A gentle pressure on her brow woke Celestia. A dark and blurry figure stood over her, bathed in star light, smiling sadly. Celestia blinked in confusion and gaped at the shadowy apparition.
“S…sister?!” she blinked at the lunar angel. Her vision swam into focus and she realized it was no apparition looming before her. Her sister merely nodded and stood a silent sentry to her grieving sister.
“How?… Why? I..I….I’m so sorry…” She managed in a choked whisper. She sighed and felt tears form in her eyes. “I know you're not real but, I have to tell you how sorry I am….I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you needed me the most…”
Luna said nothing but, her eyes grew sadder at Celestia’s apologies.
“The agony you must have felt….It was all at my hoof. I should have seen Swifts deceit…I felt like Twilight was stealing you from me and I couldn’t bare the thought of being alone again…” Celestia admitted, tears brimming in her amethyst eyes.
Her sister merely continued to stare at her and smile sadly. Is she mocking me, Celestia thought to herself in anguish. Is she happy that I suffered without her? Was her love always just another faked emotion?
“Have you no soul you cowardly spirit?” The white mare growled at the wraithlike princess. “ You come here, dressed in this ghastly attire, mocking my sister and finding glee in my torment…”
The lunar spirit stood unmoving and held the same sad smile on her face, unmoving. Something had changed to Celestia ,though. The creature had lost the twinkle to its eye and its breathing seemed to slow to nothing at all.
“BEGONE! BACK TO THE RIVER WITH YOU UNHOLY BEAST.” She screamed leaping from her lavish bed. “ I WILL NOT HAVE MY DEPARTED SISTER MOCKED IN MY HOUSE!”
Her horn glowed and she tried to send a wave of her aura at the creature to expel it from her sight. The wave of energy merely passed through the creature; It’s smile never wavering. Celestia merely shook her head and sank down to the floor sobbing.
“I’m so weak…” Celestia gasped between raking sobs. “I can’t even protect myself…It should have been me, not you.”
Her eyelids sank shut and she cried into her golden slippers with vigor. She cried for many different reasons, but chief among them was her loneliness. In her millennia’s of rule she had always had her sister by her side. Her very presence helped to fight back the looming emptiness of decay. Now, though, she had no pony and she could feel the darkness creeping into her mind. It crawled just beneath the surface of her mind…serpentine tendrils clinging to her soul. Her sisters apparition was yet another agonizing reminder of her endless punishment.
“Please…Just kill me…” The Princess moaned from behind her flowing mane. “I can’t stand this torment spirit… end my suffering…”
“Your pain has only just begun, Dear Sister…”
Celestia’s eyes shot open and she stared, slack jawed, at the ghostly being. “Luna” no longer wore the smile, but instead a grave frown. Her eyes glowed with a silvery incandescence that rivaled the torches in the room. Celestia could only stare in muted horror as her sister erupted in a ethereal blaze and rose into the air.
“You claim to feel lonely and abandoned, yet, you are the one who is afraid of emotion. You fear love and you fear loss. You hurt those around you so you will not be hurt. Your selfishness knows no bounds….”
“I loved you and Twilight…” Celestia managed weakly.
“Yes, and you let your fears and selfishness destroy there lives. For that, I punish you to the one thing you fear the most….you must love, again.”
She cackled wildly and erupted in a dazzling display of light and sound. Celestia only covered her eyes in time to shield herself from the dazzling light . her body morphed and shifted in the light and ,suddenly, exploded.
~*~*~*~
Celestia jumped from her bed gasping from her nightmare. Her fur and bed sheets had become sticky and tangled from her sweating and thrashing in her sleep. Flak lay snoring softly in his sleep, unaware of the princesses distress. She sat there panting, her mind reeling from the dream. She glanced over at the sleeping guard and sighed in frustration. a little bit of drool oozed from the corner of his mouth and he was giggling at something in his dream.
"If you're my punishment then, I suppose it's not so bad?" She sighed.
She glanced out the door towards the moon and thought about what her "sister" had said.
"I punish you to the one thing you fear the most….you must love, again.”
Hate me if it helps, sister, she thought mournfully, but don't ask me to love....
~*~*~*~
Somewhere in that starry night a filly cried and a single mare lay in a grove of trees fighting to breath.