The chariots landed in front of the Golden Oaks Library. Princess Celestia had time to step down and inspect the covered figure before four galloping ponies skidded to a stop before her. They all dropped into a bow.
“Rise, my little ponies,” Celestia said.
“Can I help you, Princess?” Twilight asked. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Pinkie trying to lift up a corner of the tarp, and she gave the earth pony a clear nonverbal signal to quit it. She merely rolled her eyes over the fact that Pinkie had approached the group from the complete opposite direction than everypony else—a logistical impossibility.
“Twilight, I believe you have the only surviving copy of Star Swirl’s Miscellanea,” said Celestia.
Twilight broke out into a sweat. “I can explain why it’s not in the Royal Archives,” she began.
“You needn’t bother,” Celestia said calmly. “There’s nopony I would trust more than you to take good care of a delicate book like that.”
“Yes!” Twilight exclaimed. “I’ve been taking good care of it, and I hope to have a full paper put together by the end of the year, re-evaluating which excerpts are genuine Star Swirl works, and which are not.” She thought for a moment before making a quick addition: “Studies that in no way are interrupting my friendship studies.”
“Very good, my Most-Faithful Student. Have no fear that I will be confiscating the Miscellanea. I merely wish to consult it, in relation to…this item I have retrieved from the basement of the Castle in the Everfree.”
The seven friends looked at each other in confusion (including Fluttershy, who had just rejoined the others). “We weren’t aware that there was a basement, Your Royal Highness,” Rarity said for the group.
“Luna and I grew up in that castle,” Celestia explained. “There were many secret passages that we knew about and many secret areas that were normally impossible to access. The basement was one of these. Luna spent a great deal of time there in the final years…before her fall.” She looked down sadly for a few moments, and the others remained quiet as well until she chose to speak. “I have a task for you, Twilight, one I hope you can accomplish on top of all of your other responsibilities.”
“A task from you?” Twilight asked.
“Well, more like a task from Luna. Can you show me a place where we can discuss certain entries from the Miscellanea out of the public eye?” She glanced over at the crowd that had gathered at a respectful distance, a crowd that included the mayor and her assistant.
“Of course, Princess!” Twilight exclaimed. “Follow me!”
“In a moment,” the Princess said, then walked over to the mayor.
(Applejack took the moment to find Ferdinand, apologize for the delay, and send him back to his home on Sweet Apple Acres.)
“Do you want us to leave while you talk with the Princess?” Fluttershy asked Twilight.
“No,” said Twilight. “I’m never turning away my friends again. Whatever she wants to talk to me about, and whatever task she gives me, I would like you to be there. If you’re interested...Rainbow, you don’t have to stick around. It’s bound to be boring.”
“I don’t think so,” Rainbow replied. “Boring or not, it’s obviously important. I’m sticking around for you. And for Princess Luna.”
Applejack sighed as she returned to the group. “We’re right at the start of harvest season, Twilight. I’ll help you any way I can, but it’s likely to be mostly emotional support, and not anything like researching that would really make a difference.”
“Emotional support definitely counts as making a difference,” said Spike, taking the words out of Twilight’s mouth. She smiled and ruffled his head scales.
Celestia finished calming down the spectator ponies, who disbursed as she walked up to Twilight and her friends. She spent a moment eyeing the tall tarp-covered figure, and then the smaller front door. “Guards, I will be teleporting the cargo to my location in a few moments. I will return within the hour. Until then, guard the door.”
The pegasi guards saluted her in response.
“Don’t worry, I have the perfect place to study securely,” Twilight told her.
Celestia turned to her personal student and smiled. “Please, lead the way.”
~ ~ ~
Celestia looked around the basement laboratory, taking in the equipment used to study Pinkie Pie mentioned in Twilight’s latest report.
Twilight looked as well and saw that many of those pieces could have been used to restrain a pony against their will—well, any pony other than Pinkie. She looked quite guilty as a result.
Pinkie by contrast was at least appearing to be oblivious.
And the other ponies didn’t know what they were looking at.
“This place needs a thorough cleaning,” Rarity declared, wiping some dust off of a chair arm. “And it needs better lighting. Even a utilitarian needs light to see by.”
Once the others had found places to sit on the ground, Twilight went up and carefully levitated the Miscellanea down the stairs to another lectern, where another semi-permanent protection spell was applied.
Celestia then teleported the covered figure to a spot beside her, minus the cords which had been used to tie the tarp down.
Pinkie Pie reached out a curious hoof towards the figure.
Celestia raised an eyebrow. “I think you’ll need some context before I’m prepared to uncover this object.”
“You don’t mind that they’re here?” Spike asked, just to be sure.
“You are all heroes of Equestria,” Celestia explained. “The experiences you have shared have proven your worthiness to learn and keep the secrets that will be discussed in this room.”
“Including me?” Spike asked. “I slept through the whole thing.”
Celestia walked up and ruffled Spike’s head scales in a manner similar to Twilight. “Spike, you have earned my trust many times over in the past few years.”
Spike smiled gratefully.
“Now then,” said Celestia walking over to the book and producing a notepad of her own. “Let me put together some notes, and then we’ll begin.”
Applejack looked over at Twilight. “Twilight, if those Star Swirl encyclopedias were mass produced, why is there only one copy of that Miscellanea book?”
“Well as you can see the Miscellanea is quite big, fully two-thirds of the length of the rest of the encyclopedia put together,” Twilight explained. “So, when the University of Fillydelphia published the set, they released the Miscellanea separately. And nopony wanted to buy that big book of ‘not-very good articles that might not even be by Star Swirl’. There was quite a smear campaign at the time saying that the book was a complete rip-off. I’ve no idea where that came from.”
Applejack glanced over at Celestia and saw her flinch. She decided to keep an eye on the Princess as Twilight continued.
“They caught on fire a lot. Something bad about the bindings. Some of them fell out of carriages during moves and sank into swamps. And then there was that one night in 874 when all but one of the remaining copies just disappeared, all at once!” (Celestia sank deeper and deeper into the book she was supposedly copying from.) “Nopony knows why.”
“But I’m sure you have a theory,” Applejack said, still watching Celestia.
Twilight, completely failing to notice what was going on, kept talking. “Well, I think there was something in there that some powerful wizard didn’t want anypony reading, and so got rid of them. But that’s just a wild guess on my part.”
“Uh huh,” said Applejack. She saw that Celestia had worked her way nearly to the back of the book, and her notes now consisted of random drawings of very shifty-looking sunflowers.
Celestia reached the end, and then frowned. She flipped back a few pages, and then forward a few pages. She spread open the binding and saw that the last few pages had been torn out of the book. And her eyes nearly popped out of her head. She looked nervously over at Twilight. “Have you read the whole book?”
“No,” said Twilight. “Mostly, I’ve been reading it in order. I’m only on page 1273.”
Celestia sighed with relief. “Well, I shouldn’t be surprised,” she muttered under her breath. “The whole world would know if you read that part.”
“What was that?” Twilight asked.
“I said I’m ready to tell you about your assignment.”
As the others gathered around her, Celestia used her magic to flip the book to a page with a woodcut illustration of an ornamental necklace affixed around the neck of a ponykin. The necklace resembled most of the current Elements of Harmony, but was oval shaped like the large gem in its center instead of being cutie-mark-shaped. “This item, the ‘Suppressor’, was designed by Starswirl to keep dangerous monsters in line.” She tapped the illustration with a hoof. “Once attached, it can only be removed by its creator.”
“Wh…what does it do?” Fluttershy asked fearfully.
“Tap on it, and the subject will turn to stone,” Celestia said flatly.
The others gasped. “That’s pretty harsh,” Rarity commented.
“Oh you won’t feel anything when this artifact turns you to stone,” Celestia explained. “If anypony taps it again in the stone form, the spell will reverse and the subject will be back to normal, with no memories of its time spent in statue form. At least, that was Starswirl’s intention.
“Soon after creating it, he and his team of heroes captured a particularly dangerous monster.” Celestia flipped the pages to the Siren entry. “They had defeated a trio of these dangerous creatures and succeeded in banishing two of them to another dimension, but he kept this one for study. That was the story that she told me.”
“You met her?” Twilight asked incredulously. “You met Sonata Dusk?”
Pinkie meanwhile had connected the dots and had peaked under the sheet. “Yup, thought so,” she said to herself.
“Things went rather badly after that. Sirens are known for—”
“Excuse me,” Rainbow Dash interrupted. “Not to be rude, but I’m pretty sure Sirens are extinct, and have been for a really long time.”
“Yes, yes,” Celestia said with a smile and a nod. “I forget sometimes how old I really am. Sirens were a major threat to ponies at one time. They had the power with their songs to get ponies to fight one another and would then feed on the hatred they expressed.”
Twilight stepped in at this point. “Starswirl realized that Sirens and other monsters that fed on and manipulated emotions had the potential to become the greatest threat to ponykind since the Hearth’s Warming Miracle, able to possibly drive ponies back into the deadly inter-breed wars of the Before Times. As such, he organized their systematic extermination. The pod that included Sonata consisted of the most dangerous Sirens to ever live, as they alone had learned how to combine their powers to create songs that were almost completely irresistible.”
“All of the Sirens that Star Swirl had fought before this point had let themselves dissolve into magic rather than let him study them,” Celestia said.
“You see, Sirens are something between spirit and matter,” Twilight explained. “They have an appetite and have to feed to live, but they reproduce by forming the hate energy they cannot absorb into new sirens. Because their minds are obsessed with hate and other negative emotions, and because their offspring are literally formed from their excrement, Sirens are incapable of loving their parents. Or…their children.” Twilight suddenly got very quiet, and she and Spike shared a long look at each other.
“Eww gross,” Rainbow Dash commented, sticking out her tongue.
“Yes. Definitely TMI,” added Rarity.
“Get back to the story!” Pinkie playfully commanded. “Something about things going badly…”
Celestia, who had been looking with worry at Twilight, turned back to the others. “Yes. Things went badly, at least that was what Sonata told us afterwards. She’s not the most reliable of narrators. According to her, her emotion-manipulation abilities accidentally turned Star Swirl’s assistant into a monster and in the ensuing battle between him and Star Swirl and his champions, she was turned to stone by a stray hoof. She was therefore unable to tell us the cause of their mysterious disappearance shortly afterwards.
“She had many adventures in the following centuries, being revivified and later re-petrified by several interesting figures, including Discord during his reign of terror.”
Twilight made a note to herself to ask the Princess about Discord at a later date.
“Finally, she was revived by a cruel dictator named Sombra. Sombra made her into the means by which he attained absolute power.
“Sombra’s dark powers let him absorb magic from other ponies. But this was a very inefficient process, and he would hardly be any stronger after reducing multiple ponies into powerless wrecks. But he was very good at inducing fear and rage in his thousands of slaves. Sonata could feed off of those negative emotions, converting them into massive amounts of magic, and Sombra could absorb that magic from Sonata. This process generated so much magic that Sonata was never weakened by the process and so the pair of them could feed off the slaves for months before destroying them.”
“That’s…awful!” Fluttershy exclaimed.
“Yes,” Celestia said sadly. “Sombra’s horrible deeds were too awful to be allowed to continue, despite being the ruler of an independent nation, but by the time Luna and I discovered what he was doing, he was already too powerful for us. We decided to face him anyway and brought along the Elements of Harmony just in case. They hadn’t worked once since we had used them to stop Discord—”
(Another Discord reference! thought Twilight.)
“—But maybe they would decide to work this time, especially after it was discovered that Sombra was working on turning his slaves into an army enslaved to his will. But in the end, it was Sonata who was key to defeating the tyrant. Somehow, Luna managed to convince the siren to change sides.”
“Through the Power of Friendship?” Twilight guessed.
Celestia nodded. “Through the Power of Friendship.
“In the years following, the two of them became best friends—”
“—And as she became increasingly isolated from her fellow ponies, Luna turned more and more to her only remaining friend, Sonata,” Twilight said, her eyes unfocused.
“Um, yes,” Celestia said, unnerved.
Pinkie Pie waved a hoof in front of Twilight’s eyes.
And then Spike stepped forward and poked her with the point of a claw.
“Yowch!” Twilight cried. Then she looked down at Spike. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it,” Spike said coolly.
“Yes, they were close,” Celestia continued with a frown, “and after Luna…turned…I was convinced that Sonata was the one who was responsible. In the wake of Nightmare Moon’s banishment, I tried to hunt her down, to get my…revenge. I’m sorry, my little ponies, I was weak…and angry. At the time, I was unable to find her, and I assumed that the magic of Nightmare Moon’s creation had destroyed her.
“But last night Luna regained some of her memories of Sonata…” She looked over at Twilight with an unspoken question.
“Yes,” Twilight said with a nod. “The old Luna and I agreed that some memories should be released into the new Luna’s consciousness only when she was ready to face them. Since my recollection of her memories appears to be completely random, I couldn’t have told you before now that Sonata was one of those memories.”
“She wants to see her,” Celestia told the others with some steel in her voice. “And she told me how to get into the secret basement lab that the two of them spent most of their time in, the place where Luna died to become Nightmare Moon.” She spent a moment seething at the thought—a terrifying degree of anger that the other ponies had never witnessed before—before she calmed herself. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I found her, but then…” She gestured towards the statue and used her magic to remove the tarp.
The ponies gasped in shock. What was depicted in stone was indeed a monster, a hybrid of sea creature and pony, with long snout, pointed fangs, a spiky fin instead of a mane and slitted pupils. It was balanced on its tail upon a stone wave and was stretched up bipedally. Its forehooves were wrapped around its chest.
But then Fluttershy flew up to get a closer look and gasped in a different way. “Girls, look at her face!”
Rainbow Dash flew up, got one look at the creature’s face, and then picked up a complaining Applejack to see for herself. Celestia used her magic to gently lift up Twilight, Spike and Rarity, so that all might look upon the creature’s expression.
That expression was one of pure horror.
“This, this isn’t a monster,” Fluttershy said with conviction. “Maybe she did accidentally push Luna into becoming Nightmare Moon…”
“…But she really wishes she hadn’t,” said Rainbow Dash.
The ponies who weren’t pegasi were returned to the ground and Fluttershy lowered herself back to her hooves.
Twilight, seeing the Suppressor artifact between the siren’s hooves, used her magic to try to press it and thereby return the creature to flesh. But nothing happened.
“That is the problem I need you to solve,” Celestia told them. “For some reason the Suppressor is refusing to work.”
Pinkie Pie had a quiet revelation. But rather than say it out loud, she gestured to Rainbow Dash to come down so she could whisper in her ear.
“She doesn’t want to turn back?” Rainbow Dash said in reply to the whisper.
It was then clear to all of them: Sonata had pressed that gem herself.
“She couldn’t handle what she had done,” Fluttershy said, then flew up and hugged the statue tightly. “It’s alright, Sonata! Princess Luna is happy now, and she wants to be your friend again. Everything is going to be better.” She reached between the statue’s hooves and tapped the stone.
Nothing happened.
“I don’t think she can hear you,” said Rainbow Dash sadly.
Twilight looked up at the sad statue with growing resolve. “I will get right on this,” she told the Princess. She then turned and started using her magic to flip between pages in the Miscellanea, taking notes as she went.
“Maybe you should send your sister over to help,” Spike suggested.
Celestia nodded. “I will do so, as soon as she feels comfortable doing it.”