Canterlot Castle. The dim lamps gave the hallways a soft orange glow as Princess Luna trotted to the library. Night court was over and all of the sniveling nobles who thought that she would give into their demands easier than her sister had long since left in disappointment. The night guards had been dismissed, there was practically no reason why she needed them, Luna could protect herself, but she did her best to placate her sister.
The library neared, its large oak doors nearly triple Luna’s height. There was an inscription above it, reading Knowledge is Power. Two guards stood vigilant on either side of the doors. One saw her approach and unlocked the doors with a large brass key. Why her sister had decided that the library needed to be locked up at night Luna would never understand. With a thought, the doors were enveloped in an indigo hue and swung open. Following her through, the doors closed with a clink, the locks falling back into place.
The fact that the stacks had not changed in the thousand years Luna had been gone was a small consolation. The towering bookcases could probably reach her heavens if somepony were to stack them on top of each other. The thousands of books filled the air with the smell of aging paper, parchment, and ink. Luna sucked in a lungful of the air through her nose and held the smell in for as long as she could. Letting it out with a sigh, Luna vowed that she should spend her free time in the library.
She passed tower after tower of aging wood until she saw the locked door of the Starswirl the Bearded wing. The iron barred door was extremely similar to a jail door, the likeness usually scaring away the skittish ponies that prowled the library. Luna opened the door with a key levitated from her flowing starry mane. A giant hourglass sat in the center of the wing, sand granules slowly counting away the hours. Bookcases split up the wing into five different alleys, each filled with knowledge too dangerous for the public or too advanced for the normal ponies who came from the School for Gifted Unicorns. Only a select group was even allowed in this part of the library, mostly composed of the princesses, archmages, and a hooful of ponies that Luna and her sister trusted.
Luna took the path that went the same direction from the door, directly behind the hourglass. This was the battle section of the wing, filled with scrolls and aging, decrepit books that detailed the finer points of battle magic. How to make constructs, powerful magic beams, and golems were scrawled in old equestrian, remnants of the Great War, the war to end all wars.
Hidden behind a bookcase, Luna found a sealed, steel, circular vault. The hinges slightly rusted and the pronged wheel jutting out from the front was covered in cobwebs. Above the vault was scrawled an ancient language that, most likely, only she and her sister even knew anymore.The font flowed and connected to the other symbols, so much so that to an untrained eye they didn’t even look like separate letters. It took Luna a second to dredge up the memories of millenniums past. The letters suddenly made sense as she peered at them. They said “Si vis pacem, para bellum,” if you want peace, prepare for war.
How fitting, Luna thought, that Celestia would inscribe that. The vault was built after Luna had been banished. Before, all of the vaults contents would have just been a normal part of the Starswirl wing, but now Celestia had deemed them too dangerous for pony eyes and hid them. Luna spun the wheel with her magic making several large thunks behind the door, the cobwebs shattering and left to float helplessly in the air.
She pulled on the vault door with her magic. The door didn’t budge, it just merely creaked and groaned. Luna strained against the door, her horn glowing brighter and a vein popping out in her neck. The door groaned in protest as it was pulled inch by hard fought inch away from the wall. Rust fell off of the hinges into a dirty red pile on the hardwood floor. Air whooshed into the vault past her as soon as the two chambers were unseparated. In return, a hurricane of dust erupted from the vault chamber, sending Luna into a sneezing fit and covering the immediate area with a thin layer of the grey particles.
Luna peered into the vault, her head sticking slightly through the door, it was pitch black. Luna concentrated and sent multiple balls of magic fire flinging down the vault and sticking to the ceiling. She sent another burst of concentration and the magic flames grew larger and brighter. She wrapped her hoof around the closest one; no heat, perfect.
The vault was a long corridor lined on both sides with bookshelves no taller than herself. A few had broken down the middle, their contents of scrolls and books sitting on top of each other covered in the rotted remains of the shelves. Above each shelf was the silhouette of a creature. They would stay the same all on one side then change to another and another as they wrapped around the end of the corridor and back around to the entrance.
Looking to her left, Luna saw the shadow of a pony above the shelves about fifteen down, where it changed into a gryphon. Her eyes passed over many silhouettes as she walked down the corridor, some she hadn’t even seen in thousands of years. At the end of the hallway sat another shelf, the only different thing about this one was that it was the only shelf in the whole vault that had one silhouette. It was in the shape of a bipedal creature, which she knew to be slightly smaller and slimmer than a minotaur, but still larger than Celestia or herself. It was holding a large circular shield and a spear much taller than itself.
There was a multitude of scrolls and books but what drew her eye was a large, thick leather bound book that sat cover-up on the bottom of the shelf. She didn’t recognize the words in the title, but they looked older than even her. With a flash from her horn, a large pillow appeared on the floor in front of the bookshelf with a popping discharge of magic. Luna laid down on it and levitated the book towards her and sat it down in front of the pillow. The book had another layer of dust on it at least a horseshoe thick. With a thought, her magic brushed away the dust cleanly, depositing it in the corner next to a corner-spanning cobweb.
When she opened it, she found that the words were ones she could understand. She knew what was in this book and hoped to find the answers she needed from it. War was looming once more. Nations were gearing their armies for another great battle and if Equestria didn’t intervene soon, the whole world would soon be ravaged by the savagery of new technology wielded by prideful rulers. There were always answers in the past, history that was being repeated, and if a pony looked hard enough they might find a way to stop it.
What Luna held in her hooves was the key to the lockbox of troubles that was emerging in the world. If needed, she would read every single document in the vaults to find what she needed, but it started with this shelf, the shelf of humans. The large bipedal creatures started the Great War with the dragons, and by the end of the conflict nearly extinct. Maybe by studying the records of the humans, Luna hoped she could find the same patterns that were occurring now.
She turned the pages, losing herself to the narrative of the poet who wrote the epic...