//------------------------------//
// Chapter 17: Memories of Proxima 
// Story: Alpha Centauri 
// by StLeibowitz 
//------------------------------//

	She was dreaming, and she knew it, but it was a dream she didn't want to end. So it didn't. Not immediately, anyways.
It took place in a garden of some sort, or a forest probably as she remembered the time period, on the shores of a small lake. She could see across the crystal blue water to the other side, which was covered in dense trees like the side she rested on. The feeling of dirt under her hooves, water soaking her coat and mane, sand stuck to the side of her neck where she'd rested it on the shoreline while floating idly in the lake – it all felt exactly like real life. The suns sent crazed patterns filtering through the forest canopy, the mixed shadows of the leaves from her star and Beta. That matched up with reality perfectly. Really, there wasn't any indication that it was dream, and logically then she shouldn't recognize it for what it was. She hadn't recognized that disturbing night with Discord as a dream, after all, why should this much more realistic illusion be easier to see through?
“This was really a terrible idea,” Proxima muttered, surfacing from underwater and spitting out a mouthful of algae-tinted lakewater. “I'm still confused why we made this a feature.”
“The algae in the ponds is to replenish oxygen,” she answered. “I thought we hammered that out  back before we made Domhan?”
“I wasn't referring to the – okay, well maybe a little.” She sighed. “We could have been much more imaginative. I mean, didn't you take this concept wholesale from Tia's world? And then the trees – also from her planet, whatever she called it - “
“Equestria.”
“Equestria, yes. Even the kelpies are modeled after things on her planet. We could have gotten so much more imaginative with them!” she continued. “Creatures with wheels, maybe – nobody's done that before. Bipeds, even! Maybe stick a few tentacles on for fun, and make them able to dig. And for oxygen replenishment – why did it have to be something that tastes nasty?”
“Kelpies aren't really supposed to swim in lakes like this. We made it taste nasty to them so they wouldn't try to and suffocate.” She stood up and shook herself, sending a spray of water droplets in all directions. She let her mane reignite after that. “We all agreed on this, didn't we?”
“We should have made another test world,” Proxima grumbled. She hauled herself out of the water and shook herself dry as well, primarily succeeding in transferring all the water from her red coat to Twilight's yellow one. They laughed, but Proxima's smile quickly faded. “Domhan is a wash. Nothing here is our design. We just tweaked Celestia's ideas a bit.”
“Not everything here is from Celestia's world,” she pointed out. “She doesn't have wolves or thunderbirds there.”
“No, but she has pegasi and – what did she call them? 'Earth ponies'?” She snorted. “What does that name even refer to? Dirt ponies, would have been better. And in any case, we stole wolves from Wolfie. We even named them after her.”
“So what do you expect us to do? Wipe them out and start over?”
“Replace them,” she said. “Do something new. Make another planet.”
“We're stretched thin enough trying to just rule one,” she chuckled. “All three of us together couldn't rule two planets.”
“Eta Carinae does it!”
“And everyone who knows him is mystified by how he manages it.”
Proxima growled frustratedly and loped off into the forest. Twilight followed close behind her. The woods were pretty at midday; certainly prettier than when it was just Proxima in the sky, though she made other areas beautiful as well. The Glass Desert far to the west, for one, was stunning when the red sun was in the ascendant. Few wolves, and fewer thunderbirds and kelpies, ever ventured that far out though. A pity.
“Ruling Domhan is dull,” Proxima complained, after a few minutes of listening to leaves crunch under their hooves. “I can't even take a break on friends' worlds. They're too similar.”
“How is it dull?” Twilight asked, surprised. “Have you ever spent any time with the wolves? Gone hunting for deer with the kelpies? Try 'overseeing' a thunderbird cloud eyrie some time – the updrafts there are almost like being in a globular cluster!”
“We've never been in one of those.”
She smiled sheepishly. “I have.”
Proxima paused and gave Twilight a look as she calmly loped past her and took the lead. She sighed when she started moving again, galloping briefly to catch up. “Caelum?”
“We visited Messier together last month,” she admitted. “I'm still not sure how her simulator works – what spells she uses to make it so realistic – but I'm getting closer to understanding it!”
“Hmph. You could have at least invited me.” She sounded disappointed more than anything, though there was a touch of jealousy just beneath the surface. Imperceptible to beings who hadn't known her so long, but to Twilight it was obvious. Anything less than obvious after several billion years would be absurd. “That might have been fun. I've heard some interesting things about that place. Did you at least learn anything else about the Song?”
They both knew what she was talking about. “It's almost the same there as it is here.”
“Almost?”
“The pitch is a little higher, and the tempo's a bit faster,” she explained. Excitement tried to bubble up into her voice – so many theories that could be disproved, so many that could be confirmed! - but she managed to keep it even. Nothing had been proven yet, after all. “I can't quantify it yet. It may have just been the effects of the simulator – I'd have to go there myself to check it out.” She growled, imitating Proxi's sound of irritation. “I almost envy the wandering stars. They can go visit it.”
“You'd get lonely too fast,” Proxi chuckled. “No matter how awkward you are in socializing down here, you'd go crazy if you didn't have anyone to bounce theories off.”
“Hence 'almost'.”
They fell silent again. For a few hours, all that they could hear was the wind stirring the leaves above them, the rustle of their little creations living their lives in the undergrowth, and their own footsteps. Eventually, though, they approached a village – the things were springing up like mushrooms as the semi-nomadic land kelpies began to settle down and farm. Smoke tinged the air – slash-and-burn agriculture was popular, and this village seemed to be keeping up with the fad.
“Village coming up.” Proxi snorted to try to clear her nostrils of the acrid scent. Burning wood...however much kelpies might like that, it always smelled like bad accidents and inadvertently torched sacred groves more than progress to them both.
“Try to disguise your disdain for them,” Alpha said, glancing back and giving her sister a quick grin to take the edge off her words. “I think it drives them away from you.”
Proxima gave her a grin with a set of teeth that would make a wolf proud. “But Alpha – if I don't drive them away from me, why would they ever choose to crowd around you?”


-----


The dream shifted, as dreams tend to do. Instead of a village, she entered a cave as they turned around the last stand of trees between them and the houses, with Beta by her side and not Proxima. The interior was almost pitch-black, but she could see almost perfectly, both thanks to her mane illuminating the space and her own abilities as a star. Stalagmites thrust upwards from the floor in a veritable forest of rock, and the high ceiling was festooned with enough stalactites to match the floor's covering. She could see the faint gleam of exposed gemstones embedded in the walls and roof. All in all, it seemed like the perfect place for dragons to live.
“Are you sure she's in here?” Beta asked, looking around at the toothlike spires dispassionately. “Why would she avoid us for weeks on end just to spend time in a cave?”
“I don't think the cave is the reason, Beta,” she responded absent-mindedly, pressing forward into the thicket. So many stalagmites – was this their work or something more natural? Could stalagmites like this form unaided? She'd have to investigate that at some point. “I think it's what's in here that's the reason.”
“Rocks? Gems? Darkness?”
“Dragons, sister. I think they're the only thing living on Domhan that she doesn't disdain.”
Beta followed her silently as they wove through the stalagmites. Many of them bore pits where gems had been pried from, and scrapes, shallow furrows carved by tiny claws, a sure sign of hatchlings. Broken bits of glassy diamonds and gleaming opals could occasionally be seen glinting in the light of their manes, the remnants of dragon feasting. Many patches of stone were warmer than the rest – almost hot to the touch. Dragonfire for sure, recent, if it came from immature mouths, or days old if from something of a more imposing size. And if those patches weren't indication enough, a few stalagmites were even melted into new shapes, given rounded appearances and the look of desert rock stacks by dragon flames and dragon tongues. Probably one dragon in particular, if Proxi was being predictable.
They didn't see any actual dragons until they reached the very back of the cave. The back wall, slick with moisture and covered with pits and ledges, was also covered with juveniles. Unlike their wingless hatchling forms, their wings had come in long since; they hadn't yet reached their adult size, but the largest was still almost five times her length and three times her height. It made the uninterested – and even hostile in a few cases – looks they gave her and Beta seem a great deal more threatening.
“Where is she?” Beta asked nervously. Alpha didn't need to ask why she was nervous. Dragons could breathe fire from birth – magical fire.
“She's here,” she affirmed. She turned to the wall of dragons and amplified her voice as Caelum had taught her. “Would the dragon who is Proxima Centauri in disguise please come down?”
Proxi's cackling laughter echoed through the cave as one of the larger juveniles detached from the wall and did a nimble barrel roll, the tips of her wings slipping between stalactites with only the slimmest of spaces between them. The other dragons roared their approval, an echoing cacophony that earned a rustle of Beta's wings as she took a step back slightly. Alpha stood her ground as the form of the red dragon melted away like watercolors, and Proxima landed lightly before her.
“Welcome to the cave, sisters,” she greeted them with a grin. “Did you enjoy the display?”
“You seemed to, at least,” Alpha chuckled. “I'm glad the dragons seem so accepting of you.”
“They don't have much choice since their clutch-king swore loyalty to me personally,” Proxima replied. She seemed exceptionally pleased. Alpha decided that achievement had to be significant in some way, if only because it sounded like she'd managed to get one of these notoriously fickle creatures to hold to a promise. “He's been a great help in getting the rest of them to abide with my presence. He's also been forthcoming on questions I've had about dragons in general – did you know our new stepmother flew through the void personally to start a colony here?”
“What?” Beta frowned at her, and it didn't take a sibling to tell that she was thoroughly confused. “What do you mean, our new stepmother?”
“The way a dragon thinks of loyalty, it is something shared between family, and not with anyone else.” She grinned again. “The clutch-king adopted me as his sister, and through me both of you!”
Alpha groaned. “Proxi...”
“The dragons will be loyal to us now?” Beta asked. Alpha wished she could shift gears that quickly – from confusion to considering the political implications of this in less than an instant! A great deal of Beta's nervousness seemed to have fallen away as well with the knowledge that these dragons would probably not kill her. Probably. “All of them?”
“There's only one lineage present on Domhan for now,” Proxima answered. “The lineage of Taistealaí, at least, will stay loyal to us. If any other dragons come by to colonize Domhan, we would have to forge similar ties to their lineages.”
“Can we get these dragons to stop raiding the new hill forts?”
“These dragons are only juveniles.” Proxima snorted, amused at Beta's ignorance. “They aren't the problem. And the problem has already been resolved. It was Taistealaí herself who was building a hoard, mainly to feed these guys as hatchlings. Now that they've grown, she's decided to burrow down to the core and make Domhan a bit more friendly towards her brood.”
“Define 'more friendly',” Beta ordered warily. Alpha had the feeling neither of them would like Proxima's answer.
“Punch a few volcanoes through the crust,” Proxi clarified, nonchalantly confirming Alpha's suspicion. “Churn up the mantle a little. Basically, get gemstones and edible rock closer to the surface.”
“Volcanoes?” Beta snapped. Her voice echoed around the cave, calling the juveniles to startled attention. That had been loud – almost the volume Caelum used! She closed her eyes, her face twitching in fury. Alpha heard her count to ten under her breath before continuing in an almost imperceptibly less angry tone. “Volcanoes? And you let her? There's a reason we didn't add any of those in the first place, Proxi!”
“No stars want volcanoes on their planets,” she retorted pointedly. “Dragons are the ones who put them there. Besides, it's not like she's going to make any supervolcanoes, or worse, volcano fields.  Taistealaí isn't an excessive dragon. She's getting on in years, too. She won't have time for more than five or six before she goes to sleep.”
“As long as nobody dies from it, she can stay,” Alpha decided. What's done is done; might as well make the most of it, she thought. Beta gave her a look of shock. “What? This is unexpected and interesting. I've never had an opportunity to interact with dragons before, much less examine the effects they have on the environment. If nobody dies, why should we treat it as a problem when there are so many more?”
“Alpha, Domhan is a planet with thinking beings living on it!” Beta exclaimed with barely, as in not at all, checked fury. “It's a home for thousands, not some kind of test tube. And I know how this will end – volcanoes are a bad idea! Don't you remember when we visited Celestia's little coterie of planets? That lava-coated, poisonous little fireball she has? All its volcanoes?”
“Was that her first or second planet?” She frowned, trying to remember the place Beta was speaking about. “Both of those were pretty hot.”
“The first one can hardly be considered a planet,” Beta scoffed. “I mean the second one. The one that's covered in fire?”
“Oh! I remember that one.” She frowned. Admittedly, that world did paint a rather grim picture for Domhan's future if the analogy was perfect, but one data point does not a trend determine. “We should be fine, I think. Besides, if I remember correctly none of its volcanoes are actually active. They weren't when we visited anyways. Perhaps its atmosphere has simply always been like that?”
“It's a nonissue anyways, Beta,” Proxima chimed in. “Taistealaí is barely strong enough at this point to burrow to the core. One volcano is all we'd get, if that.”
“She was strong enough to fly through space!”
“That hardly requires any effort at all.” She rolled her eyes. “Try taking a break from your hill forts to fly up there sometime, maybe. All she had to do was push and coast for a few eons.”
“You should spend more time with the hill forts than buzzing around the exosphere and licking stalagmites,” Beta retorted. “We're supposed to be Queens.”
“That was your decision, sister,” she hissed. “Not mine. I actually voted against it. Recall?”
“Perhaps in front of the dragons is not the best time for this argument?” Alpha suggested, spreading her wings and urging her sisters in the direction of the cave mouth with them. “We can debate each others' style of rule later. Until then, Beta, remember that her 'buzzing around' just got us the allegiance of the dragons, and Proxi, her hill forts are exactly what we'd been hoping for from them, Queens or not.”
“They're still duller than cave dirt,” Proxima grumbled.
“You probably have more experience with that than me, Proxima,” Beta fired back.
“Later.”


-----


With a yawn, Alpha rejoined the waking world, and for the briefest of instants felt the absence of her sisters at her sides. The kelpie nomads of old slept side-by-side to keep the cold of winter at bay. With the breeze taking a turn for the chilly and the feeling of grass beneath her, it took a moment for her to realize those days were gone forever. They weren't camped outside a dragon cave with a band of peddlers, and Proxima was beyond her reach.
Like Watchful is.
She rose reluctantly to a standing position, ignoring the detritus clinging to her for an instant as she looked down on the grave of her most faithful subject. Was this what Celestia had to go through with each of her students before her? Remaining alive and eternal, able to make new friends and move on, while every year another few acquaintances abandoned their bodies and jumped to new ones, out of her reach?
I wonder where she is now, she thought. It's been a while, and Domhan is a magical place. Maybe she's become a star now. In our Wheel? In another? She snorted. Maybe she's in Messier, playing tag with the rest of them. I hope the lessons I gave her in that will be useful then. Well, the lessons Proxima and I gave her.
It was almost morning. She'd cleared the hilltop of vines before falling asleep, and she could see the grey light of dawn warming the sky in the east, spilling out across the treetops. The trees were higher now; there were fewer clearings, and their canopies seemed thicker. Two thousand years of uninterrupted growing time between her last Beltane and now showed. Truthfully, she was shocked it had been uninterrupted. The kelpies had been advancing so quickly – this old growth was perfect for fuel. When had things changed? When Proxima had fallen? When Beta had? When she'd been careless and locked Proxima up for eternity? Caelum, how could she have made such a terrible mistake?
I want my sister back, she thought sadly. How could I have been so incautious? She would have been free a thousand years ago if I'd just double-checked my circle! And if she'd just been imprisoned again, at least there might've been a chance I could get to her. If I could find a way to get my friends and the Elements here, she'd be purged of her Nightmare in no time flat!
She called upon her magic, bending space in preparation for a teleportation – but she frowned and paused, thinking about where she wanted to go. Back to Caisleanard? To more feasts, with more vapid and squabbling nobles? She doubted she had the patience for a second night. Beta enjoyed that kind of politicking – also, that kind of feasting; she'd had the most say in designing edible things back when they made the place and Alpha wouldn't be surprised if the feasts had been her brainchild – so let her deal with it. They were co-Queens, whatever she said. Dealing with nobles would just have to be her responsibility. The fun parts, though – she was okay with taking care of scientific and thaumaturgical matters. Yes, if she was going to have to endure being Queen over this mess Beta had made, she might as well take charge of the interesting things.
Starting with finding out how badly, exactly, she'd messed up on her ring.
She completed the spell. The chilly wind morphed into a solid wall of driving, frigid wind, bearing with it enough snow to bury a schoolhouse. Her mane was put out in an instant. If the circle of standing stones wasn't yet a circle of fallen-over stones, it would be smothered in approximately – she thought wryly – a few kilometers of snow.
With another burst of magic, she re-lit her mane and stoked it to white-hot, incinerating whatever seaweed had persevered on her head and tail in an instant and completely vaporizing any snow that hit her. That wasn't enough. More magic turned her blazing head and flank into the bases of fiery whips, flashing around her with blinding speed and making her the heart of a sphere of incandescent plasma, hotter than the surface of her sun. The snow never stood a chance. It didn't boil off into a gas; it vanished. Frost-coated pine trees touched by her mane became bombs, their sap flash-boiling and sending bursts of burning splinters out. Then, just as suddenly, she let the fires die down. Her circle was still there, cleaned of moss and the discoloring of ages. The snow returned almost reluctantly, a few brave flakes ignoring the desperate pleas of their compatriots and drifting hesitantly in her direction again.
Okay, she thought, observing her ancient handiwork. Six stones. I suppose that makes sense.
She trotted into the center of the circle, hoping for a flash of memory that would tell her what she'd done to banish Proxima. A glimpse of the theory behind it, a fragment of her casting the enchantments...anything. But nothing came. She was just a clueless star in the center of an ancient monument. She might as well have not built it, for all she knew about it.
“There has to be some clue to how I did this!” she muttered, trotting over to the nearest stone and examining closely, pushing her magic sense to its limits as she tried to grasp exactly how she'd bound and channeled enough power to inadvertently seal Proxima Centauri away for two millennia. There was magic in the stone, definitely – a startlingly dense, tangled mess of intricately knotted spell-lines and energy flows, deep in its core, like a coven of fiendish old mares had taken it upon itself to knit a sock with Equestria's entire annual yield of colored yarn. There were loose ends, extending off towards the other stones, and anchoring the thing to the ground and – she assumed – some sort of ley line deep beneath, but for the life of her she couldn't remember how she'd done it!
“Nothing,” she growled, whipping around and teleporting over to the stone opposite the one she'd been examining. She paused, watching, as the spill from that spell was caught by the lines, and flowed along them; she could have sworn the air around the stones iridesced slightly, a rainbow aura almost too faint to be noticed, but it was there. The next stone was just the same as the first stone – more magically dense than any three potent artifacts in Equestria, and just as incomprehensible. She teleported again, picking one of the remaining four at random, and appeared before it in a burst of annoyance-fueled light.
Nothing.
She whirled around again, determined to find something in the stones to help, but a thin layer of ice was already re-forming on the stone base of the circle, and she lost her footing, spun around three times, and felt her hooves slip out from under her and deposit her unceremoniously on the cold rock. She was about to stand up again when she realized that there was no ley line beneath the ring – the loose spell-lines were connected with more spells in the ground!
She probed at the mess below her, woven into the ground itself. It was wild and hastily made, devoid of any measures to shield sensitive passersby from its potency, and she tasted metal just from brushing her aura against it, but it was recognizably hers, down to the style of shortcuts she occasionally used to simplify overly-complex spells. And it was beautiful.
Excited, she rose to her hooves again and unconsciously began to follow the spell-lines as she probed them. Portions of the weave looked like something Starswirl the Bearded might have designed – she could recognize snippets of it, and there were whole sections that hazily resembled some of his unfinished work on the Elements of Harmony – other bits that looked like Clover the Clever's work on emotion-based warding magic, though emphasizing the warding over the emotional energy source – other names slotted themselves in as her mind traced out the oddly familiar pattern. Elm the Eldritch, Marelin the Great, Hippus the Heavy-Hoofed, Elderberry the Energetic, Willow the Wizened; kelpie shamen like Pangur Ban the Aloof and Whitewood the Warm – she knew this spellwork! It was like the greatest magical minds of an age had convened and collaborated to build a ritual circle under her guidance. She'd copied spells from geniuses, kludged them together with her own spellcraft, smoothed over the rough patches, and the result had been almost elegant – and its effectiveness had never been in doubt.
She stopped pacing as she realized something. She giggled, then chuckled, and finally broke into full-body laughter as she took in the pattern as a whole. The stones, the pentacle in the ground – it was her cutie mark! If that didn't tell her that she made this, nothing would.
Finally, she could see where she'd gone wrong.
It was a little thing, as most magical errors she'd made since hatching Spike could be attributed to; in a snarl of spell-lines that must have been made in a great hurry, she'd malformed one of the runes governing the spell's duration. It had been a frustration for ritualist mages over the centuries that the magical symbols for progressively larger numbers approached being identical to the magical symbol for infinity. Novices often made mistakes in spells of longer durations precisely because of it. Whole lectures in Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns had been devoted toward drilling the difference between infinity and arbitrarily large numbers into students' heads. The difference between a thousand and infinity wasn't too small – not compared to, say, three-hundred fifteen billion seconds, which would have been an acceptable equivalent – but in a rush, it was a simple mistake to make. One rune, one insignificant typo, had doomed her sister to an eternity trapped inside her own body.
I can fix this now! she thought. I know how I did it, I can figure out how to reverse it easily enough. If I can get my friends and the Elements here, once Proxima is free again, I can purge her and start reintegrating her into Domhanane society – this is perfect!
She smiled gleefully. She had a plan – she could fix this! A trip to Equestria wouldn't take too much effort, it was just a particularly long-distance teleportation after all. And if Proxima was freed from her Nightmare because of it, there was no effort Alpha would consider excessive. All would be set right again soon; that, and the promise of seeing her friends again, was all the impetus she needed to gather up as much magic as she could hold, to the point where not only her eyes, but her entire form was coursing with light, and warp space for the trip to Equestria. No, not warp space – she ripped right through it. Who needed space anyways? All it did was get in the way! No, no – space was the way! And now there was less of it! Ingenious!
When the mouth of the wormhole sealed shut again behind her, her ever-so-slightly mad giggle was still audible in the clearing of the standing stones.