The Castle Canterlot

by Honey Mead

Chapter 16

After only three days absent her light, the renewed weight of Sol’s glory pressed down upon Chronicle like never before. Even in shade, his eyes remained squinted and watered mercilessly. The sky overhead seemed all the more expansive and ready to consume him; the ground less stable beneath his hooves, less guaranteed to fall down.

But duty was duty, and so he stood his appointed post.

All of Canterlot had turned out. Thousands of ponies filled the palace courtyard, more spilling out the gates to line the road to the city limits. Strangely, that did not bother him over much. Perhaps that part of his brain had simply shut down, too overwhelmed to face reality.

Or perhaps it was a lingering effect of the adrenaline rush following the arrival of Princess Celestia’s letter. He hadn’t even read the letter, no pony had save Princess Cadence, who promptly set it ablaze and stormed off to Faust knew where. Were it not of the Blessed and her timely intervention, the entire city would have been caught unawares when the Princess returned… with her sister.

It was well into evening when the first strains from the marching band started to reach the palace where Chronicle stood. The roar of the crowd soon followed, washing over them and drowning everything else out… except for the faithful little voice of panic chomping away at the back of his mind. ‘Run!’ it shouted. ‘Flee! Get back inside where it’s safe. Where the griffons don’t fly and the lions don’t prowl.’ It was almost a comfort in a strange way, a way that left his legs shaking and tail snapping. Like Princess Celestia, it was always there, would always be there, howling the same screams, begging the same pleas, a constant in an ever changing world.

And there she was, perched upon the royal phaeton, trailing behind a phalanx of guards and a small army of band-ponies—who might as well have not been playing for the cacophony surrounding them—Princess Celestia Invictus, as regal as ever, smiling down on her little ponies and waving as she slowly passed by.

While at her side, the unknown, the sister, Princess Luna Invictus—or so Blessed claimed. Small only compared to her sister, this new princess appeared at once to be trying to shrink into obscurity while refusing to admit to any such show of weakness. Her eyes blazed with defiance toward every gaze they met, daring them to question her position. She wore a similar regality to the elder’s, but with a stiffer, more rigid mein. Yet he still couldn’t be sure if the white wing across her back was there to provide assurance or prevent escape.

The Royal Sisters—a phrase that would take him years to get accustomed to—mounted the stairs to a great deal of fan-fair, Celestia nodding to her staff before turning to address the crowd. As though rehearsed, silence fell.

Celestia spoke. She told a story, a heart-wrenching tale a thousand years in the making, of love and betrayal and loss, of hard-fought battles and victories and long awaited reunions. And it was a story. There was truth, enough to hold up to the scrutiny of the masses. Some, like Chronicle, knew the truth, knew that Princess Luna was a prisoner only by a sever stretch of the definition, but they were not likely to speak to the contrary.

And then it was over, and they were back within the cold comfort of ceilings and walls. This lasted all of two minutes before the Princess asked the question he’d been dreading for hours.

“Where is Cadence?”

Princess Cadence had a problem. Had many problems, truthfully, but at that moment, she had one that was glaring at her in all its messy glory while another she could only hear through the door.

“Go away!”

The rapping on her bedroom door returned along with her aunt’s voice. “Not until you talk to me.”

She dropped her weight onto the over stuffed luggage, grunting as she struggled to get it closed enough to run the zipper. “Like you talked to me before dropping all of this onto my back without so much as a hint of warning?” She punctuated the question with elation as the zipper finally forward, locking the little metal teeth in place.

Her joy was short lived, however. The moment she set the bag upright, the seams ripped, spilling her clothes back out onto the floor. She stared blankly at the pile of cloth for a moment. No thoughts filled her mind, only an empty sort of numbness the likes of which she hadn’t experienced since the last time she’d tried, and failed, to run away from… home? That wasn’t right. She wasn’t running away from home, she was running toward it, back to her own city where she belonged. The Crystal City was her home, not Canterlot, and definitely not that prison her ‘mother’ had disguised as a castle.

“Cadence?” Was that concern for her wellbeing or concern that she’d gone? Both, probably. “I know you’re upset, and you have every right to be. Mother knows I would be furious with her if she’d done to me what I did to you.” There was a pause, just enough time for a sigh too soft to breach the door. “Can we talk, please? Without a door between us.”

“I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“I highly doubt that. Either way, I have some things that you need to hear.”

The numbness faded with the resurfacing of her self-righteous justifications. A powerful kick sent the broken luggage flying back into the closet from whence it came, another sending the pile of clothes in right after it. Very carefully not looking at her room, or thinking about how she could have been hours gone, she started toward the balcony.

“I’m leaving, Auntie, and you can’t stop me.”

“‘Can’t’ is a strong word. But, no, I won’t force you to stay. Before you go, however, I want you to consider the difference between asking and ‘asking’, and how much nicer it is to not force the former to become the latter.”

Cadence stopped dead in her tracks. In a purely juvenile display that she would forever deny, she threw a hissyfit, stamping all four hooves and pushing out the highest pitch whine she could muster. “Why won’t you just leave me alone?”

Celestia’s response of, “That’s a silly question coming from you.” only drove her further up the wall. Impotence in the face of the mare who’d been everything but her mother for the overwhelming majority of her life kept her from just leaving, however. It was only as she unlatched the door in defeat that she realized that ‘can’t’ really was a word that should almost never be applied to her aunt.

The disastrous state of the room went entirely unremarked by Celestia as she entered, not in word nor action, not even when she cleaned off one of lounges and made herself comfortable. Rather than join her, Cadence chose to remain standing, convincing herself that she was more comfortable that way, that it wasn’t merely a petty act of defiance.

“Well?”

“I’m sorry,” Celestia began, managing that infuriating tone of non-regretful regret, “for not telling you what was coming before hoof. You deserved to know.”

And that was as far as she would go. No justifications or genuine apology, just statements, because she didn’t regret what she’d done. Oh, she regretted some of the consequences, but not enough to admit she was wrong. Not that Cadence cared. That was not what this was about, not even close, and she refused to so much as acknowledge the comment. Her eyes never left her aunt’s, barely repressing the desire to tap her hoof, waiting.

Then, finally, “The Nightmare is gone.”

She lost complete control over her expression, an ugly sneer twisting her entire muzzle. “Right. Wonderful. Can I go now?”

“Cadence!”

“No! Don’t you ‘Cadence’ me! That… that thing—”

“Is my sister and your mother!”

“No! That thing might have brought me into this world, but she is NOT my mother!”

Celestia shrank back, her eyes trying desperately to summon tears that would not come. “I know you are hurting, but that was not Luna.”

“How can you be so blind? Yes it was! There was never any ‘Nightmare’, there was only ever her! She chose to be that thing, to be a monster. No pony forced her into it.”

“She was sick. I know it’s hard for you to see it because you never knew the real Luna. But I did. I knew her for centuries before the sickness took her from me. I watched as it twisted everything she was into that dark mockery of the sister I knew and loved.

“Now, for the first time in almost two thousand years, I have my sister back, and you… you have the chance to meet your true mother for the first time. She is cured, Cadence. The sickness is gone… but she’s not yet well. It left scars, and… and I know she will never be the same as she was, but…” Celestia looked away, unable to meet Cadence’s eyes for the first time that she could ever recall. “I know this will be hard for you. I know that it will be difficult to see beyond the monster you remember… but I am begging you to try. If not for her sake or your own, then for mine… please.”

Throughout Celestia’s pleading, Cadence’s resolve weakened but never broke. Her empathy extended no further than Celestia but not in the way the elder would have prefered. It was pity, more than anything, for all the false hope her aunt had built into the thought of having her sister back, and despite the thick shield of anger she cloaked herself in, Cadence couldn’t be the one to dispel that mirage.

It was going to be a long next few years.

Celestia was not above questioning her own actions. She never let herself go so far as to regret them, but she did question them from time-to-time in hopes to learn. Her lack of preparation for her short absence, for instance. The greater amount of her decisions were all but dictated to her by that bittersweet night a millennium ago, when a wish had been granted and family yet unborn was first met. So many pieces had to be put into place… families moved and towns established… library trees planted. Everything else had been guesswork, assumptions derived from implications of what was said, and more importantly, unsaid.

Her decision to keep it all to herself, to not even let those closest to her know that she had a plan, much less what that plan was, turned out about as she’d expected. Snow Blind was an outlier that she refused to blame herself for. Could she have kept her from that course? Possibly… yes. If she had taken more time to factor in every variable, collected more data and analyzed everything more thoroughly, then, yes, she might have prevented a senseless death. But to take responsibility for another’s actions… to hold herself accountable for every pony who could potentially be saved in hindsight if only she’d done this or that… done that path lay madness and worse.

No. She was not her mother. She could not so much as glimpse the future, much less read the threads of fate. She did the best she could with what she had, and at the end of the day, letting even Cadence know would have changed how she acted and risked Nightmare Moon deciding to wipe the board of ‘conspirators’.

The only part that made her question her actions was sitting before her in a paper-built imitation of Canterlot. Snow Blind’s little stunt alone accounted for the entire market district, with mansion row being the Queendoms, the lower quarter all of Equestria’s other cities and counties, and Luna’s return the palace grounds.

All that was to say that, even for Celestia herself, there were not enough hours in a day, and the pony knocking at her door was low on her list of problems she wanted to deal with right then.

When Madam Speaker, Scribble Blackwell, entered her office, it was with the same rigid pride masquerading as regality that all nobles seemed to learn at a young age. Her red rimmed, bloodshot eyes softened Celestia’s mood a little, but only a little.

Celestia turned the page of her current packet, a two hundred page recovery plan from Los Pegasus—where the extra hours of darkness led to that much more alcohol consumption and ‘celebratory property damage’ apparently.

Somedays she thought she understood why her mother had simply left.

Reluctantly, she her work aside and turned her attention to the pony who’d come to see her.

Her lips stretched into smile number three—patient and motherly with only a hint of annoyance at being interrupted. “Scribble, how nice of you to visit.”

Blackwell did not return the smile or even open her mouth to speak, simply dropping another packet of papers on top of the Los Pegasus plan before seating herself and crossing her forelegs.

It was not a large set of documents, ten pages… perhaps worth three when translated into common Equestrian. The title was all she needed to read.

“That will not be necessary.”

Again, without a word, Scribble produced another document, a single page and laid it on top. This one, Celestia only read one word.

“No.”

Finally, Scribble spoke. “Pick one.”

Celestia leaned back in her chair, the muscles in her back protesting the long delayed change in position. Her eyes traveled to the nearest window and Sol’s fading light. It would be time soon, for Luna to rise, another chance to… “Tell me why.”

“Because I know!” The bite in her voice didn’t surprise Celestia over much, fitting well into the vague script she imagined this meeting would take. “You and everypony else might be willing to bury their heads in the sand, but I won’t do that! I can’t.”

“It’s over, Scribble. Twilight and her new friends succeeded. You don’t—”

“Don’t you dare!” Blackwell snapped, leaping to her hooves. “Don’t you dare make a promise like that to me!” Celestia closed her eyes and barely kept from sighing, wingtips rising to massage her temples. In hindsight, she should have known better. “Stop it! Stop pretending to be a normal pony. You aren’t! You never have been and you never will be!”

She flinched, visibly. “I am a—”

“NO! No you aren’t! You’re a Tartarus damned alicorn! And so is she. And so is Cadence. Everypony else might be able to let themselves forget that, but I can’t! Not anymore. How many of us could she have killed? Answer me that. How much of Canterlot is still standing only because the whim never crossed her mind? How many times have you had to stop yourself? How close have you come to…” She closed her eyes and forced herself to take a breath. “Pick one. I don’t care which.”

With that, Scribble turned and marched toward the door, leaving Celestia more than a little flabbergasted. It was not a new sensation but an old one long forgotten. She couldn’t even recall the last time it had happened, and in that state of confusion, hurt, and—justifiable or not—guilt, she reverted back to those actions most closely associated.

“The Badlands,” she said, meekly, like a penitent foal taken to task.

Scribble stopped, magic on the doorknob, and looked back with a questioning tilt to her head.

Celestia stared down at the desk, seeing only sand and ash. “You asked how close I’ve come.”

A question formed on Scribble’s lips, was abandoned, and she shrunk back a half-step. There was fear behind those red rimmed eyes, true fear, as if seeing the pony before her for the very first time.

A bottle of wine was summoned with little thought, a dry Madeira, and two glasses poured. With trepidation in her every movement, like she were humoring an unstable dragon, Scribble returned to her seat, her aura shaking just a little as she accepted the glass. She didn’t drink any, and instead held before her like a shield.

“So,” Scribble began after several long minutes of silence, and two glasses were emptied by the Princess. “It was just a whim that saved us all?”

“No… and yes.” Celestia released a slow sigh. “There is much that cannot be said… even now. But perhaps… perhaps I have been playing my cards a little too close to my chest.” Another pause. “When they talk of knowledge and power, they never mention the weight of it. It is a terrible burden, isn’t it? To know and be unable to act because to act would only make it all the worse.” The glass swirled in Celestia’s golden magic, threatening to spill at every turn. “I have made mistakes. Snow Blind…”

She stopped, and the wine settled.

“You say I am not a normal pony, and you are more correct than I would like to admit, yet more wrong than you can imagine. I cannot give you what you want. You should know well enough that a piece of paper can only be a shield if all treat it as such. No, I cannot give you what you want, but I can give you something else. I can tell you what I know. What… I know.

“Would you take up that burden, Scribble? Knowing how it weighs on me. Would you pay the price such knowledge demands with no guarantee of peace-of-mind and the promise that it will at once stifle your ability to act while ensuring those actions will have importance? Would you join me in this, Scribble?”

The Madam Speaker had not so much as blinked while Celestia spoke, and now that the words had stopped coming, she swallowed. Her wine glass, still untouched, she set on the edge of Celestia’s desk, careful not to spill the contents over the vast spread of paperwork.

“I’ve always loved you,” she said, shakily but not hesitantly. “We all do, I think. I don’t know if there is anything you could tell me that could change that…”

“But?”

“But my mother is not the mare I thought she was growing up. When I learned the truth, I did not love her any less…”

“I see.”

Scribble stood, then bowed formally, bending her knee and touching her horn to the floor. Celestia gave a curt nod and watched as the mare rose, took three steps backward, then turned for the door. She’d just reached for the latch when Celestia spoke one last time.

“I'll see you next week.”

The door closed.

For minutes, Celestia sat motionless, staring at the door. Her thoughts were muddled, incoherent things that only left her all the more discomforted. In desperation, she turned to the mounds of paperwork, only to find Scribble’s letter of resignation at the fore. Brief as it was, she could not read it, not a single word. Then it was gone, a small pile of ash sent to join its kin in the unlit fireplace.

The next few minutes were spent pacing around the office, her eyes never lingering on any one spot for long. A pressure built behind her eyes and pressed up against her chest. She sat down, and stood up, rubbed a shin, and flared and resettled her wings. Finally, when she could fight it nomore, she left, blind to everything as she walked down the corridors to her sister’s room.

Luna would forgive her the few hours loss of sleep.