Come with me, Luna

by a human

Recovery

Two months later, Celestia was still beside herself. The crying was over, but that only helped so much, because now she was in a constant depressed haze. Luna's family tried everything they could think of to lift her spirits, but nothing worked. So they, with some reluctance, finally decided to let Celestia see what little of her parent's last effects appeared not to contain disturbing cult materials. It didn't contain much useful either, but in absence of anything else to try, it was worth a shot.

"They're in this chest," Luna said, patting the dust off a large, intricate wooden chest in their attic. "It was in your house, filled with things…" Luna paused. She had seen the inside, so she couldn't say it was left behind as a loving token without lying. Unsure, she decided cautious tact would be the safest option. "…I think they wanted someone to have."

Celestia stared at the chest longingly.

"Do you want to be alone?"

"Yes, please."

Luna left.

Celestia looked at the chest. She circled around it. It was so elaborate looking. It had to have some hidden meaning. She was sure her parents would never buy a chest like that without a reason. It would be like them. They always had a reason, always had a plan, one that she was sure extended to even their smallest actions.

That's why Celestia found it so hard to believe they had, with no plausible reason, suddenly committed suicide. She really wished someone would just tell her the truth about what happened.

But none of that mattered now, because Celestia was sure the chest would give her answers. She unhooked the front latch and opened it, bracing herself.

Inside, Celestia found the largest collection of banal, useless crap she had ever seen. She was surprised anyone collected any of these things in such quantity, let alone her parents, and let alone as last effects. Old yearbooks, class rings, clippings from sweepstakes, dull pencils, erasers, coupons, and other garbage filled the box. If there was anything useful it had been removed. Celestia hit it in frustration.

"Dammit!" she screamed. "Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!" Tears began to form. "Why does everyone have to patronize me!? Why can't anyone tell me the damn truth!" Once again, she collapsed into a sobbing mess, unable to handle the sheer cruelty and incomprehensibility of her situation.

Then she heard a clicking sound. She looked down. A small slot had opened towards the bottom of the chest. Wondering if it was what she thought it was, she looked inside the chest again. As she suspected, it was subtle, but the inside didn't completely reach the bottom.

She pulled open the slot, which revealed a hidden compartment. The first thing she noticed was a letter on top. Recognizing her mother's handwriting, she immediately grabbed and read it.

"Celestia,

If you are reading this, we are most likely dead, and your guardians have most likely hidden our actions from you. Don't blame them. Anyone would misunderstand our intentions from the outside.

If you did, however, our lives would be for naught, so we have enclosed all our knowledge in this briefcase. Inside are pure facts. We will not attempt to make anything more palatable than it really is. Read it, interpret it, reach your own conclusions, and we hope you choose to continue our research."

It was short and curt, but it had a ring of truth to it. This is how Celestia knew her parents. Driven, honest, but not sentimental. She was glad for even this small piece to remember them by.

But that wasn't all. Beneath the letter was a large, flat briefcase, too flat to hold anything but a single layer of papers. Celestia opened it.

Inside, with what was no doubt extremely complicated magic, it was bigger than the outside, and stuffed to the brim with a vast collection of documents. She started sifting through them. She couldn't make heads or tails of anything this quickly, but they seemed to be describing various incantations and prophecies. Intricate illustrations adorned most of them. One in particular caught her eye.

It was a picture of her. She was sure of it. But the scroll it was on was obviously ancient and made far before her birth. How was that possible?

Then she noticed that on the drawing's hindquarters was that mark. That exact same mark that the kidnappers had tattooed on her.

That mark of the sun.

But if the kidnappers had done that, they must have had access to these documents, because the marks were identical. Since her parents went to such elaborate means to keep these documents secret… did that mean the kidnappers were her parents?

It was definitely worth investigating. Celestia closed the briefcase, climbed down the ladder, and started carrying it to her room.

On the way she ran into Luna.

"What is that?" Luna said, unable to restrain her utter confusion. She was reasonably sure that chest didn't contain that briefcase. It looked too… practical.

Celestia tried to think of something to say. She knew that Luna's parents were trying to hide something from her, but she wasn't sure if Luna was involved. She ended up settling on a particularly ungraceful, "It's nothing."

"Was that in our attic?"

"Yes." It wasn't a lie…

"Let me see."

Celestia was not prepared for that. "What?"

"I bet it's embarrassing photographs of my parents or something. Let me see."

"What!? No!"

"Come on!"

They started struggling over the briefcase, and in the confusion, Luna snapped it open. Celestia gasped, fearing the arcane documents would spill out and be taken away from her.

Instead, they were rained upon by a veritable ton of half sharpened pencils.

Luna spit one out of her mouth. "That was in that chest, wasn't it?"

Celestia looked around, confused. She realized the briefcase must have multiple storage compartments, one only visible to her. Luckily, this gave her the perfect pretext. "I thought I'd empty it and use it for school," she said with as much embarrassment as she could muster.

"Okay," Luna said. She started picking up pencils with her mouth and redepositing them into the briefcase. She hoped Celestia would get the hint after about five, but she didn't. "Do you mind?"

"Oh. Right." Celestia used her magic to put all the pencils back in the briefcase and close it. She started heading back to her room.

"Wait," Luna said. She paused and looked down. "Did that… help?"

Celestia looked back. She smiled. "You know what? I think it did."

– – – –

Ever since that day, Celestia appeared to undergo a miraculous recovery. Luna's family attributed it to seeing the chest. That was half right. The chest meant nothing to Celestia, but the documents its secret compartment contained entranced her. The things they described were so outlandish and fascinating she couldn't help but read them voraciously whenever she got the chance, even if they did seem ridiculous to the point of being fiction.

But then she decided to put them to the test, and, mostly out of curiosity, tried one of the minor rituals described. To her shock it worked perfectly. She tried another. The same. The more she reread the documents, the more she realized they described the real world, and proposed an entirely different system for understanding the underlying workings of magic, one far more efficient, accurate, and powerful than what she was being taught in school.

With her newfound knowledge, class magic exercises became child's play, and she quickly soared to the head of the school. With increased understanding of the documents, she could even pull off feats previously thought impossible, making her participation in the introductory magic courses somewhat ridiculous. The school therefore decided to give her free reign of one of the magic laboratories to conduct her own research.

This was, of course, exactly what she planned.

Now she had all the resources she needed to attempt the most difficult, draining, intricate spell described in the documents. It was her mission from then on perfect the holy grail of her parents' research, the entire point of their existence for the majority of their adult lives.

Knowing that her parents' death was not in vain, that their work was beyond genius, and that she would, most likely, be able to continue it, was more than enough to raise Celestia's spirits. She became confident to the point of being cocky, and despite having a quite meager social life before, somehow attracted a large group of friends. Her and Luna started becoming distant. Luna didn't mind terribly, happy to see her friend finally out of her deep pit of depression, but she did yearn for those older, simpler days when it was just them.

Then the serial killer appeared. Their arrival sent the town into a scared submission. One day someone found a horribly mutilated body and from then on it never stopped. Each day had a new victim. The killer's only motive appeared to be harvesting organs. Each victim had one missing, always extracted in some intricately, sickeningly efficient way, and nothing else touched. They had no interest in valuables or any normal values whatsoever for that matter, because the victims had utterly nothing in common. Capture was hopeless. They teleported onto scenes, got the job done, then teleported away, never taking a step or leaving behind the faintest trace of magic residue, something previously thought impossible. The victims hardly even got a chance to scream. At some point, the rate increased to two victims a day and the death toll was over 100.

And somehow Celestia was not able to take any of this seriously. This drove Luna nuts.

"Don't you care about anything besides yourself!?" Luna yelled.

"Of course I do," Celestia said. "I just know the serial killer won't touch us."

"How!?"

Celestia smiled. "Woman's intuition."

Luna looked at Celestia with a face reserved for ponies engaged in dangerous stupidity. "Really."

"Just trust me. I'm sure they'll be done soon."

"Why?"

Celestia smiled again. It was beginning to become unnerving. "I'm sure they're close to their goal," she said. She turned to Luna. "Tell me, Luna, what could anyone possibly need more than 100 bodies for?"

– – – –

Exactly as Celestia had predicted, though, the next week the killings stopped. That would have been strange enough if it wasn't for the way she entered school the next day.

There was nothing terribly odd about any of her actions. What was strange was how she performed them. It was hard to point out anything specific about it, but Luna knew everyone else suspected something too. She could see the edge of doubt forming on their faces. Each of Celestia's steps seemed labored yet powerful at the same time, like she was restraining herself. She seemed to move more… smoothly, something Luna would not believe possible had she not seen it with her own eyes. She wondered if Celestia had been working out, but couldn't think of any opportunity for her to do so, especially since she had definitely not been like this the day previous.

But the strangest thing was her hair. It didn't look that different, but something about it now made you nauseous if you stared directly at it for too long. Luna spent more time than was probably safe examining it, and after closing each of her eyes, realized that it had, somehow, stopped moving in perspective.

Other than that, however, Celestia acted exactly the same as usual, and Luna, in her ignorance of magic and thus just how impossible everything she saw was, dismissed it as another failed experiment.

– – – –

That night's dinner was oddly forced.

"Hello, dear."

"Evening weather's nice, isn't it?"

"Lovely."

"Pleasant."

"Unbelievable."

"Stunning."

Luna didn't get the code. She looked at the disgusting red mass that, to the best she could figure, was only on her plate. "What on earth are we eating?"

"I'm," Luna's mother stuttered, "trying… something new."

Luna arched her eyebrows. "Which is?"

Luna's mother looked at Celestia awkwardly. Then back to Luna. "It's… a surprise."

Whatever it was it was awful. Luna vomited into the bathroom sink afterwards. She only finished it because her parents looked so desperate. But Celestia…

At that point, Luna was suddenly overcome with a wave of nausea and exhaustion and couldn't continue that line of thought. She crashed into bed and instantly fell into a deep sleep that, in her last moment of consciousness, inexplicably filled her with terror.

Comments

[a human]

3411375
I'm going to assume that's a good thing.

[New Spark]

You're a genius writer.