(Celestia, Distant Past)
Celestia stared at the scene before her, with Luna standing at her side since she had a... personal investment in the issue.
The whole point of making marriageable age higher than what was considered the one of consent was to prevent the family drama that Griffons and minotaurs went through... pretty much all the time before they had an unified country. She ought to know; she was old enough to have been there. She liked to think better of ponies, but she did not want to deal with ponies getting scammed out of their inheritances or their dowries because they ran off with the first silver-tongued quick-witted mare or charismatic dashing stallion that promised the world but gave only heartache.
Ponies were also highly physical, unlike Griffons (getting one to agree to a nuzzling was difficult for non-direct-family, much less a hug). Mere words where not enough to get to know each other, even if high-brow unicorns would like to believe otherwise.
That is to say, ponies were supposed to get to know each other before involving anything that could be considered 'official'. They were free to chose their partners, free to get together or drift apart, and thus they were given the time to mature further and do so before anything that could complicate matters due to a rushed decision was able to be involved.
"Princess Celestia herself said so."
However, words could sink a relationship really, really fast. That he sounded so demanding and smug did not earn him any favors.
(She would like for talented individuals to 'get together'... but then again, if it would lead to the situation she was currently facing...)
"Wind Whistler deserves a nobler, more adequate partner." Storm Chaser said, proudly throwing out his chest.
"Wind Whistler deserves to choose what she likes, and Windstorm is not a scoundrel, he is merely less fortunate." Storm Shadow retorted, looking straight at the two sisters without so much as a glance towards Chaser; with his impassive demeanor and cold, firm voice, Chaser actually faltered. "His interests and personality are much more in tune with my daughter's, and his skills have impressed us."
Celestia knew that it was not a battle that Chaser could win, the problem was acceptance of that fact and coming to terms with it. After all, Shadow was an officer for a reason - a whole slew of reasons, and really danged good ones at that; if he approved, Windstorm really was all that and a bale of hay. She had originally... suggested that Chaser and Whistler got together because the two families were rather influential, and they were rather strong, too.
Hay, Commander Hurricane was the first pegasus that could perform the Sonic Rainboom (that she knew of), and Storm Chaser's parents were great storm wranglers - with him not so far behind. Chaser had, however... not made the best of impressions on Wind Whistler, and Windstorm, too, did not seem to like him too much; trying to make the herd larger still was not an option.
"Not as much as his drive, however." Meadowlark interjected, and Celestia could hear the nails being driven into the coffin. "He approached us out of respect towards us. We could tell, as he asked for our permission to court our eldest daughter, that they wanted our blessing, but did not need it."
The mare stood resolutely next to her husband, her growing belly not detracting from her intimidating aura one bit. Actually, it might just have made her a little scarier.
Celestia could tell that they were holding back, though.
Chaser looked at her like she was a lifeline, though she felt like she might agree with Luna in the end (Luna's thoughts were pasted all over her face, or so they were to her, at least). But what could she do?
The crackling of static coming from the two adults' wings was so surprising that she actually widened her eyes - Luna did, too.
Storm Chaser was so outclassed, it ceased being funny, went beyond that, and became hilarious once more. She knew, from Luna and Clover, that Windstorm had 'figured out' how lightning was made - probably from a brush with Typhon and his ever-growing crazy weather powers - and was learning how to manipulate his own power to duplicate it; Starswirl, his son, and Comet Shine said that they were still researching weather magic!
Windstorm might have arrived with nothing but what he had carried himself, but being in the center of a big magical discovery certainly made him popular. He, and the way he could teach what he knew, was proof that all pegasus ponies were magical, not just the legends - and from there, it was but a minor step to prove that all ponies were, too. Starswirl's involvement in the research may have been ancillary, but that was simply because he was allowing Clover to get closer to them - they became rather close friends, after all, and felt like it was more their right than his.
Now, if only Chaser hadn't decided to get her involved... she had to think of something! She had to... oh! Remember what was that she had said when she introduced Whistler to Chaser! Maybe she could find something that would prevent her from getting tangled up in what should have been a private affair in the first place.
...
Oh... oh no... it should have been private in the first place!
*****
"Reminiscing about old times?" Typhon called out, emerging from an archway that hadn't been there before.
"I am dreaming." Celestia stated, to which he nodded. "Ugh, but why that? It reminds me of the fact that I rarely made functioning couples..."
"You may have good fortune and intuition, but you could be pretty oblivious about romantic interactions." He said as the scene slowly turned into Cloudsdale in the past. "Sometimes in general; Starswirl only acted stern and dignified while inside the castle, but not his lab."
"Well, I preferred to see him like that. He was always so... focused and passionate about his discoveries." Celestia said, almost hearing him going into a spiel about his research, even if it was something simple, like color-swapping.
...
Actually, she could hear him.
She turned around, and was greeted by the inside of the old audience hall, with Luna and herself sitting at the highest seat in the hall, and the old goat himself ranting passionately about the three tribes.
After an... 'accident' with a color spell in his youth (before he even caught the attention of the unicorn courts), the magic stuck to his coat and irises, so they kept changing. Celestia thought it gave him character, although, seeing him again, 'wearing' Twilight Sparkle's color palette at the moment, made her ask herself why she never asked him to get rid of that.
Or get Clover to stop imitating it.
"Sorry." Typhon said, shrugging. "I kinda fell half-asleep for real, so we're only semi-lucid for now."
"Memories running down regular dreams?"
"Yup. Project not working the way I wanted. Tried reading. Wound up conking out on a sofa."
"What kind of project?"
"Something for protection. Mad alchemy, mad enchanting, mad metalworking, and generic magic science were involved." Typhon shook a little and patted his face, trying to prevent falling into a deeper slumber and dragging them off into a normal dream. "I remember this one time with a mad social scientist..."
"Ah... is there a discipline that does not have a practitioner with highly unorthodox methodology?" Celestia asked; starting to get more lucid herself. "It worries me that Twilight might come across one and get swept up in their... intensity."
"Good luck with that." Typhon chuckled. "Twilight's already a little off herself, and - just for starters - there's a mad botanist, a crazy artificer raver, and an alchemist candy-maker just in one section of Ponyville! The jury's still out on Pinkie, due to her casual approach, but if she starts 'improving' the ovens, or the baked goods themselves..."
"Wait, did you say 'botanist'? Like the one that made the glow-in-the-dark flower-based clock?" Celestia asked, images of Ponyville trapped under enormous black briars flashing through her mind. And the dreamscape.
"Kind of, but we have Dark Magician Luna, so the stupid black vines can't touch her." Typhon said, making Celestia look at him in mild confusion. "Alternate universe stuff."
"Where Luna is not as proficient in its use?" Celestia asked with a vague feeling of hope.
"For some odd reason despite being mistress of the night, yes. And it doesn't help any - in fact, it makes everything worse!" Typhon laughed quietly, particularly at the annoyed sneer on the face of the otherwise ladylike pony. "Couldn't fight back vines that disrupted normal magic, couldn't fight back a being that drained the magic out of a pony, and there are instances of ponies getting dangerous dark magic that she just couldn't deal with at all."
Celestia groaned and sighed and slumped on the 'ground'.
"Besides, what's the big deal? The more you understand the basic building blocks of ideas, the better! Darkness is awesome, so long as you don't get caught in any pitfalls, like thinking about 'absolute' power or 'true' power. Curiously enough, the one guy I expected to Understand that words like 'ultimate' are only useful for drama... doesn't." Typhon scratched his head, waving his hand around as the scene swirled into the interior of Sugarcube Corner. "Anyways, if I am here, it means that I was in your head before you even fell asleep. Come on, sit down and take a load off."
"There are several things on my mind lately." Celestia confessed, elegantly lowering herself at a table before taking a bite out of a dream donut. It was good, and made her smile in contentment. "However, how to get paperwork done is no longer one of them."
"The crown is heavy only if you don't wear it well." Typhon nodded. "If you don't get advantages out of something, then why do it?"
"For the benefit of the subje- oh, that would constitute as an 'advantage', wouldn't it?" Celestia's retort died at its own hooves, making her chuckle.
"See? Benefits all around. That includes stopping something worse, of course."
"Where you aware of Nightmare Moon before she came to be?" Celestia didn't take her eyes off her pastry, but could still see Typhon wincing at the edge of her vision.
"Kind of." He gestured with his hands. "It was the most likely outcome in the versions of Equestria that I have seen, but there have been others where you are the one that goes insane; some, it's both of you and it falls to Cadence, who obviously is immortal (or really, really long-lived) in that case, and existed at the time. In a few, it was even a gambit on Luna's part, pretending to desire an eternal night to get a callous version of yourself to avoid turning into a tyrant."
He paused, tapped a finger on the table, and looked towards the ceiling in contemplation.
"I still tried, though. The timeline doesn't like big changes, and let me tell you that killing Tiamat was a huge one... plus some things I did here and there... which we had to fight to keep them from getting cancelled out until they finally stuck for good. The timeline more or less tried fighting further big changes, so it was difficult to predict what would happen next or even stopping certain events. Had we succeeded in defeating Sombra before you arrived, it might have been possible to avert Nightmare Moon, though I don't know at what cost - something equally huge, at least."
The scenery started to bend and fall away, with small, polished crystals peeking from the ground, some slowly growing into the shape of buildings, with the largest, not unlike a needle, standing much, much taller. In the end, a sparkling city carved out of crystals stood in the soft morning light, the central spire was tall like a mountain, and just one of the arches holding it was enough to fit a house.
"Your best guess?"
"No Twilight Sparkle." He said, making Celestia suddenly stiffen. "And I don't know what would have happened to you; it was a big event in the development of your personality, too. Luna learned that she shouldn't get lost in her own darkness, you learned to pay more attention to your surroundings to prevent mistakes... even if you were still kind of self-deluded in that front."
"Nothing could be done, then." Celestia sighed.
"The timeline is malleable, but not that much, not with the resources we had and the mistakes we made." Typhon drummed his fingers on the table. "However, it also means that what I want to do is possible."
Celestia knew better than to ask right then, so she settled for another thing.
"What do you know of the Crystal Empire? Oh, and how often were you there?"
"I'm willing to bet 'more than its average citizen but less than Prospit' and 'almost all the time'. I started being in two places at once, you know."
"Could you have done something about the black rain?" As she spoke, a cloud started to darken and grow, blue lightning flashing from within as distressingly solid-looking black tendrils snaked about what was now an enormous storm; she noted that it was worryingly almost rivaling the size of the storm he himself had made at the time of his... rest.
"Let me guess, you had a feeling of dread wash over you, like being swallowed in a dark cave that just would not relent?" He asked as the clouds began to release an oil-black liquid that she refused to believe could have ever been water. He pointed upwards. "That, princess, is what happens when Void and Rage touch a person capable of calling rain."
Celestia's head snapped to look at him as the water started weighing down her mane, staining it and her coat.
"I had more than enough tethers to sanity and self-restraint, princess." He answered the unasked question. "I had practice, and help, and I need to remind you that there is more to darkness than fear and loathing."
Celestia gave a shaky breath, and, even if the feeling of the... liquid on her coat was making her skin crawl, and she could taste the rage of the lightning... it still smelled like rain.
Mournful, sad... almost normal, really. Fighting off something, just so that it would not go further than that.
"I saw Sombra kill and then possess my friend, Celestia." He whispered, dejected, but his voice was still carried over the sounds of lightning and rainfall. "I... got news that he is not dead, that he managed to hold on to his life, if just barely. Sombra came by surprise, and enslaved all of our friends in the city, and that was just with misaligned magic half-understood from stolen notes. If it were not for the special projects that we started precisely to counter him, I don't know how many lives would have been lost."
He stood quietly as large arch grew out of a large crystal, as if made of blue vines that snaked and coiled around one another, with another appearing further away, and another, until they reached the end of the road. The rain bent out of the way, stopped by an invisible archway connecting them.
"These are the eastern ones, and the closest ones to competition." He said. "They might have not been ready at one-hundred percent, but I wasn't going to let him get away with it. I never figured that I would have to face him directly, though, nor that he would have angered me like so... I was not about to underestimate Sombra, however, so I actually asked for this 'corruption'."
"I... see." Celestia stared at the human, trying to see if...
"No, while my body and mind wasn't exactly meant to wield powers pertaining to another Aspect, there are no lasting effects if you can go back to your previous mentality. I had help." He said, while the grim scene slowly washed away and turned into the atrium of Windstorm's mansion in Las Pegasus. Classic pegasus architecture, with everything made of clouds, with plenty of columns, space, and the occasional bust or statue of an important pony. "I know how to ignore the whispers, and, for all of the impressive Grim-dark look... it doesn't actually change a dang thing, so my 'transformation' actually sucks."
Celestia blinked. He was, after all, challenging everything she believed. Darkness was - to her - a path not worth it; too dangerous, like a tightrope in the dark, with plenty of... things trying to make one fall. It was bad enough that Twilight already wanted to learn it, nevermind Luna teaching it, now she had to deal with somepo- someone that claimed to run along the path and found it unhelpful. Something famed for being addictive and twisting hearts, yet he gave it up because it couldn't twist him. She knew some dark magic, of course, since it was only sensible to know something in the case she found herself confronted by another user, to better understand the principles and how to counter them, but this?
"Let me put it this way. Even if I wasn't as reluctant to fight or use violence as Clover, I still hate to actually hurt others if there's another way; something that doesn't change just because I am angry enough to actually strike at him." He plopped down on a couch of suspiciously the perfect length to let him rest his head and feet. "I still gained some spill-over benefits from the portions of my Aspect I ceded to those two, but the aggressiveness combined with my philosophies meant that I was a pacifist blood-knight, which is as lame as it sounds. On the other hand, mental combat means that I give eldritch horrors Sanity damage."
It wasn't his fault! Not completely, anyways. Like it was his fault that their 'vast, expanded consciousnesses' and 'incomprehensible natures' were so often vulnerable to being told 'no', or to thaumaturgic principles, or Truth, or semantics, or philosophy. Well, the deluded ones with the big overblown egos, anyways, since there were quite a few that were so... Them, and worthy of the nature, like Discord.
Still, the look on the face of that wizard! He was ranting about how it should not have been possible for 'a mere human' to look that deeply into the eyes of the local flavor of Fae royalty, only for Typhon to ask 'What about a Buddhist monk? Or someone with the right siddhis?' and see his brain fry itself over ignored possibilities. Typical, ignoring something just because it's out of view.
Of course, being a Dersite with the favor of a few horrors himself didn't do any damage. Or that he was not a 'mere' anything. Or that 'mere humans' did not exist as such.
"Save for Discord. Or you. Or your sister. Playing the game, no matter how oddly or how many loopholes you exploit, is much too different from trying to butt in and outright trash all of its rules, after all." He also grumbled something that Celestia could swear sounded like 'purged Luna is still more powerful than me'.
A lightbulb in Celestia's mind went 'ping!'
The Elements!
More specifically, Twilight and her friends!
"I have thought of something." Celestia said, the small, happy motherly smile clashing terribly against the spark of deviousness in her eyes.
"Would I be correct in assuming that I won't get a straight answer if I ask?" Typhon felt a small chill on the back of his neck.
"Would you give one?" Celestia spoke with that same smile, never allowing it to turn into a grin... which was more worrying.
"I suppose I earned that one."
*****
(Ponyville, Library, three days later)
Twilight Sparkle released the scroll, allowing it to gently flutter to the floor.
It was not voluntarily, as it had done so due to her magic fizzling out.
"The princess wants what?!" Spike shrieked a little at the end, but it would be for naught.
"The princess wants me to reform him."