"...stars, sun, and moon for finally answering her pleas," Reveille finished with another deep sigh. Twilight stared at him, mouth and eyes agape. After a period silence, she snapped back out of her trance, looking back at the blank face of the stallion before her.
"That was the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard," she said simply. "A pony named Despair that literally lives in despair? You coming from space? How can you expect me to believe that? Are you an alien? H-how did you breathe?"
"I am not an alien," he insisted. "Not in that sense. I'm an alicorn, just like you. I did not think you would believe me... nopony ever does, no one understands."
Twilight did not know whether to laugh or to explain that the reason that no one understood his story was simple - it didn't make any sense at all. However, rather than instigate another powerful magical being, she approached the matter logically.
"So, if you came from space as an alicorn foal," she pondered aloud. "That must mean that your real parents were alicorns as well, but there aren't any other planets that ponies can live on as far as I know, and the only alicorn that was in space around that time was..."
Reveille looked at her with a grim smile. "You're smarter than I thought," he complimented the princess.
"Princess Luna doesn't have a son," Twilight insisted stoutly. "There's no way that she has a son."
"I wish it were Princess Luna that had mothered me," the stallion muttered with an air of tragedy. "It was Nightmare Moon."
Again, Twilight didn't know whether or not to laugh. The whole scenario was utterly ludicrous. Yet, Reveille seemed so serious, so dark, and so brooding about the whole thing... what if it was true? There had to be a way to explain it, but the logistics didn't pan out.
"I know this probably sounds familiar to you," she started, "but that simply doesn't make any sense. First off, she was on the moon for one thousand years. The only reason Nightmare Moon survived at all is because the nightmare power kept her alive, and she was able to survive without any other sustenance. She wouldn't have even been able to support a foal's nutritional needs while pregnant. Furthermore, she couldn't leave, and I sincerely doubt that somepony decided to travel to the moon to... you know, get her pregnant," she cringed at the thought.
"I don't know how it happened, and I wish it hadn't!" Reveille screamed out of nowhere, Twilight flinched at the outburst, and Spike groaned in frustration from the library.
"Can your friend keep it down? I'm trying to organize these books," Spike called from the other room.
"Sorry!" Twilight yelled. "Come on, Reveille, let's -" Her ears perked up again, the sound of the horn from before once again entering her recovering ears. "Do you hear that?"
"Hear what?" The shaking stallion snarled. "The sounds of a worthless pony that nopony loves crying because he's worthless and nopony loves him?"
"Never mind," Twilight answered quickly, not wanting to antagonize him anymore. "Let's go and get something to eat, and we can sit down on proper furniture, okay?"
"Fine! We'll just go to another room!" Reveille screamed again, much to the chagrin of Twilight and her ears. He adjusted his satchel, and stood up from the floor where he had collapsed rather dramatically during his outburst.
The two alicorns trotted through the castle together, not saying a word to each other. The only sound other than their hooves on the floor was the occasional sniffling from Reveille. Twilight led him into an open doorway, the room on the other side awash in the orange glow of the fireplace within. This was Twilight's study - where she would lay on a large padded mat (specifically designed for her by Rarity as a castle-warming present) in front of the fire and read. There weren't any windows in here, which Twilight secretly was grateful for - she felt better when she could read the day away without the setting sun to remind her of the time.
Aside from her mat, there were two sofas on either side of an exquisitely polished coffee table. She always made sure that the table had some sort of snack on it. When her growling stomach threatened the silence she needed to read, she would eat just enough to quiet it, and then return to her story. Today, the table had a plate of eclairs for them to nosh upon.
"Alright, take a seat," Twilight gestured to the sofa on the other side of the table as she hopped upon the one closest to her. No sooner than she had begun to nestle herself into a comfortable nook, she felt the cushion become displaced as Reveille took a seat next to her. Twilight assumed that the stallion simply hadn't seen her point to the opposite couch. Not a big deal. With a small flap of her wings, enough to lift her, but not enough to disturb the light treats on the table, she cleared the coffee table and landed on the opposite couch. Her feathered appendages settled against her side, and she turned around to find another comfortable spot and face the alicorn across from her. His fiery red eyes were fixed on her.
"So yeah, whatever, I don't know how it happened, I just know that it did," he summarized. "Neither of them wanted me, but I don't really care," he added with a noticeable hint of stoicism.
Twilight was a getting a bit annoyed by Reveille feeling sorry for himself, but she didn't say anything. After all, right after she discovered that she had swapped her friend's cutie marks without an immediate solution, she spent at least a minute or so actually singing about how bad she felt about it! The moody stallion on the other couch hadn't belted out song lyrics yet. With that in mind, she decided to indulge him.
Maybe getting the whole story off of his chest would make him feel better, and make sense of the bizarre proposal he presented.
"So... how did everything go with your mother - Despair, I mean?" Twilight asked politely, trying to convey a genuine sense of curiosity.
"It was like something out of a fairy tale," he replied. "She was so happy when she found me, she said I gave her a reason to live again, and she was delighted to wake up and see me." He looked at his hooves and issued a faint laugh. "That's where I got my name, my real name."
"Which is?" Twilight inquired.
"Revel," he said with another sigh. "Reveille is..." he paused for a second, ears perked and seemingly lost in thought. "It's my nickname," he frowned, looking disheartened.
"A lively celebration," Twilight paraphrased the definition from memory. "That's a very heartfelt nickname. It sounded like she really cared about you."
"That's what I thought too," Reveille huffed, blowing a strand of his red mane out of his red eyes. "Until she abandoned me."
Twilight didn't want to press the issue and risk upsetting Reveille again, so she just waited patiently for him to continue on his own. After another strangely long sigh, he did.
"She thought everything had turned around, and... for a while, I suppose it did," he lifted his hoof to his chin. "But I guess being the offspring of a powerful alicorn deity has it's growing pains. I couldn't control the magic within me, and whenever I would get upset or sad... things would happen."
"What kind of things?"
"Earthquakes. Fires. Localized electrical storms centered on the face of someone who wronged me. Those sort of things," he dismissed casually as Twilight's face blanched. "Eventually, they told her that I had to go. She insisted that it wasn't my fault, and it totally wasn't. I can't help that I'm a child of a god..."
Twilight was especially grateful that she had become an alicorn after having sufficient control over her powers after hearing that.
"She was ill, and it was getting progressively worse. As a result, I got more and more sad and upset as I got less and less attention, and more things happened. She eventually stopped defending me, claiming that I needed to learn to control my temper and my powers. And then, when I was only five, she and I went on a walk out in the woods. We went farther than we had ever gone before, and then..."
Though his foalhood certainly seemed tragic, he didn't seem really all that upset about the whole thing. Reveille kept inserting pauses and beats at seemingly designated intervals. And each time, Twilight noticed with slight discomfort, he would observe her for her reaction.
"At the base of the tallest tree in the deepest woods, she set me down, and told me that I needed to find my own way. She said that other ponies couldn't appreciate what I brought to the world, and that I should forge my own path without anypony else. This was all she left for me." Reveille opened his satchel, and withdrew a wooden box with a sliding top. He pulled it open, and reached across the table towards the curious Twilight Sparkle.
There were two things inside - a ridiculously large tuft of silver hair, and a note that said "Aceans" on it. Twilight was about to ask what they meant, but Reveille beat her to the punch.
"She left me a lock of her hair, and the last name of her husband," he explained. "'Aceans', with an 's' at the end, but it's silent. Told me to try and find him, saying that even though he joined a secret cult of guardians for the sole purpose of training to become the most powerful warriors imaginable, he would take care of me."
"Riiiiiight," Twilight drawled slowly, hoping to change the subject. "Did you um, did you ever see Despair again?"
"Nope," the black alicorn muttered as he helped himself to a chocolate eclair. "Died of radiation sickness." With a soft smack, the eclair vanished into his mouth. His mouth still full, he gave a pleasant chuckle, the happiest emotion he'd shown since he'd arrived that day. "I guess that explains why her lock of hair was a big chunk."
"Yeah, I guess that explains that..." Twilight giggled nervously, though she in no way found it funny. She could understand having some adjustment issues given his upbringing, but Reveille had just licked the cream filling off of his hooves after having a lighthearted laugh about his foster mother's mane falling out before she passed away.
"I suppose I should thank her," he mused, wiping his hoof against a napkin on the table. "If not for her leaving me for dead, I would never have learned to survive on my own."
Twilight shrugged, doing her best to empathize with that logic. "I guess that's one way of look-"
"I wandered that dark forest for years," he continued as if hypnotized, not acknowledging Twilight's remark. "Even when the sun shone from behind the tops of the trees, the forest was as dark as night. And when night fell, it was as dark as blackest night. I wandered blind for months until my eyes finally adjusted, staving off starvation with whatever I could acquire..."
Princess Twilight silently wondered how a pony, a creature that typically dined on plants and vegetation, could starve in a forest. She also wondered what forest was large enough to ensnare somepony for years.
"One night, I finally found a clearing, and I looked to stare at the moon, my eyes not used to seeing the world of light again, wondering if my true mother was looking down upon me," Reveille spoke with a sense of longing, staring into the fireplace. A single tear rolled invisibly down his cheek, and fell to the carpeted floor. "It turned out, she was. Nightmare Moon imbued her rays of moonlight with her essence, and sharing her bloodline, my body absorbed the magic within. My horn grew in size, tingling with pure magic, and with practically no effort, I was able to use advanced magic that took most unicorns the greater part of their life to master."
The black alicorn continued to observe Twilight's reactions at all of the natural beats in his speech, and Twilight didn't care that she was expressing disdain at the notion that all of the time she invested into learning magic could simply have been spent moonlighting. She could swear that she detected the faintest hint of a smirk as Reveille cleared his throat and carried on with his tale.
"Despite being endowed with great power, I still needed to learn how to control it. My first attempt to merely illuminate the way out of the forest had set the trees ablaze. I ran as fast as I could to escape, and after many days of running in the same direction without stopping even once, I finally had reached the edge and escaped the prison my mother had cast me to. I began the next part of my journey - to find Despair's husband," he added with flourish.
Laying down now on the couch, Twilight looked at Reveille curiously. Perhaps those many years in isolation were the cause of his explosive temper opposite his virtually blank expression the rest of the time. Maybe he simply didn't know how to deal with other ponies, ponies who would naturally fear him for his exceedingly unique upbringing. She felt somewhat sympathetic for his described ordeal - he was only a young colt that just needed someone to take care of him.
"Of course, I didn't need him to take care of me," Reveille said matter-of-factly. "I demonstrated that I could do that myself. I wanted to find him, and let him know that the wife he left behind and probably didn't pay alimony to had passed away. With only a last name and the description of his cult to go by, I did what my mother told me and forged a path across all of the land to search for him. In emergencies, I would also forge checks," he added with a wink. "Don't tell anypony!"
Twilight frowned, but nodded anyways. "I'll uh... I'll keep that to myself."
"I knew I could trust you, your highness," he smiled warmly.
She was surprised that he was even able to present a check at the age he would have been. Strange.
"Though nopony knew his name, I was able to follow whispers and rumors to find the group of guardians he had absconded with. This group, the Secret Guardians as I learned they were called, were located at the top of world's tallest mountain," Reveille explained. "Without any experience, I could not yet fly, and my teleportation spells would often take to locations exponentially further than I intended because my magic was so strong. From the base to the peak, I had to climb in one the most frigid climates in the world, battling frostbite, hypothermia, exposure, and being really, really chilly."
"Did you try lighting your horn to start a fire?" Twilight asked jokingly. The lighthearted question seemed to throw Reveille for a loop, and he glared with annoyed confusion at the princess.
"I uh... I don't understand. What do you mean?" he asked warily.
Twilight couldn't help but let out a proper laugh. "You know! Because of the whole forest fire thing, accidentally starting a fire to keep you warm?"
Reveille didn't find it funny. "I don't find that funny," he answered through gritted teeth. "I don't understand what you find so humorous about a life and death struggle."
Twilight's laughing very quickly faded out. She didn't understand how Reveille couldn't take a jab at his (more than likely) successful mountain climb, but could indulge in a cream filled treat with a polite guffaw when his mother had succumbed to her illness. "I didn't mean anything... just thought it would lighten the mood."
The stallion exhaled audibly through his flared nostrils. "Well, it didn't. It hurts that you want to interrupt me to make light of something... something so affecting to me. I thought you were better than that," he added with more than a little accusatory tone.
"I'm sorry." Twilight scratched her hoof uncomfortably in a circle on the couch. "I didn't mean to. I'll try not to do it again," she offered.
"Fantastic!" He exclaimed with raised pitch, clapping his hooves together in what had to be the most momentous of mood-swings that Twilight had seen in a very, very long time. "Now then... where was I?"
"Climbing the mo-"
"Climbing the mountain, that's right!" As though somepony inside his head had flipped a switch, Reveille's mood changed from the energetic and excited one back to the dreary, serious, and (if Twilight could say so herself) melodramatic one that he had been using during his tale. "After scaling the ice-laden walls for three days in an endless blizzard, I finally pulled myself up one final ledge. Looming in front of me was the sacred Temple of the Secret Guardians. I could only hope that the stallion I had traveled for six years to meet lay within. I opened the doors, and stepped inside."