A loud bell rang outside. The king's eyes shot open. He felt like he hadn't slept at all for so long...ever since that alicorn had arrived. That accursed goddess of the night. A groan escaped him when he dragged his hooves across his face. He couldn't remember his dreams, but he had the distinct impression that she regularly visited him just to harass him and taunt him nonstop, knowing full well he couldn't do anything about it.
He rolled his head to the side to see his queen sharing the same expression of fatigue. They both whinnied and rolled out of their immense bed and fell limply onto the floor, alerting their guards who burst through the wooden door to check in on them in a panic.
"Your highnesses, are you okay?!" one of them shouted.
"Bppth...Yes, guard. We just slid out of bed. Go away," the king grumbled.
"A-are you sure? Should I get the physician? Y-you don't look so--"
"Yes!" the king interrupted angrily. "Just get out!" The guards obeyed with the same hurry as they did when entering. "I can't take this anymore. How does a single pony ruin everything in just a few months?!"
Majesty pulled the immense purple curtains apart exposing their tremendous room to the light outside. The king stomped over the tiled floor towards a mirror to check himself and frowned further from seeing the bags under his eyes. Annoyed, he turned to his wife drinking water from an imported amphora sitting on one of their many hand-carved, gold-trimmed, minotaur dressers.
"What is it?" Majesty asked with her wings.
The king groaned and let his head drop. "I don't feel like wearing any 'royal outfits' today.
"Me neither. Let us simply wear our crowns and be done with it. A...light day?" she asked.
The king nodded. "Yes. A light day. That would be significantly better, and the peasants never know the difference when we pull something out like that just to make our days more convenient," he strained as he stretched.
Annoyed and with heads held low, the two rulers trotted out of their room, narrowly missing the guards when the doors swung open. A proud and haughty butler rushed over to them with several documents. They were held by a wooden board held in front of the earth pony by a telescopic arm coming from the left of their vest.
"What is it today?" the king sighed.
"Well, all your assassins were countered, our spies were flushed out, and there's no mangoes this year thanks to a disease ravaging the farmlands."
The king screamed in despair. "On top of all that I can't even have a mango-raspberry slurry!"
Giving him time to recover himself, the guards eventually let in the first few groups for their audience with the royal family and explain their woes or try and barter their way into the king's good graces. Too upset to continue past a dozen such sessions, the king stopped 'out of nowhere' to the visitors and left in a huff amidst the uproar of complaining.
"What am I meant to do at this point?" he muttered to himself through the halls. "I've tried everything..."
"Perhaps I could help?" one of the maids suggested.
The king raised a brow to her. There was a strange color coming from her eyes. "What, am I meant to believe you are some kind of 'super spy' meant to watch me and somesuch trash?" he mocked derisively.
The maid produced a throaty chuckle. "No. Nothing so extravagant."
Then king raised a brow and leaned in closer. "And what is wrong with your eyes?"
The maid cleared her throat. "I am using her body temporarily because I have a proposal for you." Gallant slow-blinked. "Is there any way for me to prove my words?"
The king sighed. He preferred to have his wife present to argue these sorts of things with, but he was having a really crummy few weeks. "I don't know," he forced out.
The maid looked at herself and grimaced at the outfit she was wearing. "At least Celestia and Luna let their servants wear proper clothing. Hideous frills..." The king's brow furrowed. "Regardless, I fought the alicorn that escaped the moon."
Gallant let out a single 'ha'. "Of course you did. I believe you. that's why you're here now!"
The maid groaned. "To think I would have to use the old magic again." She took a deep breath and straightened herself up. "Then I'll show you the past and let you know why her arrival and our fight will spell doom for the world."
The king suddenly found himself floating high above the world, witnessing Equestria as it was so long ago, in a time erased from history. Hundreds of thousands of different ponies dotted the landscape in immense cities that had long since vanished. Cities he didn't even know existed. One such city was growing out of the mountain like a white flower filled with an uncountable amount of ponies, all attending a castle draped in the purest white he had ever seen. The images zoomed in, scaring him. Bracing for impact, the king realized that he had phased through the wall and was now in the unmistakable presence of a throne room...and the same, terrifying sensation he had when Nightmare Moon revealed herself.
The ponies here looked...odd. Angular and...childish? It was almost like somepony was drawing everyone and redefining reality with flat figures baring innocent smiles and wide eyes.
"What is this?! What's going on?!" Gallant cried out. "What have you done to me?!"
A serpent of black storm clouds emerged from the ceiling and twirled around the king. They coalesced into the vague shape of a pony with the same child-friendly depiction of a smile as the rest of the figures below.
I'm just revealing the history of Equestria
It's a lovely tale of highs and lows
With nopony here to tell of the horrible blows
Brought about by the magic of fell and the cultish Alicorns
"Now you're signing?! That didn't even rhyme!"
The smile never changed, giving the king a sense of comfort...which brought unease.
Not all tales rhyme. Songs are strung and woven like silk
But in this tale you'll see the alicorn's ilk
And why you must destroy Nightmare Moon as fast as possible
Behold below the alicorn of the sun, sister of the one you fear
The king looked below to see a supposedly generous pony mumbling some sort of gibberish and transforming the drawings' faces from frowns, anger, and despair, into smiles of varying levels.
She intended good upon the ponies
A lovely sentiment, it is true
But she was cruel and vindictive
To those who strayed from the path with which they were presented
She herself cursed her sister to become one with the moon
And she waited a thousand years for her return
Feigning pain and strife behind closed doors
But when the Moon did not return, her sorrow was great
The scene changed to a dark room with a pony whose luster had vanished. Her mane and coat were unkempt messes, and dark bags hung below her eyes. Whatever used to be her room was now a decrepit pile of destroyed furniture and furnishings. The king noticed a tiny figure hiding in the corner, peeking at the disheveled goddess from a barely open door, and grimaced.
Her sister would destroy the world
But we prevented her return
When she learned of our actions, rage engulfed her mind and magic
So we went to war
A war most foul
A war just dire
Filled with the blood-drenched tears of a sibling in ire
For a sister she banished to return to her side was her only desire
So her truth was revealed
Not just as something she would require
Since reality would fend and snap
At every bit of magic she cast out
Gallant bore witness to scene swap after scene swap of the world gradually going from a lush green to a charred black. The sun began to snap and twist at everything below it, zapping away at the tremendous armies charging towards a very changed alicorn. He had seen something like it before. In the very, very old archives his grandfather had shown him before age destroyed them. A pony flying up into the sky, with only its underside revealed and wings spread out within a circle of white light. Here, the light was a furious group of rings that went from white, to yellow, to orange, then red.
The king found himself growing annoyed at this...thing's lack of rhyming skill, but even he had to admit to finding something fascinating about learning of the world-that-was, even if he felt there was bias in the story.
The tyrant was cast down and banished
And the ponies who witnessed our deeds cherished
That they would live another day and fix all they had lost
For the sun was now furious but left adrift
To turn around the world as the curse of a 'daily' shift
The entity snickered.
But I was cursed as well
With the form and magic of an alicorn
Left with nary a memory of my prior form
But the others found it to be swell
And to no other the truth would they tell
And so time passed
Equestria healed and not much occurred
Until one day a cry was heard
And a mare was born with wings and horn
Much to an adoration that should have instead been scorn
A house flipped open to reveal a mare holding a child whose back was turned to the viewers. The king leaned in to get a better look. The pony's feathers and horn were black with strange, glowing blue patterns.
"A pony of the night?"
Of the moon, that's right!
And she was endowed with tremendous might!
In the night sky came a new body bright and low
To the peace and autonomy we created, this was a mighty blow
We let her be, just to see
What she would make in this new reality
But we were wrong, just like a repeated song
With tricks and verses most foul,
She began destroying all
A gigantic moon in the sky falling to Equestria immediately assailed the king's senses. He had never borne witness to such an immense body before, and it horrified him. The lands below were engulfed in living shadows rising to the skies with looks and cries of misery and pain.
Every time an alicorn was born
We were tasked with taking them away
All their being and magic from them were torn
And so inside of me they would stay
No more alicorns
No more catastrophes
No more repetitive plays
Of ponies being swayed, tricked, and dismayed.
Gallant saw Equestria being flipped and spun around like it was a picture book with protruding figures and grimaced again. He wasn't a foal anymore. This entity was mocking him...Or was it? He raised a brow at the strange cloud and pondered in-between its verses. Was the water mill equipped with paddles or was the water just going through an empty frame?
And now we arrive at the present
Where the moon freed its prisoner
And I attempted to stop her
For nothing, I'm afraid to say
"Are you done?" the king lambasted. "I've had enough of your 'singing'."
The serpent harumphed in response. "I haven't heard song in millennia. I'm rusty."
"More like you've been eaten clean through."
"Regardless, let us stop this since it's not mixing with your 'palate', philistine."
The castle hallway came back into view and the king sighed in relief when he saw his hooves touching solid ground again. He flinched in horror when he saw the state the maid was in. It looked like she was melting away.
"What have you done?!" the king cried out.
The maid looked at her fur sloughing off and shrugged. "Sacrifices of the few to serve the many," she lamented. "But now you know what will happen if you leave her out there." She leaned forward. "And I trust you know now that I'm no liar."
"Fine!" the king shouted. "Then what do you want with me?!"
The maid smiled, shaking her flesh free and revealing her gums and jaw bones. "In the last battle my cursed body couldn't hold out, and my physical body was destroyed."
"So you're a ghost now?"
The maid shook her head. "No. This has happened before, but under such...extraneous circumstances. I've lost my grip on the magic I was meant to hold onto."
Gallant looked around vaguely and shrugged. "So?"
"I need your help to stop that alicorn before her own magic causes the free alicorn magic that was lost to coalesce because of her and cause a few, if not maybe a dozen or more, new alicorns to pop up." She looked outside the frame window to see several more sections of the king's castle and frowned. "Bluh. Terrible view."
"If you were defeated by her once, why should I believe you're capable of stopping her now?" the king asked.
The maid didn't take her eyes away from the window and looked up at the sun. "Because I have been defeated in the past, but I had aid with me those times. Now I'm all alone in here. Gather information on her and I'll help you by teaching you all I know on the old magics. Together, we'll be able to stop the alicorn threat."
"Fine," the king agreed reluctantly. "Not like I have any other options at the moment, now return the maid to normal."
His demand was met with raucous laughter. "If my body turned alicorn can't handle such magic, how would a regular pony?"
The lights faded from her eyes, and the mare collapsed onto the floor, trembling. Gallant dove down to hold her head up, his face wracked with guilt and sadness.
"M-my king...what...I wasn't...It hurts! It hurts so much!"
"Guards!" the king bellowed. "Guaaards! Bring me the unicorns and the infirmaries! Guaaaaaards!"