//------------------------------// // First Lessons // Story: Left Behind // by The Psychopath //------------------------------// Sunny Dimples was allowed to leave after a few hours, leaving the former mare-in-the-moon to her own devices. Having been trapped within the moon for so long, the mare refused to sleep. She was inexorably linked to the night anyways, so she would only need to take in the light of the moon and the stars to revitalize herself, something she couldn't do when she was still...weak. She could still hear the voices of the soldiers on night watch, observing her every move. The lights of their fires flickered in the darkness, contrasting against the black stone of the castle and casting large, deformed shadows. She used white light from her horn to help her look at the maps and try to decipher any bit of information she could amass, but not much could be understood still. Repetition, repetition, repetition. The same conclusions non-stop. "Hmmm. This mountainous relief," Nightmare Moon pondered. "Looks familiar." She walked towards one of the many holes of the throne room and took a look outside. "Elevation and shape seem consistent." The mare levitated three maps in front of her and compared them to each other and the mountain range. "I found it. There's even a dot down here with text, likely the city." A quiet murmur gradually evolved into mighty laughter. "With this castle, a mighty, impregnable fortress is ready to be made." Her eyes sparkled maliciously. "My own castle from which to rule my realms and plan my conquering. Then I'll get revenge on..." Her wing twitched. "Right..." She looked at the mess of a map that served as a general bird's eye view of Equestria. If the one who made this was still around, she would have had him flogged. The edges were random in shapes; bloating in one area then suddenly turning into a sharp angle. Obviously, there would be some border changes after her imprisonment for so long, but to this extent was absurd. Just because Moon had managed to locate the city she was on, provided she was right, didn't mean she could locate it on such a map, let alone on one that was properly made. Time passed and the soldiers continued to relay each other for guard duty. Nightmare Moon didn't see their precautions as an insult or laughable. Rather, she saw it as the beginning of her new guard. Heavily armored troops better equipped than even her followers from the past. It was enough to make her metaphorically salivate at the idea. To have her own impregnable army, and with her magic they would be empowered even further! Ah, but they would need to be able to handle such power, and they would need to be deserving. Don't need somepony to stab her in the back after having been granted far too much power. Power corrupts, after all. She grinned, letting the saliva on her fangs glisten in the dim light of the moon that shone through the cracks in the ceiling. Eventually, sunlight started to come forth from beyond the world's brow. Sunny Dimples came through, entering the keep and eventually reaching the throne room. He froze at what was before him: Nightmare Moon was surrounded by a semi-transparent, rotating, sparkling sphere of darkness. Multiple patches of it were covered in a thin layer of immobile black broken by wide berths of emptiness. All across the inner surface were a plethora of dots both large and small, dim and bright. Whatever it was, the alicorn seemed to have been focused on it the whole time. Carefully, the stallion put his saddlebags onto the ground and took out books in the two left pouches and set them aside, then pulled out notebooks, quills, and cartridges of ink to place within them into another pile. "You come in and do not greet your queen?" Nightmare Moon asked. Sunny stumbled and nearly fell but managed to catch himself. Unfortunately, his legs ended up crossed. "I...Greetings, My Queen!" he shouted. "Have books to teach language. Um...ours! D-do we start?" "Later," the alicorn said. The sphere vanished into an underwhelming spark, and the alicorn made her way to the outside. "I hunger and I have need for fresh air." "Oh no. I forgot about food!" He didn't have time to stop her as her hind leg was already vanishing behind the corner. The air was chilly and the alicorn could see her breath in the freezing cold air. It was a strange sensation to be enjoying something so ridiculously mundane, but being free after so long made even the smallest of things feel like a rediscovery. She was enjoying herself, watching the shivering soldiers placed in an assault stance, ready to impale her on their antimagic spears. "What is that?!" she shouted in shock. In the sky the light was still dim, and the clouds were still roaming about in small groups, but the sun itself was... "What is wrong?" the young stallion shouted. He was jolting in every direction when he finally realized that Nightmare Moon was just staring at the sky, her face ripe with fear and horror. "My Queen?" he called out. "The sun. What is wrong with it?" Moon asked without tearing her gaze away. Sunny and the soldiers were perplexed at the problem. Even thought they didn't speak the same language as her, the soldiers could tell that she was bothered by something in the sky, but they were unable to look directly at the source because of the walls and tower remnants. "Do not understand," Sunny said. He was worried that he wouldn't be able to understand whatever the creature was going to tell him. At this point he had been guessing and just determining from context the missing words he hadn't understood. So far it hadn't created any misunderstandings, but what if this time it would be a problem? "The sun!" She grabbed the stallion by the head in her magic and jerked him up to see the ball of fire. "It isn't right! It looks like it's about to explode!" Struggling to breathe normally, Dimples couldn't help but grasp at the dark magic holding him up. "Not wrong. Always looked like that." Nightmare Moon looked at him incredulously then dropped him to the ground. Where the sun used to be a big ball of light that her sister would move about the sky, now it was a horrifying ball of fire with tendrils reaching everywhere. Large coronas thrice its diameter grew around it, ebbing and dimming at random intervals between each other. Their forms were also erratic, never staying as a perfect circle as they should. Nightmare Moon could also see dissipating arms of fire growing and vanishing every few minutes. Its surface was no longer a solid, smooth, yellowish color. Now it was a roiling, bubbling cauldron of orange flames. With the solar body in such a state, the surface world should have long since boiled away, and yet nothing was different. A thought crossed the pony's mind that, perhaps, the ponies were in the mountains to take shelter from whatever hellish realm stood at the foot of the mountains, but they wouldn't be freezing here. She bared her teeth, frightening her observers. "The sun and moon of Equestria are subject to none but the princesses, and I am the only one who is allowed to control them!" Moon spun around, glaring at the stallion with her rage boiling over. "Who controls them?!" "Wh-what?!" "Who controls the sun and moon!" "Don't understand!" the stallion pleaded. It looked like they finally reached the stone wall Nightmare Moon was afraid of. Her question might have been too complicated to answer the stallion, but she at least got enough out of him. "Sun always like that," Sunny said after a long moment of thought. "No change. Always like that." Nightmare Moon's fury changed to surprise almost instantly. The stallion had caught her off guard. He would be a worthwhile servant, potentially, but his similar appearance to her made her queasy. She sat down, pensive. Of all the things to have forgotten, this was the stupidest. Celestia would have been moving the moon while she was imprisoned, and moving both celestial bodies would have required a lot of work. Then she comes back and learns that Celestia has been gone for so long that she was forgotten. That meant that somepony else was manipulating them. Was it the royal family doing it? Moon shook her head. No. Impossible. Even a so-called 'royal family' wouldn't be able to handle that much power. The alicorn snorted. This was the first piece of the puzzle, the first piece of figuring out what had happened to her sister and, potentially, all the other immortals. Discord wouldn't limit himself to such trivial changes, Accord would find it all too chaotic and disorganized, and then there were all the other immortals and potential newcomers that would have appeared throughout the millennia. King Sombra came to mind. Tirek. Grogar, although he might have truly died all those millennia ago. What could have appeared in the interim period, Moon wondered. Her knowledge was limited, and even when learning everything she wanted to hear, it's unlikely they would know anything. No. Her best chance was to get to Canterlot and hope that its archives were still protected by magic. Granted, without knowing when everything happened, the spell likely dissipated and everything would have been lost, but Moon had no way to know that without finding it. That left the moon and sun moving around. The sun was a sign that something had happened to Celestia, but the aforementioned damages prior implied that something or somepony was somehow still manipulating them. Or, more uninterestingly, it was a spell cast by hundreds of unicorns, but that still didn't explain the sun's appearance. "Something wrong?" Sunny asked her. Nightmare Moon was suddenly broken out of her trance. "Bring me food." "What...kind?" Dimples asked sheepishly. "Any kind," the mare answered calmly. "Just get me food." "Will ask others." He pointed behind her. "Books on language. There." Nightmare saw the books behind her, and Sunny saluted her and galloped towards the soldiers. She hurried over to the books and lied down next to them. Her mood took a nosedive when she saw the cover of the first one. These were books for infants! Newborn colts and fillies! The next books were no different. They were likely from the same author since the cover had a rounded and 'cutesy' goat character to serve as the mascot. Unfortunately, she still couldn't read the text. The insides of the first book weren't any better. Strange symbols next to what was meant to be an apple, yogurt, a car, a mare, a stallion. She angrily swiped the books away and heaved a belated sigh. It was aggravating for a pony of her age to need to use such tools to learn a language that shouldn't have come to be in the first place. All of a sudden she didn't want to bother learning it. She would be seen as impaired in front of the dregs of 'high society'. Two months was hardly any time for her to learn a language, even if she had all the time she needed. Ah, but then, she didn't need to learn it by heart. She would learn it, of course, but her little servant was there, and he spoke their language perfectly. He seemed able enough to understand her despite his simplistic speech pattern, but with the knowledge he already had, she just needed to patch the holes. In two months time that was more than sufficient. "They come," the unicorn announced. He noticed the books cast aside and cringed. They were on loan. If the librarian saw them damaged in any way he'd have the poor pony's hide and make parchment out of it. "What is wrong?" he asked as he levitated the books back to himself, fearing the damages he was about to discover. "I'm going to teach you now, as you teach me your language," Nightmare Moon declared. "As I had announced before. You will teach me first." Sunny nodded. "I will teach you, and you will speak to the ponies at the festival on my behalf." Nightmare Moon could see the pony cracking his mind, trying to understand a few words. "You not speak?" "I talk like you. Like you in you language," the mare mimed. "Not very imposing to have foal-speak from an alicorn." Sunny stared blankly at her. "Simple talk bad. Teach me and I teach you." The stallion felt a tad insulted that she seemed to be mocking his manner of speech, but he had brought all those notebooks for a reason. He sat down next to her, still her height when she was lying down somehow, and opened the first book while bringing up several quills and notebooks. He pointed to a page. "Start with letters. How to say. Easy. Help with reading," Sunny began.