As the rays of the rising sun crept into Luna's room, the princess of the night stepped out onto her balcony overlooking the palace gardens. Twilight had eventually drifted off leaving the alicorn to her musings. Her thoughts centered on her rage at her father and her love for the unicorn in her room. Her eyes spotted her father's colossal figure sprawled in the grass under the trees, animals peeking cautiously from the surrounding brush. His luminescent eyes stared up into the light-streaked sky, gazing at unfathomable entities in unknown places.
Luna's anger spiked momentarily, but plummeted as her weariness struck her in a wave of groggy exhaustion. An old emotion flicked her like a gentle whip in the back of her mind, caressing her emotions like a long-lost friend. She shook her head hard, slapping down the emotion in her fear of it and what it had caused once before.
Her onset of sudden emotions drew the gaze of the languid king below. He slowly moved to his hooves, sending the onlooking animals scattering for cover as he rose to fully reveal his awesome size. At his full height, King Cosmos' head was nearly level with his daughter's high terrace and his glowing eyes affixed her in their shining halo.
"Come Selene, let us speak without the onset of rampant emotions and cross words."
He lifted a wing level with the balustrade and nodded his head to it. Understanding his intent, Luna stepped onto the over sized feathers gingerly, trying not to hurt them or anything with her silvered shoes. She continued towards the joint to where the feathers changed to muscle as his wing flexed softly, pulling in to his side. His form shifted and his size slowly began to diminish as his passenger shifted to accommodate the changing structure underneath her hooves. Luna hopped to the ground when it came near and turned to face the similarly colored pony. The stars on his chest slid about in soft patterns across his shadowy coat, turning their glittering selves with depth in a seemingly impossible manner. His tail flowed in the absent breeze, flashing similar stars in its flowing ripples. Wide wings shifted in their size as the king settled into his new shape.
He spoke first, pulling Luna out of her trance, "How find ye the duties of thine rule, mine daughter?"
"Tedious, but occasionally something exciting happens." She settled onto her rump in a seated position, leaving an awkward silence between them.
He hesitated a moment, his expressionless eyes showing nothing of his thoughts.
"Truly ye know not the ancient language? As I recall, thine mother spoke to thee in the tongue."
"She did, but mostly me and Tia spoke in the common language, only Mother continued, and Tia when spoken to. But other than that I never really learned it."
More silence as the two fidgeted in discomfort.
"I suppose I have explanations to give. Helia know these, I gave them to her when'st I visited thee as a foal."
Luna nodded, saying nothing.
"Very well. I shalt begin with a description of mine duties: As ye know, I am king of the stars. I created them, molded them, defined what thine scientists call physics, and defined how nature functions. Ever since then I have maintained them and kept them in line, I assuage black holes, start supernovas, keep the stars in order, direct nebulae, all these things and more. 'Tis a grueling and time consuming task, not easy by any standards, 'tis what I was doing when thine emotions caught hold of mine gaze, keeping a nebula I call the 'The Blue Snowball' from overtaking a nearby star."
Luna understood that it would be hard to make time for family with a job like that but she couldn't help but feel resentment for the father that she had never known.
"So that's why you never visited us?"
He hummed deep in his chest, more like the purr of a cat than thunder, "Among other things."
"Other things?" she questioned with a raised eyebrow.
"Chaos wreaks more of his namesake than you can imagine. His very presence alters the world around him, eliminating gravity or inertia by merely being there."
"Chaos?" It struck Luna how little she knew about the world around her as her father continued to give rise to questions in her.
"Ye and thine sister call him Discord, but I much prefer the name I gave him."
Luna gaped at her father in shock. "You created him?!"
"Aye, after I created the animals, I was curious about what a combination thereof would produce and if it could survive. I never could have foreseen what such a mistake would cause. His chaotic genes defied my laws of genetics and therefore, by logic, his very existence defied existence. The magic of creation was still livid in mine horn at the time and mine thoughts on this turned to reality, giving him the powers he now possesses. It is very complicated and I am not sure if it is even possible to explain in terms ye would understand."
"So you created Discord and gave him his powers? Why would you do that?"
"You don't know what such extreme power does to you, and I made a foalish mistake."
"Why couldn't you destroy him?"
"It occurred to me, but after trying, I realized his being depended on opposites. If you try to destroy him, he gains power. I attempted to create him again, to reverse the equation, but he merely absorbed the clone, defying another of my laws of physics. As far as I know he can only be stunned or frozen as your... mate had done with her friends."
When he said mate in such a hesitant manner, Luna felt that pinprick emotion caress her thoughts like a forbidden lover. She pushed it away again, determined to forget about the entity in her soul.
"Your relationship with Twilight Sparkle is a work of Chaos. He developed the concept of "Filly Fooling" and "Colt Cuddling" in his experimentations that he used to master his power. He-"
The dark emotion changed tactics, instead of snuggling up to Luna, it lashed out and drilled itself into her, firing her rage like one would a cannon. "So this is why you asked me out here! You just wanted me to calm down and get comfortable so you could just lecture me on how wrong me and Twilly are!" She jumped up, screaming in his starry face with all the power her lungs could muster. "You are a sick pony and a horrible father!" she bellowed as she flew to her room and sealed the window, leaving her stunned father in the grass.
She stomped about the room continuing to vent her rage on everything in sight, smashing armoirs and tables in a temper tantrum like a foal as Twilight woke to find the princess running around breaking things. The unicorn jumped out of the bed and grabbed her lover mid-smash.
"What in the hay is going on with you?!"
Luna continued to release her fury heedlessly, "My damn father won't shut up about me and you! If only you weren't here then that bastard would never have come down from his high chair!"
She heard her words a fraction of a section too late, the hurt look on Twilight's face spanking all of her anger into Cosmos' stars. Luna tried to take back the words as Twilight dropped her hoof and walked out the door, the worst expression possible inscribed on her complexion as Luna's worst dreams came true before her very eyes. The door slammed shut behind the unicorn, leaving the horrified princess in a pile of splintered wood as her heart shattered into a hundred million shards. She collapsed on her bed, too miserable to shed tears, crying silent tears as her very soul felt shorn in two.
Cosmos watched the couple shatter as he had wanted, but inside he felt only remorse and grief for both his daughter and for Twilight whom he had guided ever since she was a foal trying in vain to hatch a dragon egg. His victory felt more sour than his grief over his wife. Seeing Selene mourn as he had, though for a very different and worse reason, forced him to remember finding his wife's lifeless body ravaged by Chaos, two twin fillies sprouting in impossible birth. He realized what he had driven his daughter to do, even while unintentional in the moment.
Feeling every part of the horrible father as Selene had labeled him, the star king withdrew his power over the world and ascended into his starry domain in shame.
Tears fell freely, but not as freely as the shards of her heart. Her first love, her first experience of love outside of her books, gone. Her lover, no her ex-lover had thrown her away like a rag-doll. She had never thought that it would ever end, she and Luna just... fit so perfectly. Personalities, hobbies, and... other things, had been perfect for each other. She couldn't remove the feeling of those wings, the gentle caress of her horn... Twilight shuddered at the memory, then again at the grief that overcame her every grievous thought. The unicorn wandered through the halls listlessly, eyes closed, ponies scrambling to avoid her, she didn't care where she ended up. For the first time in her life, she had no words for what she felt. The vast dictionary had no words, no descriptions for the extent of her misery.
She felt a surge of magical power, but she ignored it, too consumed in the cavity in her chest where her heart should have been to care. The unicorn eventually found herself before her room and she slowly entered through the door and began packing her things, there wasn't anything left for her here. As she was dumping her sparse belongings, filtering out the gifts Luna had given her, into her small suitcase, a knock came at the door. She did nothing, pulling out a pretty moonstone the size of an egg she had been given and dropping it onto the chest of drawers among the other presents. The knock came again, and still, she did nothing, just picked up her luggage and opened the door. Her face bumped into a leg and she looked up to see her teacher standing over her.
"Going somewhere?" the familiar voice asked.
Twilight didn't say anything, just dropped her head and walked around Celestia, tears leaping from her eyes like skydivers. Hoofsteps sounded beside her as the princess walked with her. She felt so numb, so comatose and incoherent, all she could hear was those words: "If only you weren't here..." over and over again in her ears. It wasn't until Celestia gently nudged her with a hoof that she snapped out of her reverie.
"What happened Twilight?"
The sunken unicorn only shook her head silently and continued walking.
The princess didn't follow.
Twilight sank into the carriage seat, murmuring for the driver to take her to the train station. He only nodded and the two stallions set off at a brisk trot at his command. A gentle breeze wafted in the carriage windows, doing nothing to pull Twilight out of her comatose shell as the clacking of the hooves outside began to mingle with the sounds of the city as the dawn woke the sprawling metropolis from its slumber. The carriage got caught in rush hour traffic, scooting forward like an inebriated slug as it crawled through the cobblestone streets. After an eternity of mourning, the driver finally announced their arrival at the station. She shuffled out of the carriage slowly, accepting the services of a caddy to carry her small suitcase.
The train arrived on schedule and the morose unicorn slowly walked into her car and dropped into the cushions like a sack of rocks. Her mind finally arrived at a roundabout description as the train rattled along towards Ponyville: She felt like a Pinkamena Pie, devoid of any sort of joy or happiness.
******
Princess Celestia returned to her throne room, wondering at the state Twilight Sparkle was in, she had never in all their years together seen her student in this condition. Of course she had been sad before, but this was beyond that, she looked like the alicorn had felt when she and Luna had come home to find their mother slaughtered by Discord. She was worried for the unicorn, she had only been able to overcome her grief over her mother because of the sudden need to take care of a foal and survive a murderous draconequus, she had grown up quickly. But Twilight had only her friends, and while they were powerful, Celestia worried that they were not quite enough to bring the unicorn out of her stupor.
She felt another surge of power as she was sitting on her throne, but this time it felt different, not the raw strength of Father, but a familiar pulse of magic that she couldn't quite place. She rose from the hard-backed chair on its dais and headed for the gardens where she had felt the magic originate.
Walking amongst the silent trees, she found the spot Father had descended from the skies, a slightly flattened and charred swathe of grass where the bolt of energy impacted the earth. The King himself was nowhere to be found and she assumed that was the source of the energy, his leaving.
Having decided this, she turned back to the palace when she heard a familiar chuckle that sent chills up her spine. She whirled into a familiar, displaced limb and took a step back. Discord's head popped out of nowhere next to hers and a yellow eye stared deep into her own.
"Miss me?"