Do like origin stories? I do, especially ones with no real canon behind them. This one is about Celestia. It is about what it’s like to live in a time when day and night are broken, when a night can last days at a time—and when days can burn. It’s about what it feels like to raise the sun.

To Bring Light to Eternal Darkness has been selected for an Equestria Daily Story post. In the story, I put Celestia front and center, relating her story in first person from before the founding of Equestria, before she was an alicorn, before she was royal, before she knew powerful magic, before the concepts that the pony tribes could live in peace, before gender equality, and before she even understood the meaning of her cutie mark. She tells a story about how doing right by her family forced her to challenge the gender roles she was brought up to believe were right, and to learn to fight against those that would use you because they covet what makes you strong.

The story is the first in a cycle of stories that take place in the years leading up to the events in Hearth’s Warming Eve during a time where a certain royal unicorn has the name Platinum. It is a novella of seventeen chapters, all completely written, to be serialized in hunks of chapters totaling about 3,000 words per week.