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// Prompt #41: Cult Status 
// Story: Ponywatching 
// by ThunderTempest 
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Celestia could remember the day she found the first one. At the time, so soon after the battle, she felt that it was disrespectful. With a few careful interventions, she managed to disband them without bloodshed.

The next one was hidden better, and nearly two centuries later. It took weeks for her to uncover the group, and disbanding them safely took months. It wasn’t for her safety, she reasoned. It was for theirs. Dark magic could extract terrible tolls upon the caster if misused, or even if used properly, and Celestia hated seeing her ponies hurt. She even managed to track down the source of the cult – An old copy of a book.

For one terrible, terrible moment, Celestia contemplated ordering her guard to seek out and destroy all copies of the book. However, she knew that a rare book, such as this one, had a strange way of making its way around the world, an actively suppressed one would spread much faster. Celestia never wanted to be that kind of ruler. She never wanted to control what her ponies thought. All she would do was watch for any signs that signified the rise of another group, and simply ordered that the book be stored in the restricted section of the Canterlot archives.

She found the next group shortly after the turn of the next century. This one was a lot more fanatical than the previous ones, and by the time she had uncovered it, they were beyond saving. Celestia had personally taken each family aside, and explained what had happened, why the deaths of their loved ones, sons, daughters had been nessecary, while simultaneously keeping a watch on them for a few years. Dark magic could be insidious, sometimes, worming into a pony’s mind, corrupting them over years at a time, and eventually resulting in...Celestia severed the train of thought.

Sometimes, Celestia regretted not ordering the destruction of the books that caused these groups, these cults to spring up, but she would not, would never allow herself to try and control her ponies thoughts. No, all she would do, all she could do was order that any found copies be placed under restrictions, so that at least she could keep track of them.

The most recent cult had been the most dangerous. They had managed to keep themselves hidden from Celestia for years, even managed to sneak some of their members into close proximity to Celestia.

They had an opportunity. They took it.

Unfortunately, they forgot that Celestia was immortal. Celestia had long suspected that Dark Magic rotted the part of the brain that dealt with sanity first.

As Celestia turned the battered copy of the book over in her magic, the wound in her side already being stitched up by her magic, she once more wondered if free thought and choices was really worth perhaps 50 copies of one book. There certainly couldn’t be many. Books like this were never replicated too many times. But Celestia was nothing if not a creature of principle, and once more, she ordered the book be placed under the highest restrictions that were available. It would not do to have a book called ‘The Nightmares’, which detailed the summoning of creatures of the purest Dark Magic, out where anypony could find it.

And any cults which connected the book with Lu – Nightmare Moon would have to be closely watched too. Celestia was conflicted about them. One the one hoof, some of the ones she had seen were mostly harmless, and some even looked downright pleasant, but once that book became involved, things started to spiral. Well, the ones to Luna looked pleasant. The ones to Nightmare Moon, the ones that had found ‘The Nightmares’, were downright horrifying at their worst. Celestia may have been immortal, but she was not invulnerable, nor infallible, as the most recent cult had proved.