Another day, and another night. Luna had roamed to and fro along the earth and among the shining dreams.
Twice now, the question had followed the night’s shepherd and hounded her: Have you considered my servant, Twilight? Celestia had come to her twice, before each night’s dream, and their confrontations had been similar each time. Celestia protested, but was unable to intervene outside of the rules of engagement established both intangibly by the nature of sisterhood and tangibly by the laws of the firmaments in their governance.
Celestia had said: She is blameless and upright, sound of mind and strong of heart, loyal and loving. This is a pony that shuns evil in every guise it wears as soon as she finds it, who delights in the truth and whose soul wrestles with deception. Though you have incited her to doubt and to suspicion, she has bested you. Perhaps she has bested me. Twice now you have done your work and she has held with integrity.
And Luna had replied, more or less: Skin for skin. Dreams! There are dreams and dreams, and both find themselves falling short. I do not pretend that they are fullproof. I will have my satisfaction, and know the truth. If she truly delights in it, then let her be found worthy. A mare will give all she has to save her miserable life, and I’ve not touched that. Nor will I, she would have hastily added.
And silently, she had replied: Even if you were to offer yourself up as a sacrifice on the ancient altar that I smashed in Lunangrad so long ago, I would not be parted from my final night with Twilight Sparkle.
It was need that drove her, yes, but not the kind she could yet put into words. Not words that would make sense to one such as her sister.
They shared many things. They shared many millenia, in one stage of life or another. The wonders of the old world and the mysteries of the new they shared. But they did not share all things, nor could they. Beneath their bonds of love and kinship there was an inviolate difference. A chasm which could not be bridged, as Luna had thought of it before her…
Her absence. Yes, before her absence began.
One way to describe this inviolate isolation was to think of the sisters in terms of the element they embodied. Celestia was the Sun, in more ways than the obvious. She shone, yes. What did that mean, really? It meant that she illuminated, she exposed, she explored. Celestia doubted as much as any mortal pony did, but she was rarely cowed by her own doubt. She pressed forward. She kept shining, like the sun which burned forever. She beat uncertainty down and threw it out, if not all at once than relentlessly over time.
But Luna? The moon generated no light. It borrowed. It shadowed. Half of it faced the sun and shared in its light, and the other was turned away and forever in darkness. Luna herself was in two parts. One part faced upwards, and this was the part which smiled in the concert booth and painted in the long columned halls of the Palace, throughfare and hoof-traffic be damned. One part faced downwards and it knew everything. Neither the light nor the darkness could understand each other with ease.
So she fumed.
Celestia would come again tonight. She knew it. Celestia knew it. (Surely she must, for she conformed to the patterns that Luna expected so often, and this was her way. To confront. To reason.) And yet she had not appeared. It was nine of the clock, and the night was in full force now. The sun was gone. Her duties were ended. Luna’s own brief court had been seen to and for once had gone smoothly. She had blessed the works of two budding artists who would attend her new conservatory in the following year, heard a petition of the batponies of the Old Colony in Ghastly Gorge, and recieved a few minor dignataries. Not busy, but satisfying. She had been…
Well, she had been peaceful. She had been peaceful until she realized that she was, in fact, peaceful. And then she had not been.
Luna waited. Her glory seeped out. The room was inky blackness, not just of sight but of touch. Any poor hoofmaiden who had made the mistake of stepping into her apartments at that moment would have been reduced to gibbering madness. She knew this for a fact--she had done it before to others. The darkness, when she was in such a state, was no longer merely a thick smog but liquid. It was like oil, viscous and dense and heavy, smelling of decay where before it had suggested spice and the lightest musk.
Still no Celestia.
What could it mean?
She had ideas.
Most of those ideas were unpleasant. Perhaps, perhaps. Perhaps Celestia was too weary to visit her yet again for what would surely be a futile conversation. That was certainly a possibility. Luna understood weariness. But it might be more than a desire for rest. Perhaps Celestia did not wish to see her out of disgust? Luna understood that as well. Perhaps Celestia was furious, already deciding her fate. And Luna also understood that. She accepted it. She invited it.
What dream would she weave for Twilight Sparkle the Faithful, on her way to her lofty bed in unassuming Ponyville? That was at least a little better to dwell on. It involved something other than waiting and speculating. It was active.
Her first dream had been weak. Twilight had already suffered the loss of her home, and she bore it again with an injured steadfastness. Her second foray had been better, but still Twilight had not relented. Suspicion was not the way to go. That much was certain. Where other ponies shied away, Twilight seemed to operate under a basic formula: trust, but verify. Twice she had refused to throw away her allegiance or her affection without at least speaking to her mentor or to the other princesses. She looked for answers, not for satisfaction.
How maddening.
Fine! Fine. So she would drop that track. No more conspiracies, no more dark hints. She needed something else. Something that would strike to the core of the matter. Whatever it was. No more games. No more waiting and adjusting. One last push.
And it was then that there was a knock at her door.
Luna blinked. There was another knock.
“I… who calls?” she asked. Celestia would not have knocked again. Or she would have knocked and come in anyway.
There was a short pause, and then a voice.
“Um… hi. Aunty. Aunt Celestia said you weren’t feeling well, and I was, ah, here. So I figured I might come by.”
Cadance. Cadance of the Empire, now, and with a wavering voice like a hoofmaiden on her first day. Luna snorted quietly, and then shook her head. “I see you value privacy a bit more than my sister.”
“Y-yes. I…” More hesitation. “Might I come in? Just for a bit? Would that be alright? I mean, I don’t want to be a bother or anything. I’m sure you’re busy.”
Luna regarded the door, and considered the voice. But only for a moment.
“Come in, Cadance.”
But she did not, not at first. There was a shuffling noise on the other side of the wall, and then: “Ah, about that. Your aura. I can’t really…”
Luna frowned. “Truly?”
Silence.
Feeling uneasy, Luna began to draw herself back into something a bit less intimidating. “It is alright. Come in.”
Cadance opened the door, and Luna saw her own uneasiness reflected. The idea that her niece, her own kin, would not be able to easily bare her unfettered glory was dismaying at best. She tried not to let it show. It no doubt showed.
“Good evening,” Cadance said, uselessly. Limply. She smiled, and Luna thought that part was real, perhaps. Mostly.
Luna gestured to the ornate couch on the other side of the room, one of a set. “Sit, niece. Might I offer you something to drink? Wine or mead? Tea, if like my sister you rarely partake of life’s finer things?”
“Wine is nice,” Cadance said. “I’m a fan.”
Luna hummed, rising from bed and retrieving two glasses and a bottle from her private stock. As she did so, grateful for the distraction, she tried to understand what exactly had occurred. Cadance was here. Cadance was not in the empire, firstly, and secondly she had never truly been close to Luna.
Which was only part of the story and Luna knew it.
Coming back to find yourself possessed of family that had never heard anything about you other than the painfully held secret of your existence and a single portrait was jarring. She could understand, as much as it was possible for her to understand another pony, how having one’s powerful aunt almost literally appear out of nowhere and change everything might be daunting.
And, bless her, she had tried. She really, truly had tried. Tea in the gardens, cheerful conversation at dinner, questions and gifts of books and music and even art. It had worked, in some ways. Luna’s bewilderment had turned into something a bit less alien. She was distant, yes, but not cold. Merely far away.
She returned and found Cadance seated upright on the couch. She chuckled as she laid on her stomach and tucked her legs in properly. “Is that how ponies prefer to engage in comissatio these days? Hunched awkwardly?”
Cadance blinked. “What?”
Luna sighed and rolled her eyes. “Lie down as I do. No comissatio, and I assume no convivium. You are… hm. Perhaps you know of the old pegasus rite. Symposium?”
“Oh! Yes. I know about that. Pegasus drinking party. Not that I’ve been to one. I mean, I have, but it was a long time ago and I was a bit of a lightweight.”
Luna chuckled. “I’m glad somepony still enjoys them. I have found that the rites today much tamer than once they were.” She poured wine for them both and then twirled her glass softly, to see the red life clinging to the edges of the glass before it faded back into the tiny sea. “Why are you here so late, good Cadance? Though I am pleased by your company, it is a bit odd. Are you a wanderer of late night halls, perhaps?”
“Aunty told me that you were feeling down, and I was here so…” She did not watch Cadance shrugged but knew it occurred.
“Hm. Of course. You cannot bear our Glory. I do not say it accusingly,” she said quickly, softly, as Cadance began to protest. “It is not a matter of what you wish but of your capability. I saw your eyes as you entered. Might I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“What is it like? To be one thing and yet another? Consider my interest personal as well as professional.”
Cadance frowned. Luna did see this, for she turned when there was a beat longer of silence than she had expected. Cadance did not frown at her, but rather at the wine in her glass. She drank.
“I’m not sure exactly how you mean that,” she said.
Luna saw herself and the room, then, as an answer bubbled up in her mind. She saw herself in repose, wine on her lips, moonlit and mysterious, smiling perhaps in a way that answered without giving anything away, eyebrow raised over eyes that stabbed through the heart and drank of the spirit’s blood. What an enticing creature. What a mask.
“Being an alicorn, but being different from ourselves. My sister and I,” she said. “It occurs to me now, as I ask, that perhaps I have asked beyond what was prudent.”
“No, not at all. It’s a fair question. I mean, we’re family.”
Well played. Luna smiled more genuinely, even if it hurt a bit. “So, tell me, youngest.”
Cadance looked into her glass for a few minutes, and Luna once again waited. Yet this waiting was easier. Softer. Shorter, certainly.
“Well… it’s a bit like having a weight on your back. Like having full saddlebags, maybe. Except it’s not just a physical weight.” She gestured with a hoof, turning it over and over, as if trying to roll out more to say. “Spiritual? Mental. It’s harder to think, and you feel like any moment something or someone is just going to…”
She didn’t finish. She gestured again, vaguely, and she took a slightly longer drink.
“It is a burden, then,” Luna said.
“It’s not the word I would use.”
“Hm.”
Cadance shrugged. “Think of the sun. You can’t look right at it. Or a candle, how looking right at it from very close is unpleasant. Yet these things in of themselves are not.”
Luna smirked. “I have never been a, ah, ‘fan’ of the sun, myself.”
Cadance chuckled. “I don’t know if it will help, but I tend to find Aunt Celestia’s unmasking very hard to bear. It always makes me feel… inadequate. Both of you do. But I’m getting better about it.”
“You have none of your own? I confess, I have not asked after your heritage. Not because I did not care, but because it seemed unimportant. You are my niece, and that was all I needed to know.” She smiled. “But I am curious now. Do you have your own?”
Cadance, to her surprise, looked away. She flushed, buried her face in her drink again.
“Yes.”
“Ah. And…? That was an odd reaction.”
“I’m… it’s different.”
Luna raised an eyebrow.
“Very different,” Cadance grumbled.
“Perhaps I shall see it soon,” Luna said, and smiled.
Cadance sighed. “I’m just… you and Aunt Celestia are so… imposing. Powerful. As I grew older, my aura manifested and it was very different. It’s weaker, yes, but its just…” she shrugged. “It’s different.”
“To be different is no crime, child,” Luna chided softly. “You’ve emptied your glass. More?”
“Sure.”
Luna poured. Cadance stared at the wine for a moment, and then looked up with a determined face.
“What has been bothering you, Auntie? If it’s alright to ask.”
Luna was silent.
She considered trying to explain it all. She honestly did. What would it look like? Would she just babble on and on, sinking deeper and deeper into the haze of dry, bitter, blessed intoxication? It felt unseemly, though she knew that unseemliness among friends and between family was sometimes the point of the comissatio, of talk over drink in the late hours of the night. And perhaps, just perhaps, it would be good. It was possible that in her ramblings she might hit upon the heart of the matter and find it out for herself even as she explained.
She made no decision. She just answered.
“I am worried.”
Cadance waited, and then asked: “About what?”
Everything. “Twilight Sparkle. But mostly risk and reward, and how the former is easier to come by.”
Cadance’s brow furrowed. “Twilight? What’s wrong with Twilight?”
What was, indeed, wrong with Twilight? What wasn’t wrong?
“It’s less that something is wrong with Twilight and more that something is right,” Luna said slowly, carefully, like a foal who imagines that to fall off her perch is to perish. “She is a wonderful young mare. But she is young. So young. Perhaps, perhaps, too young.”
“You think she isn’t ready?” Cadance leaned in, frowning. Recognition was in her eyes, or at least wine shone there, and the tones of one about to explain swelled in her voice. “Well, I mean, its very likely that she isn’t completely, uh, one hundred percent yet…”
“I have been thinking,” Luna said, striding along. “Often. Deeply. About what it is to be as we are. And more and more the thing that comes to mind, sweetest Cadance, is that we are dangerous. To ourselves, to others… and Twilight is a dangerous mare. She is a wonderful, kind, intelligent, and… and horribly, horribly dangerous… mare.”
She faltered. Stumbled.
Cadance seemed lost. “But… but she’s just Twilight.”
“Indeed.” A pause.
“She… what are you saying? I’m not sure I understand you, Auntie.”
“I was once just Luna,” came the answer, sudden like a hangmare’s noose. “Just… Luna.”
Celestia came unto her, as she walked in the places where only alicorns walked.
The palace has many floors. It has innumerable rooms and vaulted ceiling’d halls and nooks and boltholes. It had many things. It also possessed a floor which until very recently, only one pony had ever walked.
Like Everfree Castle before it, like the fortress of Solitude before that in the far north, like the high apartments of Jannah, like the well of the firmaments near the dawn of time, it was only trod by the hooves of those who had heard that creation song of the universe’s birth.
Luna walked it, back and forth. To and fro. She saw the strange, half finished, all abandoned works of Celestia’s unfettered power. The shapes that bent impossibly, the lights and colors which could not be categorized.
Celestia came upon her there, standing in a vaulted hall.
“You leave many things unfinished,” Luna said, quiet.
Celestia, behind her, said nothing.
They stood as they had when she’d spoken. They stood there for what seemed like years. It was only a few moments.
“I had forgotten your works, and the way you—”
“You were right.”
Luna turned then, and she knew that shock was written across her face like a royal decree in the common square. “What?”
“That I hide myself from unpleasant truths. That I hide myself from the things I have made. Behold, my gallery. The one before you, of yourself in Maldon’s Field, I tried to craft from light itself. Light made solid. But I did not finish. I abandoned it. How typical. See? Perhaps you see true.”
Luna began to panic. She knew this because at that moment she was split. One part of her simply stared, shaking her head, heart pounding. The other was aware of herself as a thing in the beginning rush of panicked negation, watching her Glory writhe around her like a cloud of doom.
Celestia held up a hoof. “It had not, in fact, occurred to me to give as much thought to what you obviously have. Of… nightmares. And hearts. And the act. Creation, I mean.”
Her face was stone. Unchanged, unchanging, flat with flatest eyes.
“No! No, you don’t mean that.”
“I do.”
Luna ground her teeth.
NO YOU DO NOT. I LIED. I AM A LIE.
The Glory that the Night had given her freely broke. It did not expand so much as it exploded. It rolled over the unfinished godworks. It destroyed the statuary made of sunlight, half-finished, Luna and their friends a hundred strong all unfinished, the paintings made with colors which no mortal could see, the walls, the ornate hallways, the workshops and the galleries. It washed over Celestia, and she did not resist. But she did not yield. She simply stood, and the current raged about her on either side.
It was not fury but absolute refusal.
But it was also spent in moments, and Luna stumbled backwards. She felt sick, weak. Small. Celestia strode towards her, and for a moment she was back in the ruins of Everfree, freed of her own self-created madness as her sister strode again imperious and she knew—
Celestia knelt. For the second time, her sister knelt beside her.
“Luna, I love thee.”
Luna shook. She had released so much.
“I broke your things,” she said.
“Luna, I love thee.”
“I have accused your servant, your friend. My friend.”
“Luna, I love thee.”
“Thou shouldst hate, always and forever,” she said. She sang it, for it was a language before language, the bare heart bleeding into the air, as it was before Equestria, before ponies built towns and lived in harmony or chaos at all.
“And yet I love. I do not understand you, Luna.” Celestia held her. She nuzzled her warmly, frettfully. She fussed at her mane. She kissed Luna’s forehead, her cheek, the ridge of her nose between her eyes. Her glory shone brightly and yet it did not hurt her sister’s eyes. “I wish to understand. I do not need to know everything to know that I love you. Do you know this?”
“I know this.”
“Please. Please, let me help you. Or tell me I cannot and let me love you regardless.”
“I wish you would not. Only sometimes, yet I wish it and should be damned.”
Celestia shook her head.
Luna continued. “I have to go to her tonight. I know I will not find what I seek. I know it now, but I must. I have sworn it.”
“Before the Song, on the Well?”
“Aye, both and cannot cry off.”
Celestia stroked her cheek. “Aye, and you cannot cry off.”
“Tia, what am I? Who am I? I see in the mirror a face I hardly recognize, and sometimes think that it cannot be me. For I too was your faithful student when we sang, and your sister so long, and now I see myself in history books and I find myself a spectre which haunts the dreams of foals. I am not a sister but the Adversary. I am not… I am not Luna but the Moon, but the Nightmare which lingers on after waking. It will all happen again and again. It will all…. All…”
She lost her voice. Celestia rocked her. The darkness began to fade, but in its wake there were only shattered images.
Celestia never looked at any of them.