The worst part about being the princess of dreams was that Luna could never forget she was in one. Could never pretend, even for a second, that the mare before her was more than a mirage.
Every night since her reformation, Princess Luna had dreamt of a faceless mare.
And the dreams were always the same.
She was standing with her in the old Everfree Palace.
It was empty except for the two of them, restored to the glory it had been in before the sands of time had crumbled it away, before the Everfree had crept its way inside, before she and her sister had destroyed it in their final battle. A storm howled outside. The panes of stained glass flex and heave. Branches and leaves and small stones alike clattered and pinged off the sides of the palace and its windows.
The mare said nothing to her. They were facing one another. Faceless as the mare was.
Luna did not know what she wanted the mare to say to her. She needed her to say something.
There was an intense rumble from above; the walls shook, the windows buckled and shattered, and the roof came off, drawn up into the sky—which was a vacuous, ravenous void, bearing down to consume the world.
The mare still did not speak; Luna stepped closer and wrapped her in her forelegs, wings coming next to envelop her. Her muzzle pressed up against hers.
As the walls collapsed and the throne behind them was wrenched from its stone mount, the mare looked into Luna’s eyes, her lips inches from her, mane whipped in the cataclysmic winds.
The mare opened her mouth to speak—
And Luna opened her eyes.
Every time she awoke like this—and she always awoke like this—Luna was left with a gut-twisting saudade. It was not only this that pained her. Without an identity, the great sense of displacement and nostalgic longing the mare instilled within her felt hollow and empty. It felt downright ingenuine, and Luna was left with the lingering sensation of having committed a grave error—a feeling she was quite used to.
One evening, right as Celestia was about to set the sun, Luna awoke with a name on her lips.
She had spoken the name in her dream. The faceless mare had her face painted back on the second the words left Luna’s tongue. Her delightful emerald eyes, her thin and delicate lashes, the tiny laugh lines around the corners of her mouth, her canary yellow mane—and Luna could feel her now. The heat from her body, the way she was shaking ever-so-slightly as she held her in the grasp of her wings...
“Aether Glow,” she whispered to herself out loud.
Right before Aether could speak, Luna had woken up again.
She raised a hoof to her cheek. It was wet.
Luna found little sleep in the week that followed. She snapped at every little word said to her, re-arranged everything neurotically in her bedroom and cosmomancy tower every hour or so, and missed most of her meals. Memory after memory of Aether Glow was flooding back to her. She didn’t need to sleep for that to happen now.
Still, she was scared of going back to sleep. Scared of seeing Aether Glow again.
It was too much to bear.
After three sleepless days in a row brought her to a full week since first speaking Aether’s name, Luna found herself in the palace kitchens clumsily peeling an orange. Her aura slipped on the fruit’s surface every now and then. She hadn’t wanted to eat; the past forty or so hours of her stomach gnawing away at nothing reminded her of the eternal hunger beset upon her on the moon. That was when she felt it would be best to force herself a small bite of something at the very least. Shoeing away the cooks and various palace help that she’d found upon first arrival to the kitchen, she now found herself alone, struggling with her fruit. All as planned.
“Luna? Why aren’t you in bed?”
Luna yelped. Celestia had caught her completely off guard. The sun princess was standing on the other side of the prep table, her head held slightly askew, her expression far too concerned for Luna’s tastes.
“O-Oh, it’s you,” Luna grunted, her mood immediately souring further. “I am just getting myself a midnight snack, as I believe it is called.” She turned from her sister, raised her head indignantly, and popped the scraps of orange peel into her mouth one by one.
“Luna, you look exhausted. Also, it’s 1:24 PM.” Celestia left off the seconds and etcetera. One of the quirks of raising the sun left her with flawless knowledge of the exact time at any given moment. “Have you been having trouble sleeping?”
Luna laughed unconvincingly. “Oh please, you worry too much, sister. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have important matters to attend to.” She turned to leave the kitchen, and in her delirium immediately stumbled over her own hooves. Her side smacked into the prep table hard, and sent a cutting board hurtling—knife and all—towards Celestia.
Celestia easily caught the cutting board, knife, and the half-sliced carrots in her aura. “Luna, what’s wrong?” She asked, gently levitating what had been left behind in the hurried exodus of the chefs down to its home on the table.
Luna groaned. “I suppose you won’t stop bugging me until I tell you, will you?” One of her wings twitched painfully. It had been caught between her side and the prep table.
“You know I won’t,” Celestia said, smiling at her. Luna’s grimace deepened.
“Well, it’s... there are some things that just... I am having a difficult...” Luna fell back to her haunches with a small, strangled noise and slapped her hooves over her eyes. “Never mind. I do not wish to talk about it.”
“Luna, you’ve been through a lot; I won’t press you if it’s really too much for you, but I’d like you to know that you can tell me anything you need to.”
Luna peeked at Celestia from underneath her hooves. Slowly, she let them slip down to lay on the floor once more, and she immediately began to sob so hard her entire body heaved.
Celestia’s eyes widened. “Oh dear.”
“I-I,” Luna gasped. “I remember her, Tia. I remember Aether.”
Celestia felt her heart drop out the bottom of her chest. Oh no.
“What happened to her?” Luna sobbed. “After I was banished—what happened to her?”
Celestia chewed on her lip nervously. “She resigned from the court after you were banished. She had some... choice words for me when she did so, all of them harsh and painful...” She paused for a moment before letting out a tiny sigh. “And true.”
Luna was no longer fully sobbing, although tears were still flowing silently from her eyes. “And then? What became of her then?”
“Luna, you of course have to know—”
Luna’s glare was a knife pointed directly towards Celestia’s eyes. “Of course I am aware that she is dead, sister; I am not a foal. I have no delusions about this!” Luna’s voice had begun to peak, her horn sparking more than once as she intoned her syllables as flying daggers. “I want to know how she lived the rest of her days; I want to know what she did, how she went about her day, how she entertained herself, if she still continued to practice alchemy; I—”
Luna took a deep breath. Celestia watched as her sister’s sparking horn slowly died.
“I want to know if she was happy.”
Celestia did not meet Luna’s eyes. “I’m afraid that I’m not entirely certain about any of that, Luna. She hated me after you were banished. She didn’t exactly keep in touch.”
“And I suppose you went to extreme lengths to do anything in your power to contact her in spite of that,” Luna said, rolling her own.
“Luna, things were very intense politically and emotionally at the time, and I had—”
“I do not want a history lesson.” Luna waved her hoof dismissively. “If you know nothing else then I have wasted my time with you. Goodbye, sister.”
“I...” Celestia bit her lip. “I do know one other thing.”
Luna gave Celestia an unimpressed look. “I am listening.”
“I am aware of where and when she passed.”
Luna’s expression did not change.
Celestia stared at Luna, her heart thundering in her chest.
“This is one of my greatest shames, Lu—”
“’This’ is not about you, dear sister,” Luna spat with all the venom in the world. “Every night since the Elements had purified me of Nightmare Moon, I have dreamed of her. Faceless, and always waking when she was about to speak. And now, now that I remember who she is—who she was to me—now, after every restless sleep, something new about her returns to me: a memory, an emotion, a scent, a taste, a feeling...”
Luna turned from her sister. She refused to reveal the watery sheen of her eyes to her.
“And now it hurts too much to sleep.”
Luna raised her head and scowled at Celestia, wiping at the corner of her eyes with her hoof. “Take me to where she lived.” She paused as she glared at Celestia, her horn sparking slightly. “Take me to where she died.”
And so she did; at nightfall, after the sun had been set and the moon had been risen, Celestia took her to the old stone house where Aether and Luna had spent their summers in secrecy. It was appropriately situated on a small bluff overlooking Luna Bay, surrounded by sea grass and sand dunes.
“Remember how this place got its name?” Celestia said. She was trying her best to inject a little bit of levity into the moment. She was not doing so very well.
“Yes. I was mad that you got a whole sea named after you so the naming was unveiled to me as a consolation prize.” Luna rolled her eyes. “Thank you for reminding me how foalish and petty I was.”
Celestia was silent. Luna stared at the wreckage of the cottage.
“She moved out here because it reminded her of you,” Celestia said after a moment. “And because the best times of your lives together were spent here.”
Luna cast a glance backward. “Do not purport to know what the best times of my life have been.” Her voice was cracking.
Luna wandered around the ruin. A thousand years by the sea had left it as little more than a few stone walls. She stared down at the sand covering what had been the floor, too deep to feel the original stones.
“There is nothing left.”
“We’ll need to hold still for a bit,” Aether said to her. “And on the count of three, I want you to cast the brightest light spell you know how with me. I know it seems strange—trust me, this will be fantastic.”
It was then that Luna discovered she was wrong. She squinted. It was barely noticeable as nothing more than a small off-white tip poking out from the beige surrounding it, but it was there. Her horn sparked. She gently yanked the buried object with her magic, pulling it free from the beach, grains of sand cascading from its surface.
There was a flash of bright light. The two held the position there for a few timeless moments, Aether’s lips pressed so delicately to Luna’s hoof. Luna became briefly aware of how silly it must look. The thought left her mind as quick as it had come. She did not care how long she had to remain still as long as it meant Aether was there with her, hoof in hoof.
It was old. A little over a thousand years old, to be exact. Luna had no idea how it was still intact. Perhaps there was latent magic, perhaps it had just been dumb luck. There was a small bit of fire damage in the bottom right corner—as if somepony had held it over a candle in a fleeting attempt to destroy it and stopped almost immediately. It no longer carried its supernal, otherworldly, almost heavenly shine it had had when new—but there was no mistaking it for anything else.
Aether was unable to contain herself. Giggling and prancing over to the box she had mounted before them, she nodded back to Luna. “C’mon! Follow me down into the cellar. We need almost total darkness to make sure we get this right.”
“Luna, I'm so sorry.” Celestia took a step forward, and reached out her hoof—
“I got the idea from the Astera Obscura,” Aether said to her in the darkness of the cellar. “The way the astronomers used the apertures in the ceiling to let light through in a way that allows them to study the sun, the moon, the stars—” She smiled at Luna, hardly visible in the dark, but its presence known all the same. “—the way they project an image of themselves onto the floor... I figured there was some way to reverse-engineer it, and capture a moment in time on a mirror-like surface.”
Luna’s wing slapped back against Celestia’s hoof. “Save your apologies. This is for the best, is it not?” She sighed and looked up at the moon. “This is for the best.”
“And then I realized: it didn’t have to be a mirror-like surface at all. Or rather, not what actually captured the image, anyway. I knew from my work that there are some alchemical solutions that are very sensitive to light—silver iodide in particular.”
“I deserve worse.”
“But developing it takes a very long time, like that. Hours, sometimes. I needed something quicker. It wasn’t until I was playing around with mercury in a completely unrelated experiment that I understood the fumes of quicksilver could be used to get that image to present all that much faster.”
Celestia took another step towards her sister. “Now, Luna, you know that isn’t—”
Luna watched in awe as the image shimmered to life within the solution Aether had sunk the paper into. As the solution of salt the alchemist had prepared beforehand stripped away the negative of the silver iodide, a perfect image of the two of them remained.
“We both played a part in the death of Aether Glow, sister.” Luna’s gaze was hollow and cold.
The moment was there, taxidermied time, eternal as long as its medium persisted.
All was quiet save for the crash of the ocean.
“Way faster than a painting, right? And more accurate too.” She smirked. “Not that I’m trying to put painters out of a trade or anything. It’s just much more convenient this way.”
Luna wandered down to the shorebreak, the moon high above, illuminating the ocean and beach in a serene silver shine not unlike that the picture had once possessed all those years ago. The picture which, now faded to a dull sepia, bobbed alongside her as she made her way to the waterline.
“I call it a ‘photograph’.”
She drew a line in the sand with her hoof, right before the break of the waves—
And watched as it was washed away by the tide.
She stepped forward and placed her hooves in the shorebreak. Focused her gaze on the photograph once more.
It was almost like she was still there.
Luna closed her eyes.
breathe in.
breathe out.
Her horn started to glow—
The shorebreak slowly moving further and further up the beach—
Luna built a growl in her throat, rough and raw and vibrating. Her hooves dug into the sand.
Slowly, the growl escalated into a scream—and then erupted to a bellow of rage that echoed across the water. The ocean heaved and pulled, rising into a titanic wave. Luna felt the coursing power of the tide within her, her wings splaying out, her hooves leaving the sand.
“LUNA!”
Luna opened her eyes, her horn still aglow with the intensity of supernova.
Celestia was hovering about ten feet from her, in the shadow of the looming tsunami’s crest.
Luna meets her sister’s eyes, the world slowing down around them.
The wave was lapping at Celestia’s hooves. Celestia’s expression looked like she’d been bucked directly in the gut. “You must hate me.”
Luna burst into tears. “What do I have to hate you for? It is I who left her. Left her all alone here, with nothing but memories of me. It was I who killed her—or, at least, I might as well have.” The wave howled, roared around them, the might of the ocean seconds from breaking free of Luna’s grasp.
Luna’s face was salt-soaked from foam and tears alike. “I have to let her go. I have to start over.” She couldn’t face her sister’s gaze any longer. She turned to look down at the arc of the wave.
“That is not my life anymore.”
She turned her head to face Celestia once again.
“I will have one final dream about her today, and when I awake—I will be a new alicorn. You will not see anything different about me, but the Luna I was will be gone. I cannot be that filly, who died on the surface of the moon long ago. I have to be a new mare. A new mare in this new world.”
The wave collapsed in on itself. Water rushed up the beach, pouring into the remnants of Aether Glow’s old home.
The worst part about being the princess of dreams is that Luna could never forget she was in one.
The royal sisters returned to Canterlot in silence.
Could never pretend, even for a second, that the mare before her was more than a mirage.
Luna lowered the moon. The brilliant lustrous oranges and rosy hues of pink that foretold the sunrise crept across the cold, violet sky.
Every night since her reformation, Princess Luna has dreamt of a faceless mare.
She left her cosmomancy tower and went directly to bed.
And the dreams are always the same.
She wanted nothing more than to have this be over as soon as possible.
She is standing with Aether in the old Everfree Palace.
It is empty except for them, restored to the glory it had been in before the sands of time had crumbled it away, before the Everfree had crept its way inside, before she and her sister had destroyed it in their final battle. A storm howls outside. The panes of stained glass flex and heave. Branches and leaves and small stones alike clatter and ping off the sides of the palace and its windows.
“I’m so sorry I left you alone,” Luna said, tears welling in her eyes.
Luna didn’t know what she wanted Aether to say to her. She needed her to say something.
There is an intense rumbling from above; the walls shake, the windows buckle and shatter, and the roof comes off, drawn up into the sky—which is a vacuous, ravenous void, bearing down to consume the world.
Aether still does not speak; Luna steps closer and wraps her in her forelegs, wings coming next to envelop her. Her muzzle presses up against hers.
As the walls collapse and the throne behind them is wrenched from its stone mount, Aether looks into Luna’s eyes, her lips inches from her, mane whipping in the cataclysmic winds.
“I love you.”
The winds have reached a fever pitch. Luna feels her wings being pried from Aether. She grips tighter, tries to hold on, even if it means her wings break, and she is still sliding from her feathered grasp.
“And I forgive you.”
There is a flash of light.
Luna awoke.
She hadn’t known what she wanted Aether to say to her, but that had been the most painful thing she possibly could have. The ending of the dream, the mare she loved most slipping from her grasp, was burned into her mind’s eye.
Luna groaned and sunk deeper into bed. The inside of her chest felt as if it were being chewed and torn at by a manticore.
She levitated out the photograph—the final memento, the last physical reminder of Aether’s existence—from her bedside table. She studied it, expression blank. She looked at the both of them held there forever in time. In the photo, Luna looked regal and aloof. And yet...
Luna remembered how she had felt. She remembered the way her heartbeat had quickened, she remembered the brief embarrassment that had been washed from her by Aether’s endless elation and excitement, she remembered the feel of her hoof in hers. Even with the fire damage to the corner—that corner Aether existed inside of, the only place she existed any longer—she was still as breathtaking and heartaching as she had ever been.