“So.” Rainbow fluttered down to the floor. “How much of your family can we trust?”
I didn’t bother answering. Without looking up, I pulled down two books of remote viewing spells. Study would calm my nerves... eventually.
After about five pages, I heard Flash starting to pace around the room. I didn’t look up. “Fair Tunneler’s captured. Lost Puddle’s captured. Lyra’s captured. Bon-Bon... I don’t know about her, but she’s at least deep in hiding.”
“Lyra was still fighting last I saw.”
“I saw them bring her down.”
(Half-listening, I traced out the spell-diagram in my head and tried to figure out how large a lense Uncle Nightlight could make two copies of overnight, and how I could sneak one of them out to the moon’s surface.)
Rainbow paused a moment. “Limestone and Triple Dancer weren’t there today? At least Triple’s awesome enough I’m sure she’d be able to help.”
Flash whinnied agreement. “Still... what’d we be asking them to help with? This’s the first time the Guard’s been actually fighting us. If they keep on like this...”
“We can take it!”
“You can take it. For everypony else... It’s one thing to be trying to get around Warden Blueblood’s haunches to the Divine Princess herself. It’s another thing when the Guard’s actually trying to crushstomp you underhoof in Her name.”
Rainbow suddenly poked me on the shoulder. “Hey, Twilight!”
I almost jumped. “Rainbow! What’re you doing?” Even the foals had learned not to bother me when I was studying!
“Changing the subject.” She bent her head over to stare into my face; I instinctively tried to figure out how she could possibly be keeping herself up like that — and instantly decided I had no idea. “What’re you reading? Anything to do with Daring Do?”
Well, Mother had asked me about remote-entanglement spells some three books ago, but... “Not really.”
“Anything about getting rid of Blueblood?”
I nodded. “I’m trying to make a telescope.” I tapped the book with my hoof. I’d gotten to the core formula to entangle the two telescopes for remote viewing, and I was sure I could understand it if I could just get a moment’s peace.
“And what’s that got to do with anything?”
“Because when these four stars are occluded, Luna will break free and fix everything!”
Flash and Rainbow both gasped this time. “What!?”
“Who’s Luna?”
“How’ll she fix things?”
“Does she hate Blueblood too?”
“What four stars?”
I slammed the book shut and stepped back so I could glare at both of them. “Luna is Mare-Equiis’s spell nexus. Or, more correctly, the spell-nexus is made out of her, feeding on her magic and binding her in place.” (Rainbow looked nauseous; at the moment, I just hoped she didn’t vomit on any books.) “I just found this out today. She pointed out to me four stars — Maatar, Selevoith, Glirion, and Hecate — and said that when they’re occluded by the Moon, she’ll be able to finally break her bonds —”
“Are we supposed to recognize those stars or something?” Rainbow interrupted.
I snorted.
“Wait a minute.” Flash straightened his ears. “The spell-nexus is what keeps the tunnels lit, keeps our air fresh, and keeps the air from leaking out through the rock, right?” (I nodded.) “Then... when Luna manages to get free, is there any other way to do all those things? Or will we all be gasping in the dark until the Divine Princess comes to rescue us?”
I paused. “She’ll - of course she’ll be glad to keep helping us with that,” I stammered, “A-at least, if we can’t think up anything else.” I hadn’t really thought about that, but if Luna was the Divine Princess’s sister, of course she wouldn’t leave us to die. For a moment, I considered whether to tell them that. Luna hadn’t said anything about keeping her Princesshood a secret, but after what Flash had just said, it didn’t really seem like they’d understand...
“Or maybe we’ll all go back to Equestria!” Rainbow flared her wings. “So let’s get a telescope!”
“Which is what I was trying to do, until you interrupted me!” I dragged the book over in my magic and flipped it back open.
“But...” Rainbow started. I ignored her.
Flash tapped me on the shoulder this time. “Is the magic actually hurting Luna?”
“I...” I’d never asked her. I should have. She was my friend, after all. “It used to knock her unconscious. But now...” I tried to trace through my memory of the binding-spells, but (again) I was completely lost. And they didn’t feel like any sort of spell described in my library!
Flash hung his head. “You don’t know? Is there any way for us to actually free her?”
I shook my head. I hadn’t the least idea how to break those spells.
“Can we talk to her, at least?” Rainbow quickly asked. “Is she friends with Blueblood or anything?”
“Of course not!” I grinned.
“Then...” Rainbow hovered in midair a moment. “Be right back!” She dove out the door, pushing it open without stopping, and down the hallway.
I looked at Flash questioningly.
He sank down on another cushion next to mine. “Rainbow doesn’t always bother to explain things. But she said she’ll be back, so she will be, after doing whatever she shot off for....” He sighed. “Tell me about this Luna? Who chained her up? And how long has she been there — two hundred years, since Mare-Equiis’s founding?”
“Longer than that...” How could I possibly summarize it all for him? I took a deep breath and then stumbled through the main topics of our conversations: magic, life on the moon, very little about Luna herself... “And she doesn’t like the Divine Princess.”
Flash’s eyes shot wide-open, and his ears went back. “She... doesn’t... like... her?” he breathed.
I opened my mouth to try to ask what the Divine Princess had actually done for us, aside from raising the sun — but before I could start, Rainbow Dash flew back in and stopped herself with a midair somersault right before crashing into a bookcase. She grinned at us, then reached into the blue saddlebags she was now carrying. “Here!” she said, pulling out a small telescope.
I slowly stood up and gingerly took it in my magic, awe-struck. “Is this really...” But as I turned it over slowly, I could feel the remote-viewing spell, linking it to another telescope on the moon’s surface. “Where... How...”
Rainbow shrugged. “Aw, I heard you were looking for a telescope. So when everything started going crazy, and I couldn’t fight off the guards, I ducked back into Lyra’s storeroom and grabbed this.”
“Thank you!” I jumped up and wrapped Rainbow in a hug.
Rainbow pulled out after an instant. “Well, it’s not like Lyra’ll be wanting a telescope in the dungeons, after all?” She shot a glare at Flash.
Flash fluffed his wings. “You’ve got a point, Rainbow.”
Rainbow settled down just in front of a bookcase, looking for a moment as if she wanted to perch on it like I’d seen birds do down in Equestria. “I do?”
“She and Bon-Bon said two meetings ago that they’d gladly give anything to the Revolution, right? And right now, we are the revolution.”
Setting up the telescope was easy. At least, it was easy for me. Just like I’d hoped, Lyra had set up the remote-viewing spell already when she’d first gotten the telescope. I just needed to set the telescope tube up on a tripod, or carefully tune my levitation to act as a substitute, and then activate the spell to show the image from its duplicate up on the surface.
That done, I put my eye to the lens... and blinked. It was black. The whole sky was black. It wasn’t anything like anything I’d seen even in Equestria. Had everything gone wrong?
No — I looked again — there were a few specks of light there; I turned the telescope in my magic and squinted — they were stars! This was the night sky; the sky was far darker and the stars far sharper than any night in Equestria, but it was the sky! I quickly scanned the telescope left, right, up, and down to get my bearings; I was looking straight at the head of Half-Sack the Pegasus —
“What’s up?” Rainbow interrupted.
“Just found where I am; let me find the right stars...” One of the stars I wanted, Maatar, was right there in Half-Sack’s head. It was there, as expected. Then I quickly moved south for Selevoith, and then east for Glirion and Hecate... but the black sky went dusty grey. I blinked again, and quickly realized I’d reached the horizon. Glirion and Hecate hadn’t risen yet.
“Okay,” I said aloud, quickly translating the angle into time. “We’ll need to wait... maybe twenty minutes till the stars are all up and we can see them.”
“So.” Rainbow flopped down on the cushion next to me just as I was looking up from the telescope, shaking it in my spell. It would’ve banged my eye if it’d been a moment earlier. “What do we do now? Go help your aunts and uncles with the decorations?”
“Aunt Dimity’s still doing that?” I made a face. “I could try to figure out Luna’s binding spells...” It wasn’t likely, but now that I knew what they did, I might be able to make a bit of headway.
Rainbow made a face back at me. “If we’re the Revolution, we should do something! Something really awesome, to make sure the Divine Princess knows to listen to us! Like we fly up to Blueblood's mansion at top speed and ram in and -"
"There're guards," I interjected.
"- and take down the guards, and -"
"They're trained."
"And we'll be more awesome, and -"
"They're good at it. Really good. I saw them training when I was at school, and Shiny says he watches them practice every day."
Rainbow glared at me. "Then what can we do? I got you the telescope; are you going to help us or just be a groundtrotter after all?"
I threw up my forehooves. "I - I - I’m trying!" I sputtered. “If you’d just--”
"Wait a minute!" Flash held up his wing between us. "She's trying to help!" He turned to me. "You were able to teleport us out of the Bonbonnery; can you do that again?"
"Great idea!" Rainbow's glare instantly turned to a grin. "Just tele-jump us all over the guards!"
"It's called blinking," I answered automatically. "It's a type of teleporting, superimposing your body through anaspace atop -"
"Or could you just blink a spear away -"
"That'd be thrusting, teleporting another object; blinking is when you teleport yourself -"
"Whatever!" Rainbow advanced on me like an eager foal. "Can you do it?"
"Of course! Well, it takes a lot of energy — I don't think I could do it more than a hundred hands or so — but I could unless the Warden's got a shield against it.” I hesitated. “Which he would, if he's smart at all; I haven't checked. I suppose I could ask Shiny —”
"Let's go do it!"
Rainbow quickly grabbed me in her forelegs and lifted off toward the door. I tried to squirm out, but she was much stronger than even Cousin Bellatrix; I was about to blink away when Flash clapped his hooves together. "Rainbow!"
Rainbow slowly turned back and dropped me. Fortunately, I landed on my hooves.
"We can't do it by ourselves, not even with teleporting,” he said sternly. “The three of us, against Blueblood and all the guards?"
Rainbow's head sank. I shook my head. "We'd need some other friends helping us. Like Luna."
Flash paced around the ring of bookshelves. There were still sad gaps in them; I dared to wonder for a moment whether Blueblood had any books of magic I could take if our mad revolution succeeded. For a moment, I could almost see Rainbow and Bon-Bon and the whole crowd of ponies storming out of the Bonbonnery to Blueblood's mansion... but there was something wrong with that image.
"We'll need to gather all the revolutionaries again..." Flash mused, still pacing. "We'll need to find a new meeting place. Rainbow - you know any other good abandoned mines? With hollowed-out caverns big enough for all of us?"
"Wait!" I pounded my hoof on the floor. "That's not the best way to do it!"
"Oh really?" Rainbow galloped up into my face. "And who appointed you our Warden?"
"But that won't work! Well, probably! I mean, that's not the best way to run a conspiracy! Not if you want to actually successfully conspire!" I broke off and looked between Rainbow and Flash. They were both standing in place now; Rainbow was glaring at me, but Flash was looking patiently. "Regular large meetings are far too obvious. I mean, I happened on your meeting just by chance -"
Rainbow pursed her lips suspiciously at this.
Confident in my lecture, the words rolled out of my mouth like well-tuned magic. "- and somepony else could do so too, and tell the Guard! In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if somepony already did tell them long ago, if you've been having these meetings regularly? And that's how the Guard came. Or even if they aren't telling the Guard, when you've got a hundred ponies who haven't read anything and don't know much about how politics and revolutions work - just like when you're in a school project with ponies who couldn't care less about understanding the subject, you'll just talk and talk and nothing will actually get studied or done!"
Flash winced.
I nervously swallowed, trying to pick my words more carefully to make sure they’d actually understand now. "I've never organized a conspiracy myself, I mean, but I saw a lot of conspiracies down in Canterlot. One time a Marquise even hired me to help out. A Duke on the Crown Council itself had insulted her at a party — he’d said something about her dress, I think — and she hired me to study all about the Duke's background to find out how to bring him down. The whole reason she hired me was to keep everything secret — I was a student, and a student from the Moon, so she trusted me a bit more not to be involved with any of the other nobles. And when I discovered the Duke was mortally afraid of sparrows, she tracked some down and brought them in total secrecy , and she didn't tell me a word about it until it was all over. The Duke fainted in front of everypony in court, and, within a week, he was back on his estates in disgrace. The whole thing would've burst open if anypony had known - the sparrows would've been taken away, it would've come out that the Marquise had just bought her title a year before, and she would've been disgraced instead.
I looked into the air thoughtfully. "You know... I never thought about it before, but that Duke's name was Bluefire. I'd guess he's Blueblood's brother."
Flash flexed his wings a bit. "And the Marquise?"
"Not related to anyone, as far as I know. Like I said, she’d bought the title herself. Her name’s Rarity Belle.”
Rainbow snorted. “Rarity? Nope, never heard of her. Why’d she buy a title, instead of some good food, or a soft bed, or...”
I shrugged. “I guess she liked the court? She was still there when I graduated.
"Anyway," I continued, "we need to run our conspiracy in small groups, just like that. Have one group for teleportation spells - but two or three or four ponies at most, and they might not ever meet with this other group over there who's mining rocks or something. So, nopony can betray more than their own group."
Rainbow pursed her lips, but she looked thoughtful. "And who coordinates all these groups? And what if somepony wants to bring someone new into the Revolution?"
"Maybe they could start a new subgroup?" Flash offered.
I nodded thoughtfully. "That might work... And then the subgroups would have their own subgroups, and so on, like a pyramid. And the leaders at the top could pass down messages through each group."
"With a few backup plans in case somepony in the middle's not available," Flash added.
After a moment, Rainbow nodded. "So who's awesome enough to be at the top with me?"
"The other two of us," Flash said with a grin, "since we just planned out the system. And maybe Bon-Bon as well -- No, if she's still free, they're looking for her, and her cutie mark's too obvious."
Rainbow gave me a stern look. “You really are in this after all?”
I was about to look down at my books, but then I realized that a co-captain — doubly-captain — of the Revolution shouldn’t do that. I met her gaze. “Yes. I’ll be with you.”
We batted around strategies for our new revolutionary group, with me keeping one eye on a time-spell to see when Hecate would rise. The idea of petitions was roundly shot down by all three of us. Warden Blueblood wasn’t one to listen to petitions, and Rainbow was sure (as I could confirm) that nopony in Equestria would pay a single bit of attention to petitions from the Moon.
“It’s like the Divine Princess’s forgotten us!” Rainbow whined.
Flash narrowed his eyes.
Rainbow half-fluttered backwards. “Not that She reallyhas, I’m sure —”
Neither of us replied for a moment, before Flash said, “Even if we sent petitions to the Divine Princess, would they get to her? I know Warden Blueblood’s got guards at the spell-ladder to search everything going down to Equestria...”
He was right. Even if we’d wanted to just send petitions, they wouldn’t get anywhere. We’d need to fight, at least to seize the spell-ladder. And once we were fighting all Blueblood’s guards there, we might as well go with Rainbow’s idea and seize Blueblood’s mansion. And that meant we would need to bring a lot of ponies into our conspiracy after all — or else have a really good plan...
We hadn’t reached any conclusions by the time I set the telescope back up. This time was much more anticlimactic. I was prepared for the dark sky, and I had a really good idea of where everything would be after twenty minutes. And, just as expected, Glirion and Hecate were peeking right over the Moon’s sharp horizon.
“All right!” I set the telescope on a small cushion, then levitated both up to one of the empty shelves. “I’ll just keep it here until we can give it back to Lyra, if you don’t mind?”
Flash’s head drooped.
“Oh.” It probably wasn’t best for me to talk like that about Lyra while she was in prison. “Anyway. Luna gave me the figures on where the stars were a thousand years ago,” (I produced a paper from my own saddlebags) “and, so, I can calculate how they must’ve been moving in the meantime, and extrapolate that to see when they’ll be occluded by the Moon and she can get free. Luna thinks it’ll only be another year or two.”
Thankfully, they stayed quiet while I pulled over my small writing-desk, set out the papers, and began to work. Assuming the stars were staying a constant distance from Equestria, it would be a simple geometry problem: measure how much they’d moved over the past nine hundred ninety-seven and one-half years, divide to find their yearly speed, and figure out where they’d hit the moon’s known course.
“Wait a minute!” Rainbow interrupted when I explained this. “What if they’re speeding up or stopping or something like that?”
“They don’t,” I said flatly. “What can make a star speed up? Well, except for another star right next to it, and I didn’t see any of those.”
Flash shrugged. “The Divine Princess? She raises the stars, after all.”
“She raises the sphere of the stars.” I gestured at an imaginary blackboard. “The stars remain in place on it. Anyway...” I bent over my papers.
A few minutes of simple geometry later, I had my answer. I stared at the results. Then I carefully set the paper aside, chose another sheet, and ran through them all again — and again —
“What’s going on?” Rainbow cut in. “Are the stars speeding up after all?”
I scanned my work one more time. “This doesn’t make any sense,” I said slowly. “Luna said the Moon would occlude the stars in about two years.”
Rainbow nodded vigorously. “And?”
I took a deep breath. “According to my calculations, the stars are moving much, much more slowly than she said. They won’t be in position for another eight hundred and seventy-four years.”
They both stared at me for a long moment. Finally, Flash pawed the floor. “Then... Luna guessed wrong? I guess we’ll need to break the bad news to her.”
“No! She couldn’t have been wrong!” She was a Princess! She had raised the Moon and the sphere of the stars herself, before she’d been imprisoned! “She said the stars would be occluded sometime in the next few years, so they must... must have been moving twice as fast...”
Rainbow grinned for a moment. “So something slowed the stars down after all?”
“Something did slow them down. They were moving much faster... a thousand years ago, when Luna was imprisoned. Somepony slowed them down.”
The Divine Princess.
She was the obvious culprit. As Flash had said, she was the one who raised the sphere of the stars. And — though I hadn’t dared tell either of my new friends yet — the Princess had imprisoned Luna in the first place; she was probably the only pony (except us) who knew the significance of these four stars.
I looked between Flash and Rainbow. After a minute, he slowly shook his head ruefully. He got it.
Rainbow half-unfurled her wings. She didn’t.
“So...” Flash started. “Should we tell Luna the bad news? Or... well, since the Divine Princess thought it best not to tell her...”
I opened my mouth. “Well, um, the Princess —”
A cold voice from empty air interrupted me. “Thank you, Captain Twilight Sparkle. There is no need to tell Us. We have been listening.”