//------------------------------// // Less to Live For // Story: Left Behind // by The Psychopath //------------------------------// The two ponies were stunned, not just at this entity's appearance but at her claims. "But...but how? You're not Nightmare Moon! She's a terrifying looking p-pony who acts just as...erm, terrifying!" Candy yelled. The alicorn flashed a smile. "It's not with flattery that you'll be leaving this place, not that I know how you got here in the first place." She rubbed her chin, the whispy copy mimicking her. "I feel I know you two from somewhere. Are you related to Sunny in any way?" "Insofar as we are meant to follow him, as asked by the mayor," Candied answered. "We don't know much else. Couldn't really be bothered. Didn't seem important enough for that." The mare turned, realizing that her brother was stunned. Candy seemed engrossed. "So...this is what you look like here? Is it what you actually look like?" "What?" the alicorn responded flatly. "You look...much smaller and less intimidating." He heaved a sigh of relief and his body seemed to sag. "I prefer you like this," he wheezed. The alicorn furrowed her brow and her ear flicked. Candy smiled sheepishly and slowly moved away. Moon looked herself over and snorted. "Fantastic. I'm in my weaker form before I took in the night to get my just rewards for all my hard labor." "You mean you changed into this form?" Candy asked. Moon exhaled through her nose and sank down. "Always heard ponies saying 'Oh, Princess Luna got consumed by her jealousy and anger', or 'She was possessed by some creature of darkness' or somesuch nonsense." She smiled, revealing normal teeth. Well, normal for her. The sharp fangs were still present in the strange dark echo of her. "I did this through my own choice. No such pithy rainbow magic is going to 'free' me from my anger and hatred." She lied down silently, and no pony said a word until a thought crossed the alicorn's mind. "Are you going to tell me how you got here now?" "We did!" Candied shouted. "We told you that we saw you in the keep, touched those cloud things around you, and then found ourselves pulled into here!" The alicorn shook her head. "Those wouldn't pull you into here," she stated calmly. The mare thought deeply before continuing. "It's a longshot since you're all backwards, but did you have any magical artifacts on you or did somepony use magic to send you here?" The stallion furrowed his brows, clearly insulted. "Backwards?" Candy repeated quietly. Candied looked down and pushed against her chin with a hoof. "I don't know if it was just a hallucination or me seeing wrong because of the smoke, but I saw something when Candy pushed me." She threw the stallion a brief glare from the corner of her eyes. "I think it was a pony. It vanished the moment I turned around like it had been absorbed into the wall." Moon hummed. "Sounds like somepony threw a spell onto you to enter my mind. I don't know why, though, but I want you out," she hissed. "I'll have to punish the guards for failing to do their job." "Well, we can't do anything about that," Candy stated bluntly. He raised his wings then dropped them to his sides. "Unless you have a way to get us out, I don't think we'll be leaving any time soon." The group stayed silent in the void for a while before Candy decided to break the monotony. "So, who is the white pony?" he asked. "What?" Moon said. Candy fidgeted nervously. "Every time we get sent to another...dream?" He shook his head. "Whatever these are, we'd constantly see you fighting a pony with a white coat. You called her sister almost every time. Is that like a title or something?" The alicorn stared at him incredulously. "No. She was my sister. Why would I give anypony the honor of being my sibling by title?" She scoffed. "A ridiculous notion." "Bl-bl-blood relative?" Candy's voice raised in volume as the fear overtook him. "Y-you mean there's another like you?" Candied panicked. Moon looked at them, wide-eyed and angry, then her expression turned dour and her head drooped. "I was supposed to overthrow her and take Equestria. I had everything planned out. There was no way anypony could stop me! The world would be engullfed in the light of the moon." She spun her hoof in circles on what could have been considered the 'floor'. "I came into a world where she isn't even remembered and there's nothing for me to take over or overthrow." The mare sank deeper into her depression, her voice croaking and quiet. "She changed, it seems, but only the thestrals know about that for some reason." She clicked her tongue. "Ask them if you want more details. I don't care to share." Candy looked around the vortex once more and raised a brow. "So, you've been here this whole time? Is that why nopony has seen you at all for weeks?" Moon's eyes widened. "Weeks? I thought it had only been days," she stated. Her lower lip pushed out as she contemplated the new information. "I've been spending so much time in here that it has become difficult to differentiate between fiction and reality." "Then just undo whatever this is and let us out!" Candied pleaded. "We only came here because the mayor requested it!" "And because we were going to get paid handsomely for our efforts," Candy mumbled under his breath. His sister shot him an angry look. "And why should I?" Moon asked. She looked around at the void. "Within this void I can do whatever I want at any moment. Everything I wanted to accomplish can be done so, and in a wide variety of worlds and possibilities!" Her face slowly warped into a crazed smile with wide eyes. "My sister is here and I can take her out and take over Equestria, bringing eternal night to all! All will live under my night and adore its gifts! Gifts that I worked so hard to create!" she yelled. the alicorn was becoming increasingly angry as she continued. "All she had to do was delay it or give me a day of celebration of the night, but no. 'The ponies will panic' or 'It will be a detriment to the fauna and flora'." She spat. "They would have adapted soon enough. It would just be for a day." The twins looked to each other. "Sounds like this goes deeper than we thought," Candied whispered. Candy was perplexed. "I thought that she was just angry at everything and considered them beneath her because she's, you know, a god?" His body tensed up. "I would normally say that we should cut our losses and leave, but, you know..." He rubbed the back of his head. "Who could've guessed that even gods can have family issues?" "Then we need to do something about it. She's clearly just trying to avoid reality." Candied glanced at Nightmare Moon from the corner of her eyes, discovering that the mare had become slack-jawed and wide-eyed. For some reason, her head was drooping backwards and a trail of drool was extending from the corner of her mouth. The wispy copy was doing the same but without the drool, thankfully. The pegasus had to double-take several times to be able to concentrate. "It's...Uh...It's obvious that she's going through some kind of nervous breakdown." "You think she's depressed?" The stallion nodded slowly. "Would make sense, but how do we get her out of it, or at least enough out of it that she frees us from this place? We're no psychiatrists!" "True, but we know that she's prideful to a fault," Candied replied with a sly grin. Candy gradually grew a smile of his own. "And we know how to butter up anypony enough that they'll do their job." With their newfound resolve, the pegasus twins approached the seemingly dead alicorn and shook her 'awake'. "Hmm? What? You're still here?" Moon asked. She was getting increasingly annoyed. "So, we convened with each other," Candied said. "And we've realized that you're simply trying to escape reality," Candy responded with an immense smile. Moon stared at them. "I'm what?" she whispered. "Well, of course," Candied started. "We know that you've been planning this 'revenge' scheme for so long and that you came back and the object of your revenge is no longer here, so now you have nothing left to do." He scrunched his mouth and nodded empathetically. "I understand completely that you would rather hide here than face the world as it is." "H-hiding?! I am not hiding!" Moon screamed at the top of her lungs. "Of course you aren't. You're just retreating to a...less hostile and more inaccessible location to the world," Candied added smugly. "We understand completely." The void around them shimmered. While Moon didn't seem to notice thanks to her fixation on the pegasi taunting her, said pegasi noticed it. They looked to each other and genuinely smiled. It seemed that what they were doing was working. At least, they hoped it was. "You just repeated what he said with more sarcasm, foal," Moon hissed. The pegasus was shocked and extended her wings forward while shaking her head. "Oh, no no no! That would be incredibly rude of me to do. I would rather not insult somepony who could make me a memory for the world." Moon's eye twitched and the void trembled. Candy was quick to speak up before the alicorn could respond. "Somepony as long-lived as you is certainly just having an off-day," he said semi-seriously. "You just need a break, but you definitely had plenty of plans to succeed on your own afterwards, didn't you? Your whole life wasn't involved around just getting revenge on your sister, certainly." It almost looked like Moon's hooves were breaking into the ground and the vortex was starting to pulsate violently like a beating heart during a workout. The two pegasi turned away from the alicorn to speak with each other. They were sweating profusely and trembling greatly. "W-w-w-what do we d-do if she fre-e-es us?" Candy said. Candied took in several gasps of air every time she tried to say something. "I...I think we just leave her b-be?" "I-i-i-isn't she going to kill us?" "You think it's easy?!" the alicorn bellowed. The two pegasi were quite literally blasted away by the sudden explosion of sound coming from behind them. The vortex's surface started rippling in tune with the shockwaves that the alicorn's voice was producing. "I awaken to a world without my sister, so I have no bearings. I have no place to start my reign nor live and plan for what should have been a glorious future under my eternal night! My return was meant to be a triumph! A thing that ponies panicked over," she gloated. "My return was to become a myth. A legend! Then they learn that I was real all along and that their precious princess of the sun can't save them anymore." She laughed and laughed. With every laughter tears started to run down her cheeks. Somehow, the wispy echo imitated it. "But instead I awaken to a world that not only has forgotten about me, but has been wiped clean of all things I knew. Even the ruins would have been sufficient! Celestia would have kept them all intact!" The pegasi wagged their legs frantically and flapped their wings, trying to right themselves up, but no matter what they did nothing seemed to work, and they continued to be pushed by the alicorn's voice without actually moving anymore, like another force was pushing back against them. "What is happening?! Is she having a nervous breakdown?!" Candied panicked. "I hope not! Then we'll have to try and come up with something inspiring to help her!" Candied grabbed her head and shot her brother a panicked look when their gazes finally met, albeit briefly. "I can't do that! I know how to file financial documents, not appraise somepony's psychological situation!" "But no! All that I've known has been destroyed, and I can't even look into your historical archives to catch up and learn of the fate of my sister because all you foals lost everything in ten thousand years of living! And then I discover that Canterlot, the place I was intending to restore for future use -I hadn't figured out for what yet- was somehow buried under the ground." The alicorn faced the twins. "It was on a mountain! How does an entire mountain get buried?! An alicorn sank a whole mountain range?!" She scoffed. "Preposterous!" Moon paused a moment and her voice quieted, freeing te pegasi from the storm of sound. "At first everything seemed fine. All was going well, then I discover what had happened to my sister and how she became obsessed with finding somepony. Best of all, it seemed that she was under the ruins of Canterlot Castle somehow. A ghostly figure flittering about specters and forgotten memories...but it was a fluke." Candy grunted as he got up and rubbed the back of his head. "How...so?" he asked. "Somehow she had become bloated with so much magical power that some of it somehow bled off of her and gained a mind of its own from fragmented pieces of memory and experience. How or why it was trapped down there I'm uncertain, but it was. I defeated it by the skin of my teeth...Even a fragment of my sister's power was too much for me to bear, and it wasn't even her. The long-dreamed triumph over her upon my release was shattered and I was reminded of where I am...and when." "Well...can't you find others to be around with? New servants? You already have one with..." The stallion kept flapping his wings. "What's his name..." "Sunny," Candied interjected. "Yes! Sunny! He might not be your sister but he's still hanging around." Moon looked at him with a tired expression. "I forced him to." "Y-yes, but he still stuck around. Plus, you might find ponies related to your sister." The nervous stallion thought as hard as he could while his sister looked on in sheer horror and panic. "W-wouldn't it be more amusing to have her descendants be subservient to you than simply defeating her quickly and ending it there?" He coughed. "H-he means if you were just going to do that," Candied added. Moon paused a moment and contemplated the twins' words and looked down. The twins opened their eyes in a panic and bounced into the air, taking in their surroundings. They were still in the castle, and the strange energies surrounding Nightmare Moon were no more. No pony was trapped in the dream anymore. The alicorn stood up, her joints cracking in response to being immobile for so long. "You have given me something to reflect on," she stated weakly. "I..." Her eyes darted to behind Candied. While she was still tired, the mare still found the energy to turn and glare. The pegasi were quick to fly away, hoping she wasn't glaring at them. "Who are you? Reveal yourself!" Nightmare Moon croaked weakly. Her horn illuminated that wall, showing a semi-transparent, shadowy pony-shaped figure standing in place. It apparently took several seconds to realize that it had been found out. It raised a foreleg to its featureless face then faded out of existence, leaving the trio all the more perplexed. "I couldn't feel anything from it," the alicorn muttered. "I'll think about it later. Leave me be," she told the pegasi. They were all too happy to acquiesce and fled away from the castle at top speeds back to the city. "I'm demanding a significant raise," Candy shouted angrily. "Don't forget at least a year of paid vacation!" Candied added. "Now now, we might be angry, but let's not exaggerate," her brother berated. The mare nodded. "You're right. I shouldn't be thinking that way. It could be detrimental to the continued functioning of the city and the well-being of the mayor. Ten months." Candy nodded. "That's better." There was a long paused before he resumed. "I prefer her smaller form. She was cute like that."