If she could have stayed angry, Luna would have had a much easier time keeping despondency at bay. Her temporary solution was to place herself where she couldn’t afford to be seen as anything but resolute. The command deck was not an option; it was far too likely that she’d meet Celestia there. Instead, she watched over the bustle of Cirrus’ landing bay.
The bay was an immense space, about three stories from floor to ceiling. From the interior bulkhead to the currently-raised bay door, hundreds of ponies could fit comfortably if the deck were completely clear. Rows of unused carriages sat ready towards the back of the bay, while areas closer to the door were used for staging, departures, and arrivals, as designated by the deck crew.
From her position on an observation balcony that jutted out from the interior bulkhead, Luna could see all of it, if she were so inclined. Instead, she opted to stare through the open bay door, into the cloudless blue sky beyond.
Even though Cirrus and her sister ships were only holding position at the moment, the sheer scale of the deployment allowed for no lull in activity — which wasn’t to say there was anything interesting going on. Patrols, scouts, and messengers departed and returned, while the deck crew directed traffic and the duty officer paced about, trying to make sense of the whole mess. Chaotic and exciting to the uninitiated, perhaps, but utterly routine for anypony who had seen as much of it as Luna had.
Nothing here required royal oversight, and Luna’s presence was clearly making ponies uneasy. That was her primary talent anyway, she reflected bitterly. With the exception of a few brief centuries, that was how it had always been; Celestia was all smiles and patience, while Luna was the critical voice and the short temper. Celestia the carrot, Luna the stick.
It was enough to make a pony want to plunge all creation into eternal darkness.
Luna took a deep breath and carefully pushed that thought back into its box, then spent a few seconds convincing herself it had not escaped again.
Twilight was back. Twilight would fix everything. She had fixed everything before, after all. This was an upswing in Luna’s thinking on the matter of Twilight’s return. Since this morning, she had oscillated wildly between delirious joy, burning fury, and listless depression.
All the while, uninterrupted by her emotional peaks and valleys, the process of extracting meaning from what she’d seen in Twilight’s dream continued. It was neither simple nor exact. Dreams were several steps removed from memories, which were themselves unreliable — even for a pony like Twilight Sparkle.
Still, for Luna, who had for centuries been desperate to know what had happened in Mareis, the temptation to read into what she’d seen was irresistible. The images played through her mind again and again.
The trick with dream interpretation of any sort was to understand the dreamer’s biases. Some were obvious — the way Twilight saw Spike as a helpless infant, for example. Others could only become clear in comparison to reality, or, failing that, the perceptions of other ponies. Neither was possible in this case. There was no record of what had happened in Mareis, because no being had survived to give their account.
Had Twilight herself killed Spike? All Luna could know for certain was that she felt responsible for his death; to the subconscious, there was no distinction. Luna should have — no. There was nothing useful to be found on these well-worn mental pathways of self-recrimination. She’d spent most of the previous day establishing that fact, as was her annual ritual, and she could not afford to lose herself to such thinking again so soon.
“She’s extremely insistent, sir.”
Luna’s ears pricked up as she overheard the complaint. She found the speaker with her eyes: a messenger about twenty paces away, speaking to the tired-looking duty officer.
“If it’s so important, she can go to Canterlot and wait in line like everypony else,” the officer replied, scowling. “Her Majesty isn’t here to socialize.” He turned and began to walk down the deck towards another recent arrival.
“I told her that,” the messenger protested, following behind. “So did Sergeant Courser, before me. She says she already did that, and that she actually came here with Princess Celestia.”
Luna felt a stab of guilt as she realized they must be speaking of Lumen. She hadn’t intended to harm the unicorn, not that her intentions mattered much now. She certainly hadn’t done anything to mitigate the damage once she’d understood the situation. She hadn’t done anything once she’d understood the situation, and now this Lumen would likely be broken for whatever remained of her life.
“So you think any pony with a ridiculous story should see the princess?” The duty officer scoffed, not slowing. “Tell her it’s not happening. Better yet, don’t tell her anything. We have more important things to do.”
“Belay that,” Luna’s voice thundered through the bay, significantly louder than she had intended. All eyes were instantly on her observation balcony. She fixed her gaze on the duty officer, making clear the target of her order. “Have the unicorn brought to me.”
---
Luna turned from her desk at the sharp knock on her stateroom door. That would be the unicorn, delivered as ordered. She closed the journal in which she’d been failing to organize her thoughts on the morning and slid it into its place on the bookshelf immediately to the right of the desk, among a dozen dusty tomes that hadn’t been touched since last she’d spent any time aboard Cirrus.
Rather than straighten the unmade bed to her left, she simply folded it up into its wall alcove, doubling the room’s available space. Finally, she pulled a cushion from the tiny overhead storage compartment that served as a closet and set it against the wall near the door.
“Enter,” she called, her preparations complete.
She rose from her seat and tried to appear welcoming as Lumen was escorted into her stateroom; it went about as well as usual. The unicorn’s eyes took several seconds to adjust to the dimly lit chamber, during which time the guards who had brought her exited, leaving the princess alone with her visitor. She should have arranged to meet her somewhere else, Luna realized. It was too late now.
“You had something you wanted to tell us?” Luna prompted. She gestured to a cushion she’d set out, which Lumen ignored. She should have opened with a greeting. Ponies liked that. They liked greetings, and they liked meeting their rulers in bright, public places — not gloomy staterooms aboard warships, with no witnesses. Luna shook her head, berating herself for her failure.
This had never been a strength of hers, and she was sorely out of practice, having left almost all public contact to her sister in recent centuries. She should have just sent Lumen to meet Celestia — that was clearly what the young mare had wanted in the first place.
Lumen had the look of a pony who had known exactly what she’d wanted to say, right up to the moment she was called upon to say it. Her eyes briefly scanned the minimally appointed stateroom, then settled back on Luna.
“Twilight Sparkle is crazy,” she blurted finally.
Luna’s first reaction was one of indignant offense. Who was this backwoods unicorn to judge the sanity of the goddess of magic? Her second was also one of indignant offense, albeit directed slightly differently. The statement was almost painfully self-evident, and she certainly didn’t need the help of said backwoods unicorn to see the obvious. Sane ponies did not disappear for centuries at a time while they let the ponies that cared most about them believe them dead, after all.
She concealed both reactions as best she could, and instead raised an eyebrow in the way she imagined Celestia would. “Explain.”
“Um…” Lumen stuttered.
Luna gestured again to the cushion. “Please, sit.” Without waiting for an answer, she pulled her own seat over from her desk and settled into it.
Lumen reluctantly lowered herself onto the indicated cushion, avoiding Luna’s expectant gaze as she searched for words. “You’re all crazy, actually,” she said when she found them. “We’ve been invaded and that’s pretty much the only thing you aren’t upset about.”
Luna frowned as Lumen fell silent again. She wasn’t interested in debating the point, not least because it almost certainly wasn’t actually what Lumen had come here to say. “You were going to tell me something about Twilight specifically,” she prodded.
“Twilight thinks that she fixed your relationship with Celestia by pretending to be dead,” Lumen mumbled, still avoiding Luna’s eyes. “And that she broke it again by coming back.”
“Preposterous,” Luna replied, a bit too forcefully. She took a second to calm herself, then spoke again in a more controlled voice. “Whatever troubles her, Twilight is logical to a fault, and there is no logic in that conclusion.”
“I don’t know about any of that. All I know is the history she taught me as Autumn Wind. ‘Luna and Celestia couldn’t stand each other until Twilight was out of the picture,’ was the gist of it.” Lumen finished with a shrug and shifted uncomfortably on her cushion.
Luna had to believe that Lumen had misunderstood whatever lessons she'd received from Twilight as a filly. It probably wasn't beyond Twilight to assume responsibility for a relationship that predated her by millennia, but to believe that anything had improved after her supposed death would require a stunning amount of wishful thinking, coupled with complete ignorance of day-to-day happenings in the palace.
Twilight had certainly isolated herself well enough to avoid any news that would contradict such a fantasy — at least for the few decades of her absence that were now accounted for. Still, there was no evidence to support the idea in the first place. Even united in grief as she and Celestia had been for those first decades, the actual process of ruling was as contentious as ever.
"Princess," Lumen spoke up, interrupting Luna's musings. "I have a question."
"Ask, then," Luna ordered, preoccupied.
"Why is it that when I look at you I can't keep my thoughts straight, and it feels like somepony bucked me on the horn?"
Luna's heart sank. She had hoped the symptoms wouldn't be appearing yet. The damage might be even more severe than she had guessed. Explaining to Lumen would be easy: “Oh, I just ruined your mind, and what little remains of your life will be spent descending into madness,” she could say. The unicorn would hate her, but that was bound to happen eventually regardless.
Explaining to Twilight would be much more difficult. Twilight already knew that Luna had brought Lumen into her dream, but likely didn’t know that she hadn’t pulled her out as it ended. What was Lumen to Twilight, anyway? A trusted friend? A surrogate daughter? An accessory to go with a well-constructed disguise? Luna had a hard time imagining Twilight being so utilitarian in regard to any pony, but yesterday she would have wagered Canterlot itself that Twilight could never have willingly abandoned her sisters.
In truth, Luna had only seen Lumen’s ailment once before, a very long time ago when she had not understood her own powers very well. As Twilight might tell her, it was an inadequate sample on which to base any kind of prediction. Still, as she was wont to do, Luna assumed the worst, especially given that it was an alicorn’s mind that Lumen had been exposed to.
“Princess,” Lumen repeated impatiently.
Luna opened her mouth to answer, but was saved by Cirrus’ alert horn. One long blast, two short. Seconds later, the reports of the other two airships’ horns followed. “That’s the contact signal,” Luna said, more curious than alarmed. She stood, looking instinctively to the porthole on the exterior bulkhead, only to remember that she had secured its cover a short time ago to avoid glaring sunlight she’d found abrasive. “Stay here. You don’t want to be in the corridors if the ship begins maneuvers.”
With that, she stepped out of the stateroom, shut the door behind her, and hurried to the command deck.
---
“New contacts at six o’clock, presumed hostile. Contacts at four o’clock holding steady at approximately two klicks.” The disciplined monotone of the spotter was impressive for a pony who had never seen combat. If nothing else, Luna reflected, this exercise was a valuable test of readiness for a military that hadn’t been used as anything but a deterrent in generations.
Celestia glanced briefly at Luna as she stepped onto the deck, then her eyes returned to the captain.
“The recall is nearly complete, Princess,” Captain Sails was saying. “Scouting crews await your order.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Celestia said softly. “Please let me know when a count is available.”
The captain turned and bellowed across the deck. “Count!”
“Uh, about ten at six, sir,” shouted the aft spotter.
“Same at four, give or take,” came the report from starboard. “Still can’t say what they are exactly.”
Captain Sails turned back to Celestia. “Princess, with the escort flyers recalled, we’re blind topside. Recommend we either loosen formation, or redeploy flyers.”
“No,” Celestia answered mildly, gazing over the deck’s forward railing.
The captain had a point; the massive gas balloon that held the ship aloft also created an enormous blind spot. Standard procedure called for escort flyers at all times that could signal to the deck in case of danger above, but Celestia had apparently ordered all flyers out of the air as soon as the contact alarm had sounded. She’d also clustered Cirrus and the other two airships in a tight defensive formation above Stonehoof, making it impossible for the ships to cover each other’s blind spots.
With a deep breath, Captain Sails contained his clear displeasure at the refusal. Luna sympathized with him, but knew her sister had the right of it. If there were wyverns out there, putting their ponies into the air with them was a pointless sacrifice. None of them had any experience or training fighting these creatures, and they were hopelessly outmatched in the air, especially. Best not to deploy them until there was no other option.
These airships were designed for two modes of combat. Firstly, they were meant to present a credible threat to an adult dragon. That meant a great deal of firepower, with durability to match, but not necessarily any real precision or agility. Secondly, they were capable of carrying enough pegasus troops and support staff to engage a gryphon horde, delivering them to the battle fresh and combat ready, rather than making them waste energy by flying themselves to the engagement.
Neither was ideal for wyverns — in fact, nothing in Equestria’s aerial arsenal quite fit the job, as wyverns had not been on the minds of Equestria’s military planners in centuries. Still, the fact remained that the ships could take some abuse. Better to sustain damage while they assessed the situation than to let their ponies die fighting a battle they couldn’t win.
“Contact!” It was the port spotter shouting this time. “Nine o’clock. About fifteen of them. They’re spreading and…” he paused, lowering the glass from his face. “Lost visibility. There’s a cloud in the way.”
“I thought we’d cleared this area, Captain,” Celestia said, only the mildest rebuke evident in her tone.
“We did,” the captain replied gruffly. “Anything out there, they brought themselves.”
Celestia found Luna with a significant glance. Wyverns weren’t capable of any sort of weather magic, something nopony else present could be expected to know. This would have to be investigated, immediately. There was a question in Celestia’s eyes: you, or me?
Luna nodded and spread her wings meaningfully, receiving an appreciative smile in return. She turned and, with casual grace, leapt over the starboard railing. As she pushed herself clear of Cirrus’s shadow, she dipped into a roll, getting as complete a view of the air above and below her as possible. Finding nothing notable in her immediate vicinity, she adjusted course for the offending cloud.
It was a fluffy white thing, nothing like what she imagined the wyverns might bring with them or conjure, were they capable of either. Drawing closer to the cloud also drew her closer to the wyverns, of course — soon she could see them well enough to identify them herself. Even though she’d believed Celestia when she had told her they’d reappeared, it was still a shock to see them after so long. They were converging on the cloud, now — all those that had been spotted from Cirrus, and even more distant specks that were still outside the airships’ visual range.
That was interesting — wyverns were not capable of that sort of coordination normally. Were they all responding to individual urges or instincts? Why would they be attracted to what appeared to be, suspicious placement aside, a fairly ordinary cloud? It was important that she reach it before any of them, Luna decided. Augmenting her already impressive speed with a magical boost, she rocketed forward.
She noted with some curiosity that none of the wyverns reacted to her burst of speed, even though those closest to her could certainly see her by now. They were completely focused on the cloud; something about it seemed to be so powerfully attractive to them that it robbed them of any semblance of situational awareness. Luna could destroy any of the half dozen nearest her with very little effort right now, despite her being in full view of all of them. From what Celestia had described of her skirmish the previous evening, they had at least tried to evade her then. What was different now?
Luna flared her wings to slow herself as she approached the cloud, then dropped almost daintily onto its surface. It seemed in every way normal, aside from the scores of reptilian beasts hurtling towards it.
“You probably want to get down,” a familiar voice suggested from surprisingly close by.
It took her a moment to spot Twilight, nestled in a trench a few meters away. Above her, a glowing orb floated in her magical grip. From the way Twilight bobbed and jiggled it, Luna was able to recognize it for what it was immediately: a lure.
It still felt surreal just to look at Twilight and realize she was alive. She had a million things she wanted urgently to say, driven by the probably irrational fear that if she turned her back for just a moment, Twilight might disappear again. She couldn’t give in to those desires right now, she knew — there was work to be done. Twilight, intently focused on her lure, seemed equally determined to avoid distraction.
Luna followed her gaze, taking another look at Twilight’s lure. At second glance, it was much more than just a shiny bauble. “Bonsai dragon?” She asked curiously.
“Something like that,” Twilight replied tersely, as her eyes darted away from the orb and began tracking the oncoming wyverns. “Seriously, though: down.”
Luna scooped out a trench next to Twilight’s and settled into it, wondering exactly what the other alicorn had planned. Had she called them here with that lure of hers, or was she using it in an attempt to salvage the situation once they’d appeared? Was she just gathering them to make them easier to destroy, or did she have some other goal in mind?
As the first of the wyverns reached them, Twilight sent the orb shooting higher into the sky. They followed without hesitation, completely ignoring the pair of alicorns that were now within striking distance. When the orb was high enough that Luna could only just make it out as a white speck against the blue sky, it stopped and hung in the air. It seemed clear that the wyverns weren’t tracking it visually; Luna wouldn’t have been able to find it at all with her eyes, if she hadn’t watched its ascent.
She gaped in amazement as the wyverns reached and clustered frantically around it, looking like nothing so much as moths at a lamp. They were certainly far from the most cerebral creatures known, but the mindlessness on display now was beyond anything previously witnessed.
For the better part of minute, Twilight waited, watching patiently as more and more wyverns flocked to the bait. By Luna’s estimation, there were nearly a hundred when the light glow of Twilight’s horn intensified sharply.
“I don’t think I’ll lose him,” Twilight said, her voice strained, “but be ready just in case.”
“What?” Luna looked to Twilight, then back to the sky, her ears folded back in alarm. “Lose who?”
Luna was answered by what sounded like the simultaneous shattering of every window in Canterlot. From the orb, brilliant white flares shot in every direction, pelting the wyverns. At the center of the explosion, the dragon that had been held within the orb seemed to burst into being, growing swiftly to its proper size and roaring in what Luna interpreted as a blend of relief and fury.
Luna stood and spread her wings, her horn beginning to glow as she readied herself to fight.
“Wait,” Twilight ordered calmly. “It’s still under control.”
Luna had some difficulty believing that, but did as asked. The flares, which Luna assumed to be a sort of magical shrapnel resulting from the orb’s explosion, had passed through the cluster of wyverns. Several now hurtled toward Luna and Twilight, but as Luna prepared to launch herself out of their path, they began to curve. All them were turning, actually, each settling into a different orbit of their point of origin.
There were hundreds of them — maybe thousands. Was Twilight controlling every one of them individually, or did she have some technique by which to order their behavior en masse? Either way, it was a magic show the likes of which Equestria hadn’t seen in centuries. As the flares began to pick up speed, the spherical area their orbits defined began to appear as a solid, if somewhat translucent object.
It was all the more impressive, Luna realized, when she saw hints of purple aura holding aloft injured wyverns inside the contained area. They would have been hurt in the initial explosion, of course, but apparently Twilight was not content to simply let them fall from the sky. With an effort, Luna pulled her gaze from the spectacle above and looked at her companion. She opened her mouth to comment, but stopped herself as the white glow of Twilight’s eyes told her that the alicorn was likely not receptive to conversation at the moment.
Looking upwards again, Luna noticed that the sphere was getting steadily smaller, along with everything inside it. This must be how she’d captured the dragon originally — Celestia hadn’t told her about that.
Luna’s ears pricked up as she heard the faint sound of distant cannonfire. She couldn’t imagine that Celestia would have ordered the action — more likely, one of the captains not under the princess’ immediate supervision had been unable to resist the target presented by the dragon and the clustered wyverns. It would have been a waste in any case — the shots certainly wouldn’t be accurate at this distance. Seconds later, three cannonballs whizzed past, two succumbing to gravity short of their target and passing beneath Twilight’s cloud, a third drifting wide before its forward momentum slowed and it too began to fall.
Luna considered for a moment catching the cannonball in her magic and taking it back to present to the pony responsible. It might make for a valuable object lesson — more likely, though, the pony in question, whoever they might be, feared Celestia and her quiet disappointment more than they ever would Luna’s far less subtle styles of reprimand. If the cannons fired again, however, even Celestia would not stop her from personally expelling the pony in question from the service.
“Done,” Twilight announced almost cheerfully, pulling Luna from her thoughts. The glow was gone from her eyes, and she was surveying the sky carefully for any leftover threats. Seconds later, her orb, only slightly larger than it had been when she’d sent it upwards, fell to her feet.
It landed without a sound, displacing the only slightest clump of cloud fluff in its impact, as if it had almost no weight at all. Twilight looked at her prize with a satisfaction that turned to apprehension as her gaze shifted to Luna. “What now?”
Luna was shocked for a moment that Twilight was so deliberately leaving the decision to her, after how forceful she’d been earlier this morning. Was it meant as some sort of olive branch? She considered her answer carefully.
“Now, we will return to Cirrus. There, we will spend what remains of this day with Celestia. You will explain all that you know of these events and their causes. Together, we will decide upon a course of action.” Her expression softened as she continued. “Then, if our plan allows us the time, we will have dinner. No talk of dragons, or wyverns, or any of the rest of it. Just the three of us, appreciating each other’s company.”
A dubious expression had grown on Twilight’s face in response to the latter part of the plan. Her doubts likely mirrored Luna’s: it wouldn’t be as easy as that. Still, she nodded with only slight hesitation. “Alright. Let’s go.”
---
The command deck was abnormally quiet as the two alicorns landed. For a moment, the crew made an attempt at looking as if they were still seeing to their duties, but it was soon abandoned as all eyes found their way to the purple princess none had seen before. Celestia’s measuring gaze swept across the deck as she made her way to the new arrivals from where she’d been standing near the bow.
She stopped a few paces short of them and studied them carefully for a moment — a stalling tactic, Luna knew, as she decided what to say. Though Twilight had already been seen by a pair of guards earlier today, the vows of secrecy undertaken by a princess’ personal guardsponies were much stricter than those of rank-and-file service members. How Celestia received Twilight in this moment would soon be widely known, and would set the tone for all public perceptions of the princess’ return.
“Princess Twilight,” Celestia said finally with a curt nod. “Princess Luna. Welcome back.”
Luna had to suppress a snort. Both by her tone and by including Luna in the greeting, Celestia seemed to imply that Twilight’s absence was an almost casual occurrence — as if she’d merely stepped out not so long ago, and taken a bit longer than expected getting back.
“Is the situation stable?” Celestia asked. The question was ostensibly directed at both of them, but Luna knew it was designed to allow Twilight to give a triumphant answer — to let her deliver good news in her first somewhat-public appearance.
In response, Twilight floated her orb over to Celestia, who scrutinized it curiously. “They’re all contained,” Twilight said. “I don’t believe there are any others within our borders yet.” Her formal tone and carefully limited statements made clear her understanding that this was all for show.
“Excellent,” Celestia said as she sent the orb floating back to Twilight, who took it again. “Shall we let the crew return to their duties?”
“Lead the way,” Twilight replied. Her eyes never left Celestia’s, which indicated to Luna that she wasn’t yet comfortable making eye contact with — or possibly even looking at — the many ponies on the deck who now openly gawked at her.
“Captain, you have the deck,” Celestia called as she turned and made for the nearest stairway.
“Yes, Princess,” the captain stuttered belatedly, forcing his eyes back to his station once he realized he’d been spoken to.
As the alicorns disappeared down the stairs, Luna couldn’t help but smirk at the sudden buzz of half-whispered conversation among the crew above. Their excitement was contagious; she felt a wave of optimism rushing over her. Matters were still complicated, certainly, but Twilight had willingly returned to Cirrus and let herself be seen by her ponies. That was more progress than she could have hoped for after this morning.
Her good spirits lasted a few seconds longer, until they were vanquished by the tortured screams coming from the direction of her stateroom.