Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot

by Equimorto


Journey Through the Dark - Part 19

Twilight watched the world below move by from the window in the room she'd found. It was unoccupied, and the guards didn't seem to be paying special attention to it. As long as she was careful and didn't mess up the bed while sleeping on it, they probably wouldn't suspect a thing.
She wasn't quite sure what time it was. The sky did change, showing different stars as it turned, but none of them she was familiar with, and it was hard to gouge time without any change in light levels. She'd just decided she would sleep when everyone else did though, or when she felt tired.
She actually wondered if the way things were set up made it easier to have a different sleeping schedule if someone wanted to. With no difference between day and night, it was all pretty arbitrary. Not that there weren't a number of other questions raised by the complete lack of daylight, but the fact that there was a clearly functioning world in front of her was proof enough that things could work out even like that, and she unfortunately didn't have the time to figure out how.
It occurred to her that it was odd for the unicorn she'd met to be named Sunlight. But by the way the two had introduced themselves, perhaps that was the point. Those were names they'd chosen and not the ones they'd been given. It was actually a pretty brave thing to do if that was the case, one among the many others to be attributed to the mare. Twilight did wonder what her real name might have been, though.
She wondered a number of things, really. Some she'd eventually get to ask, once she rescued the two from their position. If everything went right and according to plan. She wondered if that world had seasons like her own. She wondered where the heat came from, or how they managed to grow their crops without daylight. Perhaps the moonlight was enough?
Either way, the town around the castle certainly wasn't frozen. But things down on the ground far below did seem to be getting colder as they moved further north. Not by that much yet, but a little of it was noticeable. Some snow on the taller peaks, patches of different vegetation replacing each other.
The trip was thankfully stable, no sort of shaking on the ship that far. They'd yet to take their first stop, and she assumed it would only come after the night. Or maybe it was more appropriate to call it the resting period? Everything was night, after all. The unicorns had spoken of cycles, which she figured were the world's equivalent of days. She was curious about their exact length as well. They could be as long as Nightmare Moon wanted them, exactly as precise as she wished.
There was some beauty in that, something Twilight could appreciate on a purely theoretical level. Running the heavens like clockwork. Controlling everything about a country, down to the details. It allowed for a level of order unheard of in her Equestria, in theory. In practice, it was almost certainly a violation of ponies' freedoms, and in that case fundamentally against the way things were supposed to function naturally. And yet... Twilight couldn't find it completely wrong. Many other things Nightmare Moon had done, yes, those were evil. A desire for order, though?
Twilight shook her head. She had other things to focus on. She pulled out her maps, and began to read them over.