Dancing Alone

by Jordan179

Chapter 3: Her Bibliophilia

6. The Great Imperial Library

First, she explored the Great Imperial Library. It was everything of which she had ever hoped and dreamed. Notebooks in saddlebags, she wandered in a happy daze down those stacks, the wisdom of millennia rising to the ceiling on either side of her wondering eyes. The librarians had finally gotten the Library back in order, retrieved the histories from the basement in which Sombra had put them for protection against a feared Equestrian sack, and had a functional library rather than a mere warehouse full of uncatalogued books.

She spent days there, absorbing the lost lore of the North-Realm. The very best books were missing -- hidden by Sombra somewhere that the librarians had not yet found -- which was a disappointment. But the disappointment was utterly overridden by the utter joy of the many, many, many lost books that were there, that she could find. She piled them up on the tables, made lists of them, teased herself with little tastes of them, then buried herself in utter rapturous reading such as she had never known before, her mind filled again and again and again with the ecstasy of new knowledge.

There was always something more to learn! Over a millennium ago, the Loyal Tourmaline had brought a cart-load of the most basic Imperial books out of the Crystal City, sadly obeying Sombra's last order to herself -- her own banishment -- and from that cart-load had come most of what Equestrians had previously known about the Crystal Empire. It had been a sketch, a skeleton of the vast lore the Empire had possessed. Now, instead of contemplating a skeleton in a tomb, Moon Dancer embraced the living, breathing flesh.

So much art, so much culture, so much science, so much magic! So much that was only hinted of in the Equestrian books, and so much that had not even been hinted of which revealed itself to Moon Dancer's wondering eyes and hungry mind. They had never bothered to develop the steam-engine, but they could do impossible things with crystals and electricity and swarms of tiny little machines. They knew the secrets of the Age of Wonders, and they sadly knew that most of them wouldn't work any more, because the world had ... changed? Moon Dancer only understood half or less of some of what she read, and there were tantalizing hints of even greater mysteries in the missing books.

She spent hours upon hours in the Library, emerging only to take her lunches, and often forgetting to do even that. She filled all the notebooks she had brought with her from Canterlot, mailed them back to her home where her house-sitter had been instructed to put them in her study; ordered more notebooks in bulk, filled these as well. She was exhausted every night, but supremely happy.

Sometimes she took a break from her work at the Library. She toured the City, seeing the monuments which had previously been but legendary descriptions to her. She took the tour of the Crystal Palace, of course, admiring its vast magnificence, seeing it with new eyes now that she understood how its swarms of living machines sought out and healed its hurt, rebuilding any broken part of it so seamlessly that the structure seemed eternal, untouched as it was by any decay despite the long centuries which it had stood.

What a wonderful technology! If it could be reproduced in the modern world, Equestria would grow fantastically more wealthy. It would be a step toward the ideal scientific equalism which would provide for each Pony according to her need, leading to the New Ponies who would be happy and loved for ever, not lonely misfits who couldn't even trust their own parents to behave honorably.

But the secret had been lost, forgotten in the chaos of the early middle Empire, when the Time of the Good Emperors had fallen into the chaos of the Age of Discord. Though Discord could not directly touch the Crystal City, he strove mightily to destroy it from afar, hurling barbarians, brigands and pirates at the Empire from without, sparking conspiracies and revolts and rebellions within. There had been a Time of Troubles -- a century in which there had been dozens of Emperors, because no Emperor could survive to rule more than a few years -- and when it had passed, much of the glory of the Empire had been gone for ever, abandoned to decline. Never to be recaptured.

Almost never. For her researches revealed something else, something which had plainly been expunged from the Equestrian sources. There had in the last century of the Empire, that same Disastrous Fifth Century of the Year of Harmony which had seen the fall of the Empire and the rebellion of Nightmare Moon, a noble of the Crystal Empire, who had plainly realized many of the same things which had come to Moon Dancer's own mind. A brilliant mind, a kindred spirit to her own, who had determined to restore the Empire to its former glory by regaining the lost knowledge of the past, and developing it into something greater in the future.

He had been an Imperial Prince. And his name had been Crimson Quartz.

7. The Secret of Crimson Quartz

The records on him were oddly-incomplete. Incomplete, because there was nothing about his ultimate fate, which was strange because he was of the ruling Quartz Dynasty, the same one from which Sombra himself had sprung. Oddly, because the removal of the records was itself spotty, and in strange ways ... Moon Dancer could not have described in detail what she meant by "strange," but she sensed that the one who had purged the records had not hated Crimson Quartz. To the contrary, she must have cherished him, been trying to protect him.

He had apparently become a high-ranking librarian, one who worked side by side with another librarian, the Lady Tourmaline Elbaite Boron -- the same Loyal Tourmaline who figured so importantly in the intellectual history of late Fifth Century Equestria! Moon Dancer had felt the thrill of discovery when she realized that identity. He must, then, have been a close friend of the nameless Crystal-Imperial Royal who took the reign-name of Sombros, as Sombros was the one to whom Lady Tourmaline had been so famously loyal -- yet Sombra was nowhere described in their association. It was a mystery.

She might have realized the truth earlier, had not Prince Crimson Quartz been such an obviously honorable and kind Pony. He had been attempting to achieve so much that would have been good not only for the Empire, but for Equestria, for Ponykind, indeed for all sapient life on the Earth. It had been such a tragedy that, right after his time, two tyrants, first Sthenarkos and then Sombros, had seized the Crystal Throne. Had Crimson Quartz only been given the time to succeed -- Ponykind might today be centuries in advance of its current technological and social development. It was so unfair.

It was when she found a document that had been penned by Lady Tourmaline herself that Moon Dancer finally grasped Crimson Quartz's more famous identity. It was a fragmentary journal, one that had been stuffed in some corner of the Library and then shelved under Autobiographical Fragments by somepony who plainly had not understood the importance of what it said.

In it, the Lady Tourmaline discussed some experiments she had undertaken with Prince Crimson Quartz on some sort of healing mechanism, a device which was intended to transfer life force from a healthy volunteer to an ill or injured patient, to speed that patient's recovery. There was mention of dangerous side effects, the possibility of harming the volunteer. At one point, for this reason, Prince Crimson had insisted on using his own life force for the transfer.

He, of course, did insist on acting as the donor for the experiment, despite the fact that both I and his other friends pleaded with him that such a risk was beyond reason, given his importance to Science, and to the Empire. He nobly asserted that it would be wrong for him to claim immunity of Person owing to his Station in Life, and commanded us to use him in the experiment.

The fool! Dear fool! Dear, beloved fool!

Science. The Empire. I once thought I loved these things, and I still do, for one is the Enlightenment of the Mind and the other the Preservation of that Sacred Legacy the Past has left us. Yet my love for such Abstractions is as naught compared to the tender regard in which I hold my dear Prince, that wondrous Person who has captivated my Heart as I had once imagined impossible. I would cast aside both Science and Empire, if in doing so I might preserve his most precious Existence.

He knows this not. He must make some Dynastic Marriage, and I would neither stand in the path of his Duty, nor stain his Honor. Yet, though it never be known to the World At Large, let these pages know the Truth -- I love him!

I am Tourmaline Elbaite Boron, a Lady of the Crystal Empire, last daughter of a proud House, and I shall remain forever maiden. I shall never wed, and the Borons go down to extinction, because I could never love any Other, having known even Crimson's Friendship. I am Tourmaline, and to my Crimson may I always prove Loyal.

The raw emotion of this, coming from one whom Moon Dancer imagined must have been very much like herself, flooded through her as she sat reading this ancient document, ten and a half centuries old, and preserved by the Crystal City's long stasis in a condition as if it had been but five decades old. Moon Dancer felt as if the Lady Tourmaline were reaching across the very gulfs of Time and touching her soul.

And Moon Dancer knew.

Crimson Quartz was King Sombra.

She fancied then that she heard a sound, but of course there were all sorts of sounds in the great Library, open as it finally was again to the scholars of so many nations. She looked up. Was that a hooded face briefly glimpsed, or an illusion born of light and shadow? She must be imagining things. This was no horror-tale, in which the virginal heroine (she smirked at that all-too-accurate and likely to remain all-too-accurate description of her self) stumbled across some ancient ancestral secret around which factions fought from the shadows, putting her own life in danger. This was reality.

In an ancient library in the heart of a time-lost city which has fallen back into our dimension from ... Somewhere Else, Moon Dancer reflected uneasily. Perhaps I should go back to my hotel.

So she did. After, of course, filling many pages of one of her notebooks. Her fears were one thing, but this was research.

8. Those Summmer Days, Those Summer Nights

She decided to vary her routine. She spent some time exploring the second-hand shops of the Crystal City. There were rather a lot of these right now, because the Crystal Empire had a shortage of bits and an abundance of ancient artifacts in remarkably good condition, owing to the preservation of the limbo in which it had spent the last millennium.

For Moon Dancer, of course, this meant books. She bought herself a small cart and some shipping crates, and went out day after day in quest of books.

Each day was an adventure. She never knew what she might find. Many of the Crystal Ponies had inherited or otherwise come by the libraries of the now long-dead Crystal Unicorns (some of whom were her own remote ancestors), and had very little sentimental attraction to these possessions, such as might have otherwise restrained them from their disposition.

Sometimes she hauled home piles of children's books and popular fiction, incredibly-fascinating because of the glimpses they gave her into the cultural assumptions of a world now vanished save for this one city, and terribly-changed even here by the scourging shadow of Sombra. Sometimes she found lost classics, books which had been tantalizingly-mentioned in sources available in Canterlot, but which had not been deemed sufficiently important by Lady Tourmaline to include in the cartload she had drawn out of the Crystal City just ahead of its millennial limbo.

One day -- which she long remembered in happy breathless dreams -- she discovered, just strewn out in front of a house in a street sale, the complete works of Downybeard -- the greatest general and one of the most insightful philosophers of the Early Empire, the Pony who had single-hoofedly saved the whole Empire from disintegrating when the Windigoes came, only to be slain by his jealous compatriots, mingled in a pile of trashy romance novels. She had managed to contain her excitement just enough that the seller did not jack up his prices (she mentally apologized to the Donkeys for the thought) and had bought not only the books of General Downybeard but also many of the romance novels.

Afterward she had taken them all to bed with her. Even she couldn't properly study that many books at one time, but this was no proper study -- this was a great orgy of reading that lasted far into the night. She first read a little of each book, teasing herself to the point of breathless excitement, then dived into first one and then another book, reading them rapidly and furiously, gasping with astonishment at the depth and breadth of unguessed-at lore that was now naked before her. Finally, in one tremendous burst of reading, she finished both his unabridged description of the Three Tribes and his analysis of his campaign against the Air-Pirates of Rollingcloud, overcome by the mighty mind of the great stallion.

As the morning sunlight streamed through the windows of her hotel room, she collapsed into slumber on her book-strewn bed, her body sore from her awkward reading positions, exhausted but happy, fulfilled as never before. This trip had been Paradise -- she was sorry that it would have to end. She had come north thinking she knew the joys of bibliophilia, but what she had experienced would forever change her. She had left Canterlot but a filly student in her mind; now she was truly a mare scholar.

And that was before she met Penumbra.

Author's Note:

Trained in both science and magic at Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns, Moon Dancer is especially able to appreciate the wonders of the Crystal City, especially its technological wonders. This is a place where the science of the Age of Wonders and the strange sorceries of a multi-millennial civilization have combined to make something lovely and strange.

Moon Dancer's bibliophilia (or is that bibliomania?) is of course mine, as are many aspects of her personality, both in the Shadow Wars Storyverse and in vanilla-canon. As should be obvious, Moon Dancer is far from cold and passionless. She's just sublimated almost all of it into her books, because her books are her friends. Her only friends ...

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

Right. This is just getting embarrassing...

It's very nice to see Moondancer in her element, as happy as she can be. But with a name like Penumbra, this new fellow is most likely the one who will set her sledding down the spiral into radicalism. That's sure to be tragic...

And given my track record, I'm going to find out in a few minutes.

[Jordan179]

6219108

Communism, which is basically the philosophy Moon Dancer is espousing, has in America been at most times a philosophy of dissatisfied members of the upper-middle to upper classes, who are generally dissatisfied for reasons which have very little to do with social justice or injustice. Moon Dancer, for all that I love her, is most definitely an emotionally-unbalanced Pony, who feels betrayed by her parents' inability to continue loving each other, and by her peers due to her own inability to make and keep friends.

What Discord did wouldn't have lasted past his re-petrification if he hadn't hit her with ideas which struck at weak points in her own psychology. He basically introduced a virulent meme into her mind, and it's destroying her from the inside by tempting her to do bad and dangerous things.

There are obvious analogies between Moon Dancer and two other Ponies: Twilight Sparkle and Starlight Glimmer. Twilight Sparkle was alienated much like Moon Dancer, but was psychologically much stronger to begin with because she came from a happier family. Though the old Twilight tried to deny it, she understood Love and Friendship because she'd experienced them as her normal condition growing up; she just had to learn to generalize such emotions beyond her family.

For Moon Dancer, unconditional love is something she only felt as a little filly, and it's something she lost when her parents drifted apart and increasingly found her inconvenient. Her younger sister, Teacup, has her own problems, and Moon Dancer has been drifting apart from her as well. Moon Dancer lost the few friends she made in school (she has begun to regain them, of course, at the start of the framing story, which takes place soon after "Amending Fences") and never made any new ones.

When one fails personally to connect with society, one tends to blame society rather than oneself. This is especially true when one is a smart but naive person, as is Moon Dancer. She is tempted to think in terms of grand schemes for changing the world, because they are less upsetting (and less frighteningly real) than the ways she would have to change herself in order to fit in better (which she could do, contrary to her fears, without abandoning her own uniqueness or code of honor).

One of the reasons why Celestia thought it so important for Twilight Sparkle to make friends was that Celestia knows all about the memetic dangers that can befall the intelligent, arrogant and naive. She knew that Twilight had the potential for greatness -- and that, if she attained power without learning to love and understand other Ponies -- that power could so terribly turn to great evil.

Which gets us to Starlight Glimmer. Starlight Glimmer is, in my current fanon, an earlier product of Celestia's potato garden -- in particular, Celestia was hoping for her to attune with Magic, and play the key role in pulling Luna out of her Nightmare. She was an attempt before Sunset Shimmer, who was an attempt before Twilight Sparkle.

Starlight Glimmer, unlike the young Twilight Sparkle, did value other Ponies. Unfortunately, Starlight was afraid to make real emotional connections with them, and convinced herself that manipulating them was the same as making real emotional connections. Marksism, with its concept of "vanguard intellectuals," was pure memetic poison to Starlight Glimmer, as it showed her how she might be the leader of a Utopia in which she could make other Ponies be good by forcing them onto the paths of what she deemed virtue -- by destroying the differences between Ponies which might lead to conflict.

Celestia noted with alarm the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of Starlight's thoughts. Celestia is an autocrat, but she is an enlightened despot, who rules well by ruling as little as possible. A Pony who regarded herself as the one true fount of wisdom and rode roughshod over the most fundamental liberties of her subjects would make an absolutely terrible Princess -- she would instead be a tyrant-queen! The influence on Luna would also be very bad, as Luna has displayed and serious tendencies toward miitary coup and dictatorship.

When Celestia finally rejected Starlight Glimmer, kind as the Princess tried to be, Starlight Glimmer still knew that this was a rejection, made worse by the very lack of animosity. Starlight Glimmer, of course, concluded that Celestia feared her and feared teaching her deeper lore (which was in some ways even true).

Unfortunately, the point at which Celestia made her decision was after she had shown Starlight Glimmer the unfinished last spell of Star-Swirl the Bearded. The spell from which Twilight developed the Destiny Restoration Ritual -- and from which Starlight developed the Spell of Sameness.

The Spell of Sameness utterly-horrified Celestia. It would destroy the most special thing about Ponykind as a species, one of the attributes which had led Cosmic Fusion to fall in love with the Ponies in the first place. Its use by a tyrant was obvious -- if put into effect before countermeasures could be developed, it could create an almost-unbreakable tyranny, because it would rob Ponies of the very courage and talents which alone would make rebellion possible.

Celestia seriously considered killing or imprisoning Starlight simply because this spell, in the wrong hooves (and Starlight had already shown tyrannical tendencies) was so very dangerous. She decided not to do this because to do so would be so very, very horribly against the Harmony -- and besides, she still loved and cherished Starlight, and hoped that she would calm down after some time spent in the real world outside Celestia's school.

When Twilight and the Element Bearers were nearly twisted to Starlight's purposes, Celestia wondered again if she had made the right decision. She's issued orders to find and arrest Starlight (what she did at Our Town was highly-illegal), but unfortunately, Starlight is a powerful and gifted mage. And powerful and gifted mages can mask their presence.

She doesn't know yet that Starlight is hiding in plain sight, right under her muzzle in Canterlot. And recruiting.

And that's where matters currently stand.