2. Then
As a child, Celestia believed she was an angel.
That was her only context for the wings, back then. Memories of Sunday school and church iconography (so vague, so distant; it all feels lifetimes away), and dreams that didn't match her body.
At first, her parents thought she wanted to be an angel when she grew up, which they found adorable. Then they realized what she actually meant, and thus began the increasingly stern talks with their pastor.
She went through a phase, sort of, where she thought she was a bird magically transformed into a human. She never really believed it — it was spirituality by compromise, not obvious inner truth — but being an angel was upsetting her parents, and she was still struggling to find a way to understand the wings.
She tried to tell them about being a bird. She thought they'd be proud she was putting "the angel thing" behind her. That led to several sessions with an expensive upstate psychiatrist.
She was too scared to think much about her wings after that.
When word reached her of the crash, Celestia had just turned 18.
Luna was inconsolable (she remembers: vaguely, distantly, lifetimes away). Celestia was fine, though. She knew she was fine because she had to be. With Mom, Dad and Grandmam suddenly gone, she was the only adult Luna had left. And there was only one way to heal them both: Wipe the past away as if it had never existed.
Maybe — she dared to think, if not to voice — this was the moment she had been born with dream-wings for. It was an impossible tragedy. The sort that it would take an angel to fix.
There was a huge mess with the living trust. Luna talked to the trustee behind Celestia's back and he spun her some line about "offering" to keep control so he could "help the sisters manage their finances responsibly". Tried to rope Celestia in, too, with an out-of-date copy of her parents' will and some platitudes about what they would have wanted. But she couldn't let him take advantage of Luna's fragility. Celestia was an adult now, and the family assets (and her sister) were her legal responsibility. That bastard was trying to stop her from spreading her wings.
Celestia hired a lawyer. (Litigate, liquidate, liberate.) The trustee started looking more and more haggard at their meetings — presumably with the stress of maintaining the deceptions that kept Luna sitting silently, tearfully, on his side of the table. There was a court date. Celestia won decisively. There was an appeal. There were delays. Luna turned 18.
Celestia's heart twisted when her sister walked into the next hearing with a lawyer of her own. Suddenly the whole matter was accusations and countersuits and depositions. The knives were out on every little thing.
She swung back. It ripped Celestia's heart in two to fight family, but Luna was a child compromised by grief, claiming adulthood on a technicality of age, and if she was going to be immature enough to cling to the trustee's lies …
Ultimately, Luna's resolve broke. They met for an out-of-court settlement. Luna got the fixer-upper second home in Dream Valley and her old college fund. Celestia got the rest — close to three million dollars cash, even after the lawyers' cuts.
That day, they exchanged a grand total of six words which weren't about the money.
It was their last conversation for a decade.
She remembers that dream like she just awoke from it.
Luna stands on tiptoe on the edge of a cliff on the world's tallest mountain. Fierce grey stormclouds smother everything, and icy wind whips at their bare skin. Celestia's never been here before, and yet her heart aches at the beauty the storm obscures: beneath them, she knows, the land rolls away, pristine emerald green out to the shimmering sapphires of distant seas.
"I got my wings!" Luna announces (somehow audible over the howls of the storm). She spreads them, and they are immense and magnificent, like a midnight-blue shadow looming over her thin and pale arms.
A gust of wind buffets Celestia. She staggers sideways, but recovers. Thunder rolls ominously below.
Fear grips her heart. She has to protect her younger sister.
"Luna, no!" Celestia sprints forward toward her serene, unmoving sibling in the tar-pit manner of nightmares, flailing and straining and making little progress. "Close them!"
Luna's face curls, indignant. "You should be proud of me," she accuses. "I thought you wanted us to fly together!"
"Not now!" The wind is tearing at her words, stealing breath from her lungs.
"Then when?"
"When it's safe!"
Luna frowns. The wind howls and bites, numbing Celestia's fingers. She's running out of time. So she does the only thing she can to save Luna: reaches out to rip the wings from her shoulders.
Luna flinches back, shocked. Celestia's fingers miss by inches. The wind screams like a wounded dragon, blasting Celestia back.
There's a frozen moment where they lock eyes. The storm goes silent, and Celestia is pinned only by the withering weight of her sister's outrage.
Then Luna whirls and dives into the maelstrom.
She vanishes almost instantly.
Celestia screams, and flings herself over the edge. The clouds grow fangs, and —
After the settlement, Celestia flew to Europe (a vaguely distant place: a few thousand miles and a few lifetimes away). A continent defined by its history. No better place to escape hers.
The Bittish nobility's parties glinted like gemstones, and she blazed into them like a sun. For years, she felt like the light of the world. Then the money ran out, and she began to lose her shine. One last desperate gleam caught the eye of some fifth son of the royal family, and he fell head over heels for her, and she talked herself into a whirlwind royal wedding before either of them could have second thoughts.
The press judged her. Her party acquaintances did, too. Her resolve for public appearances quickly crumpled; she tried focusing on her life at the castle and playing at domesticity. But the shine of Blueblood's conquest wore off quickly, and his interest in her dropped away once she was no longer a prize to chase.
The marriage chilled. He began avoiding her. Everyone did. Even the servants started doing that thing where they waited until her requests became orders, and then fulfilled them at the last possible second before she could legitimately complain.
It was almost a relief when he caught her having that ill-thought fling in Costa del Sol. It was almost a kindness that the divorce was quiet and ignominious.
She was left with almost enough pieces to reassemble her life.
So it was that she found herself wandering the streets of Roam one day, broke and broken and friendless and aimless. (Plans vague and distant; her friends lifetimes away.) As she rounded the corner to the Piazza di Grazia, it occurred to her to ask what she was doing with her life.
Celestia looked up. And her answer was a statue of an angel reaching up to the sky, its wings outstretched as if in flight.
She stared, dumbfounded. And a long-smoldering ember stirred and lit.
"Bullshit!" she shouted, in a roar that shook the heavens. As punctuation, she flung her half-full bottle of Campari to the cobblestones, where it shattered anticlimactically within its paper bag. She stomped off with an incoherent scream, punched some stupid ancient Roamin building that had the gall to get in her way, and sank down sobbing in a nearby alley.
Angels weren't real. (Not here, where they could be touched, the pastor had once explained — but that was a fine distinction for a girl that young, and when Santa Claus turned out to also not be real, she did some mental addition.) For all that people admired and praised and drew inspiration from them, angels didn't exist. That lack of reality freed humans to do the most terrible possible thing they could do to angels: put them on a pedestal.
The angels the world worshipped weren't messy, flesh-and-blood things. Angels didn't have problems and fights and drinking habits and estranged family and failed marriages. That, a small whisper said in her old pastor's voice, is why you're not an angel.
And now the world was saying: Look. This is what an angel is, flawless and rigid and cold and unapproachable.
It was an outrage.
They were wrong in every possible way.
When the recorded voice says "La tua chiamata è stata accettata," Celestia almost loses her nerve and hangs up.
(This happens shortly after the statue moment — long before the property damage, but no longer lifetimes away. The memory of it is clear and tangible. It is her, not Celestia-who-was.)
When Luna's sleep-muffled voice says "Hello?", she almost drops the phone.
She manages: "It's me."
There's a long silence.
"I'm sorry," she says. "For everything."
There's a choked sob from the other end of the call.
"They told me I couldn't be an angel when I was young," Celestia says, desperate to blurt it all out before the line goes dead. "Maybe they're right. But I'm not going to let that stop me from trying, and that means making things right, Lu. You were more important than the money, and I wish I'd figured that out at the time, and I was the world's biggest idiot, and I'm so sorry. If that means I have to find a job and earn three million dollars so I can trade it back for you, then damn it, that's what I'm going to do."
Luna's openly crying now.
"I don't want the money," Luna says between sobs. "Come home."
She does.
Celestia spends half a decade stretching her metaphorical wings.
She's learning how to really be an angel, now. "Flawless and rigid and cold and unapproachable" are her anti-checklist, and she takes a sledgehammer to them one by one. Flawless — well, that one's already shattered. She destroys Rigid by pounding her life into an entirely different shape: going to college, earning a degree, moving in with Luna, doing the shopping and cooking and chores that she used to order servants to do in the Buckingham Palace days. Cracking the ice of Cold is no problem at all; the blazing personality that attracted Blueblood to her rekindles in an instant, once she isn't spending her nights staring at the ceiling and wondering how her life ever got so screwed up.
Unapproachable … well, that stumps her for a while. All her life, she was in charge of everything, and it always had to be her way. (Like the sundial they gave to Camp Everfree.) And as soon as she takes charge, she's beginning to notice, everyone gets so distant. She doesn't know how to break that.
Fortunately, she works up the humility to ask her sister. Luna doesn't know either — she's been a recluse since she got her degree, working a quiet back-office job at a local high school and heading home the instant the school day ends. But, she says, maybe they can try to figure it out together.
Celestia shadows Luna for a few days, and falls in love with the campus immediately. Luna suggests she apply for the open guidance-counselor job; she bluffs her way through the job interview and starts taking night classes in psychology. And staring past her textbook one night, caffeine warring with fatigue, she suddenly realizes what that dream was trying to beat into her head all along:
It's about what others need.
The most important part of angel-hood is caring, no more and no less. But she can't care on her own terms. She made things right with Luna when she listened — when she stopped trying to be an angel, and started trying to be the sister Luna needed all along.
In an instant, the terrifying scope of her job floods in. She's talked herself into responsibility for the mental health of an entire campus of children, young and innocent and fragile. She's flawed and clumsy and surrounded by priceless porcelain.
"I can't do this to them," she tells Luna at the tail end of her nervous breakdown. "My life is one unbroken string of mistakes."
"No it's not," Luna says gently. "You came home."
"You know what I mean."
"Yes, I do." Luna holds her. "And I think that's why they need you."
"… I don't understand."
"Growing up is about making mistakes and coming out the other side." Luna grins. "What better proof that they can?"
Celestia laughs despite herself. "You're horrible."
"But seriously, sister." Luna's voice softens. "They need someone who cares. The fact you're worried about being able to do that just means you're qualified."
Celestia sleeps on that. And in the morning, with the rising sun shining on her wingless back, determination creeps in.
Breaking unapproachable means walking with the children. Understanding the hazards they face, so that when she sees one of them approaching a place where she messed up, she can help them learn from her mistakes.
What they need is someone alongside them, hand in hand.
It's time to make some friends.
It turns out Principal Sombra isn't a fan of the hands-on approach. Canterlot High's reputation for academic rigor doesn't allow time for friends — it requires a certain low-grade perpetual terror to keep the children chained to the books. The instant Celestia threatens that, he takes aim at her employment contract.
She solves that by making the right friends. A razor-thin majority of the school board.
A year later, she's running the place.
She's not quite sure how it happened. He just exploded at his staff one day, and after that, he was gone, and someone needed to take charge. She reflexively volunteered before realizing that was exactly the wrong thing to do, and the board voted her in before she could look for a better alternative.
Luna, bless her heart, steps in to handle the administration, and Celestia promotes her on the spot and tries to focus on emotional support. Balancing that with rule enforcement is a fine line, though. She keeps to the background — sticking to the walk-with plan and letting them set their own direction — and that seems to work out. Her valedictorian is ambitious, visionary, and somehow manages to ride herd on a dozen warring cliques, leading the school by example.
If only she'd open up more about her own needs, Celestia thinks. But Sunset Shimmer isn't really the walk-with sort — and if she needs space to be a leader, well, the school needs one of those.
Celestia starts dreaming again, and it scares her.
It's a distraction. She tried ascending upon her dream-wings, once upon a time, and all it did was bring her too close to the sun. She's discovered what makes her an angel, now, and it has nothing to do with who she thought she wanted to be.
Slowly, she comes to an uneasy peace with her dreams. They're a reminder of past-her's failures, she tells herself. Being tormented by the yearning pull of dream-flight helps, she tells herself — the more miserable she is, the more fresh incentive not to screw up again.
For all that, her dream-self never goes back to that clifftop. She never sees what happened to shadow-winged Luna. On the other hand, she doesn't need to — she knows.
The storm never touched Luna in the first place — she dove unharmed through the clouds and out into brilliant clear sky.
The storm was Celestia's. And that's why she took so long to catch up — battered, humbled, and short a few feathers.
She doesn't learn quite how many until Twilight Sparkle stops for a few minutes to say goodbye.
"I've got to get back to my friends," Twilight says after all her thank-yous and apologies and stammered half-explanations limp to a halt. "The real ones. Um, I mean. My world's versions. Not that this world's Applejack and Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash and Rarity aren't amazing pon—, people, but the ones that made me who I am miss me."
"I understand," Celestia says, and then the question's out from her lips before she can have second thoughts: "Is one of those ponies another me?"
She forces a casual, jocular tone into her voice, but her heart is hammering. She's remembering rainbows and seeing angels, and it would be so nice to think that there's at least one world in which Celestia doesn't have to dream about wings.
"Oh! Um. Yeah." Twilight gives a self-deprecating laugh. "I guess you figured out that was how I knew your name, huh? She's pretty amazing." Twilight's face flushes. "I'm, um, kind of her personal student."
"Your Celestia's a teacher?" Pure curiosity, there. That's a career path she never had the opportunity to pursue, but she can see it.
"Not really," Twilight says, "she's —"
Floored.
Numb, maybe? Thinking, certainly. Mind outracing the Wondercolts track team. But as the days since the property damage drag on, Principal Celestia finds herself no closer to knowing how to feel about the fact that the other her is immortal.
She does come to one conclusion.
Principal Celestia is the lesser of her two selves, mortal and fragile and imperfect. She makes mistakes that Alicorn Princess Celestia simply cannot be capable of.
Alicorn Princess Celestia — so Twilight says, and she believes it — literally raises the sun every day for an entire world, ponies and other beings alike. She's not just an angel — she's a goddess. She can't be flawed, not the way Principal Celestia is, or that flaw would be magnified to an unthinkable degree.
With that sort of power, if Princess Celestia had done anything as horrible as sundering her family for a decade, their world would be a smoldering cinder.
Principal Celestia starts to wonder what Princess Celestia's biggest regret is.
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Why are you doing this to my feelings?
Frick yeah!
I actually don't even know what to say about this chapter. It's blowing me away.
Another little mistake I noticed.
]With that sort of power, if Princess Celestia had done anything as horrible as sundering her family for a decade, their world would be a smoldering cinder.
Principal Celestia starts to wonder what Princess Celestia's biggest regret is.
Now that is some good leveraging dramatic irony right there.
Now this is interesting. It's rare to see a story written this way, but it is certainly captivating.
The comments were right. This is, I think, a unique take on Luna's banishment.
It's kind of a reverse, really. Sure, Luna ended up "banished" to the second family home... but it's Celestia that ends up throwing herself into near madness, lost away from home, almost destroying her life until her sister helps her come back with forgiveness.
Her greatest regret?
Tia, your pony counterpart is millennia old and has watched countless generations pass and has even watched whole civilisations rise to glory, fall into archaeology and ultimately crumble into forgotten dust. She has stood on devastated battlefields without number and watched the blood dribble off of her horn and hooves. Her nightmares are countless dead friends screaming: "Liar! Betrayer! Murderer!" at her over and over again. She has listened to her sister scream that her only remaining duty is to kill her. She has listened to her daughter swear to return one day to destroy her. She has made more mistakes than any living being on Earth and has regrets of a kind that you can't imagine.
She is The Lonely Goddess, The Beautiful Coward and The Oncoming Storm. Good ponies don't need rules; pray you never learn why Princess Celestia needs so many.
Trust me, Celestia, you do not know the concept of being 'flawed'.
...did you mean Rome?
Roman
Wow, that seems vindictive. And mistargeted.
I like the gall/Gaul pun in context of a remnant ancient Roam, less so the rhyming of way with itself with "her way"/"alleyway."
Wow, terrible pastor not just in terms of tending to their congregation, but it seems possibly where theology and the mythology of angels are concerned, too. What with the whole demons and devils thing and all.
I wonder if her old pastor would manage to catch that parallel there... :/
That aside, a lovely moment ever appreciated.
Campari is a proper noun.
I needed this today--the story in general, and this bit in particular. Thank you.
8317186
Nope. Horse puns.
Haha, that paper bag is so American of her
You do not have to do that in Europe 
Fascinating take on the sisters' family history.
Hahaha!
8314950
Why would you think Celestia has betrayed friends?
8322909
With a life that long there is bound to be someone she makes a mistake with and in the comics we have Sombra which she had a relationship with before he went mad.
I feel like a hundred-fold would fit better. A decade times one hundred is a thousand years on the moon.
Fantastic writing so far. Really grabbed my attention and didn't let go.
I love how after the whole legal battle (and Celestia coming out the winner), she winds up doing exactly what the trustee claims. She flies to Europe and completely exhausts the family fortunes. You really get a sense that Celestia is the [unreliable] narrator of this story.
To 8315650 - I agree that it seems very self-important, but to me that makes it all the more genuine, given Celestia's background. I've never read any of horizon's other works, but I can say that I like what I've seen of this one so far.
8364653
Definitely read some more Horizon stories he’s in my opinion one of the top ten best authors on this site.
8314950
ah, but her biggest is the same in both worlds.
8322909
I think that bit was meant more for poetry than anything else.
Whoa
Good lord, this is poetically beautiful.
9517431
Thanks, and glad you enjoyed!
And re your comment on chapter 1 (9517419) — I am happy to announce that this story's sequel will be in the Bronycon Bookstore, and available on FIMFiction shortly thereafter.
This makes me wonder how Princess Celestia came to the same conclusion.
Good closure feels here.
The dramatic irony of that last line is priceless!
9730354
Thank you!
Curious what you think of the other two chapters; it's usually the end of 3 that gets people. (And will also be curious to see what you think of the sequel — which will make its premiere in the collection available at the Bronycon bookstore!)
"PRINCIPAL SOMBRA"
that is just amazing
9861175
Not apologizing for the wordplay about his departure, either.
I have swigged too much $2 white Zinfandel to be eloquent, but I wish I could, since this is a masterwork. If your writing was a longsword, it'd get +4 to attack and damage rolls. Thank you for reigniting so many dull embers in me. Thank you for reminding me of glory.
Just...
Ouch.
That was painful. Really feeling for Celestia. Can't say she made a mistake, but she wasn't wholly in the right either.
Might I say I adored the symbolism in that dream?