Princess Luna’s Unconvincing Disguise

by SockPuppet

Chapter 4: Swordplay is best avoided

The two drunken groups of fraternity colts squared off, cursing, shouting, and bucking appetizers at each other.

Glenwood Griffon perched on a ceiling rafter, shouting at them to “Get out of my pub!” and brandishing a hoofball bat.

Merlot said, "Quickly! Will you attest to my sis... matriarch that I am sober and have consumed no alcohol? She has much justification to distrust my veracity."

"Yes," Rosie said.

"Can I hope our friendship will endure if you two discover I have made white lies to you?" Merlot asked.

"Princess Luna," I said, "we never bought your disguise for a minute."

She blinked once and her nostrils flared. "Well! Good. I have so few friends. I value you two very much. Call me Merlot in public."

She levitated her glasses down to the table, slid out of the booth, stood, and stomped in her walking boot to the edge of the incipient brawl.

She then stepped in between the two skirmish lines. I had never heard a pony speak so loudly. "Stop! I command you."

"Who the bucking tartarus are you?" said the largest Canterlot State unicorn. He waved his five-inch switchblade toward her. "Get out of the way or we’ll cut you up first." His voice slurred, drunkenly.

"Seriously!" said the earth pony ringleader of the Polytechnic colts.

"You wish to drunkenly and stupidly duel each other?" she said. "Fine."

Luna/Merlot took two steps backwards, freeing up the space between the two groups.

Then, with a flash of levitation, she pulled a scabbard out from under her Rarity bespoke cloak, and unsheathed a mid-length katana. It was jet-black, almost fuligin, and drank the light except for its cutting edge, which shined with cruel sharpness. "But as a Peer of the Realm, I claim my right to duel the winners. The Earl of Canterlot is my vassal, and I shall not accept your insult to the peace of his county."

A particularly drunk pegasus looked at her and said, "Who are you? Did your mom invent a better mousetrap and get named a petty Baronet? And screw your honor and your big kitchen knife.”

The unicorn ringleader sneered, “There are ten of us and you're just you, and you’re limping. Ha!—your face is already cut up!”

Merlot glanced over her shoulder at Rosie and I, and flicked her ears in annoyance.

The flash of cobalt magic stunned everypony in the pub with its brightness.

When I could open my eyes again, the Merlot glamour was gone, and Princess Luna stood there, fell and wrathful, still in the walking boot, and her face still covered in stitches, her eyes still black. Her wings flared high, lifting up the sapphire cloak. Sparkling with stars, her mane and tail billowed. Abrasions and long lines of stitches ran along her flanks, under her wings. Half-healed injuries covered her body.

Her midnight-blue coat and sapphire cloak complemented each other. Her every muscle strained, tense underneath her skin with readiness. Rosie is my one and only special somepony, but I will remember Luna’s athletic stance, predatory and deadly and beautiful, until the day I die. Even with the wounds, she was more like a goddess than a pony.

Luna is beautiful.

She levitated the sword to a horizontal guard position just above her eye level, scabbard held vertically above it, ready to batter downward.

Then, Luna spoke. I covered my ears, and one of the windows broke from the volume of her voice. Rosie slapped her wings over her ears.

"Who am I? I am Princess of the Blood, Grand Duchess of Central Equestria, and too many other titles to count, no spawn of a mere Baronet. My title and wings I earned in war, knee-deep in the blood and ruptured viscera of Ponykind’s foes. I am the Darkness incarnate, come down to the waking world, and my ‘kitchen knife’ I name Necromancer’s Bane. He drank my blood and cleaved open my ribs and my lung before I slew his owner and took him for my own, from the necromancer’s dead hooves. He has drunk the blood of one score and four since he became Mine. I have killed five malefactors just this week; see my stitches and my leg cast and believe my words. Throw down your weapons or Necromancer’s Bane shall drink more blood today!"

The colts stared, gape-jawed, and the really drunk pegasus puked onto one of his companion’s backs.

They dropped their knives and brass hooves.

Luna stood, sword steady, moving not even a fraction of an inch, for five minutes, until a squad of Guards arrived.

The Guard sergeant was a griffon, and her troopers pegasi. Luna saluted her with the sword. The griffon genuflected, and then they placed the drunk colts under arrest.

---

Luna sheathed her sword and tossed a large pile of bits onto our table. It was more money than I made in a month. "Out the back," she said, trotting through the swinging door to the kitchen. Rosie and I followed. As we escaped into the alleyway, there was a flash of cobalt, and she was Merlot again. She flared up her wings while she hid the scabbarded sword under her cloak, then tucked her wings in and resettled the cloak into place.

Rosie said, "Your disguise doesn’t change your cutie mark."

"Cutie mark magic is not to be used trivially," Merlot said. "In fact, it rather hurts and wears off rapidly. Only my Ponyville friend Starlight has any cutie mark control at all. One cannot change one’s body shape or facial bone structure without excruciation that would be illegal to inflict on a convict or prisoner of war, so I settle for taking my mother’s coloration and name, and a cloak to hide my wings and cutie mark. I am big; my disguise cannot change this. I have attempted changeling magic, but ponies cannot cast it."

She led us at a trot down the back alleys of Little Griffonstone, her cast thumping with every fourth hooffall. Rosie’s legs are short, so she took to her wings to keep up, and I found her straining muscles nicely distracting.

Griffons stared at us, but Lua returned their stares and they returned to their activities. These griffons were all Equestrian citizens, many generations back, with a high proportion of ex-Guard veterans, so I didn’t really expect them to act with any more criminality than ponies... but I was still vaguely uncomfortable in a neighborhood where, for the first time in my life, I was the minority. I smelled cooking meat from every kitchen window and breathed through my mouth.

"Confound it, I left my spectacles on the restaurant table!"

"It’s good," Rosie said. "Your expression is scaring the griffons."

"Glenwood Griffon is a savvy business owner. He will post the specs to the palace in hopes of me returning to his establishment and giving another ten thousand percent gratuity."

We reached the edge of Little Griffonstone and emerged onto one of the streets in a working-class pony neighborhood.

"Princess—" I began.

"No! Merlot. Understand?"

I nodded. "Merlot, let’s sit."

Roaie landed and we all plopped down at a table at an outdoor cafe, and ordered mineral waters. We were all hot and winded from the run.

I said, "You didn’t get your cuts and cripple your leg teaching fencing, did you?"

Her ears flattened. "Celestia and Luna went to the Frozen North on Tuesday. Twilight Sparkle came to the Palace and ruled for thirty-six hours. Cadance and Shining Armor accompanied Celestia and Luna into the wastes. A coven witches... thirteen, of course..."

Merlot trailed off, and chewed her lower lips. "My leg hurts from running. Shining Armor injected antivenin and cleaned the wound, and the doctors stitched the sliced tendon, and I heal fast, but it still hurts. The blade reached the bone marrow.”

“Antivenin?” Rosie asked.

“They bred fer-de-lance in heated cages, and milked the toxin to coat their blades. Were I not of, hmmm, my tribe of pony, so to speak, it would have been be a permanent and life-altering injury. Crippling, maiming. Likely a field amputation.”

"Witchcraft isn’t against the law," I said.

The waiter brought the bottles of water. After the waiter disappeared, Merlot said, "Of course not! Some of Celestia’s best students name themselves ‘witch.’ But this coven explored the black arts of R’lyeh and Yuggoth. They learned things must not be learned, cast spells that must not be cast. Celestia and Cadance offered them parole and forgiveness if they abandoned their pursuits and repented their crimes. Four accepted. Nine did not. They were killed, and the fighting was brutal, close-quarters, and short. Ten seconds, at most. Perhaps six. It is good Cadance detected them sooner, before their power had waxed, and not later. Luna killed five, Shining Armor one, and Celestia three. Cadance held the four who swore their parole under her horn so that they dare not attempt to rescind their surrender."

Rosie began to shake. "Would... would Luna have killed the college colts at the coffee shop?"

Merlot, staring at her drink, looked up. "What? No! No! See, Princess Luna is a monster. Everypony knows this. Her reputation precedes her. However, in this situation, Luna would have used the flat of the blade or her scabbard to daze them insensate. A particularly intransigent individual might have forced Luna to hamstring him, at worst. She would have taken no heads. Their five-inch blades could not kill Luna; she was not in danger.”

Rosie asked, "Did somepony really split your lung open with your sword?"

“Can you speak in third person of Luna to Merlot?”

“No. I really can’t,” Rosie said.

Luna flicked her ears in acquiescence. "Yes, a few months ago, four months, when I was absent from my studies. I was in Vanhoover Hospital for some weeks. My first sucking chest wound. A necromancer is dead and I took his wonderful sword."

"Wait," Rosie said. "You’ve killed twenty-four ponies in just the four months you’ve owned that sword?"

"Twenty ponies, three yaks, and a griffon. My duties to the realm involve much unpleasantness. Ordinary ponies would lose their minds if they knew the dangers that swirl around the edges or depths of Equestria."

Rosie started to speak, but I put my hoof on her withers. I said, "Merlot... why do you hate Princess Luna? Why do you hate..." I looked around, ensuring we were alone, and whispered: "yourself?"

Author's Note:

Fer-de-lance taken from The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston, an excellent and highly-recommended book. Don’t google fer-de-lance on a full stomach, the injuries on Wikipedia, etc., are horrific.

Comments

[platogkrone]

Don’t google fer-de-lance on a full stomach, the injuries on Wikipedia, etc., are horrific.