The Name of Our Mistakes

by ObabScribbler

18. Memory

“Luna!” Celestia did not bound to her sister’s side – such a thing would be far too unbecoming – but she did trot faster until she reached her. “I bring thee auspicious news, dear sister!”

Luna looked at her sidelong, as if she had not expected such an effervescent greeting. “Thy comportment be almost rash, sister. Dare I say, even foalish? A strange thing indeed for thee. Thou art customarily concerned with appearances and how to maintain them.”

“Pish posh, Luna. Listen well to what I say and heed not my excitement until thou art aware of the cause!” She was fairly dancing with what Clover had told her and related every word to Luna. “What thinkest thou of such a thing?”

“Clover the Clever hath created a means to look back into the past?” Luna gaped.

“Nay, Starswirl the Bearded hath created it. Clover merely seeks to cast it on our behalf. He knoweth not how long it might take, for the hours between that terrible night and now stretch long into days and weeks, yet he hath given his oath to do all he can until the face of the accursed thief be revealed! Thinkest this not a wondrous thing, dear sister?”

It took a moment for Luna to smile. “Indeed, Celestia, ‘tis a wondrous thing indeed. How fortunate we are that Clover the Clever hath blessed us with his presence.”

“Indeed, fortune hath finally smiled upon us!” Celestia beamed. “Think of it, dear sister! Soon the Elements of Harmony may be returned to us!”

“But Celestia, what then of the treaty with Gryphona? Didst thou not construct it chiefly because the Elements were lost and thy worries over our borders were sharpened? Are we then to renege on our side of the agreement? What then for Equestria if its rulers be so changeable?”

Celestia grimaced. She had not even considered the treaty in her delight. “The treaty … ‘tis an issue for consideration at a later time,” she said eventually.

“To break the treaty would be to risk war with Gryphona,” Luna insisted. “Yet to keep it would be to hobble Equestria with King Sanguine’s demands. He takes our textiles to clothes his soldiers, our crops to feed the animals his griffins hunt, our gems to decorate his palace – though I do believe in actuality he trades them with the Dragon Lands behind our backs –”

“I know this, Luna,” Celestia protested. “Canst thou not allow me some small enjoyment before I am to think of such things?”

Luna stared at her, all smiles vanished. “A ruler cannot be permitted such joys while her country balances on a precipice she hath created with her own quill. Thy treaty hath allowed our enemy to grow fat and make allies of dragons, Celestia.”

“And if the Elements of Harmony art returned to us it matters naught!” Celestia disputed, her own happiness dwindling as her voice rose. “For neither griffins, nor dragons, nor great white bears may challenge Equestria if we hold the Elements’ power!”

“Thy sight remains short,” Luna snapped. “We cannot rely upon Clover the Clever’s success, for ‘tis not yet guaranteed. We must make plans, Celestia.”

“Oh? And what proposals hath thee?” Celestia snapped back, not expecting an answer.

“A demonstration of our power,” Luna said almost before she had finished speaking.

“But the Elements –” Celestia began.

“Are not the whole of our power. Celestia, I am the Moon Princess. Thou art the Sun Princess. Not mere titles, but descriptions of what we may do. Sayeth I, we should show King Sanguine and all his allies that to challenge Equestria would be to challenge the sun and moon themselves!”

Celestia was aghast. “Thou doth propose to use the sun and moon as weapons?”

“They remain ours to command even without the Elements, do they not?” Luna demanded.

“To nurture the land only! Not to wield as weapons!”

“The land would indeed be nurtured if we were to keep its enemies at bay.”

“To use them thus would bring disaster!” Celestia gaped, unable to believe Luna was actually suggesting such a course of action. “To remove them from their orbits, to break the pattern of day and night, would … would …” Just the thought of what would happen made her shudder. The entire natural order of Equestria would be devastated. What would be the point of taking such steps to defeat their enemies if in the process they wiped out their own citizens? Celestia shook her head emphatically. “I will hear no more of such nonsense. ‘Tis foolishness, Luna, mere foolishness! I had thought thee more shrewd and mindful of thy duties than that.”

“So because my suggestion doth not meet with thy agreement it is to be discarded out of hoof?” Luna snarled. “A pretty diarchy, this, with one princess set so much higher than t’other.”

“Luna –”

“Begone, Celestia. I am done with thee.” Luna flared her wings as if to fly away, but she had lost even more feathers and could not get herself aloft. Instead, she stamped away like a truculent foal.

Celestia wanted to go after her, to demand that she see sense, but her hooves were frozen in place. Too later, she realised her guards had witnessed the entire exchange. She whirled around to see their faces averted and stoic. They might have been made from white marble for all the emotion they showed. Nonetheless, she dismissed them and retreated to her chambers, telling her hoofmaidens to come back later.

Still in her daywear, she stepped out onto the balcony and stared up at the crescent moon. The sky was cloudy tonight in preparation for a thunderstorm tomorrow. She stared at the moon as if the answers to all her problems lay on its distant surface.

“Oh Luna,” she murmured miserably. “No matter what I do to bring thee closer, thy orbit grows further and further from mine own.” She hung her head and breathed out a sigh that seemed to come from the soles of her hooves. “I did not think I should ever be so near thee, and yet so far away.”

They had always been so close as foals and fillies. It astonished her that things could be so different now. Growing up in Canterlot, a settlement far north of Everfree long before it was even called that, they had enjoyed their simple lives as simple pegasi. Canterlot sat on a wide ledge halfway down a cliff, as the elders who had built it believed there were few predators able to catch defenceless ponies there without being spotted and beaten back, and they were sheltered from the worst of the mountain weather. Commander Hurricane had called them fools for choosing life so close to the ground when they could have gone with her to her new city of Cloudsdale, but the Canterlot pegasi would not be dissuaded.

They had not known about the griffins. Why should they? Griffins lived in Gryphona, not Equestria.

Surrounded by destruction and death, two scared fillies had wormed their way into a crevice in the cliff face behind their house. No adult pony could have fitted, and there they had stayed as griffin raiders laid waste to their home, their family and everything they had even known. When the griffins set light to what remained of the settlement the heat had driven them deeper into the crevice and they had emerged into a set of caves where they cried out their grief and stayed for several weeks, eating lichen and drinking from puddles of condensation.

There had appeared to be no way out of the caves. At first neither filly had wanted to leave. They were convinced the raiders would be waiting for them out there and had almost decided to live out the rest of their lives as cave-dwellers who never saw the sky.

Celestia rarely thought back to those fraught days when it had been just the two of them alone in the dark. Sometimes they would find scraps of light and fly up to them, but inevitably the fissures would be too small even for their small bodies to fit through. Her spirits in particular had grown so low that one day she just lay down and refused to get up again. Luna had brought her whatever food she could find even though she was starving herself and dipped her wings in puddles to drip water into her sister’s mouth, cajoling and pleading with her to keep going. Only Luna’s loyalty and generosity had made her rise and eventually carry on.

Finally, when they were so weak they could barely walk, they found it. In retrospect, maybe it found them. Maybe the buzzing sensation that went through them those last few yards was what stopped them collapsing. Maybe what had compelled them to squeeze into the crevice in the first place was the call of the beautiful gemstones they found embedded in a wall in what felt like the mouth of Tartarus.

The gems had pulsated with a fantastic, inexplicable light. The two fillies had felt instantly comforted and curled up beneath their glow in what they thought would be their final sleep. There they had shared such dreams that every time they had dreamed since it had paled in comparison. They had felt the gemstones speak to them and they had talked back without question, as one does in dreams when logic no longer matters. The gems were old – far older than Equestria, or the founding ponies, or anything else they could name. They were also powerful and would lend their power to those them deemed worthy. They had been watching the two fillies ever since they entered the caves and had witnessed their struggles. They had seen the older filly’s kindness as she carried the younger one, who joked and made her laugh even when things seemed direst. They saw the older filly’s honesty over the fate of their families and how the younger filly refused to desert her when she lost hope.

Laughter, honesty, loyalty, kindness and generosity, the gems had whispered. These bind lost souls closer and breed harmony from chaos. They also permit us to release our own power. There is strength in these five elements, for when they come together they create the spark of another and we are able to free ourselves.

What spark? the two fillies had both asked.

Magic. If thy agreement be not in doubt, say it plain, little ponies, and thou shalt be given the power to save thy nation.

Of course, they had agreed, and when the two fillies had awoken after what seemed like a long, long time, they had found themselves changed. Their bodies were taller, their legs longer, and on each of their foreheads was the horn of a unicorn. They also knew the way out of the caves and took the gemstones with them back into the sunlight. There they discovered that their flanks each bore a strange mark, unlike any that had ever adorned the flanks of ponies before them.

“We were so young,” Celestia whispered to herself on her balcony. “Did we truly understand what we agreed to?” She raised her eyes, silently asking the question that had come to her before, but which she had never had the courage to voice. Did we die in that cave and were reborn as we are now? Be that the reason thou art changed from the pony I knew, Luna, and changing still?

But, as ever, she received no answers.