The terms of the contract were simple. Luna would not set hoof in Equestria. She could not contact her ponies. She was forbidden, even, from safeguarding their dreams, the potential of her poisoning their minds to some subversive agenda left unstated but blatantly implied. Exiled, excised from the fabric of the nation. One-sided, unjust, a bitter poison pill she swallowed with cold, cold fury.
It could have come to blows. It so very nearly had, the surprise appearance of one of Luna’s own night guard knocking her building rage off course at the last possible moment. Any fight between alicorns, after all, was better known by another name: apocalypse.
And she was better than that. Every day spent fruitlessly attempting to prove herself to no avail was not, could not be only for the pursuit of something as vapid and shallow as her elder sister’s approval.
So she paused. Took stock. Studied her options, bit down her instinctive reaction, turned her face to stone, counted the beats of her heart, and willed herself to have the grace to lose this battle.
They retained a line of communication, of course. Twinned books, a stylized sun on Luna’s copy, moon on her sister’s, a captured soul split between them. Before the subject was raised in one of the higher courts, Celestia’s courts, it was common practice to salvage that imprint left of a pony in all manner of ways, but a single session and it was promptly labeled necromancy before being banned. Anything created before the new law was grandfathered in, leaving the aristocracy very satisfied indeed. Luna had some choice things to say to her sister about that, words which went ignored as a matter of course before her sister diverted the topic to something inane, as was her wont. A new method of cheesecake manufacture, made possible through a treaty with one of the larger cow herds.
Distracting drivel. Nothing that led anywhere, nothing of substance, nothing that even tried to resolve the pattern of conflict between them, and a very intentional avoidance of Luna’s attempts to do so.
No matter. She was done. At this point, any further effort wasted on talk was self-sabotage. She’d get nothing accomplished in that arena.
Which left her … where? An alicorn, on her own, had raw power. Had that in spades. Besides that, not much else. All real progress came not from one or two great minds, but from the engine of civilization reinforcing and backing the idea. Starswirl could come up with a thousand new spellforms in a day, but Starswirl was dead, his only true progress immortalized in what theorems he deigned to share with his assistants, or scattered scraps of parchment left unencrypted by chance.
Anything monumental, anything she wanted to accomplish on the level of nations, it needed ponies. Ponies she was foresworn from contacting even in their dreams.
Except. A thought sparked, Luna’s pace slowing from the bounding gallop she used to traverse the moon’s surface when she wanted to think, down to a slow walk that kicked up a minimum of dust. She stared up at her home. It seemed impossibly small from here, insignificant in the scheme of things, Equestria a fraction of a much greater continent, even that a single example of a greater array of foreign lands.
Why ponies, exactly? They had a lot going for them. Easy to feed, being herbivores. Naturally sociable, communal spirits who as a rule had no problem being a small part of a greater whole. Holding a wide variety of natural talents, unicorns suited to wielding the untyped magic of spellforms, pegasi and earth ponies granting communal access to spaces which would otherwise be completely uninhabitable with the barest effort, there was no question that they were uniquely suited to act as the kind of lever on the world they were in Equestria, spinning ideas into life at scale.
Problem being, except in very special, isolated circumstances, they were off limits. Griffins were an option, certainly, yet the amount of work involved made them a very unpalatable one. They had communities, certainly, and Luna was not so culturally ignorant as to believe they were inherently any less capable. Yet the logistics alone staggered her to consider. Carnivorous, and thus in need of an entire supply chain and enormous amounts of space. Internal magic circuits with near zero utility for anything other than combat. A bloody history which made political overtures a very, very steep cliff for Luna to consider climbing.
At that point, she might as well abduct a clutch of dragon eggs and personally raise them. The imprinting process made it a much more viable option, and there would be no worry of senescence destroying the more solitary kind of genius that cropped up in ponies like Starswirl.
It was a very, very different approach to nation building than she’d taken with Celestia before. Radical in a way that made her want to reject the notion out of hoof almost on instinct. Slow, unbelievably slow, requiring her to take a personal interest in the lives of every single dragon she raised in order for the imprint to take.
It was a strategy that directly resolved a core disagreement she had with her sister. That impersonal, distant rule Celestia took, ensconcing herself in courts and meeting rooms, interacting with only those at the upper escehelons of power, maybe taking on a personal student whenever there wasn’t a war to oversee, none of those elements had a chance of arising when she personally, individually knew every single one of her subjects.
There was more to consider. There were the minotaurs, known for incredible feats of engineering, the distant cat people, rumor having them creating cities from dust, and of course the end goal of Luna’s project was a multicultural expression of harmony, something Equestria had failed to be at every turn.
Yet it was Luna’s habit to latch onto an idea that seemed promising and prototype it on a whim.
And because she’d always wanted to, she’d do it on the moon.
Finally, finally. She was engaged, focused, faced with a problem of engineering that tested her abilities to the limit. She’d never had time to sink her teeth into something of this level, something which absorbed her so completely she forewent conjuring up something to eat and instead relied on the rejuvenation enchantments in her crown and armor to supply the fuel she needed to attack the project with her full, uninterrupted attention.
The structure was easy. She’d worked with Celestia to build their palace, she had the knowhow and the experience. There were just a few differences. Lack of air, that was a big one. Reduced gravity, which threw off all the standard calculations which relied less on magical welding and reinforcement. In other words, solid engineering was out. Or, she’d have to do a lot of math. If only she could delegate that, but she couldn’t, because she needed to finish her moon palace before she could house subjects to delegate to.
Well. She tilted her chin, looking away from the hardened moon rock in front of her, empty circular protrusions for windows that she needed to source or create the glass for snagging her thoughts off track for a moment. Then she looked up, up to Equestria, and thought of a certain twinned journal, left neglected for … a long time, probably.
Wouldn’t that be funny, if she delegated basic engineering problems to the ruler of Equestria? It was exactly the kind of random nonsense Celestia usually bombarded her with. It risked revealing her base of operations, yes, but with the knowledge that Luna was busy away from her precious nation and instead tasking herself with, to all appearances, a vanity project on the moon, she’d more than likely be overjoyed to help.
With an almost vicious glee, Luna summoned the journal to her, flipped to the next empty page, ignoring several sections filled with observations, questions, pointless distracting nonsense she’d skim over later when she wasn’t busy, penned the math she had, stated what she was looking for, and went back to puzzling out a way to entangle the enchantment for a stable portal to the ocean in adamant. Access to a steady supply of fish, salt, and water, the latter of which would be trivial to separate, solved a great many problems.
The challenges were greater than she’d anticipated. Years down the line, and she still had space suitable for only a single hatchling to take up residence. Unless she compromised on comfort, which she never would. The spiralling section of her moon palace resembled the tower Celestia usually housed her apprentices in, though the reference had been unintentional at the time. The product of a wistful subconscious, no doubt.
She summoned her journal, always nearby, and penned another problem. She’d begun affectionately referring to it as the work journal in her thoughts, something which filled her half with amusement and half apology. Her sister genuinely was trying to retain a positive relationship, even if it was a broken, shattered mess of the sisterhood they’d once shared. On Luna’s part, she found herself of two minds. On the one hoof, maybe they’d find that again in the future, and she wasn’t against that. The rest of the time, she found herself too busy, apathetic, and hurt to respond to Celestia’s attempts at connection with any real effort. The more time that went by with little Amethyst to focus on, the less Luna dwelled, the less she found herself hoping for that distant reunion.
She found that sad, in a vague, distant way. Thankfully, she had more than enough to distract herself with. Amethyst was growing quick, already probing at the idea of exploring the world above, wondering at how there could be so much space outside the tower she lived in. Luna was itching to reach for her work book, to find some area that would give the little dragon a taste of what the world above had to offer, something reasonably safe, and of course far, far away from Celestia’s domain.