Chapter 7
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There’s an old griffon saying: if you see your enemies, you can kill them.
What if your own mind was that enemy? What then? Co-existence was a possibility, but even then, it wasn’t a permanent solution.
I sighed. Despite all my research into the matter, post-traumatic stress was still one of the greatest mysteries of these times. Celestia must have found my research, somehow, and tracked me down based on it. Simply putting theory into action was what I was doing now.
Luna’s eyes sprang open and she rolled over to the side, where she saw me sitting pensively on the floor.
I turned to face her. “Another nightmare?”
Judging by the sweat rolling off her coat, and the jerky movements of her pupils, I supposed so. She nodded to verify.
I reached up to touch one of her shoulders with as soft a claw as I could make. “It’s alright, I’m here. Want to speak about it?”
She paused, before glancing at the door. The shadows of two guards splayed into the room from the lit doorway. Celestia had never really gotten rid of them; despite her proclaimed trust in me, she still had the soldiers on my tail. A wise move, I thought. Wise, but still a pain for me to deal with.
“It is about my sister,” Luna replied, whispering.
I could see the shadows shift from their positions, before suddenly freezing into place. Clearly, the guards had overheard. “Do you want to speak privately? They can hear.”
Luna glanced back at the doorway, before extending her wings, surrounding me in a cocoon of feathers. They were larger than when I’d first met her, by about a few centimeters. I’d only noticed because she used to be unable to block out my field of view with them; now, she could, if just barely.
Inside the feathery dome, we leaned our heads forwards like a pair of conspirators. I could feel Luna’s cheek brush along my own, and her exhaling breath blasted against my left ear-hole. Likewise, I found my beak centimeters away from Luna’s own fluffy left ear.
It was getting really warm in there, too. Somehow, the warmth felt odd; uncomfortable, yes, but still bearable. Must have been my curiosity that kept the heat at bay. Anything like this had to be juicy.
No! This was serious. I let a breath slip through my beak, seeing the waft of damp air sweep the hair on her ear left and right.
She sighed airily, before starting. “My sister. I – I stood outside Everfree Castle. Untouched. Smoke rose in columns as far as the eye could see. Buildings burned, without exception. The stones embers, the wood kindling. Smoke and the taste of blood in the air.” She paused for a moment. “All my fault.”
I felt my breath hitch in my throat.
“I burned those structures to the ground. I killed the ponies inside. All for what? Mine own pride.”
“But it didn’t feel like that, at the time,” I mused, shivering as a jolt of ice seemed to spread from my chest. “Still, why?”
“Damned pride, damned jealousy!” she hissed. I tensed up immediately. At this range, it was like she was shouting. “It was not their fault! Why must they die?”
There was nothing I could say to defuse the situation. She needed to let it out, and know that she didn’t have to be alone.
Tapping her foreleg with an open claw, I exhaled deliberately slowly, attempting to forget the fact that I was in the room with a murderer; a remorseful, broken mare that had her hooves stained black with the blood of her people. The very same people who had trusted her, followed her, and were rewarded with death.
It was kin-slaying, almost. Without synchronization and harmony, natural or coerced, a society could not function at peak efficiency. Why weaken the community you were in? It made no sense. No sense, unless you had nothing more to lose. Spite and hatred could do a lot.
Did she intend to kill? Perhaps not. But one couldn’t change the past, not even one as powerful as her, or her sister. Time was truly the lord of us all. Time and death.
She sighed a long, wavering sigh. “Why? Why did I survive?”
I continued to comfort her with my presence. Somehow, it was working. The tears that I thought would be forthcoming did not flow. There was simply nothing left to flow.
“Why?”
Perhaps she wanted an answer from me. As much as I wanted, saying the honest truth that she got off lighter than her victims would not help. She recognized that already. It was the injustice that was eating away at her, not any self-delusion of who to blame.
“I don’t know, Luna,” I murmured, closing my eyes.
“Blind fate,” she growled softly. “Not fair. I did not deserve this. I did not deserve you.”
“Many do not get what they deserve,” I continued, perhaps a bit more harshly in hindsight than I had thought at the time. “You, your victims… yet, we cannot change the past. We can only choose to fly in one direction in the present time.”
“I never wanted to hurt anypony,” she choked out.
“No one ever does, Luna.” I opened my eyes again, taking in her twitching wings all around me. Wracked with sorrow, guilt and insanity, she truly made for a pitiful display. I wondered if I was the same. Thinking of it, we weren’t so different in this regard. Neither of us had wanted to hurt anyone. Yet, that was what we'd ended up doing.
The next few moments we spent in that little bubble passed by like the brutal, bone-chilling wind down the Hold mountain range; uncaring and constant. In that little cocoon of feathers, we had one another, and that was the only reassurance then and there.
“What should I do?” Luna muttered, placing her hooves around the claw touching her foreleg. “What should I do?”
Alas, all things never lasted.
“Sister, I’m here!” Celestia’s jolly voice reverberated off the room’s walls.
Bad. Bad. Bad. Shit.
The click-clack of metal on stone stopped, and for a split second, peace.
“What is the meaning of this!”
We disengaged from our little world in a tangle of forelimbs and feathers. Each of my feathers felt like they were sticking out at some odd angle to my skin, and I was sure that under my coloring, my skin was scarlet from head to tail. A quick glance to the side at Luna revealed that she was also similarly flushed.
“We were –” They sure weren’t kidding about Celestia’s infamous glare. I felt as though my hindpaws had grown into the stone beneath, and that I was just staving off the inevitable execution. I froze, mid-sentence, as my mind flickered through a multitude of scenarios. Was there going to be torture? Was it going to be quick? Either way, it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to decide how fast I would die. They would.
Sobering thought. I sighed, and seemed to shrink slightly as all the air left my body.
“You have betrayed my trust, griffon. I hereby –”
“No.”
Both of us looked at Luna, whose even, quiet voice cut through her sister's shouts like a bullet through cloth.
“I never meant – I never meant to hurt anyone,” she murmured, eyes vacant. Little droplets of water trickled out of the corners of those big teal eyes.
She spread her wings wide, nearly clipping the back of my head. “All my fault.”
Celestia shot me one last glare, before taking a step towards her sister. “Luna!”
Her sister’s head shot up, and the blue pony started to shake, her breaths coming in ragged little gasps. “Please – I – just do it quickly.”
Enough was enough. I moved a claw up from the smooth stone grip, but Celestia’s little growl made me falter. Then, my eyes passed over Luna’s form, and her face, carved with a resigned, relieved smile.
Please, Luna. Death wasn’t the only way out.
I took a deep breath, steeling my shaking muscles, and reached out once more.
“No, griffon!”
Celestia’s bark went unheard and ignored, as I placed the soft palm of my talons against Luna’s shoulder. “Snap out of it!”
“I did not mean for any of this!”
“Get your damned claws off her –”
“Luna!”
The cacophony of voices, of which I was a part, brought my charge down to her knees. She lay there, moaning a tuneless, melancholic elegy, her forelegs wrapped over the top of her head. Her wings, exposed as they were, twitched randomly. The both of us stopped what we were doing; I froze in place, claw in mid-air. Celestia was in a similar position, on the other side.
With a glare that said “This isn’t over”, she slowly stood back up, before stomping downwards. A harsh crack reverberated through the wooden room.
Luna didn’t stop her humming.
“Luna.”
I stopped talking, just as Celestia did, when we realized that we had started at the same time. Glancing over at her, we met gazes; I waved a claw towards the shivering blue form that was her sister, and she nodded once.
“Luna.”
Nothing. I expected as much. Celestia sighed.
“I’m sorry, I have to go now. I’ll come by after court’s finished, alright? I’m so, so sorry.”
No reply. Luna’s elegy continued unabated.
With an awkward, slow nod and an almost indistinguishable sigh, she left the room, glancing once backwards. She stopped near the guards, and after a quick, hushed discussion, the two golden forms turned to face us. After a short staring contest, I ignored them. If they weren't going to do anything, then they weren't worth my attention.
I could understand that, for once. Simply a numbers game; as a Princess, with an obligation to serve her country, she had to neglect her own siblings. The people at the cost of the sister. Probably what happened a thousand years ago, reflected here.
We griffons say that the first casualty of war is innocence.
So true, I noted as I looked at Luna. Her sobs and her song had abated somewhat in the twenty or so minutes after Celestia had left, but as I stayed sitting with a claw upon her upper foreleg, I let my mind drift off.
She couldn’t cope with what she’d done. Once the bloodlust, the adrenaline and the hatred had been stripped away, she’d taken a look into the mirror, and she didn’t like what she saw.
There was nothing about it. A kill was a kill, regardless of intention or circumstance. No take-backs, no second-chances. Sure, the law could stand up for you; back home, legal self-defense meant no official punishment. At that point, though, if you felt guilty, you’d be guilty even if the law said you weren’t. In your mind’s eye, the difference wasn’t there.
Even an ancient Princess had a mind. Even she could feel guilt.
I slumped, drained. Maybe I was in over my head.
No. I made a promise, and I was going to see it through.
“Sleep in peace, Luna,” I murmured, patting her shoulder.