2. Incongruous
The dungeon remained empty most of the time. Incarcerating a pony rarely happened anymore; Canterlot Castle only had a dungeon as a relic of past times. The custodial staff maintained everything, of course. No cobwebs or dust adorned the corners, no spiders or rats prowled the walls. Yet the air still smelt stale, the cold still clawed at Celestia’s coat. Even a sun goddess couldn’t keep away such a permeating chill.
She stepped through a few doors. No guards stood watch or accompanied her. Cadance had offered to come along, but Celestia had declined. Finally she arrived at the cell farthest from the entrance.
“Hello, sister,” she said simply.
“Hello, Celestia,” Luna replied. She did not turn from the wall. “I assume you know what I did, by now.”
“They are still cleaning up the remains, but yes, I am aware.” Celestia glanced around the cell Luna had chosen. It looked as empty as all the others. “We could be having this conversation in a more comfortable room, you know. You don’t need to embellish your explanations with theatrics.”
“I wanted to remind myself of something, of how it feels with no wind and no sun.”
Celestia sat down. The cold clawed at her again. Even with the power of the sun radiating from her, the stone tiles felt like ice. The architect had probably enchanted them to do that. “Why did you do it?”
“I was scared. Scared of what might happen if he won.”
“We were all scared, Luna! That didn’t give you the right to take his life!”
Luna finally turned away from the wall. “Hiding would not have worked. He would have found Twilight eventually. And she would not have been able to control our magic, not even a little.”
Celestia watched Luna carefully. Something about her body language seemed off. “There is something you aren’t telling me, Luna. Simple fear doesn’t explain such a heinous action.”
“I’ve had to live in a dead world, Celestia. The thought of it scares me more than you could imagine.”
Celestia opened her mouth, but paused. “I…I did not think that your time on the moon had affected you so strongly.” She tried to hide the guilt from her voice, but it leaked out regardless.
“No, that is not what I meant. I…” Luna sighed, turned back to the wall. “There is something I have needed to tell you, Celestia, ever since I came back from the moon.”
She rose, and turned her body to face Celestia. Her gaze still lingered on dungeon walls. “What…what would you say if I wasn’t the Luna you knew?”
Celestia bit her lip. “Luna, I know that your time on the moon changed you. More than I thought, given this—”
“No, it is more complicated than that.” Luna sighed. “A long time ago, very long, I…” Luna tore her gaze from the dungeon wall, made eye contact with Celestia. “Perhaps I could show you, that would be simpler.”
“Show me wh—”
Before Celestia could finish, light began to leak off Luna’s body. Her horn didn’t ignite, so no spell was being cast. Lines of blue magic spiderwebbed across her coat, and they grew thicker and brighter as more appeared. Luna closed her eyes, took a deep breath. Her coat began to flake off, like paint peeling off an old building. Bigger chunks began to peel away, and black hair poked out of the holes. The fallen bits hit the floor and evaporated.
Luna took another breath, and blue light flooded the room.
Celestia uncovered her eyes. She tried to say something, but she found no words.
Luna stood in front her, but it wasn’t Luna. She looked like Nightmare Moon, tall and sleek. Yet her armor was absent, her fangs were missing, her eyes and pupils retained their normal color and shape.
“Luna, this…this is not funny.”
Luna sat down. Her eyes were now level with Celestia’s. “This is my true form, Celestia. I would never joke about something like this.”
“I do not understand,” Celestia said. It had been a long time since she had last said that, but the situation warranted it.
Luna took another breath and smiled. “It feels so nice, not having to wear that. I didn’t realize how cramped it had become,” she said. Celestia caught a glimpse of her canines, worn flat instead of pointed and ridged.
The smile faded. “It all happened such a long time ago,” Luna said. “Nightmare Moon whispered so many sweet lies to me, told me how poisonous and destructive you were.”
Celestia said nothing. Luna had never spoken about this so openly before. The sudden candidness unsettled her as much as the words themselves.
“I tried to ignore her, at first. I wanted to be loyal to my sister. But it didn’t last. Seeing all those ponies enjoying the day so much and sleeping through the night, it made Nightmare Moon’s claims so hard to write off.”
“Luna…”
“She made me so many promises, Celestia.” Luna closed her eyes, and the edges started to glisten. “She kept telling me how much better things could be, how much respect and adoration I could get, if I only did one thing.”
Luna opened her eyes, slowly. She bit her lip, and tears ran down her cheeks. “So one day, I gave in. I was weak and I gave in. And…” Luna moved her head, tried to look at Celestia and failed. “And I killed you.”
“I don’t think you did, sister.”
“No, no that’s not all.” Luna looked up at Celestia. “Once you were dead, I got rid of the sun. I made everypony build me a new castle, I kept listening to Nightmare Moon, all the whispered promises and lies.
“And eventually, everypony was dead. They couldn’t live without the sun, after all.”
“You’ve made your point, Luna,” Celestia whispered.
“And eventually, Nightmare Moon stopped whispering to me. I was all alone in a dead world for a millennium.” Luna smiled again, and it looked even more forced than the last one. “I would have done anything to escape that, even ask Discord for help.”
“And what did Discord do?” Celestia asked.
“He told me that history was immutable, and I told him, made him send me back anyway.” Luna turned away again. Her tears had stopped, but her voice lowered. “He threw me backwards in time, to this time. And when I got here, Luna was waiting for me. Your Luna.”
“My Luna?”
“She was hysterical. Nightmare Moon had already gotten to her, poisoned her. I tried to reason with her, I— I tried so hard to reason with her, but she wouldn’t listen. She attacked me, and…”
Silence saturated the room. It matched the chill. The silence stretched on, and the cold reinforced it.
Celestia stood up, teeth clenched, and the cold retreated slightly. “And what?”
“And I killed her. I put on this disguise, and then I went to confront you in the throne room. I had to act it out properly. We fought and I had to make sure it looked convincing—” Luna’s eyes widened as pressure hit her throat. Luna’s back slammed onto the ground, her mane rippled and her wings flared.
“You mean to tell me that you killed my sister?” Celestia hissed.
“I am your sister too, Celestia.” Luna coughed. “A different one, but I am. I had to kill her, she would’ve destroyed the entire world.”
Celestia leaned down. She held her hoof to Luna’s throat, tried not to push too hard, tempting as it was. “And it’s just that simple? You travel back in time and fix your mistake and everything simply works out?”
“I had to fix my mistake, somehow. I had to…had to try something.”
Celestia grit her teeth. “If you traveled back in time and killed yourself, then why are you still here?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“Perhaps there is nothing left of Luna in you.”
“T-that’s not true…”
“You never questioned the mechanics of your journey before now? You were content to kill Luna, but you couldn’t be bothered to question why that didn’t kill you too?”
“Of course I questioned it!” Luna pressed her face into the floor. “I had no other choice! I had to end all that suffering, prevent it somehow!”
Celestia stood up, released her grip. “I understand your response to Tirek, now. All those years alone, corrupted by Nightmare Moon, they turned you into a sociopath, a pony who uses murder for all her problems.”
Luna rolled onto her side. “I tried so many things, Celestia. I tore apart the libraries looking for a solution. I tried every time travel spell I could find, tried to convince my past self to change her course. But every time it would fail. I would return to the present with nothing but a new memory. Another delusion among my collection. I had to end it somehow, I had to.”
Celestia turned to the door. “It sounds like your memories are not the most reliable source of information.”
“I had to protect Equestria, sister! If killing myself was the cost to pay, then I would gladly pay it again.”
Celestia turned to leave. “If you killed yourself, why are you still here?” she asked quietly.
Stats
Page generated in 0.019 seconds
Total duration
755 users online
532,508 hits today, 1,822,946 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.®
....bitch?
5896907 Eeyup. OOC bitch, at that.
If this is the case, the Elements "reforming" her was all theatrics. Probably after being fired, they found nothing amiss to harmonize and thus Nightmare Moon had to transform herself in that time. As well as break her pretty armor...
Maybe change the number of years Nightmare Moon wants to be sent back in the first story.
Looks like she adopted another name change as well. Identifying herself as Luna and not Nightmare Moon despite all she has done. Possibly starting to forgive herself? Or maybe lying to herself in that it was the only way. Thinking back, she has left multiple universes and therefore multiple Discords on desolate worlds.
cdn.meme.am/instances/500x/54405059.jpg
See, here's the part I'm not getting. The loop seems to look like this: Luna becomes NMM, kills Celestia, waits a thousand years, asks Discord to send her back, gets defeated by her younger self, who repeats the cycle. No matter how many times she did that, it sounds like the only cycle she'd remember is the last one she personally experienced.
5898596
My assumption is that, upon failure, NMM is sent back to the present and tries again.
5897916 I thought "centuries" sounded better, but I guess in this case she would want to emphasize the actual number anyway; changed it to "millennium" to hopefully be more accurate.
Celestia is too angry to think straight right now but she's right. Something about this doesn't scan right. If she killed her own past self, how can she still exist? Answer: She can't. Which means she is somepony else. I don't necessarily mean that she isn't Luna, I mean that she isn't our Luna.
Discord was right - history is immutable... at least your history is immutable. But someone else's history? That you can change at will. The only way for Nightmare Moon to beat the time lock of a fixed point in history is for her not to have encountered a fixed point at all.
In the end, Discord was still the Trickster God. He gave poor, deluded little Lulu exactly what she thought she wanted... just with a little of his own special brand of ironic justice mixed in.
5899982
I agree. I don't think her younger self killed, but I assumed she had tried diplomacy every other time and those attempts had failed.
Celestia's ethics are just a tad bit dubious. Just a tad.
This story would work if Celestia was totaly incompetent and so were the elemnts of harmony. We know that Elements have their own mind. From this we can tell that this story could never happen because Luna was put to stasis by the elements. The immage on the moon was Luna not Nightmare moon. Thanks to that Nightmare didn't have acces to Luna.
5900713
Maybe its all a virtual reality created by the Discord in Nightmare Moon's dead world? And Luna/Moon only thinks she went back in time.
I wouldn't put it past Discord. He's probably just laughing as he watches it like a show.
On rereading this, I have noticed a way that it could be improved:
I think this would be better as "candor", as it's a double modification of that word, along the lines of (for a hypothetical example) inform->information->informationize. (There are real examples but I can't think of them right now.)
6192707 I agree the length of the word does make the sentence a bit more awkward to read. The two words have subtly different meanings, though. Candor has slightly more positive connotations, whereas candid implies more bluntness. I think the slight awkwardness of the phrasing is worth it to better match the situation. "Candidness" is a bit uncommon, yes, but it is grammatically correct.
Thanks for the note, either way
5900713 On a bright note.
She saved another world from a dark possibility.
Fascinating, innit? Multiverses are finicky like that to a three dimensional entity transversing on the ray of the fourth dimension (What we can perceive without a doubt). We end up in existential crisis of what is real anymore if everything around you can simply be one of the many infinite copies of the same thing.
Hypothetical scenario: you encounter someone who is your deceases loved one. In your history, he/she died. In his/her history, your counterpart died.
What's to say that your loved one is still alive or this is simply a lookalike and should be treated as a separate, unique entity?
For once I agree with Celestia. Why IS Nightmare still here if she killed her past self?
Ugh... I'm getting a headache.
7325985
I know! The spell that Discord cast to send Nightmare Moon back in the past to stop Luna works like the TARDIS! The reasons for my thinking this are as follows:
1: It sent her back in time and to the castle in the Everfree.
2: When she came back through time, she remembered what had happened.
3: The spell was able to hold the timeline together, despite the fact that Nightmare Moon had killed Luna.
In Doctor Who, the TARDIS can:
1: Send someone through time and space
2: Allow the occupants to retain memories of events that they change
3: Hold the timeline together even though the Doctor had saved Gallifrey.
So far, the spell and the TARDIS are three for three! The only difference being is that one is biological technology (technology that's alive), and the other is a spell!
7325985 think of time as a river Rivers can flow in many different ways by killing herself she unawarely made another alternate universe which is this one in other words Another River for the Waters of time to flow
5898596 The whole issue is that it's not a cycle. NMM would try a time travel spell, go back, make no difference to the timeline, run out of time to change her own younger self's mind, then try another spell.
Discord sent her back to either a different timeline to create an alternate universe, or he used a certain type of time logic in his spell, which follows:
Going back in time and killing yourself doesn't make a loop, time just carries on due to the future you that traveled to the past being a separate entity, and time being a single point.
Thus, killing Luna simply created a dead-end detour. The time line will run once with the line of NMM winning, up until the point she travels back to.
The moment she kills her past self, the time line diverges and everypony now follows the new line where NMM takes Luna's place.
The old version still exists and can be accessed if you know it's there and how to find it (looking at you, Discord), but it isn't "looped through", it's just "there" as the original version.
Yeah, time travel is usually just one big headache
TIMEY WIMEY STUFF (AND WHY ARE YOU MAD ABOUT HER KILLING EVIL GOAT MAN)
Would that count at homicide,
sororicide,
or suicide?
Regardless, how is she still around after killing past Luna?
Multi-verse theory confirmed!
5900713 You don't seem to understand time travel logic. It's okay -- most people don't. So here's the rub: if Luna is able to travel back in the first place, then nothing will happen to her. Ever. Logically, if she would have never existed as she is in the present by killing herself, then the butterfly effect would also work just as well to cause her to cease to exist. Example: a single molecule of O2 being displaced is enough to stop the sequence of events that lead someone into the past, so the fact that Luna is able to exist in the past proves that her presense is independent of anything happening in the future. In short, she will always exist in the past no matter what she does. It's that simple. This is true for multiverse AND single timeline.
There are a few ways to, according to current and speculative physics, allow this to work. The first is that there is a multiverse and she just went to a different one. This is the most simple explaination for time travel, and the one that, I assume, you think occurred. The second option is a doozy: it requires mass to be taken from outside the universe or be created from nothing (even less 'nothing' than vacuum energy, which should be impossible) in order to replace the time traveler's mass, position, and velocity; for the original time traveler's temperature to be changed to absolute zero and stop interacting with every intrinsic field... somehow; and for every single field interaction in the universe to reverse itself -- with the exception of the time traveler, of course -- until the desired time in the past. Naturally, this would require an omnipotent being, which Discord may or may not be.
And that's it. There are no other methods for true, full universal time travel into the past that truly could exist, given that time is a physical state. However, hypothetically, 'time' could be reversed in a local sphere a light year across without affecting anywhere else. This way you don't need to create matter from nothing, but instead take matter outside the volume you want in order to act as the original you. You would still need omnipotence, but it wouldn't violate conservation of mass and energy. Even more practically, maybe we could find a way in real life for simple pseudo time travel of individual particles using a downscaled version this method.
Oh, and for our discussion, it actually doesn't matter what actual method the author choose for time travel: the logic stays the same either way. Even if fictional time travel invents many other fun timw travel methods that are incompatible with or universe. As long as the butterfly effect logic is sustained, it doesn't really matter how they acomplish time travel to me.
“We were all scared, Luna! That didn’t give you the right to take his life!”
Yes it actually did though.
But as fans of this scene know, that is NOT the case!
Oh yeah!
As Cell from DBZ abridge said "multiverse theory is a bitch" but, in this case maybe not so much of one.
7325985
Simple this one is from a time-line where she didn't die. Since she tried to make that the last resort it plain to see that there are many time-lines where she lived until the end of the world.
7407219
nope! gallifrey were displaced into the end of time. its sol system were contained in temporal barrier. "artificial time" were generated inside by the timelord technology.