Chapter 2
Where was Cadance? Celestia felt the anguish of wait and worry bearing down upon her. She was uncomfortable with her unease, her need, and her mind recalled a time when it was just her, all alone, with no help, no relief, no assistance. Somehow, she had stood on her own during those dark, dark years. There had been much betrayal, much under-hoofedness, things had not gone well.
But Cadance? Cadance could be trusted. There was help now. Turning her head, Celestia looked over at Hazy and Soprano where both stallions were piled into a chair together, snoozing, exhausted. Closing her eyes, Celestia prepared herself, and she reached down into the earth, deep down into the ground below her, into the dark, unknown places where the primal magics pooled.
She felt some of her strength renewing, and with almost unlimited power available to her while she was connected to Terra-thauma, she began crafting a beautiful dawn. Having seen what Gosling could do with clouds during a sunrise or a sunset, Celestia was no longer content to just raise the sun. On the distant horizon, she pulled clouds into position, compressed them into just the right density, and then dragged the sun a little higher into the sky.
Dawn did not so much break but shatter over Canterlot, in a vivid display of color and warm light that banished the darkness and brought a rosy, life-affirming glow to the city. Glittering, the tall, graceful spires and minarets of Canterlot appeared to be bedecked with diamonds as the sun’s splendour shone upon them from the east. With the dawn came renewal. Whatever tiny bit of aging that Celestia had suffered during the dark of the night was rolled back, and her body, pregnant though it might be, was restored to the beautiful ideal of her eternal youth.
It would take a long, long night indeed to give Celestia her first wrinkle.
She was eternal, endless, she was life. There were aspects of her power that were unknown to her, parts of her that were a total mystery, a mystery that she had spent centuries trying to unravel. For whatever reason, she had grown stronger as of late, and try as she might, she could not explain why. Her confidence had returned with the fire of new life growing inside her, and she had recovered her mojo, as the saying went.
Soprano awoke with a snort, startled by something, perhaps a dream. Celestia held a feather up to her lips, her eyes merry, and the stallion calmed a bit, though his eyes remained wide. He yawned with a low whine, settled against the snoozing pegasus beside him, closed his eyes, and went back to sleep while Celestia continued to craft the dawn.
The problem with tea, as Celestia saw it, was that it wasn’t nearly as caffeinated as coffee. This… annoyance had plagued Celestia for a time, irking her, violating her sensibilities, and driving her to distraction. With time, with her being the crafty mare that she was, she had turned her attention to the problem.
A typical cup of coffee had about one hundred milligrams of caffeine. A cup of tea had around twenty five milligrams of caffeine, a woeful, dreadful number. One had to drink a fair bit more tea to become as perky as one needed to be to face the day, or stare down a crisis. To this end, Celestia had created Celestial Glory tea in an effort to combat fatigue and ennui.
A single cup of Celestial Glory tea had an astounding two hundred milligrams of caffeine in a four ounce teacup due to Celestia’s meddling with the camellia sinensis plant, which now produced excessive caffeine as part of its photosynthesis with her sun. It wasn’t cheating, no, it was efficiency. She wanted to ensure that her empire ran as smoothly as possible.
Since her meddling with the camellia sinensis plant, productivity in Equestria had gone up, way up, and she was happy with her creation. It certainly left her feeling peppy, and she was feeling much, much better after a long night with every sip she took from her enormous mug that was emblazoned with sunflowers.
The blue one looked a little bit grumpy, but that could be forgiven. Celestia was glad to see her sister up, even if the day didn’t quite agree with poor Luna. Her sister was silent, and had said nothing since waking up. Upon waking, Luna had risen from the bed, her mane reconnected with the Aetherium, and then she stood watch over the bed.
Smiling, Celestia passed her sister a cup of tea, fixed just the way Luna liked it, served with butter and honey, a tea tradition shared by the yaks of Yakyakistan. The two sisters stood together, sipping tea, and exchanging knowing glances with one another. To a casual observer, the two sisters were as different as night and day, but to one that knew them…
“Sister, I do not think I’ve ever seen you rest so peacefully since your return,” Celestia remarked in a soft voice, making idle chit-chat. “Having a foal in your bed does you good.”
Scowling, Luna did not respond.
“Luna…” Celestia waited for a moment while Luna sipped her tea, but she was determined to say what she felt needed to be said. “Even if you do not desire to have foals, and I respect that, you should think about taking a student… an apprentice. You are such an excellent teacher, and it always made you happy before—”
“No.” Luna shuffled on her hooves, turned around, and stared out the window.
Sighing, Celestia glanced at the empty chair where the two stallions had been sitting. “Luna, you have to heal and move on. Look how happy you are with Gosling. You can’t keep using your past as an excuse to withhold yourself from the world. You would make an excellent master for Moon Rose.”
“No.” Sipping her tea, Luna’s ears fell, going limp, and she did her best to ignore her sister while she stared out the window.
“Sister…” Celestia’s voice was pleading, almost begging. “The master-apprentice relationship is one of the most sacred of all trusts. It is a relationship that satisfies the unicorn within us. To deny it is to deny a third of what we are, Luna, please, what you are doing is hurting yourself, and you know this, you’ve admitted to this—”
“Leave me be.” Luna’s voice was a mere whisper, but it silenced Celestia. “We are aware that what We are doing is wrong, and that it hurts Us. In time, We might address the issue. We do not wish to address the issue right now.”
“Luna, I just want to see you better.”
“So We are aware. The road to wellness is a long one, fraught with peril. For now, We are content to have a playmate and a friend.”
There it was. A tiny sprout of hope emerged, and a relieved smile could be seen upon Celestia’s face. A tiny glimmer of Luna’s playfulness and silliness had shown itself. For now, Celestia decided it was best to drop the issue, and she would instead focus upon the tiny sprout of hope, this tender, delicate shoot that had emerged from the field of their relationship. Luna had referred to Gosling as her playmate as well as her friend, and while both terms were ostensibly true…
Luna kept withdrawing, leaving poor Gosling to start all over again. It frustrated Celestia to no end, because Gosling wanted to be Luna’s playmate and friend. Gosling was still young enough to be playful, to be coltish, and he could respond to Luna’s shenanigans in a way that Celestia found that she could not. Gosling would, in fact, follow after Luna, and they would paste big felt mustaches onto the statuary. Together, they would stick googly-eyes upon the statues, and then monocles for maximum silliness. Then, he and Luna would retreat someplace so they could watch the mayhem unfold when the palace staff discovered their nefarious, dastardly deeds.
A googly-eyed, mustachioed, monocled Princess Celestia was just too much majesty for a little pony to take. Maids fainted. Kibitz would stand in one place and moan until somepony came to his rescue. Blueblood would pretend that such vandalism did not exist. Seville would snap pictures for the royal scrapbook. The castle was lively again, and Celestia felt that a castle should be lively. That was why one hired jesters, but those had fallen out of fashion. The cutie mark for a jester had not been seen in centuries, a fact that Celestia often lamented.
The filly called Hazy ‘Mama.’ Celestia felt something unseen constrict around her heart and she smiled. Little Moon Rose was up and awake, and after permission from the nurse, she had been allowed to leave the bed so that she could sit with Hazy Breeze in the chair beside the bed. Soprano stood by, guarding those he loved, and Celestia gushed over the fact that Hazy was Moon Rose’s ‘Mama.’
All of the tubing was still connected to the filly, and great care had to be taken to hold her, but the look of relief in Hazy’s eyes was plain to see. A mother worried for her foals, they longed to hold them in times of crisis—and to Celestia, motherhood held no single form. In her long, long life, she had seen motherhood come in all forms, and from the most unlikely of places.
There was a creak as the door opened, and Luna returned to the small, somewhat cramped hospital room, bearing a chocolate bar wrapped in gold foil and matte red paper. Saying nothing, she strode over to Soprano, held the chocolate bar out, and offered it to him while giving Moon Rose a meaningful glance.
Chocolate, with crystalised, curried carrots and cranberries, the wrapper promised in gold lettering.
With a nod of thanks, Soprano took the chocolate bar, tore open one end, broke off a tiny sliver, and offered it to Moon Rose, who gobbled down the treat with a smile. Luna, pleased with what she had done, turned away, took a few short steps, and stood beside the hospital bed where Gosling lay, still sleeping, and she resumed her watch.
“We want to enroll Moon Rose in your school,” Hazy blurted out in a somewhat shrill, but also soft feminine voice. “But we want her to come home to us every day… I’ll… I… I will fly her to school every morning and pick her up every afternoon. I shall have to rearrange my work schedule, and my boss might not be happy, but I’ll find a way.”
Moon Rose, munching on another bit of dark, dark chocolate, said nothing.
“I am positive that we can work out something,” Celestia responded, and even as she spoke the words, she saw the light of hope appear in both Hazy Breeze and Soprano Summer’s eyes. “In the meantime, I would like for the both of you to be our guests at the castle. I fear your home is in shambles and will require extensive magical cleanup. Stay with us, please?”
“We would be honoured.” Soprano, standing near Hazy, pressed up against the chair and blinked away a few tears. The stallion started to speak, but a knock upon the door caused him to go silent with his mouth hanging open.
Just as Celestia was starting to turn around, the door was pushed open, a pink horn became visible, and then a pink face. Cadance came in, her expression one of exhaustion, and her eyes were narrowed with fierce love. Near Cadance’s hooves was Flurry Heart, and just behind them both was Shining Armor. Right as Celestia started to say something, one last pony entered, a stark-white pegasus, who froze in the doorway with a wounded look of anguish upon her face.
Shining Armor lifted Flurry, levitating her, and then he plopped her down upon the bed beside Gosling. The filly sat there, blinking, trying to be brave, trying to be grown up about this, but she failed. In seconds, her resolve shattered, her lower lip quivered, an indication of the eruption to come, and then with a muffled wail, she exploded into tears, lacking any other means to express her grief.
“Cadance, am I glad that you are here,” Celestia said to her niece while Flurry continued to bawl. As Celestia shuffled around a bit on her hooves, it was Luna who attended to Flurry, and she tried to quiet the little grief-stricken filly.
“Sorry I’m late.” Cadance’s tone was apologetic. “There was a huge feral storm between here and the Crystal Empire. Normally, I wouldn’t mind such a thing, but I was pulling passengers.”
“Things got bumpy,” Shining Armor remarked after he gave Luna an affectionate kiss upon the cheek. “Cadance insisted on flying through the storm, and so she did. She just powered through, dragging all of us behind her, and we were tumbled around like clothes in a dryer.”
“Oy vey,” Sleet murmured while she stood beside the bed.
“No more wasted time.” Cadance held her head high and the fatigue retreated from her face. “I am ready to begin. I’ve had some practice since that last fiasco, so hopefully Gosling won’t wake up as a Goosicorn…”
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Nice chapter not to see how things work out for Gosling and company. Luna is being extremely stubborn
Noice.
Feels good to read this. The sisterly interaction between Luna and Celestia.. it gives me hope that the moon goddess is healing.
So Geerg is now one of your editors?
Georg is helping you out? Well, the Weedverse is about to get twice as awesome! Now we just gotta keep an eye out for a certain grass-colored tutor making an appearance...
I wonder if being pregnant actually gives her strength, as she is a symbol of life and so bringing life into the world would somehow make her stronger?
I can't help but imagine Celestia waddling into battle, days away from her due date, ready to smite the wicked.
"Sister?" Luna craned her head to get a glance at where Celestia was curled around a bowl of something that smelled of chocolate and...something else. "What is that?"
"Chocolate-covered coffee beans," she muttered through packed cheeks.
"Oh." Luna sniffed the air. "Are there any left?"
She did not get an immediate response, only a low growl that raised the hairs on the back of her neck.
"Well, how many have you had so far?" she asked instead.
"Five," snarled Celestia.
"Oh." Luna looked around the room. "Bowls or beans?"
"Fifty pound bags," admitted Celestia. "Be a dear and see if there's a new shipment yet."
8050385
Celestia is stronger because of enshrinement.
Luna is getting better, and is being restored to her rightful place of worship. Celestia's strength is dependent upon Luna's strength. This will be made clearer in time.
Celestia engineered a new tea plant to get more caffeine. Now that is a good use of internal life.
8050415 I remember an idea like that being brought up in Perilous Romance, but I didn't think it was actually real. That's quite interesting.
I don't remember if we got confirmation about what Gosling's cutie mark means?
Perhaps 'tis a mark of splendid Japery?
So, I recently re-read TW and VI, and the following makes me wonder:
If I remember correctly (not to mention understood what I read), the formation of Mt. Maud was caused by bad magic in the ground being allowed to build up (since all the Poison Joke in the area was destroyed). But I also remember (hopefully correctly) that a current theory is rocks are acting (along with Poison Joke) in some way to cleanse the magic passing through them.
So, I wonder: How far down did Celestia have to go to get access to the good magic? Is there a danger that the bad magic at surface level could seep far enough down to affect the pool from which Celestia pulls?
A related question is, if Celestia has to reach down deep, what would happen if she had to raise the Sun while standing next to Mt. Maud? Would that day's sun-raising be tainted, if her magic had to reach down through the surface-level badness to get access to the deep magic?
Or maybe I'm over-thinking this?!?!?!?!?
8050409
Fifty pound bags
Best reply
8050451
Gosling's specific magical talent is making others happy. That's it. No more, no less. His rubber duckie is a symbol of happiness.
Some ponies have cutie marks that lead them to become the ultimate archmage, or the world's fastest pegasus, or some brilliant fashionista with the ultimate in business sense.
Gosling just wants to make others happy, and does.
8050453
In this instance, she is connecting with Terra Firma directly, but she doesn't know this. She is getting magic that has not yet been corrupted by Grogar's influence. It's like reaching into the astral realm, or other realms outside of common realm she lives in.
8050467
Hmmmmmm.
One side-effect of all the problem going on: If everything was peaceful, Twilight would eventually wonder how Celestia's sun-raising works, and would have to start the extreme science to figure it out.
8050477
Celestia's sun raising works by using gravity to slingshot it around. Once a day, she gives it a big nudge to keep it in motion, followed by little blips to keep it on course, because the sun is a silly celestial body. The moon works the same way.
Two of my top three favorite authors on this site coming together for a chapter? I physically cannot handle the awesome.
Goosicorn
thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/horn-billed-goose-15363868.jpg
Alternate humourous
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I have been waiting for the sequel for so long. Thank you
8050482 Something I've always been curious about in the show, and by extension this 'verse, is why the sun and the moon need to be moved, rather than functioning as our own system does. Was it originally similar to our system and then stricken by something, such as Grogar, with Celestia and Luna acting as a means of fixing the issue, or is this a part of the natural state of the equine-solar system/ dimension, in which case what moved the celestial bodies before the alicorns?
8050621
In the Weedverse, things just broke down... with the reasons yet to be revealed.
8050453 One must remember that Canterlot used to be just on top of a very short hill that you could not even sled down. Centuries of raising the sun later...
img04.deviantart.net/9842/i/2014/269/4/b/_144_i_live_for_coffeeeee_by_darkflame75-d80lwc2.png
This frightens me because I regularly slurp down 12 to 16 ounce mugs of tea, mostly herbal but I do have a big cup of black and then green tea daily.
I think, I too, lament that there she hasn't seen a jester cutie mark in centuries. The shenanigans Luna, Gosling, and the Jester could get up to would be highly entertaining.
The tea makes so much more sense now.
Also I gotta try butter and honey, butter is one of the only forms of dairy I can process.
Go Cadance go!
8051431
Google butter tea.
Works best in spicy chai blends. Ghee works the best, but you can use plain butter. If you can't get yak butter, goat butter is good, but cow butter can work too. It's very creamy, and with a bit of honey, hits the spot.
HONK!
I approve of everything about this. If you aren't cheating, you aren't trying hard enough.
Celestia and Equestria in general have been without a healthy Luna for far too long. Whatever went down with her corruption, it was clearly a significant victory for the forces of evil to have taken her off the board.
I, by contrast, believe a goosicorn would provide some much needed levity.
XD Goosicorn!
Eh, damned tourists.
"We must SEE him! We don't care that we'll delay and exhaust the essential help he needs, we don't give a crap about him getting better, it's OUR feelings that matter."