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// 14 - Luna's Apprentice 
// Story: Forsaken 
// by Beware The Carpenter 
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	Since her return from exile, Luna had made many promises. She’d promised Celestia, aristocrats, scholars and foreign diplomats to attend certain events, fund projects and meet with more people who would all want something from her. These promises mattered absolutely nothing to her, and she kept them only because the rewards for their keeping were greater than the costs to breaking them. 

In the last millennium she had made one promise, an only one, which meant anything to her. It was the only one she had not made out of selfish reasons; and it was the only one that she had been unable to keep.

Every night, until now, she had kept her promise to visit him; slowly but surely repairing the damage that had been done to his being. They would talk if there was anything to be said, they would play together, she would feed him, and then she would sing him back to sleep; keeping him calm and relaxed until it was almost time for their next meeting. Then, just when Luna thought he might trust her enough allow himself to be vulnerable to her, this happened.

How much time had passed for him since her last visit? Without Luna to monitor the time distortions of his dreams, carefully rationing him out a few hours of unsupervised activity each night, there was a chance he felt he'd awaited her for no more than three days, but it was entirely possible it could be much, much longer. Even if it was only three days, by now he would be starving, panicked, desperate… brooding. 

It would take months for her to regain the trust she had fought so hard for, months which she no longer had. The solar eclipse was coming in just under six weeks, and could not be denied. 

Luna counted her victories, and found them ruthlessly few. She reminded herself that inside the astral plane, he had no body or physical entity an so his grief was incapable of hurting anyone, including himself. Neither Shining Armor nor Twilight had seen him, and despite her subconscious mind conjuring an image of him, her conscious mind had been able to make it call her “Luna”, rather than her name. 

The background around them flickered once, and Luna forced these thoughts out of her mind before they brought conjured another phantom like the one she and the unicorns had only barely escaped. If that happened, it risked not only exposure, but staying even longer in Enigma's mind, and so for the sake of her ward, she did not let herself think about him waiting for her. She did not wonder how much time he had experienced, she did not worry about how she was going to apologize, and she did not let herself dwell on the fact that he did not forgive easily.