//------------------------------// // Bones of Contention // Story: The Ninety-nine Nectars of Princess Luna; Or How Twilight Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Her Wings // by NoeCarrier //------------------------------// “Bones of Contention” Starswirl the Bearded tasted Equestrian air only briefly on his tongue before his thaumic accelerations tore him away from that thin skein of warm gas. Thirty seconds after his transition through the new-formed Tartaran gate, he was passing the outermost fringes of the atmosphere. Long-prepared complexes of spells, thaumic instructions and intentions running in the autonomous portions of the ancient mage's expanded mentality, clawed at space/time in clever and unusual ways. From the atmosphere, many tons of nitrogen and oxygen were gathered, as well as a thousand litres of water, stolen from a thunderhead which, to the casual observer, appeared to simply cease existing. Like a comet in reverse, leaving and not coming, this mess of elements and not-quite-pony came to stop a hundred and fifty kilometres above the alkaline flat and the emerald blotch of the greater Equestrian nation. The chaise lounge nucleus at the heart of it all revolved, and two milky-blue eyes peered down from behind strands of captured materials, to regard a thousand-years changes. The mentality considered; one lifetime, a long and aching loneliness ago, it had lived here, and it had been a unicorn called Starswirl the Bearded. Starswirl had known the smell of a lover's neck, and the new blossoming trees of spring, and he had known of good food and merriment in abundance. There had been risk, and there had been heartache, and there had been the inimitable thrill of discovery, of hiking up the skirts of reality to see what lay below. Yes, there had been triumphs and disaster in equal measure. As these memories flooded through what passed for his mind, he traced out the invisible roads between the faint greys and browns of towns and cities he remembered, joined now by many he did not. Starswirl felt a longing to return too deep and painful to give voice. For a long moment, the nebulous bulb of elements drifted idly in their telekinetic containment, some boiling, others quickly freezing solid. “Nah, bugger it,” he said. Within half a sidereal day, Starswirl was beyond the orbit of the outer gas giant Cronos, having raided its hydrogen seas for supplies and, by the time a full day had passed, the mage was snuggling light, his telescope pointed firmly ahead. * Twilight fell through the Gate with her eyes closed and wings folded flat against her back. There was little fanfare, but the sudden sensation of merciless sunlight on her neck and flanks, and the dry air of the alkaline flat, were shocking in comparison to the unceasing and relentless chill of Tartarus, which surrounded the soul and set about draining it of energy with all the patient inevitability of glaciers. Her avian instincts, so recently patterned into her brain via apotheosis, demanded she spread her wings. Without conscious impulse, she found herself coasting on the last of the velocity, the tug of gravity now reconciling itself to a more standard location. Up really was now up, and down was down. The subtle smells of the salt desert, normally so much dull background olfactory noise, were like water to a parched mare. She spent a moment drinking it all in, the unabashed joy of return. Cerberus lay some distance from the set of four black pillars that surrounded the sphere of bent light and clever tricks with space/time. His houndish features, usually as stoic and foreboding as a mountain range, appeared razor sharp and focused on the wormhole. His eyes were almost shut, their pupils contracted to points. Whom came through the object of his staring a moment later, shortly pursued by Fluttershy and the roc, the latter of which seemed happiest to leave by far. It immediately made for the sky, pounding its wings and sending up plumes of dust, momentarily shading everything brown in a haze of fines. Whom landed in the salty sand as soon as she had, jerkily, arrested her velocity. She whimpered in agony and promptly collapsed, wings splayed uselessly. Fluttershy was first on scene, joined by Twilight seconds later. “My ribs,” Whom squeaked, then coughed blood onto the sand. “Don’t move,” Fluttershy said, eyes dancing up and down Whom’s prostrate form, assessing and analyzing. “Breathe slow and steady.” “Can’t get my… breath…” Whom wheezed. “It must be the return to standard gravity, something slipped and gave way, punctured a lung--” Twilight began. “Twilight, shush!” Fluttershy scolded, sparing her a harsh glance. “You’ll make it worse.” She tutted and felt gently with her nose until she found the rib in question, which she skirted around, producing only the smallest of whimpers from Whom. “Could you try to stand please, Whom?” she finally said, after she had satisfied herself. Whom complied, shakily and with snorts of pain, but managed to hoist herself off the caustic sand and into some semblance of trembling uprightness. Fluttershy frowned, apparently noticing the little reddened puncture wound on Whom’s inside left leg. “What’s that?” Fluttershy said, peering closer. “Did you inject her with something?” “Some sort of painkiller, I-I think,” Twilight said, still reeling from having been shut up moments before. “Twilight, you aren’t a doctor! You can’t shoot ponies up with whatever you feel like just because you read a book!” “It wasn’t me, it was Starswirl the Bearded!” Twilight stamped to reinforce her point. “He’s more qualified than some hedge-vet like you!” “Hedge-vet? Hedge-vet?! I went to a veterinary college!” Five rolling booms echoed in the distance, spaced evenly apart. In the silence of the desert, the far-off sounds were clearly audible. All ears and eyes were inexorably drawn to the direction of the disturbance, retorts and counter retorts aborted in throats as instinctive parts of their equine brains scanned for threats. On the horizon, much smeared by heat shimmer, the faint smudgy green of the furthest extent of the Everfree wavered hazily, in and out of reality, as its image was projected around the curve of the planet by planes of warm air. “I’m sorry I called you a hedge-vet,” Twilight said, half a minute later. “I’ve just been a bit wound up recently. What should we do?” “Apology accepted,” Fluttershy said, softly. “We need to get Whom back to Ponyville. Nurse Redheart will be able to help. One of her unicorn medics can set the rib into place and deal with any internal bleeding. ” “Agreed,” Twilight said. “Has anything major happened whilst I’ve been indisposed?” “There was a really bright light in the sky a day ago, brighter than anything I’ve ever seen before,” Fluttershy said, looking up at the roc, which had joined its partner and was now circling again. “No sound or anything, just fire, so much fire. It crept across the vault of the heavens and was gone in an hour. Then, it was aurorae that carried on until dawn.” “Ominous,” Whom spluttered. “Very ominous.” “Closing gateway,” Cerberus intoned, voice a thundering report like cannonfire, which drove Twilight’s ears back in self-protection. Nothing happened. Twilight was watching with the intense and furious interest only an academic could muster up, but the scene did not change. She noticed that little eddies of white vapour were starting to seep from the black pillars, rolling down the sides and pooling around their bases. The sphere still projected the bent image of the gateway’s other side, a horizontal plane surrounded by perpetual darkness. One minute passed, then another. Fluttershy was making urgent, but silent, motions that it was time to go. Twilight had just been about to say something to Cerberus about how important it was that the gateway to the universe in which the ancient imponderables stored their dangerous imponderables remain open only as long as was required, when one of the pillars cracked. The noise set Twilight’s teeth on edge. It was like someone had nailed her brain to a calving iceberg, penetrating deep into her mind. Quicker than thought, a fissure ran the entire length of the pillar, from which erupted clouds of roiling steam and smoke, tinged purple with an intense light that emanated from somewhere inside the pillar. Despite the new heat prickling Twilight’s skin, cold tendrils ran up her spine. Hissing noises thereafter issued forth, growing louder, as if something under unimaginable pressure had sprung a leak. “Sabotage. Mechanism exposed,” Cerberus announced. “All life must leave immediately.” The rocs had sensed something was amiss, because one was already coming in for a low pass. Apparently intending to grab Fluttershy and Whom, it waved off at the last minute following shouted commands that Twilight couldn’t hear over the shrieking noise. It wobbled and wavered, then pulled up and around before landing smartly some distance away. Fluttershy was already hurrying Whom toward the landing site. The roc splayed its crane-scoop talons and lowered itself to permit their easy boarding. “I’ll be faster on my own!” Twilight shouted, as loud as she could, but Fluttershy and her roc had worked this out already, as they took off without further attempts at comment. She followed suit moments later, the fear of whatever was happening to the gate mechanism on the Equestrian side propelling her to achieve new speed records. The warped sphere of the gate remained steadfastly open, even as it was limned by ever-brightening purple light and a wreath of boiling vapour. * “Satan, there’s a horse outside,” Death said, peering sideways through one of the thickly-bevelled windows of the Cosy Tie-Up. “Ponies, Death, they’re ponies, and not entirely unexpected, given this is Ponyville, planet Equestria, Universe--” “No, what I mean is, it’s a big pony. A horse.” “So what?” “It has the moon on its backside.” “Oh, man!” Satan was suddenly animated, nosing around his person excitedly before pulling out a little black book, which bore no cover illustration. He started flicking through it, then stopped on a page with dramatic aplomb. “Sights to See in Temporal Equestria, here we go, Death. That horse is no horse, of course…” Satan joined Death in peering out of the window, the view from which was mostly taken up by the monstrous, towering form of Mytheme. “Princess Luna, She Who Trots in Dreams, Mistress of Tides, Gravitrix, blah-de-blah, all that extraneous names mumbo-jumbo, she’s got ‘em,” Death said, rolling his eyes. “That right there, my friend, is a bona-fide, grade-A demi-hemi-semi whatever God, or Godling, whatever you like.” “One of them?” “Yeah, the Fallen Two.” “She’s pretty,” Death said, vertebrae grinding together like millstones as he nodded. “Do we go and say ‘hello’?” “What, you want to bone her or something?” Satan said, grinning at his own unforgivable pun. “Oh, vade retro!” “That’s what they all say.” * Twilight and the roc bearing Fluttershy and Whom, flying in close formation after all, managed to reach the edge of the Everfree, beyond the transition between desert scrubland and proper trees, when the eastern horizon blossomed with light. The double flash of actinic intensity briefly outshone the glaring sun, then faded quickly to nothing. Almost at the same moment, an awful falling sensation, as if once more they were poised above the wormhole, overcame them. Below, the boughs of saplings and some of the smaller adult trees bent precipitously back. Twilight spotted stones and other things moving below the canopy, rolling as though the whole world had been tipped. Making any headway toward Ponyville became harder and harder. Glancing back, she saw the roc increase its effort, it’s unsettlingly sapient eyes staring resolutely ahead. Just when the effect had intensified to such a level that Twilight had begun to panic, it faded to nothing. The forest below rippled and sent up cracking, moaning noises as megatons of wood returned to former positions. Obviously, some of the older trees hadn’t survived. Chunks of splintery ruin crashed into their more steadfast peers. Birds and other large, canopy-dwelling creatures Twilight didn’t recognize, began to rearrange themselves, hooting, hollering and roaring in alarm and disquiet. The roc zoomed ahead, overshooting before adjusting again. “Do you think it’s over?” Fluttershy shouted, over the relatively gentle noise of the hundred mile an hour airstream. “I have no idea,” Twilight replied. “Discord, did you see him escape?” “Forget about it, he can look after himself.” They continued on over the Everfree, that massive emerald cladding which simultaneously sheltered Equestria from the desert winds and held its least pleasant wild threats, defying centuries of pony attempts to tame it. All Equestrians had ever managed to do was keep it more or less in check, though whether the forest’s lack of expansion to the north was the result of pony intervention, or simply the wrong kind of climate, remained an open question in botany. The crag-like edifice of the derelict Castle of the Two Sisters, an unimaginably ancient construct which predated the nation itself, passed below and to the far left, indicating that they were on the right track. Twin spires had once crowned its cruciform heart, according to certain oral histories, but it had no place on official maps or in authoritative written histories. Twilight knew, for she had read them all. Those of a few century’s vintage drew purple circles around that area, indicating a general thaumic hazard. Venturing too close to the Castle derelict tended to result in magical burns and, with sufficient exposure to the environment there, the worst kind of slow, lingering death. Twilight swore she could see a faint corona of blue or purple light around the crumbling pile, though it soon passed away behind them, out of range of easy inspection. Despite its proximity to Ponyville, the hazardous ruin had never been a target of interest. Equestria had many such sites, where old magic inflicted death. It was always the usual story; epochal battle between powerful foes. Something bulbous, like a huge silvery tick, crouched over Ponyville. Twilight struggled to resolve the shape, smack in the heart of the village. Clouds, black and thick with the threat of rain, circled the outskirts of the town, occasionally squirting out bursts of hail. Lightning flashed between them in sheets, or in forks to the ground, incinerating small trees. The clouds seemed to be giving the town proper a fairly wide berth. “Was that there before you left?” Twilight said, getting closer to Fluttershy. “No!” “I know that shape,” Whom said, wincing with the pain it took to be audible above the slipstream. “That’s Mytheme!” * “Dear Sir, I write to you today in order to express my deepest disgust at your recent pro-Gryphon sentiments, particularly those contained in the article ‘Why We All Need a Feathery Friend’. Not only are these viewpoints highly perverse, they are unpatriotic, and very disruptive at this time of heightened national security. Additionally, your suggestion that we all take a gryphon for a ‘bedfellow’, that we good, honest ponies lie with these filthy, beaked monsters from beyond the sea, drove my wife to frank hysteria, for which she has been admitted to hospital for urgent treatment. I mean really, where would you even get a gryphon from? Think of the sheer mechanics! I demand, in the strongest possible terms, that you cease this blatant attempt to harm the equine race. Furthermore, I have registered a complaint with Her Majesty’s Equerry, regarding your crass behaviour. Yours sincerely, General Brass Polish (ret).” - excerpt from ‘Letters to the Editor: A Life Behind the Quill’, Nose Knows, Pigeon Fancier’s Association of Ponyville Independent Press, AN 970. * The roc landed in the stretch of open fields behind Ponyville’s well-appointed hospital. The space was typically used for therapeutic purposes, or to cope with incoming medical fliers from surrounding villages, which the hospital also served. Twilight had only been here on a few, largely-forgotten occasions. As far as she recalled, the interior was a mess of aseptic corridors and brightly-lit rooms, stinking of caustic soda and the sweet tang of anaesthetic gas. By the time Twilight landed beside the roc, which showed no outward signs of fatigue, Whom was off the bird and being urged toward the hospital back entrance. She had obviously deteriorated in the short few minutes it’d taken them to actually reach Ponyville. Her skin, where not covered by fur, was colourless, and her breathing, previously fast and laboured, was almost non-existent. Twilight could not have seen a more glorious sight then, than a quartet of ponies, wearing medical capes and curious-yet-terrified expressions. For a moment, Twilight thought she might have to cure them of their fear of gigantic birds with curved beaks the size of driven carriages, but then their professionalism took over. They came trotting up and immediately set to work on Whom. The roc mantled its wings in a whoosh of avian smells and loose dirt, which made the medics cringe. “What happened?” said one of them, a sexless individual beneath the cloak, voice light enough to sit somewhere on the stallionish side of mare, scent betraying nothing. “She crashed,” said Twilight, feeling impotent as they unrolled some sort of large fishing net. “Into?” “The ground, bare rocks.” “Flying accident?” “Yes, I suppose.” “How long has she been like this?” “Twelve hours, maybe?” “What?! Why didn’t you bring her here sooner?” “We got here as fast as we could.” The medic stared at the bird, which loomed over the party, and was doing the ponies the same favour, though with a hungry, wantful eye that only a starving predator could possibly muster. “I’m sure you did, Princess, very sure,” the medic said, after a moment. The fishing net turned out to be a pony-carrier, into which Whom was ensconced, with the weight taken under her legs. Parts of the net could be added to or removed, so it left her ribs and belly untouched, free of pressures. With a medic at each corner, they hurried into the hospital, making it respectfully clear that any non-medical ponies would surely get in the way of the speedy treatment of a case in dire need of said. Twilight just stared at the hospital, thoughts wheeling through her mind. Whom had barely been breathing, barely shown any signs of life at all, since they’d entered Ponyville airspace. Modern medico-thaumic science was good, but they could not work miracles. They could not bring a pony back from the dead, except within a few minutes of the heart stopping. After that, the brain itself began to die. “She’s in the best place now, Twilight,” Fluttershy said, nuzzling her gently on the withers. “There’s nothing more we can do.” “Mytheme,” Twilight said, looking over at the omnipresent looming shape, much like a pinecone but incredibly smooth. “That’s what she said. I know that word, I’m sure I do.” “Is it something to do with…” Fluttershy cringed at the recollection. “That thing Princess Luna talked about?” “Princess Luna? Oh, starry foals, of course! Mytheme!” Twilight danced across the grass toward the centre of town, suddenly excited. “It’s her yacht! I thought it was just a legend!” “That doesn’t look like a yacht, Twilight.” “They say it was made from a single huge diamond, hollowed out and filled with star metals and ancient dragon bones,” said Twilight, ignoring her. “When Luna was banished, the yacht was buried under Avalon to await her foretold return. I didn’t think it was real!” “Yachts have sails.” Twilight leapt into the air and took to wing with a smart and snappy trio of downbeats, shortly followed by Fluttershy. * “Come,” whispered Discord, to the universe. “Come and play.” Vast mechanisms within the layered depths of Tartarus began to move. They were stupid, though large as solar systems, and responded to magical commands without questioning the identity of the commander. The builders had never thought anything bent on mischief would make it past the gate, and the guardians they had installed there. Into the guardians they had poured all their eons of cleverness, and it had survived the test of two billion years of unrelenting time. Until now. Though in its beginnings, Tartarus had been much like any other nascent universe, the singularity responsible had been cultivated, curated, edited in subtle ways by the builders, who intended it for their own purposes. Unlike those universes which eventually grew aware of themselves, the deep structures required for such slow, yet purposeful, thoughts, had never been allowed to form. Instead, the immense budget of energy had been stolen and reshaped, and the universe forced down a different evolutionary route, that of the demesne. Emplaced within the everything-nothing space of the Bulk, it was cut off from all other universes. Fate decided before the spark was even lit, this place would not undergo the slow and graceful death of entropy. It would not be allowed that dignity. Instead, it would persevere for an eternity of eternities, mutely watching and outlasting even the living universe to which it was attached like a cosmic lamprey. After some span of time, things began to move across the voids, from the cores of mechanisms which would long ago have collapsed under their own mass, were they extant within a universe whose physical laws demanded it. They were echoes of a memory, stored for only the blink of an eye, by the reckoning of Tartarus. Remade now, they crawled, crept, flew and accelerated on plumes of reacting matter and antimatter, all grasping for the light that shone from the jarred open door to the universe beyond. Above it all hung Discord, and all he could do was laugh. * Twilight's recollection of the legend surrounding Mytheme had just reached the part about the fabled yacht requiring Luna herself to operate, when space/time ahead of her sharply folded inwards, and her ballistic arc over the town toward the diamond hull was jarringly arrested. The scene around her melted and warped, air was compressed and heated. Like being caught in the jaws of a huge wolf, complete with warm breath, she was trapped. Twilight didn't bother trying to fight against it. She could feel the magnitude of the force arrayed against her, and knew it would be a pebble's vote against the avalanche. The space/time warp intensified, and the warped vision of Mytheme and the town became more distant, losing brightness. The ring of jet clouds was the last thing she made out clearly, then the abyssal gloom covered everything. All Twilight could sense was the quickening sound of her breathing and her own familiar smell. “I am not angry,” said Princess Luna, whispering from a point just behind her ears. “I am just disappointed, if I may use a cliché.” “Luna! Let me go!” Twilight shouted. “Selfish nag,” Luna spat. “Can you not see, all of this is your fault?” “All of what?” Twilight said, stung. “What did I do?” “Canterlot burns, the nation tears itself apart in drunk reverie, my sisters plot dread things in the shadows, and you sit here proclaiming ignorance?” Luna's tone was one of utter contempt. “Black Gods lurk upon on the threshold, Twilight. I feel them coming closer. They hunger for the terms of Celestia's old compact.” “Canterlot's burning?” Twilight felt like she had fallen into an ice floe backwards. “I saw smoke from orbit... I thought it would be in hoof.” “Yes, while you kicked over stones that should have remained buried!” Luna growled, and impressions formed on the interior surface of the warp, leaving faint ideas of claws or fangs, ripping and biting. “We are granted a mercy, though, that you have not yet finished manufacturing my Nectar.” “Why is that such a bad thing, Luna?” Twilight flailed her limbs, trying to orient herself better, but all such power had been stripped away by Luna's magic. “I deserve it!” she barked, through gritted teeth. “You and Celestia, you demanded that I join you, that I become, to take on the mantle you wear, but would not allow me a little relief? To enjoy the things I enjoy? Tell me, whom do I harm?” “You 'deserve' it?” Luna echoed, and a liquid nitrogen chill entered the warp, to match the deep freeze of her tone. “Whom do you harm? Could it truly be that you know not what you do?” “Tell me then, you of all this righteous fury, tell me!” “Thiasus, Twilight, does this word mean anything to you?” Luna said, though the cold still remained, now causing ice crystals to form, clinging to her fur and drifting through the tortured air. “No,” said Twilight. “Should it?” “My memories have only recently returned,” Luna admitted. “Much of the truth was obscured to me. But I know this: our existence here, by which I mean Equus, on this world, has always been tenuous. It has balanced on the vagaries of fathomless Divine beings for the past five thousand years.” “Divine beings? Like you, and Celestia?” Twilight gulped. “And me.” “The being in the Autumn Crown was the first, called by gryphons on the edge of extinction,” Luna said. “Equine ancestors had become too wily food, and the big birds couldn't catch them. The gryphons were one species then. Their last mortal king beseeched an uncaring universe to care, and it worked. So began an era of misery.” The disgusted tone came back for a moment. “The gryphons were cleft in three, made better conquerors. Equines were pushed to the edge of extinction. Can you guess what happened next?” “We called our own God?” “We called Discord.” Luna's head suddenly emerged from the interior surface of the warp, a fierce expression on her slight features, eyes pinpoints. “We made a mistake, however. Without a body to inhabit, without a mentality like the last mortal king of gryphons, the Divine was unbound. It did not understand, could not understand. Oh, it tried. Some might even have said that it succeeded, for in the aftermath of the great fires it unleashed, equines fled across the sea and, by ways and means, came to Equestria.” “But the gryphons don't have a Divine leader, just the--” “Just the Crown, into which the First retreated, after the destruction of Gadarn. Discord made it into a sad, aborted thing, clinging to existence.” Luna smiled slightly then. “There it remains.” “Then how--” “The universe could not suddenly stop caring, now it had meddled,” Luna said, expanding the warp to admit her lithe, midnight-blue form, wings unfurled and spread wide, surrounded by a skin of warped space. “It needed balance, it knew that it needed to array forces against one another to achieve stability. So, selecting two ponies of the Diaspora, it made two Sister-Gods, to watch over the Race.” “Great cosmogony, Luna.” Twilight frowned. “But where are you going with this?” “I am answering your questions!” Luna darted forward, some impulsive wave sending Twilight flying, nearly interacting with the far edge of the warp. “Discord survived his conflict with the First, in better shape. He drifted aimlessly through the world, first lost, then bitter and furious that others had been given his rightful inheritance, that none lived who loved him.” She folded in her wings. “He himself, born of meddling, began to meddle. Thus, the Intercessions began.” “I've read that word somewhere,” Twilight said, furrowing her brow. “I can't remember--” “I would be surprised, Celestia sanitized the record expertly, wrote her own narrative, where it is I who triggered the Intercessions!” Luna bared her teeth, the unspeakable contempt like a physical blow to Twilight. “Nothing could have been less true, for it was I who fought them with all the blood of my foals, all the rage of my nightmares.” “Foals, Luna? We're sterile.” Twilight felt for a moment she could stare down the other Princess, but she was quickly disabused of this notion when she saw the glaring force beaming back at her, bright as a lighthouse. “We are dams to the nation, and so I birthed races, not individuals,” Luna said, as if it were the most obvious thing. “My beautiful nottlygna. More of their blood than any else was spilled on the Hill of Tithes.” Rage and contempt transformed to a bitter, bottomless agony, but only for a moment. “But we changed, I changed, for who could stay so pure and virginal after three centuries of unceasing war and formless terrors, heaped onto us from places we did not understand? To forestall a Fourth Intercession, my sister begged the universe for aid, and was answered, instead, by those from whom we were budded.” “The 'black Gods'?” “The Divine source that dwells outside all universes,” Luna said, nodding. “They've many guises, but all are terrible. They offered my sister a solution, the Elements of Harmony, though that is a mortal name for a set of tools that do not truly exist here. They were forged with perfect understanding of the physical and magical rules that underpin our reality. With these, she could trap Discord, remake the world in her image.” “So that's where the Elements came from.” Twilight couldn't resist a grin. “A big God did it and galloped away. But they didn't hand them over without a price?” “Their Party, in the old tongue, Thiasus, a great meeting of all the many faces of the Gods once every thousand years, on neutral ground.” Luna slid closer, moving across some unseen surface, or perhaps only miming the action. “When Gods party, all suffer. The universe screams in torment, even now. It sees all that happens within it, knows what happens next. The Nectars are made and, called to it, the Gods arrive to drink and make merry. All is lost.” “But... Celestia? I can't believe--” “The last time it happened, I realized too late. I rose to strike her down, but the Gods had already given her their own weapons, the Elements. She rewrote my memories, trapped me against the surface of the moon to wait out ten centuries. She twisted the recording of history. My brief war against her, and her response, told as a story about the corrupting influence of power. Used to explain the damage, the missing generations, mountains and suffering. Later, she could not face what she had done, so turned the weapon on herself, obliterating her mind. Celestia died a long, long age ago. All that now remains is an automaton of duty, smiling and obliging Gods.” Luna was crying as she spat out those last words, which graduated to inconsolable weeping as soon as she had run out of things to say. One thousand years of emotional isolation and confinement, coming to the surface at long last. Twilight's breath hitched in her throat, and she felt sunlight on her skin again as the space/time warping magic faltered. Just in time, she caught Luna in an envelope of her own purple thauma, and lowered them both to a grassy stop, landing in a wide strip of common grazing land just off the square, where Mytheme waited like a tame iceberg. Twilight had thought of this moment often, following her discoveries on the moon, and her rescue of Whom. So much horror was there, and Twilight wondered if a great deal more was hidden, or if this was only her own mind, filling in gaps. She had thought of what she would say to Luna, the arguments and counter-arguments she would use to eke answers out of the Princess. The fire behind those sentiments was gone now, though. It left with Luna's tears, falling to the ground. All she did was move in close to the collapsed Princess, more living, thinking pony than the aloof Goddess she had known, and held her, neck to neck, praying that the racking sobs would stop. All around, the nottlygna were watching, and not one of them said a word.