"Oh, dear," I said. Then, I shouted down from the parapet of the observatory tower. "Princess!"
Far below me on the surface of the hill and cocooned in a veil of raw shining magic, Luna did not respond. Even from this distance, I could see that her eyes were half-closed with the effort she was expending in pulling the entire sky out of alignment. I took a deep breath and tried again. "Princess Luna," I called out, "what are you doing?"
Luna's eyelids fluttered. She glanced back at me and the sky gave a sickening lurch as it struggled to reassert its natural position. "Ah, Twilight!" she shouted back, pulling a rug of joviality over the strain in her voice. "Perhaps thou hast noticed something a bit 'off' about the stars, yes?"
"You might say that!" I yelled.
"Yes, well, we have decided that we are going to give thou what thou most desire'st tonight: a chance to see thy new star! Is that not wondrous?"
"Princess, I don't think—"
"ENOUGH!" screamed Luna, suddenly, in a voice that literally shook the heavens. "ALL EVENING, I HAVE BEEN TRYING AND TRYING TO REPAY MY DEBT TO YOU, BUT YOU KEEP NOT LETTING ME!"
I took a couple clumsy and unwitting steps away from the edge of the tower. Luna seethed at me, her corona boiling angry black and shedding rays of dark energy skyward. "TWILIGHT SPARKLE," she continued, "YOU WILL OBSERVE YOUR NEW STAR TONIGHT, AND YOU WILL THUS PERMIT ME TO MAKE THINGS RIGHT BETWEEN US, AND YOU WILL ENJOY IT!"
Luna stood, breathing heavily for a moment, and then wrested her composure back into place. "And yes, before thou askest, that is a Royal Command. You are now mandated to be pleased, huzzah!"
I swallowed hard. "Yes, Princess," I said, barely loud enough to carry to the ground.
"Good," Luna called up to me, her aura flaring back to a businesslike slate color. "Now this next part is't a bit tricky, so why dost thou not just run along back to thy telescope and prepare thyself for when we lift the Orion Nebula above the horizon, yes?"
I nodded wordlessly and then stumbled back across the tower roof to my makeshift workstation, taking a few moments to straighten everything once I got there. I was barely keeping it together as it was, and I didn't need clutter on top of everything else. Why do things always go so bad so quickly?
I squeezed my eyes shut and recited the first sixty digits of pi to get steady. All right, Twilight, I said to myself. The night is obviously a wash. Just buckle down, take a quick peek at your star as soon as Luna pulls it visible, and then you can both just go home and bring an end to this charade. I put my eye back to the eyepiece of the telescope and swung it around, trying to orient myself to the off-kilter sky. Tomorrow, I continued, you'll look back at all this and lauaAAAH!
I jumped back from the snarling face in my eyepiece. Thank Celestia that objects in the telescope appear closer than they are, I thought, but what could possibly—
—and then I saw it. Moving steadily through the foliage of the Everfree Forest below was a massive, shaggy, somewhat translucent animal, tall enough that its head just penetrated the surrounding canopy. The creature gazed about at the world with sleepy malice, motes of light flickering beneath its dimly luminous hide. It was one of the star-beasts, a baby Ursa.
"Oh, no," I said. "This can't be happening!" My research with Fluttershy had clearly shown that tonight's stars were in entirely the wrong position for the Ursas to be up and about! Theoretically, this should be impossible…
…unless tinkering with the starfield and shaking it around had confused the creatures enough that one of them had been jostled awake…
I rushed back across to the other side of the tower, the side closest to where Luna was still braced against the tremendous forces she was bringing to bear against the night sky. "Princess Luna!" I shouted. "You have to stop! You're disturbing the Ursa Minors!"
"Ursas Minor," corrected Luna, calling back over her shoulder.
"Yes, sorry!" I said, genuinely mortified by my incorrect pluralization. "You're right. But the point is, you're getting them all riled up!"
"Worry not, young Twilight!" Luna announced. "I have the beast in sight, and it will pose no threat to thou or thy viewing!"
"How can you have the beast in sight?" I yelled. "It's on the other side of the—"
And then my stomach fell as I looked out over the forest on this side of the tower and saw an identical wake of rustling leaves stretching out behind yet another monstrous blue-black form: a second Ursa.
"Oh, no," I repeated. "Luna! That's not the only—"
At that exact moment, Luna's mantle burst into a twining column of angry red spirals. Gale-force winds howled up out of nothingness, ripping the words from my throat and scattering my astronomy notes into a storm of paper. "CHURLISH BEAST!" thundered Luna from below. "ONE THOUSAND YEARS PAST WE DROVE THY KIN INTO THE CAVES BENEATH THE EARTH, AND WE SHALL DO SO AGAIN!"
The angry red column reached up into the heavens like a grasping claw, calling to it a score of meteors. With one forceful gesture, Luna hurled them to the ground in front of the baby Ursa. It recoiled from them, bellowing in fear. "COWER AT THE WRATH OF THE MOON-PRINCESS!" howled Luna, her pegasus wings menacingly outstretched. "HOW DARE'ST THOU DISTURB US! THERE ARE DELICATE ASTRONOMICAL EXPERIMENTS GOING ON!"
I ground my rear teeth for a moment, made one last futile attempt to be heard over the sound of the wind and the meteor strikes and the sheer volume of Luna's Royal Canterlot Voice, and then gave up and summoned magic of my own. If Luna couldn't hear me from this distance, well then, I simply had to close the distance. My horn sparkled with the crisp, headachy power of a teleport spell as I folded space in two and then stepped across…
…directly into open air. I scrambled comically for a moment, flailed out with my hooves, and managed to catch them on the crumbling edge of the observatory tower. My calculations are sometimes wrong, but they're never that wrong — Luna's noisy, radiant magic field had to be warping the Stream completely out of shape. Buffeted by powerful winds, I slowly managed to pull myself back up to the roof of the tower, my mind frantically rolling through calculations that could compensate for the presence of such a huge and chaotic active magical aura nearby. Long story short, I failed.
So take the stairs, I thought, impatiently. I made my way back over to my workstation, which was by now in shambles. I picked up and stowed my telescope in my saddlebags, folded my portable writing desk, counted all the scattered papers and spilled ink as a loss, and then, only then, looked up to see the first Ursa, towering above me.
"Speedy little guy," I muttered, backing away. It growled — an impossibly deep and throaty rumble that shook me from chest to withers — and then lunged at me, paws wide. I yelped and dived for the safety of the trap door leading to the stairs, but was only halfway there when the Ursa's claw caught the last remaining support strut of the old observatory dome, causing the whole huge metal tangle to come crashing down in front of me. I dodged at the last instant, spun practically on the tip of one hoof, and ran off in a new direction, toward the edge of the tower, my writing desk trailing along behind me in my telekinetic field.
When I reached the edge, I bunched my legs beneath me and then leapt for dear life onto the roof of one of the wings that connected the central tower to the outbuildings. After a few seconds of air time, my hooves scraped flagstone and I hit the ground running, charging headlong across the battlemented roof, my nostrils reddening with effort; I was making good progress toward the second tower when a stray meteor from one of Luna's repeated strikes impacted the floor in front of me, sending me tumbling into the blackness below.
For a moment, all was quiet and dark around me. I got up and checked myself for broken bones, and finding none, I stowed my writing desk in my saddlebag and then illuminated my horn with a Violet Flare spell and shone it around the arching second-floor hallway where I found myself. I had just enough time for a bare glimpse of rag-draped walls that had once been a tapestry gallery of some kind before there was a crash from above and the great paw of the Ursa hammered down from the hole created by the meteor hit, the hole I had just fallen through. I spun around and took off at full gallop down the old hallway, leaping and dodging the wreckage of fallen chandeliers as I went. I could hear the ground vibrate outside as the Ursa tracked my movement along the hallway. The Ursa knew where I was, I thought, but at least in here I'd be temporarily saf—
With a crash, the Ursa's paw broke through the fieldstone wall directly ahead of me, scattering rubble everywhere. I screamed, then ducked and slid under its arm, even as its searching claw thudded blindly down mere inches to my left. I skidded on my face for about a yard and then got my feet under me and continued breathlessly running.
For better or for worse, the hallway was ending soon, and in just a few more seconds I found myself on the top interior level of the tower I had been aiming at. I stopped short, scrabbling against the stone floor to keep myself from tumbling down into empty air; a downward-leading spiral staircase hugged the outer wall, but other than that, the entire tower was a big open space, filled with gears and the ruins of complex machinery, probably an ancient Orrery. I had no time to appreciate the wonder of what this chamber must have looked like in good repair. I had to get down to the first floor, down to Luna, and plead with her to stop this madn—
Again, the questing paw of the Ursa smashed through the wall ahead of me. With no time for anything else, I leapt from the staircase onto its forearm and then back down to the stairs beyond. The Ursa's paw struck the twisted remains of the Orrery at the center of the tower and apparently became entangled. It roared in frustration, pulling back and lifting the entire mass of twisted metal to smash repeatedly against the tower wall as it tried to extricate itself. Now dodging falling stones from above on top of everything else, I finally achieved ground level and burst through the half-rotten door leading outside to the cool night air even as the entire tower crumbled behind me. Trumpeting angrily, the Ursa waved its paw about, hopelessly caught up in the metal wreckage it had pulled all the way out of the now-destroyed tower.
I re-located Luna's position on the hill by her eye-searing nimbus and speeded across the jasmine and heather in her direction, arcane winds whipping at my mane as I ran.
"Princess Luna!" I shouted, galloping up to her.
"Oh, hello, Twilight Sparkle!" said Luna, with forced conviviality. A trickle of sweat wended its way down her royal cheek. "We thought that thou might still be up on the tower roof!" Luna turned angrily back in the direction of the Ursa she had been trying to scare away with meteors. "BACK, CREATURE!" she thundered. "BACK!" More meteors rained down from the sky, shaking the earth as they fell.
"Princess, you have to stop this! You're making the Ursas crazy!"
"But what about thy new star?"
"Forget the new star! I hate to be the one to tell you this, but these Ursas are taking us to the farrier here!"
"Marry, wait, 'Ursas'?" said Luna. "We are sorry, there is a second beast? We must have totally missed that fact! Oh, right, the pluralization problem. Very well, let us direct some of heaven's anger thataway!"
"No!" I pleaded. I wanted to throw myself bodily at her, but I wasn't sure if I should be touching her aura in the state it was in. I wasn't even sure I should be standing next to it.
"Come now, Twilight Sparkle, just a few more minutes." Luna tossed her head in the direction of the horizon. "Soon we will have the Orion Nebula up. Dost thou see'st the stars of his belt over there?"
I squinted. "Yes, I see them, but it doesn't matter, Princess!"
"Of course it matters," said Luna, matter-of-factly. "It means we do not have long to go!"
"I don't care how long we have to go! It's the middle of the night, in the spring! I don't want to be able to see Orion's Belt!"
And, suddenly, as if on cue, I could no longer see Orion's Belt. Not because the sky had fallen back into place, but because it had been obscured by a huge mass that had pulled itself head and shoulders out from a distant rocky cleft and then continued to rise.
I had never seen an Ursa Major before, the parent version of the baby Ursas that had been harrying us. I knew all about them: huge, tusked paleoponic things as tall as mountains, who slumbered, sometimes for centuries, in their gargantuan caves deep beneath the hills and rocks of the earth. But no diagram in any ecology textbook could prepare me for the sight of one in the flesh. My knees locked. My mouth went dry. I could do nothing but stare as the paralyzingly huge animal turned to face us, moving with ponderous, nightmarish slowness.
It took a single, league-long step in our direction. Trees flattened beneath its tread. The shock of its footfall scared up birds for miles around, and they rose in huge noisy black clouds into the night.
"Luna?" I finally managed. The Ursa Major took another step toward the observatory, toward us.
"We believe," said Luna, staring straight ahead, eyes flinty, "that we can take this chump."
I finally exploded. "You," I shouted, "are being selfish!"
Luna blinked at me, startled. Her corona of power faltered. The Ursa Major took another earthshaking step.
"All evening," I said, trembling, "I have told you exactly what I wanted from you. Every time you asked me. I never lied. I never hesitated. But somehow, that wasn't enough for you! And now, we’re about to get killed because of it!"
The Ursa Major closed in on our position. I could barely keep my feet now. Rocks fell freely from the ruins behind us. "It turns out," I shouted, "that this never was about me at all! All these elaborate gifts, they're all for you! To make you feel better, to the exclusion of everypony else! And I don't want a present like that!"
"Twilight," said Luna, gently, her corona flickering out; and as it did so, the sky slammed back into its customary position with a dizzying jolt. Then the Ursa Major was upon us. We stood there for a moment, silhouetted against the light of the great glowing star-beast, just two tiny little ponies.
The Ursa Major raised one claw and brought it around in a shining arc, cleaving the main observatory tower in two.
Tons and tons of rock tumbled down at us.
I threw myself at Luna, performed the mother of all teleport calculations in my head, and then my horn flared once and we were gone.
* * *
We watched from a distant hill as the Ursa Major returned the remains of Griffinwatch Observatory to the earth. Then, with an ear-splitting bellow that managed to sound nonetheless tender, it called its two children to itself, comforting the one that Luna had frightened with meteors and, with a strange gentleness, working its other child's paw free of the Orrery-wreckage. The Ursa Major sniffed mightily at the sky, gazed appraisingly at the constellations that had now returned to their proper positions, and then slipped back into the Everfree Forest, its young in tow, vanishing without a trace.
Gradually, the normal noises of the night reasserted themselves.
"Twilight," said Luna. "We… I am… sorry."
I nodded, shivering slightly in the increasing cold, the sweat of my recent exertions now chilling me to the bone. Luna looked me over, and then, with a flash of pale orange from her horn, summoned a warm sheet of dry air that immediately made me feel better.
"What you said back there," continued Luna. "On the Hill."
"Forget it," I said.
"No," Luna insisted. "You were absolutely correct. We… er, I, was so preoccupied with all the bad things I've done to ponykind that I couldn't see clearly. I got so wrapped up in my own need to make amends that I stopped caring what you actually wanted. And that's the worst sort of gift."
I nodded. Even confirming what she herself was telling me would feel a little smug and sacrilegious, so I just played dumb for a while.
Eventually I did speak up. "I'm sorry about your observatory."
Luna shook her head. "Don't be."
"Maybe you could build a new one there. It really is a good location for stargazing, if a little… treacherous."
"I may," said Luna. "Or I may not. In either case it will be something completely new, not a relic of the long-buried past, of somepony who's not me anymore."
"But you are you," I said. "Ever since I was a little filly, I would look up into the sky and see the image of your face in the craters of the lunar surface. My mother told me stories of the Mare in the Moon, and I would sometimes wonder what kind of person she was, if she was ever lonely up there."
"She was," said Luna, quietly.
I shifted a little beneath Luna's comforting wind-blanket. "You were the first thing I ever observed in the night sky, Princess Luna. And ever since I met you, the real you, not your Envy-corrupted shadow, I've wanted to know more about you, about the mare who introduced me to astronomy. And that's a greater gift than anything else I can imagine tonight."
"So… for your boon, we should…"
"Talk," I said. "Like I said before. Get to know each other, just you and me. It's a beautiful clear night, we've got a nice warm breeze going, the threat of death has temporarily subsided, I've still got a little granola, and, last but not least, we're magic unicorn ponies. From where I'm standing, that puts us in a happy place."
"Very well, then,” said Luna. “What would you like to hear about?"
"Tell me about what tonight was like thirteen hundred and forty-four years ago," I said. "Before anything went bad, before Griffinwatch, before Equestria. Tell me about the night the baby star was actually born, all those light-years away."
And so she did.
* * *
"So I summoned up my courage like you told me to and I turned in that rain check and I asked Princess Luna if I could maybe possibly please have a new pet Cloud Rat for my boon."
"Good for you, Fluttershy," I said.
Fluttershy smiled bashfully. "Angel helped." Fluttershy's little pet bunny nodded affirmatively from his position on her back. "And then Princess Luna said, 'A rat? All thou wantest for thy boon is a rat?' And I was about to say no, because I got frightened, but then Angel poked me and I said yes, a Cloud Rat is a very special rat and I've always wanted to love and take care of one. And it seemed like she was about to say something else but then she changed her mind and said, 'A rat it is!' and now I've got my very own cuddly fluffy little Cloud Rat and I couldn't be happier."
"That's such good news, for so many reasons," I said. Then I glanced around. "Um, where's your rat now?"
"Oh, he's at home, settling in for his first night's sleep in a new place. I'm going back there right now to make sure he's not scared and that he has everything his teeny-tiny little heart desires, but I wanted to stop by and let you knew how grateful I was for you talking to the Princess for me last night."
"No problem, Fluttershy. That's what friends are for."
Fluttershy smiled a wee little smile. "See you tomorrow for badminton?"
"Wouldn't miss it," I said, escorting my guests to the door.
After we had said our good-byes, I climbed up to my little sleeping loft overlooking the library proper and started getting ready for bed. The sky was just turning to purple dusk, but it had been a very late and eventful night last night, and I thought it wouldn't hurt me to turn in a little early. Spike had beaten me to it, snoring peacefully in his little basket; truth to tell, he had hardly been conscious at all today, so torpid was he after devouring that entire chest full of diamonds, and then, the chest itself. I didn't mind. Today felt like a rest day.
Tomorrow would be different. Tomorrow was big: studying, studying, badminton with Fluttershy, studying, some card catalog rearrangement, and then some more studying. Oh, and I had two full letters to write. The first letter would be to Princess Celestia, explaining how last night's adventure had taught me that the greatest gift a pony can give to her friends isn't a telescope, or a chest full of jewels, or even a new Cloud Rat pet. The greatest gift a pony can give to her friends is the gift of being a friend, of just being there, listening to them, sharing stories and having fun. The gift of herself. And as I planned my first letter, I thought of what Luna had said about her sister as we walked through the forest together, and I wondered if, somehow, my letter would make Princess Celestia feel less alone. Living forever in the tower of a mountainside castle was not all that different from living in the moon, after all.
The second letter would be to Princess Luna, thanking her for our one not-quite-perfect but unquestionably memorable night together and expressing the hope that we could do it again soon, maybe with a little more talking and stargazing and fewer wild animal attacks. I didn't quite understand why, but I felt somehow that Luna and I had just taken the first steps of a journey together that would lead us to places neither of us could even dream.
That was all for tomorrow. Tonight, I was content to snuggle under my blankets and lose myself to sleep for a while. But before I did so, I trotted over to the small telescope at my upper window and fixed it on the Orion Nebula, just now becoming visible on the horizon line.
I closed one eye and peered through the viewer, quickly locating the object I was searching for, twinkling softly against the violet dusk.
"Happy one thousand three hundred forty-fourth birthday, baby star," I whispered. "One day late."
I crawled into bed and shut out the light.