Chapter 30
Celestia awoke with a start from strange dreams. She tried to go back to sleep, but could not fight her restless mind. The four friends that slept around her did so soundly and placidly. She rose quietly and walked to the door of the tent, where she anticipated the customary rifle-barrel to the face. Strangely, the guards were not there.
She advanced cautiously into the “road” between rows of camouflaged tents. There was no challenge, nor even a stir. Perhaps she was still dreaming. In her tyrant days she had been wary of her nighttime thoughts, as Luna could, with limitations, shape the dreams of others. She had learned to perform a dissolution spell in her sleep and cast out illusions. She tried it now, but nothing happened.
A chill breeze swept through the camp. The discomfort hardly bothered her; she wasn’t here to relax. She seemed to remember looking for something in her actual dreams. “I shouldn’t expect to find it now, but since I’m already out here,” she figured, and trotted through the camp. She looked alertly down the green canvas isles for anything that might move in the moonlight. Were there no soldiers on watch that night?
At last another being intruded on her lonely walk. The face of the pony was shaded by a hat—seeing the particular hat, she recognized Applejack as the earth pony approached. “Major,” the little alicorn acknowledged.
“Celestia,” Applejack addressed squarely.
“You have trouble sleeping too?” Celestia attempted to relate.
“Actually I wanted to have a real talk with you,” came the major’s unexpected reply. “But not out here, you’ll catch a cold. It’s like a damn early winter.” She led the way back to her tent and ushered the duskling inside.
With the flap closed there was some relief. The tent was divided into sections, and conveniently there were no other occupants in this section, nor could snores be heard from the rest of the enclosure. The dispossessed ruler sat on a blanket, but did not pull it around herself. She didn’t want to pretend she was more welcome than she was.
The major did not sit or relax her demeanor. She forced eye contact with Celestia; she tried to look normal but could not really hide the truth-stare. “What happened to you?” she questioned.
Celestia was not comfortable with the situation, but she could see the value of getting Applejack to understand, so she narrated, “Something began to haunt me in the palace. At first I thought it was Luna, but it wasn’t. Then I thought it was just me, but I started to think things I wouldn’t; I started to feel guilty. Then I was overcome by whatever it was. It was ancient,” the old alicorn attested. “I was young and it was ancient. It took the sun away from me and boiled me down to this,” she indicated her own feeble body. “I burn. I’m dying and I burn in sunlight. Do you know what that’s like? What am I without sunlight?”
“How different are you?” the major inquired.
The false pegasus had wondered just that for quite some time. “I’m not the same, but I’m not as different as I would like to be. Whatever it was showed me how horrible I was, and made me realize there are some good things, things worth not being that way for.”
“Why wouldn’t you get that from Luna?” Applejack asked perceptively. “From what she told me, she really tried to help you. After the Elements, she endured you for the longest time, patiently tryin’ to show you how she’d changed, and tryin’ to make you want to. Why didn’t you listen to her?”
“Why not?” returned the once-great Empress. “Because I knew better. She was my inferior and she must have still been jealous—that’s what I thought. I don’t think I was capable of hearing what she was trying to say.”
“What do you think Luna should do with you?” came the next question.
“She has to help me raise the sun,” Celestia replied simply.
Applejack skeptically enquired, “How’s she supposed to do that?”
“If I’m restored I can do it,” Celestia explained. “Twilight tried to help, but she used dark magic and brought back the monster I was, and it was killing me. She said that was the only way, but I consulted an artifact, a book. It showed me a place in the mountains; there was a ruined city in front of three peaks and in the middle mountain was a cave. It’s a special cave or something. If we raise the sun to shine into it, I can be restored for real.”
Applejack asked again, working for a real answer, “What would she do with you if there was another way to raise the sun?”
The smoky prisoner shifted nervously, and replied, “I’m scared of what she’ll do as it is. It’s just good for me there isn’t. I know it’s not fair.”
“Do you really regret what you did?” the major delved necessarily.
“Yes,” Celestia answered sincerely. “Yes I do. I ruined everything I touched, and I touched everything. My regret doesn’t help anyone, though, unless I really can save the world.”
“Because you got caught or because it was bad?” the major probed. “Do you even know what bad is?”
“Because I’m so bad and I hurt so many ponies,” she attested, “but I don’t know what bad is. The only thing I can think of for sure is me. I don’t know what makes something bad, but I know what I’ve done is horrible. I’m pretty fubar.”
“What part bothers you the most?” Applejack wondered.
Celestia had to think about that one, rejecting options as they came. “I guess I should say something about one of the cities I destroyed, or about the ponies I oppressed and fucked with their minds for thousands of years—shit, maybe what I did to the cows—but that’s not really it. The part that affects me the worst is everything I did to make my sister hate me. I’ll be alone forever now.”
Applejack scraped her hoof on the ground tentatively. “What part bothers you the most?” she repeated.
“Why are you asking me this?” the storied alicorn reacted. She had hoped the questions would not cut so deep. She sighed and answered straight, “Really, it’s what I did with my own hooves. The ponies I kidnapped—the fillies, because it’s most like what… Because it was so personal. I can’t forget them. Some of them no pony remembers, but I can see their faces.”
“Why?” came that ultimate question. “Why did you do all this?”
Celestia answered offhand, “It was all selfish, of course. I did whatever would make me happy. I wanted every pony to love me, but they didn’t really and I guess I hated them for it. I couldn’t risk anyone becoming more powerful than me again. The reason I…” she stopped herself. “I can’t just tell you my reasons for doing some of those things. You wouldn’t understand.”
Applejack let it slide and continued, “What motivates you now?”
“I just want to live,” the ailing pony expressed. “Is that too much? It probably is.”
A practical crux of the investigation was this: “What do you want to do if you get your powers back?”
“I want to bathe in sunlight and warm the world again,” Celestia answered idyllically. “I’d stop all the shit I started and make there finally be peace.”
Applejack pawed the floor with her hoof. “I’m not sayin’ it’s a lie, but what’s wrong with your answer?”
Celestia was stuck. It could damage her mission to say what she was thinking. Now that she was in a corner, though, the worst thing she could do would be to refuse a reply. She reluctantly divulged, “That’s what I want to be true, but I don’t trust me. At first I pretended to be a different pony, but I found out I’m not. I’m still manipulative and I have the same feelings and fears that made me do so much shit. I don’t want to be that way anymore, but I don’t know what I’d do.”
“Were you always this way or did something happen to you?” the good pony investigated.
“I don’t know. I guess I always had that side of myself, but I didn’t let it out all the time. I had another side too. But then…” Celestia ran into the same emotional barrier again. “Look, all the history books let this go silent. Is this really important?”
“I think you’ve been hiding it enough,” Applejack insisted. “It doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.”
Celestia started to speak, but nothing came. There was another false start as she fought with her own compartmentalization. At last she disclosed, “The first time Discord came, he was looking for something precious to steal that would throw off the order of things. He saw me, and I was young and… he took me. All of me. He… I…” she bit her lip and began to sob. “If you try to get anything more specific I’m leaving.”
Applejack nodded, but left the question open, sensing that there was more that Celestia had to say.
“The unicorn sages rescued me, but I don’t know if they beat him or he let me go. The last thing he said was…” Celestia moaned at the recollection. Then came a smile, the kind that comes when no expression can show the hurt. “I made you better!” she repeated, before covering her mouth, appalled at the sound. She sobbed a moment longer. Gradually she quieted.
Regaining a certain detachment, she analyzed, “After that, the bad part of me was worse and the rest was broken. Now I don’t have two parts, just a pile of pieces. Only some of the bad pieces are still under there somewhere.”
“I’ve gotta ask,” said one big sister to another. “I love Applebloom, and I wouldn’t ever let nothin’ hurt her. Did you ever really care about your sister?”
Celestia wiped the tears from her black eyes—shit, and got ash in them—and stared wistfully into space. “A long time ago, I thought I loved my little Luna. I didn’t know what love was though. I still don’t. I respect her, I admire her, but I don’t think she’ll ever let me love her.”
“What made Luna the way she used to be?” Applejack prompted.
“That’s between me and Luna,” Celestia reacted defensively. Her sister’s secrets were not for her to reveal, nor was she eager to open up that one of her own. “I don’t know if she would have been like that anyway, but it’s between me and her. I guess that’s your answer.”
Applejack started to ask, “How much—“ but stopped. She knew she no longer belonged in the conversation. “Uh, I think it’s time for me to go.” With that she excused herself, slipping through the tent flap, closing it behind her, and hastily trotting away.
At last Celestia understood the nature of her appointment. Her heart quickened, but she remained and silently waited for the question.
The dividing curtain of the tent loosed itself from the ceiling and collapsed. Luna sat where she had throughout the interview, pondering the fate of the one called Dusk, probing the heart she loathed and feared, sifting through signs of despair and hope. Her imposing presence filled up the space that her large form did not.
Luna broke the heavy silence with heavier words. “How much does it hurt to be your sister?”
“Maybe like it hurts to be me,” Celestia answered.
Luna turned and looked at her intensely. “You are wrong. Do you not remember, while I wept, you laughed. You were happy.”
The little alicorn was afraid to look Luna in the eye but did not dare turn away. “I was fake. But, then again, sometimes I was happy. I guess that’s the sickest part, isn’t it? I won’t say I had inner peace or anything, but I did have fun. I never had to deal with the pain, I always made it go away, or gave it away. I was proud of that. I thought that everyone was playing a cruel game, and I was winning.”
“Now I do feel it,” Dusk exposed. “Some things don’t go away in a thousand years.” “A long time,” she thought, cursing privately, “I should have said a long time.” The stars in Luna’s mane dimmed for a painful second.
The night Princess, with fresh understanding of her own betrayer, related, “With Discord—I knew when it happened, but I did not know it was like that. If you had told me, before you became the same thing, I would have been sorry for you. I could have helped you.”
“You wouldn’t have,” the older sister spoke boldly. “You were too much like me, remember?” With renewed regret, she was heedless of the consequences as she revealed, “Anyway, I did tell you. I couldn’t say it with words, so I passed the message on the same way I got it.”
At that Luna’s gaze sharpened. The ancient pain of violation throbbed in her chest, and summoned the anger she tried to restrain. She felt the snapped threads of an old bond, long put away but now raw. Her muscles tensed, but she resisted the urge to lash out or flee from the shared shame. She gritted her teeth and groaned deeply.
For several moments they were palpably speechless and unclean. It was as if it happened yesterday.
“We are trapped together,” Luna lamented. “I know sisters, that if they were together forever, it would be a wonderful thing. But we are trapped. I cannot kill you and I cannot forgive you.”
“Can you forgive yourself?” Celestia wondered, out of concern for them both.
Luna examined herself, as she had before, and once again she was unsatisfied. “I do not know if I am forgiven. When you forgave me, it was not real, and your forgiveness is not what I needed. The darkest part of me was killed, and now the six Elements press down on me and hold me away from what I used to do. I cannot be the same, but forgiven? I trust Harmony. It did not make me happy, but it fixed me.” The royal inquisitor requested finally, “Now tell me the truth, this thing that has overcome you—did it fix you? Do you trust it?”
“I’m different, but not really fixed,” Celestia replied honestly. “It made me want to be fixed, but it didn’t fix me. It knows how bad I am, that I should die. But it didn’t fix me and it didn’t kill me, so I don’t really trust it.” Then she thought of the book, and something it would make her do. “It’s like the book; I don’t trust it but I believe it.”
“Then for Equestria, we must go to the mountain ruins,” the Premier declared. “I know the city, and I never forgot where it lies in the wilderness.”
“I don’t deserve any favors,” Celestia admitted, before she begged of Luna, “For everyone, for yourself, promise me one thing. If it works—if I’m restored, but I’m not different, you have to stop me. You can’t kill me, but we both know there are worse things. You can’t give me any warning; you’ve got to pretend you think I’m better, until you can stop me.”
“I am burdened with many promises already, but this one is not new,” the warrior Princess agreed solemnly.
Celestia’s confused heart beat faster as she was conscious of something between them. It was the closeness of experiencing the pain of the past together. She had to know if her sister felt it too. She was compelled to speak, but only managed, “I…”
Luna’s gaze was fixed intensely on her mouth as she struggled to complete the thought, as if the slight movement of those lips was threatening.
Celestia met her sister’s eyes, seeking to communicate that way instead. A solitary tear was the only answer she would receive. The glistening droplet burst into a fine mist that spread toward her. “Wait!” she called, but it came out as a whisper. The vapors rushed around the gray one and swept her away—to sleep.