Moon. Moon. Stars. Stars. Pony. PONY???
“Why do you want this?”
“The people will love me, I will make them! They thought they could just ignore my wonderful work, how DARE THEY!”
“Luna… sister… why must you do this?” Celestia knew this fight was finally coming to a close, and it had to. If she didn’t stop Nightmare Moon now, then she would bring about an endless night on all of Equestria. But this was her last chance to reach out to her sister, who she knew was still in there somewhere, just lost and confused.
“I, Nightmare Moon, will cause the sun to never rise again; the moon will be all the ponies will see, and I will lead these ponies into a new empire!” Nightmare Moon’s laugh was heard from 100 miles away, haunting the ears of any mare of colt unfortunate enough to hear it. It was a laugh of true evil.
Celestia knew it had to be done. She closed her eyes, not wanting to see what would happen next.
When she opened her eyes to the dark blue mare, they were not Celestia’s eyes. It seemed that light poured out from them as she tapped into the powers of the Elements of Harmony. This sight was formidable enough to cause even the powerful Nightmare Moon to feel fear. The end was near, and both alicorns knew it.
“NIGHTMARE MOON, YOUR CRIMES AGAINST PONYKIND ARE UNFORGIVABLE” The princess of the sun spoke in an otherworldly voice. It echoed, and seemed to fade and get louder within Nightmare Moon’s ears. Surely the Elements were powerful, but were they really capable of such strange wonders? “AS PUNISHMENT FOR YOUR ACTIONS, I HEREBY BANISH YOU TO THE PLACE YOU LOVE MOST—THE MOON!”
Light began to blind the evil alicorn. There was nothing she could do; the light felt like rope that bound her to an invisible stake in the ground beneath her. Try as she might, there was no escape. She closed her eyes. The last thing she heard was “I’m sorry, Luna.” Then…
……
Luna woke up from another fitful night of sleep; that is, if you could call it sleep. She had been in isolation for so long, the days no longer held any value to her. For all she knew she was asleep for years. But it always seemed that the poor ex-princess had the same nightmare every time she closed her eyes.
A thousand years changes a pony, and the mare known as Nightmare Moon was no exception. Hate turned to anger, which turned to grudges, which turned to self-pity, then remorse, then genuine guilt. Luna knew now that she was wrong. All she wanted was to return home.
“Home”, she uttered in her daze. A place where other ponies live with you, where you have loved ones by your side. A place where you were always safe, comfortable, and well fed. A place that she missed more than almost anything. But even more than home, she missed her elder sister. The pony that taught her love and kindness, who never doubted her little sister even when she doubted herself, the pony that she let down in a way that was unforgivable.
She came from time to time to visit. Not in the last hundred years, but she would come by. But that was back when Nightmare Moon still had a hold over Luna. Princess Celestia would come, and determine if her sister was ready to come back, and wait for an answer. Every time it was a ‘no’. But Luna still remembers her sister’s face every time she came. It was a look of disappointment— nay, it was a look of disgust, a look that conveyed to the now remorseful alicorn that she could never come back. The worst part was she didn’t even blame her older sister.
“Sister… I’m sorry… can I please come home? I’ll be good, I promise. I love you...” Luna croaked. Even though she was technically immortal, she could still suffer from things like dehydration. She had been thirsty for as long as she could remember, so she always kept the talking to a minimum. But if there was even the slightest chance that her sister was out there, she would scream her loudest, in her official Canterlot voice, begging for Celestia to take her home. But that was far-fetched. No amount of wishing could save her; she had to stop dreaming that something or someone would just… fall from the sky to come save her.
Luna got up, and decided to go for a walk. It was the first one she had in at least 30 years. Most of her solitude had been spent immobile. She decided to go see the only interesting sight she knew of on this world of a prison.
“Hello again, friends!” The sight of her only two companions always seemed to lift her mood, even if it was only marginally. They were always quiet, but they were company; company that Luna was grateful for. The only problem was they never spoke. Luna didn’t even know what kind of ponies they were.
The first one was a very tall pony with 4 skinny legs, and a white coat of very hard and cold fur. She could tell that she was always cold, because she wore a huge and shiny orange blanket around her body. She was a strange pony, as far as she could see she didn’t have a head. It could be she didn’t see it just because her new friend was so tall. All over her body there were weird lumps. These were something Luna never brought up to the large pony because she was afraid her friend was subconscious of the square-and-triangle abnormalities all over her body. When they first met, she wasn’t even sure she was a pony until she noticed her cutie mark: a rectangle with blue in the top left corner, and red and white stripes surrounding the little blue box. There were stars as well— 50 of them, to be exact (the lonely, blue princess counted them so many times that she even lost count of how many times she’s counted them). Luna figured her name was the one written on her body, so she called her LM “Orion”, or Orion for short.
The other one took a while for Luna to make heads of. He was very flat, and shorter than her. It made her feel nice that she wouldn’t be the smallest one of the group. But he was very wide, almost as wide as Orion. He too had a hard, cold, white fur coat. Where his legs should have been, there were instead 4 large wheels, though no kind of wheel Luna ever saw in all of Equestria. They were shiny in the middle, and surrounded by this disgusting-looking black tar that was very hard and yet very bouncy. He had a face. It was very small, about the size of Luna’s hoof, surrounded by half of a sphere. The head was on top of a very long neck many times the size of the alicorn. She could see the poor colt’s insides. She hoped he wasn’t dead because of this assumed injury, but his body didn’t fade away since they first met 200 years ago, so she didn’t think so. There were lights and little gizmos that didn’t seem to belong, and a thin black circle that she assumed was his heart. She was never any good at pony anatomy. She also found a name for her flat friend- LRV, which she pronounced as “Larry”.
Luna reasoned that the two were sibling for many reasons; they shared the same cutie mark (they must have also taken pride in their cutie mark because she could see a cloth stuck on a pole in the ground that displayed a picture of their red, white, and blue rectangle), they both came to the moon at the same time, and they both stuck together at all times, never moving from each other’s side. In a way, they were an inspiration for the exiled pony; she wished that her and her sister had the same love for each other.
After spending the day (or it could have been many days) with her non-talkative friends, she decided to walk and try to find another crater comfortable enough for her to sleep in. She hadn’t taken a step when she heard a noise right behind her. Luna jumped. The moon was always quiet, so this incessantly loud roar was the first real noise she heard in nearly a thousand years. She turned around.
A tornado. On the moon? Luna took a step closer, and found that this “tornado” was actually a rushing wind that was coming from somewhere— a blue oval in the ground. It was as if the moon was a balloon, and someone poked a hole in the balloon and watched the air come fizzing out. But this didn’t explain WHERE the air came from; as far as Luna could tell from aimlessly digging into her lunar prison, all that was in the moon was more rocks. Finally, something broke Luna from her contemplative silence. Something big. Something scary. Something coming from the hole! She didn’t take time to look at what it was; she turned around and ran back to Orion. She knew her friends would protect her. She hid behind her trusted friend just as she felt blackness creep around the corners of her eyes. She felt herself slipping away. The shock of today was too much, and she was blacking out. As she fell, she could have sworn she heard a voice over the roaring air, which screamed in a metallic, monotone voice “Space? Space?!?! SPACEEEEEE!!!!!!”