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One thousand years ago, history was changed.
One thousand years ago, Nightmare Moon was killed.
One thousand years ago, Equestria broke, and Celestia had to put it back together.
Special thanks to Skeeter The Lurker and Craine for their help with ideas and pre-reading.
Inspired by the cover art, used with the permission of the artist, LeStrangeLady.
[Originally planned to be a longer fic. I might return to this and continue it beyond just a one-shot in future.]
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This was fun to help, with, actually.
~Skeeter The Lurker
I have to say, that was wholly engrossing.
2941415
Glad you enjoyed it!
There is more to come, but not for a while, I'm afraid.
2941425 one thing that surprised me though was the fact that this story has the same name as another one of my fics. Quite interesting really.
This is AWESOME! I love it! Your characterization of Celestia is great and a lot of fun to read. This story had me hooked all the way to the end. Great job.
2941738
Hehe, thanks!
When I get back from my holiday, I'll get working on the second chapter. Thanks for the awesome art
Okay, first: I'm shell shocked that CRAINE helped you do this! Craziness, I tell you! That mental son of a bitch urged me to sign up with Fimfiction to further improve my writing, and THIS is the first story I come across??? Good God! I feel like the luckiest guy in the world!
*Ahem* Well... I suppose you're looking for a review. I must warn you, I'm a horrible critique, but I can try.
As LestrangeLady mentioned, the characterizations were some of the most effective I've seen. Celestia, in all her infinite glory, has been brought to life in this fic. Underneath that cold, stoic form, seasoned and sharpened by eons of rule, lays a pony as pathetic and helpless as her subjects. I love it, you hear me? Love it! I especially enjoy Celestia's hallucination. I won't lie to you; I shivered. I. Actually. Shivered. And I've read a gore scene written and edited by Craine. *Shudder loudly* Your profile says you're a novice writer. And I call 'bullshit'.
I'm pleased with the conflict grounds you've set here. While Equestrian subjects cherish, praise, worship, love, and honor their savior, Celestia is eaten from the inside out, slowly dying behind her own fleshy walls. You sir, are a god damned genius.
I don't really have any bad points here, which is terrible for constructive feedback, I know. But I hope I did good, for my first comment on Fimfiction. Also, when Craine gets back from whatever the fuck he's doing, give him a virtual slap for leaving RIGHT AS I ARRIVED HERE! The jerk.
--Favor
2943740
...And you tell me that your critique is horrible? Pish-posh!
Also, Craine is one of my best friends of fimfiction, actually. He's a great guy, helped me out a lot.
Anyway, thank you for the review!
2944268
Right?? That unbelievable bastard has a habit of helping other authors. Hell, the guys mentored me the last five years! Anyway, when you return from your trip, I sincerely hope this continues; its gold.
Mah heart has experienced a massive amount of feels; Please standby.
I request more from you and as FortunesFavor has said "Your profile says you're a novice writer. And I call 'bullshit'."
2955224
Thanks! More will be on the way.
And as unbelievable as it (apparently) sounds, I've been writing on-and-off for only about a few months. Critique from friends and family has helped me out a lot, though.
Well this is a nice spin on the elements of harmony not working, you've got my attention and I hope that you will be able to keep it.
I'm interested in where this will go and how much the world of Equestria that we all know and love will have changed with just this one simple action, will you be traveling forward in time to a alternate ponyville or will this compleatley skip using the already established characters?
Yes. A thousand times, yes...
This is the most authentic piece you've written, hands down. Nearly everything was perfect; the setting, the tone, the mood, characterizations. But the best part, one that I'm glad to see you dwelling in, was the inner conflict. Your sensory details brought Celestia down to the muck with us chickens in the most beautiful of ways.
Oh sure, she can act like she doesn't care. She can stand over her subjects with that bulls**t smile and pretend her hooves are clean. Pathetic, is what it is. And you've written it all in a way that captures and tugs the heart strings. We can feel things for Celestia, hope things for her. This is just... Continue this or I'll f**kin' kill you.
There is... one tiny, little, itty bitty... okay, it's a HUGE problem.
When I reached the middle of this chapter, I saw a name that shouldn't even exist during this timeline: Ponyville. Ponyville didn't exist until centuries after Nightmare Moon. If it did, Granny Smith would be... good God... Unless this is that alternate universe perk you told me about, disregard this problem.
If it isn't? Fix it. Fix it now. Right. Now.
Craine...
2989842
Oh shit, forgot about that.
hehehe, thanks for pointing that out
That... that was brilliant. I cannot say much else. I'm completely speechless. Celestia's emotions are hard to detect in the beginning, but at the same time, you just know she is suffering. The end only satisfies that theory. Her characterization is so strong, I can imagine this very character existing. I really can't wait to see how this goes. How Celestia is going on from here can only be questioned and somewhat feared. Love this, and it's only just started.
24.media.tumblr.com/a257ad5165644b1f79354634dfdee284/tumblr_mqo61uYbwk1rj6vd5o1_400.png
3012364
Wooo!
3014120
Um, ok, I'll take your word for it.
Thanks for the fave!
3014120
Dafuq?????
Writing talent as awesome as ever!
Alright, taken a good look over the story, I give it a thumbs up. You've gotten characterization down to a t, and is genuinely intriguing seeing Celestia's descent into madness. Not quite unnerving as some have said, but very fascinating.
You do have to be more careful with some of the formatting and mechanics of the story, specifically the follow up to your dialogue. You need to know when to capitalize the word following the dialogue, and what punctuation ought to be used at the end of it. Take for example this bit:
Ought to be:
Since the verb of the bit after the dialogue directly refers to the action of speaking the dialogue, that sentence is considered part of the dialogue, therefore the first word, by rule, shouldn't be capitalized.
Here, since Celestia isn't the one who spoke, there is a problem with the comma after 'once'. That dialogue is considered it's own sentence, thus it ends with a period. Like so:
(Slight typo with swiveled and the ellipsis. Fixed them for you.)
These problems are easy to fix, and once you get some practice, you'll be avoiding the mechanical problem that is recurrent in the chapter. As for formatting, some paragraphs are not spaced well, but nothing that a proofreader cant fix.
All in all, color me interested. Write on.
Hm.....
Interesting premise, well written,...
Continue, and pray the good work is kept up.
*looks at first fic he wrote before reading, remembers a scene where Twilight fights an evil Celestia that went mad after killing Luna. Looks at the plot of the fic* mother of Celestia. Did I bring this?
Lets find out shall we?
Back, and appearently not yet...but we'll see, This premise is excellent and I want to see more
denver.mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/img/mlfw4279-pinkie-friendship-goes-where.png
Whoa... I was not expecting something this good from a newer writer. That was really interesting. Wow, I'm kinda just sitting and recovering a bit here now. I'll give a review I guess.
I'll admit, at the start of this I was skeptical. The synopsis gatling guns rhetoric and promises only a change up to cannon just for the fun of it. Effectively a simple 'What If' story—it blatantly says this.
Then upon first entry, there's the lacking tabs and seemingly random paragraph breaks making the formatting look... well like fanfiction. There are a lot of lines that are dropped out of paragraphs for seemingly no reason, or lines that are separated from each other when they deal with the same topic. Actions are also split from character dialogue when it clearly could be used for inherent attribution.
Granted, our community does have a few homemade rules (namely a double carriage return after paragraphs rather than one), but in general, this stuff sets off a red flag.
What kept me reading though was the simple fact that the pacing was so good. You start right at the clip of the plot action, namely Celestia staring down at Nightmare Moon's corpse. The simple description of what shape Nightmare's body is in, how she's leaking greasy black tar—amazing. I loved it. The descriptive powers in the story are somewhat inconsistent but when you hit it you hit it perfectly.
Beautiful
.
Then the story touches up on how it all happened, and then a bit on how everyone hates Nightmare/Luna thus possibly seeding doubt into Celestia. After all, she's not happy or angry. In fact, she's not even sure what to feel, and that fact comes over nice and quietly subtle at first.
Finally, we get the burial scene. Oh god, that scene, that's what made me truly love this—what pushed your story far beyond something as simple as a 'What If'. Not only did it put me on the edge of my seat, but it showed so much with so little. Hardly any work successfully communicates like that. Celestia is trying to bury her guilt, quite literally putting a it to rest in what I saw as a clever metaphor. She likely had to give up on her sister at this point and did what was necessary, but she's horribly haunted by it all in the end. The whole illusion, where Luna breaths and screams with rage, represents her horror, her guilt and sadness that she's running from, that she's not ready to face. Maybe it wasn't Luna's fault at all, the walk past guards and citizens showed that much, and Celestia has killed her now. There's no going back at all, and she almost feels her sister calling to her, asking 'why? Why couldn't you help me? Why did you kill me? It's of course not Luna at all, but Celestia's conscience dripping through the cracks of her stoic sense of duty.
Ah, man. That was just awesome. Even my analysis only scratches what the reader gets to truly feel through that, whether they understood it or not.
In the end, I think this could have been written a little neater, I caught quite a few telly statements and LUS instances, but the message was great and came across through the story anyhow. I honestly see a lot of potential in you, and I'd like to encourage you to continue writing.
—Plague (Pathos)
3188978
That's an amazing comment, thanks! Nice to see some criticism.
I should really get around to updating this at some point. Lack of ideas and motivation has kept me, however.
That, that was equal part brutal and breathtaking, beautiful and heart-breakingly tragic.
Normally I have trouble with fics that have Celestia do something like this, combined with the guards disdain for Luna, but the amazing descriptions, incredibly evocative language, fantastic pacing and chilling, but amazing characterization spurred me onward. And i'm glad i did, the slow subtle build, the repressed guilt and sorrow, covered by pride and stoicism; that final, nightmarish, scene with Luna, that will be staying with me for a good long while as will Celestia's reaction, utterly chilling and depressing, seeing and feeling how much she loved her and what their roles as leaders had led them to. She seemed to have little choice, but in the same vain it was a choice between two wrongs, not harm her sister, or save the world at any cost.
I'll be interested to see where it goes, there's so many questions after-all. Why didn't the elements work, will Cadence show up, will Celestia be able to ever deal with the guilt and is there, or will there, be some ghost of her sister or is it only brought on by guilt?
Overall incredible piece.
Well, you went and did it, Prose. You went and murdered Luna. It almost seems inevitable, looking back. There was goodness and night in the world, and then you went and took it all away.
That being said, a disclaimer: I do not typically read short stories. I certainly don’t typically review them. However, I’ll make an exception for this, partly because I know you personally, but mostly because NMM is best pone. Just don’t expect too much out of me, since I’m dealing with an unfamiliar format.
Now, the premise: intriguing, if probably not super-original. The tone is quite dark, fitting given the seriousness of the situation. The length seems right to me, given that it’s essentially just a little snapshot meant to showcase the effects of NMM’s death on Celestia. Any longer and it starts to drag. I don’t really think that it needed to be any shorter, but again, I’m no expert.
Now, as I said, the purpose is primarily to show Celestia’s reaction. In this regard, I was rather impressed. It would be so, so easy to have her weepy and heart-torn. But you mostly seemed to keep in mind the old wisdom that the reader will weep when the character doesn’t. I think that your keeping in mind this simple truth is what really sells this story, and in fact, if anything, I think you should have taken this further. I found the end to be a little bit confusing, but I think you’re saying that Celestia hallucinated the whole crying/screaming thing with Luna?
Well, I would have changed that part, I think. You do such a good job of showing Celestia’s emotional distance throughout most of the story, I think I might have showed her callousness to the very bitter end. Perhaps she still imagines Luna crying or screaming or whatever, but goes ahead and slams the door of the (temple? Palace? Whatever) on her face. Then the story could end with her being crowned sole ruler of Equestria or something of that nature, with the tone and emotional distance of the narrative showing us her numbness. That’s what you should go for throughout the whole fic, I think: her callousness as a byproduct of her numbness and absolute inability to deal with the enormity of what has happened: the death of her one and only sister. In fact, I might even have gotten rid of the part earlier where she recognizes how the emotions will comes back to haunt her, and made her even more here-and-now focused, trying to push what has happened out of her mind.
Basically, I feel like there is one big selling point to this short story: Celestia’s callousness as a result of her complete emotional shock. (She doesn’t even need to realize how shocked she is; it may be even more powerful if you show the reader and let him figure it how for himself.) If I were to rewrite the story, I think I would take that up to eleven, so to speak.
Beyond that…we tend to get into the nitty gritty of the stories’ grammar, mechanics, sentence structure, description, all that. I typically find that somewhat boring and I’m not really used to focusing on that in reviews, so I won’t. Suffice it to say that while I overall thought you did a pretty good job, there is always room for improvement (there are typos in this story, despite its brevity), and for a short story like this, every single word counts. It behooves you to write, rewrite, and edit a story of this size as many times as necessary to get it as perfect as you can. And of course, how perfect you can get it will improve with practice.
So: overall, I was pleasantly surprised. I liked this story, and I felt like you gave Nightmare’s death at least a smidgen of the respect it deserves. Your use of emotional nuance was much better than I was expecting, and is definitely a strength that you can build off of. And yeah, there’s plenty of room for improvement - there always is - but you seem to have a ‘feel’ for storytelling which I can really appreciate.
Anyway. I’m no short story author, as I said, so I have less to say about this story than usual, but I hope it helps. Write on, Prose. ~ Sable
3426094
Wow, that was way longer than I was expecting, given the length of the fic in question. Still, it's good to hear that you enjoyed it. I like your thoughts on how this story should progress, and I'll take them into consideration.
Woah. Just woah.
I don't usually have time to read much on here, but seeing as this story looked interesting and coincidently has the same name as one of mine I thought I'd give it a go, and I'm glad I did
. This seemed nicely paced; getting in the little details whilst not boring with drawn out dialogue. I also really liked how you showed the bond Celestia had with Luna, calling her "Lulu", and feeling torn about what she did. I'll definitely try to read along with this 
. The only thing I could really find in the way of constructive criticism was several minor typos. In paragraph 31 Celestia is missing the 's' and just after that in the same paragraph I believe it should say "The rest of you". There was one more I spotted closer to the end, but I can't find it now... Either way, keep doing what you're doing!
4002555
Thanks for the heads-up, nigguh. Been a while since I've looked at this story. Unfortunately, it kinda sorta died.
Are you ever going to update this again?
4437889
I want to, but I've been busy with school and writing other things. I might just mark this as complete and hope to come back to it someday.
4437913 Ok then. I'll be waiting.
Living forever isn't hard.
Living with yourself is.
I love the concept, but the execution wasn't all that good. A bit too telly for my tastes.
2013