“This day was going to be perfect,” Celestia said to herself as she confronted the sad, wilted thing that had once been her salad. Her face must have slipped out of her control, showing the disappointment she felt, since Twilight began panicking and apologizing.
The alicorn cut off her student’s babbling stream, “Twilight, this isn’t your fault. I was the one who was late.”
“But if it weren’t for me and Luna and the chocolate you wouldn’t have had to spend all night and all morning in meetings and you didn’t get any sleep last night and I almost started a war and me and Luna fought and I-”
“Twilight.” Celestia used her implacable voice. It had the desired effect and the unicorn stopped talking long enough to breathe again. “These things happen, mistakes get made in diplomacy all the time. It’s how we recover from these mistakes that defines our skill in this arena.”
“But I ruined your salad.” Twilight claimed sorrowfully.
Celestia took the duration of her sigh to concoct a means to diffuse her student’s overwrought state. She didn’t want to spend Twilight’s last day arguing. “If blame must be thrown around, perhaps we could hold the Canidians responsible. I had immediately explained the fact that the offer of chocolate was a simple misunderstanding, it was some of their diplomats who chose to assume that you were my means to assassinate the pup.”
“Okay,” her student replied before lapsing into silence.
Celestia’s frustration mounted as the uncomfortable gap in their conversation grew into an almost visible miasma of discomfort. When she had planned out this lunch with Twilight a week ago her imagination had filled this luncheon with laughing, reminiscence, and a warm sense of familial love. Instead, they spent several minutes avoiding eye contact. Eventually their efforts failed and Twilight dropped her fork from the shock of locking gazes.
Twilight nearly bolted at the sudden clatter. One chagrined laugh and several steps back to the table later she asked her mentor, “Are you sure you aren’t mad at me?”
“Getting there,” Celestia said within the privacy of her own skull. To her student she instead said, “ Absolutely not. Perhaps we should move on to a different topic: How are you and Luna doing?”
Twilight stared mutely in response to her question. Occasionally the mare’s mouth moved, as if finally figuring out what to say, but then she would stall out and close her mouth once again. After several minutes of repeating this cycle, Twilight looked away from Celestia and lied. “Things are going fine.”
Awkward silence reclaimed the room as Celestia nursed her hurt. Twilight wasn’t the best of liars and the alicorn had centuries of experience in politics and diplomacy. It was as obvious as a severed limb that her protege wasn’t comfortable discussing this topic with her. The mares spent the next several minutes hunting through the limp greenery on their plates for anything edible. After discarding her third soggy crouton, Celestia had had enough and tried engaging the unicorn yet again.
“Are you looking forward to the play?”
Twilight immediately brightened up as the change of topic released the mare from the spiral of guilt that was consuming her. “Oh yes, Princess,” she chirped as she levitated a pair of bulging saddlebags into view. “ I’ve brought seven reams of paper, five quarts of ink (each of a different color), and a corresponding quill for each type of ink, backup quills, backup backup quills, b-”
“Twilight,” Celestia once again found herself using the verbal equivalent of force to quell her student. The mare, still stunned into silence, gently lowered the mass of scribing materials as her smile shifted from genuine to strained.
The alicorn wracked her brain, searching for a gentle way to phrase her coming question. “While I am impressed, as always, with your skills in preparation and organization, taking notes during the performance, from the royal box no less, might make some of the actors a bit nervous.”
“Oh, so you want me to rely entirely on my memory for this one.” Twilight looked inordinately pleased with herself as she spoke but then suddenly relapsed back into a guilty hunch.
Celestia, with mounting dread, broached the question hanging in the air, “What’s wrong now Twilight?”
Twilight’s posture straightened, as if giving a recitation. “You shouldn’t test me on this play. It would be cheating. I mean, I would be cheating on the test... of this play... that you’re giving me.”
Celestia’s soul whimpered. “Dear, I am not going to test you on this play.” She was afraid to ask, but had to know and therefore soldiered on into the awaiting minefield. “Why do you think you’d be cheating?”
“I’ve already seen the play, Princess. And since this would be my second time seeing it, the test wouldn’t be an accurate assessment of my recall abilities.”
“This is the first performance of this work, the premiere.” Celestia pointed out, flatly.
“Um, Luna knows the playwright. She got us in to see the dress-rehearsal.”
“Oh...” The master diplomat had no idea what to say in reply to her student’s simple statement. Celestia the pony, however, was quite sure that screaming unflattering names in her sister’s face was the most appropriate response.
“Maybe you could test me on something else?” The violet mare offered with cautious hope.
“Going to this play was not a means by which to assess you, Twilight.”
“Then...why were we going?” Her honest confusion stabbed Celestia in her chest again and again, in time with her dying heart.
Practice and skill kept nothing more than a slight quaver in Celestia’s breath from showing as she explained. “I had thought that, perhaps we could attend the play together, socially.” She watched as her prize pupil struggled to make sense of the simple sentence. Her control once again beginning to slip and she forgot to breathe while waiting for Twilight’s reply.
“Oh...” the mare said to fill the silence as she worked up the nerve to ask, “Why?”
“I can’t let her see me cry,” Celestia schooled herself. “Thoughtless little mares barely out of fillyhood aren’t supposed to make ancient goddesses cry.” As the question hung unanswered in the air, the alicorn’s mind continued to race. “This is my fault, isn’t it? At every turn I’ve created distance between us. When she was a foal I brought her into the palace but instead of raising her, I shoved it all off onto Cadance. As she grew into a young mare, I sent her away to find friends instead of becoming one myself. And when she grew into an adult and sought love, I threw my sister at her. Luna: awkward, shy, alicorn Luna. She’s a princess Twilight could approach, a goddess she could touch without it feeling like desecration.”
“Princess?” Twilight quietly prompted after several seconds.
“She deserves the truth, not the sentimental claptrap you had selfishly planned out for her,” Celestia decided. “There’s something I haven’t told you, Twilight. Something I’ve been holding in for a while now because I thought you finding out would be a disaster. I wasn’t giving you enough credit.”
“Um...Princess?” Twilight’s mood immediately shifted towards the uncomfortable end of the spectrum.
Celestia squeezed shut her eyes and forced the words out. “This... realization that I’ve had. It might scare you,” she humorlessly laughed once though her nose, “I know it scares me. I’ve denied this terrible knowledge and as a result its been eating away at my soul. And if I trust you, truly trust you, then perhaps we can face this together, hoof-in-hoof.”
The alicorn took a calming breath and re-opened her eyes, returning them to her student’s face. She hadn’t been expecting the slack-jawed mien of horror that faced her. “The only way now is forward,” she told herself. She began to explain, padding the coming words with a warm smile, she asked, “Twilight, what do you know of Fate?”
Celestia's ears reflexively pinned themselves against her skull as the mare across the table from her began to chant at the top of her lungs, “La la la la la, I can’t hear you, la la la. If I don’t hear you I can pretend it never happened; LA, LA, LA!!!”
“Twilight!” Celestia shouted over her student’s sudden denial. The unicorn fell silent but had the posture of a hunted animal. The two mares locked eyes for several seconds before Celestia took the initiative. “Twilight, I-”
“LALALALALALALALALALALA!!!” Twilight screamed at the top of her lungs and register as she galloped away. The sound of her shouts faded slowly into echos as she left the dumbfounded alicorn behind.
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“National Emergency is such a delightfully broad label,” Celestia mused to herself. It could be invoked to instantly evacuate whole towns, authorize troop movements, establish secret courts and, in this case, to requisition a lovely three-tier cake from the palace kitchens. The alicorn sighed in response to the blissfully sweet solace she found as she consumed the entire top tier by herself, ala mode of course.
Condensing out of a cloud of darkness, her sister arrived at her table. Celestia concluded from the nightcap and bunny slippers that her sister, the mare of darkness, had been rousted out of bed by Twilight.
Sounding like a villain from a one-bit paperback novel Luna boomed, “How DAREST thou?!”
“I have made a sizable donation to the Equinitarian Society in exchange for their cake. That is how I ‘darest,’ dear sister.” Celestia’s sardonic tone was far from diplomatic.
“Cake? I carest not for thy-” Luna began to reply but then she noticed the state of the room and of her sister. The frosting and melted cream were the most obvious substances coating Celestia’s muzzle but there were salty tears mixed in with the sugar and fat. Out of the corner of Luna’s eye she saw the leafy green remnants of two high-velocity salads impacting the far wall. Turning her attention back to her sister, the dark alicorn spoke with a tone heavy with caution and care. “Tia, what happened?”
“The salad disappointed me.”
“And this ‘salad’ is why Twilight is galloping in circles around my room saying ‘ew’ over and over?”
“Of course she ran to you. Who else would she turn to here? She has no other friends or family within the palace.”
Luna’s ears turned back as she detected the simmering anger coloring her sister’s words. “Tia, what does that mean?”
“Luna? How do you think Twilight sees me?”
“She respects you, deeply. I’d even go so far as to say she reveres you.”
“Can you revere a friend? Your mother?”
“I don’t understand, Tia. What happened between you and Twilight?”
“She merely made some things clear to me,” Celestia answered in a fey tone.
“Sister, she’s a grown mare now. I’m sorry if you find aspects of our relationship disturbing but she can’t stay your innocent little foa-”
“Oh stars and sky, stop,” Celestia cut her off before Luna could ruin the cake and ice cream for her. “As odd as it may seem, not everything is about you or your sex life.”
“Then what are you talking about? Twilight’s going crazy upstairs and you aren’t much better.
“She’s growing up, Luna, and no longer needs me like she once did. I had planned on spending this afternoon with her but it sounds like she would prefer to spend it with you.”
“Tia, I-”
Again she cut her sister off, “I only ask that you send her to me in time to join me for sunset. Could you do that for me?”
“I suppose, but-”
“Good. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to the baths for a good soak.”
“But Tia, I-”
“Ta-ta!” Celestia said in a sing-song voice that she knew left no opening for reply. As the great, white mare got up and trotted away from the ruins of her brunch, the remaining two tiers of cake glowed within the grip of a golden aura and followed her out the door.
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The sun, red and swollen, hung above the western horizon and Celestia was locked eye to eye with her incandescent charge. The burning orb wanted to set but she, as its master, refused to allow it. She would give Twilight one more minute. Ethically, that was the longest she could delay sunset in order to buy her student time to arrive.
As if in response to that thought, she heard the sound of a small hoof knocking timidly upon her bedroom door. Not bothering to speak, Celestia simply opened the door from where she stood on the balcony. She did not turn her head to face her pupil. She told herself that there wasn’t any point to seeing the mare’s contrite but fearful countenance. So she waited, immobile as her garden statuary and stained ruddy in the sun’s carmine glow.
“Princess?” Twilight said from two steps behind her.
“That’s her name for me, isn’t it?” Celestia thought in response. She then wondered if she’d ever heard Twilight speak her name without that title.
“Come forward, Twilight. I want you to set the sun with me,” Celestia answered.
She could feel the mare relax as the memory of the disastrous brunch was eclipsed by her student’s enthusiasm for obscure magics. The dour expression that had become a permanent fixture on the Celestia’s lips rebelliously softened as Twilight burbled on excitedly about the thaumaturgical forces required to change day to night. The alicorn gestured with one of her massive wings where the student should stand: in front of her, eyes towards the west, and with her back to Celestia.
Twilight moved into position and Celestia’s eyes drifted to the back of the mare’s violet-furred skull. “Just a bit lower... there: the Foramen Magnum,” she thought. The spot where the brain-stem exits the skull and enters the spinal column was where she planned to place her lance of fire. She had mentally rehearsed this moment time and time again over the last week and knew that a single, concentrated beam of light would painlessly excise the aberrant unicorn from the world of the living.
Shaking her head to regain focus. Celestia became aware that Twilight had not actually stopped talking the entire time she was gazing at the back of her neck and plotting her murder. Her blood thundered in her ears as each beat of her alicorn heart brought the death of this day, of her pupil, and of everything that made her equine, drew nearer. Celestia couldn’t actually decipher any meaning in the words pouring forth from Twilight but she could hear the joy of them. Her protege, her pupil, her student... she had hoped to be something more but her own cowardice had prevented that option.
She had wanted to be a friend, a confidant, a maternal figure but with the distance she placed between herself and every mortal creature on this world such things were impossible. Cadance loved Twilight and was loved in return. Luna loved Twilight and was loved in return. “Do I love Twilight?” Celestia asked herself as she began the flow of magic that would set the sun. As her student’s magic joined hers and followed its pattern she wondered, “Or do I just want to be loved by Twilight too?”
She could feel the unicorn’s magic reaching out to the sun, she barely had to do any of the “work” herself in this tandem process. All Twilight needed was for Celestia to guide her spell into the most efficient form and the sun lept to follow her commands. Celestia followed her plan, twisting the shape of the casting out of the optimum configuration, using the thaumaturgical weight of the sun to yank Twilight’s power out of control for the required moment of defenselessness. Having preserved her own strength, Celestia then gathered her power into the required needle of fire and placed its tip against the neck belonging to whom she now realized was her surrogate daughter.
Celestia screamed as the category Twilight filled within her heart became clear. She screamed because she could no longer continue. She screamed because of what she had almost done. She screamed because she had killed the world. And she screamed because she should never have let things ever get to this point. The great white mare stumbled away from her intended victim and used her wings to cover her face in shame and sorrow.
As the last sliver of sun slipped over the horizon, Twilight’s magic was freed from the snare the solar alicorn had devised. The shock of the magical feedback knocked the violet unicorn to her knees and she reeled as Celestia’s screams grew beyond mortal limits.
“Celestia!” Twilight shouted, shocked and terrified.
“And now, now of all times she uses my name!” the goddess wordlessly raged as she shifted from screaming to gagging on her own hypocrisy and cowardice.
“Princess! What happened? What’s wrong?” The mare she loved as a daughter shouted at her. Having regained her hooves Twilight approached her would-be murderer with concern for her well-being.
“GET OUT!!! Celestia snarled as she dropped her wings, exposing her true face. The masks had all been burnt away in her rage and grief and Twilight gasped at the powerful emotions laid bare. “As she should,” the broken goddess thought, “for I am a monster.” She shouted, “GO!!!” as loud as she could at the tiny mare, “RUN!!!”
Run she did, but Twilight paused at the doorway to look over her shoulder at her mentor. Fear and worry warred in her eyes.
Unable to contain her rage and self-loathing anymore, Celestia turned her gathered power against her surroundings. She glowed a blinding white and anything made of paper or cloth burst into flame. Twilight dived through the doorway, tail smouldering, and slammed the portal shut behind her. An instant later the diarch’s massive bed slammed against the thick, bleached oak, preventing anyone from entering the building inferno. Celestia then smashed, crushed, blasted, and burnt every object within that room because it was impossible to do the same to herself no matter how badly she wanted to.