Have you ever been to the moon? No? Seen pictures of it? Well, then you should know how lonely of a place it is. To be banished there for eternity by your own sister on top of that is absolutely heart-wrenching. If I could have seen, I would have spent my days staring back at Equestria and praying that my sister take me back home. Instead, all I could do was the latter part of that statement, and I cried while doing it. It seemed that that’s all I could do, just stare at nothing and cry and wish I was home. I didn’t care how right my actions were, I wanted my loving big sister, my elaborate bedroom, my kind servants helping me when I needed it, and just ponies around me. Here, I didn’t have to be able to see to know I was alone. And after two days here, I was hungry and thirsty as well. I screamed and thrust my face into the moon dust coating the ground.
Suddenly, I smelled hay and water. I knew I must be delusional by now, because nothing could grow on the moon. The water, I supposed, was a possibility, but not hay. No. I was crazy.
“Dear alicorn sister, won’t you eat and drink for us? You’re the first visitor we’ve had in millennia. Please, let us treat you like a guest.”
I spun around blindly, trying to determine the source of the voice. “W-who’s there? What are you? What do you want?”
“Be calm, child. We are the stars, and we wish to treat you like a guest, as any good host would.”
I sat down, my nerves soothed. “The stars, huh? I take it you guys still have magic?”
They collectively chuckled. “Yes, dear sister. How else would we have conjured you this food?”
I lay down, eating and taking small bites to savor the taste. “So my sister didn’t take everything from you guys when she stuck you up here?” I refused to say her name after what she did to me.
I could sense a sort of sadness floating about them as I mentioned my sister and her deeds. “No, she did not…”
“Sorry I mentioned it,” I apologized.
The silence that followed that unnerved me, so I felt the need to speak more. “Well, at least you have me here now! Now you won’t be so alone and neither will I!” That last part was something I realized as I was talking, and it cheered me up. At least my eternity on the moon wouldn’t be lonely. Probably boring, as we’d tired of each other’s company, but not lonely.
“Yes,” the stars agreed, “now there is a friend.”
In the presence of all these stars—most of them ancient, older than myself or Celestia, I felt like a little filly and I began to act like one, enjoying the newfound emotional freedom I felt when away from Celestia.
“Child,” one of the oldest stars began, “would you care to show us what new magic has popped up in Equestria these days?”
“I would, I really would,” I told him, “but my sister put a hole in my horn, so all my magic just leaks out.”
“Oh, that won’t do,” Ella, one of the other stars, spoke up. I could feel her essence draw closer as she examined the state I was in. “Dear me!” she exclaimed. “You’ve got dried blood all in your eyes too, you poor dear!”
“Yeah…” I trailed off. I tried not to think about, you know, seeing and everything. The way I figured it, Celly had robbed me of my sight for good.
“I have just the thing that’ll fix you right up,” Ella told me.
I felt my face dawn an expression of surprise. “You can do that?”
“Of course, dear. A little magic can fix anything,” Ella stated with certainty.
I felt the magic course all over my body, first gathering in the hole in my horn and causing the flesh, muscle, and bone to grow back where it had used to be. Then, the magic flowed to my eyes and I could feel the caked-on blood sizzling and evaporating into nothingness. I blinked, finally able to see my new friends, and do so without the feeling of my horn wobbling all over, threatening to topple off my head, it seemed. I couldn’t identify each star’s location yet, but I knew all of their approximate areas.
Turning toward Ella’s area, I bowed. “I am eternally grateful to you for your deeds.”
“A little to the right, dear” Ella chuckled. I corrected myself, blushing in embarrassment. “That’s better,” she said. “And it was no problem. We all have common ground here. We’ve all been banished for eternity by Celestia.”
“About that…” I began to think. “If all of us have magic now, why don’t we escape this place and return to our Equestria?”
“Don’t be silly, that takes quite a bit of magic. And we don’t want to deal with Celestia anymore. We’re happier here, with our families.”
“I’m not happier here,” I cried, planting my hoof firmly in the ground. “Those Equestrian ponies—“for emphasis, I pointed my hoof at Equestria “—are all suffering. Celestia’s rule is worse than ever. She becomes more tyrannical by the day, and I’ve had ponies come to me and ask me to take her place somehow. She may have imprisoned you here then, but now, if she found you in Equestria, she’d just kill you.”
“And what’s the big difference?” came the reply.
I sighed in frustration. “The difference is that ponies are dying! They’re dying left and right for no reason, no reason at all!”
“There is not enough magic in anyone but Celestia to teleport between planets, or in this case, a planet and a satellite, but combined, we may be able to help.”
“Oh, thank you!” I gushed. “Thank you so very—“
“But…”
“But?” I asked.
“The magic it will take to keep you alive during your stay here will take its toll on our resources. It will take us around a thousand years to be able to send you home.”
“A thousand years is better than an eternity,” I said firmly.
“So be it,” they said, “but there is something we’d like in return, sister alicorn—“
“Please,” I interrupted, “call me Luna.”
“Fine. Sister Luna, would you do us the favor of telling us why your sister imprisoned us here and why you did nothing to stop her?”
“I can,” I told them. “You see, Celestia and I had just begun our rule of Equestria. She didn’t want anyone to rise against her and take away her control. She knew that if anyone could, it was an alicorn. She acted on what she thought was best and imprisoned every alicorn in Equestria, aside from herself and me, in space, forcing their magic to radiate off them and create various items so that they could survive. To Equestrians, she had me give a speech saying I’d cast a spell that hung glowing orbs in the sky and that they were called stars, which was a lie, but it wasn’t a problem because she wasn’t the one telling it. Nowadays, pegasus and unicorn marriage is forbidden and the children are sentenced to death, no matter if the child is an alicorn or not.
“As for why I didn’t defend you, I was too young to understand what was happening. I was still a filly, and I thought my sister was right. I would question her every now and again about what she had done, but she always had a justification that my young mind accepted. Had I been as wise as I am now, I would have tried my best to put a stop to her. I am truly sorry for my ignorance.” I bowed to the stars to show my surrender and repentance. If it hadn’t been for me, they may not even be here, and for that, I will always be sorry.
“Rise, young Luna,” the stars told me. “You have done well enough in our eyes. You did only what you thought was right, not what was selfish as your sister did. We will uphold our end of the deal, only as long as you try your best to see to the overthrow of your sister.”
I nodded. “I will, brother and sister alicorns.”
And with that, the longest waiting game known to ponies began.