//------------------------------// // A Royal Meeting // Story: A Pony Called Death // by thehalfelf //------------------------------// A Royal Meeting     Shortly after, the two mares left the tree library, waving goodbye to the lavender librarian as she closed the door behind them.  Roseluck turned to her daughter, pulling the bag given to them by Dashing Cloud out of her saddlebag.     “Well, now or never I suppose.  Shall we see what’s inside?” she asked.     Rose Petal shrugged before darting forward and snatching the bag from her mother.  Ignoring her mostly token protest, the white mare opened the bag, taking a peek inside.  “Ok,” she said, “I think we’re going to need a table or something before we can look at all this stuff...”     “Let me see it,” Roseluck said.  Rose Petal handed over the bag.  After taking a quick look, she placed it back in her saddlebags.  “Yeah, I think you’re right.  Come on back to the shop, might as well get some more work done.”     Rose Petal jokingly rolled her eyes.  “Right, because working is what I wanted to do today.”     Before long, the two ponies walked through the door of the flower shop, where Lily was standing behind the counter, grinning like her usual self.     “Hiya,” she said in her overly cheerful manner, “How was the trip to the library?”  The two ignored her, making a beeline straight to the back room.  Lily frowned, walking out from behind the counter, and flipping the sign to “closed” before following her family into the back.     “Fine, don’t talk to me,” Lily quipped as the other two dumped out the items from the bag onto the desk.     “Sorry Lily,” Rose Petal said, giving her aunt a half-hug from her side of the desk.  “I must be a little preoccupied is all.”     “‘So kiddo,” she said, “looks like your mom is in inventory mode,” she said, taking note of the cream mare pouring over the contents of the bag.     Roseluck was muttering under her breath.  “Ok, one map to the Canterlot Castle.. a note to get us past the guards... enough bits for two round trip tickets, and maybe for some food...”     Lily nudged her niece, and made a shushing motion with one hoof.  Walking as quietly as she could, she snuck up behind Roseluck, who was focused solely on the things in front of her.  Getting her muzzle as close to her sister’s ear as possible, Lily said in a somewhat loud voice, “Hiya sis, whatcha lookin’ at?”     Lily jumped back as Roseluck shot up into the air.  The cream mare spun around and glared at her sister.  “What was that for?!  I was focusing!”     “I know,” Lily giggled.  “Couldn’t resist.  Sorry.”     Roseluck turned on her daughter, who was laughing uncontrollably on the other side of the desk.  “What’s so funny?!”     “T-the look on your face!”  Rose Petal gasped between the shaking gales of her laughter.  “I wish I had a camera!  That was great!”     Roseluck hunched back over her desk, hiding a light blush and very conscious of the location of her sister.  “Whatever you two.  Leave me alone...”     Rose Petal and Lily shared a look before dashing around and wrapping the other pony in the middle of a hug.  “We’re sorry!” the two said in a sing-song voice.     “Yeah, whatever,” Roseluck grumbled before turning back to the desk.  “You two are going to be the death of me...” *****     Roseluck had explained the plan as she waited with her daughter at the Ponyville train station.  As soon as they stopped in Canterlot, they would go talk to the princess, then spend the rest of the night and the next day exploring the city.  She had always wanted to go, and now she had an actual reason--and the bits--to do it.  Rose Petal was actually somewhat excited as well.  A lot could come from this trip, and the train ride couldn’t be too bad, right?     Rose Petal was wrong.  So very, very, wrong.  Two hours.  Two whole, Celestia-forsaken hours stuck in a small carriage with her mother.     “Rosieee,” Roseluck was saying as the train clacked and bounced over the tracks, “you never come visit anymore.”     Rose Petal sighed in exasperation.  “Mom, I spend all day working with you at the shop.  I come over every Saturday to have dinner with you, Aunt Lily, and Aunt Daisy.”     “It’s not the same,” Roseluck whined, crossing her hooves.  “Why can’t you just come over to say hi?  Drop by unannounced.  You do it for Lily.”     “Yes, I do, but Lily doesn’t spend all day working at the shop with me now, does she?”     Roseluck sighed.  “No, I suppose not...”  The cream mare looked out the window, ears drooping.     Oops.  “Well,” Rose Petal begun, trying to salvage the situation, “we have a two hour train ride... What do you want to talk about?”     Her mother turned around, beaming.  “Well...” she rubbed her chin with a hoof, feigning a long, intensive thought process.  When she pulled her hoof away, however, all that remained was an evil grin.     Oh goddess, what have I gotten myself into?  Rose Petal thought to herself in the instant before her mother spoke.   Meet any nice stallions lately?  Or maybe a mare...” she added with a wiggle of her eyebrows. *****     Roseluck raised her hoof to knock on the door to the restroom, trying hard not to look amused.  “Ok Rosie, I get it, I won’t ask you about your love life. Just please come out?  You’ve been in there almost an hour and the other passengers are getting a little... upset.”     A bolt slid back, revealing the white earth pony within.  She leveled a stern glare at her mother.  “Promise?”     Roseluck nodded, partly to hide the smile on her face.  With a grim nod, Rose Petal left the bathroom, ignoring the cheers of the ponies in line, and walked back to their compartment.  She took her seat as her mother walked in a few moments later, remnants of a grin still etched on her muzzle.     “Ok, I get it,” the elder earth pony said, proud of the lack of mirth in her voice.  “I won’t bother you about that anymore.”  Roseluck cast her mind about, frantically searching for another topic.  “So, how is your roommate?  What was her name... Something Shine?”    “Silver Shine,” Rose Petal grumbled from her seat without looking away from the window.     Roseluck sighed.  “Hon, are you really going to be upset with me?  I was just teasing... mostly.”     “No, I’m not upset... just kind of nervous,” Rose Petal said, turning to face her mother.     “You know we can always go back and tell Princess Luna that you won’t do it.”  Roseluck moved over to sit next to her daughter, and put a reassuring hoof on her withers.     “All passengers, next stop in South Canterlot Station is in five minutes.  I repeat, next stop in Canterlot, five minutes.”     Rose Petal grinned over at her mother.  “Guess that solves that problem doesn’t it?”     “Yeah,” Roseluck replied with a smile that didn’t quite stretch up to her eyes.     True to the conductor’s word, five minutes later saw the train slowing to a halt right outside of Canterlot’s southern station.  Rose Petal and Roseluck walked out of the train into the sunset and began making their way through the streets and crowds of the city up to the looming monolith on the top of the mountain, the Canterlot Castle.     Both mares stared up at the magnificent white stone battlements towering above them.  In fact, they were so entranced they almost ran head-first into the ponies in shining gold armor standing before the great portcutlis.  One of the guards looked down at the new arrivals who were shaking their heads, ears ringing from colliding with the armored ponies before them.  “State your business.  The castle is closed to those not invited,” one of them said in a flat, monotone voice.      “I... uh... we...” Roseluck stuttered.  Shaking her head to gather her thoughts, she reached into her saddlebags, pulling forth the note given to them by Dashing Cloud earlier that day.  “We have a note, sir,” she said, handing it over.             The guard stepped forward and took the note from the small mare, looking it over with a blank gaze.  At long last, he raised an eyebrow.  “Is this some kind of joke lady?”             “N-No of course not!”  Roseluck said, ears folding flat.             “Listen, we get stuff like this all the time.  A badly forged note isn’t going to get you in so you can bother the princesses.  Get lost.”  The guard threw the note back, then moved to stand with his brethren in front of the gate.             Rose Petal blinked.  Fueled with rage at the situation and the impudence of youth, she stormed forward until she was muzzle to muzzle with the guard, though he stood a good head above her.             “Now wait just a minute,” she said in a voice laced with venom.  “You mean to tell me that I sat down to have a conversation with Death, then with Twilight Sparkle, and came all the way up here, so we could speak to Princess Luna about something you probably aren’t even smart enough to understand just to get turned away by a guard who woke up on the wrong side of the bunk this morning?”             The guard narrowed his eyes.  “You better be careful who you speak to like that, citizen,” he said in a dangerous tone.             “No, you better be careful who you talk to!”  Rose Petal plopped down onto her haunches on the ground.  “We came here to talk to Princess Luna and Mortis, and here is where we are going to stay until we do!”             The guard raised an eyebrow, looking over towards Roseluck.  “Ma’am, control your friend, please.  I don’t want to have to send anypony to the dungeons today.”             Though Roseluck was usually a very good, law abiding pony, the thinly-veiled threat to her daughter caused her to march up, and plant herself on the ground alongside the white pony.  Thankfully, before anything else happened, the next shift of guards walked out of the castle to the gates to relieve the ones currently being harassed by the residents of Ponyville.             “What seems to be the problem here?”  One of them asked in a deep voice.  Rose Petal looked up, noticing that this guard wore silver armor instead of the golden plate of the ones on their side of the gate.             “Well,” the golden-armored guard said.  “We have a couple miscreants here who want to get in.  They say they have a note from somepony named Dashing Cloud, and an audience with Princess Luna.”             The silver-armored guard’s ears perked forward.  “You are Rose Petal and Roseluck, yes?”             “Uh-huh,” the two mares said in unison.             The silver guard smiled, opening the gate from the inside.  “You two are a little early, but I believe Princess Luna is waiting in her chambers for you.  Simply go up the grand staircase in the main hall, swing a left, then follow the corridors until you see the door with the big crescent moon on it.  Then, talk to the guards there.  They will let you in.”             He turned his attention to the golden guards on the outside of the gate as Roseluck followed her daughter into the castle grounds, swinging their heads around in awe of the architecture.  “You two are relieved.  Head back to the barracks.” *****      Rose Petal strolled slowly through the massive arching hallway leading to the main hall.  She thought the walls and the battlements and gate were impressive, but they were barely in the same league as the castle’s interior.  Massive pillars of marble veined with some sort of granite shot up to the lofty ceiling above.  Arches of the same type of odd material spanned the gap between the symmetrical pillars, bordering the detailed murals painstakingly painted onto the ceiling.            Between the pillars sat massive stained glass windows that stretched from the floor to the ceiling.  Rose Petal assumed the abstract, stylized chunks of glass depicted important scenes of Equestrian history, but she didn’t really pay that much attention in school, so she wasn’t sure.             The hallway wasn’t nearly as long as either mares imagined.  It ended in a circular room a few hundred paces from the gate to the courtyard.  A staircase swung upwards, hugging the wall and more of the strange windows.  Its twin circled up the other side, meeting its brother in a sort of landing.  In the middle of the two staircases stood a great door.  One side was emblazoned with a fresco of the sun, the other with a moon.             The country ponies slowly trotted into the grand room, receiving odd looks from guards and ponies awaiting audience alike.  “Um, excuse us,” an embarrassed Roseluck said to both the guards and the other high class ponies.  “We, uh, we have an audience with Princess Luna.”     The two guards flanking the entrance to the grand chamber looked at each other and, after seeing the note offered by a trembling cream hoof, nodded.  With a little curtsey, the two mares slowly ascended the stairs, much to the disdain of the ponies below.     “What is so special about them that they have a personal audience with Princess Luna, hmm?”  one asked a stone-faced guard in the peculiar accent used mostly by some upper-class ponies.     “Return to your place in line,” Rose Petal heard one of the guards reply as she swung a left, heading into another opulent hallway.  This one was much more subdued.  The white marble of the entranceway now had stripes of dark blue and gold fanning through it, twisting and overlapping in a random pattern.   Arches still bridged the gaps across the vaulted ceilings, but the murals decorating the space between arches was absent.     “Real fancy place they got here,” Roseluck remarked as the duo plodded through the hallway, searching for Princess Luna’s chambers.     “Uh mom, it’s the castle,” Rose Petal responded, eyes scanning side to side.     Roseluck giggled nervously.  “Yeah...  It’s still nice though.”     Rose Petal smiled.  “Yeah it is.”  It took some doing, but eventually they found themselves outside a door flanked by guards.  They looked at each other, both noticing the thing crescent moons carved into the door at the same time.  As they were about to approach and ask for admission, a white unicorn burst out the doors, rudely shouldering the guards aside.     “Get out of the way!” he said as he pushed through.  Spotting the two mares, he glared.  “Commoners?  What are you doing here?”  he asked with an air of disdain.     Rose Petal smiled.  “Hello, we have an audience with Princess Luna.  Is she in there?”     “No,” he scoffed.  “Besides, even if she was, I would not tell you.  You did not address me by my proper title.”     “Uh...”  Rose looked over at her mother who shrugged.  “Sorry... sir?”     He tisked.  “Stupid ignorant country ponies.  What do they possibly teach you instead of the names of your rulers?  My name is--”     “Prince Blueblood,” a regal voice called with an icy tone from down the hallway.  Everypony in the room turned towards the voice, and everyone but the white unicorn dropped into a deep bow.     “But Aunt Celestia,” Blueblood whined in a petulant voice, “they didn’t know who I am!”     “And after your stunt at the Grand Galloping Gala last year, you should be happy about it!  Honestly, being that big of a mule towards one of the guests, an Element of Harmony and friend of my student, no less!”  Celestia pointed a hoof down the hallway.  “Leave us.”     “But Aunt--”     “Now.” Her eyes narrowed dangerously, making Rose Petal want to flee too, though she wasn’t on the receiving end of the glare.  Blueblood turned, blonde tail practically between his legs as he walked down the hallway, trying to put on an air of grace. Celestia waited until he turned down another hallway before giving her guests an apologetic smile.     “Sorry you had to see that,” she said, “Prince Blueblood gets a little... uptight at times.  Now, what can I help you with?”     Roseluck blinked.  “Uh... t-thank you, Your Highness, but, uh, we actually came for a meeting with Princess Luna.” Celestia’s brow furrowed for a second.  “Ah, you must be the candidate to replace Dashing Cloud as Death, yes?”     “Actually, no, Your Majesty,” the cream pony said.  “This is the candidate,” she said, motioning to Rose Petal, who gave a meek wave.     Celestia smiled once again.  “Well, pleasure to meet you miss...?”     “R-Rose Petal, Princess.  And this is my mother, Roseluck,” Rose Petal replied, bowing once again.     The alicorn rolled her eyes, though neither mares noticed.  “Pleased to meet you both. You’ll find Luna’s room is down the next hallway.  Just take a right, and it’ll be at the end of the hall.”  She smiled down at Rose.  “I look forward to working with you in the future, Miss Rose Petal.  But for the moment, I must return to court.  Have a pleasant day.”     Both mares stayed with their muzzles to the ground until the Princess was well out of sight.  They raised as one, and stared at each other before letting out filly-esque squeals.  “Meeting both princesses in one day!”  Roseluck exclaimed, pointing her daughter down the indicated hallway.  “Jeez, you might have a real high-profile job here, Rosie.”     Rose Petal grinned.  “Yeah.  I’ll see if they’ll send you and your sisters a card for Hearth’s Warming.”     Roseluck laughed as they turned right.  The laughter died abruptly as the two stood face to face with the guards flanking another door engraved with the crescent moon.  The ends resided firmly on the right side, swooping across to meet in the middle of the left.  Two guards flanked the door, silver armor gleaming in the light.     “Ready?”  Roseluck asked.     Rose Petal nodded, then looked to the guards.  They nodded, so she raised a hoof to knock.