//------------------------------// // A Last Royal Audience // Story: Do Not Go Gentle // by ShinigamiDad //------------------------------// “Starswirl lied.” Reaper and the Princesses passed briefly through the “Waiting Room,” and woke again in Luna’s Canterlot quarters. Twilight sniffled and wiped away a tear: “Why did he lie? He obviously never told Celestia about any of this!” Luna shook her head: “No. I am certain I would have heard something of it. Clearly he did not tell you the truth at the end, Reaper. I wonder why?” Reaper sucked air through his teeth: “Not sure. I suspect it was just in keeping with his secretive nature--even at the end, he couldn’t bring himself to reveal the truth. I assume he figured (correctly) that I would have gone to Celestia.” Reaper stood up stiffly and stretched on his way to the side table. He poured himself a goblet of cider. Twilight furrowed her brow: “Why are you drinking that? I thought you just absorbed energy from the world around you?” Reaper smiled: “That’s true. It’s kind of a displacement activity—echoes of a bad, old habit from a former life.” Twilight asked, “So what happens to it?” Reaper cocked his head to one side: “Hmm. Not entirely sure. As I pass in and out of the boundaries between this world and my “waiting room,” my physical form phases from solid to insubstantial. I assume the cider simply gets lost in the translation between those states.” Luna chuckled: “So you are leaving a stain somewhere as you move through your phases?” Reaper shrugged: “Most likely.” “Do you miss it?” asked Twilight. “Miss what?” “Any of it, all of it--actually being alive.” Reaper’s eyebrows jumped a bit, and he emptied the goblet: “You mean eating and drinking for real? Not really. This is the first drink I’ve taken in centuries. When I came to Equestria countless millennia ago I was given a new form, and purged of any mortal fears, or wants or lusts or needs.” He set the cup down and turned back toward the lounging alicorns. “So the trade-off for being essentially indestructible, incorruptible and fearless, is having no need or desire for eating, drinking, playing, fighting, fucking--none of it,” Reaper concluded. He sat on a cushion: “Do I remember those things? Sure, but they’re less substantial to me now than the death visions I carry, or even those dreams I have experienced.” “Speaking of,” he said, turning to Luna, “do you recall any of Starswirl’s dreams?” Luna shifted her position and nibbled at an apple slice. She pondered Reaper’s question for a minute. “Now that you mention it, I cannot clearly recall any dreams for Starswirl,” Luna answered, “well, at least none from his later years.” She shifted uncomfortably. Twilight raised an eyebrow: “Didn’t he sleep?” Luna took a deep breath and considered her response for a moment: “You are aware, of course, of his mirror gateway. I wonder if he was away from our plane when sleeping. Or if his passing between worlds interfered with me somehow.” “Or,” Reaper interjected, “he was doing to you what he did to me for twenty years.” Luna looked startled: “Do you think so?” Twilight nodded and took another drink of cider: “It sure looks like it to me. I guess there’s a lot we really don’t know about Starswirl. Maybe we should ask Celestia. She might be able to shed some light on this.” Luna frowned, and Reaper answered: “I think it is pretty clear he thought Celestia would be ashamed of some of his work, and he wanted to take it to his grave, as it were. I would rather avoid bringing Celestia in if we can avoid it.” “Well then what do we do?” Twilight asked. Reaper tapped his hooves together lightly: “So you can’t recall anything of Starswirl’s later dreams, correct, Luna? I mean you were banished about that time, if I recall.” Luna nodded silently, ears drooping. “What’s the latest dream you can recall?” Reaper asked. Luna closed her eyes and chewed her lower lip: “What few dreams of his I recall were often filled with books and scrolls and incantations. I do not see much there of any value.” “No other ponies, no dreams of other worlds?” Reaper pressed. Luna looked off into the distance, focusing on a time, hundreds of years in the past. Twilight yawned. Luna repositioned herself on her cushion and held her horn high: “Come. There may be information, here--you two can judge it as well.” The three companions were back in Luna’s ruined dream hall moments later, eyes adjusting to the dark, Luna illuminating the space as Twilight and Reaper headed for the banner-portal. “My perspective is somewhat untrustworthy in this dream,” said Luna nervously as she rose to the flickering portal as well, “as I am (or a vision of me is, at any rate) in it as a participant. You two may be better able to untangle this obscured tableau, as I fear it has more to do with me than Starswirl himself.” “How interesting,” Twilight said. “I wonder what it would be like to observe a dream me?” Reaper chuckled as Luna raised an eyebrow and responded dryly, “I suspect you would find it quite uncomfortable. You figure far more prominently in a variety of, shall we say, romantically-inclined dreams, now that you are famous.” Twilight blushed furiously and stepped through the portal. She materialized alone at the edge of an ancient, ruined coliseum. “Luna? Reaper?” she called out, looking around for her companions. She noticed the indigo alicorn at the opposite end of the structure, about half-way up the crumbling seats. She took off and flew toward Luna. “I do not understand any of this,” Luna was saying to Starswirl, who was seated on a broken marble column. She loomed over Starswirl and demanded, “Why do you keep involving my sister in your pointless gallivanting? She has far more important tasks that require her attention!” Twilight stopped and hovered, realizing she was seeing a vision of Luna from the past, arguing with Starswirl. “How could you understand?” Starswirl countered, standing and bristling, “You have no sense of adventure! You brood and whine and resent those who actually strive to bring new knowledge and experiences to Equestria!” “You should be glad I lack a sense of adventure, you fool!” she spat, unfurling her wings, “My power far exceeds yours, and rivals even that of my thrill-seeking sister!” Starswirl staggered back a step as if hit by an invisible blow. Luna’s wings began to stir the dust, and whip it into a growing, darkening whirlwind. Twilight noticed that the cracked and decaying seats now held the bones of scores of creatures--some ponies, but many clearly not. The bones began to haphazardly assemble into partial, jumbled skeletons, which then applauded, as Luna and Starswirl sparred and stumbled among the ruined aisles and seats. “Yours is only the power of anger and bitterness, Luna!” Starswirl shouted above the wind, his horn glowing, slashing at the towering funnel. Twilight flew in closer, and noticed some of the skeletal apparitions had begun to take on more-complete forms. Her eye was also caught by movement on the far edge of the coliseum--Reaper and Luna-of-the-present were making their way toward the confrontation. Dream Luna glared at Starswirl, and fanned the funnel with her wings, trying to blow it over him. The base of the funnel was carving through the skeletal spectators, blowing them apart, leaving a glistening black trail like oil in its wake. Reaper and Luna-of-the-present were at a full gallop on the coliseum’s open field, but weren’t making any apparent progress, and Twilight now saw many ponies and creatures clearly: colors, limbs, shapes, and cutie marks, in the case of ponies. Most were cheering on Starswirl, but some began to fall on their neighbors, rending them asunder, reducing them, too, to oily, black patches. The crowd of creatures--complete and partial, skeletal and flesh began to howl, matching the intensity of the shrieking wind. They were sucked up into the funnel by the dozens, streaking it black. Dream Luna spread her wings wide and hovered, stock-still in the air: “Enough!” she shouted as the scene froze. Starswirl stood tall, shaking dust and bone fragments from his mane, sparks flying from his horn. He scanned the scene and squinted at the few ponies and others who remained. “Why are you here?!” he demanded of the remaining apparitions. They applauded again, and pointed to the sky, where Dream Luna had now placed herself before the blackening funnel, wings spread beyond the bounds of the crumbling stadium. The funnel surrounded and subsumed her, turning her into a glossy black silhouette. “But this is my world!” Starswirl shouted, firing bolts of energy at his remaining audience, popping each one like a bloody bubble. The last spectator, a pale gray unicorn with a cutie mark of twisted brier answered: “Not for long!” The vision collapsed with a mighty roar, like an avalanche, and Twilight felt herself pulled from the sky, sucked into the black maelstrom.