By Luna's Light: Moondancer
By Luna’s Light: Moondancer
Moondancer was still in the warehouse were Luna had brought her after Raven’s attack. She was one of the only ones still there. Technically Twilight’s friends, and some of their friends, were still here but they were about to leave soon; they were already at the door, waiting for Princess Luna to give the signal for them to leave, to meet up with Rarity and to bring back Twilight to save them all. Sunset Shimmer had gone to get Queen Celestia, that is Princess Celestia, out of the palace along with her daughter. She had taken Lightning Dust, the pegasus who had saved Moondancer’s life – and, more importantly, Twilight’s research – with her, even though she was still injured (‘Don’t sweat it, glasses,’ she’d said, when Moondancer had brought that up. ‘After all, getting hit in the head doesn’t matter when there’s nothing there to start with, right?’ And then she’d grinned in a way that was completely crazy…but kind of cute at the same time). Bon Bon had gone with them as well, bandaged hand and all.
Princess Luna was gone too, of course, taking with her Brass Bolt and a few of her guards too.
The only pony in the warehouse that Moondancer knew, and who weren’t preparing to leave to go and save Twilight, was Lyra. The rest were all Sunset’s ponies, or Luna’s guards, or the zebras working on their giant robot. She was sure they were all decent people, but she didn’t know them.
Just like she didn’t know the purple unicorn with the scars on her face and neck who stood to attention by the door of the austere grey office. She had introduced herself as Striker Sentinel, which didn’t was an unusual name and which help but remind Moondancer of the project Sentinel under which Starfleet had cloned Twilight, but she didn’t have the courage to ask if there was any connection there. Striker’s eyes were so cold, that Moondancer didn’t have the courage to really speak to her at all.
Her manner didn’t really invite conversation.
Besides which, Moondancer was supposed to be working. She was supposed to be analysing all of Twilight’s research and working out what it was that she had stumbled upon, or been close to stumbling upon, that had gotten her killed. She had to find out what was so important that Raven was determined to destroy it all.
If she could work out what the connection was between Raven and Starfleet, and how all of these disparate-seeming pieces fitted together, then she would consider herself to have done a good day’s work. Because there was a connection, there had to be. She could feel it. Maybe that wasn’t the most academic or scientific way of looking at it but then you couldn’t boil everything down to a science. Twilight had taught her that. Sometimes you had to trust your instincts, just like sometimes you had to trust your friends.
She glanced up from her work, from all of Twilight’s papers and her own notes strewn across the table in the centre of the office, to look at Lyra pacing up and down. Bandages covered the stump where her hand used to be, the hand that Raven had taken from her. They couldn’t reattach it. There was some talk that Lyra could get a prosthetic, but she didn’t have one now. She had a stump, a constant reminder to Moondancer of what was at stake in all of this, of why she had to crack this puzzle and find the answer before it was too late.
Lyra’s pacing was a little distracting, but Moondancer couldn’t pretend not to know the reason for it.
“I…” she hesitated. “I’m sure that Bon Bon will be okay.”
Lyra scowled. “I ought to be with her.”
“You’re hurt.”
“And she isn’t?”
Moondancer was silent for a moment. “I’m sure she’ll be okay. I’m sure that they’ll look out for each other.”
“All the same,” Lyra muttered. “I should be with her. Or…I know that I’m not at my best, I know I’d probably get in the way, but…I hate this waiting, sitting here, waiting for her to come back. Because I love her, you know. And so it hurts me to let her go, every time.”
Moondancer bowed her head. “If…if you need something to take your mind off it, I mean you don’t have to, but…I could use a little help with this.”
Lyra looked at her for a moment. “Sure, Moondancer, I’ll help. It’s all for the good cause, right?”
Moondancer nodded.
Lyra approached the table. “So…what are we looking at?”
“Twilight was researching the early history of the space ponies, from their own records,” Moondancer said. She shuffled around the papers layering the desk until she found what she was looking for: the introduction to a dissertation written in Twilight’s hand. “She was going to write a brief account of it all for publication, and she was considering writing a longer-form work. Her intent, as she describes it, was to explain to Equestrians how the space ponies came to be the way that they are now.”
“Okay, but how did she get hold of space pony records?” Lyra asked. “Weren’t they destroyed along with Unicornicopia?”
“Some of them, but others were rescued from the archives when the people evacuated, and others were held on other worlds,” Moondancer explained. “Most of them were moved into the palace archives, which is where Twilight had access to them. At some point along the way, her initial intent turned into something more serious. It has something to do with this symbol, the old unicornicopian rune for creation, which is also the same symbol that we end up with on our necks when we get our conversion treatments. They have something to do with it, and so do the monthly shots.”
“They’re poisoning us with the vaccines?” Lyra asked.
“Maybe, but in that case what’s the connection to space pony history, would they be poisoning themselves? And in those early years they didn’t have vaccines,” Moondancer said. “Wait…”
“What?”
“They didn’t have conversion bureaus back in those days either,” Moondancer said.
“Yeah, but they didn’t need them did they, who were they going to convert?”
“Themselves!” Moondancer cried. “Space ponies aren’t born with hands or feet any more than we are. Even the Grand Ruler wasn’t born that way, according to his own account he converted himself into a bipedal form when he had to rebuild his own body after his injuries from Nightmare Moon, and whether that’s true or not-“
“You don’t think that it’s true?” Lyra asked.
“Twilight wasn’t convinced either, listen to this…um, if I can just find it, where is it, where is it,” Moondancer shuffled through all the clutter until she found what she was looking for. “Okay, so this is from Twilight’s diary from before first contact with the space ponies: ‘Shining Armour gave me a tour of the barracks today. He’s so proud to have been made captain, he couldn’t have puffed his chest out any more if he was trying. It was great to see how popular he is with all of this troops, nopony I met had a single bad word to say about him, and in fact all of them seem to like and respect him enormously. In fact, I was supposed by how friendly everyone was, when I’ve seen the guards on duty they’re all so stoic, but I guess they just act that way because they’re working. Shining said that the barracks can be really rowdy at times. And then Twilight – because she was copying this – skips over some stuff with an ellipses and then ‘When we got to the Mess, Shining Armour showed me the Wall of Captains; it’s the back wall of the mess where the names of all the Captains of the Royal Guard are listed together with their dates of service. He didn’t admit it, but I could tell that my brother was really proud of the fact that his name is going to be up on there some day.’”
Lyra smiled. “That’s nice, but I don’t really see the relevance.”
“Twilight copied that fragment from her journal and beneath it she wrote, ‘I was looking through my old diary when I came across this. It intrigued me because I thought, looking back, that there was something funny about the names on the wall. Nevertheless, I thought that my memory could be at fault so I went back to look. Nobody uses the old Royal Guard barracks now, as the new Guard have their own facilities, and so there was no one to stop me from looking around the Mess. I looked at the Wall of Captains, and what I found was both intriguing and disturbing. His name isn’t on the wall.”
There was a second page attached to the first via a paperclip; Moondancer levitated it over to Lyra, who took it in the grip of her own telekinesis.
“Looks like a rubbing,” Lyra said. “From the wall?”
“Yes,” Moondancer replied. It was a rubbing that Twilight had made from the Wall of Captains. “Look at the dates.”
Lyra studied the rubbing that Twilight had taken for a moment. Her green eyes widened. “But according to this then the Captain of the Guard during the Nightmare Moon incident was somepony called Valiant the One-Eyed. He got the job…thirteen years before Nightmare Moon and kept it until five years after she was sealed away, have I got those dates right?”
“Yes,” Moondancer said. “Now, according to Twilight, she mentioned this and the Grand Ruler told her that, due to her excessive grief at having lost him in the chaos of Nightmare Moon’s attack, Celestia had had his name removed from all the records.”
“That doesn’t sound like how you deal with losing somepony you love,” Lyra said. “If I lost Bon Bon…” she was quiet for a moment, doubtless considering how she might well lose Bon Bon this very day. “If I lost her then I’d mourn her, but I’d remember her, too. I couldn’t ever forget her, even if I wanted to. I certainly wouldn’t cut her out of my life and pretend that we’d never met. Who does that?”
“I know, Twilight thought it was a stranger answer too, she says so here.”
“Did she talk to Princess Celestia about it?”
“No, she never got the chance,” Moondancer replied. “Besides, I’ve done some research of my own on Captain Valiant, the pony who is attested as captain during that period. Now, if the Grand Ruler’s explanation holds then you could say that he had been captain during the five years before Nightmare Moon, and Valiant was his successor, however Valiant’s career is quite well attested during the period in question: he was a pegasus from a small farming town on the Saddle Range, he was born Cloudwater because his family made a living using small clouds to water the farmers’ crops for them, but he left his home and made his way to Canterlot where he impressed the princesses enough to be admitted into the Royal Guard; he seems to have tried changing his name several times to something more martial but nothing stuck until he was commended for his bravery during the attempt by the dragon Hespera to steal the treasures of Canterlot, at which point enough ponies started calling him Valiant that the name stuck. He also lost an eye to the dragon hence ‘the One-Eyed’. It doesn’t seem to have slowed him down, though, because he won several tournaments and eventually became Captain of the Guard; he didn’t resign until he lost his wing fighting off some gryphon raiders and couldn’t carry on his duties any more. Celestia must have been fond of him because she kept him on as an advisor for many years after until he retired from public life altogether. He spent his last years in an estate provided for him by Celestia herself. And this is all documented in numerous sources of provable veracity. By contrast, all the records of Celesto’s tenure as Captain of the Guard come from after the union of our two realms. So either Celestia orchestrated a huge conspiracy to write Celesto, her one true love, out of the history books altogether-“
“Or the Grand Ruler is lying,” Lyra finished.
“Which we kind of knew already,” Moondancer admitted. “And it doesn’t get us any closer to finding out why Twilight died.”
“I don’t know, if I was an evil dictator then I might be willing to kill to keep my secret safe.”
“Okay, I can accept that argument, but that wasn’t really what Twilight was working on and if that were the case then why the need to destroy Twilight’s research? Anyway, we’ve got a little off the point which was…um…what was the point again?”
Lyra thought back. “Um…oh, right, you were saying about the conversions.”
“Right!” Moondancer said. “So, as I was saying, even space ponies aren’t born in this bipedal form. They have to get converted just like us and just like children here it happens when they’re old enough to start walking. But, in the old days, when the very first space ponies were created, they didn’t have the sophisticated methods of conversion that they have now, the technology wasn’t advanced enough, so they used magic.”
“I’ve often thought that most of what space ponies call magic is really their technology,” Lyra said. “I mean, their attacks are powered by their suits, aren’t they? Their energy is the battery on the suits; it’s not their own energy like our magic.”
“Well, it’s a little more complicated than that, from what I understand,” Moondancer said. “The short version is that space ponies do have their own magic, they just don’t use it very often. Instead, they rely upon the power of the morphing grid, which is where their weapons and the battle forms of their armour are stored when they aren’t using them. That’s why it all appears when they activate their Starfleet insignia, and it’s why the weapons appear when they call their attacks. However, the morphing grid is not itself pure technology; it’s sustained by the magic of the Grand Ruler himself, or that’s what they say and I haven’t come across anything to make me contradict that.”
“So all of the Starfleet is running off the magic of this one guy?” Lyra said. “That’s…sweet Celestia he’d have to be…I mean…how powerful is he that he’s got everyone drawing down on his magic and he’s still as powerful as Celestia? And why, why not just let the space ponies use their own power.”
“I would have thought that that was obvious,” Striker said.
Moondancer jumped, she’d honestly forgotten that the other unicorn was there. “W-what do you mean?”
“Control,” Striker said. “By keeping the Starfleet tethered to his power, power which I presume he can withdraw at will, he keeps it firmly under his control. Thus he ensures that all must obey him, and none can rise up. If they tried…they would be rendered absolutely powerless, wouldn’t they? Or rather, they would be thrown upon the resources of their own magic, a magic which he has ensured they are not taught how to use and probably cannot even begin to understand before they are hunted down and killed by his loyal servants.”
Lyra shivered. “That’s a cynical assumption but I guess you’re right.”
“It would explain why even Equestrian ponies are encourage to rely upon their armour, and why unicorns joining Starfleet are taught to fight hand to hand rather than with magic,” Striker said. “Grand Ruler dislikes any source of strength he cannot control.”
“Like Twilight’s strength,” Moondancer murmured. “Now, in the present time the conversion technology runs upon a similar principle to the morphing grid, in that the nanites with which we’ve been injected all contain a trace of the Grand Ruler’s own magic to animate the process.”
“We’ve all got a piece of his magic in us?” Lyra asked. “Ugh.”
Moondancer nodded. “But before that, the records say that the Grand Ruler would do it himself, in batches, and it uses this symbol, the same symbol that has been given to us, this creation rune. I’m sure that this has something to do with it but if Twilight had figured the answer out she didn’t say there’s just this word ‘reverse’ underneath the picture and I don’t…”
“Moondancer?” Lyra asked. “Are you having a brain-wave or something?”
Reverse, Moondancer thought, as her eyes widened behind her glasses. Reverse, does that mean that the spell can be reversed; is that what you’re getting at, Twilight? Or do you mean that…reverse the rune.
Moondancer reached for her reference on space pony runes, flipping the rune of creation over so that she could see what it looked like in reverse. She thumbed through the book until she found an image to match.
Absorption. A rune used in spells that involved draining life or energy or magic out of animals or plant life, now rarely used.
But then that would mean…
Is that it? Is that what you’d figured out, Twilight? Is that why you had to die?
Is that the true power of the Grand Ruler?
“Moondancer!” Lyra snapped. “What are you thinking?”
“It’s a two-way conduit,” Moondancer declared. “When ponies get converted into this form, a little pinch of the Grand Ruler’s power is used to start the process of conversion and this rune, this mark of creation, is a part of that spell. But it doesn’t just mean creation, it stands for absorption too once the rune is reversed. And once the pony dies, then spell itself goes into reverse and all of that power, all the energy and magic that they possess it flows straight back to the Grand Ruler.”
“So...so what you’re saying is that when we die, when anyone dies, that just makes the Grand Ruler stronger?” Lyra demanded.
“Provided that they’ve been converted, yes,” Moondancer said.
“But then that…is that why there are so many wars?” Lyra asked in a tone aghast with horror. “Is the Grand Ruler deliberately sending his soldiers to die just to strengthen himself?”
“He got stronger when Twilight died,” Moondancer murmured. Since the Grand Ruler got stronger when everyone died that was a statement of the obvious, but she said it anyway because it seemed especially wrong, somehow, that he could so directly benefit from the death that he had commanded in order to keep his secret. “She was close to finding out and so he killed her and he got stronger because of it. Twilight’s power is his now. All of our power will become his when we die.”
“No wonder he can sustain all the power of Starfleet single-handedly,” Lyra said.
“There has to be more too it,” muttered Striker. “I mean to say that as bad as it sounds, you could explain it if you wanted to: a perhaps regrettable but unavoidable side-effect of the conversion process. You could even argue that, since the ponies are dying anyway, it’s not actually doing anyone any harm. Is it really worth killing over?”
“You don’t think that’s bad enough?” said Lyra.
“I’m not sure, now that you mention it…” Moondancer murmured. She stared at the two symbols. Creation. Absorption. The second one, considering that she’d only seen it a moment ago it looked very familiar, but where had she-
“A map!” she cried. “I need a map. A map of space, of everywhere ruled by Starfleet.”
Together, she and Lyra were able to find just such a map after a few minutes of searching, and placed in top of everything else that was already laid out on the table.Moondancer gripped a pencil tightly in her fingers, even as she used levitation to hold a second pencil so that she could get this done faster. She began to draw lines, connecting the various planets together, the worlds around the edges of Starfleet’s territory, and the world in the interior, all bound together by the lines that she drew.
The lines that made up a rune of absorption.
“It’s a spell,” Moondancer whispered. “The entire empire is one giant spell for absorbing all the energy from everyone inside it.”
“But…those are just lines you drew,” Lyra said. “Don’t they need to be real in some way?”
“The dimensional paths,” Moondancer said. “When the time is right, they’ll form the lines. And then…and then it would need something to trigger it, but we’ll all be caught up in it. The Grand Ruler will absorb us all, on all these planets. There’ll be nothing left…but him.”
Lyra staggered backwards, recoiling from the very idea. “But…but why? Why would he do something like that? Why would he want to…isn’t it enough that he rules over so many people but now he wants to kill us all so that he can, what, become god or something? How…how in Equestria are we supposed to fight something like that? Not even Twilight could fight something like that he’s too, he’s too strong…if he ever got serious…how are we supposed to fight that?”
“We have to have faith,” Moondancer said.
“Faith?” Lyra said. “Faith in what?”
“Faith in ourselves, maybe,” Moondancer said. “Faith in one another, faith in all of the things that Twilight had faith in: friendship, loyalty, kindness, all the virtues that she lived and let her win time and time again. Twilight was wonderful, but not because she was really strong even though she was strong. Twilight was wonderful because she was kind and brave and righteous and honest and so full of so many virtues. That’s why I loved Twilight, that’s why her friends loved Twilight, that’s why everyone loved her. And that’s why…that’s why she was able to do everything she did, a magic more magical than magic if that makes any sense, the magic that I never bothered to learn until she shared it with me after all those years. And we have to remember that, and have faith in that. I know it sounds sappy and silly and it probably sounds really naïve and stupid when I talk about it compared with how strong the Grand Ruler is and how powerful the Starfleet is, and I know that we’re never going to be as strong as him or as powerful as them…but if we have faith then…
“I don’t know. I don’t know if we can win. I don’t know if we’re inevitably going to lose, if it’s our destiny to lose. But I do know that…that if we give up then we’ve already lost, and so I’d rather have faith that we can win somehow, even if it is faith in something sappy and silly and stupid-sounding because…because I think that’s what Twilight would want us to do.”
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Man, I am so looking forward to seeing this worthless bastard go down permanently, and to Twi and the girls doing it.
And I honestly enjoyed seeing the veil ripped from Lightning's eyes (yeah, I know, wrong chapter for this, but oh, well), and him finally seeing his precious "Father" for the bloody, cruel monster that he truly is.
Anyway, can't wait fore the next chapter
I love the use of the Fullmetal plan here (What? FMA is one of my fave magna series) and th way that he is executing is quiet ingeious.
YES! World building, sweet mericiful world building. see, if he only put it into terms like that, I wouldn't have any problems with their power sources and their abilities. I would finally understand the big difference.
8857847
I'm glad I'm not the only one who was a little confused by why they need to power their suits up to use their magic, or why they seem to lose said magic when the battery on the suits run out.
So basically, they have to believe in each other and the power of friendship?
8935431
Pretty much, yeah. Just because it wasn't used very well in the original doesn't mean that there is no magic in believing.
8857993
Where was this stated? Link please!
8937476
It's scenes like this from chapter 1 of SFM IV
Spike, for context, has been reduced back to his child form after getting kicked around by the monster.
In scenes like these it really does seem as though it's the suit power that grants them their weapons and attacks, seeing as how they don't seem able to fight without them; certainly you could argue that it's their own magic powering the suit but then in that case a) why bother with the whole Starfleet Magic! rigmarole and b) why is it described in power terms?