Silk stared down at the blank piece of paper. She’d had this problem every day since the Summer Sun Celebration, but just staring at it didn’t make writing the letter any easier. This was different from taking notes, and unlike researching in the scorched lands she couldn’t rely on others to get the concepts in her head just by thinking it. She couldn’t just jot down short, disconnected ideas like she could then.
Fluttershy walked up to her as she groaned in exasperation. “Are you writing a letter to Princess Luna?” she asked.
“Trying and failing to,” Silk replied. “How am I even supposed to address her? I hardly know anything about Equestrian royalty.”
“Well most ponies don’t know much about Princess Luna,” the pony said. Silky was hardly unique in that regard. She’d heard tales of Nightmare Moon as a filly (and been scared stiff every time), but everypony always dismissed it as a legend until she actually showed up. Nopony had even dreamed that she was not only real, but Princess Celestia’s sister. Well, nopony but Time Turner, apparently.
That nopony knew anything, however, was far from useful. “That’s not helping,” Silk said.
“Sorry.” The two were silent for a few moments. “Um, you don’t need to worry. We’re only supposed to write letters when we have something to write about.”
“That might be for Princess Celestia, but for Princess Luna I’m sentenced to. I’m just glad she never said how often.”
“Maybe it would be easier to write after we hear what Doctor Turner has to say?” the pegasus suggested.
The changeling sighed again. “Maybe. We’re supposed to go over there in a couple of hours, right?”
Fluttershy demurely replied “Uh, it’s just a few minutes actually. We, uh, really need to go. I just didn’t want to bother you. Sorry.”
Silk blushed in embarrassment. “Oh. Well, okay, uh, let’s go I guess,” she said sheepishly, standing up. “Hey, uh, please don’t tell Twilight about this.”
Fluttershy giggled. “Okay, I won’t,” she said. She turned to her pet rabbit, who was sitting in an armchair reading Fluttershy’s old high school textbook on physics and magical exception. “Okay, Angel Bunny, we’re going out for a while. Take care of the animals while we’re gone.”
The two walked out the door and, as she closed the door, Silk saw Angel give a nonchalant wave goodbye without looking up from his book. “That rabbit is way too smart.”
Angel smirked.
The two set off down the road to Ponyville at a trotting pace, but they had barely gotten out of Fluttershy’s yard when they noticed an orange and a white pony running up to meet them. As they did so, it became apparent they were arguing again.
“Of course you would, you can’t handle a little dirt!” Applejack accused.
Rarity’s nose wrinkled. “A little dirt doesn’t cover it, Applejack. It’s a massive pile of festering mud! It’s of absolutely no value to anypony!”
“Tch,” the farmer scoffed and grit her teeth. “Somethin’ doesn’t need to be pretty or fancy or sell for a lot’a bits to be worth somethin’! It’s more than just that, and she hardly needs the bits anyway!”
Rarity scowled. “We shall see, let’s ask her, shall we?”
“Yeah, it’s her decision.”
“I never said it wasn’t.”
The four ponies stopped when the groups met up. Up close it became obvious to Silk from how bitter their emotions tasted that this was almost personal for the two of them, so this was a bit more than the usual bickering between the rough and tumble AJ and the prim and proper Rarity. However, there was a note of concern mixed into the hot and bitter flavor they emitted.
“What are you two arguing about this time?” Silk asked, unsure if she wanted to know.
Rarity and Applejack gave each other a look. “Me ‘n Rars went to have a look at that little stack of papers Princess Luna had for you see if it's on the up 'n up.”
“You went without me?” the changeling asked with a frown.
AJ chuckled. “Heh, sorry, Silky, I guess we got a bit curious after Twi said she’d like us to take a look at it.”
Rarity continued. “In exchange for royal assistance building, giving ownership of, and covering the overhead costs of the inn, you would have to give up certain… how do I put this?” she explained, thinking of a way to abridge the document eloquently, unlike Applejack who had no qualms about being direct.
“Basically every area the Changeling Swarm had under their control would get annexed by Equestria.”
Silk did a double-take. “What? I don’t own the whole marsh!”
Rarity coughed. “Ah, yes well, it seems Princess Luna has decided to interpret international law a bit bluntly on this occasion. Since you are the only changeling left, she’s decided that means you’re the rightful owner of all of the territories generally accepted to be the swarm’s.”
“You’re kidding, the Barrier Range too?” Silk asked, stunned.
The ponies all just stared at her for a moment. “Wait, Silk dear, the changelings controlled the... Barrier Range?” the designer managed to eke out.
“Yeah. We made sure nopony could cross. Most of our Soldiers were deployed there.”
Silence. The only movement came from blinking.
The Barrier Range was, to Equestrians, twice as frightening as the Everfree Forest, and many times more dangerous. It was a huge chain of mountains that divided much of the pony kingdom of Equestria and the gryphon kingdom of Ferros, the Kingdom of Steel and served as a strong natural boundary. The range spanned two thirds of the continent, leaving only the northeastern territories of Equestria directly touching the southern and eastern portions of Ferros.
The air was cold enough to sap the life from even the hardiest of earth ponies, and the winds wicked enough to whip up fearsome blizzards and hailstorms on an almost daily basis, with ice cold downdrafts as intense as tornadoes. It was considered incredibly dangerous for Gryphons to fly across, and nigh-suicidal for any pony save perhaps the royal princesses, as these winds would suck away their strength and slam them to the jagged rocks below.
Climbing was no easier. The mountains were high enough that altitude sickness was a constant danger to any unicorn that dared cross without an air spell in place, and even earth ponies were affected by it. The terrain was steep and what few paths there were along the range were narrow and hazardous. One could be swept off a mountain with an avalanche at any moment, buried under heaps of snow. Of course, one could freeze to death just as easily here as in the sky.
As if the land itself wasn’t dangerous enough, there were all manner of terrifying creatures. Wolves, polar bears, yetis, abominable snowmen, ice giants, and even windigos were all known to inhabit the area, and quite probably many other horrors as well.
Save for a single mountain pass, the only way through it by conventional means was going around it. Now it seemed that yet another one of the dangers of the Barrier Range had been a race of shapeshifting pseudo-alicorns determined to stop anypony foolish enough to venture there.
Silk eventually broke the pregnant pause. “What?” she asked.
Applejack spoke after another two seconds. “Oookay, well, that’s a bit of an eye opener, and more of a downside than I reckoned before. That’s a lot of land, Silky, you’d be gettin’ the raw end of the deal.”
Rarity interjected. “It’s a colossal deathtrap, Applejack, and she’s a scout, not a soldier.”
Silk put up her hoof. “That’s alright, Applejack. I wouldn’t really know what to do with it anyway. I shared a tree with Skitter and had a small cave in the Scorched Lands, and the last time I went to the marsh…” she hesitated. She didn’t exactly want to make her friends worry about her, especially about something that was already over with which, for all she knew, could have been just another nightmare. She didn't know how she wound up back in the outskirts of Ponyville that night either way. “… well, let’s just say I wouldn't feel safe anymore.”
Fluttershy gasped. “Oh my, I’m sorry. Did the animals from Everfree move in?”
Rarity managed to keep a straight face, but Applejack was never very good at bluffing. Her eyebrows rose and her eyes widened as she exaggerated her frown, looking up and to the left. Fortunately Fluttershy’s question had drawn the changeling’s eye contact away.
“Well, something like that,” she said. “Anyway, I don’t see the point of keeping it.”
“Well, the marsh isn’t particularly large, but the Barrier Range is a very large territory. Even if you do want it off your hooves, you might be able to trade it for a fairly sizable sum… although the hazards in the region would make it less valuable than most places that size,” Rarity suggested.
Applejack thought for a moment. "The way I figure it, I guess ya got four choices. You can sign that agreement right now and get that inn but give up that land, you can wait and see how much more leverage the princess can get, you can see how much you could sell the territory for, or you can skip it altogether." She absentmindedly tilted her stetson back and forth on her head as her look softened. "I know ya said you don't feel safe there, but just... think it over some, y'hear?"
Silk sighed. "Alright, AJ, I'll think about it for a while."
"Um," Fluttershy said, "we should probably talk on the way. If that's alright."
Rarity agreed. "Yes, I'm not certain if Time Turner thinks one can be fashionably late," she said as they all began trotting into town.
The sounds of clockwork filled the shop, every tick and tock in perfect sync, an army of timepieces marching in step. It was a point of pride for the stallion, a small thing that left him feeling satisfied and content. A little thing, something that helped make the last thirty years living in Ponyville enjoyable. It certainly impressed his clientele, which helped him afford his costly repair bills, albeit barely.
He looked at an old wooden grandfather clock, the only enchanted clock in the shop. It was a relic from years past, but far from his only one. Three minutes and twenty-two seconds past two o’clock in the afternoon.
He reached to straighten his bow-tie, but found it missing again. Old habits die hard. With a chuckle he grabbed his sterling silver pocket watch from the store counter, another old habit of his, and opened it with the click of a button.
“Three, two, one…” In that instant there was a loud rapping on the door. “Hey, doc! Open up!” Rainbow Dash’s voice yelled through the door.
The doctor smiled to himself, flipping the watch closed with a snap. “Right on time,” he thought aloud. He walked over and opened the door, seeing each one of the element bearers there, as well as the Changeling remnant. Twilight sparkle greeted him. “Hello, Doctor Turner,” she said politely.
He beamed and stood to the side as his guests walked in single file. “Hello! Yes, welcome! Glad you decided to come!” he babbled happily, greeting them all by name. “Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Twilight Sparkle, Fluttershy, Silky, Pinkie Pie,” he said happily, recalling he should skip Silk’s assumed surname. In an instant his face soured as if he had just mistakenly eaten a bug. “Applejack,” he said, not bothering to hide his irritation.
Applejack did a double-take. She didn’t know what his problem with her was, but she was no dumb hick. It only took her a moment to realize. “Huh? You’re still sore about that thing with Applebloom?” she asked, a bit taken aback. That had been almost two years ago!
“Yes,” he said bluntly. In a heartbeat his disposition brightened up again. “Right! Yes, let’s move down to my study,” he said as he closed the door. He trotted with bells on his hooves over to a door in the wall, opening it up and walking down a wooden staircase. “Do mind the decorations, they’re antiques! Some of them aren’t even mine. My wife inherited them from her mother, brilliant mare.”
The group followed him down the stairs. Pinkie hesitated, having the feeling that, for some reason, she shouldn’t go into a basement with Rainbow Dash. She quickly shook herself back to her senses, or whatever counted as her senses, and followed everypony else with a bunny hop.
“Where is Spike, by the way?” Time asked, flipping on the lights.
“He’s resting today. Silky called it ‘crimson flame poisoning,’” the purple pony replied. She frowned at the thought of leaving him by himself, but he had seemed much better when she left. The thought quickly left her mind when she saw the room.
The room looked almost makeshift, the wooden studs in the walls sticking out like a sore hoof. There was no dry wall, nor anything to hide them, as you would expect from a place somepony spent a lot of their time in. The floor was neither carpet nor wood nor tile, but cold concrete, with nary a rug in sight.
The concrete itself was pitted and cracked as if it were decades if not centuries old, but it didn’t look as if it had degraded at all. Rather, it looked damaged, as loose pieces of it could still be seen here and there. It almost looked like a changeling had struck it, repeatedly.
The contents, however, were astonishing. Antiques and artifacts all sat on display beneath gleaming glass cases. Some of them she could place, artifacts from the classical era, or from wild races like the Diamond Dogs. Most, however, she couldn’t. Statues, cups, a chess board, a huge ornate metal hammer, there was no telling how old some of these things were. Sandwiched between the studs in the walls were bookshelves filled with tomes as old as those in the most restricted of Canterlot’s archives, many preserved through magic well beyond their natural years.
In the center of the room he had arranged a number of seats. Eight of them were small, cushioned armchairs and looked perfectly comfortable, all facing a white board and a desk opposite the stairwell. On the far right, though, was a stool made of heavy steel, with a very cheap looking cushion on top.
The doctor looked back at Twilight. “Oh, too many rubies. That’s a shame, hope he feels better,” he offered in sympathy.
Rarity walked up to the doctor as the rest of the girls took a seat, avoiding the stool. “Darling, I didn’t know you were married!”
“Oh, naturally! Not naturally that I’m married, of course, naturally you didn’t know. I’m afraid we’re at best casual acquaintances, Miss Rarity. I’ll have to introduce you when she arrives, though I think you’ve met before.” He pulled out his pocketwatch. “In seven… six… five…”
“Have we? I suppose I’ll…”
“… four… three…”
“What are you counting for?”
“Two steps back please.”
It took a second for the seamstress to realize he had stopped counting and given her a warning. She hopped back, alarmed, as the brown stallion snapped the watch shut with a flick of the hoof and pointed at the cellar door leading outside. In that instant the door splintered open with a loud CRACK as a blur of grey and yellow streaked through the room, crashing where Rarity had been standing a moment before.
The mares all jumped back, startled by the sudden noise, and saw a familiar sight.
The color drained from Rainbow’s face. “Oh no…”
Time Turner just smiled warmly. “Hello, Derpy. How was your day?”
The town mailmare’s opened her crossed yellow-green eyes, got up and looked at him (as well as the desk). Her eyes set back straight and she smiled before flying from the re-chipped floor and hugging him. “It was great! I had a delivery in Canterlot today, I always like going there.”
It took every ounce of what little restraint Rainbow Dash had to keep from asking “You’re married to Derpy?!” Out of every pony in Ponyville, she was by far the most likely to get under her skin. It didn’t help that she was the only pony in town who caused more collateral damage than her and that they both constantly wound up fixing each others’ messes, which meant Dash got roped fixed three or four accidents for every one she caused.
He chuckled, hugging her back. “Well, it isn’t smoking at the moment, so enjoy it. Everypony, my wife Derpy Hooves. Say hello to our guests, dear.”
She turned around and beamed. “Hello everypony!” she said before her look turned sour. “And Applejack.”
The farm pony was stunned. “Wha-“ she stammered, getting the stink-eye a second time. She couldn’t figure out what could make the blonde pegasus react that way for a moment, but once again it hit her. “The muffins!?” she yelped. Apparently that had been Derpy Hooves who’d bought the baked bads, not her cousin Ditzy Do. Aside from the eyes, it was nearly impossible to tell the two apart at a glance, and Derpy’s eyes weren’t always crossed.
“Yes,” Derpy said.
“Aww,” Applejack groaned, slumping into her chair in defeat. “I don’t get counted in ‘everypony’ and the changeling does… no offense, Silky.”
“None taken,” Silk said with a shrug, getting a slight taste of depression from the bummed out farm pony’s bruised feelings. The amount of love coming out of the married couple was more than enough to drown it out, and it tasted mild enough not to warrant real concern. “Anway, I think that’s everypony, Doctor Turner.”
Twilight pried herself away from staring at one of the relics and agreed. “Yes, I’d like to know what happened in this ‘nightfall’ event you’re describing. I assume the name has to do with Nightmare Moon’s attempt to make an everlasting night?”
The doctor chuckled, walking over to a bookshelf. From up on the top shelf he took a pair of tongs and used them to grab a pale azure book with what looked like fern frost on its cover. The book coursed with a cold magic, emitting fog like it was made of dry ice. “You are a genius, Twilight. Absolutely brilliant…” he praised, causing her to chuckle, unable to resist her ego rising just a little before he finished his sentence. “… but I’m afraid you’re only partially correct.”
Twilight’s ego deflated again.
“To understand how Luna went mad, and why she’s so guilt ridden now, the first thing you need to know,” he said, walking over to the whiteboard and dropping the book on the desk with a clatter, “is what she’s lost.”
It was nighttime in Everfree, about six months before Nightmare Moon was banished to the moon. Magic coursed through the air as Princess Luna taught her apprentice. On this evening they neared completion of a magical experiment, one of many they submitted to the now nigh-defunct Guild of Magi. Amusing thing, really, it got its name when one of their signs… sorry, not the time!
“Hm. Let us see if we can increase the pressure,” Princess Luna said, a bead of sweat forming on her brow.
The freezing castle air became rife with magic as the two ponies concentrated, creating a powerful magical pressure on the ice. The force being used on this small patch of ice would surely be enough for magically-sensitive individuals to feel it throughout all of Everfree City.
The weight put into it was almost unbearable. Already they had exceeded the crushing pressure of the deepest ocean depths by a hundred fold, and yet they kept their experiment going.
“Just a little more...” the princess said, undermining the strain that would be put on the two of them for maintaining their exponential increase in pressure.
The colt groaned. The seconds ticked by.
Two hundred times. His horn burned with the strain.
Four hundred. He felt as if he was going to pass out. His vision swam as he began to lose his feel for the crystals making up the ice's structure. He couldn't keep this up much longer. Why couldn't his special talent have been generalist? He could still have an elemental school as a preference if it had been!
Eight hundred times. He collapsed.
The alicorn placed a hoof on her head, taking a step back as her horn shut off. Even for her, brute forcing her way through an unpracticed, untested, and experimental new spell was often very strenuous. It usually took time to refine magic into a conventionally useful form. Celestia always seemed to be better at that, though she did so less often as her interests usually laid elsewhere.“How do you fare, Rime? Are you unharmed?”
The pale blue unicorn nodded, panting as he got back to his hooves. “I'm fine, Mistress. I'm sorry, I did the best I could, and-”
Mistress, like its masculine equivalent, Master, was a title that was much more widely used. Its more risqué connotation was far outshone by the typical usage of the time. The princess was perfectly fine with him addressing her as such; she was a mare of many hats and as many titles. Princess, General, High Commander, (honorary) Archmage, her Highness, her Honor, her Grace, her Majesty, Lady, her Benevolence, and while she strongly discouraged it, a strong case could be made to call her a Queen.
This was to say nothing of less general titles she had accrued over her long life, which at this point had become tedious; the Princess of Night, Ruler of Equestira, Moon and Stars, Starpainter, Bringer of Balance, Immortal of Equestria, one of the Royal Sisters, the list went on and on. She dreaded to even consider some of the positions, both high and low, she held before recorded history.
As such, how others would address her varied from time to time, individual to individual, for more reasons than she cared to count. Sometimes they would, in an attempt to avoid insulting her, try to correct each other, but she herself thought nothing of it, and neither did anypony who spent enough time around her.
“What is there to apologize for?” Luna asked with a warm smile, turning to the stone table upon which their experiment lay. “You gave it your all, and I couldn't ask for anything better than that. Besides, who ever said it was a failure? See for yourself,” she encouraged.
Wait, Doctor Turner, the princesses didn't talk like that back then.
Hm, that's right, I suppose they didn't, Twilight. My mistake! I'm taking a liberty here or there, but... oh, I've got it! I could shout what they say! That could be fun!
NO! No, that's okay, I take it back! Uhugh, my ears are ringing just thinking about it...
Right! Okay, where was I? Ah, yes!
He stood on his hind legs and placed his front hooves on the tabletop, which was still just a bit too high for the 13-year-old to look down on. There in the center was a small cube of ice, but there was something different about it.
“Did we do it?” he asked warily, gingerly lighting his horn to get a feel for the ice in front of him. His horn still burned when he did so.
“I believe so,” Luna said. Until just a moment ago, the substance before them was only a theory. It would be still if she hadn't enchanted it to hold its pressure, though one failure and she could have created a tiny bomb with shards of ice shrapnel.
She watched him gaze, wide eyed, into the crystal in the middle. She smiled to herself.
Rime's brow raised, craning his neck back a bit in surprise. The air around the ice was shimmering. “Wait, that can’t be right, is that a-”
“Boo!” a feminine voice yelped from below them suddenly. Startled, Rime jumped and Luna snapped her horn in the direction of the disturbance before she saw a certain unicorn’s head sticking out through the floor. “I hate to interrupt, but just what are you two up to?” she asked, floating up through the floor, hovering for a moment, then falling to her hooves with four solid CLACKs, her horseshoes now as solid as the rest of her.
The alicorn sighed. “Honestly, Cereus, it’s the witching hour, you know what we're doing,” she complained, looking back to the table which now held a rapidly evaporating puddle, shrinking rapidly. “You could have consulted Olive Pit. He handles the castle’s affairs well enough.”
Cereus Nightbloom, her second name attained when she finally earned her station, was the Captain of the Lunar Guard. Even though she was over a century old, ponies hit a plateau in aging upon reaching adulthood, and this plateau lasted a hundred years, after which one began to age much more noticeably. Ponies between 100 and 120 years of age were considered to be in their prime: physically fit and youthful, but with a long life of experience to draw upon. She was no exception.
Rime had seen the captain without her armor on. She had a light green coat with white hair. She claimed to have originally had white eyes that shone in the dark like most night ponies, but he found it almost hard to believe a mare so brightly colored could be one of the last of her kind, let alone that her son had the darkest colors he knew.
Now, of course, her eyes were the same pools of molten gold as the rest of his mistress’ military branch. She was in uniform at the moment, and as such sported their usual colorations as well. Her haircut was shorter than usual for female ponies; if not for her chin, it would be difficult to tell whether she was a mare or a stallion.
“We were in the middle of an experiment, if you must know,” Rime quietly pouted in disappointment, throwing an accusatory glance at the captain, “until you messed up our concentration.”
Cereus chuckled. “I’m sorry about that, but the magic in that spell you two were cooking up was making all the unicorns in Everfree nervous. I had to make sure you weren’t going to blow something up.”
Luna raised an eyebrow. “And if we were, you thought the best way to handle the situation would be to startle the ponies working with explosives?”
The captain smirked. “I waited until most of your spellwork was over, my lady, you know I’m not skittish.”
Rime Floes groaned, lightly kicking a leg of the table with his front hoof. “Well that’s great, but nopony’s going to believe me now!” he griped.
“I’m sure they will,” Luna told her apprentice, “we simply have to submit our procedure to the Guild of Magi and show them it’s replicable. They won’t dismiss my claims offhoof.”
“Yes, I know, mistress, but Flicker won’t care. She’ll just-" He sighed. "I don’t want to be a one-trick pony.”
Whatever his mistress’ gut reaction to this was, she didn’t betray it, but Captain Nightbloom looked taken aback and just a little shocked, if only for a second.
To be called a one-trick pony was a very strong insult. It was used by unicorns accuse unicorns with less varied magical abilities as being inferior. Generally speaking there were four classifications of special talent when it came to magic.
The most common were the specialists, unicorns who could only cast one spell, albeit often one very specialized to their passions or personalities, and sometimes this spell could be mastered to a degree that granted it more utility. There were some unicorns, telekinetic specialists, that couldn’t cast a single thing another pony couldn’t; though much rarer than any classification of unicorn, the sheer magnitude of their talents was something to behold.
The typists were next, ones whose magic could take any shape so long as it was limited to a certain motif. There were ponies whose magics revolved around shields or hearing, around celerity or healing or enchantment. Roughly one in ten unicorns born were typists.
Then were the schoolists, like Rime. Their abilities came from the primal schools of magic; from elements and sub-elements and pseudo-elements. Light and shadow, earth and wind, fire and ice, lightning and time, arcane and water. Like typists, one in ten unicorns were so.
Finally there were the generalists, those ponies whose special talents could be said to be any form of magic, or magic itself. Though able to learn nearly any spell, there were some that were advanced enough to be forever out of reach, or simply learn at a linear rate compared to the quadratic rate of those more focused on it. They were the jacks of all trade and, in all but the rarest of cases, the masters of none.
The princess closed her eyes. “You are not a one-trick pony,” she said, calmly and firmly.
“I am,” the Captain self-disparaged, amused by her own joke.
Luna playfully agreed. “Yes, and a marvelous trick at that,” she added. “You, Rime, are a schoolist. You may not be able to conjure lightning, teleport, transform objects or creatures, or light a hearth…”
You’re not helping, Rime thought.
“… but you can do anything you set your mind to with freezing, cold, and ice. Out of all the schools, I truly think the subschool of ice is the most versatile and imaginative. Tell me, rime, do you remember the four cornerstones of unicorn magic?”
“Emotion, Understanding, Imagination, and Willpower,” he recited from memory.
“Very good. Emotion gives our spells raw potential; a parent defending his foal is one of the best examples, as both an explosive blast of rage and a shining beacon of love. Understanding allows a wide variety of spell work, essential for generalists, and one’s magic becomes more balanced and stable if one understands it.”
“Like understanding what ice looks like, what it feels like, makes it stronger?”
Luna nodded, flashing an almost motherly smile. “Pre-cisely” she said with a short nod. “Emotion fuels it, and understanding steadies it. However Willpower is needed to give magic form, to bend the world to your wishes. This is most easily observed in telekinesis, as the basic key all young unicorns must understand to learn to move objects as they want them to. If telekinetically grabbing another living creature, that creature must either allow it, or be noticeably weaker of will than the unicorn.”
“I know all of that,” Rime said.
His teacher nodded. “Of course you do, you’re one of the brightest ponies I’ve taught, and I’ve been teaching for many, many centuries. Your greatest strength, however; the strength of your school of magic and my own greatest source of prowess, is something less tangible.
Any fool can feel extremely powerful emotion, but wasted potential is useless, and uncontrolled power can be dangerous, as you learned the day we met. Any spoiled brat can have a will as strong as steel, but lack the ability to use it, thank the stars. Griffins and donkeys can become some of the best scholars of magic, and can learn to understand it nearly as well as I do, but they cannot cast a single spell with knowledge alone, ritual spells aside. But for all the strength of those three cornerstones, I find the purest form of magic, the most crucial of the four, is imagination.
Imagination can allow you to vary a spell endlessly, or create new ones. To improvise or bring the power of artistry into a tangible force. The ability to do anything you set your mind to, everything you can envision, even if you don’t quite know how it works yet.
Your ice can take the shape of anything you can dream. It can flow through cracks like liquid water, or stand as solid as the mightiest bulwark. It can create the fury of a blizzard or the shelter of an igloo. As mighty as a glacier or as delicate as a snowflake. Anything you can dream, an ice schoolist can do, and you are the brightest one I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
Rime nodded, feeling more confident with the princess’ praise. She never lied, at least not directly or intentionally, but still he had his doubts. “Okay… but all the imagination in the world won’t make a fire in that igloo.”
Luna laughed. “That is true.” The mares looked each other in the eye. The larger one, smirking, lit her horn and started speaking to her captain, who suddenly looked apprehensive, but the words fell silent.
A whisper spell. It was an easy enough cantrip for generalists and those with a talent for sound magic, and very useful for quick and dirty silent communication. It was hardly perfect, of course. It was limited in range, couldn’t quiet somepony who didn’t want to be, wasn't useful in loud areas, and one’s lips still moved when using it. It worked well enough to keep Rime in the dark, at any rate.
Luna ended the spell, and Cereus rolled her eyes with a shake of the head and a heavy sigh. The princess watched her walk through a nearby wall before turning to her apprentice. “I’m due at court soon, no doubt to listen to further requests to cut winter short, if not out completely, so I’m giving you a list of tasks to accomplish,” she said, smiling devilishly. “I think it time that I visit vengeance upon my sister for the Mule Kick Sauce incident two months ago.”
Well that explains why Captain Nightbloom looked nervous! he thought, alarmed. “But mistress, the last time-“
“Firstly, I want you to put three drops of Poison Joke Extract into tomorrow morning’s tea,” she said. “Also, I want you to find a way to tamper with the water temperature in my sister's washroom. Finally, you are to place four vials of reekthistle in her mattress in a way that they will break when she turns over.”
Before he could plead to do otherwise, the princess disappeared in a flash of navy light. He placed a hoof on his head, scratching his snow-tipped hair; he really didn’t want any part in the princess’ prank wars, which were infamous for escalating to epic proportions. As loathe as he was to do so, he was even more reluctant to disappoint Princess Luna. He quickly committed the list of pranks to memory as if his life depended on it.
“Princess Celestia is going to kill me.”
Rime walked, horn alight, down a flight of dingy stairs into the castle’s dark underground. The walls were drab gray stone, the air dry but still somehow still smelling strongly of must. That and smoke from the stallion he was going to see.
He rounded a corner and saw a light coming form beneath a doorframe. He walked over to it calmly, hooves echoing off the bare stone, before knocking on it three times.
“Come in! But don’t touch anything,” a grumpy voice called out. Rime heeded it, pushing the creaking laboratory door open.
The expansive laboratory was filled with glassware of every shape and size upon shelves and tables too numerous for him to bother counting. Inside a great many of the flasks were a multitude colored liquids, less than a quarter of which were labeled. Most of the light came from the gas burners and cauldron fires dotted throughout. The smoke of the woodburning flames was ventilated out by a lightly wind-enchanted ceiling in the shape of a funnel, rising out of one of the castle’s chimneys.
Crazy old nag, Rime thought as he lightly coughed entering the smoke-filled room. Save for Princess Luna, he was one of the only four night ponies who lived in the castle. “Hello? Doctor Nightshade?” he called.
Nightshade, a middle-aged, dark purple earth pony with avocado hair and moon-blessed eyes, poked his head out. “Yes, yes, what is it, colt?” he demanded, lighting a cigarette with a Bunsen burner. He quickly turned around to look at a piece of parchment that looked as if a two month old had scribbled on it. He wore a white labcoat with a variant of the Lunar Guard emblem, a constellation drawn bow aimed upward and a dagger nocked instead of an arrow. In his case, the variation was that reserved for licensed medical practitioners, with a Caduceus taking the place of the dagger.
Doctor Nightshade, a Lieutenant First Class by rank in the Lunar Guard, was the apothecary and alchemist to the Equestrian Royal Family. He’d studied how to make medicines, chemicals, explosives and poisons from all over the world. Equestria, Zerahan, Ferros, and even the local medicines of certain tribal societies like the Buffalo. His expertise was unquestionable.
His sanity, on the other hoof…
“Erm, should you really be smoking with all the chemicals in here?” Rime asked. He’d studied the basics of his time’s limited chemistry with Princess Luna, and that certainly didn’t seem to meet safety standards.
“Lots of smoke anyway. Won’t make a difference,” he said. He took a puff of his cigarette. “What do you want?” he said, tapping his head with his hoof, zipping over to a roiling beaker, and sniffing the fumes twice. Directly.
Rime winced and recoiled at the sight. That is NOT standard practice! he yelled in his head. “I, uh, Princess Luna-“
An egg timer dinged somewhere in the back of the lab, and the doctor seemed like he was there an instant later. “Yes yes, night mare, odd biochemistry, really should study that, what about her?”
“She wants me to take Reekthistle and Poison Joke extract, and then-OOF!“ he grunted as a vial and a jar were practically punched into his chest.
“Here: Carduus Foetidus, nonmagical. Mostly harmless. Prickly, though. Used as insect repellant. Poison Joke. Old Equestrian Viola Iocus. Alchemical. Enjoy. Don’t swallow, effects last 30 days. Cure… annoying to make,” he said. As soon as he did, his ears perked up. “Finally! It’s done!”
Rime almost didn’t want to ask, but couldn’t resist. “What’s done?!”
Nightshade was already at a large cauldron, looking like he was about to summon a demon with the flames lighting him the way they did. He took another drag of his cigarette and said “Lunch. Gumbo. Equestiran, no meat. Want some?”
“NO!” Rime yelped and sprinted out of there.
Nightshade shrugged, dipping a large metal ladle in and taking a long, loud sip. “Mmm. Good gumbo. Weird kid.”
Rime sat in the dining room with his little glass vial, watching the staff walking to and fro preparing for yet another meal in their nearly endless chain of formal dinners. He stifled a yawn; though he had mostly gotten used to it over the last six years, it wasn’t natural for him to be up near midnight. He wasn’t a night pony. Nopony really knew why, but there were very few night ponies born these days. Even so staff worked tirelessly, knowing that the night pony was among them.
He nonchalantly sipped from a glass containing a mixture of orange juice and coffee as he kept a close watch on the double-doors that led to the kitchen, waiting for a break to slip in. He knew he had no knack for hiding, but he hoped his timing would be sufficient to slip in unnoticed.
Before long a waiter stepped out of the doors, carrying a large silver tray of meticulously arranged fruit. Rime darted by so quickly he thought he might have left a scorch mark on the carpet before ducking behind a countertop.
He cast a spell, creating a small hoof-held mirror, which he raised up to peer above the countertop. However, he saw nopony notice him. A chef rounded a corner, causing Rime a moment of panic, but she was so focused on her job that she just walked around him.
He blinked twice. “O... kaaay…” he muttered to himself, feeling a bit embarrassed that he had overestimated the difficulty of this. Sheepishly, he slunk over to the wood burning stove, next to which a quartet of kettles sat. Nopony paid him any mind.
If it was this easy to spike a drink, he thought, it was a good thing the royal sisters had a resistance to most naturally-occurring toxins. It was also fortunate that Luna had only asked him to spike the tea, not that it actually find its way into Celestia’s cup.
He was about to unseal the extract when he realized a problem: he was told to add three drops, but there were four kettles.
“And just what might you be up to, young Master Floes?” a voice said from behind him.
“WAH!” Rime yelped, as he spun around. His face grew paler than it already was, face to face with an older earth pony stallion in quite possibly the finest suit on the continent: the castle’s head butler, Olive Pit.
Olive Pit disliked his feminine first name, preferring to be called by the more masculine “Oliver.” His eyes were golden, his pupils slitted; the mark of a former Lunar Guard member. He was taller than most stallions by a full inch, but was much sleeker of build, almost to the point of lankiness. His once olive-green coat had begun to lose its color, like his now grey mane and tail had many years before.
The stallion had aged very gracefully thus far, looking dignified even at an age he wouldn't have lived to had he been born a pegasus or unicorn. At a hundred and eighty years of age, he was the oldest pony that still worked within the castle that wasn’t an alicorn, yet there was not a wrinkle on his face to be found, even if that was likely to change rapidly one day soon.
“Oliver! Erm, I-I was just-“
“Attempting to spike the kettles with what appears to be extract of Viola Iocus?” he interrupted, finishing the colt’s sentence for him.
“I-I can explain!” No I can’t.
“Indeed?” the butler questioned. He paused. Rime had to fight the urge to let the short silence make him literally squirm. “I suspect the princess instructed you to do so, am I wrong?” Rime clenched his jaw shut. He closed his eyes tight and shook his head furiously, refusing to talk. The butler merely raised an eyebrow. “I see, I will have to have a word with the regent. Your loyalty to your mistress is commendable, young master, but you would do well to avoid involving yourself in the princess’ feuds. They have had millennia of practice with this kind of trite nonsense.
… I shall assist you, this once.”
Rime did a double-take. “Wait, what?”
“I will see that this substances finds its way into Princess Celestia’s tea this one time, harmless as it is, however if I catch you trying your hoof at anything nefarious again, I promise you there will be dire consequences regardless of whose bidding you are doing. Do we have an understanding, Master Floes?”
“Y-yes sir! Thank you, sir!” he blurted, sprinting out of the room in a blur and knocking a tray of plates to the floor.
Oliver grimaced. He had a suspicion about what Princess Luna was trying to accomplish with this charade, but this was going too far. “I suppose I will have to have words our august ruler of the night,” he thought aloud, looking at the kitchen staff which had stopped in its tracks. “What are you waiting for?” he asked. “Get back to work, and somepony clean this mess up! For goodness’ sake.”
The staff immediately started working frantically.
Rime skidded to a halt in the hall above, heart pounding in his chest. He swallowed hard, a shiver running down his spine. He breathed a slow sigh of relief then put his fore hooves on the back of his head. With a sharp inhale he yelped “AAAH! Luna’s light, that was SO CLOSE!” There were probably a half dozen ponies that could get caught as he did and get away with their life and their freedom; he was damn lucky to be one of them, and he knew it.
“What was close?” a voice said right beside him. Rime jumped away in a blue blur, startled, hair standing on end like a cat. Getting a grip on himself, he saw a unicorn his age sitting there, or at least the silhouette and eyes of one.
“Darn it, Ebon! You almost gave me a heart attack!” the ice colt snapped at his friend.
“Sorry! You know I can’t help it,” the inky black colt replied, and it was mostly true. The vast majority of ponies had at least some shading differences between their hair and eye color, but Ebon Sky’s color lived up to his name. His mane, coat, and tail were almost totally black; only the barest tint of red was visible. A cutie mark would make him a little easier to spot but, much to his chagrin, he was one of the last his age not to have one. The only feature that stood out were his bright, reflective green eyes.
“We should put a bell on you,” Rime griped, his heart still beating hard enough to feel. “Why aren’t you wearing your suit?”
“Oh come on, Rime! Clothes are so stifling, and that thing’s even worse!” the dark pony objected.
“They’re not that bad.”
“Then why don’t you wear them?”
“I, uh, I just don’t feel like it?”
“See?! You don’t like it either!” Ebon protested.
Rime stammered. “Uh, well I, uh, t-that’s not important!” he poorly defended, looking away and scratching his temple.
Ebon glared for a moment before letting out an exasperated sigh. “Well, anyway, what was close?” he asked.
“I, uh, was kind of caught messing with the food.”
“And?”
“By Oliver.”
Ebon cocked his head, eyebrow raised. “So?”
“’SO?!’” Rime parroted incredulously, completely forgetting to keep quiet. “What do you mean ‘so’?! He’s the scariest stallion in all of Equestria!”
“Have you ever actually talked to him? He’s a really nice guy.”
“Oh, of course,” he groaned, “you’re the last pony who’d get scared around anypony: your mother’s Captain of the Lunar Guard.”
“So? Your mistress is a goddess.”
“Yeah, and she scares the living starlight out of me when she’s upset,” Rime declared, adding a muttered “she makes thunderstorms when she yells.”
“And apparently she scares the day pony out of you, too,” Ebon joked. It had taken less than a year for Rime’s vernacular to change once Luna made him her student.
Rime rolled his eyes. “Yeah yeah, Ebon. I have to get back to my mission, we’ll hang out later,” he said, starting to walk off.
“Mission? What mission?” his friend inquired.
“I need to find a way to sneak into…” the day pony trailed off. The answer was staring him in the face. He turned around, a devilish smile on his face. “Hey Ebooooon…”
Ebon’s face would have paled if it could. “Uh oh.”
“I need a favor.”
“Oh no.”
“I need you… ”
“I don’t like where this is going!”
“… to sneak into Princess Celestia’s room…”
“It is because I’m black?”
“… and plant this reekthistle in her mattress.”
“I knew it! I freakin’ knew it!” Ebon Sky complained. He breathed in only to let out a long groan as he contemplated whether it was worth the scolding to dye his hair. He waited a moment, thinking it over. “This is one of Princess Luna’s pranks, right?” he asked cautiously.
“Yeah.”
“And I take it she actually told you to do it?”
“She never said I had to do it myself, but yeah,” Rime nodded.
Ebon squinted, silently judging rime. “You owe me for this, Floes,” he relented. “Well, let’s get this over with.”
Rime grinned with a squee. “Thanks, Ebon.”
The night pony sighed. “I am so grounded.”
The Everfree Castle at night seemed to reflect Luna’s domain. The pristine stonework and colorful décor fell to silver and gray, with a great many small lights both magical and mundane dimly illuminating the corridors. Somehow, even though it had been millennia since its construction, it still smelled of the grassland it had been built upon.
When he had first arrived a half dozen years ago, this darkness scared Rime, but the colt was perfectly calm now. He had learned the black cloak of night wasn’t anything to be feared. Indeed, now it calmed him even though he couldn’t see as clearly as he would like.
“You’re lucky you’re a night pony,” he told his companion.
“Huh? Why’s that?”
“I can’t see in the dark like that, it’s like a superpower.”
Ebon shot a questioning look with a squint at Rime out of the corner of his eye. “Oh, that’s a superpower? If I walk around in broad daylight my eyes burn like the sun! Or at least like yours do when you stare at it. Besides, I wanna be a Lunar Guard when I grow up anyway, so I’m not really going to get anything out of them for long,” he added.
“Sorry, you’re right, I guess I’ve been considering being a guard too.”
“Really?”
“Well, maybe, I’m not sure yet. Mistress Luna says she’ll support whatever I decide to do, so it’s not like my options are limited. Royal Guard, magic researcher, artist, engineer, janitor, poet,” he said, with a more of a hint of distaste for poet than janitor.
Ebon grumbled. “Seriously wish I had your luck, Floes.”
“Give it time, Eb’. I’m the first pony Mistress Luna’s taught in a century, so maybe once you get your cutie mark she’ll apprentice you, too?” the azure colt suggested.
Ebon did a double take. “Wait, what? Really?”
“Well, maybe; she doesn’t lie, but she makes up for it by being really hard to figure out. I think she’s been dropping hints. Anyway, we’re here.”
The two peeked around a corner into the next hallway to see which guards were on duty.
Illuminated by a hallway of torches and a pair of sun-shaped braziers stood a pair of watchponies. “Noble Knight ‘n Shining Armor. Of course. We definitely have our work cut out for us," the moon’s apprentice observed, to which Ebon quipped “What do you mean, we?”
Solar guards named Shining Armor and Noble Knight were the Equestiran equivalents of a blacksmith named Smith and a tailor named Taylor. They were terribly common in the first place, and especially so in their respective fields.
Unlike Twilight’s older brother a thousand years later, this Shining Armor was a pegasus, and of average size. His eyes, unchanged by the gold-plated plate, were a light bluish-silver. His magically-blued mane was cut short, almost level with his whitewashed coat. His companion, also a pegasus, was naturally gold eyed, and sported a mane with bangs and enough length in the back to reach his shoulders. Both were part of Celestia’s unofficial but still recognized elite group, the Solar Corps, the equivalent of Luna's Zodiac.
“I’m definitely having second thoughts,” Ebon said.
“Hey, you might earn your cutie mark in sneaking.”
“A-pf-ch”, he stammered. “Cheap shot, Rime. Fine, you have an ideas?”
“I might. Would a distraction work if I can kill the lights?”
“Probably, if you can pull it off. Assuming Princess Celestia’s either’s sleeping or isn’t there.”
“Alright, let’s try it.”
Rime stepped into out full view of the two guards and faked an expression of being lost in thought. It wasn’t terribly hard, since he wore it a lot without realizing it. Knight and Shining Armor spotted him right away as he walked over to a torch and cast a freezing spell on it. The fire went out in a second flat. “Darn it. Maybe if I…” he feigned, walking over to the next torch and casting the same spell.
Noble Knight walked toward him as he repeated the process. “Hey Rime, what’re you doing?”
“Casting a spell,” he said. “Dang. I could try...”
“I can see that, what are you trying to do?”
The ice schoolist replied “I’m trying to see if I can freeze a fire,” as he snuffed out a third torch.
Shining Armor turned his full attention to Rime. “I think you’ve proven you can. It looks pretty easy for you.”
Rime continued walking up to and extinguishing the fires one after another as he talked. “No, I don’t mean extinguishing a fire, I mean freezing it,” he lied.
“Wait, what?”
“I mean making the flame turn solid and relatively cold.”
“We know what freezing means,” Knight objected. “You can’t freeze fire, Rime.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it’s FIRE! You can’t freeze it.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not a material. It’s physically impossible.”
“You just described magic.”
Faced with an impossible, intellectually frustrating, and still valid point, Knight sputtered like the brazier Rime was now dousing and Armor took over. “Okay, look, Rime, I’m not going to pretend I know more about ice or magic than you or the night mare, but could you experiment somewhere else?”
“Yes,” he answered in exact words.
Wise to that foal’s game, Armor asked “And will you?
“Okay, got it,” Ebon said, suddenly appearing next to Rime before he could answer and surprising the guards.
Rime grinned. “Sure! I guess it was a pretty silly-“
“HEY!” a salmon colored pony barked, slamming the bedroom door loudly shut. She had scarlet hair with a pristine white stripe running off-center to her right. The teenage mare wore a frown and a pair of strapped reading glasses, which had been in front of her goldenrod yellow eyes not thirty seconds ago, dangled from her neck. The tips of her ears were missing. “What was your inky butt doing sneaking out of Princess Celestia’s room?!” she demanded.
Ebon spun around, alarmed. “Flicker Light! Wha-how did you- what are you doing here?“
Flicker narrowed her eyes. “I was studying for a test in Princess Celestia’s chamber with a Light of Glory spell, since I had a test tomorrow. What were you doing?"
“I, erm,, funny story really, uh, you see-“
A warm, hearty chuckle rang out hall along with the clinking of heavy plate. “I’d like to hear this story, Ebon,” a deep voice said as its owner stepped around the corner and into view. And just like that Flicker was the only pony in the hallway who wasn’t in trouble. Knight and Armor snapped to attention and gave a salute. “C-Captain Image, sir!” they said simultaneously.
It was like fate had set them up: they had been caught by both Celestia’s apprentice and her highest ranking officer.
Mirror Image was a strongly built unicorn stallion who wore a smile as well as he wore his ornate captain’s armor. He was physically fit and attractive, his features not detracted the X shaped scar that framed the bottom of his ocean blue right eye. Unlike most who weren’t on guard duty, he always carried his longsword and his shield, which was emblazoned with Celestia’s cutie mark. Supposedly he did this to show that he was always on watch, to lead his troops by example. Almost nopony doubted it.
Almost. Ebon Sky just thought he was a little bit paranoid.
"You two hold that salute! I may have words for you,” he ordered amusedly. He turned to Ebon Sky as the guards stiffened like they saw a cockatrice. “Well, Ebon Sky? Were you sneaking out of Princess Celestia’s room?”
“Well I wasn’t really sneaking.”
“Ebon…”
“Yes, Captain Image,” he admitted.
“And how did you get in?” Rime Floes tried to slink away quietly, only to be held back by his tail as Captain Image grabbed it with telekinesis. “Stay right there, Rime,” he said.
“I just walked.”
“When?”
“When Rime snuffed out the second torch.”
Rime shouted “What the heck, Sky?!”
“What? I’m not lying to a guard! Especially not Mirror Image!” the black pony said in self-defense.
The captain glared for a moment before cracking a smile. He tried to stifle a laugh, turning it into a chuckle before giving up, throwing back his head and guffawing loudly. “Haha! So it wasn’t even dark and you just waltzed right through the door without two of my supposedly best stallions, standing right there, noticing a thing?!” he laughed, rustling the colt’s onyx mane. “The Phantom would be proud. Alright, get out of here.”
Flicker Light’s jaw dropped, wiping the smirk she’d had just a moment before off her face. “Wait, what? He snuck into Princess Celestia’s room while she was asleep and you’re just letting him go?!”
“I’m sorry if he interrupted your late-night studies, but tell me: did he steal anything?”
“Well, no.”
“Did he hurt anypony? Damage anything?”
“Well no, but-“
“Then I don’t see the problem.”
“But he was trespassing!”
“And if I toss him in a cell, all that’ll happen is me getting an earful from his mother and the night mare. He wouldn’t spend a day behind bars and Luna would just wipe any criminal record we’d give him,” he explained with a grumble and a roll of the eyes at the thought of the hassle. “I’ll tell you what, you follow the two of them if you want to keep them out of trouble.”
Flicker sighed dejectedly. “I guess,” she said, lighting her horn and reapplying a stimulant spell to keep herself alert and awake for the next four hours. It wasn’t a perfect spell, as it had a tradeoff: a maximum of 3 days of sleeplessness and six hours of nigh-comatose sleep for every four hours of sleep she skipped.
“Good, now run along before they get away,” he urged, looking out the corner of his eye with a smirk as the two colts galloped down the hallway. “Oh, and Ebon!” he called after, causing the pony to skid to a stop. “That was trespassing. Do it again and you’ll spend a day in the dungeon, Captain Nightbloom's son or not. Is that clear?”
Ebon nodded quickly. “Y-yes sir,” he said, scampering after Rime with Flicker hot on his heels.
Within Celestia’s room, the princess of the sun cracked open an eye with a smirk and softly giggled. She didn’t even bother to lift her head from her pillow as, with a quick bit of magic, she opened a window, took the offending leaves from between her mattresses, tossed them out the window, and shut it once more. She then recast her quiet-room spell, causing the walls to shimmer yellow once again.
This was going to be a lot of fun.
Meanwhile, Captain Mirror Image turned to Noble Knight and Shining Armor. “Now, as for these two…”
A flash of brilliant white lit up the stained glass court window, right on schedule, followed swiftly by the clap of thunder and the dull roar of the scheduled summer rain. “Foreboding,” a particularly large stallion commented.
“You always say that, Rhythm,” Princess Luna replied without taking her eyes off of her newspaper. “For the ‘Prince of Courage’, you certainly seem to find a lot of nonsense to fear,” she teased in a bored tone.
She awkwardly flipped a page. More tensions along the border between the Ferros and the Northeast Territory. Not like that said anything that hadn’t been true for four millennia, Luna thought with a roll of her eye, but her scouts had reported that there had been a buildup of military personnel there. It seemed every twenty years or so, Steel tested the waters with a small war, and they were probably due for another invasion.
Still, the defensive force of the land was her sister’s, so typically all she had to do was stop any smaller fronts from forming and cut off movements with pincer maneuvers. It was almost a song and dance at this point. A horrible, bloody, tragic, revolting, and dare she think it, occasionally almost glorious song and dance. She shook her head at the thought. Folding her paper with magic and placing it down, she looked at her guest.
Prince Ritmo Amico Mio the First, usually just called Prince Rhythm, was a dingy yellow alicorn, and the seventh great-grandfather of Princess Cadance. He was positively massive; not including horns, he was equal in height to Princess Luna and a mere two centimeters shorter than Celestia. However, his stocky build made him heavier than either of them.
Simply being an alicorn was extremely rare. Besides Celestia and Luna, there had never been more than one alive at any given time in recorded history, and over half of them were part of the same direct lineage.
He chuckled. “Yeah yeah, Aunt Luna-“
“We are still not related” she inserted, lest he get get too familial.
“… and I’m sure your Element of Honesty prevents you from being tempted to lie.”
The night mare smirked. Most nobles either feared her or payed her no heed, it seemed. This was even true of most of the mortal alicorns before him. Ritmo, however, had managed to establish a rapport with her and her sister.
“I cannot say that it does,” Luna said, “but I am usually more tempted to blurt out blunt truths.”
“Such as?”
She frowned. “I nearly fail to see the point of court,” she said, gesturing to the room. “Most nights it has been as silent as the grave.”
“Then why hold open court? Why not just take requests for meetings?”
Luna shrugged. “One must keep up appearances, Rhythm. The fact that most are asleep is in itself enough to keep most away, so I must make a great effort to be more readily available than my sister, which is utterly exhausting. It is endlessly vexing that such efforts are largely in vain.
I would much rather be painting or teaching or researching; I am not the social butterfly Celestia is, as you know.”
Another blinding flash lit the room. The prince looked over and raised an eyebrow at the princess. Luna was unamused. “It was not me this time!” she defended. Ever since she screwed up an experiment with her pegasus magic 422 years after taking up the throne, small storms formed whenever she got sufficiently frustrated or similarly emotional.
Rhythm put a hoof to his temple, rubbing his three-toned gold-white-azure mane sheepishly. “Sorry, force of habit,” he said as the thunder struck. “It’s easy to forget sometimes that you’re not responsible for every errant lightning bolt.”
“Thank you for your vote of confidence,” Luna said sarcastically. “What brings you here tonight? Surely there are concerns for the Everfree region’s primary representative?”
“Canterlot.”
The word clicked. “Ah, yes, my sister’s pet project,” she recalled. It was a proposed construction of a large city upon the slopes of Heaven’s Peak just to the southeast of Everfree Castle. Celestia and Luna had voted on the issue three times without changing stances, leading to a tiebreaker vote in the Grand Council, which Rhythm was a member of.
The project would bring a great many jobs and, upon completion, become a symbol of Equestrian prosperity. Celestia certainly did like to show off.
Perhaps more importantly, it was further away from the territory of the gryphon kingdom of Ferros, the Kingdom of Steel, which hadn’t been a concern upon its founding. Ferros’ animosity had not been immediately apparent. It had come as a surprise, if not an outright betrayal.
Even then, for many centuries afterward, they had had a strong alliance with the changeling swarm to act as a deterrent. Given that the changelings had been more powerful than any single tribe of ponies alone, doubly so at the time, having Everfree situated on the opposite shore of their lake from the gryphon kingdom made it that much more secure than it otherwise would have been.
However, the changelings had been declining into isolationism and rabid xenophobia for millennia now, and were neither the force nor the friends they had once been. They could no longer be said to be keeping the capital safe. If anything, they were almost akin to parasitic, feral animals and, perhaps, an eventual threat to Everfree.
However, Luna had voted against it. The costs would have been astronomical, though they would have been able to afford it with a multiplicative 10% tax increase. She had usually been the one to deny the nobles’ excessive spending habits, so it would have been hypocritical for her to condone increasing taxes on a glorified vanity project. The plans included rooftops coated in actual precious metals, for pity’s sake.
What was more concerning, however, was the ire it would likely draw from Ferros. Heaven’s Peak was the original center of the Gryphons’ territory, much as Olympus had been the Unicorns’, before the subtle influence of a powerful, malevolent trickster had caused ponies and gryphons to, she could quote, “CHANGE PLACES!”
It was difficult enough in its time to dissuade her own peoples from taking grave offense when Vigil was built atop that peak, and she feared answering in kind would only lead to a war that rendered Steel’s past incursions trivial in comparison.
“What of it?” Luna inquired.
“The council has finished going through the primary legislature,” he said, unfurling a wing and grabbing a sealed scroll out of it. “I figured you’d like to see the final draft before the construction order goes out. Upon completion, as long as it holds up to the proposed standard, we’ll begin the process of changing it into the national capital.”
“I see,” she sighed. “Very well. Thank you, Rhythm, though you could have sent it with messenger’s flame. You did not need to come in person.”
He smiled. “I figured you could use the courtesy of a personal delivery. Besides, night court bores me, I figured you could use some interesting company.”
“Hey!” a mare’s voice objected from the shadows, followed immediately by the thunk of plate striking plate and an “OW!”
“No offense, Ribbon Flyer!” he shot at the hidden guard who was not allowed to speak during court unless necessary. Ribbon Flyer let out a muffled, growling pout.
“I’m sorry, your graces. My sister apologizes for her outburst, don’t you, Ribbon?” a hidden stallion scolded, as Ribbon began repeatedly tossing an object and catching it.
Luna lifted her left wing toward the shadowed stallion. “That is enough, Comet Tail, I think she got the message. Unless you’re vexed by it, Rhythm?”
The prince shook his head. “It’s alright with me as long as it’s alright with Princess Luna, Vice-Captain, she wasn’t interrupting anything important.” He half-frowned at the shadows, one eyebrow raised. “Though I do wish she didn’t play with knives.”
“They’re daggers!” she defensively insisted, then sheepishly added “It’s a nervous habit.”
Luna chuckled. “Put it away, First Lieutenant, you’re scaring our oh-so courageous guest.”
“Ouch, Aunt Luna. Ouch.”
“Fiiiine,” the guardsmare relented, accompanied by the woody rattle of a weapon being sheathed before it clicked into place.
“Now, was there anything else?” Luna asked.
“No, that was all, Princess Luna,” the yellow alicorn said with a bow, which he messed up as another bolt struck nearby, “I shall take my leave.” Luna nodded, and he turned to do just that.
“Very well. Send in the next citizen.”
Comet spoke up. “That was all so far, your grace.”
Luna sighed loudly. “Of course it was. Thank you, Comet Tail,” she groaned, picking up her newspaper once more. And there’s still seventy-seven minutes of this, she thought. It was the same every weeknight. She played it off as boredom, but deep down, she couldn’t help feeling unappreciated.
It would only get worse in the months to come.
A deafening thunderclap slammed into Flicker Light’s ears, causing her to wince as she galloped after the two up the spiral ramp outside Everfree’s tallest tower. The winds were light, fortunately, a sign of a very controlled albeit intense storm courtesy of the Everfree weather team. The city below was dark, hard to see through the pouring rain that battered the roves.
“What are we even doing here? This is crazy!” the young mare yelled over the storm.
“You’re complaining?!” Rime shot back incredulously. “You’re the one with an umbrella spell!”
“That doesn’t stop lightning bolts!”
“Oh come on, when has anypony ever gotten hurt by a little lightning?”
“All the time!”
“Oh come on! Cloud Skipper shocked herself three days ago and she’s just fine!”
“She’s a pegasus!”
“So? It doesn’t hurt Gryphons, either, and they’re not weather-resistant.”
“The reason lightning spells don’t work on them is because their armor makes a Fair Day cage!! Celestia’s sake, Rime!”
“Sheesh! Relax! What are the chances we get struck by lightning? Wild lightning only sort of senses charges within a few tens of meters of the tip. If you’re not high…”
“Care to finish that sentence?”
“I… uh.. not… really,” Rime said, shrinking from the point.
Flicker groaned. Once again Rime was running the three of them headlong into trouble. “Ugh, fantastic,” she groaned. “So why are we sprinting to the most lightning-prone place in Equestria during a thunderstorm?!”
Rime thought about lying for a moment, but came up with an idea. “Because Princess Luna wanted me to mess with Celestia’s water temperature,” he said.
Ebon piped up before Flicker could tell Rime that that was insane. “What? Then why am I here? I can’t cast thermal spells!” he excalimed.
The other colt replied with a question. “I don’t know, why are you here? You followed me on your own, Ebon.”
“And you can’t cast any spells, blank-flank,” Flicker quipped.
That struck a nerve with Ebon Sky. “WHAT DID YOU SAY?!” he yelled in a passing flash of red-hot rage as he gave off a brief pulse of potent magic which didn’t seem to do anything. He gave Flicker a death glare which, she had to admit, was somehow far more intimidating than it should have been.
Rime Floes, however, paid no attention. “Alright! Here we go!” Rime he said, sliding to a halt without losing his footing. The other two slipped a little on the wet staircase, but caught themselves. They had arrived at the entrance to Everfree Water Tower 1’s internal pipelines.
Even at a time when ponies hadn’t harnessed electricity or stable fossil fuels, and magically powered devices were rare and hard to maintain, Everfree still maintained an almost modern system of running water by means of its water towers, and this water tower was the largest in the world. Each tower opened at the top, allowing pegasi to fill them with rainwater. Since the towers were taller than any structure they were connected to, they supplied running water by simple means of gravity. That meant that, in order to function, this tower had to be taller than Everfree Castle itself.
The three now stood before a small but solid stone door. There was a keyhole in the center which the weather team and the maintenance staff could use to access the network of pipes within.
“Dead end?” Ebon asked, his innocent sounding voice belying the daggers he glared at Flicker.
“Not necessarily," Flicker said, looking at the lock. “Solid, but I think it’s a normal pin and tumbler design.”
“I could try making a key out of ice,” Rime suggested.
“I don’t know, I think it might break off in the lock.”
“Guys?”
“Freezing it and shattering it, then?”
“Maybe if it was made of iron, but that’s a solid stone lock, I don’t think anypony’s that good.”
“You guys?”
“Well if you’re here anyway, how about you then? I’m sure Princess Celestia’s taught you a lockpicking spell.”
“I only know one that works simple metal locks, not granite deadbolts. I could try altering the elem-”
“Hey! You two!” the black colt snapped with a raised voice.
“What?!” the apprentices asked simultaneously
Ebon put his hoof to the door and pulled. “Door’s open,” he said, swinging it wide to reveal the shadowy interior.
Flicker and Rime blinked and exchanged awkward looks. “Uh, I knew that,” he sheepishly fibbed.
“Me too,” she said, embarrassed.
Ebon rolled his eyes with a self-satisfied smirk. “I don’t need a cutie mark to out-think you two idiots,” he declared.
“Yeah…” Rime admitted reluctantly.
Flicker whispered to Rime. “He’s never going to let this go.”
“Hey, this one’s on your head,” he whispered back.
“He’s going to be insufferable for the next few days.”
“To you, maybe.”
Ebon strutted forward into the darkness. “It’s a good thing I came along. Even for me it’s dark in here, so you probably couldn’t see your hoof in front…” he paused as the room brightened. He turned around to see Flicker casting small, bright yellow orbs around the room, hovering in midair like fireflies and lighting the room like candlelight.
He let out a disappointed groan to himself. Flicker Light could cast any kind of spell, but she was particularly focused on studying fire and light magic. “… killjoy.”
Rime chuckled. “Well, at least we’ve got three pairs of eyes now,” he said, patting his friend on the back. “Come on, let’s find-“
“If you say ‘cutie mark,’” the night pony warned midsentence.
“… the pipe that goes to Princess Celestia’s room. Luna’s sake, Ebon, chill.”
Ebon sighed. “Right, right, sorry,” he said. The lack of a cutie mark was a sore spot for him at this point. He was all of two years away from breaking the record for oldest pony without a cutie mark in recorded history, and he really, really didn’t want to be in the running for that title. The bottom 2% was bad enough already.
The three spent the next several minutes clambering about the damp recesses of the tower. Unknowledgable of plumbing, the task took hours of crawling around piping and through tight spaces.
Flicker got stuck several times, only to teleport back and immediately check that neither of the boys had seen her screwing up. The door had been quite enough embarrassment for one day.
She expected nothing short of perfection from herself, let alone from her image, which she was adamant remained untarnished. She was the student of Princess Celestia, after all. The last pony to hold this honor was Archmage Aura Shine, the head of the Guild of Magi and most renowned mortal magician on the planet.
It was a big expectation to live up to. She had only let the princess down once, and she was determined never to make such a terrible mistake again.
Eventually Ebon called out. “Found it!” he said as the other two made their way over to him.
Rime’s looked up, accidentally banging his head on a pipe. “Ow! What? Are you sure?” he asked as he rubbed the lump above his horn.
“Yeah! I found some cloth tied around this one, pink green blue white, and sometimes the maintenance crew color codes stuff so they can figure it out. What else could those colors be?”
“Great work, Ebon!” Rime said, running up to his left while Flicker arrived on the right. It was fortunate that Flicker had arrived then as well, though if he guessed wrong… well, Princess Luna wouldn’t ditch him for messing this up, right? “Alright, well, maybe this’ll work,” he said, lighting his horn. As they watched, a centimeter-thick ring of ice coalesced around the narrow pipe. Mist fell visibly from the chilled ring, indicating just how cold it was. “Alright, there! Let’sgoEbon,” he said hurriedly, grabbing him and scooting quickly toward the exit.
“Wait, what did you do?!” Flicker called after him.
“Delayed action endothermic spell! Should reduce the temperature to just above freezing next time the water turns on!” That was a bold-faced lie, but he didn’t know how to go about casting something as complicated as that. It might even be impossible, he wasn’t sure, but regardless, that wasn’t the point.
It only took about ten seconds for Flicker to catch up. The three now stood in the doorway, rainwater trickling in through the door. Flicker looked down. “Uh, was the water tower always this high?” she asked with a nervous undertone.
“What, don’t tell me you’re afraid of heights?” Ebon commented.
“Well excuse me if I’m not a pegasus!” she snapped. “How are we supposed to get down from here?”
“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Rime commented. “It’s not that high up.”
“You don’t get to talk. Your parents are pegasi,” she grumbled. If she had a problem with fear of heights, as far as she was concerned he had a particular problem with taking them too lightly. However, even as she said it she knew the type of his parents wasn’t directly the crux of the issue. The issue was the decision they made.
Pegasi who had earth pony or unicorn foals had an expensive choice to make. If they wanted to keep their children, as most did, they either had to move to the ground, which could be very expensive indeed, or take the option of getting Thunderforged shoes crafted for them.
Thunderforged metal was unique in that, like a changeling’s hooves, it could rest on a cloud but could not interact with it. Over the course of a foal growing up, this would be much more expensive than a typical house, but for some living in cloud cities and neighborhoods it was worth it.
Rime’s parents were dependent on living in the cloud district of Fort Laughterdale, so they opted to buy the Thunderforged shoes. Of course, that was hardly his fault.
“That’s not what I meant!” Rime said. “We could walk down-“
“Too slippery, it was hard enough on the way up.”
“- or you could teleport us down.“
“I can’t even see the ground!”
“I can,” Ebon added.
“Not helping, inkblot.”
“Then cast a light spell to look,” Rime suggested.
“I can’t cast a lingering spell that long a range.”
“A fire spell?”
“It’s pouring rain, you idiot!”
“Fine! You know the glimmerwing spell, right?!”
“Okay, there’s a whole lot of problems with that idea. A, I don’t like it-“
“Because of the heights thing?” Rime joked, immediately ducking a light smack aimed upside his head.
“B,” Flicker continued, ignoring Rime’s smirk, “I’m not sure it’s a good idea to mix a spell that exhausting with a spell that forces me awake, it could have really bad side effects. C, I can’t carry anypony with it, and D, most importantly, they don’t work when they’re wet.”
Rime considered a few options. They could wait until it stopped raining, but that wouldn’t be for several hours, and he was expected at breakfast. Or supper in his case. They could have Flicker try to signal a pegasus down, but that’d take time and might not even work with the downpour reducing visibility. However, he did have an idea, and said as much with a mischievous grin.
He breathed in deeply and exhaled slowly, a small cloud of water vapor emerging from his mouth. Closing his eyes, he listened to the rain falling around. Opening his eyes slowly, he lit his horn, turning the rivulets of water trickling around him solid and turning the raindrops into small hailstones, which hovered in midair like morning dew covering the grass on freezing autumn day. He turned his eyes to the ledge of the staircase and out toward the courtyard. The ice flowed together like liquid water, converging rapidly onto the ledge and forming a ramp which quickly spread out to the castle grounds below.
The ice pony turned to the others, grinning ear to ear. “Well? What do you think?” he asked with giddy anticipation.
Flicker Light and Ebon Sky exchanged glances for a moment before they replied.
Ebon replied simply. “No.”
“Heck no,” Flicker agreed.
“Oh come on, don’t tell me you scardie-fillies are afraid to go down a slide,” Rime said.
“A slide? No. That is not a slide. THAT is a luge,” she said.
“You want wait here to explain to Princess Celestia why you missed breakfast or walk down with stray lightning bolts?”
Flicker groaned. He had a point. She hated it when he had a point. “Oh, alright,” she said hesitantly. She walked over to the frozen ramp, looking down its slope, and Ebon joined her.
The ice seemed to disappear into the darkness. She couldn’t even see the end. “I’m having second thoughts,” she whimpered. “I can’t even see the bottom!”
Ebon, however, could. That’s not what unnerved him. “I don’t think the bottom’s the problEEEEMM!” Ebon answered as he and flicker were unceremoniously shoved onto the ice.
“Involuntary luge,” Rime giggled as he gleefully flung himself down after them.
Rime Floes, Ebon Sky, and Flicker Light rocketed down the slippery ice, all shouting loudly: Rime in excited delight, and Ebon and Flicker in surprise and terror respectively. Much to the mare’s horror, she soon saw the problem Ebon had: she had been more accurate than she thought when she had called it a luge. She and the boys went against curves, held to the sides of the slope by centrifugal force. The slide twisted and turned regularly, zig-zagging its way over to the main gate of the castle, until finally coming to a stop in the grass of the castle courtyard. Just before hitting the grass, a smooth sheet of ice formed over it.
The two slid forward quickly, hooves flailing about trying to find purchase as the slid toward the marble pathway. In their efforts to get under control, they collided with each other, tumbling end over end and finally coming to a stop and landing in a painful heap. Rime slid gracefully past them, adding a spin on his front-left hoof for the fun of it. “Honestly, don’t you two know how to skate?” he teased.
Flicker scowled, glancing at Ebon Sky out of the corner of her eye. “How long before one of us kills him again?” she complained.
He looked back at her out of the corner of his own eye and replied. “Ten years, twelve tops. Assuming he doesn’t kill us first.”
Flicker growled as she hopped back on her hooves. “You are absolutely insane!” she shouted at the pony with the snowflake cutie mark, her heart pounding in her chest. “I thought I was going to die. Why in the name of Celestia did you add those turns?!”
Rime raised an eyebrow. “I had to slow us down somehow. It was either that or a loop or a jump. Come to think of it, that actually that might be a lot of fun…”
Ebon groaned. “For crying out loud, it’s supposed to be the fire users who act out and the ice unicorns who’re reserved. You two dunderheads have this completely backwards.” he said, shaking the water out of his mane.
“Hahaha! That’s what you get for reading all those fairy tales,” Rime laughed. “Well, let’s go, that’s all Princess Luna wanted me to do.”
“Oh for Luna’s… yeah, fine, let’s just get out of this rain, I’m soaked,” Ebon said.
Princess Luna flew in place high above the storm. “Hrm,” she sounded to herself as she gazed out at the horizon, which was lightening before the moon had set. Tia is getting carried away with the twilight again, she thought. Celestia had always been proud of her sunrise and sunset, and rightly so. The way she could color the firmament of day was simply breathtaking, but every so often she would slip up and start turning the eastern night sky a dark violet. With a shrug as she gently tucked her charge in for the day.
A moment later, the sky grew bright as the sun hopped above the skyline. With a nod, Luna dove down, letting gravity pull her. She met resistance at the cloud’s surface punching a hole through it, enjoying the splash of rain as she streaked toward the royal balcony, where Celestia waited with an arcane umbrella.
Celestia giggled as her sister landed. She teased, “You know you can lower the moon without seeing it, Lulu.”
“Yes, sister, but the last time I missed a star you burned poor Alhena,” Luna replied with a smile.
Celestia grumbled. She looked over her shoulder for anypony listening. “That was fourteen thousand years ago, Luna,” she hissed in a whisper. “I think your track record is good enough.”
The blue pony smirked. “Yours could use some work, though. You were illuminating my night sky again.”
Celestia unfurled her wings and lightly blushed in embarrassment. “I-I just thought it could use a little color.”
Luna was unamused. “It’s raining, Tia, nopony without wings could see it. You know how I feel about fibbing,” Luna said, tapping her hoof expectantly.
“Oh fine,” the elder sister huffed. “I thought a stormy December night with a waning crescent moon was dark enough that the ponies could use some extra light. There aren’t many night ponies out there after all.”
The younger stared sternly at the elder, then groaned and hung her head, depressed. “Oh don’t remind me,” she moaned. “The last census we ran showed my Equestrian subjects have become so scarce that I’ve actually memorized the names of all of them.”
“Luna, everypony in Equestria is your subject except me,” Celestia reminded before she realized that meant Luna had memorized over three thousand names.
Luna rolled her eyes. “I wish they would act like it… and I was speaking about the night, not Equestria specifically. The day ponies seem afraid of it for the most part.”
Celestia smiled gently, putting a hoof on her sister’s shoulder. “I’m sure things will get better. They always do in the end,” she comforted.
“Thanks, Tia.”
“Besides,” she added, “I can’t help it if everypony likes the day better, it’s just good taste!”
“Celestia…”
“Just teasing! Mostly. Come, we’re due for breakfast,” she said, walking inside. “And make sure to dry yourself off!”
Luna scoffed, following the larger pony indoors. “What are you, my mother?” she griped, casting a spell and throwing the water outside in a stream. “How many times do I have to say that six and a half years is negligible at our age?”
Celestia laughed. “Whatever you say, little sister.”
“I’m telling you, it’s good, Flicker,” Rime said, taking a large bite of his brie and jelly on rye toast.
Flicker held back a retch. “Blech! No thanks! You enjoy your freaky food as usual, it still looks disgusting.”
“Usually. It’s not bad sometimes. 20-80 I think,” Ebon said.
The moon’s apprentice shrugged. “Suit yourselves,” he said, tossing the last of the sandwich into his mouth.
“We will, pink-eye,” Flicker said, sticking her tongue out in disgust.
Rime swallowed hard. “They’re not pink!” he chirped defensively. “They’re strawberry red!”
“They’re pink.”
“They are pink, Rime Floes,” Ebon agreed.
“See? Even Ebon agrees you’re an albino.”
“I’m not an albino, I’m BLUE!” Rime argued.
“Your hair is blue. You’re white,” Flicker declared.
“That still means I’m not albino, and I’m telling you I’m blue!”
“He’s light blue anyway, Flicker.”
“Oh please! He’s no bluer than an egg,” Flicker insisted, not seeing the royal sisters enter the dining room behind her.
“A robin’s egg, I think,” Celestia said, startling her student as the room bowed before her in greeting. “What do you think, sister? You’re the artist.”
“Pale cyan,” Luna replied. “No yellow, magenta or black, and approximately one part cyan to four parts white, varying with lighting and texture. At least that’s how I paint him.”
Rime looked at his teacher. “You’ve painted me?” he asked.
“Of course I have, you’re my precious apprentice,” Luna said with a smile. “I’ve made a few paintings of you; some alone, some with other ponies, one how you might look in a few years.”
“But I’ve never stood for a portrait.”
She chuckled. “It’s not ideal, but if you’ve painted as long as I have, you don’t need to have somepony in front of you to capture their likeness, at least not if you know them well,” she said “Though that much practice might just mean you’re never satisfied with your own work so you’re reluctant to show anypony. I guess I’ll have to make an exception if you’d like to see one.”
Rime gazed awestruck up at the dark alicorn for a moment. “Uh-huh!” he chirped, giving a short nod and a wide grin.
Luna smiled. “Very well then,” she said as she walked to her end of the table. “This should be an interesting supper,” she announced, smirking with a glance at her sister out of the corner of her eye.
“Oh, certainly,” Celestia agreed, taking her seat at the closer end. “I’m told the summer harvest isn’t as high as it usually is, and the winters have been harsh this decade.”
Luna rolled her eyes as she took her seat at the far end. “If this is yet another attempt to convince me to extend the full moon, spare me. We have heard this every generation for our entire reign. The only exception I can think of was not pleasant,” she said. “Do you recall-?”
“’-What it was like when we were fillies,’ yes yes. That was a different climate, still has no bearing on the here and now..”
“Different climate or not, it is stable. I am not about to spend another thousand years cleaning up an ecological horror show with you just to attempt improve our already massive bumper crop.”
“It’s not like I’m asking for gumball hail,” Celestia reasoned.
Luna shuddered at the memory. “No, but you are asking me to defy the nature of my night. I cannot force the moon and stars to do as I please.”
“Cannot, or will not?” Celestia inquired sincerely.
“I will not. My harvest moon alone asks more of it than I am comfortable with,” she declared. While she sounded very calm and matter-of-fact to the guests at the table, those who knew her better could tell the very idea offended her.
A stallion cleared his throat next the dark princess, who turned around to see her butler with a tray in his left hoof. “Speak of the wolf and he howls at the moon,” she remarked with a smirk.
Olive Pit flashed her an annoyed look. He replied “You would know better than I, Luna. At any rate, the tea is ready,” as he pulled a teapot from the tray with his teeth and poured her a cup. Like most non-unicorn ponies, he had no problems speaking while doing so.
Rime watched anxiously as he rounded the table to Princess Celestia’s end. It was tradition that, while the food was placed for their arrival, the princesses were served first; a sign of respect to royalty. Doubtlessly his mistress had anticipated this when she had arranged this prank.
“Good morning, Oliver,” Princess Celestia greeted with a warm smile. “So, what do you think about extending the full moon?”
Olive Pit closed his eyes and shrugged before he started pouring her her tea. “I wouldn’t pretend to understand the consequences, your radiance, but I have learned a bit about artistry in my years. If I let every chef make whatever changes they wanted to a dish being prepared, it would be late to arrive and quite… unpalatable,” he said, pulling the kettle back up to the silver tray. “Too many chefs spoil the broth, and the same could be said for any masterpiece.
I may be biased, but the night sky? That is the greatest masterpiece of all. I would be hesitant to make changes the artist finds unwelcome.”
Celestia sighed in defeat. “Oh very well, I can see when I’ve lost an argument. We all have our accomplishments,” she said. With her golden magic she lifted her teacup to her lips.
Rime held his breath, staring at Princess Celestia as she audibly sipped on the teacup. What would happen? Would her mane’s proverbial wind whip into a frenzy? Would her massive size become titanic? Would she get the hiccups or set the castle on fire?
More importantly, just what would she do in retaliation? He’d gotten away without getting covered in leeches last time the princesses had gotten into a prank war, but this time he might be directly in her sights. Celestia was the superior prankster after all, though his partisanship would never let him admit it.
Princess Celestia let out a satisfied “Aah,” and set down the teacup. Her eyes turned upon Rime, looking at him knowingly and sending shivers down his spine. Any hope he’d had of keeping a straight face went out the window faster than a pegasus late for work. What came next left him stunned.
“And congratulations on your accomplishment, Rime. That’s two of the little tasks my sister had for you successfully completed, and now we’re just waiting for” she said as Cereus flew out of the wall behind her. “Ah! Cereus! Was the water ice cold?”
The Lunar captain chuckled and landed next to the princess. “Scalding hot, actually.”
“WHAT?!” Flicker yelped. She dropped her fork on her plate with a clatter as she realized her folly.
Rime sat still, wide-eyed and mouth agape. She knew? How did she know?!
The alabaster demigoddess went into a fit of giggles. “Oh my!” she sniggered. Luna had always had a way of influencing ponies to do what she wanted without telling them, and apparently Rime had learned this habit from her. “I’m sorry, Flicker, I think Rime tricked you. You can’t heat water with ice magic,” she said.
Rime found part of his voice. “Well, actually…“ he whispered, unnoticed by Celestia who continued speaking.
“It’s a little unorthodox, mind you. Does he pass your little test, Luna?”
Luna smiled and nodded. “Indeed he does.”
Rime shook his head. “I’m sorry, mistress, but… I didn’t actually do any of it. I just got other ponies to do it for me.”
The dark mare gave him a knowing look. “I’m aware, but that’s part of the lesson. Everypony has things they can and cannot do. You looked to get help from the grown-ups for the tea- I’m a bit impressed you got the dosage right, Oliver,”
“Of course, madame,” he replied.
“You let Ebon use his stealth to sneak past Celestia’s guards unnoticed, providing a diversion yourself before Captain Image even could. Flicker lit up the darkness in the water tower, and you created a quick way down from the tower. Everypony had something they alone could do, Rime, yourself included.
Nopony can do everything, Rime. Not you, not Flicker, not even my sister or me. What we do have is each other to rely on, to make up for the things we can’t do ourselves, and find a strength that surpasses the sum of our whole. That synergy, those bonds we share, that is more powerful than any magic we know. Do you understand?”
Rime thought for a moment. “I… think so,” he said. Flicker stared down at her plate, hoof on her chn, lost in contemplation.
“Speaking of bonding,” an amused Celestia said quietly.
“What, sister?”
“Oh, nothing.”
Cereus walked over to Ebon. “Finish eating and get your butt to your music lesson, Ebon, you’re late,” she told him.
Ebon sighed. He didn’t mind the music lessons, but he knew by now that his talent had nothing to do with music. “Sorry, mom,” he said, quickly eating a biscuit and walking away. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Rime.”
The rest of the meal went as normal. The nobles, as ever, rubbed elbows with Celestia and left Luna much to her own devices, speaking with the staff about the night’s events. At 7:00 on the dot the storm cleared up, and not long after the breakfast began wrapping up.
Celestia was the first princess to dismiss herself. She stood and thanked the staff, adding “I must be going. There’s a lot of work to be done.”
Luna made to stand, but suddenly her eyes widened as she put her front hooves on the table. “You DIDN’T.”
The elder sibling merely smiled. “I didn’t what, dear sister?” she asked, poorly feigning innocence.
“I gave you full warning!” the younger growled.
Celestia smirked. “Don’t blame me for your sticky situation. I let Rime Floes off the hook for you, but you still started this.” The others in the room turned deathly quiet in an instant.
“I cannot believe you! You insolent-”
“Good day, Luna,” she said, teleporting away in a flash and leaving her sister fuming.
Oliver walked up to the livid Luna. “The glue remover, madame?”
She nodded. “You do realize what this means.”
“War, madame?”
“War, Oliver,” she said, terrifying every pony in the room with the exception of the butler.
“Shall I fetch the buckets as well?”
“Please do.”
Princess Luna hovered in the hallway outside her sister’s bedroom, pouring the contents of a bucket in a hole she had made in the wall. The solar guards nearby looked at her out of the corners of their eyes, but dared not interfere lest they find themselves caught in the crossfire between two irritated demigoddesses.
She finished emptying the first bucket, but as she reached for the second a shout caught her ears. “Princess!” it cried.
A solar guard flew around the corner, banking just short of colliding with the wall. “Princess Luna, it’s… what are you doing?”
“Emptying a few buckets of spiders into the crawlspace around Celestia’s bedchamber. They should be coming out of the cracks for weeks.”
The pegasus flew back a bit, horrified, but shook her head to focus. “It’s war, your highness.”
Luna rolled her eyes. “Obviously. Don’t worry, they’re magic constructs, they’ll disappear in a month.”
“No, you don’t understand, I mean it’s war,” she said. The royal turned around, realizing what she meant. “The gryphon kingdom has invaded Stalliongrad.”