Sharing the Night: Chapter 13
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Twilight burst out of the stardust desert like a drowning mare gasping for breath and fell on her front hooves, coughing. It was not how she had expected to return to the desert of dreams. In fact, it belied all her experience with stars up until then.
Twilight was the stars. They were her. For a moment, as she shook, trying to catch her breath, she remembered what it was like when the ursa had swallowed her and feared that Gemini was fighting her for the stars… but no, Gemini had meant it when she had renounced them. This was more like she had been choking on her own lungs.
Regardless, the danger was over. Here and now, she could breathe again.
It was absurd, is what it was. She had plenty of experience feeling like she still had physical features, which she did not actually possess when she was manifest as the stars, but never before had her own stars stifled her like this. She sat there breathing deeply as she took stock of her situation.
The stars buried deep in Equestria were a part of her now. Technically, she supposed they had always been a part of her, but now they were connected in a way that the stars in ponies were not. Dreamers brushed up against her, dipping in and out of contact, but no other presence clouded the stars. They were hers and hers alone. As her mind cleared, the truth of the matter filled her with a dizzying euphoria.
No matter what happened from here on out, the nightmares were over. The fear that had driven her to come here—fear of what lurked beneath Equestria—was gone. It was she who lurked beneath Equestria now. She could go back to living a normal life without dreading the moment dusk would come and take from her the lucidity she so treasured. She could sit alongside Luna without her making that frown that meant she felt the trembling that even Twilight herself was numb to. She could begin to measure her time in days and weeks again, instead of hours and minutes.
She could finally relax.
No. No, she couldn’t relax just yet. Soon, but not yet. The memories she had experienced might haunt her to the end of her days, but that book was closed for now. Gemini, however, was real. Gemini was part of this time, and the last time Twilight had seen her, she and Luna had been charging at each other with fury in their eyes. Twilight had to find them. She had to do… something.
First, she had to manage getting to her hooves.
She tried to lift herself, and her body felt heavy even though her breathing was almost normal again. Her hooves felt like they were full of sand, and the rest of her was not much different. With her incredible skills of deduction, the cause was immediately clear to her.
Her hooves were full of sand, and the rest of her was not much different.
She was not her usual starry black self, but a solid, crusty, shining white. The void inside of her was packed heavy with stars, and even as she moved, they sloughed off of her like a sand castle collapsing under its own weight.
The sight of it was an unwelcome reminder of what she had discovered—that she was little more than the broken and forgotten pieces of alicorns who had once ruled since time immemorial. The reminder that her greatest fears had come to pass was almost enough to make her give up right then and there. She expected that, any moment now, she would collapse into the sand, curl up into a ball and ask why she had ever thought she could be happy.
That moment never came. Her greatest fear was no longer a fear. It was just a fact. Facts, she could deal with.
Fact: Twilight was, at the basest level, a celestial system composed of both stars and the magic they produced. Fact: unlike the night sky, this land of dreams was separated into discrete areas, with stars below and magic above. Fact: when Gemini had manifested, she had done so by bringing stars and magic together in equal parts.
Conclusion: when Gemini had attacked Twilight, she had renounced the stars, but kept the magic.
This should have been a relief to realize, but instead, it sent a shiver down her spine. It meant that eventually, Twilight would recover. In fact, she would recover immediately if she returned to the night sky.
Gemini, however, would not. Not on her own, anyway. Twilight couldn’t guess what rules governed the shadowy mare now, but she was a being of pure magic. If she couldn’t replenish that magic, eventually she would simply cease to be. Suddenly, it was a lot more important for Twilight to find Luna.
Gemini was dying, and though Twilight wanted to believe that Somni and Fati would be accepting of this fate—approve of it, even—she knew better than to trust in it. The alicorns which Twilight had come to know in such a short time were all deeply flawed individuals, and while Solaria’s genesis had been undertaken with the best of intentions, the same could not be said for Gemini.
There was a chance that things could go very, very wrong.
☾ ☾ ☾
“Show thyself, thou currish, milk-livered canker-blossom!”
It had been hours since Twilight had disappeared into the stardust below, and Luna cursed herself for letting her guard down. She had come down here with one goal in mind, to protect Twilight Sparkle, and she had failed.
She wasn’t going to make that mistake again. Her milky white eyes caught movement in the darkness, and she shot a beam of moonlight out to illuminate it. She thought she heard the creature that Twilight had named Gemini hiss in response, but otherwise, there was no sign of it. Such had the conflict stretched on into the night, with long periods of silence interspersed with short bouts of motion and light.
In truth, Luna was having trouble blaming herself. Twilight had all but asked to be possessed by this creature. No, she had asked. She had actually asked to join with it, to share memories and become some ancient alicorn made whole. The very thought made Luna’s skin crawl, and she didn’t even have skin in this endless land of dreams.
Twilight had made it perfectly clear that she did not want to be worried over and had made it all but impossible to protect her. None of the fault lay with Luna, but somehow, the thought only rankled her further.
Luna spread her wings and beat them with one great motion, launching herself out of the way of the shadowy pony that came at her from above. As the shape passed in front of her, Luna could tell that it was larger now and looking less and less equine by the moment. It snarled and snapped, dripping darkness from its twin maws as it fled back into the void-black sky from which it was indistinguishable.
The creature’s deterioration worried her. Had it made a mistake by giving up the stars? Would it try to take them back? So long as Luna had its attention, she didn’t think so, but Luna could only stay here so long. That was the real concern.
There was little doubt in Luna’s heart that one such as Twilight would undoubtedly survive the ordeal of being thrown into the desert of stars and eventually collect herself once more, but there was no guarantee that it would be any time soon. She could be lost in memory and dream for hundreds of years. Thousands. There was no way to know, and Luna didn’t have that long.
Dawn was nearing, and when it came, Luna did not think that this land of dreams would remain. She would find herself in a very deep hole, and Twilight would be alone with the creature she had offered herself to, trapped in the throes of a fugue that would leave her helpless to resist.
Finally, she saw her chance. Though the creature was still lucid enough to use the empty black sky for concealment, its growing size and volatility was beginning to betray it. Now, she decided, was the time to strike—before it realized it was exposed and before Luna ran out of manifest moonlight. The moon was a great distance from where she was fighting this battle by proxy. If her manifestation dissipated, she would not be able to return before dawn. It would be her loss.
She had one chance, and she took it. The light of her shining white form dimmed subtly as everything she could spare gathered at her horn. She took a quick breath and fired a ray of moonlight far brighter and faster than any of her previous probing shots.
She would have hit if not for the sudden sirocco of stars that swept in, spoiled her aim and sent the creature skittering off into the depths of darkness around her. “No…” she whispered weakly as she struggled with the stars’ buffeting and registered her failure. That was it, then. Her heart sank, and so did she, lurching over and letting the stars do as they would with her.
What they did was hold her. “Hey,” they said with a wan smile and ran a hoof through her mane.
It took Luna a moment to realize what was going on and then another to make sure. “Twilight?” she asked, hoping for some sign that this star-crusted figure was the mare she knew, whole and hale. What she received was the most beatific smile she had ever seen on her friend’s face.
Oddly enough, this did not encourage her. It must have shown on her face, as the figure leaned back in to nuzzle her. “It’s me, Luna. I’m fine.”
“Truly?” Luna asked, almost in rote just to hear Twilight say it again, but the mare in her arms stiffened.
Twilight withdrew from the embrace, suddenly uncomfortable, unwilling to meet Luna’s gaze. “I saw… a small slice of the past,” she explained with a shiver; though as she went on, her reticence turned to melancholy. “Barely a day’s worth. I saw some things that I’ll never forget… but that’s all. I saw them. Nothing more.”
“Then—”
“I was wrong,” Twilight admitted, grateful for it. “Thank it all, I was wrong. I know what I am now. I know what we are now, and it’s not her. It’s not them. Not really. I have my answers, and to be honest, they kind of suck, but we have them. We’re done looking. It’s over.”
Luna was overcome with a sudden gladness she could not describe. She lunged forward to hug Twilight, but this time, the stellar alicorn crumbled beneath Luna’s hooves, giving her a shock.
Twilight swirled around and reformed, looking a little worse for wear as she slowly took a few breaths. Luna turned to face her once again, making a weak gesture with her hoof, but staying back with a distraught look on her face.
“Ah, don’t. Please don’t do that,” she said—though it didn’t keep her from sweeping back close to Luna. “Sorry, my magic is spread kind of thin, right now. Gemini kept her magic, and I suddenly have a lot more stars than I came down with. I’ll be fine when we get back to the night.
“It’s funny,” she said with a chuckle. “It’s the opposite of that time I gave you a star. I feel heavy yet… brittle.”
Luna’s panic subsided a bit then flared back up as she put the pieces together. “We must go now, then. Dawn is approaching. If we are too late, you will not have a night to draw from.”
For the first time since her return, Twilight’s apparent inner peace shattered, and she glanced upwards. “It’s that late? That’s… unfortunate.”
Luna made to grab her hoof. “Come! We still have time!” she insisted, but Twilight pulled back, looking worried and conflicted.
“No, I can’t go yet,” she said, and Luna swore there was a tremor of concern in it. “Not with Gemini like this.”
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Luna scowled at Twilight’s declaration, as well she should, given what Twilight had just said. She didn’t understand, though. Twilight tried to explain it to her. “If I don’t do it now, then… I won’t get another chance. She won’t get another chance. They won’t get another chance.”
Luna was taken aback. After all, she had just spent the entire night fighting the creature for Twilight’s sake. “That thing does not deserve another chance!” she spat.
“Irrelevant!” the darkness around them boomed. “We—I do not need a ‘chance.’”
Twilight turned to try to find the source of the voice, but it was hopeless. “Somni,” she pleaded. “Fati, please.”
“Don’t call me that!” the voice cried, its source circling around Twilight and Luna. “I would rather be Gemini. That is what you called me, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t know you, then,” Twilight insisted, though her uncertainty showed.
The darkness made a kind of scoff, which sounded more like a growl. “And you presume to know me now?”
“A bit,” Twilight offered, thinking this would all be much easier if she knew what was actually going on in Gemini’s head. “Enough that I can’t just leave you like this.”
Gemini’s voice roared in front of Twilight. “Let’s have it, then!” she shouted, forcing Twilight back a bit with her intensity. “Spin your tale of unity for me again, Twilight Sparkle. Suggest that we join together. I dare you.”
Twilight swallowed hard on nothing but her own nervousness. “I… can’t,” she finally admitted. “What happened was a tragedy, and repeating history would only make it worse.”
“You do know me,” the shadowy figure said and let out a hiss that Twilight wasn’t sure was approval or pain. “You know what happened. Very well, go on. Tell me that you know how I feel. Surely that is your angle.”
Twilight’s lips tightened, and she shook her head in one sharp movement. “I don’t. I really don’t. I don’t know what love is. I don’t know what it feels like… I don’t know what losing it feels like, and I… I hope I never have to.”
Though she was surely getting the answers she wanted, they only seemed to anger Gemini. “Tell me that I can be what I was, once again!” she snapped, and Twilight was briefly able to make out her face contorted in rage before it blended back into the flat black darkness.
“What you were is gone,” Twilight whispered, losing her hesitation as Gemini cornered her and took the last thing she could claim. “Even Luna and I, who inherited it, are something different.”
“Then how do you expect to help me, girl?” Gemini snarled. She continued her circling around Twilight and Luna with something akin to a prideful strut. The darkness hid what seemed to be the incorrect number of legs. “How do you expect to make this better?”
“No, you’re right,” Twilight said, her voice rising in pitch as she admitted it. “You’re right. You scare me, and I don’t want you as a part of me. I can’t even properly empathize with you, let alone fix what was broken thousands of years ago.” She reiterated her failings but couldn’t add to them.
“What then?” Gemini cried, this time from behind, starling both Twilight and Luna. “What do you intend to do?”
Gemini thought that she had run Twilight out of options, but as she closed her eyes and took a breath, she knew there had really only been one to begin with. “I think… it would be best for all of us if you just faded away, but it doesn’t have to be like this. Not screaming and clawing for one last shred of magic.”
“You… You would euthanize me? Euthanize us?!” Gemini balked, incredulous. “We were gods before you ever—”
“But you’re not,” Twilight interrupted, stepping forward towards the voice with every ounce of determination she could muster. “You’re not gods. You’re not alicorns. You’re not… even real.”
For the first time, Twilight’s answer didn’t elicit another outburst from Gemini. Instead, there was a long, cold silence until she spoke. “You dare.”
“I do,” Twilight said matter-of-factly. Her terseness edged into bitterness and a hint of anger as she laid out the facts. “I have fought long and hard trying to understand the stars and what I am. Let me tell you what it means to be an alicorn of the stars. The alicorn of the stars.”
“You think to lecture me on alicorns?” Gemini asked. “I have been an alicorn for more years than you can count, foal!”
Twilight was not deterred. “You know nothing,” she insisted, anger smouldering in her voice. “You know nothing about the stars. I am the alicorn of the stars. I am the first, and eternity willing, I will be the last.”
Twilight paused as Luna placed a gentle hoof on her shoulder. “Twilight, becalm thyself,” she whispered.
Twilight took a breath, but it didn’t help much. The truth was ugly. It was hard to take and hurt to accept, and she was damn well going to share it. “You gave up on the stars because you see them as broken, but I am not broken!” she declared. “I am every star in the sky, every star under the earth. There are legends told about parts of me that have gone feral, and there is a piece of me in each and every pony on this planet. Even so, they are all me. That is what it means to be me. I am the soul of the stars, and I am legion!”
Without warning, Twilight had the disquieting opportunity to feel her head scattered into stars as Luna swatted it from behind. “Bad Twilight Sparkle. No megalomania,” she chided, but the words were muddled thanks to her ears being particulate at the moment. Her pretend ears. Which were made of stars. Okay, now Twilight was getting a headache, and she wasn’t sure if it was Luna’s fault or not.
In any case, it worked. Ranting catharsis over, she collected herself, literally, and reassessed the situation. All she had to do was to state the facts, not spit spite at the top of her lungs. She kept her voice even; she kept her words measured. In short, she lectured.
“You were, before tonight, a part of me. You were a piece—a fairly large piece—that existed in parallel, born from a memory, doomed to a terrible fate from the start. I have traveled the world, searching out starbeasts and taking them into me. I believe that I was justified. I believe that there was a categorical difference between them and me. I believe that I am the alicorn of the stars, and they little more than animated memories.
“We could argue all night about the semantics of whether that applied to you—who had a right to what and whether we could have coexisted, but it’s all irrelevant now. You gave up your stars. You gave up yourself. You gave up. There is no part of me left in you, Gemini. There is no alicorn in you. Somni and Fati are gone, and Luna and I are their children—as close as alicorns can be. That is the state of things.”
Twilight’s calm demeanor seemed to work. At the very least, Gemini seemed content to hear her out, rather than fume and snarl. Twilight hoped it would last, as she finished her explanation. “You—the you that I am talking to—are no longer a part of that equation. You are a memory. Not even that, you’re an echo of a memory. That memory will remain forever in my library of stars, but you… there isn’t much hope for something like you.”
Gemini’s voice came across ragged and raspy as she asked, “Something… like… me?”
Twilight’s heart sank as she contemplated answering that question. This was not going to end well. “You are what’s left when you take away everything that makes a pony. Residual magic still flowing in the same currents out of momentum and remembered connections, without body or soul to drive them. Without any real volition of your own, you will continue acting out the last thought and emotion you had—anger and outrage, I suppose—as you slowly wait for entropy to take over. My guess is that you’ll fade with the morning dew, screaming pitifully as your magic evaporates in the sun. I would honestly like to spare you that if you’d let me. You might last a little longer lurking beneath the earth, but I doubt you’d fare any better with the dragons than the sun.”
Even as they left her mouth, the words mocked her attempt to bring this to a peaceful resolution.
“Liar!” Gemini screamed—though it was more a wail with a tremor of fear. The pony that Gemini had been when she had rejected the stars would not listen.
Twilight stood defiant. Pointless as it may have seemed, she’d had to try, and even if Gemini was too far gone to listen, that didn’t mean she had failed. After all, if there was one thing that personified her, one thing that she would never let go of for as long as she lived, that thing would not be her magic, her friendships, or even the stars themselves.
It would be her punctuality.
The instant that Gemini launched her attack was the same instant that Celestia began to raise the sun. The next instant, Twilight and Luna lit their horns, and reality came crashing down between them and the wretched creature before them. Suddenly, the two alicorns stood at the nadir of a very deep hole.
“Huh. I’m surprised that worked,” Twilight muttered mostly to herself. “I guess the two nights are connected.”
Luna blinked. “Might they not have been?”
Twilight reached up with a hoof and scratched her chin. “Well, the hole is full of leaking night, so yes, there is a chance that exiting the dreamland could have been… difficult.”
“Ah,” Luna responded plainly. “You might have mentioned that before we came down here.”
Twilight took a moment to respond. “Didn’t think of it, to be honest.”
“Twilight?” Luna prompted, and Twilight turned toward the voice even though she couldn’t actually see anything in the pitch black of the hole. “You can be really depressing when you want to be.”
Twilight was silent for a long time. Now that she had a moment to think about it and she was flesh again, her eyes began to mist. “Yeah,” she said with a tight throat. “Yeah, I know. Talking somepony into killing themselves isn’t exactly how I wanted to end the night. It was cruel, I know, but the truth usually is. I’m not even sure if I should be glad I failed. I wish I could have done something for her—them—but…”
“Not that, I imagine,” Luna finished for her as Twilight felt a warm wing settle over her.
“No, not that,” Twilight agreed. “One of them sacrificed herself to save ponykind, and the other just stopped caring. I hoped she would at least have a shred of nobility… or at least apathy, but all there was was hate.”
Twilight felt a shiver in the wing draped over her. “Are we truly both the children of that thing?” Luna asked.
“Not that thing, no,” Twilight said with a stiff assurance, letting out a sigh. “Come on, let’s go home. I’ll tell you about the real alicorns of Fate and Dreams.”
“It is an uplifting tale, then?” Luna asked, curious.
Twilight could only shake her head. “Not really, no, but it’s worth telling.”
Just as they were about to lift their wings to take off and begin the long journey towards the surface, there was a burst of pitch-black magic in the rock around Twilight and Luna accompanied by one last desperate, terrible wordless cry. The sound screeched through their heads like that of a banshee, but eventually it died out. Twilight and Luna held their breath, but as the seconds ticked by, it seemed as if nothing came of it.
Then, an eye snapped open beneath their hooves.
☼ ☼ ☼
Celestia awoke that morning to a dull ache in her chest. This, she decided, was an improvement over the previous night.
She had overreacted, plain and simple. She had mistaken shock and surprise for strength of emotion and transformed the dull melancholy of the past few weeks into a frothing panic. As she rose the sun, however, the clear light of dawn showed her the truth. Yes, she was jealous of her sister’s relationship with her student, whatever form it currently took, but she was not so inexperienced with jealousy as her revelation-addled mind had made her out to be. Why, it was not uncommon at all for her to covet a particular slice of cake that decorum denied her. Surely this was no different.
She frowned as she explored the idea that her faithful student was a slice of cake to her. There was something… oddly enticing about the idea. Just the image alone seemed to stick in her mind like a bit of caramel between her teeth—and now caramel had somehow wormed its way into the image though it wasn’t the sort that stuck in one’s teeth. How peculiar. She shook her head and took a breath in an effort to dislodge the unbidden and unexplained thought.
Successfully managing to clear her mind, she declared the last minute or so nonsense. A temporary fascination with the absurd, wherein the sheer absurdity of the matter was itself the cause of fascination. One did not covet a pony in the same manner as one coveted a slice of cake, after all. Of this, she was certain.
This, begged the question, though, as to how one did normally covet a pony. More importantly, in what way was it which Celestia coveted her closest of faithful students, such that the very thought of her with her sister could result in such an ache as she felt now?
Celestia’s calm and measured train of thought betrayed her, then, for though she had claimed to not be so ignorant of jealousy as she had imagined the previous night, she couldn’t quite recall any situation in the past in which she had quite… desired the same thing of another pony. She’d had many aides whose presence and skills she had found desirous to have around and many personal students whom she had watched develop under her care, blooming into wonderful mares and stallions who had filled her with pride. What she desired of Twilight Sparkle, however, remained an unknown anomaly.
As she watched the sun creep higher and higher, she had the distinct feeling that her emotions were being deliberately obtuse with her. She was Princess Celestia—she exuded wisdom and understanding, not just practically, but literally. She could inspire introspection at a stone’s throw and reflection so easily to tease out of her subjects that it would be understandable to think that her brilliant white coat could be mistaken for chrome. There was no way she didn’t know what she felt. Clearly, whatever the cause, it was simply something so alien to her that she could not admit it, even to herself. Images of cake flashed back through her mind again, and she had to banish them once more.
Okay, forget what she wanted. Approach from the other direction. What didn’t she want Luna doing with Twilight Sparkle? That was easy—their closeness bothered her in spite of her very machinations to bring it to be. As close as possible, she had thought just last night. That was the goal. An amorous relationship was always a possibility.
Were she a normal pony, Celestia supposed that the answer would be quite obvious. She would desire Twilight Sparkle to respond to her own amorous advances. Celestia was not a normal pony, however. She was the immortal alicorn of the day—an existence completely apart from such base concerns.
As was Twilight Sparkle.
The celestial gears churned in her head.
It is at this point that a dragon burst into the air on the horizon in a shower of rock and trees.
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Twilight’s head throbbed as she scrambled up the hole that Luna had made and was now being unmade by a dragon who barely fit in it. It was not so much a maw of gnashing teeth as it was essentially a landslide throwing itself at her over and over. She supposed there was a certain amount of irony that Equestria was trying to eat her almost immediately after she’d rid herself of the instinctual fears that had been plaguing her, but she couldn’t exactly stop to appreciate the fact.
As it was, Twilight could barely fly at the best of times, and now was not the best of times. Still bloated with stars from the desert of dreams—and don’t even ask her how that worked, since she didn’t think she had actually physically come into contact with any—it was like being forced to race a triathlon after an apple family event… and losing. Definitely losing.
She tried not to think about the stars lagging behind her ascent. It truly didn’t matter if she left any behind, as most of them had come from beneath Equestria in the first place, she told herself. Just don’t think about it. Luna wasn’t doing much better. Though, she was whole, at least, and had avoided the extreme hooficure which Twilight had so far received in bits and pieces.
Having failed to not think about it, Twilight glanced downward to take stock of the situation, which was thus: there was a giant freaking dragon below her. Also, her back left leg was almost entirely missing, and it was entirely irrelevant whether the other had been shorn beforehand or not. Good to know.
It was a good thing she had glanced downward, as she barely managed to avoid another thundering chomp and kicked off what passed for the dragon’s snout with what limbs she was able. One of them crumbled, and she wondered if it even mattered that she had avoided the teeth. Truth be told, the dragon could easily scatter her to pieces with the bluntest part of its body, and while it couldn’t kill her, being trapped miles beneath Equestria was an unpleasant prospect, to be sure.
It came as a shock when she realized she was not, in fact, miles beneath Equestria. Not any more, at least. Moments after using the dragon’s snout as a makeshift trampoline, she was assaulted by fresh air, open skies and the rosy light of dawn. The sheer sense of relief hit her almost as hard as whatever part of the dragon it was that had knocked her into the forest as it rushed past her.
She didn’t even care. Branches tore more and more stars away from her, but it didn’t matter. They had reached the surface. She was safe. Her body, such as it was, eventually came to rest in a shallow stream, and she just lay there, unmoving, as she waited for it to decide that it had limbs again. She was fascinated to realize that she was, in fact, bleeding, yet anywhere the blood left her, it turned to stars and just… went back. It wasn’t long until she was holding a whole hoof against the dappled sky above her.
She was shaken out of of her reverie when an earth-shaking roar ripped through the Everfree.
Oh, right. She might be safe, but there was still a mountainous dragon that had just been woken up and desperately needed a cup of coffee. Actually, she wondered if coffee had even existed back in its time. It had been pretty deep…
The dragon roared again, and Twilight realized she was probably going to have to do something about that.
“Horseapples.”
✶ ✶ ✶
The hole which Luna had made in the world was gone—collapsed entirely by the dragon which had clawed itself up out of its depths. A quick glance confirmed Twilight’s fleeting memory of a clear dawn sky. The artificial night was gone, so there was that, at least. It wasn’t without consequences, though.
All the earth to fill not only the hole, but the void the dragon had left behind, had needed to come from somewhere, and the results weren’t pretty. The Everfree was still technically a forest, but just barely. It was now a heavily wooded crater, and there was a dragon sitting in it, thick in body, powerful in limb and literally a mountain. Not just the size of a mountain… it was actually a mountain.
Also, the dragon was fighting Luna. Twilight flapped harder in an effort to reach her faster. Luna wasn’t technically in any danger, but that hardly mattered. Twilight could go nowhere else.
As it was, Luna’s moonbeams raked the dragon’s sides, spilling rock and dirt, but doing little to actually dissuade the colossus. The lunar alicorn had already been spent after her earlier fight, and the rising light of dawn nearly blotted out her light before it could reach her target. Even as Twilight neared the fight, though, she wasn’t sure what good she could do either.
Entirely apart from the fact that the ancient dragon was immortal and could not be killed, Twilight and Luna had failed to reach the surface before dawn. The same occurrence that had left Luna nearly magicless had prevented Twilight from addressing her own imbalance as well. She technically had more magic to spare than Luna, but it was all bound up in too many stars. Like the water in wet sand, it was simply not accessible to her.
Damage control was what was most important, Twilight reminded herself. She didn’t have any massive stars with which to slap some sense into this dragon as she had Emberstoke, but maybe the right words… Oh tartarus, who was she kidding? She couldn’t even talk Gemini down, and she’d been downright talkative compared to this thing.
Suddenly, a foul thought crossed her mind just as she reached the general vicinity of the dragon’s rampage. “Luna!” she called out in the traditional Ponyville librarian voice. To her relief, she was able to catch the lunar princess’ attention on the first try. Better still, the distraction didn’t get her co-ruler killed. Well, she would have been discorporated, not killed, but either way, it hadn’t happened, so it was a plus.
“Twilight!” Luna called back as she swooped over to her, dodging the snapping jaws of the dragon as she did so. The size of the thing was almost impossible to comprehend from the vantage point of a pony. When they had faced Emberstoke, it had been night, and Twilight had had the benefit of a different perspective. Now, in the light of day and as a pony… she was about ninety percent certain that this dragon was even larger still than Emberstoke had been. “I am glad that you have collected yourself,” Luna said in a hurry as the dragon recovered. “You boasted of your great power even without regalia. I am afraid the time has come to use it.”
Twilight wilted, flattening her ears and glancing away, to keep watch of their adversary. The dragon’s movement appeared slow, but it was a trick of scale, and Twilight worried that it would take more speed than she had to remain in the area. “I can’t. I’m sorry. Gemini kept the magic when she gave me the stars,” she explained. “But that’s the thing! Do you—?”
Twilight was cut off as the dragon committed itself to an attack. Like an avalanche, it was several seconds before it reached them, and every single one was important if they were to survive to do… something. Luna went one way and Twilight the other through a hail of rock and dirt. Had she been a regular pegasus, she was rather certain that she’d have been crippled for life, as several of them went through her wings, spoiling her flight. Still she managed to power through it, and Luna found her again before she’d even had a chance to look for her.
“Damn it,” Twilight cursed as her sandy stars struggled to move themselves back into alignment of flesh and blood again. She wasn’t sure, but they seemed more sluggish than the last time. “Luna!” she started again. “Do you think this is Gemini’s doing?” she asked, and Luna looked like she was going to roll her eyes as if it were obvious. “No, look,” Twilight clarified. “You’ve been fighting it. Has there been any sign that it’s still possessed?”
Luna looked surprised for a moment. Then, her face twisted into a scowl as she glanced at the mountain-range-sized force of nature. “Neigh, but I doubt the sunlight would let it show on the outside even if it were,” she concluded. “It is hard to imagine such a creature being controlled by that… wraith, but if it was still a creature of dreams, who can say?”
Twilight groused inwardly, fighting another outburst of anger. “Unless you want to fly inside it and check, we need to be able to take it apart, and we can’t! We don’t have the power, and we can’t wait twelve hours until dusk, either. Even if we did, we’d risk losing her in the night. We need—”
“Celestia,” Luna finished for her with a slight grumble as the dragon loomed silently over them once more, and Twilight nodded.
As if summoned, the sun pulsed, and everything went white. Twilight was looking straight at Luna when her regalia cracked, and she simply ceased to be. The dragon shook the world as it roared in anguish, and Twilight was too blinded to see whatever struck her. Whatever it was, it instantly unmade her and scattered her stars across the forest.
Twilight only had the vaguest sense of the world as the sunlight blotted out her magic.
The Everfree forest burned.
☼ ☼ ☼
Luna was going to be pissed, Celestia reflected to herself in the silence of her mind as she channeled the unbridled fury of the sun down on the Everfree. She did not actually use the word ‘pissed,’ even in her mind. No, the word was much older, more cultured and colorful than that and in an entirely different language besides.
Still, ‘pissed’ was about the gist of it. Her sister had a thing about being banished to the moon.
In Celestia’s defense, Luna was ordinarily a touch more resilient than that, and Twilight getting tail-swiped had been just plain bad luck. Not for the first time, she wondered just what the two of them were getting up to, but then, she probably should have thought of that before vaporizing her sister.
Now she was alone with an ancient dragon of unknown origin, and she didn’t even know why she was reducing it to its component elements. Aside from the obvious, of course. She usually needed a better reason to bring the fires of the sun down to Equestria than “I saw a dragon! Quick, somepony get me a horseshoe.”
There would be consequences for this. Sunlight was not like moonlight. It would not cleanly cut the earth as the moonlight did when Luna had used it to bore a hole in the world. Celestia could focus it as she was doing now, but for whatever reason, where the moonlight isolated and dissolved, sunlight would become a part of it and spread as heat.
Her biggest regret right now was for the Everfree forest. The dragon would recover, but the forest would not. Then again, judging by the crater she’d seen on her arrival, the forest had already been on its way to becoming a lake, so maybe turning the whole thing to rock pudding wasn’t actually that big of a deal.
As Celestia ceased directing her sunlight to this single spot of unfortunate land and the white power of the sun died out, however, she very much doubted that many others would see it that way. The crater the Everfree forest had fallen into was now a pool of molten slag. The dragon was gone, as was everything else. Hopefully it would find the experience of being liquefied warm and soothing enough to lull it back so sleep, and the rest of her day would be spent signing weather requisitions to deal with the rest of this mess.
No such luck. A shapeless maw of molten rock burst out of the lake of fire like a breaching whale and closed around Celestia, dragging her down into the lake with it.
Today was going to be a long day.
✶ ✶ ✶
Twilight was somewhat baffled when she woke to a warm bed and the scent of chamomile in the air.
The bed was not her bed, but neither was it quite as disconcerting as the time when Luna and Spike had contrived to move her into the Ponyville palace without her consent. Before it had existed.
Twilight blinked.
Come to think of it, she hadn’t actually seen Spike since then. Well, no, she’d seen him, she remembered, but only from a distance that one time during Winter Wrap Up. Actually, she didn’t even know where in the palace he was living, so she could hardly be expected to go see him. Wait, no, that wasn’t an excuse; it was a recrimination. Stars, she didn’t even know where he was living. What kind of guardian was she?
Twilight blinked again.
Okay, as important as it was that she be a responsible adult when it came to Spike, it was clear she was just using it as a reason not to think about the fact that she was in Celestia’s bed.
It was not, technically speaking, somewhere that she hadn’t been before. At least, not if you counted her early days of living in the castle after becoming Celestia’s student. In those days, however, she had typically gone to sleep here and woken up back in her own bed, not… not the other way around.
Twilight rubbed her face with her hooves, let out a groan and flung them aside, blinking herself more awake. Somehow, it only made her more conscious of how awkward she felt. Also, conscious of Celestia standing over by the door.
She seemed to be just… standing there. Twilight shifted her head to look at her. As always, her face was a picture of neutrality. Though this time, it seemed a little off. Blank, maybe? Twilight couldn’t tell if Celestia was looking at her or through her, and she had the sudden urge to pull the covers up to her chin, which she dismissed and chided herself for.
Still, it wasn’t a look that Twilight was used to seeing on Celestia. It was more like… well, one she’d usually wear herself, actually. Usually at times like this, when her mind was… oh.
Twilight weakly lifted her hoof and gave a slight wave. “Celestia?” she said. “I’m awake.”
Celestia didn’t stop and blink like Twilight would have when someone announced themselves for the seventh time in her presence. There was just the tiniest furrow of her brow before she simply… came back to life.
“My faithful student.” She beamed, stepping further into the room with a cup of tea floating at her side. “It’s good that you’re finally awake.” Twilight moved to sit herself up in the bed as Celestia neared, taking a sip of her tea. She paused briefly to wince and set the cup down on the nightstand.
Twilight pondered the cup for a moment. “Something wrong?” she automatically asked, her curiosity getting the better of her. Bad tea didn’t exist within the confines of Canterlot castle.
“It’s nothing, Twilight,” Celestia answered. Then she added, “It’s just c—nothing.”
Celestia… stuttered? Twilight turned to look at her, which was the first moment she noticed that the white alicorn had climbed up to sit at the tail of the bed. Thoughts of tea disappeared completely. She didn’t know what to say or… do for some reason. Something bothered her. Pressing a hoof her her face, she took a breath and started over. “I’m sorry, Celestia. I’m just not quite together. I had a long night, and then you vaporized me—hey, that’s right! You vaporized me!”
Celestia turned away with a light harrumph. “I did no such thing,” she declared then opened the eye closer to Twilight with a grin. “I vaporized Luna; you were only blinded.”
Twilight was unamused. Celestia had a sly humor, but she wasn’t usually this… coy. “And then a dragon hit me,” Twilight pointed out.
“And then a dragon hit you,” Celestia repeated with a nod. “With its tail, specifically.”
“Wonderful,” Twilight said and let out a heavy breath. “What happened? I assume you…” Twilight couldn’t quite bring herself to say the words ‘reduced the Everfree forest to a smoking crater,’ so she just… didn’t. “That probably took care of Gemini if she was anywhere within a hundred miles.”
Celestia looked confused. “Gemini, I take it, was the dragon?” she asked. “If so, then no, she was significantly more stubborn than that.”
Now it was Twilight’s turn to be briefly baffled as she took in Celestia’s misunderstanding. “No, Gemini was…” Twilight hesitated, trying to figure out how to broach such a subject. “It’s hard to explain. I don’t know who the dragon was.”
The bed shifted as Celestia sidled up next to Twilight. “Maybe start from the beginning and work up to the point where you got into a fight with a dragon whose name was lost to time?” she suggested.
Twilight let out a sigh and leaned into the warm figure next to her as she thought about what she’d seen and learned last night. Suddenly, her mind’s eye locked onto an image of a golden alicorn tangled up in the sheets with another, midnight blue and half her size. It dawned on her why she was so uncomfortable.
Both Twilight and half of the sheets thumped onto the marble floor beside the bed. Technically, it was Twilight that did all the thumping; the sheets and the floor were essentially impassive. Impassive and impenetrable. Ow.
“T-Twilight?” came Celestia’s voice from over the edge of the bed. To Twilight’s astonishment, she actually sounded hurt.
Twilight gave up on trying to disentangle herself and popped her head back up over the edge of the bed, sheets and all. “No no no no no!” she said to the… tall, white alicorn lounging in her bed. In her private room. In her castle. Twilight stumbled back, and the sheets decided to let her go. “Celestia, it’s not—I mean, I’m sorry. I just can’t… be… here… right now. It’s not your fault. It’s mine. I’m uncomfortable—err, wait, no—”
Celestia barely moved. Her mouth hung open as Twilight backed away from her like she was a… an attractive alicorn in a very, very inappropriate situation. Which, Twilight supposed is what she was. What they were. Wait, did she just imply to herself that she was attractive?
That’s when Twilight dove off of the balcony.
“I’ll send you a letter!”
☼ ☼ ☼
Celestia stared at the balcony after Twilight’s exit for a not-insignificant amount of time. Was it something she’d said? Something she’d… done? She absentmindedly picked the tea cup up from the nightstand and almost took a sip before she came to her senses and remembered that the tea was cold.
Her lips curled in disgust, and she threw the cup out the balcony door. The cup shattered on the hoofrail, but Celestia didn’t even notice. She was already crawling across the bed to go find something stronger than tea. She wasn’t even sure why; it just seemed like the thing to do.
I’m uncomfortable.
In retrospect, it was a perfectly reasonable statement, Celestia decided as she poured herself a glass of what she suspected was a bottle of brandy she’d started sixty years ago. Alcohol was, again, one of those things she tended to do without as a matter of course. The question was, how had Twilight known?
Celestia swirled the brandy in her magic, going over the conversation in her head. She had made some gaffes, that was for certain. She’d stumbled over her words like a filly with a secret crush, to start with, and the tea… had Twilight realized it was cold? That she’d been standing there by the door for… rather longer than was appropriate? It was the obvious answer, but it didn’t quite fit.
Celestia’s mistakes, such as they were, were all at the start of the conversation. Once they had gotten to talking, she had been gentle, teasing and motherly as always. At least, the actions had been as such. She could not in good conscience claim that she knew precisely which part of her confused mind had been calling the shots. Had something slipped? Had Celestia had some reaction that she hadn’t even noticed?
The idea that these feelings she was having might have robbed her of her perfect self-control soured her mood and stopped the glass of brandy just short of her lips. Control. Celestia had an impenetrable faith that things would turn out for the best so long as she conducted herself and the nation as honestly and wholesomely as possible. How could she do that if she didn’t have control of herself?
Celestia pitched the glass of brandy out after the tea.
She couldn’t.
✶ ✶ ✶
Twilight regretted her flight from Celestia’s chambers almost immediately. Fleeing an awkward situation was… well, okay, it was entirely like her, but that didn’t mean that it was something she was proud of.
Also, she regretted her flight from Celestia’s chambers because she regretted her flight from Celestia’s chambers. She was still heavy and laden with an excess of stars, and though her body itself was rested, it was still all she could do just to glide down to Ponyville. Thankfully, she had the advanced altitude of Canterlot on her side, so all she had to do was glide.
This gave her quite a lot of time to think and also a good view of the Everfree… lake. The forest wasn’t completely gone on the Ponyville side, but there was little enough of it left that she doubted it would ever be home to any manticores again.
Manticores or… other inhabitants of the forest. Much to her relief, it looked like Zecora’s hut had been spared the carnage, if just barely, but what reason would a zebra alchemist have to stay without a wild, magical forest to harvest, take up fishing on her new lakefront property?
Actually, come to think of it, the volcanic basin that was being fed with water from several rivers had now been touched by the magics of all four—err, three—alicorns and an ancient dragon from before recorded time. Twilight made a mental note to get Zecora a fishing pole for Hearth’s Warming Eve next year.
Fluttershy’s cottage was the next closest to the Everfree. Twilight very nearly swooped down to see if she was alright and take some time to think before going back to Ponyville, but from the looks of it, she had her hooves full with dozens of agitated animals. She’d get no peace and quiet there, and the questions would be… awkward.
Of course, the questions would be awkward anywhere. She let out a groan that was lost in the warm spring air as she scanned the city for some place an archlibrarian could sit for an hour or two without being asked, “what was that light?”, “was that a dragon?” and “where’s Luna?”
The last question in particular was one she wasn’t sure how she felt about. From the looks of it, Twilight had slept roughly eight hours of the day away, which was earlier than her usual schedule. In any case, since it was the beginning of spring, that meant there were roughly four hours until dusk arrived and Luna could return from the Umbra and manifest herself a new body.
Four long hours she’d have to go without Luna’s counsel.
Four short hours until she’d have to figure out how to avoid a repeat of what had happened with Celestia. The last thing she wanted to do was make Luna feel like she wasn’t wanted, especially when Twilight… didn’t not want her.
Twilight shook her head at the backwardness of that thought and had the sudden urge to reread Stunk and Whine’s The Elements of Style as penance. It was a popular linguistic style guide, a fact which had greatly disappointed Rarity once upon a time. She had claimed that the title was misleading and a defamation of the good name of style, and Twilight had agreed, but for rather different reasons.
Remembering the scene fondly, Twilight realized that she knew where she could get some time alone.
✶ ✶ ✶
The old Ponyville library, which Luna had bequeathed her more than two weeks ago, now, seemed to be holding up relatively well in her absence. A little too well, actually. The mailbox was empty, the doorstep swept and the bolt unbolted. The only thing that was as she had expected it, was the sign in the window which read ‘closed,’ as well it ought, as its stores of books had been cannibalized for her own collection in the Ponyville palace.
The door swung silently open, and she stepped inside, looking for any further signs of habitation. As luck would have it, there was one right there in the middle of the room, lounging on the couch and reading a comic book.
“Oh, hey, Twilight,” Spike said, and went back to reading Batmare issue 616.
Twilight stared at him for a moment. “Spike?”
“Yeah?” he responded without looking up.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “Why aren’t you in the palace?”
Spike dropped his comic down into his lap and looked at her oddly. “I live here,” he said.
It was, well, an answer as good as any, Twilight supposed. Well, Twilight had one of her own. “But… why?” she asked, stepping further into the not-so-abandoned library. It was the first time she’d ever seen its shelves looking so barren outside of reshelving day, and that just wasn’t the same.
Spike let out a little huff and shrugged, “Why not? I like it here.”
“All alone?” Twilight asked.
Spike rolled his eyes with a huff. “Oh, come on, I’m not alone. The rest of Ponyville didn’t just stop existing when you started living in that tower, you know. The only one who hasn’t been by is you, actually.”
Twilight frowned and was about to say something in response, when Spike added, “And that’s including Princess Luna, you know.”
Ouch. Had she really been that out of it for the last two weeks? The small green and purple evidence was stacked against her. “Oh, Spike, I’m so sorry. It’s just been—”
“Hey, it’s fine!” Spike said holding up his little claws to stop her. “I mean, it’s not like I didn’t help with the whole… move you out of here while you were asleep, thing.”
Twilight considered him for a moment. “You’ve grown up,” she decided.
“Maybe a little,” he said bashfully, scratching his neck and looking away. “And besides, you don’t need a sort-of-grown-up dragon in the room with you when you’re sleeping with the princess.”
Twilight froze. “S-Spike!” she sputtered. “You can’t say things like that; you’re not that grown up yet!” Honestly, you give a dragon an inch and he takes a mile. “And besides, it’s not like that,” she added, a little snippy.
“Oh,” Spike said, a little disappointed. “Really?” he asked. Really, what kind of nonsense was Rarity filling his head with these days?
Twilight readied her usual rebuttal, but stopped short when she found it wasn’t there and was forced to reconsider for a moment.
“It… might actually be like that.”
☼ ☼ ☼
Coffee was not Celestia’s typical choice of beverage, but after what had happened, she didn’t feel that another cup of tea would help her mood. Luna, of course, would have chided her for even calling such a concoction ‘coffee,’ as the substance in the cup floating along beside her contained so much cream and sugar that its color was barely darker than her coat. Her sister, on the other hoof, had predictably decided, upon being introduced to coffee, that anypony who did not take it black did not truly like coffee.
Well, she was probably right, Celestia reflected and took a sip of her sweet cream lightly garnished with coffee. Be that as it may, the substance had managed to get her through the rest of the paperwork caused by the earlier incident with the dragon, and the paperwork had helped her regain control after what had happened with Twilight. The weather requisitions she had dreaded had really been only the tip of the iceberg and only complicated by still being in the dark as to what was even going on. She had briefly considered just sending it all to Luna, but that had ceased to be an option the moment Celestia had vaporized her sister.
A quick glance out the window told her that it was close to sunset, and she let out a sigh as she anticipated the mess that would cause. Luna was not subtle, and she would not let the matter go unaddressed, nor was she likely to address it at a reasonable volume. At least there weren’t many ponies in and about the castle today, since she’d cancelled court. Luna could shout her head off if she had to, and it wouldn’t cause too much of a fuss.
Come to think of it, the castle seemed even more deserted than it ought to have. Certainly, all the usual business had been suspended so that Celestia could deal with the current crisis and address her personal state of mind—which apparently meant watching Twilight Sparkle sleep, she noted to herself with some derision—but there still should have been the usual maids and the like. They practically wiped up her hoofprints as she made them, so where were they now?
Suddenly a bit self conscious, Celestia craned her neck to look behind herself and managed to catch a pastel pink blur disappear around the corner. Somewhat befuddled, she stood and waited. Sure enough, a small pink head slowly peeked back around the corner and disappeared again.
So that was it—she was being avoided. Odd, she hadn’t seen the servants act like this since the early days after Luna had returned. She pondered this for a moment and retraced her actions of the last few days. She had been irritable and confused—it was true—but she was quite certain that she had not snapped at anyone, and—oh right she’d just called down the fires of the sun and turned the local haunted forest into a crater. There was that.
In her defense, it had been a crater before she’d arrived.
With a great, put-upon sigh and another sip of her cream, she decided to put a stop to this right here and now. All she had to do was talk to the mare and let her see that she was still the same Celestia as always. At least, that was the plan. What actually happened was that, as she took one quiet step towards the corner the mare was hiding behind, there was a pop by her head, a soft rustle at her hooves and a clatter of hooves fading away from around the corner.
Celestia stopped, blinked and looked down. There was a scroll laying on the red carpet in front of her. Twilight had wonderful timing sometimes, she groused inwardly before the reality of the situation had quite struck her. Twilight had promised to write; Celestia hadn’t thought it would be this soon. Actually, she hadn’t got her hopes up at all over a promise made by a pony who was quite literally diving off a cliff to get away from her at the time.
All these thoughts subsequently disappeared as she unrolled the scroll and realized that it was composed entirely of three lines.
Dear Princess Celestia,
I think I’m in love with Luna, and… I might actually be okay with that.
What do I do?