"Of all the aberrations born under the sun of Discord's madness, none were as terrible, powerful, devious, wonderful and beautiful as those two we all have come to call Princess."
—Sand Song, 452 before Nightmare Moon
One could say there was a certain duality involved when it came to the two Royal Sisters. Princess Celestia would rule the day and Princess Luna watch over the night. But of course, that was only the most obvious part of it.
In a way, one could say that similarly, Celestia was a mare of reason and deliberation and Luna one of emotion and impulse. Naturally, that didn't mean Celestia was incapable of compassion or that Luna wouldn't think before acting. It went along different lines. Where Celestia crafted her magic into formulaic spells and willed them to work with great precision and superb control, Luna would weave them more according to her feelings, and intuitively shape the magic to do as she desired.
Where Celestia was a statesmare, Luna was an artist. Celestia could talk to diplomats and lawyers, Luna to animals.
Celestia would rule the day and Luna watch over the night. That's what it boiled down to, in the end. Celestia listened to her ponies' waking complaints, and Luna made sure they had none while they were asleep, attending to her subjects' dreams.
Luna loved keeping her subjects safe in their sleep. Their dreams often allowed her to be closer to her subjects than her sister would ever be, and she could aid them all individually, doing so much more good on a personal level than most policies and laws.
That had not always been that way, of course. In olden times, she had seen it mainly as labour, and resented it as it had seemed to her she was the only one labouring when all else were resting; worse even, it was her work that allowed them to rest.
To Luna, the realm of dreams was a wondrous place, and even after centuries of walking the dreamscape (something she had done quite regularly even before becoming a princess of Equestria) she would still find herself in awe of the beautiful images devised by her little ponies' dreaming minds.
But just like there was beauty that could be found in dreams, there were also occasions where images of fear and terror would take hold of a pony's dream. The reasons for this were many, but not as many as there had been in the past, and those occasions were much rarer, too.
The dreamscape of Luna's youth had been a wild place, terrible and dangerous, where the possibility of getting lost and never finding your way back into the waking world was not only very real, but actually one of the lesser perils of dreaming. It had gotten a lot better after Discord had been imprisoned; what remained afterwards had been tamed by Luna herself in the course of several hundred years. Among the well-versed, there was talk about a special wing in the depths of Tartarus reserved especially for fiends that dwelt solely within the realm of mind and imagination, filled mostly by Princess Luna more that a thousand years ago.
After her millennial imprisonment, Luna had found that some of the peril had returned to her subjects' dreams – but what darkness had managed to take hold was mostly harmless. While Celestia was not able to walk dreams, she had been taking care of those foulnesses that had some root in the real world, for those where susceptible to spells of banishment, protection, exorcism and more.
What remained where minor darknesses that where almost all sole inhabitants of the dream world. Those creators of nightmares where with little exception dreamcrawlers, miserable little spirits that induced terrors and preyed on the fear of her ponies. A closer specification forbade itself in most cases. If they were spawn of windigos, if lost and pained soul, if curse of Discord, if echo of the deceased, minor demon of the underworld or even shadow of some unnatural Thing from the Outer Planes, Luna was seldom able to determine.
Yet even those were dwindling in numbers only two years after she had taken up her duty again. No, these days the most common source of nightmares where the dreamers themselves, who carried the fears of their waking hours into their dreams. Such dreams were unpleasant, but under Luna's guiding hoof, they could help their ponies cope and learn to overcome their fears, and thereby mostly caused more good than harm.
But today, it was no bad dream from which a valuable lesson could be learned that occupied her so. It was very much a dreamcrawler, but one with abilities she had not seen for ages in anyone but herself. Ordinarily, a dreamcrawler would latch onto a pony and feed off the fear it caused them. They were usually simple to combat from afar using her dream magic. Sometimes it even sufficed to lead the pony it preyed on to recognise it and drive it away, which both robbed the dreamcrawler of its source of power and turned its host against it. That way, if the dreamcrawler's own magic was not great enough to overcome the pony's dreaming mind, it would be banished from it, usually to never return again.
Last night, however, she had encountered a dreamcrawler that had resisted all of her usual methods of dealing with it. In fact, it had behaved oddly from the start. Luna had, while keeping watch over the night, sensed the anguish coming from a pony's dream – from a mare called Golden Harvest, to be precise – and as her gazing into the dream had not revealed it to be caused from anything of import that might be seed for learning, she had radiated Laughter into the dream, which usually had the effect of gently turning the nightmare back into something happy.
As that had failed, she had surmised there had to be a dreamcrawler or a deeper, underlying fear at work here. She had entered the dream without revealing herself, and almost instantly caught the traces of a dreamcrawler's work – fears not coming from the imagination of the dreamer.
Oddly enough, just as she had noticed the dreamcrawler's presence, it had sensed hers, and, even more oddly, begun to hide within the dream.
She hadn't thought much of it and hunted the beast tormenting her subject down. It had taken her a bit tearing through the horrible figments haunting Golden Harvest until she finally found the dreamcrawler disguised with the inconspicuous form of a coffee table. Joining forces with the dreaming pony, she had chased the wayward furniture through the increasingly labyrinthine hallways of a dreamt-up version of Golden Harvest's home in Ponyville, at last trapping the dreamcrawler in a dead end. But as she had it cornered, it managed to slip away into an adjacent dream. (The dreamscape possessed its own, ever-changing topography, which was somewhat related to, but mostly independent of the shape of the real world. In that sense, it wasn't adjacent in a spatial way, but in one of similitude in dream, emotion, magic and minds of the dreamers.)
Luna had followed the dreamcrawler, and the process repeated itself for a few times. After tracking it down through four or five different dreams, she had managed to isolate the dream it had fled into from the rest of the dreamscape, shielding it in such a way that the only dream accessible from there would be her own, where her influence was appropriately greater.
It almost worked. Almost. When she had the annoyingly persistent nasty backed into a corner once again, and once again forced it to switch dreams, it had figured out what she was doing. For a fleeting moment she felt it peeking inside the dream she had prepared for it, and then it had pulled back when it recognized her as the dreamer. It had taken her one or two seconds to realise it wasn't going into her trap, and before she had the opportunity to obliterate it there and then, it had disturbed the dream they were in so greatly the dreamer had woken up – taking the dreamcrawler with him.
Where the dreamcrawler's previous behaviour had been highly irregular, this was something she hadn't seen since the days of Discord, when the border between reality and dream had been much more permeable than in any way desirable. A dreamcrawler attaching to a waking host and using that to escape into the waking world? In these times, that was almost unbelievable.
She realised, of course, that the dreamcrawler, strictly speaking, couldn't have become real, at least not in the physical sense. It had merely left the dreamscape, and with it her influence, by clinging to the mind of one of her ponies like a blood-sucking parasite – which, indeed, was the closest analogy to a dreamcrawler the kingdom animalia had to offer.
This greatly upset her, as it reminded her of a spell of her own design, which would influence dreams at night but remained latent within the dreamer when they woke. It was almost like it was her fault – and she couldn't stand that. After what damage Nightmare Moon had and could have caused, she had sworn herself to never again let her ponies come to harm, be it through action or inaction.
So she set herself on finding this vicious dreamcrawler. Locating the pony the dreamcrawler had infested was easy enough an exercise. He was a young colt, and through his parents and teacher, who she knew as a niece of one of her maids, she was able to find his name and address. She might not have been able to remember each of her subjects as well as Celestia, who prided herself on never forgetting a face, but she knew them from their dreams on an emotional level. Also, she had, over centuries of watching over dreams, gained an uncannily accurate ability of guessing her ponies' names just from their dreams and personality, which really came in quite useful on that occasion.
What was more of a challenge was making room in her day for a trip to Fillydelphia, where the colt, Autumn Leaf (which had been her second guess after Golden Leaf), lived in a flat with his parents. She immediately set herself onto the task right after breakfast, and only by being quite adamant about it and even raising her voice a bit once or twice was she able to convince her chaperones to reshuffle her schedule and free her for the early afternoon.
After a brief but refreshing lunch, she shook off her flock of guards and flew east, keeping herself high up in the air, so that even sharp-eyed pegasi couldn't tell it was her. This was her duty, and she would do it alone, without anypony else involved. Besides, she enjoyed the bit of freedom. She could get all the solitude and time for reflection she desired in her private chambers, and since she was a Princess, none could really object to anything she opted to do, but feeling the wind in her mane, sky all around her, nothing to set her path but her own desire, that held something special, something she rarely had opportunity to indulge in. So she savoured the moment, enjoyed the flight.
As she approached Fillydelphia, she slowed down, descending, gliding the rest of the way.
When she crossed the city perimeter, she placed a spell of inconspicuousness on herself. It wasn't quite as effective as true invisibility, but it helped her blend in. True, one or two especially observant ponies might notice her, but whoever heard of the Princess of the Night walking the streets of Fillydelphia in broad daylight?
After only a few of minutes navigating street signs, she found the address she was looking for – 7 Sunflower Lane. She let herself in (who was going to stop her?) and, following her ears, found Autumn Leaf in his room. The colt had just come back from school and was in one of those energetic moods ponies, and foals particularly, get into when the days are long and the sun shines warm and bright.
Luna stepped up to him and asked him about his dreams last night. He was surprised at first, but she told him to relax, as she was only here to help, and soon he told her he recalled some nebulous but unpleasant dream ending with a sudden impression – a combination of strange imagery and a feeling of chill – that had woken him up an hour early and left him unable to get to bed again before it was time to start the day proper.
She nodded, and explained the situation; that she had been hunting a dream demon preying on the fear of the sleeping, that it had sought refuge in his dreams, and that she had come to capture it.
Autumn Leaf listened with wide eyes before enthusiastically offering his help, excited at the prospect of adventure. Luna smiled, and asked him to go to sleep, so she could enter his dream and combat the beast.
With help from the slightest touch of magic, the colt quickly fell asleep. Before entering his dream however, she took certain precautions. Again, she sealed off the surrounding dreamscape, but also, she placed a charm on the pony to put him into a deep and dreamless sleep. She intended to end this dreamcrawler here and now, and to keep the foal out of harm's way as well as to prevent the dreamcrawler from pulling the same tricks again, Autumn Leaf needed to be in a sleep so deep he wasn't aware of his dream and his dream wasn't aware of him.
After everything was prepared, Luna entered the dream.
It was dark and quiet, as those of dreamerless sleep usually were, for they were without the vivid, burbly imagination of a pony to fill them, and resonated only in the most base ways with the pony they originated from.
The dreamcrawler, shapeless at the moment, stuck out like a sore hoof in the peaceful environ. She gave chase, and it fled, releasing sudden frights and horrifying phantasms to stop her or awaken the dreamer, but to no avail. It took greater terror to frighten her, the Princess of Nightmares, and Autumn Leaf was out of reach from here. She pinned the creature down and prepared a curse that would banish it from any pony's dream now and forevermore.
But to her aggravation and surprise, it writhed, squirmed—and managed to slip away. Angry, she turned to give chase, but it was already fading away, leaving the dream.
Immediately, she checked the barrier around the dream, searching for a breach, but there was none.
After eliminating the impossible, only the inconceivable remained: the dreamcrawler hadn't merely left the dream, but the dreamscape itself. She didn't know what to make of that. Only one thing was certain now: no ordinary dreamcrawler would do that. It hadn't gone back where it came from – Luna had brought enough haunted souls to rest and fended off enough otherworldly foulness to tell the difference – but it had pierced through the outer layers of the dream and travelled not to the wider scape, but towards the real world on the path of the waking.
She wondered what that meant as she followed suit. The dreamcrawler had no body to return to, and the magic necessary for something from a dream to become substance was monstrous even for one as powerful as her.
Luna opened her eyes, breathed in, looked around, surveyed the room, its postered walls, the bare ceiling, carpeted floor, brightly painted furniture, the nicknack strewn about, the foal lying on his sheets—and found nothing. She waited, watched, filling the entire room with her attention, but still found no sign of the wayward sprite.
She sighed, beginning to wonder how it had eluded her and silently chastising herself for her failure, when she suddenly felt something invisible rise up from the colt's sleeping form.
At once, she willed her magic into her eyes to let them see true, and lo! she caught a blur zipping through the air, making an attempt for the window. Light exploded from Luna's horn. Blue magic spread along the walls, across the floor and ceiling, forming a glowing skim on the room's interior.
The blur (she couldn't see it clearly under its veil of obscurity that blocked both sight and sound) reached the window, then stopped at the magical layering, hesitated, sped back and forth along the barrier, found no gap, and finally came to a quivering halt in mid-air.
Slowly, Luna released her breath. The skein of magic that covered the room began moving inwards around the invisible something, trapping it in a shrinking energy bubble. As the bubble shrank back, letting everything pass except for the blur, she stepped forward to get a closer look at it.
Now that it stood still, she realised it was quite small, only as big as a pony's head even with the most generous estimation of its uncertain contours.
She let the sphere shrink until it was about the size of a bowling ball, then solidified it into a perfectly translucent ball of glass-like, crystallized magic. The thing she had trapped still left her without any kind of response to its imprisonment.
She reached inside with her magic, felt it squirm under her touch as she stripped away the magical veil that covered it.
It looked—strange. The closest analogue she could imagine was if someone drew a diazocopy of some arachnid or cephalopod in light on a sheet of glass, and then pulled said drawing into the third dimension. She could see little more of it than luminescent contours and lines running through it; in its central body was a bright orb like an eye or somesuch, different extremities that seemed like wings, fins or webbed arms extended outwards from there.
It also emitted a faint buzzing or whispering now that its sight and sound were no longer obscured.
Luna frowned. It seemed so small and frail for something that had caused her, the regent of the night, so much trouble. And still, she was none the wiser for all of it.
It jittered and twitched in her bubble, rolling over one side and tumbling, as if it had lost balance.
She must have damaged the oddity somehow when she peeled away its skein of obscurity, because she found one of its webbed limbs fraying and decaying before her eyes. As soon as she looked closer, she found the glowing lines composing her capture unravelling at several ends. While she still pondered what to think of and what to do about it, something on its inside snapped and the central luminous orb expanded outwards, tearing apart the rapidly decomposing shell around it.
As the bluish light touched the inside of her forcefield and came in contact with her magic, she almost instantly recognised the familiar feel of dream magic—and not the unrefined, limited power of a dreamcrawler, no, it was pony magic, unicorn magic, like she used to affect the dreamscape.
What that meant was obvious, yet her mind seemed to blank for the sheer surreality of it.
Luna blinked, shook her head, stared disbelievingly at the blob of dream magic trapped inside her magic bubble. Somepony had, using dream magic nopony but her had been privy to for a thousand years, created a half-sentient magical construct that could mimic the abilities of a dreamcrawler as well as traverse between the dreaming and the waking world.
This was worrisome, even if the construct had been weak and unable to offer any resistance to her magic. Somepony out there was using secrets they should not know for malign purposes, though she didn't get what they hoped to achieve. A single of those constructs could never have any meaningful impact onto more than a couple of ponies, it had chosen its targets by adjacency in the dreamscape while she had been chasing it, so it hadn't been sent after anypony specific, and if it was merely a test run, they had just exposed their scheme to her. Who could possibly benefit from this?
Again, she shook her head, putting her questions and worries on hold for now. She would talk this through with Celestia, she decided. She was usually adamant on her subject's dreams being solely her responsibility, but this was a case of somepony abusing their talent for magic. It wasn't probably of that much significance, but Luna had a bad feeling about the affair.
She collapsed the bubble, making sure the unicorn magic inside discharged harmlessly, removed the charm keeping Autumn Leaf asleep and awoke the colt, thanking him for his help.
He expressed slight disappointment at not having witnessed her battle with the dreamcrawler, but was quickly placated by Luna's assurance it hadn't been all that spectacular.
She was just about to say her goodbyes when her still finely-attuned mystical senses picked up a sudden disturbance that reached from the deepest layers of the dreamscape, through the very realm of the waking mind into the dimensions of space and time themselves.
She stopped in the middle of her sentence, the hairs on her neck suddenly standing on end.
Turning her head towards the source of what must have been a tremendous shifting of magical power, she saw, through the room's small window, a spiralling, dark tower of cloud and lightning forming rapidly in the distance, sticking out sorely in the otherwise clear blue sky.
The colt followed her gaze, and his mouth formed into an almost perfect little circle. When the churning maelstrom of thundercloud grew denser and darker, flickering with flashes of lightning, he asked “Princess Luna, what is that?”
“Nothing good, I fear,” Luna answered, and as if in response, the sun fell from the sky.
Time seemed to slow down as the life-giving light sunk downwards towards the horizon at an unnatural speed, and Luna felt her heart sink with it. The bad feeling she had been carrying since discovering the dreamcrawler to be artifice grew manifold into an unnerving feeling of urgent dread, and as the sun dipped over the northern horizon, sending the world into a night darker than the new moon, Luna instinctively felt, nay, knew, that her sister was in trouble, that her sister needed her, needed her now.
She spread her wings, broke into a short gallop to gain some speed, pushed herself off the ground and took to the air.
At this point, it might be wise to mention that alicorns are remarkable creatures. Of course, that much is obvious since they possess both pegasus flight and unicorn magic. However, it is not quite as simple as one might believe. It is true that alicorns possess the magic of all three pony tribes, but the fact they have all these kinds of magic at once allows for some subtle interactions and mutual influences of these abilities.
In particular, earth pony and pegasus magic interact quite strongly, which is not really surprising since both types of magic are mainly passive and influence the pony's physique. What makes this even more interesting is the clash of affinities; earth ponies are strongest with all four hooves on the ground, pegasi excel in the sky.
One result is the high strength and stamina resulting from earth pony magic extending to the alicorn's wings, giving them a greater wingpower and leaving them perfectly equipped for long distance flights at high speeds, well beyond the capabilities of most pegasi.
On the other hoof, they are more – sturdy, have greater momentum, so their higher wingpower does not come with increased agility and manoeuvrability. A swift pegasus can easily dodge and evade an alicorn – but not outlast or outrun them.
This also comes to bear when landing and taking off. Where a pegasus settles down lightly and flutters up into the blue gracefully, an alicorn impacts the ground with all the sturdiness of an earth pony and their wings can only get them airborne so fast. Of course, alicorns can also use that to their advantage. They can, in fact, take off and land faster than pegasi, slamming into the ground without slowing down first or literally jump-starting, courtesy of their far stronger legs. It is also not unheard of that an alicorn may quickly change direction by impacting an obstacle and then pushing off of it.
The two Royal Sisters, for example, who both are exceptionally magical, are, when properly motivated, capable of ludicrous take-off speeds and can propel themselves forward with such a momentum that even solid walls would have a hard time even slowing them down. Not to mention that, with enough adrenaline in their system, a collision with such a wall would only slightly inconvenience them.
Such a physical condition renders, if need be, take-off inside a building unreasonably viable.
And that is how on one Summer afternoon, Princess Luna broke through the façade of a family home in Fillydelphia and soared up high into the black, star-dotted sky.
About an hour later, the owners of the house would tell this story to the royal messenger who had arrived from Ponyville to inform Her Royal Highness Princess Luna of the sudden disappearance of her co-princesses Celestia and Twilight. The pegasus messenger would then, quite downtrodden and slightly exhausted, return to Canterlot, only to be sent up north to the Crystal Empire with the task of informing Her Royal Highness Princess Cadance that the princesses Celestia, Twilight and Luna had all disappeared.
The landlords, however, would later ask the crown for compensation for the damage to their property, and after a lot of rejections, notices of appeal, forms being misplaced, resubmissions, documents being filed, shredded, declared obsolete and forwarded in quick succession and variable order, all amounting to lots of general headache, the whole affair would finally land on the desk of the very head of the Equestrian Civil Service. Said pony, a generally quite disgruntled person, would reset his chain of office, have a sip of tea and do the necessary paperwork while silently complaining to an uncaring universe as to why those things always fell back on him; luckily, there was a special fund established exactly for such occurrences—bumps in the road of a Princess adjusting to modern society.
Luna pushed her wings against the air, using her momentum to quickly gain altitude. Taking up speed towards the pillar of storm, she found time to orient herself.
The dark funnel of clouds was hanging over the Everfree Forest, about an hour of flight away.
There was no time to lose. The last time she hadn't been there when her sister needed her had resulted in a changeling invasion of Canterlot, and there was no way she'd let something like that happen again.
She concentrated on the forest and the storm, and called upon her power. Brilliant cyan light rippled from her horn as her magic reached out for space to transport her faster than wings could carry her.
But try as she might, her destination wavered and slipped from her focus time and time again. Teleporting into and out of the Everfree Forest was never easy due to its alien nature, but this was beyond anything she'd ever experienced. Whatever was inside the maelstrom's eye was causing a heavy distortion of the surrounding space. Blinking over there was difficult, and outright dangerous. Detaching herself from normalspace to get closer to a source of turbulence could well result in a belated re-emergence, this she knew from experience.
No, teleportation was too risky if she didn't want to loose any time.
Her wings started beating harder. If an ordinary pegasus took one hour to fly from Fillydelphia to Ponyville, she, Princess Luna of the Night, would do so in one minute.
Wind rushed past her as she built up speed, but it lacked the liberating feeling she had felt during the flight towards Fillydelphia. Now that she was flying back, only anxiety, tension, a hint of dread remained in her heart. Whatever had caused her sister to give up control over the sun to something or someone else (for that was the only meaningful explanation for the sudden darkness) it could only mean bad things.
With a little more effort, she passed the sound barrier, and the pounding of the rushing air against her ears became deafening. Folding her ears back, she pushed herself further, faster, light condensing at the edges of her flight field.
When the second boom came, it came sudden, as it always did. The cone of condensing light that had formed around her collapsed unto itself, and the the air around her snapped, rushing past her faster than before. The shock, the sudden change of the flow rippled over her, through her mane, which seemed to smear, leaving behind a streak of star-dotted, moonlit night sky; a glittering cone of condensing magic left in her wake.
Before her, the pressure wave expanding around her speeding body formed into strands of darkness, curling around her, shrouding her in shadow.
The landscape beneath her became a blur. Hills and meadows, woods and streams, all streamed past her, painted grey by the darkness of this unnatural night.
Before her, the churning funnel of clouds grew wide, shadow and light falling in odd angles over the swirls of the freakish storm.
Passing over the jagged expanse of Rambling Rock Ridge, she took note of the cloud-storm's position: it hung directly over the ruins of her old castle and home.
She turned downwards, starting to slightly slow down and to descend. The castle was obscured by the raging gulf of heavy thunderclouds, but at the vortex's very foot, a fiery, unsteady glow pierced the blanket of cloud, which was almost opaque in the darkness. This is where she aimed herself.
Were this any other night, and were this any other storm, Luna might have had more to go by, for she prided herself in seeing as well in moonlight as in daylight, but this was a darkness without moon, and the clouds were unnaturally low and thick, and so her eyes failed to penetrate the darkness.
She spread her wings, gliding downward at a sharp angle, feeling for her sister's familiar presence, when she became aware, first dimly, then suddenly, terribly unmistakeably, of six other presences.
Brilliant white light shone through the clouds, burning the ruined palace's silhouette into her retinas.
A shiver ran down her spine as she once again felt that massive wave of harmonious power build up, resonating with the six ponies she had come to love so dearly, and then release into an unstoppable force of harmony and light.
Luna braced herself just in time before the resulting shockwave blew apart the storm and passed over her.
However, although she had been prepared for the turbulence, what she saw still threw her off course.
From the source of the blazing light, a bright rainbow tore through the night, quickly engulfing a form that was only visible as a shadow against its brightness—the form of a tall and slender alicorn, the form of her sister, visible for a moment, then dwindling and melting away against the intensity of the rainbow's light.
“No,” Luna breathed, her blood freezing in her veins. This wasn't happening. They weren't banishing her sister, just like she had been. They couldn't be!
She frantically beat her wings, trying to regain control over her course that had been lost in the first moment of shock, when the sun rose, blinding her, disorienting her more.
She blinked against the blinding light, but all she could see was her sister dissolving in the rainbow, over and over and over again. She tried to stabilize her flight, but her wings only moved sluggishly and unresponsive.
There was a burst and a second shockwave, and her sister's presence was gone. Luna tumbled, her eyes burning with light and tears, her muscles shaken by winds and shock. Disbelief flooded her mind.
Something hit her left wing, and she went helter-skelter crashing into something else back-first. She heard something crack, but felt too numb to care. Tree branches whipped around her as she fell, hitting her wings, her legs, her back, her neck, her ears her muzzle, but she felt too numb to care.
Her side slammed into the soft, muddy ground, but she felt too numb to care.
Celestia couldn't be gone.
In her chest was a numb, painful emptiness that drowned almost anything else out.
She reached for her sister again, but found nothing but a sensation of wrongness from where she had been moments ago. Was it an actual sensation? Was it her senses rebelling against what had happened? She didn't know. She didn't care.
Celestia was gone. The Elements had banished her.
Luna sobbed against the ground, blinked against her tears, blinked against the image of Celestia dissolving in the light, again, again and again.
It was a terrible truth she faced, one she could barely stand.
She drew in a ragged breath, only to let it out again in a muffled, miserable cry.
Luna cried, cried at the loss of her sister.
For all her long, long life, Celestia had been there, as reliable as the sun, the moon or the earth. Even as Nightmare Moon, imprisoned in her namesake, she had felt the touch of Celestia's magic every night, every day as she rose and set the moon that was not hers.
And now, she was gone.
Her wonderful, perfect sister, gone. Always smiling, always kind Celestia, gone. When Luna closed her eyes, pressed them against the ground, tears draining into the earth, she could still see Celestia's smile. Her beloved sister had so many smiles, and she knew them all. Like the tired but relieved smile she'd show after a long but successful night of negotiations. Like the coy smile that appeared whenever Celestia indulged in her more mischievous side. Or the proud smile she so often shared with their subjects, whom she loved so much.
Or the radiant, honest smile that was reserved for her beloved little sister...
The memories hurt. Yet Luna couldn't let them go. Weren't they all she had left of Celestia right now?
She thought back, far back, trying to recall the first time she had ever seen Celestia smile. After a while, the image came back to her. Why Celestia had smiled then was a mystery lost to time, but she had smiled for her, Luna, and that was the important part.
She had been so small back then...
They had lost their parents soon afterwards. She had been too little to really understand what was going on, but she had cried nonetheless. Celestia had cried, too.
Luna lost herself in the memories of centuries gone by.
Luna felt utterly miserable. She'd stopped weeping some time ago, but so far she hadn't been able to bring herself to get back up. What was the point, anyway?
So, she just laid there, in the dim of the Everfree Forest. The dense roof of treetops kept most of the sunlight from ever reaching the ground, and obscured the sky in turn. Maybe an hour or so had passed, it wasn't yet time for the moon to rise.
But what was the point, anyway? Without Celestia to bring forth a new dawn, a new day afterwards, Luna might as well bring night eternal when—if she ended this day. If her little ponies were to be robbed of their beloved Princess Celestia, they should at least keep their equally beloved day.
They'd get on well enough without the night. They'd get on well enough without Luna. Surely, if they had lived on for an entire millennium without her, they didn't even need her.
Once again, feebly, in some last, fanciful hope she might be mistaken, she reached for where her sister's presence had been, but still found nothing, not even those who had banished her.
She let loose a sigh. So be it, then. Luna knew well enough that just lying here in self pity until the end of time was not actually an option. The cycle of night and day had to be maintained, no matter what, and her ponies may not have needed Luna, but they needed their Princess.
Like Celestia had, she needed to stay strong, and maintain Harmony in Equestria until her sister would return. The Elements had banished and imprisoned before, but it had never been permanent.
Perhaps, a small, hopeful voice in the back of her head said, the Elements can undo what they have wrought. After all, Celestia hadn't been connected to the Elements any more, so they should still be bound to Twilight Sparkle and her friends.
This, of course, brought Luna to the nagging question why they had used the Elements against Celestia. Maybe, and this thought seemed possibly even more terrible than losing her sister, there had been good reason, and Celestia had turned to some kind of madness just like she had.
She suddenly struggled to her hooves. Her joints ached and were slightly stiff, and one of her legs was numb and prickled, but she didn't pay that any heed. The thought, the uncertainty, the possibility that Celestia might have turned—turned evil was simply unbearable.
Keep calm, she had to remind herself.
She breathed in deeply, then closed her eyes and slowly exhaled to calm herself. Letting go of all her pain, she let her face become an image of serene kindness, the visage of a princess.
Keep calm, Luna, she thought, panic will not help here.
Concentrating, she reached for the location of the Castle of the Two Sisters, magic pulsing from her horn. The source of the disturbance was gone, it seemed, and space was no longer in flux. She pulled herself to the other side.
With a soft pop, Luna vanished. A few lumps of muck that had been stuck in her coat fell to the ground.
She reappeared in the foyer of the castle ruins. The roof had collapsed some time in the past, and the windows were shattered, yet the floor was oddly clean, free of the forest that had encroached on the castle.
Something had happened here, this much was clear. Scorch marks like little black flowers stained the floor tiles and walls around the room's centre, where the stone was marked by two circles, one within the other. A faint tinge of ozone hung in the stale air.
Her gaze wandered through the room, and found the stone monument on which she and Celestia had placed the Elements when they weren't in use. It was but a crude effigy of the true Tree of Harmony. And if memory served her right, it had been standing at the room's centre the last time she had visited the castle.
Ponderously, she grasped it in her magic and levitated it back to where she remembered it had stood. She wondered why somepony would have moved it at all. And moreover, why was it even here, in this room?
If anything, it belonged into the Vestibule of Day and Night, where Celestia and Luna used to hold court together. There was a hidden compartment below the floor in which the statue was usually stored. She understood that Celestia must have removed the Elements from there to banish Nightmare Moon, but why move it so far?
She looked around the room again. This was where Celestia had been banished, she could feel it. There were still traces of the Elements' activation lingering in the atmosphere.
Her wandering eyes fell on the open door leading deeper into the castle. Perhaps the Element Bearers had ventured further in?
Luna moved through the door and entered the grand Atrium. Quietly, she trotted forwards, ears swivelling left and right as she strained to pick up any sounds possibly caused by a pony. Nothing.
She reached the long hallway's end, and looked back at the rows of doors leading away into the many chambers and corridors of the expansive castle ruin. Following a sudden intuition, Luna turned towards the closest flight of stairs and walked up. Passing another set of grandiose doors, she came into a large hall. At the opposite end stood two large thrones, each on an elevated platform.
A shiver ran down her spine. More than a thousand years had passed since she had been in this room. The sun was shining through a large hole in the far wall where there used to be a stained glass window. This was where she had turned into Nightmare Moon.
She let her head hang low, and a sigh escaped her lips.
On the floor, two large slabs of stone had slid aside to reveal a small chamber below the floor.
Luna shook the goosebumps off and stepped closer. She hadn't expected the small vault to be open.
A round platform designed to lower the sculpture with the Elements into the usually hidden chamber filled most of the opening in the floor. Unlike the surrounding floor, it looked clean, polished even. The only explanation was that the chamber had remained closed until very recently.
On a whim, she stepped on it to get a closer look. Strangely, she didn't find the thin layer of dust one would expect to accumulate over time on a surface left in an enclosed space. Curiously, she reached for the vault doors and triggered the spell hidden within them. To her surprise, the thousand-year-old mechanism still seemed to work. Sure, it rattled and clanked a lot more than she thought it would, but the platform lowered gently enough.
Then, as the stone oblongs slid back together above her, she suddenly felt very silly and mayhap even a bit stupid.
Luna blinked into the dark for a few confused seconds, her eyes adjusting quickly.
She silently cursed herself. Just what had she been expecting to happen? Angry with her own carelessness, she fired up her horn to open up the chamber again, but before she could, the floor gave away – not by much, maybe half a hoof's breadth, but enough to make her flinch and break her concentration. Stunned, she looked down at the platform, which responded to her inquisitive gaze with a low, metallic creak.
Something seemed to shift gear, and with another thunk, Luna found herself on a rapid journey further down into the depths below.