Friendship Is Magic - Extended Cut

by AdmiralSakai

>Nightmare Moon: Descend

(♫)

It was a perfect night for celebration, balmy and dry, the narrow streets of Ponyville lit by dozens of hanging paper Sun lanterns. Twilight wandered among the throngs of ponies more or less aimlessly, seeking out wherever she was more comfortable, and never having been much of a fan of loud music or dense crowds soon found herself ascending a rickety staircase that led up onto the roof of the Town Hall. Spike had split off from her some time ago to investigate a display of local gemstones at the Carousel Boutique; judging by the occasional flashes of lime-green flame she was spotting from within a particularly dense cluster of onlookers not far away and their subsequent stamping of applause, he was having more than enough fun on his own.

Off in the distance, somepony had set alight a box of skyrockets, but Twilight was high enough up and far enough away that the sound wasn’t too intrusive; instead the collective chatter smoothed itself out into a sort of white noise over which she could still detect animal calls from the surrounding forest. Twilight took a deep breath, and sucked in the scent of sautéing vegetables and wood-burning fires and the old musty odor of the building she was standing on. She wondered how many of the ponies below her would ever realize how close their reality had come to being utterly upended by cosmic forces only she and a select few members of the Day Court had been permitted to comprehend. Then she wondered how many other near-misses had occurred over the thousand years of the Pax Equestria of which she had been kept unaware, and what proportion had occurred during her own time as Celestia’s so-called ‘personal student’.

“Lucky mare I turned out to be,” she finally said aloud, “I don’t even know who I really worked for any more.”

“Oh!” A familiar, soft voice issued from the shadows of one of the building’s eaves, and Fluttershy stepped out into better view. Twilight made a little, involuntary jump- she hadn’t even known the pegasus was there. “I didn’t think I’d… see you up here.”

“Yeah… well…” Recovering her equilibrium the scholar settled herself onto her haunches so that she could peer over the edge of the roof. It was chillier up here with the wind coming off of the Everfree, but a full day’s sun exposure had baked the shingles to a pleasant warmth under her legs and barrel. “It seemed like a good place to ponywatch.”

“You’re right, it is.”

Another pony might have found the silence that ensued awkward, but Fluttershy seemed to understand better than most that there was nothing rude about simply not having anything else to say.

A pegasus mare and stallion flew overhead, almost wingtip-to-wingtip, eyeing the rooftop contemplatively before spotting Twilight and gliding onward. Down below, a pair of earth ponies and a unicorn in pieced-together armor worked to liberate a bottle from the jaws of a tottering red earth pony stallion, bickering goodnaturedly as he held on for dear life and allowed himself to be dragged back out of sight.

“Hey.” Fluttershy’s voice came again from just over Twilight’s shoulder.

“Yeah?” The scholar didn’t look up.

“Is… everything going all right? With your… research?”

Twilight let out a long, slow breath. “Actually, it’s done. You might hear about it in the papers a few weeks from now… assuming I can get it past Celestia, of course.”

“… Princess Celestia?”

“Yeah, look, it’s a long and kind of stupid story.” She noticed that the crowd around one particular stall near where the earth pony had come from was abnormally thick, and thought she saw a pyramid of wooden tankards set up behind it. “Hey, do you know if there’s cider down there?”

---

“… even though other researchers, when they bothered to look at it at all, dismissed it as Mist Watcher’s own invention. I did too, at first, but after I noticed the correspondences with the obviously genuine Luna Bay fragment which contained information available nowhere else, I knew I was onto something.”

The game at which Twilight was currently trying her hoof was a very simple one, which involved tossing head-sized leather balls at something resembling a giant, tilted Roulette wheel; and before it Twilight’s doctoral-level knowledge of probability, ballistics, and telekinetic field dynamics was proving entirely unhelpful. It wouldn’t have been so bad if Pinkie Pie hadn’t racked up twice the scholar’s prize money despite downing five tankards of cider to Twilight’s two.

“You know, that is a kinda' screwy prophecy,” Rainbow Dash cut in from where she hovered at Twilight’s left, taking a temporary break from the bag of carmelized popcorn that was consuming most of her attention, “Why does it have to have all that confusing stuff about arcs and solar years and Moon Circles? Can’t it just have a year where she comes back?”

“Well...” all of Twilight’s interest in the ballgame was abruptly forgotten as an opportunity to educate the Common Pony presented itself, “That kind of dense, pedantic detail is actually really common for prophecies. Part of the standards for professional divination -and something that by the early First Century was being actively enforced by their Guild- is that prophecies have to be written in a very formal way. What’s described has to be completely unambiguous and literally correct according to an agreed-upon dictionary. Otherwise, ponies might misinterpret it, or worse, the questions you feed into the working will have ambiguous answers and show you uncertain or even outright impossible futures. That’s not the same as being easy to understand, though.”

“Ya’ mean like a legal document or somesuch,” Applejack cut in from the next stand over. Twilight hadn’t known she’d been listening in.

“Exactly! For instance, just talking to you, I'd say the ocean is filled with water. Saline water, if I was feeling pedantic. But there's other things in the ocean, so a prophecy would either have to spend six pages confirming the existence of different kinds of fish... or use a phrase that meant the same thing according to strict logic but didn't suggest details that might pull the working away from a guaranteed future, like ‘there is water contained within the maritime boundaries defined by the Celestia-Galatian Treaty.’"

“Or like, ‘Nightmare Moon will bring back Nightmare Moon’!” Pinkie supplied.

Twilight nodded approvingly. “To make matters even worse, prophecies can’t reference or describe events that might or might not happen, based on the choices of intelligent beings like ponies- and since ponies work together to decide on calendars and turn the seasonal cycles, prophecies can’t just use those to tell time! Usually they get around that by including their own definition of a calendar and just continuing that into the future, without saying it’ll still be what everyday ponies recognize when the prophecy’s fulfilled. That’s what I was expecting to find here, and why I was so surprised there wasn’t more to the Lunar Prophecy, but now I realize that it’s not describing dates or times, it’s describing specific events of astrological significance and warning of what would occur whenever ponies got around to causing them.”

The teal stallion running the ball-throwing booth whickered at her impatiently, and Twilight realized that Rainbow Dash was only the first pony in a sizable line forming behind her. She stepped out of the way, but noticed Pinkie Pie, Applejack, and several of the customers sharing cider and candied apples at the farmer’s stall were still watching her with interest. “And it's the dichotomy, where the text switches from a ten-page list of all the types of pottery used by a specific ancient people, to a curt, three-line abstraction of a war party's makeup, that makes interpreting prophetic materials such a nightmare… so to speak. And remember, you can’t divine anything at all, or use it as context in a divination, if it’s something that an intelligent creature can potentially change or decide not to do.”

“But isn’t Nightmare Moon moving the stars and casting her spell something she could decide not to do?” one of the patrons asked. Twilight realized it was the tailor, Rarity.

“That’s entirely true! One of the more common ways modern diviners get around the limitations imposed by pony interaction is to split their prophecies into conditional cases, based on assuming different possible decisions a pony could make- that’s why so many divinations commissioned for business forecasting and prospecting and so on are just big charts comparing numbers to other numbers these days. That technique wasn’t fully developed until about the 720s, though, and in any case while the description of seasons in the Lunar prophecy could be seen as a sort of proto-conditional, that doesn’t answer your question about Nightmare Moon’s involvement. It’s rare, but there have been ponies whose actions are actually predicted by prophecies in the past, and they all describe the same thing. They inevitably ended up in situations where, even when they knew what the consequences of taking the actions that were prophecized would be, circumstances were such that they felt like they literally had no other option. Their basic nature could only let them act in one specific way.” It was interesting, watching the dynamics of this crowd. Ponies with no concern for the subject matter ambled off whenever they felt like it, but every single one of those who did stay, listened with genuine interest. Unlike the soldiers she’d briefed on magical subjects in the past, who’d listened because their lives depended on it, the townsponies’ attention felt earned. For the first time in a good long while Twilight seriously considered abandoning her Crown-commissioned research and applying for a lecturer’s seat somewhere other than the Academy.

“Most of those prophecies were divined during laboratory psychological experiments with very specific controlled conditions, though, and even the few that were taken in a realistic setting predicted events only a few days or even a few hours ahead of time, where there were a lot more elements out of anypony’s control. A prophecy predicting the actions of an intelligent creature a thousand years after it was written is, as far as I know, completely unprecedented. I guess it really is… err…was fundamentally against Nightmare Moon’s nature to do anything but get back to the Material Plane as soon as she was physically able.”

“Orrr, maybe Nightmare Moon isn’t actually intelligent and just operates off a big list of reflexes and routines baked into the inside of her skull,” Pinkie suggested, “You know, like Applejack!”

The farmer scowled and took a swing at Pinkie Pie, which managed to connect only with the smaller earth pony’s outsized mane as she darted nimbly away. Applejack and Twilight were both laughing along with the rest of the crowd not long after.

“Now there’s an odd thought…” Twilight herself didn’t know quite what to think about any of it any more. She’d more or less come to terms with a radically revisionist history of the Lunar Rebellions that made Nightmare Moon and those who’d followed her… well, certainly not right, of course, the famines and tribalist violence that had occurred as a result of their gross mismanagement of ‘liberated’ Equestrian territories were a matter of archaeological record; but following a misguided path to the same civic ideals that modern ponies understood. It was also clear that something had drastically changed in Princess Luna on that fateful night a thousand years ago. Could a pony -an alicorn, no less!- really take such complete leave of her senses that she ceased to function as an intelligent being at all? Twilight wasn’t even sure if the problem could be considered scientifically well-defined. How would she even go about measuring such abstract qualities? There were, of course, spells -illegal spells, but that didn't much matter in the grand scheme of things- that could reduce a pony to operating mindlessly on a rigid set of instructions, but the idea of such a thing lasting for a thousand years was nearly as absurd from a thaumoentropic perspective as the psychological argument.

She supposed it didn’t matter now. Celestia had implied, with unusual directness, that for better or for worse Nightmare Moon was dead and gone. Between the loud, slightly-obnoxious amateur music and the cider sloshing around her brain, she decided she would write to some of her Canterlot colleagues on the matter sometime tomorrow and let it lie until then.

Not long after, midway through a truly delicious ice-cream sandwich, Twilight realized that she had no idea where the aerobatics demonstration was scheduled and if she continued to sit in one place pondering the limits of cognitive psychology her odds of getting a decent viewing spot would be significantly diminished.

---

Amethyst Star was more than happy to provide Twilight with a copy of the night’s schedule, although the slot that Dash had claimed would be occupied by her aerobatics demonstration was instead dedicated to the town-wide fireworks display. Twilight’s confusion turned to horror when she realized that there was, in fact, no mistake at all and the pegasus intended to fly through the fireworks.

Only afterward, sharing a picnic table in the market square with Twilight and a few others -still wearing her mildly-singed armor and reeking of sulfur- did Dash question why the Ponyville Militia and small Canterlot security contingent had been so dead-set on grounding her.

“What exactly were you expecting?” Twilight asked, “For the Royal Guard to be so impressed with your flying they’d offer you a position on the spot?”

“Of course not!” Dash rolled her eyes and stretched out a bladed wing alarmingly close to Twilight’s muzzle, “Obviously for a pony on my level they’d call in the Wonderbolts! I don’t know who’d even think about weighing down these girls with that all that bulky, noisy gold armor…”

“That… wasn’t my point.” In fact the electrum armor of the most elite units of the Equestrian military -not pure gold as claimed by many popular sources- was enchanted to be nearly weightless and completely silent among many, many other functions, but that wasn’t exactly the point either.

“Hey, at least everypony got something more entertaining than just fireworks this year,” Pinkie Pie supplied, “Maybe you’ll even get into Dead Air’s newsletter this time!”

Twilight was in fact an avid consumer of the publication in question, although given that last week’s issue had featured a stallion who held up the Canterlot-Baltimare Rail Line for three hours by jumping onto the tracks to search for his dropped orange, a mare who’d pulled a loaded crossbow during a backyard hoofball game, and the ‘That Doesn’t Go There’ 1097 Rectalspective, she was pretty sure being featured in it didn’t particularly count as an honor. Then again, knowing Rainbow Dash…

“Don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll be interviewed once Twilight’s research is published,” Fluttershy suggested quietly.

“Well, it’s not like any of it really matters anymore,” Twilight snapped, feeling suddenly embittered, “Nightmare Moon’s back to being history.”

Rarity shook her head, the distant firelight transforming her elegantly-curled mane into a cascade of dozens of tiny stars. “Well, I’m sure the Lunars would appreciate having their work acknowledged, even after a thousand years.”

“Wait…” Rainbow Dash’s eyes narrowed and her helmeted head swiveled in Twilight’s direction, “I thought you said all this was classified!”

“What, you gonna arrest me? None of my work is really militarily relevant, I really don’t think anypony outside of a university department is even going to care about the details.”

“Well, I hardly think that my contribution is even worth mentioning, but it would be nice for somepony in authority to acknowledge the work everyday townsponies put into your discovery,” Rarity suggested.

“Hmph.” Applejack looked up from her own mug of cider and shook her head, “Personally, I dun’ think any a’ this’s ever gonna see the outside a’ some archive under Canterlot Castle again. Kinda’ a shame, but that’s how it is.”

Twilight was not inexperienced in keeping secrets from ponies, and realized that Applejack was probably right. Nonetheless, she was now beginning to see the others’ point. It hadn’t just been her work that had made this possible… for all the good it would do them. She leaned forward and put both forehooves on the table. “Look, I… can’t really promise you anything, but if I get the chance I’ll try my best to get some kind of official recognition, OK?”

“You’d better…” The cyan pegasus trailed off.

Twilight, for her part, wasn’t optimistic about her chances, and for a few minutes lapsed back into awkward silence. Then somepony tossed Applejack a fiddle and convinced her to lead them all through a complicated sort of folk ballad about messengers and dragon bandits, and the scholar made a very well-thought-out decision to stop caring.

---

As the night drew on, the speeches and civic dedications began. Having to sit in an uncomfortable folding chair and listen to some minister or high priest lecture on the True Meaning Of The Solstice had never been one of Twilight’s favorite parts of the Summer Sun Celebration; it was even worse when the speaker was somepony she knew. But Ponyville seemed to treat oratory as just another attraction no different from the cake shop or Rarity’s gem exhibition, leaving ponies to come and go as they pleased from a few small seating areas set up around the Town Hall. Twilight had stayed in Canterlot the year Celestia had held her celebration in Cloudsdale and as a result had never seen a formal Naming of the Four Winds, so she decided to watch that ceremony for a while. It was a surprisingly lively affair, with much cheering and surging of wings whenever Derpy Hooves completed a slow, laborious section of the litany she was reciting, and Twilight quickly realized that while she wasn’t by any means the only non-pegasus attending, she was the only one who wasn’t singing along. She resolved to study up on the wording at a later date.

Not long after that a general current became apparent in the milling crowds, and after a great amount of fanfare from the attending locals Twilight realized the ceremony had ended. She slipped into the larger, thicker stream of ponies in the center of the square alongside the other observants, and was carried along at a relatively gentle pace to the Town Hall in the center. What she’d found two days ago had evidently been the business entrance, as the doors she was heading for now were much wider and opened into a sort of central amphitheater, nearly the height of the entire building and richly draped with Summer Sun banners. Ponies already filled the balconies up above and most of the tiled floor, forcing her and other latecomers to make do with a spot near the back. She thought idly of attempting to locate Spike before catching site of his telltale green spines on one of the balconies. He seemed deep in conversation with Rarity, and she decided there was no point to bothering him. Instead, standing at her right shoulder, she found Pinkie Pie.

“Isn’t this exciting?!” the earth pony asked, “I’ve never been so excited! Well, except the time I saw you flying into town, but who can top that?!”

“Umm… thanks, I guess?”

A high-powered crystal spotlight came on somewhere up above, shining down on the raised dais at the far end of the hall and the small tan earth pony standing on it. “Fillies and Gentlecolts!” Magically amplified by an amulet at her neck, the Mayor’s businesslike voice echoed over them, reading out the traditional Salutation To Celestia with easy confidence: “In just a few moments, our town will witness the magic of the sunrise and celebrate this, the longest day of the year! And now, it is my great honor to introduce to you the ruler of our land, the very pony who gives us the sun and the moon each and every day, the bringer of Harmony to all of Equestria, Princess Celestia!”

The Day Court fanfare followed a moment later, not in the traditional trumpets but in birdsong. Looking up on one of the other balconies, Twilight spotted Fluttershy with what appeared to be trained songbirds. Impressive. Spells to control animals certainly did exist, but required a greater reserve of willpower than she’d thought the little pegasus possessed. Perhaps Fluttershy had developed a different approach, or Twilight’s own estimation of the mare was simply inaccurate.

By that point, though, the velvet curtains on the upper balcony had been pulled open, and it took Twilight a moment to realize that the entire crowd was waiting.

Whispers developed, then murmurs.

“Hey, you’re from Canterlot, right?” Across from Pinkie, a brown earth stallion in a slightly out-of-date but nonetheless expensive suit asked, “Is this how Celestia… normally does the Raising?”

“Well she does typically show up from seclusion with little to no fanfare, but… usually she’s on time.”

The eight-pony Royal Guard contingent began conferring with increasing frequency, first with each other over their enchanted helmets and then in somewhat louder voices with the local militiaponies who apparently lacked such equipment. There wasn’t much they could do given Celestia’s well-known tendency to escape her own entourage, but it probably at least helped to feel busy. Twilight sympathized.

(♫)

Finally, a pony in the front row -Councilpony Granny Smith, Twilight thought, or was the younger earth pony Cheerilee?- worked up the courage to speak aloud. “Where’s Princess Celestia?”

Rarity’s balcony must have had some connection to the central one, as the unicorn disappeared from view only to return moments later. “She’s… gone!”

From the far side of a paradigm shift, a wizard could no more understand how a new theory had been anything less than perfectly obvious all along than she could unlearn how to read. Twilight realized then that watching that process occur in another was in fact far more of a shock than enduring it herself.

Perhaps, then, the townsponies were fortunate that their confusion was interrupted by the sound of hooves on dirt tracks outside. A lot of hooves, all in time, and distant, sonorous voices.

Twilight and the others in the back were able to turn, in time to see what appeared to be the whole of the Everfree Forest at the edge of town step forward.

The distant shapes resolved, bit by bit, into individual ponies clad in exotic, indigo armor from which the moonlight seemed to slide off like cold water. Over the sounds of syncopated hooffalls the movement of metal and leather became audible, and bit by bit the ponies’ raised voices resolved into comprehensible words.

We stood at arms before our liege, each one of us just a pawn

Now we reign supreme throughout the dark until the light of dawn

Memories we have left behind us might cripple lesser souls

But those of us brought up from nothing have risen, remade whole

We see it in her moonlit eyes, the fury held at bay

A battle waiting in the ashes to resume another day

And as we disappear into the shadows to fill their souls with dread

We fight tonight to rule tomorrow and a dark day lies ahead!

The times we live in now have changed, honor is long gone

And now that good and evil are shades of gray a cruel impasse is drawn

For all the good we have created it doesn’t make us right

But those of us who hide in darkness seek a different kind of light

As the sunset fades away the yellow turns to gray

The moonlight shines across the land, a calling we obey

From purest black we shadows rise to fight a greater fight

My brothers and sisters move as one, we soldiers of the night!

Twilight finally realized she knew the tune. It was the Royal Guard parade anthem, but the wording had been altered; corrupted. She experienced a curious flash of anger at the strange ponies’ crass impropriety… and then realized that the Celestia-praising version sung each morning by the cadets on Hurricane’s Green was, and had always been, the corrupted one.

This was the original.

By that point the mixed force of Royal Guards and militia had pushed forward out of the building and set up a loose skirmish line some distance in front, weapons drawn. “Stay your blades and hold position!” An officer called, “No sudden movements…”

As the shapes in the dark drew closer, it became increasingly clear that there were far, far more of them than the militia. The order was given to close ranks, and before the advancing Lunar Army, Ponyville’s troops pulled back. Twilight wondered why they weren’t trying to shuffle ponies out of one of the rear entrances. She worried she already knew the answer.

A runner from somewhere behind the building arrived, then, and shared a muffled conversation with one of the Royal Guards.

“… what do you mean encirc- …”

“… right out of the shad- … never seen anyth-…”

“… calm and … situation cont- … need a panic on top of …”

Now, flying shapes could be made out against the night sky they so closely resembled- shapes with leathery, bat-like wings.

“What… are those things?” A filly asked.

Twilight could no longer form words. She was only dimly aware of another pony trying to drag her telekinetically deeper into the building, but she held her ground, transfixed. Curious. She had expected there would be more screaming.

The soldiers advancing on her looked half-dead already, their coats thin and patchy and strung far too tightly over the bones underneath. One, she was fairly certain, was missing her lower jaw; another still had the shaft of an arrow protruding from one hollow eye socket; a unicorn stallion’s ribs jutted out so visibly that at first she didn’t realize his earth pony companion’s were in fact completely exposed by a wicked magical burn.

The oldest texts had been right all along, and for a moment Twilight wasn’t certain if she was feeling revulsion or sympathy or some combination of the two.

That was impossible, though, the rational part of her reasserted. Many of those wounds should have been instantly fatal regardless of how the pony in question thought about them. In fact, a thousand years in a crypt should have been invariably fatal.

It was only then Twilight remembered, that one of the many individually tiny slights that had first brought about the Lunar Rebellions had been an edict by the Day Court -repealed, no less, a year after the Reconstruction Acts thanks to “the wise council of Minister Paper Clip”- that had forbidden even theoretical research into the discipline of necromancy.

The oldest texts hadn’t been correct at all. They had been, no doubt with the best of intentions, sanitized.

No no, that wasn’t a fext carving through our best soldiers, just a lunatic berzerker. No no, that wasn’t a lich raining down magical fire on your town, the poor rutter was just starving and half-mad with lowland fever. No need to look into the matter any closer than that.

All of it was impossible. Unreal. That cider had to have been stronger than Twilight had thought; she was passed out on a bench dreaming of her wasted work in some perverse vindication fantasy. But what was really more implausible? That Celestia had silently and covertly dealt with a threat of Nightmare Moon’s obvious power years ago, or that she too had been somehow fooled? If Nightmare Moon had returned and been defeated years ago…

Most of the townsponies remained transfixed by the spectacle, eyes locked straight ahead. The moon was behind the Town Hall, and Twilight was reasonably certain that she was the only pony in attendance who thought to look away and find a window through which it could be observed. She shouldn’t have bothered; all she’d done was confirm what she already suspected.

The Mare In The Moon was gone.

If Nightmare Moon had returned and been defeated years ago, why had the Mare only vanished now?

Some detached part of Twilight boggled at the fact that she was less disturbed by what was going on in front of her, than she was by the fact that Princess Celestia had lied to her.

Then, behind her, somepony laughed. It was high, and clear, and cruel, and disturbingly equine in character.

Now there were screams, or at least shouts of surprise. The slow movement of ponies back into the Hall suddenly reversed, but Twilight fought against the crowd to turn around and face the interior.

There was an alicorn standing on the upper balcony; one that Twilight recognized.

Her face, despite its fanged mouth and slitted turquoise eyes, was nearly as familiar to the scholar as Celestia’s own; and indeed this was not the first time Twilight had noticed the significant family resemblance. It was naive of her to have thought, however, that simply looking at pictures of the beast in dusty grimoires and fragments of banners had in any way prepared her to face the real thing. Paint could never properly capture the inky blackness of her coat, a curious substance that absorbed all light but somehow still revealed in perfect detail the contour of muscle underneath. Artisans had done a decent enough job reconstructing the pale blue astral steel of her smooth, tooth-edged armor, and perfect white enamel of her fangs, but had failed utterly to capture the ethereal quality of her mane; not so much any material at all, in fact, but an absenceof material which removed any obstruction between the viewer and the stars outside. Nor was there a single account that even mentioned the change in atmosphere that the pony brought with her- a smell of dew and ozone and something electrical in the air.

Nightmare Moon was the most terrifyingly beautiful creature Twilight Sparkle had ever encountered.

“Oh, my beloved subjects!” Her voice was surprisingly light for a pony of her tremendous presence, confident and refined certainly but at the same time oddly dismissive. It carried easily throughout the entire hall without any hint of amplification, and more amazingly to Twilight without any hint of effort on the alicorn’s part. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen your precious, sun-loving faces.” From another pony the sentiment might have sounded bitter, but the utter sincerity with which Nightmare Moon delivered it as a complement cut a thousand times deeper.

“What’d you do with the Princess?” Rainbow Dash shouted, and for a moment the spell was broken. She launched herself upward with a throwing knife clutched in her mouth, but before she got more than a few feet Applejack had wrestled her back to the floor.

The alicorn clearly saw her outburst, and indeed turned to look right at her, but continued on as though Dash was nothing more than a stagehoof providing her expected cue. “What… am I not royal enough for you? Do you not know who I am? Does my crown no longer count now that I’ve been imprisoned for a thousand years? Did you not recall the legend? Did you not see the signs?” For the first time, her oddly pleasant expression began to take on the quality of a smirk. “What has Celestia been telling you all?” The entity -the Princess- shook her head sadly.

The militia must’ve been waiting for that moment of apparent distraction. “Seize her!” yelled the Mayor, and four Royal Guard pegasi leaped upward with longspears in their hooves. “She’s the only one who knows where the Princess is!”

Casually, almost dismissively, Nightmare Moon flicked out her left wing, and an arc of blinding white lightning chained through each of the guards in turn. They were knocked out of the air and landed hard, and Twilight was fairly certain she’d heard bones snap. For a moment she thought they were trying to get to their hooves, but their movements were frantic and uncoordinated; where one had curled into a tight ball like a newborn filly, another was bent almost double the other way. When bystanders rushed to their aide it took two or three ponies each to try to restrain them. One started screaming, louder than Twilight had ever heard a pony scream before. The others were trying to, but could only manage a horrible, choking-gasping-whimpering noise.

Twilight looked away, more out of pity than any fear.

The alicorn leaped down from her perch and landed absolutely silently on the floor below, steel-shod hooves failing to leave so much as a scuff mark on the polished stone. She walked slowly, casually over to the Mayor’s position. Nopony tried to get in her way. “So you’re the mare who commands these brave little ponies. I hope you’ll see reason and ask them to lay down their arms.”

The Mayor seemed to mull over her response for a moment, then in lieu of words spat a glob of congealed saliva at Nightmare Moon’s forehooves.

The alicorn didn’t seem to notice. “If that’s what you want, I won’t try to talk you out of it. I’ve waited a long time to take back my place in Equestria… we can all stand to wait just a little while longer.” The posture of her wings shifted slightly, and the guard who had been screaming tapered off to a raw, almost-breathless whine. Their spasms intensified, and additional ponies moved in to try to keep the four still. One, a white-and-pink earth pony with a medical bag in her hoof, looked up at the nearby alicorn with wide eyes, “I’ve never seen… I don’t know how… please, whatever you’re doing, just stop!”

“Is this the sort of leadership my sister encourages? Ponies who stand idle, holding onto their power while their subjects suffer?” Nightmare Moon’s smile fully exposed her long, wicked-looking fangs now. “Surrender, or I’m sure your successor will.”

The Mayor’s mouth opened, but she produced no words. Finally, she held up one shaking hoof and, once she saw the militiaponies focused on her, waved it outward. To a mare, they lowered their weapons.

Abruptly, the guards’ convulsions ceased. The one who’d screamed drew in a long, rasping breath. Twilight suspected he was the only one who still held onto consciousness. One of the others, she was fairly certain, wasn’t visibly breathing. All of them lay absolutely still.

The silence was, briefly, overpowering. Then, as they collected the defenders’ weapons, the Lunar soldiers started taking charge of the crowd. Twilight found their short, matter-of-fact orders- “Over there”, “You three come with me”, “Where is your mother?”- somehow a more palpable show of force than if they’d hurled threats and abuse. She noticed that the majority of those coming forward looked… well, alive, and wondered if that was an intentional psychological tactic. It seemed to be working, at least until one of the militiaponies- the runner from earlier, in fact, a skinny red unicorn who didn’t look far out of adolescence- refused to release her shortsword. Instead she swung it in front of her with obvious killing intent, narrowly missing the snout of the bat-winged pegasus who’d been trying to grab it, and darted for the exit. “C’mon,” she yelled, her voice at once loud and tremulous, “W… we can take ‘em! We can-”

She was cut off abruptly as the pointed end of a warhammer met her shoulder. There was a loud crunch as her armor crumpled and a thump as she dropped out of sight. Then complete and utter silence. Twilight wondered if there had been enough force behind that swing to kill a pony by impact alone. There wasn’t any visible blood splatter so it hadn’t hit her heart or carotid artery… right?

Nopony put up much resistance after that.

This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. Twilight forced herself to ignore the continued presence of Nightmare Moon in the far corner of the room, watching the proceedings with something that very much resembled amusement, and instead shouldered her way through the mostly-paralyzed crowd to where the Mayor was still standing. “You don’t-” she started, then lowered her voice, “You can’t-” the Mayor was ignoring her so she went back to shouting, “You have no idea of the gravity of-” That was getting nowhere, “This is more important than just one town, dammit, that thing over there is Nightmare Moon!”

That cold, cruel laughter froze Twilight where she stood. The electrical presence drew terrifyingly close to her and she found herself wrapped in magic, staring directly into Nightmare Moon’s perfect, horrible, slitted blue eyes. “Well, well, well, somepony remembers me! Then you also know why I’m here…” The creature in front of Twilight smiled again, and without changing tone in the slightest her voice once again filled the entire hall. “Remember this day, ponies, for it was your last.”

Author's Note:

UPDATED 4 OCTOBER 2020 to fix some grammar and formatting issues.

I wrote the entire scene of Nightmare Moon’s introduction, from Twilight’s arrival in the assembly hall to the end of the chapter, in a single sitting the night before my Master’s diploma ceremony completely from scratch. I started at 7 in the evening and finally went to bed at 2:30 AM. Normally I’m the sort of writer who outlines, re-outlines, and picks away a sentence at a time over the course of several days, but once I got started on this I couldn’t not finish it. I’ve tweaked phrasing and sentence structure here and there since then (apparently me at 2AM really likes the word ‘terrifying’ for some reason), but the essential structure of it is basically the same.

I had seriously considered having Nightmare Moon or her troops actually unambiguously kill a few of the townsponies just to show that violent death is a real possibility here and we aren’t playing by TV-Y rules any more, but there really is no other narrative purpose to doing that and so I opted not to.

I am aware that Zephyr Breeze complains about the weight of his Guard armor in Episode 200. While I don’t generally consider Extended Cut to have to hold to every element of canon, this I think is something that is in fact explainable:

• Zephyr could have been given an unenchanted suit as part of a hazing ritual
• He could have had the lightening enchantment removed as a disciplinary measure
• He could have failed to activate the enchantment, grabbed an unenchanted trainer by mistake, or somehow disabled it
• The armor doesn’t become totally weightless, but is still light enough for any reasonably fit pony to carry… and Zaphyr still complains about it.

Actually, all of those seem plausible. Possibly simultaneously.

Comments

[Comickook]

Yeah. I definitely liked Twilight's actually taking the time to genuinely bond a bit with her future friends (i.e. "pony-watching" with Fluttershy, playing a game of chance with Pinkie [and sharing a dialogue with the others as well] and acknowledging that Applejack had a point about the probability of Twilight's research getting sent to the archives AND the others have a point about how THEY helped with that research too. And yeah, Rainbow's comically missing the point concerning Twilight's concerns about the planned stunt with the pegasi and the fireworks was a really good detail too. And, as we already guessed, Nightmare Moon has just returned (as I said in my review last chapter, it's pretty clear that letter HAD to be a fake.

At any rate, really good job on the exchanges, characterizations and future chapter set-up in all the right places.

[AdmiralSakai]

9863678
It's interesting that you say that when other people have said that Twilight is TOO arrogant and aggressive in Ponyville. I don't really think either interpretation is more inherently valid than any other, but I do think it's kind of neat how many different interpretations of the same character can exist simultaneously.

[Lurks-no-More]

Speaking of the author's note, the simplest explanation, of course, is that Zephyr's not actually part of the guard, and was placed there by Spike and Luna as a part of the whole distraction thing. (As a younger sibling shadowed by his elder, he no doubt was happy to participate!) So you shouldn't trust anything he says to Rainbow. :)

[Cerulean Blue]

A working theory for prophecies, and how to make sure they're not incomprehensible garbage until after the occurance - I very much like this. Having Twilight solidfy the friendships she's made while explaining them - that's really good. I also sense something lurking deep regarding Princess Luna and her actions with regard to turning into Nightmare Moon.

Twilight working out that Celestia had lied to her but not thinking about why, although she's kinda busy what with the whole Army of the Dead thing.

[BlueMoonHarlot]

There isn't quite an exact line to quote, but I love & have still been thinking about how well the drinking and celebrating brought everyone together.
Twi didn't have as many little moments in the fic as she did in the show, but one-or-two-ciders Mane 6, even RD just listening to Twilight sort of simultaneously science and vent, research-vent, whatever the word would be felt really unique to this more adult verse and was really nice.

“ Well ...” all of Twilight’s interest in the ballgame was abruptly forgotten as an opportunity to educate the Common Pony presented itself, “That kind of dense, pedantic detail is actually really common for prophecies. Part of the standards for professional divination -and something that by the early First Century was being actively enforced by their Guild- is that prophecies have to be written in a very formal way. What’s described has to be completely unambiguous and literally correct according to an agreed-upon dictionary. Otherwise, ponies might misinterpret it, or worse, the questions you feed into the working will have ambiguous answers and show you uncertain or even outright impossible futures. That’s not the same as being easy to understand , though.”

Following this story I ended up spending the next two-three days going through all of the later ones too and enjoying them, though with less exact stuff to say about enjoying the works so much. Pretty fantastic art.

[nlinzer]

I love a villian that gives me nightmares, and your Nightmare Moon is certialy that. I can't wait to see your Discord