Chapter 1: Awakening
Her mornings and evenings were spent with her sister.
Some of this was purely social.
She discovered, to her happiness and embarrassment, that Celestia really, deeply did love her, despite everything she’d done both as Nightmare Moon, and – before that – as an increasingly-rebellious younger sister. For the first few weeks, Celestia was almost always at her side, save when actually transacting State business, and as Luna healed, she began to make a point of having her watch the State business as well. Luna was still far too weak to raise the Sun and Moon again, and so Celestia got very little sleep, taking what sleep she could in short naps in the afternoon and early morning.
Alicorns don’t actually need sleep. But they much prefer it. Luna realized, to her horror, that her sister must have been living like this for a thousand years, operating the Solar System entirely alone.
How did she stay sane? Why isn’t Equestria a charred and smoking wasteland?
Her respect for her sister increased.
Some of this was educational. Equestria had changed much in a thousand years. Some of this, like the factories and airships and railroads, Luna had seen from her exile. Much of it, she could not have guessed.
The ancient royal and noble lines had much declined. Most were still rich, but little remained of their old feudal privileges. The competent ones now served the realm in war and peace, while the incompetent ones … “drones” would have been the kind way to describe them.
There was one particularly-useless young prince, which to her dismay she discovered was the lineal descendant of Princess Platinum, and hence traced his heritage back all the way to the time of the Three Tribes. Her dismay turned to horror when she remembered a few facts which had not made it into the chronicles, and realized from whom else he was almost certainly descended.
Prince Polaris Blueblood, 52nd of His Line, addressed Princess Celestia as “Aunt,” as was of course his right. This was a legacy of the numerous formal adoptions by which Celestia had become first a junior, then by dint of her immortality, by far the most senior, member of every one of the ancient Great Houses. As Celestia’s sister, Luna of course was addressed by the same title. Luna did not tell him, and devoutly hoped that he never discovered, the other appellation for her which he might have still more accurately employed.
His talent was supposedly for navigation, though Luna never noticed him navigating anywhere other than to food, liquor and mares of negotiable virtue. He was, not unsurprisingly, a coward – Luna could have made a game out of scaring him just to hear him squeak, were it not for her knowledge that this sort of game would be an early step on the same path that had led to her previous downfall.
He was also a great snob and a bit of a bully, who used his position to push around anyone of lower social status, which was most of the people in Equestria. To be fair, he was not a very cruel bully – cruelty takes malice, and effort. In him, apathy and hedonism acted as restraining virtues. Luna would not let him be a bully in her Palace, though, and after she made him squeak a couple of times, he ceased such attempts.
He was a pathetic member of the royalty. But then, mortal royalty and nobility had become increasingly irrelevant in modern Equestria.
She saw that now what were still called the middle classes, and to whom the nobles still felt superior, now dominated. These composed everything from what had been the gentry all the way down to any artisan or clerk or tradesman with a passable education.
From the upper layers of these had come Twilight Sparkle, who could trace her lineage back almost to the time of Luna’s banishment, and had the manners but not the titles of the aristocracy. Around the same level in formal status, but far above it in actual wealth, were princes of industry such as Fancy Pants, who could trace his lineage back only a century, yet on whose decisions factories and towns rose from virgin soil across the whole nation.
It was largely the middle classes who did things now. They were the scientists, the scholars, the industrialists, the bankers, the engineers. They were the ones who were building the bright new world she had seen growing from the Moon. They were making the new Equestria. They knew that their fortunes had been founded and could only be kept by their own labors, or they remembered lost fortunes and strove to regain them. In either case they disciplined their own conduct, worked hard, and had an immense regard for the practical virtues.
Some of them almost frightened her with their intense drive, but she found that she liked them better than the decadent aristocracy. Yes, she missed the old days of lightning and thunder, of desperate sallies and heroic fights, the ponies of iron who had fought the battles Luna had led on the too-often occasions when Celly had missed a trick in her Long Game, and the round had to be salvaged by blood-price rather than adoptive connection.
But she was no romantic fool about it. She remembered how many good ponies had died untimely in those struggles, and while an Equestria so united and powerful that its foes usually dared not attack might be more boring, she judged it happier for most folk,
There were still, of course, the ordinary working classes, and below even them the abjectly poor. Yet even they seemed healthier and happier than they had been a thousand years before. Goods were more plentiful, and cheaper to buy in terms of time spent laboring. Food was abundant, carried by steamships and steam trains.. Towns were healthier, doctors more able to deal with diseases. Famines and plagues belonged to a thankfully-banished past.
This, too, made her happy. She remembered the times she and her sister had frantically labored to relieve provinces stricken by hunger, on a scale which dwarfed even the powers of alicorns to end. Or when invisible death had stalked the land, felling the innocent with its contagions, making both her and Celestia feel utterly helpless as they watched their little ponies perish.
She was not at all sorry that she would not have to see that again.
Of course she rarely spoke to any of them. One really useful thing about being not only a Princess, but also a dreaded immortal accused of demonic practices, was that she could remain silent, frown a bit, and no pony would dare address her in anything but conventional pleasantries. And no pony would ever suspect that she simply had no idea what to say, and feared seeming foolish in the saying.
Sometimes this made her somewhat lonely. But she was used to that.
***
She had nightmares, of the conventional kind, regularly.
Most commonly she dreamed she was back on the Moon, sometimes alone, sometimes tormented by the Shadows. Once she dreamed that she was completely alone, but that when she looked up at the Earth it was a dead world, its forests bare, its cities fallen to ruins, and in those ruins the bones of ponies – and seething through the remains of buildings and inhabitants alike, like maggots on a corpse, were the Shadows. That one left her trembling for a good hour, for she knew that this was what her own possessor had meant her to do upon the real Earth.
Sometimes there were confused dreams, or at least she remembered them that way upon waking. She would be trapped on or around a terrible, Sunless world which was neither Earth, nor Moon, nor any planet of the Solar System. It was airless, incredibly cold and old, and covered with ruins that seemed almost as old as the planet. Everything seemed silent and dead, and yet there was a terrible wrongness rather than peace to this silence and death, as if here entropy brought no peace, but instead a protracted torment that would last until the very matter around her evaporated in proton decay.
There was also something very strange about the sky, but that she could not and did not want to remember.
Was she seeing the true world of the Shadows? Or one created from her own terrors? She knew that sometimes, in this world, she would see the Shadows, swarming, everywhere – but creeping slowly, terribly slowly, as if even the processes they used instead of life were exhausted, here on this ancient charnel world. These were not her worst dreams of this place. In her worst dreams, she would see the Shadows, and then see herself. And she would know what she was.
She was one of the Shadows. And always had been.
Sometimes she had dreams that she did not remember, from which she would wake saying strange things. Sometimes she did not remember what she said when she woke.
One in particular she was sure she had taken from some very confused memories of Moondreamer and her Cosmic self combined.
“We did it, Sunny. And it was everything Starlight promised. The Great Wish. A civilization without physical instrumentality. Direct telepathic contact with a sentient, self-sustaining magical vortex, fuelled by the energies of a star. Paradise, forever and ever. Causality no more than a personal preference.
“And we did it, too, with our Cousins. We saved causality, saved the Universe. We stopped the Great Wish, ended that whole timeline. Even the Great Wish couldn’t stand against our Cosmic powers. Their world died, screaming.
“But we forgot one thing, Celly. Shock-heating, shock-cooling. We weakened the crystalline structure of spacetime, like a too-rapid heating and quenching of steel.
“We cracked the Cosmos. And now they are coming through!”
The last lines she shrieked, and promptly fell back to sleep. She had remembered none of it when next she waked, but this had been one of the nights she had slept with her sister, and Celestia remembered it all too well.
It reminded her of a mixture of an old science-fiction movie from the Age of Wonders, the reality that had been the World That Was Lost, her part in its end, and her fear of the Shadows.
But it couldn’t be true. Could it?
***
She made some new friends. To her mingled happiness and shame, her Night-pegasi had survived ten centuries of her absence, forming her Night Guard even without a Night Princess to guard. She had feared, in her madness, that Celestia would wreak her vengeance upon these innocents, the descendants of the unwanted children she had taken and altered so long ago. She should have realized that such cruelty was not her sister’s way. Instead, she had found useful things for them to do: primarily, as auxiliaries of the Guard Corps, night-scouting in war and performing search-and-rescue in peace time.
Their survival was her happiness.
Her shame was in how pathetically loyal they still were to her, despite her terrible betrayal both of them and of all Equestria. She knew that, had she won a thousand years ago, and remained in thrall to the Nightmare, they might be the only living ponies on a dying world, sustaining the terrible spectral remnants of a civilization, living in deep mines off fungi and bacteria, as the planet began to cool toward the minimum temperature possible from internal heat alone. And yet, for a thousand years, they had revered her memory, worshipped her as their Mother Goddess. Even as Nightmare Moon, they loved her, with a love of which she knew no version of herself was worthy.
Within a week of her return she had been forced to explain, in no uncertain terms, to the leaders of the Night Guards that no, she was not going to lead them in a coup against the “Sun Tyrant,” and she would really prefer if they ceased all plotting toward such an end. Their disappointment was palpable, and made her miserable. But she could hardly repay her sister’s trust by plunging the realm into civil war, just to make them happy.
Besides, she knew it would have been hopeless. She knew her sister. In her subtle and kind and utterly sneaky way, Celestia probably had their conspiracy riddled with more holes than a colander. Come to think of it, there had been one of the Night Guard mares at that treasonous meeting whom she never saw before and never saw again, who had given her a suspiciously smug smile upon hearing the most outrageous of their plans. Indeed, she recalled the mare winking at her during one particularly lurid rant regarding “Nightmare Corona.” And both she and her sister were, of course, accomplished shape-shifters.
This utter and insane devotion made it hard for her to make real friends among them. They loved not herself, but an imaginary version of herself who was some cross between The Megan Returned (and didn’t it make her feel old to realize that she and her sister were among the few beings still alive on this Earth who would even comprehend the significance of that reference?) and some sort of Mother Goddess of the Sacred Night. Their vision of her was beautiful, and touching, but it wasn’t the mare she saw in the mirror.
They would, of course, have offered her an obvious release from one kind of loneliness – had she been heartless enough to take it. Seduction would not even have been an issue: had she asked them to, their stallions would have lined up, even fought duels, for the honor of pleasing her in any way she desired. The wives of those stallions would probably have counted it an honor, too.
Which was precisely why she could not do it. These were her children, or at least the remote descendants of her adopted children, and if their culture had become a bit strange in the millennium of her abandonment, it was her own fault for having summoned the Shadow in the first place. She should have been there for them, loving them, nurturing them, as Celestia had been there for the ponies of the day. Instead, she had made a mad bid for power, and in the process betrayed her most loyal followers.
She did seduce one young and exceptionally loveable stallion of her Night Guard, to a degree. She flirted with him outrageously, stole a few kisses, and even slept with him several times, though in an almost entirely chaste fashion. He held her when she woke in confusion, frightened by the nightmares, and eventually those nightmares became less frequent.
She genuinely loved him, though she knew more as younger friend than as potential mate, and when she saw that he was truly falling in love with one of her hoofmaidens, and that the mare returned his affections, she pretended to be her sister and did everything to encourage their union. The mare – also a Night pony, had a physical defect which prevented her from flying, and which had led her into self-hatred and self-harm. She healed that defect – which she should and would have done years ago, had she not been in exile – and visited the mare’s dreams to soothe the bitterness in her soul.
Of course she put an end to her concubinage with the stallion, relatively chaste as it had been. She knew that in her own loneliness it could not have continued to remain chaste for much longer, and she did not want to destroy his hopes for genuine happiness. And in time, the Guardspony broke through the hoofmaiden’s shell of pain and won her heart.
That gave her far greater joy than could have any conceivable debauchery. And besides, she had always found debauchery rather repulsive, especially as a way of life for royalty.
***
The aid she had given her hoofmaiden reminded her that she was a dream-walker, and more to the point why she loved that ability. She began – first in a small way – to roam the night intangible, a body of long-wave radiation, drawing a small degree of sustenance from dreamers and paying them back by banishing their bad dreams, and performing subtle surgeries on any longer-term madness. She was, like all Alicorns, to some extent an emotivore, and it was this that had led to the legends of her as a lamia, though in truth she helped, rather than harmed her hosts.
For the Alicorns partook somewhat of the nature of all ponies, and though it had been a very long time since anyone could reliably claim to have seen one of the emotivoric and eusocial Flutter Ponies, she still had her version of their life-linking talent. She could probably have used their even more famous ability, too, had she had a whole swarm of Flutter Ponies – or Alicorns – beside her. Since there were only three Alicorns known to be alive today, this eventuality seemed improbable.
For that matter she also swam quite well, when she so desired. She was also a passable singer, though she fancied herself to have a more varied repertoire than had the other famous vanished Pony kind.
So once again the Night Princess patrolled the dreams of the ponies, and drove away the nightmares. She tried not to interfere too greatly in the lives of those ponies, but when she found those nightmares to be caused by true and tangible evil, she intervened more directly. This was necessary less often than she had feared, for in a thousand years, the Equestrians had mostly become rather good ponies, even by the historical standards of their kindly species. But when it was necessary, she did intervene – and evildoers who had imagined their evil safely done in secret found they were not as safe as they had hoped.
***
She tried her best to stay away from Ponyville, and from Celestia’s chosen champions. Especially from their leader. She told herself that this was Twilight Sparkle’s territory, that six such champions were more than a match for any likely threat, and that Celestia herself was kept well-informed as to the situation in that area by Twilight’s Friendship Reports.
She told herself many flattering things, from time to time. Too bad she was still in part Honesty, so she couldn’t believe them.
In truth, she did not want to walk Twilight Sparkle’s dreams, to find out who she loved, and to writhe in the painful awareness that the object of this love would not be herself. She could distance herself from the most embarrassing, horrifying or repulsive dreams of strangers, approach them like a surgeon attempting to save a soul. But she could not so distance herself from the dreams of someone who had been Dusk Skyshine. And to enter another’s dream with the intent of manipulating or spying upon them for one’s own personal benefit – that would be a terrible thing to do.
***
So passed Princess Luna’s first summer, since she had been freed from the Nightmare. And if she still had nightmares, sometimes, and no one to hold when she woke, it was something she deemed her duty to bear alone.
So she did just that.
Stats
Page generated in 0.022 seconds
Total duration
1,008 users online
1,570,725 hits today, 2,280,440 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Well this was nice, even if it seems a bit weird to me that Luna's main reason for not wanting to try to overthrow her sister isn't learning from past mistakes or sentimentality, but that her sister's near infallible troll logic would pretty much beat anything she could throw at her.
3723900
She loves her sister, she doesn't want to overthrow her, and she's well aware that she probably couldn't overthrow her, and that the transparently-obvious conspiracy of her Night Guard leaders would be especially unlikely to work. She was not the one who brought up the topic of overthrowing her sister -- her followers did, and she shot the idea down.
It's just that the fact that Celestia herself was probably at that meeting, apparently without anyone but Luna noticing this fact, makes the conspiracy seem even more futile from Luna's POV.
Note well that Celestia doesn't seem to take it all that seriously either: she does nothing to punish anyone involved!
3724080 would she really have done much to punish them regardless? She basically did phase out most of the war and strife in Equestria in a thousand years after all...
3724111
Well, if they had actually launched their intended coup, Celestia probably wouldn't have let them remain as a formed body of troops within her own Palace. Celestia simultaneously made a gesture of trust toward her sister (by letting her keep her Night Pegasi) while making it obvious to Luna both that she was well aware of the situation and that she bore no ill will toward anyone involved.
The message was clear: You can keep your followers safe by discouraging them in this, which is exactly what Luna proceeded to do. Luna knows Celestia well enough to be aware that her older sister wouldn't hurt anyone out of spite.
3724111
To elaborate: even if she did have to punish the Night Pegasi, Celestia would have done it by either breaking them up as a unit and parceling their members out to other formations, or by sending the whole unit to garrison someplace far from Canterlot. She would not have clapped them all in a dungeon, and still less executed them, unless she really could see no other way to prevent innocent ponies from being harmed.
Celestia does not like to hurt ponies. Or any sapient beings, really.
"Only Nixon could go to China" Blueblood has his uses as a diplomat. Blueblood IS a spoiled rotten coward, but he'd be a blank flank if he was truly a worthless entity. To call Blueblood a bully IMHO however is unfair, he sees those around him as servants (which is different from what a bully sees their PLAYTHINGS as).
I like you remember that Celestia's most powerful weapon isn't her magic, but her thousands of years of life experience.
The biggest theme in the Pony POV Verse is that the Nightmares ARE NOT alien parasites, but in reality that pony's dark side and come into existence much like the Witches in Madoka Magica.
And all that being said, IT IS AN HONOR that you chose to include snippets from my verse in your own. Thank you!
3731628
Luna is not an entirely reliable narrator when it comes to Blueblood, whom I actually don't despise as much as she does. He violates almost every principle of honor she holds sacred, so she is bound to underrate him.
Eh ... yes, you're right about the difference between a bully and a snob. But Luna's really not in a good mood about what she perceives as a severe decline in the aristocracy, and Blueblood offends her. Thus her judgement.
I'm taking a compromise position in my fiction on why alicorns go Nightmare. They can do it on their own, and Luna was far toward such a sanity loss a thousand years ago. But there are also the Shadows, which actively look for corrupt and powerful beings to possess -- corrupt to make it easier to control them, and powerful to make it worth controlling them. A sanity-slipping alicorn is from their point of view the perfect host.
This of course makes this more inspired by your Pony POV universe than being in strict canon with it. This is unavoidable, since I'm (I think rather obviously) building up the Nightshadows as Bigger Bads to blame for many of the unfortunate events that have happened, and many yet to come.
I'm glad you mostly like what I'm doing, despite its non-canon status relative to your world. I really, in particular, like the way that you tied all four MLP continuities into a single epic story, and since I've always been a huge fan of fallen and lost civilizations, I couldn't resist the notion of the G2 world as being a lost age of technological wonders buried deeply in the G4 world's past.
I really hope you keep on writing your stories too, as I love them.
3731628
I'm also, you may have noticed, trying to strike a medium between Luna as the Incorruptible Pure Pureness and Blameless Victim that many of her fans see her has being (but if she were that perfect, she would never have gone Nightmare) , and Luna as some sort of mad nymphomaniac berserker out of a feminist version of John Norman (sort of a Luna-riffic version of Molestia). I see her as an extremely good but also flawed pony, who generally tries to do the right thing but sometimes loses control of her emotions -- which I think is the way she's actually shown in her canon appearances.
Note that in canon, even after she's freed herself from her madness (or possession, or both) she scares the crap out of Ponyville on Nightmare Night, starts bitching at Twilight, the one person in that town who is still sticking by her, and then in "Crystal Empire" glowers at Twilight again, apparently because she's jealous that Celestia is trusting Twi rather than herself with this important mission. This is not Incorruptible Pure Pureness here. But we see in other episodes (and other parts of "Luna Eclipsed," even) that she genuinely likes Twilight, and that she has done and still does a lot of good.
(For that matter I also see Celestia as both good and flawed -- she's just better at hiding her flaws than is her more moody sister).
I know I'm going to get criticism from someone down the road for depicting Luna as good but flawed, so I'm laying my cards on the table with this comment.
*There's a "to" missing here. Like, "to whom the nobles still felt superior" or "whom the nobles still felt superior to."
Wow. That's some fanatic loyalty right there. After a thousand years of presumably benevolent rule by Celestia, the Night Guards are still raring to take down "the Sun Tyrant." Are they just assuming that that's what Nightmare Moon would want, now that she's back? If so, Celestia is to be commended on keeping them away from the element bearers while the Guard could still have interfered with the outcome of Luna's return.
4014915
Fixed the missing "to."
It's not actually the normal Night Guards, but the "Night Pegasi," aka "Batponies" or "Nocturne" (as Georg calls them). Luna actually created their kind: there aren't that many of them, and almost all of them are in one or another branch of the Royal Service. Their culture is a bit ... strange. They've been expecting Luna's return for a thousand years, and have their own ideas about what she will lead them to do. Luna's rather horrified when she finds this out.
And yes, Celestia made certain that they weren't in a position to interfere during the Longest Night.
Nice A Fire Upon the Deep reference.
5260451 it's been a while since I read those books... What, exactly, is "pinkness" referring to, in them?