrian capital, but she could hear its whistle in absence of any other sound in the silent city.

Her library was directly in front of her. She’d had a pretty vivid mental image of her destination before she had let loose with the spell, and it seemed the decreased distance had indeed paid off quite well.

Old Canterlot was eerily quiet. It hadn’t been the most visually appealing city in Canterlot, but it at least still had the general ebb and flow of one. Now, though, there was little else but the distant rustlings of various bits of life hastily scurrying about through the eternal night.

A raccoon or a crow here or there. No equine voices that Twilight could hear.

She lit her horn, the way Moondancer had told her to. Pushing the smog away from her. Twilight had brought a respirator as an extra measure, and she donned it quickly as she trotted up to the main entrance of her home.

There were magic streams from many ponies in the interior that her still active enchantments showed her, but she couldn’t see too many signs of looting otherwise. She supposed there wasn’t much incentive for anypony to break into a library without a rather particular reason to, and she hadn’t left anything too valuable for anypony to find.

Shaking her head, Twilight sped her cautious walk into a trot. It had only been about two weeks, but she had missed the library dearly. The take-out containers from her and Celestia’s last meal were still lying on one of the long reading tables, along with a few law and history books that Twilight had been reading, lying in wait. Dust pirouetted through the beams of light cast by Twilight’s horn, little other natural light besides with the entire sky above them filthy smog.

Twilight trotted into her study, first, and pulled out a long cylindrical tube from beneath her bed. The telescope. Gripping it in her telekinesis, Twilight carried it with her as she cantered up the two flights of stairs leading to the roof of the library. She eased the door open and winced as a cool night wind caught her off guard. From the roof, she could see a darkened, lonely Equestria where the roof gave way to abrupt cliff that descended down and down to the rivers and roads weaving in and out of the lights of New Canterlot.

The greenhouse was lying in wait. Twilight cantered to it quickly, already shoving the door open in her telekinesis before she had even reached it. Immediately, Twilight saw that Celestia’s cooking herbs were all a dead and withered mess, and she felt a flurry of fear in her chest as she trotted inside.

Yet... the worry eased as she trotted in proper. Her dreamroot had been given its own corner of the greenhouse, where it might catch the most sun and moonlight, and Twilight could see the tell-tale shapes of flowers as she approached the magical plant.

It shouldn’t have been possible. With all the smog above, it surely must have only been getting a few hours of moonlight every day. Then again, she supposed, it couldn’t possibly have had any better luck in the Hollow Shades, with so much oppressive foliage greedily stealing any chance it might have had to thrive. Perhaps the dreamroot itself was used to growing in non-ideal light conditions.

Perhaps Twilight was simply that lucky.

She levitated the flowerpot, adding it to the same aura the telescope was contained in. The surviving dreamroot still wasn’t a lot—she’d be lucky if she could get three dreamwalking sessions out of it, but that was alright. She only needed two. One for Celestia, and one for Nightmare Moon.

It was foolish to hope, she supposed, but perhaps there still might be a way out of this Endless Night after all.

Exiting from the greenhouse again, Twilight trotted towards the cliff-side edge of the room. Levitating the telescope closer to her eyes, she pointed it to the lights of Ponyville, tracing down the streets she’d been helplessly meandering for two weeks. Then, she brought it down to the foot of Canterlot Mountain instead, where the plume of smoke signaled the train she had come in on, lying in wait at the Industry Way train station. Biting her lip, and glancing at the dreamroot still levitating in her telekinesis, Twilight decided she’d have a bit of time before she had to worry about teleporting back onto it.

And so, she trotted down to the kitchen area of her library, leaning the telescope down against a wall and yanking out a pot from one of her cupboards. Her water had been cut off, but enough had been collected in her rain-water barrels that she was able to quickly get a pot boiling.

While it heated, she plucked a few leaves off the dreamroot she was still carrying, setting the plant down after and the leaves down onto the counter. Exactly as the old thestral had shown her, Twilight quickly took to kneading them in her hooves, working the wispy leaves down into a mushed and broken mess.

In all her magical studies, alchemy was the one she’d practiced the least. That would surely have to change, if she were to pick the craft up where Luna had left it. Still, she had the vague sense that she was doing something right, as she daintily dropped the crushed leaves into the gradually heating pot of water. As it heated, it slowly produced the same strong, earthy scent that the old thestral’s own example had produced. If anything, it felt stronger this time to Twilight—perhaps her concentration of dreamroot was too intense? Surely it wouldn’t be the end of the world if she brewed a slightly more potent batch, right?

She recollected her affairs, this time added the pot of boiling water to a separate aura of telekinesis and continuing to boil the water and steep the dreamroot tea. Before she left, she grabbed one last thing: a travel mug formerly used for her morning coffees, and by the time she reached the roof of the library for a second time she was pouring the steeped dreamroot tea into it and carefully sealing the lid.

The Ponyville Express was belching more smoke now that she could see from so high up, and she heard it call out a few warning whistles. She flared her horn, deposited the empty pot with a clatter, and said a temporary farewell to her home before teleporting back down to the train in wait below.

Applejack jumped in surprise when she reappeared, and even Twilight was a little taken aback by the sheer precision of her teleport.

“Sorry...” Twilight said immediately as Applejack readjusted her hat, which had gone a little crooked from her startled jump.

Applejack replied with a little laugh. “Got what ya needed?”

“Yeah, I did. I can’t thank you enough for getting me over here.”

Applejack waved a hoof. “Friend of Fluttershy’s is a friend of mine. I’m just happy to help.” She rose an eyebrow curiously at the telescope, flowerpot, and coffee mug all shimmering in Twilight’s magic. “So... what exactly didja need in there so badly, anyways? I just kinda assumed Flutters was pullin’ my leg ‘bout a ‘magic plant’.”

“No, actually, she wasn’t. It’s... it helps me with... with learning dreamwalking.”

Applejack’s eyebrow rose higher. “That right?”

Twilight nodded. “Y-yeah. I know it’s probably a stupid theory, but I can’t help but wonder if maybe I can get through to Celestia through her coma that way. Because she’s... she’s still responding to stimuli. She’s still there.”

“Y’know, it sounds a little crazy and a little out of my hooves, but that don’t make it ‘stupid’. Least you’re tryin’ somethin’,” Applejack said with a shrug. “Plant was there, though? You got it okay?”

“Yeah.” Twilight waved the travel mug. “Already brewed a bit of it into a tea, too. Hope it works. Wanna try some?”

Applejack laughed. “Think I’ll leave the magical plants to you for now, Twi. Maybe another time. But if you wanna give it a whirl yerself, by my guest. Got a good couple hours or so ‘fore we’re back in Ponyville. Train takes the long loop around from here. Ah can keep a lookout for ya, wake you up if I need to.”

“R-really?” Twilight blinked. Dreamroot meant lucid dreams. And every one of those Twilight had carried out had the added benefit of Nightmare Moon’s presence. The idea of visiting with her teacher in the dreamworld while her waking world was spent travelling felt like a rather productive usage of time indeed.

“Sure. Just don’t go snorin’ too loud.”

She unscrewed the lid off of her travel mug and took a long swig of the earthy tasting tea within. The thestral had called it an ‘acquired taste’, and it had seemed ridiculous to Twilight, but she could sort of see it more and more, even in the hoof-full of chances she’d been afforded to try it.

She hadn’t had to drink more than a third of the tea before she could already feel its effects hitting her like a tidal wave. A potent brew indeed, already the lines that made up the passenger compartment were beginning to blur together, and her eyes felt weighted by lead. After several moments, so, too, did the rest of her body. Keeping her head up felt difficult, so she laid down across the compartment bench instead, having just enough lucidity to screw the cap back onto her dreamroot tea before darkness swept over her like a blanket. She could see it begin from the mountains far away, out the window of the train, and then it crept closer to her rapidly, consuming the landscape, then the rails, then the train car, and stopping only upon reaching Twilight’s own form, now alone in a featureless black void.

“Twilight!”

Twilight whipped around, but before she could speak a skeletal black wing had wrapped around her. The rest of her dreamworld hadn’t even had a chance to form, yet, before Twilight was assaulted by the quick embrace of Nightmare Moon herself.

Nightmare Moon broke the embrace just as quickly as it had begun, clearing her throat and swiftly folding her wing back against her side. As she spoke, the rest of the dreamworld began to trickle into being—the roof of her library, once more. Still fresh on her mind, she supposed, because it seemed to be what her subconscious was intent on quickly weaving together. The landscape beyond the roof was still lost to void, and her greenhouse was gone. Much of the disarray and neglect that had formed its being for twelve years had returned; this was her library as Twilight had seen it the most, not what it was now.

“Twilight Sparkle, you certainly know how to keep a mare waiting.” 

“That, coming from you?” Twilight replied sharply. “Where in Tartarus have you been? For months you don’t ever shut up, and then when I need you the most, you’re nowhere to be found!” 

“Yes, it is very inconvenient, I agree. But I told you, last time we spoke; the magic binding me to this world is fading. Every spell fades, and magic is never eternal. Now, more than ever, I know this.” 

“What do I do, Nightmare?” Twilight kicked the rumbling dirt floor. “I need to know what to do, please…” 

“You already know what to do, if you’ve managed to reach me.” Nightmare Moon extended a hoof to Twilight’s chin, gently raising it up to look into her eyes. “You went back for the dreamroot, yes?” 

“Yes, and my books and my journals and…” 

“This…” Nightmare Moon’s horn lit, and she withdrew the metallic cylinder of the telescope from Twilight’s saddlebags. “An essential, I’m sure.” 

“I just… I need something important of hers close to me. I just feel… I don’t know…”

“Alone. Hopelessly alone. Like the world is moving on without you.” 

Twilight gave a little nod, sitting down on the ground. “Yes.” 

“Well, you should not. You have made friends across an Equestria more divided than I have ever in my days seen. You have spread hope to a pony who thought hope itself was impossible for her to experience.” Nightmare Moon pushed the telescope into Twilight’s hooves. “I think you are ready, Twilight.” 

Twilight gripped the cold metal of the telescope, tilting her head as she looked at Nightmare Moon questioningly. “Ready? For what? I can’t even raise the Sun.”

“And why is it you feel you must?” Nightmare Moon tilted her head. She extended a hoof, pointing to Twilight’s cutie mark. “If you need to bring the Sun back, why is there a star emblazoned on your flank, mare? I do not recall seeing many stars out at night.”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “It’s just my cutie mark. I got it writing an essay. It doesn’t mean anything.” 

“Uh huh. Sure.” Nightmare Moon shook her head, laughing. “Twilight, you need to bring Celestia back. But before you do that, you need to start trusting in your abilities. You don’t need to rest the Sun on your shoulders just yet. It’s right there in your namesake. Be the bridge between night and day first. Worry about what comes next when it comes.” 

“It’s just... I thought I was learning. I thought I’d be able to do something to help bring the Sun back, but...”

“Twilight, do you know how long it took Celestia to master raising the Sun? Have you any idea?”

Twilight bit her lip and nervously shook her head. “N-no.”

“Years. A war began, was fought, and ended, before she’d even come close to mastering it. The fact that you can even make contact with it at all is impressive enough. Why in Tartarus are you selling yourself short on an achievement only rivaled by alicorns and draconequus?”

“I don’t... I don’t know, Nightmare.” Twilight admit.

“It takes time, Twilight Sparkle. And patience. And practice. And when you awaken Celestia, and an Equestria no longer spinning into darkness, you will be afforded both. And you will be able to develop your Sun-raising skills the right way. Not the fast way. Do you understand?”

“I was supposed to be her contingency.”

“I do believe Celestia thought she had more time to prepare you. I don’t believe she imagined the mortals would have jumped the gun on her and attempted something so stupid. But... regardless of what she intended, what happened has happened, yes?” Nightmare Moon trotted closer, once again pulling Twilight into a warmer, and less impulsive embrace. She tucked the telescope back into Twilight’s pack with her magic, and withdrew the Sunstone, instead. Gently, Nightmare Moon levitated it atop the glowing gemstone atop Twilight’s head, parting her mane so that it fit just right. 

“It’s funny. I should be pleased by this. Eternal night, despite everypony’s best efforts. I won, and I didn’t even do anything. The ponies who turned away from me turned away from Celly, too, and I won.” Nightmare Moon sighed deeply. “I suppose that the roads we chose in this life make fools of us all. I never would have thought I would be grateful to have been made one, myself. I never would have met you, otherwise.”

Shaking her head, Nightmare Moon rose to her hooves again, rustling her wings.

“I shouldn’t stay long. Do you recall the place we met last? Before we were awoken?”

Twilight gave a shaky nod. “The... the Everfree Castle, right? You said there was something for me there, but then vanished before you had a chance to show me.”

“Indeed. We will meet back there, then, in the waking world. My magic might be limited, but I suspect enough of Luna’s palimpsest remains there to allow me one last walk through the mortal plain. Until that happens, though, I should conserve my magic while I still have some to expend. Goodbye for now, Twilight Sparkle.”

The last time Twilight had been in the Everfree Forest had been with Celestia. 

Had that seriously been less than a year ago? It felt like a whole generation had come and gone since that night when she and Celestia had broken into the Everfree Castle Museum and recovered the Sunstone. It was strange to think of a time so recent, and yet still before Celestia had announced her return and sent Equestria into a whirlwind. 

When she had traveled into the Everfree to meet Celestia, the Sun had been going down. And, when she had made her way back towards Ponyville with the Sunstone safely stashed in her saddlebags, the Sun had been inching its way into the rumbling, rainy morning sky. Rain on the horizon had helped mask the smell of rotten wood that made up so much of the Everfree, but now Twilight had no such luxury. She was travelling in almost pitch-dark, the electric lamps lighting the way towards the Everfree Castle now extinguished and the Moon hidden by the obtrusive forest canopy. 

Her horn sufficed, though, and she crept her way through the partially tamed Everfree Forest. Every snapping twig in the forest around her was a fresh jolt of terror down her spine, every night-owl call an alarm of impending doom. At one point, she’d sworn she had heard a pack of timberwolves rustling from someplace far off the path, and at another she thought she’d seen lights like stars shining through the dense foliage. Her panicking brain had no trouble reminding her of the desperation of the Everfree’s native residents, forced to struggle for every scrap of food within their decaying ecosystem. But, to canter was to make even more noise, and so she made her way towards the Everfree Castle at a brisk trot instead, taking care to never once leave the path. 

Finally, the clearing of the old castle came into view. Slivers of moonlight split by a thousand branches, bringing her nervous trot back to something resembling intent and focus. When last Twilight had been here, the castle had been exposed vividly by bright electric light, but now it lay undisturbed within its little grotto, a cool black silhouette within a yawning quarry of rock. 

Down below, standing in one of the castle’s side courtyards and peering back up to her, was a familiar alicorn. She would have looked a little unsettling, standing tall and alone within the empty grotto of darkened shadows, if Twilight hadn’t been so excited to see her once more.

 A flare of teleportation magic and Twilight was right beside her, greeting Nightmare Moon in the non-corporeal-flesh with a little nuzzle. Her regalia had been discarded, and her starry mane was hanging limp, as Princess Celestia’s did, now.

“Nightmare.” 

“My faithful Twilight.” Nightmare returned, giving her a small smile and nod. “It is good to see you.” 

Looking around, Twilight could see that she had teleported into some sort of garden. There did not seem to be any other practical usage for the courtyard besides, it simply snaked its way out of and then back into the castle again in a gradual U-shape. Already, Nightmare Moon had begun to trot her way towards the interior of the castle, and Twilight quickly fell into line behind her, the sound of her hooves the only sound even as Nightmare Moon led on ahead of her. 

Piece by piece, it seemed the alicorn’s physicality was vanishing. It had never really been there at all, Twilight reasoned, but now it seemed even her own perception of Nightmare Moon’s spirit was failing her. Nightmare Moon phased through the door into the Castle, and Twilight had to settle on burning the anachronistic padlock off of it and pushing it open herself, joining her waiting mentor on the other side. 

“It seems as though the mortals have been busy restoring this place if what you have told me of the passage of time is true.” 

“It’s, uh. A museum, now,” Twilight said, frowning. 

“My sister and my greatest failures. A museum.” Nightmare Moon sighed, her head sinking low. “I suppose that makes sense. Well, no matter. It isn’t much further, Twilight.” 

Twilight had done her fair share of reading on the Everfree Castle--not enough to memorize any floor plans to a tee, of course, but she had at the very least visited it before. If only to decry the slanderous claims of the curators showing her around, but that was no matter now. She knew before Nightmare Moon had started her way up the stairwell what would be waiting for them at the top. 

The chamber they emerged into was enormous and lined on both sides by spectacular glass windows that seemed to catch the moonlight and cast it in shining slivers across the room. The only thing of note within the room itself was the large stone pedestal directly in the center, vaguely resembling a fountain and resolving into a glass orb at the top, with five other smaller orbs orbiting around it on their own attached pedestals. Like the windows, they caught the moonlight and glowed in warm and bright colours, the glass itself stained to send beams of coloured light around the rest of the chamber.

“It isn’t them,” Twilight said, shaking her head sadly. “The Elements of Harmony. It’s not them. Celestia says she had to sacrifice them to the Tree of Harmony.” 

“That is obvious,” Nightmare Moon replied, giving the faux-Elements a scrutinizing gaze. “The pedestal moves. There’s a spiral stairwell below, and the ruins of the castle itself have been designed to serve as a conduit towards the Tree of Harmony. Its roots travel far below the Everfree. We didn’t just store the Elements of Harmony here because they were fashionable.” 

Nightmare Moon shook her head, scoffing at the bright and colourful display of lights before them now. 

“Wait, wait. The Tree of Harmony is still alive?” 

Nightmare Moon scowled. “How in Tartarus should I know? I’m not even alive myself. But if it is, you would do well to, well... acquaint yourself with it.” 

“With… with a tree. Acquaint myself with a tree.” 

“Oh, don’t be so close-minded, my faithful student.” Nightmare Moon chuckled--a restrained and friendlier-sounding version of her all-too-familiar cackle. “It would be a rather somber state of affairs indeed if the Tree of Harmony itself was dying, though I’m sure it’s strong enough to endure the strain of the past twelve years.”

Nodding in vague understanding, Twilight got to work on scanning the area around the Elements pedestal with her telekinesis. If there was indeed some manner of trap staircase as Nightmare Moon had implied, then she should surely feel some sort of mechanism. Telekinesis wasn’t exactly the best method of finding one… Twilight would have much preferred to have an earth pony’s well-trained hooves for that task, but with enough care, she should be able to find some way to progress all the same.

The Element pedestal was sturdy and well-built, and surely weighed far more than Twilight could possibly hope to move on her own. Finding no indicators of a hidden lever or switch, Twilight settled on trying anyway, pushing her weight against the pedestal and gaining an amused snort from Nightmare Moon.

“You flatter your own strength, Sparkle. No offense.”

Twilight sighed, turning back to face Nightmare Moon. “I have no idea what I’m looking for.”

“What did you do to find the catacombs with Celestia?”

“She used a… a gemstone. It located foreign magic, and we followed it.”

“Foreign magic, hrm? Magic of who’s source, I wonder.” Nightmare Moon shot her a mocking, quizzical grin, as though the answer was so horribly obvious that even a filly could have guessed it by now. It took Twilight another few seconds before the dawning realization hit her.

“Luna’s. We followed Luna’s magic. Old enchantments put up ages ago.” Already, Twilight was levitating the Sunstone off of her head. The gemstone in the middle of the tiara had already begun to glow, albeit as faint as a vague hope in the midst of a bloody battle. Keeping the Sunstone in front of her, Twilight began to trot forwards, her eyes never leaving the gem even to blink. Her heart began to thump in her chest as her theory proved itself, the gem slowly but surely beginning to shimmer with more light the further Twilight’s hooves carried her across the Elements of Harmony’s chamber.

The gradually brightening Sunstone led her as far as a seemingly mundane portion of the chamber floor. Nightmare Moon had been gradually meandering behind her with a look somewhere between curiosity and pride. There was no difference at all that Twilight could tell from the spot where the Sunstone’s glow was the brightest; they weren’t in the center of the room, but instead off to one side beneath a stained-glass depiction of Celestia and Luna raising the Sun and Moon in unison.

Already, her mind was replaying flashbacks of her last encounter with Luna’s strange and puzzling methods of enchantment—the last time they were down in the catacombs, and she’d sacrificed the Sunstone itself in order to best them. Peering up at the stained glass, Twilight placed the Sunstone back atop her head and began to cast her magic, searching for the Moon and finding it with ease a few degrees beneath the western horizon.

“This one’s for you, Luna...” Twilight whispered to herself, as she gripped the Moon and began to carry it across the sky. Equestria would surely be afforded a strange and confusing sight, she thought, as the Moon arched quickly back across the sky. She supposed they’d known the source of it now, if anypony had been paying attention to the Moon’s strange patterns in the past year. She carefully and meticulously eased it into place, so that the Moon’s light was shining through its stained glass sister.

Behind her, Nightmare Moon let out a satisfied exhale. The moonlight through the stained glass cast the entire chamber in a beautiful blue light, and in the center of the room, the Element Pedestal had begun to shudder as some arcane mechanism awakened after a millennium of neglect. Twilight was cantering over instantly, and by the time she reached the pedestal, it had already begun to laboriously shift to the side, a pitch-black staircase revealing itself beneath the ancient stone.

The spiral staircase crept down into darkness, and Twilight could hear the faint sound of water gently babbling from some point far below. Her blood suddenly curdled, as she realized she’d seen this place before.

Nightmare Moon had been showing it to her. A different location, but the same staircase. They’d been interrupted by the SunTrotter Explosion before they could have ventured further, but the staircase itself and the lapping water below were as familiar as the morning sun. This time in the realm of the waking, instead of the realm of the dreams.

Nightmare Moon had promised her power. Whatever that meant. She should have known she had been referring to the Tree of Harmony!

Twilight started down, and when she turned, she was alone. Without ceremony or announcement, Nightmare Moon had vanished, and now the Elements Pedestal was already shifting back into place before Twilight.

She continued down the steps. The sound of the water below grew louder and louder with each step, her own hoofsteps growing quieter as her steps became warier. For what felt like hours—but could surely only have been minutes, Twilight reminded herself, she was just out of shape--she descended, her horn the only light and her nervous breathing the only evidence of equine presence.

Eventual, though, even that shifted. Light exposed itself from some point further down and grew brighter as the sound of babbling water grew stronger. And then, Twilight’s breath caught as she finally turned one last spiral into an enormous natural cavern. 

Her hooves trod into still water, icy to the touch and sending a shiver down her spine. Before her was the most mystical sight she had ever seen—a tree of pure white light, growing out of the subterranean pond. Its roots stretched down and up, snaking their way upwards through the soil above them, and downwards into the still water… deeper and deeper until the light they were made from vanished into darkness.

The Tree of Harmony. Again and again, relegated to fairy tale and fantasy, and yet here it was before her in all its mystical glory.

Water was trickling down through a few cracks in the cavern ceiling, the torn and shifted forest rivers above bleeding down into the great cavern. It fell into the pond murky and unclean, but it seemed the Tree of Harmony worked instantaneously to purge them down to something clear as glass. 

She hesitated before stepping any deeper into the water, wondering what the glowing Tree would do to her if it was capable of such purifying magic. 

Besides the Tree of Harmony, Twilight quickly realized that there was another light in the cavern. The Sunstone, glowing on her head, brighter than ever now, and white as the tree in front of her. As though the two were reacting to each other. 

“H-hello? Nightmare?” Twilight called out warily, her voice echoing across the subterranean walls. She’d been expecting a response, and still, she nearly jumped out of her hide when she received one.

It wasn’t the familiar voice of her alicorn mentor, though. It was younger. Like a filly’s.

“Hello, Twilight Sparkle.”

It echoed all around her, coming from someplace within the cavern Twilight could not see. Against her better judgment, she put the Sunstone back atop her head and started to make her way closer to the Tree of Harmony. The pond of the flooded cavern seemed to grow a little deeper, and she quickly found it easier to swim the closer she got to the Tree of Harmony. “Who are you?”

“You’ve brought something strange to this place, Twilight Sparkle.” The filly voice, again. If Twilight didn’t know any better, she could have sworn it was coming from the Tree itself. “A fragment of an alicorn’s soul is not something commonly held by mortal hooves. And certainly not worn around their manes as jewelry.”

The still water around her rippled, as though a great weight had been dropped into it, though Twilight hadn’t heard a splash. She looked downwards in terror, expecting to see some black shadow rippling down in between the light cast from the Tree’s roots. She stopped swimming, treading water directly in front of the towering form of the Tree of Harmony. 

From the light, a figure resolved itself. An alicorn, her coat blue, and her mane blue as well. She was young---younger than Twilight had ever thought an alicorn was capable of being. She couldn’t have been older than an adolescent… her eyes were alight with youth and when she spoke, it was the filly’s voice again.

“You have beared our Moon.”

She flapped down, her hooves resting down on the water as if it were a solid surface. She looked down at Twilight—she wasn’t any taller than her, though Twilight still felt pitifully small treading water before this youthful alicorn standing proud above her.

“I’ve been learning,” Twilight said, unsure of what exactly to say. “Using… this.”

She hadn’t even had the chance to levitate the Sunstone off of her head, before the blue alicorn took it from her. “Using me. I have been watching.”

“W-what?” Twilight managed. Her hooves were starting to get tired. She suddenly realized how much she wanted to start back towards the shallow corners of the sea, but she couldn’t turn away from the looming alicorn before her. “You’re… the Sunstone?!”

The alicorn laughed. “We are Luna. Or, what little of her soul that still remains. What little she felt would be required to power the… ‘Sunstone’, as you call it. We have been given form by the Tree you see behind us.”

Suddenly, Twilight remembered. Celestia had told her, and some part of her had remembered, even if a larger part had discarded the knowledge in favour of seeing the Sunstone as a tool and little else.

The dark magic tore Luna to pieces. But she was smart. She split her soul and drove it into the Sunstone...

Celestia herself had said it. Hadn’t she been listening?

“We have been watching you, Twilight Sparkle. From within our prison of stone. Watching how you wield us, how you have learned and heralded our magic as though it were your own. The Moon is so often ignored, we wonder why you have felt this to be necessary. Indeed, we wonder what brings you here.”

“I want to save my friend,” Twilight replied. “She’s… she’s sick. She’s trapped in her own dreams, and I can’t get her out. Nopony can.”

“So you desire power.”

“N-no. Not exactly. I mean, well… I don’t...” Twilight trailed off, realizing just how horribly she had handled what had surely been a trick question.

But the vision of Luna smiled, instead. “There is nothing to be ashamed of in searching for strength, Twilight Sparkle. Shame lies in the misuse of power, not through the mere act of searching it. Surely you know that by now?”

Twilight couldn’t answer. Her hooves were growing tired from treading water. Her head had begun to dip further beneath the still water, and the shoreline seemed so far away, now.

“We do not know with precision what has been done to this world. What has been done to… us, for the Sunstone to have regained its necessity. We only know what we have seen of how you wield it, and for what purpose. And we are impressed. This… ‘friend’ of yours. Our sister. The power she wields... you trust she deserves it without a doubt. And yet you do not trust the power that has brought you here. Even as we stand before you and preach of our own existence, you do not seem to trust that you deserve it. You cannot even say to us with confidence that you desire it.”

The ambient sound of the Tree of Harmony’s cavern had begun to fragment itself with the dull drone of the underwater world as Twilight’s ears continued to dip beneath the water. It felt thicker, somehow, and panic began to wrap around her hooves and cause them to start beating more frantically. She was sinking in liquid too thick to be water, as though some force were dragging her down. Suddenly, she realized how badly she wanted to scream, for she was going to drown here. She fought as hard as she could to keep herself afloat, but it was becoming too difficult to even think. The Sunstone was cast off of her head by her struggling, and she watched helplessly as the glowing gemstone light sunk down into the waters and vanished.

Something grabbed onto her hindleg. It coiled around it, gripping her tight, and she let out another scream. Glancing down, she watched in terror as the Tree of Harmony’s roots began to coil around her, starting at her legs and soon wrapping themselves around her entire form, stealing away movement and touch and sound and breath and leaving her with little else but the hazy sight of the glowing roots all around and beneath her.

Luna continued to watch her struggle quizzically, an uncaring look on the young alicorn’s face, as though she couldn’t be bothered by the sight of the drowning unicorn before her. It was the last sight Twilight was afforded of the above world, before she was dragged beneath the waves one final time, that Tree of Harmony’s roots dragging her deeper, deeper, more of the long white-light roots of the Tree of Harmony creeping past her as she followed them down into the depths, struggling to hold onto her breath for as long as possible…

Then, a shimmer of movement. A glowing light of telekinesis and Luna was there, staring at her with that same passively curious expression. She wasn’t swimming, simply floating as though weightlessly unaffected by the world around them.

“You’re wrong, though, Twilight Sparkle,” Luna said, her voice in Twilight’s head instead of in her ears “Nightmare Moon tells me that you’ve done much and come far to deserve this gift of hers. Of ours. It isn’t with jubilation that we give you the remnants of our power, but rather with necessity. Nonetheless, it is a torch we trust you to bear.”

Luna’s horn grew bright. Her wings spread out, and the roots of the Tree of Harmony pulsed their white light across the neverending void beneath the waking world. The ones that had coiled around Twilight felt warm to the touch--it shouldn’t have been possible, but the feeling was unmistakable. Twilight felt the crushing pressure of an entire ocean around her, and she squeezed her eyes shut against the blinding light of magic overtaking her every sense…

And then, she was flung into the Element’s chamber once more, gasping and sputtering for breath. Every stained glass window within the chamber had shattered, and the cool night air on her soaked fur and mane jolted her into lucidity. Beneath her feet lay the Sunstone, shattered into a thousand pieces, its light fading away to nothingness, until it was indistinguishable from the glass coating the Element's chamber.

Twilight's sides were aching. She glanced behind her, and gawked at the sight of her cutiemark, pulsing with a fading glow. Dark purple splotches had formed around her familiar six-pointed star, snaking down her flank and her lower leg.

Her cutiemark had changed. She hadn’t heard of such a thing happening in all of her days, but her eyes couldn’t exactly lie to her. The sight was as clear as could be. The familiar markings of the Moon’s former mistress were upon her now, and the Sunstone was nowhere to be seen.

The glowing mark faded back to normal gradually, as though it had always been the same. Yet the pain on her barrel did not subside… it wasn’t excruciating, but it wasn’t exactly comfortable, either. It was a pain like a tooth growing into place as a filly. 

It wasn’t important. Not yet, anyway. Celestia was waiting for her, and with her waited a new dawn for Equestria.

Celestia’s own dreamworld was horrifically plain.

Twilight winced the moment she entered, after having drained the rest of her dreamroot and pouring a small bit into Celestia’s mouth, too, when she was certain the nurse wasn’t looking.

The dreamscape was nearly all pitch-black, with the only notable thing in the room being a long tube of plastic descending from the ceiling above them. Celestia herself was curled in a corner, her sides rising and falling and her back turned to Twilight.

“Celestia...” Twilight spoke out firmly and gently into the barren room. Celestia didn’t stir, even as Twilight started towards her and spoke again, a bit louder this time. “Celestia, it’s Twilight.”

No response. Laboriously, with the precision of a practiced surgeon, Twilight brought a hoof to Celestia’s back, resting it gently down. At best, Celestia perked up as though a cool draft had swept through the room, her ears twitching around as they searched for a source before settling back down, disappointed.

The dreamscape of a pony reflected their mental state. Nightmare Moon had taught it to her--an anxious pony would have a cluttered, disorganized dreamscape. Like Twilight’s. A frightened pony’s dreamscape would be a hive of distant whispers and shadowed figures snaking in and out of one’s peripheral…

What did it mean, then, that Celestia’s dreamscape was nothing at all?

Nothing except for the SunTrotter. A single purpose, and nothing more.

Twilight nestled herself down next to Celestia, for all the nothing it did. She was back where she’d been in the waking world--a guest to a pony who didn’t seem to know she was there. She’d come here expecting to find some simple solution, and yet here she was back where she had started again.

She felt like weeping, for all of a second, before her horn lit and she got to work. This was the dreamscape, after all. It might be plain now, but it was malleable. She’d watched Nightmare Moon weave stars and galaxies into empty, barren sky, and she’d helped.

Twilight started slow. She gripped the concrete ceiling above them, and cast it further and further back, stretching it thinner and thinner until it wasn’t there at all. Then, the black void above them wasn’t darkness, it was sky. Empty still, but she could work with that. A shimmering star here and there. She didn’t have the exact layout of Luna’s Constellations memorized, but that was alright. She would just have to start small and work out from there, even if it took her all night. It took effort, but eventually she was able to discard the worries of the outside world from herself. Flim Flam Industry, the SunTrotter, the horrible skies of smog and waste… they were waiting for them, yes, but they could continue to wait for now.

Piece by piece, she built upon the night sky. She populated it with interlinking stars, and she gradually eased moonlight into the sky--taking care not to make it too bright so as to overpower the starwheel above them.

The cool concrete below them had turned to dirt. Twilight hadn’t been focusing her energy there, but a sideways glance at Celestia and she realized she didn’t have to. Celestia was looking up now at the stars, a curious frown on the beautiful alicorn’s face. Celestia’s mind had taken over without her even fully comprehending it, and suddenly her lying form didn’t feel quite so cold and lifeless to Twilight.

Satisfied with the sky for now, Twilight reached out around them. The light of her horn cast against the trunks of trees gradually pushing themselves into being, stretching up out of nothingness all around them. Rising higher, and relegating the starry night Twilight had just been weaving to nervous peeks through a canopy of leaves and branches above them. Not the fragmented, half-alive forest canopies Twilight had been so used to seeing lining her nation, but a proud forest of an Equestria satisfied with it’s being. Grass formed from the dirt, and suddenly the earth wasn’t cracked and dry and cold. A forest in bloom, and not in decay.

Beside her, Celestia was cradling something in her hooves. Twilight hadn’t noticed it before, or perhaps it simply hadn’t been there. A long, cylindrical tube of metal, polished and reflecting in the newly formed starlight. The telescope.

Twilight extended her hoof, touching Celestia’s and the telescope at the same time. Celestia met Twilight’s eyes, and she stared into them for a long time, as though trying to properly focus on the mare inches away from her.

“Twilight…” she whispered, and gripped Twilight’s hoof with both of her own forehooves.

“I’m here, Celestia.” Twilight nuzzled her snout against Celestia’s neck. “I’m here.”

“I don’t… where are…”

“We’re asleep in Ponyville, Celestia. And Equestria is out there. They’re waiting for their princess.”

Celestia pursed her lips. She stroked the telescope for a moment, feeling it’s cool metal against her hooves. She looked up to the moonlight, and then around them at the forest of shimmering trees, phasing in and out of being as Twilight’s magic wavered to keep them alive.

“It’s time to wake up, Celestia. Dawn’s coming soon, and everypony is waiting.”

Celestia smiled. She nodded her head once, and shakily rose to her hooves. Around them, the dreamworld forest had already begun to dissolve, along with the sky above them. The stars had begun to blur into each other, casting long streaking lines of white across the sky, like fresh paint dripping down a canvass. The sky cascaded down into the trees, which cascaded down into dirt. 

Twilight nearly gasped out in surprise as Celestia wrapped her wing tightly around her, pulling the smaller mare close and kissing her passionately, as around them the dreamworld collapsed for good.

Celestia awoke.

Moonlight was dancing through the open blinds of a hospital window. A silent street lay outside, lit by electric street lamps and revealing the humble town of Ponyville. Celestia could have recognized the town’s signature architecture anywhere.

The telescope she had gifted Twilight was resting on her lap. Twilight herself was stirring into consciousness from a chair in one corner of the room, yawning and blinking sleep out of her eyes as she focused on the room around her, only to freeze and lock eyes with Celestia instead.

“Good morning, Twilight Sparkle.”

The moment the words left her lips, Celestia had to clear her throat. Her voice sounded raspy from inactivity, and the hospital room felt dreadfully dry.

“You’re awake! Oh goddesses above, you’re awake!” Twilight tore across the hospital room instantly, gripping Celestia with both of her forehooves and nearly hugging the air out of her.

“I’m awake.” Celestia confirmed, chuckling sheepishly and hugging Twilight back. “Though that is due to your intervention, I imagine.”

“It’s been two weeks, Celestia,” Twilight said, evidently too excited to bother with an answer to Celestia’s query. “They've felt like decades. Gods, I’ve missed you so much.”

Already, Celestia was trying to rise to her hooves. Twilight was scrambling out of her hug instantly and helping her rise instead, a nervous little frown on her face. Already, Celestia felt completely out of breath even from the tiny bit of movement, though she did her best not to telegraph such to Twilight.

“W-want your glasses?” Twilight levitated them in front of Celestia, who accepted them gratefully.

“Oh, thank you, Twi...” Celestia began, and then paused as soon as they were on her face and she could see the room in newfound clarity. And, more importantly to Celestia, Twilight Sparkle in all her beautiful details.

And yet, she was different. Celestia blinked, wondering if her glasses were smudged, but no. Twilight’s coat seemed… darker, as though it began at a normal hue but shifted along an incredibly subtle gradient along her barrel, only to collide with a splotchy patch of deep purple around her flank and cutie mark.

“It seems as though I missed quite a lot,” Celestia said, her voice a low whisper as she reached a hoof over to rest it upon Twilight’s mark. “And yet… I have a suspicion I know exactly what I missed.”

“I, uh. Visited the Tree of Harmony. I don’t… I’m… still trying to understand what…” 

Celestia ran her hoof along Twilight’s newly hybridized cutiemark as the unicorn trailed off. “I’m sorry, Twilight Sparkle. I know how much she meant to you.”

“Nightmare?”

Celestia nodded. “I suspect she merged her magic with you. The magic that my sister split and hid away in the Sunstone… I suspect that lives within your horn, now, too, thanks to the Tree of Harmony. And… I’m sorry. If that suspicion is true, I am very, very sorry.”

Twilight looked back at her cutie mark, her ears sinking down against her head. “...why?”

“Because it is very unlikely that Nightmare Moon exists, anymore. And if the Sunstone has vanished, then it is impossible that Luna does. Their legacies are yours to carry now. I suspect Nightmare Moon knew that.”

“She… she did talk to me with a… sort of finality…” Twilight sighed. “Damned mare didn’t… didn’t even let me say goodbye…” 

“I’m sorry,” Celestia said again, as Twilight’s eyes began to water. “She… must have known her time was fading.” 

“She said it was. I just thought…” Twilight rubbed at her eyes, letting out a long breath from her snout and looking at her hooves. “I don’t know what I thought. That I could save her, maybe. I don’t know.” 

“I believe she would have said you have already done that.” Celestia replied without hesitation. 

“...Gods...I’ve missed you so much, Celestia.” Twilight whispered, nuzzling her snout into Celestia’s barrel. 

 “Two weeks, hrm?”

Indeed, looking outside the window, Celestia could see it. Even as little as fourteen days hadn’t been kind to the hints of organic life visible outside. The hedges and trees and bushes she could see had all begun to wither, wispy branches exposing themselves where healthy leaves should have been. The chill of winter compounded with the lack of sunlight made for a rather dramatic shift in their liveliness.

“Two weeks.” Twilight nodded, wiping her snout and eyes and attempting a smile, though it was pained and tired. “Equestria’s been… been better. But… there’s good news, too; Spoiled Rich is currently on trial for gross criminal misconduct. They even asked me to question her, on your behalf. Tons of ponies are coming clean about her, and about the Industry. I… I don’t think they’re going to be surviving this one.” 

Celestia managed a small smile. “I suppose a brave deed does count for something, doesn’t it?”

“Brave?” Twilight gawked. “You’re lucky to be alive, Celestia. The doctor’s say you’ve got lung disease from that damned smoke you breathed in, running in there without a plan!”

Celestia waved a hoof. “They are hardly qualified to make a diagnosis on--” she broke off into a quick, hacking cough. “...On immortal beings.”

Twilight pawed at the floor, saying nothing.

“It’s funny, Twilight… when I felt myself falling back there, at the SunTrotter… I was certain that the first pony I saw would be you. When I flew there, I was placing my entire trust on you arriving in time to save me. Perhaps that was irresponsible of me to take that gamble…”

“I guess you weren’t the one who asked to take it.” Twilight shook her head. “They forced you to. You did the right thing, Celestia. They say those ponies would have been dead if you hadn’t arrived when you did. And if they died, nopony would have known how to quell the SunTrotter’s flames. I’m just sorry I couldn’t get to you sooner. I wish I could have been there to help.”

“The woes of both of us not being able to fly, hrm?” Celestia said, smiling coyly. She eyed Twilight’s newly changed cutiemark, internally replaying Twilight’s own testimony in her head. A merging of an alicorn’s magic with a unicorn’s, and carried out by the Tree of Harmony, no less? It was a curious turn of events, to be certain.

She would have to wait and see. If it was a path that Twilight was destined to take, then she would take it. Filly’s flights, as her physician would have said.

A clock on the hospital room wall told her it was five forty-seven A.M. If she were to raise the Sun now, it would be an early one, but that was alright. She didn’t imagine Equestria would mind.

She had to lean on Twilight for help only once as she made her way out into the hospital corridor. Even early in the morning, a few nurses were milling about in the main corridor happening, but they both immediately turned their attention to Celestia and Twilight as they laboriously exited Celestia’s room. The nurse at the reception dropped the magazine she’d been reading in an instant, and both let out audible gasps as Celestia stumbled out into the light of the corridor.

Even from the short distance she’d travelled, Celestia knew it was a mistake. Her head was thumping and her side rose and fell with increased urgency, her body trying and failing to fill her weary lungs. She almost stumbled again, but Twilight was there beside her. Helping her first to stand, and then to walk.

Keep going. You’re almost there.

Her thoughts were a disorganized flurry as she made her way further into the hospital. Down the hall, past the reception… the nurses and doctors were saying something to her, but she ignored them as she forced herself forwards.

One purpose. Sunrise Scroll her flank. You look terrible, Celestia. Damn you, Flim and Flam. I did so to save my country. Voice like a song. Hello again, Sister. Worthless harpy. Sun Princess. Tell it to the court. It just keeps getting colder and colder, auntie. Sun, sun, sun! I’m sorry, Luna. She begged you to save her. Call it optimism, if you like. Always there, the inadequacy. I don’t wish to go, no matter what.

She exited out into the Ponyville streets, Twilight at her side. It was early, but the frenzy she’d stirred within the hospital itself had already earned her a small entourage emerging from the old brick building. The few ponies setting up their stalls in the marketplace all dropped what they were doing instantly, gravitating towards Princess Celestia as though she were casting some universal magnetic field.

Her horn lit. The Sun had drifted far from her… she could barely feel it at all, but it was undoubtedly still there. Her link with it remained, but it was so far, their connection stretched so thin so as to be meaningless. Perhaps it would never be as strong as it once was.

It was a worry for another time. Everypony was watching, and waiting, and just this once, Celestia couldn’t let them down.

The sky was unbroken by clouds, and by the fury of the stacks.

One purpose. She gripped the faint and fading Sun, and pulled it close. Her first and her oldest friend, as weary and as proud as she was. She closed her eyes as she focused, her world becoming blackness, and the sounds of hushed and excited pony voices gradually filling the plaza around her within the fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes she spent gradually reforming and refining her connection with the Sun.

She reached a wing to Twilight, and spoke to her softly. “It is quite far, even for me. Would you mind helping an old mare out, Twilight?”

Without hesitation, Twilight lit her own horn. Celestia felt Twilight’s magic intersect with hers immediately, and it gave her strength. She had direction, but she lacked power. She could find the Sun, but she didn’t feel strong enough to raise it on her own. Not dissimilar to the function of the SunTrotter, she supposed. What a humorous irony.

“On my word, Twilight. I will need you to lend your strength to mine. I will cast the magic, and you will refine it.”

“Of course, Celestia.”

She kept her eyes closed the whole while, a small and patient smile on her face as she worked. She didn’t speak, though the din of an occupied town plaza continued to rise in intensity as the morning crept ever closer. She couldn’t make out their specific words, but the tone was all the same.

Eager anticipation. Celestia could certainly empathize.

There was no sense waiting any longer. She had the Sun’s tug in her magic. All that was left was to give it a tug back into orbit.

“Now, Twilight.”

And together, they carried the Sun into the morning sky. Celestia’s legs were shaking, and her maw twisted into a snarl from the effort. It was far, but not out of reach. Not for the two of them. It’s heat and light came gradually, slowly, but inch by inch they peeled away the endless curtain of night and filled it with the muted warmth of a late autumn morning in Equestria.

She opened her eyes as the Sun rose over the distant eastern horizon.

Beside her, Twilight Sparkle was bowing, light flickering out of her horn. Deep, and low, and with her eyes closed in respect. Celestia felt her heart shudder as the gesture trickled it’s way through the gathered ponies in the plaza… instantly from some, a little coyly or hesitantly from others, but the gesture was collective all the same. A hundred bowed heads in her direction. Still a far-cry from the glory she’d once held, a cynical part of her chirped up, but she knew better. Sleep and hopelessness surely must still have its claws around the hearts of the rest of the silent town. Soon enough, they would wake to see the calm beams of sunlight dancing their way through the suspended motes of snow and dust. 

It was just another morning in Equestria, after all.

She finished casting the Sun along its path across her sky. She had no doubt she would have to correct its course soon, but for now it ventured along the old and well-trodden celestial path it had always taken. The moment she finished, she felt exhausted, yet her heart felt full.

Beside her, Twilight was still in her bow. Celestia managed a small smirk at the sight, and gently extended a wing to the unicorn’s chin, guiding her head back up to meet her eyes.

“It’s not customary for peers to bow so formally to each other, Crown Minister Twilight.”

Twilight blushed, and then hid the blush with a hoof. “Bit pre-emptive for that, though…”

Celestia nodded her head to the bowing ponies within the plaza. “Is it?”

Twilight turned, and looked a little surprised at the sight. Celestia stifled an amused chuckle--in her haste to show her own respect, it seemed Twilight had completely missed the wider effect of her actions.

A typical side-effect of Twilight Sparkle, Celestia thought. So wise, so brave… and so dreadfully ignorant to the impact of her own wisdom and bravery.

“They’re bowing for you, too, Twilight Sparkle,” Celestia told her, softly and patiently, running her telekinesis down Twilight’s bedraggled and messy mane. She’d have to get Twilight a new crown, she told herself idly. The Element of Magic fused with the Sunstone had been a natural look for her during these days of rebirth for Equestria, but she felt they were finally passing that slow and laborious return.

Perhaps something new was in order.

“Perhaps some don’t even know why they bow to you, yet. Then again, for some time now they haven’t known who has truly been moving the Moon about either, have they?”

Twilight’s blush intensified, and she looked to her hooves, speechless.

“From here on out, we stand together, Twilight Sparkle,” Celestia said, reaching over to grip her forehoof in her own. “For as long as we can.”

“What do we do now?” Twilight whispered, deliberately turning her gaze away from all of the ponies looking intently at the two of them, no doubt wondering the same thing.

“I do believe that right now, the surviving members of Flim Flam Industry’s directorial board will be making haste in their attempts to contact the two of us,” Celestia replied. “Publicly or not, I don’t care, because I am only accepting one stipulation now.”

“Complete and unconditional surrender?”

Celestia shot Twilight a coy smile. “As politely as one can word such a demand.”

“That’ll be a… fun conversation,” Twilight growled out, gritting her teeth.

“You know…” Celestia pursed her lips, tilting her head thoughtfully. “As much as comeuppance and revenge and harshly delivered ‘told ya so’s’ are not my strongest preference… part of me fears it will be.”

At first, Celestia had been surprised at how quickly the Industry had collapsed.

Then, she had realized her mistake in such a belief. It hadn’t been collapsing swiftly at all. For the better part of a year, it had been eroding slowly. Ever since the Hollow Shades, ponies had been fleeing it urgently, as though the Industry itself were a black hole and everypony within its influence were horrified at the prospect of growing any closer to it.

The death of the Industry’s founders hadn’t really helped matters, either. Moreso, when ponies realized that it had happened nearly a decade ago, and they’d simply been spared the details so that the Industry themselves could continue parading the very thing that had killed them. Indeed, the rot that had slowly been consuming Equestria had turned on itself, now, and anypony foalish enough to stay was risked being caught within its decay.

She had respected the Brothers. In the strange, bitter sense that one could respect the ponies who exposed one’s own flaws. They’d been arrogant, and irritating, and she knew they hadn’t ever had the best wishes of her ponies at the forefront of their considerations, but their intelligence and creativity had been useful.

She could extend no such respect to the Industry that had grown from their successes and their inventions, nor the majority of the ponies who had aligned themselves as the Industry’s chief leaders. Of course, there were plenty of respectable ponies within the Industry, but the developing majority of them had all followed Fine Line’s hoofsteps in crossing their moral chasms using the bridge Celestia had extended them.

Celestia did her best to remind herself of all this as she glared at the suited ponies in front of her, one of her hooves tapping impatiently against the table. Still had to think of the ponies. Had to consider their welfare, too.

She felt like scoffing. To Tartarus with that. They’d almost killed her Sun. They didn’t deserve a godsdamned moment of her mercy, anymore.

She was sitting at a polished glass table with half-a-dozen or so well-dressed ponies who’s names Celestia couldn’t be bothered to recall. Cohorts of Spoiled Rich, who had no doubt thrown her directly beneath the streetcar the moment word of her secretly funded SunTrotter Project had gotten out.

They had at least been prompt in their requests to meet with Celestia, following the end of the Fourth Longest Night. They’d offered to come meet her in Ponyville--she was still weak and recovering, after all!--but Celestia would not be patronized. It took more effort than it did during her younger years, but she still stood proud and held her head high as she scanned the faces of the ponies sitting at the table with her.

Nervousness and uncertainty were the predominant emotion. She was sitting with a group of about half-a-dozen ponies who, the last time Celestia had seen them all together, had viewed her as little else but a prisoner. That very thought was a little unsettling to consider, but she supposed it framed the entire morality of these ponies into staggering focus for her. She didn’t know half of them, and the other half she knew only through the some indescribable half-remembered context. Nobles, or mayors, or capitalists of note from across Equestria. Anypony who had been blinded enough by greed to know about her imprisonment without caring about doing much about it. 

Celestia figured she would do her best to remember her own little morals about mercy. She doubted Twilight would care so much, though, and she did not imagine she would interfere too much with her Crown Minister’s judgment. 

Celestia was the first to speak, and she preceded it with a short little laugh. “Did anypony here seriously imagine this conversation taking place a year ago? Goodness, wouldn’t things have been so much simpler if I’d just written that damned scroll, hrm?”

A few of the gathered ponies looked away, and nopony spoke up. Some nostalgic part of Celestia’s brain filled the void with some response long forgotten, snarled to her by Spoiled Rich in not dissimilar circumstances, while she stood at the same place on the table with an inhibitor strapped to her horn.

“But, well. It seems things did not play out quite so simply,” Celestia continued on in absence of a response. “And that’s why we’re here with so many empty seats, figuring out where to go now. Now, as far as I can see things, there’s two real options on the table. We call an emergency vote for the Equestrian people to decide who will be taking immediate control of the Industry following Spoiled Rich’s resignation, or, we simply streamline the process and I take over that role by default of apparently being the only pony anyone with a brain is capable of trusting, right now.”

Her callous, snarky tone garnered a few glares, but no real objections from the gathered company of ponies who Celestia doubted had ever had to make legitimate decisions in their lives. One suited stallion did speak up, thank goodness, and even precluded his comment with a respectful nod towards her.

“Most of the factories have already refused to go back to work without the stipulation that you will be chiefly in charge of them henceforth.”

“Thank you, dear.” Celestia smiled. “I will be completely honest, I have already made this decision in my head the moment you ponies thrust Equestria into eternal night without their consent. The only real ambiguous path forwards for me, personally, is how I should go about treating you ponies. I have plenty of ideas for reforming the factories and gradually easing back their output to a manageable and economically responsible point. What I am uncertain about is what particular usage I have for ponies who’s primary justification for being in the position to be speaking to me here is predominantly the limitless nature of their own greed.”

Beside her, Twilight was trying her hardest to keep her expression neutral. Celestia could see the hints of a smirk lining her frown, threatening to give away her attempt at professional demeanor. Truthfully, a mischievous part of Celestia didn’t mind at all. Twilight Sparkle had been starved for something resembling a victory over these ponies for her entire life, and now here it was playing out in front of her. Could she seriously fault the mare for feeling a little bit pleased?

Another pony--a mare, this time, spoke up. Her voice quiet and restrained, but she was another face Celestia recalled seeing at the table, during her imprisonment. “Miss Celestia…”

Celestia tilted her head. “Try that again, dear.”

“Sorry, sorry. Princess Celestia…” She swiftly corrected herself. Celestia smiled. “But, to be clear… you’re implying severance, yes?”

Beside her, Twilight couldn’t seem to contain herself any further. “That’s one way of putting it.”

“Yes indeed.” Celestia nodded. “A suspension from politics effective immediately is chiefly my main initial demand.”

And then, she could worry about impeachment trials and redistribution of their personal assets, the more she learned about how much of such had been ill-gotten. But she wasn’t fool enough to mention that at the table.

“I have already been in contact with many defectors from your corporation interested in returning as my Cabinet, so. I truthfully don’t have any need for more, ahem… assistance, from any of you ponies. Now, truth be told, I believe the wise decision for the majority of you ponies would be to accept this offer to stay out of my mane for the time being. I’m not the only one discontent with your presence, after all.”

“Approval rating dropped from fourty-eight percent prior to the SunTrotter, to uh...” Twilight Sparkle consulted her notes tucked away into a messenger bag in a semi-organized manner. She let out a little snorting laugh at the figure she saw. “Fifteen percent after. Ouch. Never rains but it pours, eh?”

“Yes, well.” A bit of indignance from the side of the table across from Twilight and Celestia. “That is why we’re here discussing what we’re to do next.”

“Well, what you are to do next is stop saying we in reference to my plans for this nation,” Celestia replied shortly. “I’ll go over the terms of your severance at some point after official announcement that I am retaking the throne.”

“Which is to occur?”

Celestia shared a glance with Twilight. “Well, Crown Minister to-be?”

“I can be ready in as little as tomorrow. I’ve been waiting for this moment my entire life.”

“Wonderful. Then it is to occur as swiftly as it takes for you ponies to haul that old throne and wonderful oak desk of mine out of storage.” Celestia rose to her hooves, somehow feeling stronger in that moment than after any of the life-endangering stunts that had framed her legacy. “Oh. And my golden crown, too. I do quite miss that old regalia.”

A cool autumn evening sprawled out from beyond a frost-fringed window.

A radio microphone on the table before her, alongside her golden crown. Recovered and returned to her possession by the Royal Guard, though she’d had to temporarily part with it in order to fit the pair of headphones atop her head. She did so calmly, immediately taking a long sip of her second cup of tea and closing her eyes to enjoy both the taste and the soothing classical number drizzling into her ears from the blinking radio panel before her.

A lovely blend of peppermint and lavender. A friend of Twilight’s had given it to her, promising that the ‘all-natural remedies and jazz’ would help clear her throat and stave back some of the worst of her coughing. She wasn’t necessarily worried about such, but it would absolutely be an inconvenience. As would her newfound shortness of breath. Truthfully, she found herself simply enjoying the taste of the tea itself, and treating its alleged benefits as a nice little bonus.

She finished her tea just as the classical number ended (The second-to-last movement of Bayhooven’s String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, if Celestia’s memory served her right), setting her tea down on the desk before her and breathing out a long exhale to steady her nerves.

Just another speech, she reminded herself, waiting for the all-clear from the radio technician on the other side of the glass. The ponies here were familiar with her at this point, a strange relationship bordering on friendship and colleagues. As much a member of Celestia’s blooming sphere of influence as the ponies who’d served her Cabinet officially in years passed.

Her speech was there, written in hazed bullet-points instead of any concrete stream of dialogue. She’d been doing this for long enough that she’d found herself more comfortable simply speaking as herself, than as any over-considered reflection of her thoughts. Part of her knew ‘winging it’ wasn’t a necessarily wise approach for something quite so severe, but another part of her felt that the spontaneous power of unconsidered words to be at least as effective and genuine.

The technician smiled at her, and gave her a single nod as the last of the cellos and violas serenaded them into silence. Clearing her throat, Celestia levitated the microphone closer and began.

“Ponies of Equestria, good evening. My name is Celestia. I am speaking to you candidly across all available radio networks, not as a leader or as an alicorn or as a ‘Sun Princess’ or whatever term endears you the most… but as a mare who is tired. Tired of all of the lies spewed to us by a fractured, rotting government. Tired of watching the sand in the proverbial hourglass of this old world’s resources tumble down every passing day. Most importantly, I am tired of standing by on the sidelines and praying that things will get better.

“When I left the throne, twelve years ago, I could not possibly have left it in a worse place. I still relive the horrors of the Crystal War, the changeling attacks, and Tirek’s rampage often. I have grown to understand that some wounds are not of a physical nature, and that they can affect an entire nation at once. I… I truly wish I had been there to have helped rebuild our frightened nation, when my help could surely have been of use. I wish I could have been there for the Crystal Ponies, as they faced persecution simply through implicit association with a former tyrant's hatred and wrath. Or the thestrals, as they watched their homelands stolen away, reduced to dust before them. Or any of the unfortunate thousands of ponies who carried these scars--physical, or emotional--with them long after these conflicts ceased.

“I could not, however. I could not, because I was not permitted to. For twelve years, the government of this nation had seen fit to keep me away from you, because my very existence presented to them a glaring contradiction. A lie, which formed the bedrock of all the beliefs that stemmed from this dark age in Equestrian history. Lies, compounded upon fears, and sold to you as your own beliefs.

“For about that long, my political peer and my dearest friend Twilight Sparkle has been addressing these lies. I know that her efforts may sometimes seem misguided, but she has within her the most magical, most compassionate heart. Her fight to share the truth of Equestria with you did not come from some self-righteous desire to contradict the norm. It came from an unshakable belief that perhaps things could be better for the ponies that the government in place had been telling you to ignore and forget.

“I don’t need to tell you any of this, truthfully, for I have watched it echoed back at me in the week or so following my gradual recovery. Truth be told, there is often little to do while waiting for doctors and nurses than listening to the radio, and I have been doing plenty of that and learning plenty of what has come from the past little while. If I’m allowed to be candidly metaphorical… I once believed that the truth of our nation would present itself slowly, as a river gently babbles on to some greater body of water further on. Now, though, I see that the result was more like one of a dam bursting. The SunTrotter’s explosion was the catalyst, and the ensuing fallout has been impossible for the Industry to deny any longer.

“I have talked at lengths now, largely about things most listeners are aware of. I have done so because I wish to contextualize our current place in time. It is… eerily reminiscent of one twelve years ago. A long, hopeless eternal night, and a dramatic environmental catastrophe that has left many frightened, displaced, alone, and in danger. This time, however, I am not imprisoned unjustly. I am here, and I am alive, and I don’t wish to stand by and let Flim Flam Industry continue to reap upon your fears and worries any longer.

“I am choosing to step in and take immediate control of the Equestrian Government effective the moment this broadcast concludes. I am doing so in the interest of guiding Equestria back towards a position of stable normalcy. Because for every inch of our cities that expand, our once beautiful land shrinks. For every pony that dies in the factories in service of a greedy industry lies a grieving family in wait. The equine cost of Flim Flam Industry’s greed is one I am no longer prepared to abide by.

“For those who are nervous about the stability of this transfer of power… it is an agreement that has already been struck. I have been sitting upon my throne for the better part of the morning--dusty though it was upon my finding it. The ponies of Flim Flam Industry have largely been accommodating towards this transfer, for I believe they wish for a return to a place of normalcy at least as much as I do. After all, the greater majority of them were not entirely aware of the sins of their highest governing bodies. A greater majority of them did not know about the alicorn the Industry had been keeping chained up within their basement. To those individuals, caught in a web of lies that has changed what the past twelve years of their lives may have meant, I offer my sympathies.

“To the others, who have used fear as a weapon--who have reaped it to turn ponies against each other, against myself, against themselves, I apologize. I apologize for my strength, or for my weakness, or for my indecision. For whatever may inspire that fear in you. I can only hope that what I do will be what frames me, not what I am. This is in part why I am proposing the construction of a third, and final SunTrotter Facility, as a hypothetical plan for ensuring the Sun’s survival in the event of future tragedy. One who’s construction I intend to oversee, and assist with, and which will be built with safety as our initial priority. This is not a replacement for my own Sun-raising duties, but merely a back-up plan. One placed in mortal hooves, in the event that mine become unable to carry on my duty.

“Concerns with this shift in power are understandable. The concerns of my subjects have always been the backbone of my views for our nation’s future, and how we handle ourselves moving forwards. I used to listen to them in my Day Court, and I found myself enraptured, daily, by the stories and issues my subjects brough me. Alas, no such Day Court exists anymore, at least to the capacity I had twelve years ago. I will be doing my best to reimplement it and provide a public platform where my citizens might once again voice their discontent or their ideas. I am speaking to you across the nation all at once; we have technologies which might bridge the gaps between us more easily than ever before, and I promise that nopony will ever be left without a voice again. Expect to hear me via this medium again, and likewise expect to be able to reach and speak to me via it, as well.

“Thank you for listening to an old mare share her thoughts, Equestria. Please, be with each other during these times. Lend a hoof to ponies who need help, and share a smile with ponies who need happiness. I know we live in frightening times, but we are bigger as Equestrians and as ponies than any one of us will ever be by ourselves. Yours in Royal Servitude, Princess Celestia, saying goodnight.”

Celestia clicked off her microphone and removed the headphones from atop her mane, replacing them with her golden crown once again. She gave the radio tech a grateful nod as he went back to work, and he returned it with a wordless smile of his own. Shuffling out into the reception area of the New Canterlot Public Radio building, Celestia nodded to the secretaries who responded to her exit with respectful bows.

More ponies were waiting outside the station itself for her. Rumours of her return had been trickling through Equestria for the better part of a day, and the verification of such gave way to instantaneous excitement. A few cameras flashed, and a great many reporters had already begun swarming close to her, every single one of them barking over each other in feeble attempts to have their voices heard. Giving the crowd a patient smile and raising a hoof to politely request silence, Celestia spoke.

“I will be more than happy to talk with reporters as soon as I’m properly situated back in the Canterlot Palace. My secretaries Raven Inkwell and Fine Line will be more than content finding a timeslot for all of you. For now, I have a friend I am somewhat worried about, and I would like to go check on her.”

Spreading her wings without anything further to say, Celestia carried herself over the city streets. Snow was falling gently down from the mid-November sky, drizzling her braided mane and tail with little specks of fading white. A few more cameras flashed behind her, and Celestia felt a small tinge of guilt to be leaving them with so many questions.

And yet, they weren’t questions being demanded of her, anymore, she supposed. Questions from subjects, delivered to the mare who they thought might be able to help them. A far-cry from the first time she had left the New Canterlot Public Radio Station, amidst jeers and harshly screamed demands that she return to her retirement…

She cleared the tallest of the buildings ascending into the sky, her horn aglow--first to check on her Sun, and then to cast a thin little filter of fresh air a few feet out from her.

She could not find the Sun at first, but it was there somewhere. A little off-track, as it had been as of late. Yet that was plenty remediable, so long as somepony cared enough to do so. An old friend, in need of a little help and guidance that she was more than happy to provide. She flapped her weary wings once, twice, a dozen times, every one feeling stronger than the last, guiding herself forwards into the hazy evening skies.

There was much to be done, and much more that she could do now that she knew she wasn’t alone in doing it.

Celestia smiled as she flew on. There it was! The Sun! For a few moments, it was all that would matter to her. She watched as it was brought slowly down, easing below the horizon as the wondrous expanse of inky black overtook the plain of light above her. Cool, beautiful moonlight soon filled what her Sun had abandoned, lighting the night sky over Equestria and doing its best to ease the worries of all the fearfully sleeping little ponies below.

And onwards, Celestia flew into the blooming night around her.