"Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria, there were two regal sisters who ruled together and created harmony for all the land. To do this, the eldest used her unicorn powers to raise the Sun at dawn. The younger brought out the Moon to begin the night."
Evening had fallen over Canterlot. The low Sun’s vivid glow painted the Royal Palace’s ivory walls pink and turned its golden roofs into frozen fire. The bustling activity that filled the streets of Equestria’s capital city during the day was quieting down in preparation for the city’s rich and sophisticated nightlife.
The palace itself was quieter than most places. No receptions were planned for the evening and no gala or ball was to be held during the later hours, and so the busy ponies of the day shift were slowly trickling out to be replaced by a far smaller and less busy night shift.
Luna was watching the city from one of the castle’s high balconies – she had taken over Celestia’s study while she managed the affairs of state normally handled by her sister – and looked down at her little ponies enjoying the evening.
Of what had happened during the day, preciously little had caused any uproar in the wider population. The ominous but brief darkness and the strange weather pattern above the Everfree Forest had been most widely noticed and caused the most worry; far fewer ponies knew of Celestia’s absence and even fewer of her actual disappearance.
She herself had spent a great deal of her time since returning to Canterlot not only smoothing over the upset that had been caused, but easing and dispelling what worries remained, as well as prepare both herself and her sister’s aides so that she could shoulder the full weight of the crown and assume the position as sole head of government tomorrow, should the need arise and Celestia remain missing.
She turned her head and looked into the room, at Spike, who was sleeping curled up on a seating pillow, a blanket hastily thrown over his body. The young drake’s help had been invaluable, for Twilight had taught him a knack for organisation that completely escaped her. From Celestia he knew a good deal about the ponies that surrounded and assisted her sister in her daily affairs, as well as some helpful details regarding the priorities of her schedule.
Looking back on this hectic and exhausting afternoon, the confidence and reliability with which he had been able to assist despite the unfamiliar situation inspired nothing but respect for Spike in Luna. He had more than earned his rest.
Her gaze wandered further, over desk and drawers, papers and quills, to see if everything was in order, but nothing had changed since the last time she checked. With a sigh, Luna turned back to look over the city, down toward the ground, avoiding to look up to the horizon and the sky beyond. She was stalling, and she hated herself for it. She was stalling because she was afraid, and for that she hated herself more.
It was late evening, and by now, the Sun’s setting was almost three minutes overdue. If she waited much longer, ponies would start to notice. Yet still she hesitated.
The problem wasn’t just that the task was daunting, to set the Sun which she had never moved on her own, rarely even reached for. It wasn’t just the fear of failure that plagued her. The worse fear was of what setting the Sun by herself, alone and without her sister, meant, was the fear that admitting that Celestia wasn’t here now meant admitting that if she was gone now, she might not be here tomorrow, was the dread that embraced her when she considered the possibility that her beloved sister might not ever return.
Luna gritted her teeth, let the breath escape from her mouth with a slight hiss. You should be stronger than this, she chastised herself, you shouldn’t be this stupid. She pushed her fears, both rational and irrational, aside and looked up, at her sister’s Sun. It was too bright, so she looked away again.
Oh sister, how I wish you were here.
With closed eyes, she turned her head back toward the Sun. A thought, a push of will, and her magic reached out, connected Luna to the celestial object up in the sky. It was simply too bright, really. She could see it even now, with her eyes closed.
Tendrils of her magic wrapped around the Sun, invisible to anypony who might be watching due to both the great distance and the Sun’s brightness. Luna was replicating the spell she used to move the Moon – how different could the Sun be, after all – as a starting point to work from. Carefully, she wrapped it in her magic, then began to pull, slowly at first, then stronger. The Sun didn’t budge, so Luna poured more power into her spell, further threads of magic encasing the Sun in a tighter net, the magical pull growing and growing until suddenly, there was some give—yet it still didn’t move.
Instead, the Sun seemed to wobble, to deform and slip in ways Luna did not anticipate at all. The breath caught in her throat as she released the tugging force, dissolved her magic grasp save for a gentle, probing, worried touch. What had she done wrong? Had she damaged it, somehow? Was that even a possibility?
The tremor in the Sun’s surface that had startled her so rippled, weakened and subsided. Luna released her held breath. All was still fine. She hadn’t accidentally broken the Sun.
Now, the fear of failure returned, stronger than before. She didn’t know what she was doing, so how could she even dare a second attempt? Luna let her head hang and sighed as her mind returned to darker thoughts, thoughts of how weak and worthless she was next to her sister, thoughts whose seeds had been sown more than a thousand years ago, which had grown alongside the Nightmare as her dark side’s secret fear, which had haunted her even after Nightmare Moon had been defeated for good.
These thoughts seemed to have more weight now that she again wore the Nightmare’s armour, changed to look like her usual regalia, but nonetheless there and serving to extend her power. It blurred the lines between then and now, making her feel sick to her stomach.
An unwelcome voice interrupted her descent to that dark pit of despair, one both obnoxious and unrepentantly gleeful. “Giving up so soon?”
There were very few beings in Equestria who would attempt to sneak up on the Princess of the Night, and fewer still who had a chance of success. There was no surprise on Luna’s part, no confusion as to who this intruder might be, only the instinctual flinch of her body, easily suppressed by centuries of experience. Just as easily, she slipped back into a mindset of stern, cold focus, burying the despair that had been welling up within as she opened her eyes and turned to look at her uninvited guest. “What is it, Discord?”
Her eyes stabbed nothing but empty air. Of course. He was either invisible, disembodied or throwing his voice, just to discombobulate her.
A motion in the corner of her eye caught her attention—her shadow, elongated by the low Sun to the point of bizarreness, had moved independent from her, and been replaced by the likeness of Discord. She locked eyes with the grinning shade, but it broke eye contact almost immediately.
“Oh, I was just watching an old friend have a hard time with that big stupid Sun up there,” Discord replied, and the shadow slithered away from her, curling up the palace facade, twisting around the doorway to the study. “And I was wondering to myself whether she needed some help.” In an instant, he shifted from shadow to corporeal, transitioning as simply and smoothly as if just stepping out of the darkness.
Luna sighed. “Have you nothing better to do than bother me? Did you not want to look for my sister?” she asked.
The draconequus crossed his arms. “I was!” He pouted, just for a moment, then the grin returned. “But I’m finished now.”
Hope, a radiant spark bursting into a roaring warm fire, blossomed within her chest. “Did you find her?” she asked, unable to keep the eagerness from her voice.
“Ha!” he snorted. Luna’s heart sank. “You know, your precious elements really did a number on her. Normally, if you throw something out of reality, it just drifts out there in limbo. Worst case, it falls into the Void.” He made a nondescript gesture. “Poof. Disentangled from causality. Never existed in the first place. Complete retcon.”
Luna swallowed; there was an uncomfortable tightness in her throat. “Is this what happened to Celestia, then?”
“Well, obviously not,” he chortled, then leapt into the air and span a circle, hanging upside down as he spoke. “After all you know she’s missing. What happened to her is a bit more complicated, and you seem to be a bit short on time right now…” Discord pointed his furred thumb in the vague direction of the Sun hanging in the sky, just above the horizon, waiting to be set.
She didn’t answer. Her skin was crawling with dread, both at the prospect of another attempt at setting the Sun and at the possible fate of her sister.
Discord righted himself and leaned forwards, lacing his fidgeting claws together to rest his tufted chin on them. “So…” he asked, “want some help with that?”
“I do not want or need your help,” Luna said coldly. It was only half a lie, really. “The cycle of Sun and Moon is not a game to be made light of, and I will not allow you—”
“Ugh, boooring!” he interrupted her. He yawned loudly, blinked down at her lazily as he hovered just a few feet above her.
“No, I wasn’t talking about anything as dull as doing any of your work for you. I have standards, you know.” Twisting in mid-air, he slowly circled around her, an insufferable smirk plastered across his face. “You see, I was merely offering some friendly advice. Just two friends, chatting about magic. Like back in the day.” Discord chuckled lightly.
As he circled back into her field of vision, his smirk had turned sly. “Unless you want to figure it all out on your own, of course. Don’t mind me then, take your time.”
Luna sighed, again. Indulging Discord’s whims even a little seemed like a tremendous mistake, yet she felt that if she didn’t, he’d do his best to be an even bigger pain than if she did. “Fine, I’ll humour you,” she said. “How do I move the Sun?”
“The Sun is not a cabbage,” Discord stated, and in a flash, one appeared before her, round and green and floating.
“How profound,” Luna deadpanned.
Discord nodded sincerely. “Indeed.” A butterfly net appeared in his paw. “Which is why you can’t just catch it like one.” He swiped for the floating cabbage as if to scoop it up with the net, but the webbing just passed through the cabbage with little resistance, causing it to shake and stir like the disturbed surface of a pond.
“Rather,” he continued, dropping the butterfly net, which frayed and dissolved into a mixed swarm of lepidoptera, “it is a lot like water. That means you can’t push it,” – he mimed a fruitless pushing motion with the liquid cabbage – “you can’t pull it,” – he raked his claws through the cabbage in the opposite direction – “in short, you can’t force it in any way.”
Despite herself, Luna found herself caught between interest and annoyance at Discord’s exposition. As obnoxious, boisterous and frankly insane as the old Spirit could be, there were times when his unique and backwards perspective on things could lend some truly fascinating insight amidst all the nonsense.
“So how do you move it, then?” she asked, unable to keep a tinge of curiosity from her voice.
“Simple,” Discord said with a grin. “You just let it flow, you just let it” – he snapped his eagle claw – “fall.”
The cabbage dropped and splattered onto the balcony, spraying its green liquid everywhere. Luna got completely covered in cabbage goop and the stains reached several pony lengths up the castle wall. Only Discord remained completely dry.
Luna sputtered and grimaced; some of the stuff had somehow gotten into her mouth and, despite the smell, it tasted nothing like cabbage. She glared up at an innocently smiling Discord. “You will clean that up,” she growled.
“Yeah, yeah.” He waved a paw dismissively at her, and the liquefied cabbage covering her and the balcony instantly evaporated. “Look at you worrying about a few little stains. I never took you for such a neat freak, Luna,” he taunted.
“Green just isn’t my colour,” Luna countered snippily and turned away. Getting riled up by Discord’s antics was a fool’s errand—it only encouraged him. Better to disengage and calm herself down; time was short enough even without starting an argument. “Now be quiet. I need to focus.”
She closed her eyes again and took a deep breath. She didn’t really feel like another attempt at lowering the Sun, but there was no time to be wasted by more verbal sparring. Besides, for all the nonsense and antics, she did now have some ideas inspired by Discord’s little piece of theatre.
She reached out once again with her magic, weaving a different spell this time, one that dragged at the flow of time and the relative dimensions of space. Her first few attempts were fruitless; she had underestimated the complexity of the magic she was attempting. At least the challenge of understanding the idiosyncrasies of warped space and relative velocities proved a welcome distraction.
Soon, however, the pieces of the puzzle were starting to come together and Luna felt the Sun, ever so slightly, begin to move down towards the horizon. Redoubling her efforts on both the magical and the mechanistic front, Luna managed, bit by bit, to accelerate and adjust the Sun’s descent until finally, she opened her eyes and saw, with a breath of relief, the golden disk of her sister’s Sun disappear behind the faint blue peaks of the Unicorn Range far to the west.
Slowly releasing her breath, she began to alter the spell one final time. The Sun slowed as she completed it, but did not quite stop. The spell would now maintain the Sun’s motion and gently guide it over night to the east horizon, where Luna could then raise it in the morn and set its path across the sky for the day.
Her head felt heavy as she severed the magical link to the Sun. Almost as an afterthought, just before extinguishing her horn, she cast a quick pain-numbing spell of her own design to alleviate her growing headache.
“Didn’t you forget something?” Discord’s mischievous voice asked behind her.
Puzzled, she turned back at him. At her questioning look, he drew a crescent shape in the air with his fingers. It only took Luna a moment to grasp the meaning behind Discord’s charades—and panic flooded back in an instant.
The Moon! Of all things, she had forgotten about the Moon. She was so angry and embarrassed, she felt like biting herself. Her horn protested with a barely-dulled jolt of fresh pain as she reached out into the sky again.
To her relief, she found the Moon where it was supposed to be, just rising above the horizon opposite the Sun. Well, almost like it was supposed to; the lunar phase wasn’t the right one – or even any right one.
Her magic’s gentle touch swiftly corrected the Moon’s rotation, and soon all was in its proper place in the heavens, Moon rising and Sun setting.
She wanted to give a biting remark, to scold Discord for doing shoddy work, for making light of her Moon by turning it sideways, but the shameless grin on the spirit’s face told her that if she acknowledged he had raised the Moon, then she would acknowledge that he had had to raise it for her, and she would never hear the end of how she, Luna, had forgotten about the Moon.
And so, she kept her mouth shut and swallowed every word that came to mind.
Taking a deep breath, Luna made back to the balcony door and into the study, moving on in body before doing so in conversation. “Now that this is done,” she said, “I believe you still owe me an explanation. How has your search for my sister gone? What has happened to her?”
In a flash, Discord was adorned with a chequered coat and a matching deerstalker hat.
“You see,” he started, taking a drag from his pipe and releasing a puff of lemon-scented smoke, “when the Elements blasted Celestia across all dimensions known to ponydom, they left a rather noticeable trail. They’re not exactly subtle, you see. So all I had to do was keep my wits about me” – he peered down at Luna through a comically oversized magnifying glass – “and follow her tracks until I found the pony herself.”
“But you did not find her,” Luna wagered. She could guess at least that much.
“Brilliant deduction, princess.” Discord took a bite off his magnifying glass and chewed thoughtfully. “Alas, I followed the trail to the very edge of existence itself, right up to where nothingness begins, and there it stopped.”
Luna opened her mouth to ask the obvious question, but Discord beat her to it.
“And no, before you ask, Celestia’s not in there. It wouldn’t be much of a nothingness if there was a pony there, now would it?” he scoffed. “No, if Celestia was” – he made air quotes – “‘inside the Void’, she wouldn’t be much of anything herself. If you are within that nothingness, you are part of that nothingness, therefore nothing at all yourself and logically never existed in the first place. It’s all quite simple, really.”
“Really,” Luna echoed. He wasn’t making much sense, but at least he was making some—even if it was a nonsense kind of sense.
“Yes,” Discord continued, “and since Celestia left a trail from being banished by the Elements, she must have existed at some point and that means she has not been cast into ultimate, all-consuming nothingness.”
He swallowed the remainder of the magnifying glass.
“Yet you still say she could not be found, ” Luna said. “Where is she, then?”
A cube-shaped cloud of smoke rose from Discord’s pipe as he puffed pensively. “Quite elementary, my dear. She is on the other side of nothingness.”
She nodded slowly. “So she is still out there, somewhere.” The answer Discord had given was a confusing, frustrating non-answer, but it wasn’t the answer Luna had feared, that Celestia was gone, for a year, a hundred, a thousand years, or even gone forever. And so the frustration and confusion it caused her was overshadowed by the hope she felt at its implied meaning: Celestia could be brought back.
While her questions were not answered to satisfaction, this seemed to be all that Discord was willing to tell of the lost Princess of the Sun, so she let the topic rest for the moment. Luna had other questions, and they talked more, in the dusk-illuminated study, about the letter from the Crystal Empire’s prince and the danger posed by the Spirit of Insight.
Apparently, while lesser in the direct reshaping of the physical world than other types of magic, the magic of Insight lent itself to manipulation of the abstract and the indirect. It could be used to misdirect others or to extend ones senses to other places and times, to access both dreams and the mind itself, and to perform subtle alterations that seemed, to Luna, more philosophical than tangible, more semantic than concrete.
A Spirit of Insight would, through subtle and circuitous manipulations of causality, leverage the actions of others to amplify its own strength and orchestrate events that favoured its own designs. However, as much as cause and effect would let the Spirit set in motion forces many times larger than it originally supplied, they could hamper its plans just as much when disturbed to act against it. It was the unpredictable nature of Chaos, this Discord supplied with confidence, that could hamstring the machinations of Insight like nothing else.
While in the short term, Theory might unravel any move made against her, Discord could similarly disturb any of her plans in the longer term, where her true strength lay. In such a way, she could be placed in an indefinite deadlock, and made vulnerable to the Elements of Harmony, which she might otherwise have disabled by targetting their bearers in a similar way as Discord had when he had escaped from his first imprisonment.
Whether this would be necessary was a question Discord couldn't as readily answer. The idea of reforming Theory was laughable, of course—but so had been the idea of reforming him, Discord, Spirit of Chaos and Disharmony.
If nothing else, Theory had been far more open to the idea than he had ever been, if she hadn’t straight-up wanted it to happen.
Whatever had occurred in the Crystal Empire, the Elements of Harmony had not been used, that much Discord could sense. It seemed likely that Theory had merely been testing the limits of her parole, possibly in some carefully calculated way that would let her escape immediate retribution. There’d been a loophole, he pointed out, in the concession she’d asked of Luna.
“I’d bet that she’s keeping her word,” he said, “but only to the letter.”
And just then, as the edge of the sinking Sun vanished below the horizon, a knock on the door interrupted their conversation.