The very first thing when one when one wakes from a long sleep is take a deep, exhausted lungful of air. Twilight, much to her confusion, didn’t have a lungful of air to take in. She opened her eyes, trying to inhale. Nothing, not even the slightest amount of suction graced her windpipe. Not even the tiniest sliver of oxygen, or any other gas for that matter. The only thing that met her famished circulatory system was a vacuum. She sat up, thinking that she must be dead. The sky above her was black and infinite, and the ground under her was cold dust and hard gray rocks. She sat up, looking around, immediately noticing how silent it was. No sound filled the air, not the regular whistle of birds, or even the sound of her own breathing. The only audible noise was her heart beating the same stale, unoxygenated blood through her veins. She opened her mouth to yell, maybe call for help. Then she realized that, with no air, she couldn’t speak. There was nothing for her to scream for help with.
Panicked, she looked around to see that the sky wasn’t entirely black. High above her was the earth, far away, consuming a mere fourth of the horizon. The stars twinkled faintly, just enough for her to see the different nebulae. The lack of sound was disturbing. The sheer velvety, drumming thud of her heart in her chest was becoming deafening, consuming her senses. She didn’t need to breathe, but she needed to hear something. There had to be some other noise to fill her senses. It was the loudest thing she’d ever heard, and she swore she could feel every pint of blood sliding through her veins with each cacophonous stroke of the thing that gave her life. She covered her ears, wishing that she could listen to something, anything other than herself. It was maddening, with only the steady beating of her own life to keep her company. Every hair on her body stood on end, everything she touched was like sandpaper, and throughout the whole experience was the beating, like a war drum coming closer to her, steadily getting louder, her senses filled with nothing but the grating sensation of her hooves and legs scrambling on gray sand and the beating. The awful din that was drowning her, slowly.
Then, like a miracle reaching through the void, she heard a voice. “It’s awful, isn’t it?” A familiar tone rang out in the silent plane of dust. “I had to spend a thousand years here, once. Imagine that.”
Twilight looked up once again to see Luna, standing over her, looking quite melancholy. She reached down with her hoof, offering her help. The younger alicorn gratefully took her hoof and let herself be pulled to her hooves, struggling to gain traction on the ultra-fine, fully monotone sand. Once she had stable footing she turned to her princess, wanting to ask her a million questions. First and foremost, why had she been brought to such an awful place?
As if she’d read her mind, Luna said in her head. “I brought you here because I want you to know what could have happened back there.” She told her in a tone that was so dire it nearly scared Twilight. “If Limba had succeeded, or if you let her out again, and she achieves her goals that time, then this is where you’ll end up. Here. Alone, for what will feel like eternity. You will go mad. I did, so many times I can’t even count them. I made statues of the boulders near here and named them. I named my own hooves once. Then my horn, and my tail. I was quite feral, and for a thousand years I had nothing but my own mind and that sound. That awful sound in my ears. I wanted to summon a sowing needle to pierce my eardrums with at least four-hundred different accounts. I want to show you how bad it gets.”
Twilight looked at her in confusion, receiving her message fully, but she still didn’t understand how Luna was communicating without moving her lips and with no air. The princess didn’t offer an explanation, but began waking in the direction of a rocky outcropping on the edge of a desert of dust. Dust that never stirred, and looking around, Twilight could see that Luna’s hoof-prints were everywhere. There was hardly a single surface that didn’t have one of her hooves tracked on it. The mare couldn’t help but think of what Luna had possibly done for a thousand years with nothing but a small satellite, rocks, and a limited magical supply, since she couldn’t summon things all the way from earth. There needed to be an ‘original copy’ for one to summon from, and no magic could reach the span between worlds, not without a limitless resource of energy. And even an alicorn’s supply of magic was limited to extremely powerful bursts; the type of energy needed to reach so far would have to be equally as powerful, but stretched over a period of twelve hours or so just to summon one solitary object.
Twilight followed her and began to notice scribblings, marks on the rocks and the outcroppings, the cliff faces. They ranged from short, nice quintets so rather brutal sonnets, dedicated to self-mutilation and what a gift death would be to obtain. There were perfect artistic renditions of Luna doing everything that could be fathomed, from brushing her mane with a spindly rock comb to talking with Nightmare Moon, all the way to cutting off her mane and storing it in a crater so that it could be of use as an extremely crude stuffed animal she later weaved out of the individual fibers. It was quintessential depression at first, then it merged into schizophrenia, as it began to depict things that couldn’t possibly happen on the moon, such as her finding a lake and bathing in it, and her finding a young mare that she had called Nyra and later had tea with back at her house. After that it gradually fell into all forms of psychosis, with her essentially drinking her own blood, if only to taste something for a second, and her setting fire to the toxic dust around her and inhaling it, poisoning herself in order to be able to breathe again. She killed her imaginary friend Nyra in a bloody display of treason and blasted her own crater into the moon a mile deep for her funeral and later burial. The whole time Twilight read and observed these drawings and pieces of artwork she felt the cold claws of dread steeling at her stomach. If Limba got out again, would that be her?
Luna seemed to be doing her best to ignore the writing on the rocks and continued, walking with grim resignation towards some set point in the distance. Twilight still followed, though feeling more uneasy by the second about being there with her. This place was one of agony, of pain and regret, one that was Luna’s alone and wasn’t hers to be in. It felt like taking a trip into the past thousand years, and even more dreadful was that it was also a trip into her mind. Despite all of the warnings she could never had imagined what she was being led into. As Luna turned a corner into a cave she pulled a small cube out from under her wing, one that glowed a faint blue and seemed to be spilling a whole lot of air out into the vacuum around them. She lit her horn and summoned a torch through the cube, holding the cube close to the torch so that it would remain lit.
Twilight nearly fainted at what she saw written on the walls. Blood, gallons upon gallons sprayed, spattered and painted onto the walls of the originally silver cavern. Where there wasn’t blood was legible markings, all backwards, and as the young mare began to decode them in her head, all of them seemed to be spells, enchantments. It was using her, stockpiling energy, openly sapping it from Luna every second she spent in the cavern. It was stored in the stone, the moon itself. That had been her grand triumph, the invention of a magic so dark it stole life and stored it away as energy. It cut years off anything’s life, but as an alicorn was immortal, it hardly mattered to her. To any other creature it could reduce them to ashes if they spent more than a few minutes in the cave. Luna hadn’t cared, since she was in a state of eternal preservation, so long as no physical trauma affected her. It had been what she’d used to escape, after spending a number of years in there she had finally built enough power to transport herself back.
Twilight didn’t even know how to begin her questions. This was sorcery that was so dark, so corrupt it hardly could be considered magic. It practically bordered on necromancy, since it relied on copious amounts of her life’s blood in order to work. It stole life in exchange for power. What she was staring at was evil, pure, quintessential, corruption. It was every type of outlawed, banned, taboo and forbidden magic that could be imagined combined into one massive, hideous conglomerate of sin. Nothing else Twilight had ever imagined could scratch the surface of what this place did. Looking closer she saw that it was grinding up time itself in the chamber, speeding it up, eating away at potential energy like a cosmic, bloodsucking leech and storing it for later use. It was eating time, matter, and energy. Anything that it touched it consumed. Like black hole, compressing it eternally on one infinite fulcrum, waiting to be released, all the while absorbing anything it could, always hungry for more.
Luna turned to her, looking directly into her eyes as if to tell her that this hadn’t been created out of choice. Her hoof had been forced when she had created that place, and now it was time to leave. Luna took out the small, iridescent blue cube from under her wing again and threw it on the ground, where it opened a portal. She nodded for Twilight to go first.
Twilight lay in the shower an hour later, still recovering from shock. Taking her first breath in such a long time had been agonizing, but her physical wounds couldn’t be compared to psychological ones. She stared at the wall, unable to get the symbols out of her head, the dolls woven out of Luna’s own mane, the imaginary creatures that had haunted her all hours of the day, every day of the year. She couldn’t stop asking herself if that would be her in ten years. Or two, or even one. It could even be tomorrow if she didn’t keep a tight lid on her emotions. Limba was silent, still inside of her, as if she had been equally as affected by the trauma as she had. Cadence’s Id didn’t even begin to measure up to how disturbing it had been in that cavern with Luna. The walls seemed to breathe to her, and she swore she had heard a faint heartbeat in there, echoing from deep in the cave, somewhere in the bowels of the moon. The water was beginning to run cold, but even then she stayed, craving the comforting sensation of the water hitting her skin. That was what she needed. Comfort.
With that she got up and turned the water off, stepping out of the shower with her hooves shaking. She wasn’t cold; she was rattled, and unhinged. She wanted clarity, and she needed somepony to tell her that what she’d seen in there couldn’t hurt anypony. She felt the malevolence of the place inside her, like a drop of poison her body couldn’t clear out. It had touched her soul, in a way that had profoundly awed her and disturbed her in equal measures. She turned to the full-body mirror and called out to her other half, seeking conversation in the most unlikely of places. She didn’t give Limba control, but just enough movement to that she could hear her.
“I will never use such magics.” Limba told her. “What you saw… what we saw, wasn’t clean. It wasn’t efficient, and it wasn’t necessary. That was evil. That was torture, for the world.”
“But what do I do, though?” Twilight asked her reflection. “I feel like I need to talk to Luna about this, but at the same time it feels like a major invasion of privacy to talk about it. I felt wrong just looking at it, but she seemed even more off than me. It was like she could feel herself slipping back into that place, the same state that she’d been in when she created that… thing.” Twilight couldn’t even bear to speak of it as anything else besides something that was completely unholy.
“Don’t.” Limba said sternly. “For both of our sakes. Move on from it, and never bring it up to her ever again. She showed you that to remind you of the stakes, and to scare you. Nothing else. She doesn’t want therapy, or somepony to talk to. That would only make things worse. Sometimes the only thing a pony can do after doing something so dark is to just walk away and never speak of it.”
“Like the incident with Cadence?” Twilight asked.
“No. That’s an easy thing, with easy answers. She caused no permanent damage. Nothing that can’t be fixed. Mull that over with her the next time you feel the need for some closure. The thing that Luna showed you… is eternal. It sustains itself by sucking the energy from anything and everything. The very rotation of the moon is slowed by it. It is evil. There is no right solution besides to make sure it is kept far away and hidden, never to see the light.”
Twilight nodded and turned away from the mirror, feeling Limba return to the depths of her mind, too weak to try and take control again. Not so soon after being conquered by Luna. The young alicorn grabbed a bathrobe and turned out the lights with a whispered spell, extinguishing the chandelier. She opened the door and marched upstairs, seeing that Spike was still awake on the couch, writing to himself in a small notebook that Luna had lent him. He had changed recently, perhaps for the better. Then again, maybe for the worse. There was no way of telling at this point. She could only hope that he would forgive her if he ever figured out what Limba had been trying to do. She felt love for him, a maternal, motherly love. She thought of him as a son, or maybe a younger brother. He was still so young to her, inexperienced and unversed in how things were. If he had seen what she had today he would have fainted, he would have been unable to comprehend. She craved that, in a way. To be ignorant of the situation, now that things were laid out so very clearly to her. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t give to be the Twilight sitting in her library almost a month ago.
She continued up the stairs towards Luna’s bedroom, thinking of what to say to her. The young alicorn turned the corner to see Luna staring pointedly into the mirror, as if she had been having the same type of conversation with herself that Twilight had been having just a few minutes before. When she saw her she turned around, blinking. She looked at Twilight in her bathrobe and stepped towards her, as if she had something important to say to her student. It died on the tip of her tongue, just as she was about to utter the first syllable. It was as if whatever she had been about to say no longer mattered, and in a way, it didn’t. She had been preparing a long and arduous speech about how important it was that Twilight didn’t end up like her, but seeing the look on Twilight’s face said that it wasn’t necessary, and that there was to be an unspoken agreement to never make mention of the cavern ever again.
Luna, ignoring the previous, grim topic of discussion, stepped close to Twilight, her horn contacting her own at the very tip. She leaned as close as possible without touching her, running her own horn all the way down the other alicorn’s, a knowing smile showing at the corners of her mouth.
“Luna…” Twilight tried to protest, caught off-guard by her sudden approach. “That’s my horn… it’s a little sensitive when you rub it like that.”
“I know.” The princess replied, touching the very base of her own against hers. “I was trying to take your mind off of what happened today. What better than the pleasantries that you have forever to indulge in?”
“What do you mean? Please don’t tell me that you’re thinking about something like that right now…” The emotionally exhausted mare sighed, not in the mood in more than a thousand ways.
Luna laughed in such a lighthearted way it sounded almost foalish. “No, Twilight. I was thinking more about preening.”
Twilight’s head had to turn on a dime to adjust to what she was talking about. She recalled Rainbow Dash mentioning it what seemed like forever ago, but what was in fact only yesterday. She recalled her telling her that it was feather maintenance, and how to align them certain ways in order to make them look better, as well as keep them healthy. The fact that Luna was mentioning something so trivial now was sending her spinning for a reason, but none came up. She settled on the theory that maybe Luna felt that something like this would take her mind off of her troubles. She doubted it personally, but if it made her princess and new mentor feel any better, she would humor her.
“Okay then… what do you want me to do?” The younger alicorn asked, spreading her wings. “I personally don’t see anything wrong with the way my feathers are.”
“Just lay down on the bed with your legs tucked under you and your wings at your sides. I’ll do the rest.” Luna explained vaguely, motioning for her student to follow her.
The more Twilight thought about it, the more she was beginning to feel like Luna was trying to say something to her, albeit in a very roundabout manner. She did as she was instructed, and pulled back the curtains to the bed and jumped onto the fluffy blue mattress, tucking her legs under her in a sitting position. She was beginning to feel rather relaxed as she spread her wings to her sides, wondering just what this did for her in the long run. Luna stepped into bed behind her, sitting behind her on her back legs while her front raised her above Twilight. The princess smiled at her student comfortingly, then began to reach for her wing. Twilight barely had any time to think of an excuse to back out before her teacher was running her hooves over her wings, straightening her feathers. It was nice at first, but after a few seconds she began to truly see why Luna had told her this would help.
The way that her hooves felt was like silk being draped over her, akin to hot, steaming water running over her whole body in a way that made her feel so at ease that she nearly closed her eyes to sleep. The way that her hooves were trailing down her wings reminded her of just a few hours ago, when her skin was so sensitive that the slightest touch from another pony made her want to moan. It was a sensitivity that couldn’t be described, like that portion of her body was the only part that mattered, and anypony that was willing to please that portion of her could very well have her melting like warm butter under their firm, steady hooves. Luna smiled as she heard her student let out a small, feeble breath that had involuntarily turned into a gasp as she’d began to massage the area between her wings. Twilight felt Limba in her head, insulting her for enjoying this far more than she needed to. In the end Twilight didn’t care; this was the guiltiest pleasure she knew of, more than greed or magic or even sex. In her own mind this was heaven, with Luna over her, lovingly doting on her with a massage, and all the time in the world to enjoy each other’s company.