The Imperial Age of Equestria

by dEdPhErE

Prologue: Luna Usurps the Throne

Princess Luna trotted into the Canterlot Sculpture Garden. She galloped past all of the unimportant statues (at least not important to her task at the moment) as she raced to find the one she was looking for. She had forgotten her way around this maze of a garden, as she never really found importance in going in.
But now she did. In fact, coming into this garden was a prelude to the most important thing that she would ever plan to do. She finally gave up and used a simple unicorn spell to find things that are not hidden, but that the caster wants to find. The alicorn found the statue she was looking for. She ran towards its location, as indicated by her horn’s magic, and sure enough, there it was. Or rather, there he was.
Standing twenty feet tall, with the head of a pony, left horn of a goat, right antler of a deer, a snake tongue, right arm of a lion, the left claw of an eagle, the right leg of a lizard, the left leg of a goat, a bat's right wing, a pegasus' left wing, and a snake's tail. He was the God of Chaos, Disharmony, Evil, and All That is Detrimental to Order and Peace, Discord.
Luna gazed at his awe-inspiring grandeur, but returned her focus to her main objective. She placed her horn on his lizard-leg, and recited a spell that would gain her Discord’s knowledge. Slowly but surely, after several seconds, Luna knew everything that Discord knew.
With her new knowledge, Luna sprinted back to her palace to study the spells that would give her control of Equestria. She had to study in secrecy, especially from Celestia. Her plan involved costing the life of several innocent ponies, including her older sister.

Princess Luna closed the last spell book that she needed to read in order to complete her task. Her mind was near exploding from all of the information she had taken in. Luckily, with the help of memory-aid spells, she was able to memorize everything she read and create formulas, equations, and spell combinations that enabled her to do what she needed to do. She stepped out of her room and walked down the palace corridor toward her sister’s with nervousness and determination.
This was it, the night that Luna had planned for seven months. It was a long time, but seemed like nothing now that she had finished. There was no turning back, for there was no other way than to delve into the secrets of Discord’s magic. The God of Chaos had been sealed away for good, and nothing could break him out. But Luna didn’t need to. She only had to extract his magical abilities and knowledge through a set of convoluted spells only an alicorn could master.
She had found out through studying Discord’s black magic and intricate spellwork that there is, in fact, a way to kill an immortal alicorn princess. She just needed the pieces to be set exactly right.
Luna entered her sister’s chamber through undetectable teleportation. It produced no sound, and Celestia was weakest while she slept. Luna knew that this was the only time she could assassinate her sister. It half-pleasured her to do this, maybe more than half. But who could blame her? A thousand years alone on a giant ball of rock in space can become fuel for a grudge.
But a part of her loved her sister, and wanted Celestia alive for the sake of family. But Luna quickly silenced that half, believing that she was doing the right thing at the time. She floated over to the bed because her sister might hear her hoofsteps. She slowly bowed her head and horn downward, and lightly touched Celestia’s sun-shaped cutie mark.
She looked, cross-eyedly, at her own horn, which was slowly changing from its dark-blue shade, to a dark, indigo-like color, to purple, to bloody magenta, to a dull, ruby-red. She closed her eyes, and thought hard with the spell she had memorized. When she was done reciting the spell in her mind, she opened her eyes. A split second after, Celestia woke up with a jolt and looked quickly at Luna, with eyes wide and bloodshot.
“Luna!” she shouted, but not before Luna created a magical ball of silence around Celestia. After a few seconds of inaudible shouting, Celestia’s mane, a flowing patch of hair with a sort of diluted, rainbowish color, had dissipated into the air, giving her poll and crest a look of being bald, besides the horn on her forehead.
Luna couldn’t hear her sister, but she knew she was in pain, and that is exactly how she wanted Celestia. The part of Luna that regretted this act was momentarily, completely gone. She knew only malicious hatred for her sister now, laughing maniacally with a burning, hateful passion.
She modified the silence ball so that only Luna could hear the inner noises. A blood-curdling scream pierced her ears like spears made of sound waves. Luna’s horn turned yellow (while going through several shades of orange) and Celestia’s cutie mark disappeared. It then seemed as though Celestia was expanding by her muscles, but Luna knew this was just the skin peeling off by a controlled radius. It then could not hold the bulge of magical, expanding air inside it and it ruptured like a popped balloon, revealing Celestia’s muscular tissue. She bled everywhere, and lost control of her bladder from the shock, voiding herself onto her own exposed inner thigh muscle. Her scream became louder, and it was music to Luna’s ears.
Luna’s horn was white now, as Celestia’s exposed abdomen and chest area expanded like her skin did a minute ago. Her ribs ripped through, making the sun goddess bleed profusely. Her heart detached from the arteries and veins that attached it to her innards, and dropped onto her bed like a stone. Her lungs followed, as did the rest of her internal organs.
Seconds later, there was nothing but silence. But silence was all Luna could now bear to hear.