Luna's Invitation

by CloudMagnet

The Castle in the Everfree

As Luna flew across the verdant expanse of the Everfree Forest she found herself thinking of Equestria’s first aeons, the unreckoned expanse of time that passed before she and her sister had brought forth the ponies to tame the land and make of it what they would. At that time a single vast and virginal forest had spanned the breadth of Equestria, it’s mighty trees unchallenged in their majesty by any work of hooves or claws.

A wild thing, it had lived through consuming itself. Trees fought glacially slow battles for sunlight and water. Animals ripped at the plants for food, and when the plants did not suffice for their hunger the animals had ripped each other to bloody pieces.

It had been exuberant, passionate and complex; a living, growing clockwork built of thousands of tiny lives.

It had been beautiful.

Then, as now, Luna had felt the simple animal dreams of the forest dwellers, tiny crystalline beads of wanting, hot burning jewels of hunger, mating and defence. Through Luna’s magical sight the forest was spattered with pinpricks of emotive light in the same way that her night sky carried the stars.

For thousands of years she and her sister had watched it grow, change and evolve, endlessly fascinating in the variety of ways that living creatures could learn, compete and kill. But then Luna and her sister had been struck down by the terrible curse of empathy.

Their favourite toy, the fascinating machine of life that they had constructed as a game, drew them into itself. They could no longer dispassionately watch it’s workings whilst they vicariously felt the fear of the hunted and the hurt of the victim.

Their old game had been stripped of it’s fun, revealing a nightmare skeleton of cruelty and pain beneath the fascination. Celestia had applied her grand intelligence to the invention of new rules for their creation. She decreed that they would bring forth creatures of emotion and intelligence to tame the land and husband it in such a way that all of it’s creatures might live together in an orderly fashion.

And Luna had built them, the ponies. Crafted them with passion to be beautiful and strong and independent of their creators will.

After the first few centuries of watching with delight as the ponies built their dwellings and devised their own crude sciences and arts, she discovered that she had wrought too well. What had started as a game had become a trap. Luna and her sister were now bound to Equestria by their love for their surrogate children.

‘Millennia we have given to this land, and the ponies grow and prosper, but whilst they live on Equestria’s earth we must remain physically manifest. It may come to pass that we will never leave this place and swim amongst the stars again.'

Seeing her destination, Luna banked, dropping through the spots of low cloud that always seemed to hang over the castle, filtering the moonlight into a gentle wash of silver on the slick stones of the worn walls.

‘So many times have I wished that I could simply leave the ponies to their own ends, their love is for Celestia, not for me. But she could never leave them, and I would never leave without her.’

Luna alighted on the ruined wall of the Everfree Castle and turned towards Ponyville, invisible through the dense canopy of the forest. Like feeling the heat from a distant fire, even at this distance she could pick the exotic shapes of Twilights dreams from the dull backdrop of the sleeping township’s minds.

Somehow, amongst the thousands of ponies living across the surface of the land, it seemed that nature itself had conspired against Luna. Her little ponies evolved and mixed their strange traits from generation to generation in a genetic engine of complexity fit to boggle the mind of a goddess.

Somehow, this random process had given rise to Twilight Sparkle.

‘And now, for me, the trap has been made complete. I no longer want to leave’

-- c --

Luna paced around the main hall of the derelict castle, examining the husks the of the windows and kicking at clumps of wreckage to examine the remains of the mosaic floor beneath. The relatively recent wreckage of Nightmare Moon’s battle with the Elements of Harmony overlay the thousand year old wreckage of Nightmare Moon’s ugly brawl with the triumphant Princess Celestia. That vicious fight had destroyed nearly half of the castle and nopony had wanted to repair a place of such evil import.

‘I recall almost nothing of those final years, the Nightmare’s dominance over me was so complete. The brightest of my memories of this place are the happy ones, from the long years Celestia and I governed the kingdom from this very room. There were two thrones on that dais, gold and silver, and the walls of the Greeting Hall were always covered in bright blooms brought to us as gifts by our supplicants. Celly would always joke that she was jealous of my mane as it was always full of flowers.’

Whatever strange material comprised Celestia’s imposing mane, flowers just would not stick to it.

After she had been driven by force from the castle that they had shared for so long, Celestia had fled to the easily defensible mountainside village of Canterlot and transferred what remained of Equestria’s government to a fortified facility there. That fort grew into the very same Canterlot Castle that Luna slept in every night since her return, trying not to feel like a captive held in a high tower.

‘After Celly left, Nightmare turned this castle into a fortress of war. The halls were filled with soldiers, smithies operated day and night and the castle’s rooms were given over to stockpiles of blades and cannon balls. When Celly left, the flowers stopped coming, but I doubt that Nightmare even noticed that.’

Luna lit her horn and descended the spiral staircase behind the thrones. By far the largest of the changes Nightmare had made to the castle, after having all references to her sister scoured from the castle’s beautiful mosaics and torn from the leaded windows, lay underneath the ground levels where caverns had been excavated and protected with powerful charms.

Luna passed through emergency quarters and briefing rooms, reagent stockpiles and soldier's mess-halls. This had been the heart of Nightmare’s war machine, all of it now spoiled and destroyed. She reached the end of a map room where a rotten board still bore push-pins, buried deeply in the remains of a map that had lost it’s legibility in another age. She paused before an unremarkable stretch of wall.

Luna knew that Celestia regarded the old castle as a melancholy place and had refused to go there since the night that she had rent the sky, banishing Luna to the moon from the parapet of its high tower. The cleansing of the castle and the destruction of the not-inconsiderable number of monsters Nightmare had stockpiled beneath had been left to the military.

‘I do not doubt that Celly was deeply upset and too troubled to continue fighting, but she should not have so shirked her duty to safeguard her ponies; soldiers are blunt tools without the sophistication to detect something like...’

Luna’s horn shone with the gentle light of a full moon over a still lake.

‘Like THIS!’

Nothing happened.

‘But.. My memory might be hazy, but I know this place in my heart. On the other side of this wall is the only place where Nightmare Moon felt any pleasure that was not directly the result of hurting ponies or seeking power. The only place where, in those latter days, I could ever feel any peace or hope for a better future after the Nightmare took me. In this laboratory we sought to winkle out the secrets of science together and I could feel that Nightmare was not wholly evil .. I know that it is here!’

Luna set her legs into a braced stance, lidded her bright teal eyes and lit her horn again. A hard silver light like the gleam from the edge of a honed blade filled the chamber. Dust and small stones began to spin in place and shoot from wall to wall as a stifling electrical pressure built inside the room.

With every hair standing on edge and a white light leaking from beneath her tightly closed eyes, Luna shouted:

‘You are commanded to OPEN!’

Nothing happened.

Frustrated, Luna began to pace. ‘There is but one hour until false dawn. I must work quickly if I am to achieve anything tonight whilst my sister is yet sleeping. If Celly were to discover what I am attempting she would be unduly distressed. She would not want me to be anywhere near such a place of Nightmare Moon’s former power.’

‘She means well, but this soon after Nightmare’s defeat, she has no good reason to be concerned. I don’t want to touch that dark magic again, but I shall need some of her power. It seems that Nightmare’s portal will only open for Nightmare alone. That is, after all, how that deluded and paranoid mare would have wanted it.’

Luna glared at the unremarkable expanse of wall. Just a touch of dark power was needed, the merest breath.

This should be easy.

She took a deep breath and gathered her thoughts.

It was too easy. Far, far too easy to draw upon Nightmare’s power. The envy was still there. Celestia, the bright shining icon of warmth and motherly affection, beaming down onto their little ponies like a rain of sickeningly sweet honey.

Luna’s ponies.

‘I made them. They were mine. You stole them from me Celestia, you stole their love. Well, If they have no love for me then I will take obedience in its stead.’

Luna gasped as her most recent memories connected with the ancient hate. The deserted night court, Prince Blueblood and his petty tirade, his private guards trying to restrain her, her for the good of Equestria, lest she wrest control from her sister again.

‘Hah! He thought he could lay a hoof on his Queen? I threw that foal right through the doors. I should have used a wall or two and ended his whining for good.’

The ghosted outline of a door was appearing on the bare wall, dangerous runes flickered around the edges, promising harm to any who would dare to open such a portal by brute force. Luna’s coat darkened, her mane becoming translucent with stars.

In all of those years, nothing had changed. Now, as then, all of the ponies ignored her perfect night. The stars and the moon shone only for the beasts of the forest.

‘And their savagery and the precision of their cruelty shalt be the template for my perfect army. Perfect in it’s savagery, unmatched in it’s cruelty and it’s dominance of all ponykind.’

The portal recognised it’s creator and mistress. The runes fled back into the mass of stone and the thick slab of wall neatly pivoted back into the darkness.

Oh, there was so much more. Celestia’s petty parasitic nobles kissing her flank all day.

‘OK, the task is done. Bring it down now, don’t let it get out of control.’

The horrible crowded cities and their filthy streets. That despicable fetish of a candy palace clinging like a leach to the mountainside and the two faced tyrant smug on her throne with Luna out of the way. Their humble Princess, pretending to avoid the title of Queen through prim modesty despite her millennia of single-hoofed rule.

‘No, no, no. Nightmare should be nowhere near this strong! She was only just defeated. Stop, please stop. This was not what I wanted. I can control it! I know I can. What can I do... What can I... I need something positive, something must have changed, something that makes being Luna better than being Nightmare Moon.’

Ghostly greaves were forming around Luna’s feet. A helm depressed her wild star-filled mane.

‘Wait...’ Twilight. On her balcony with her telescope. Taking notes on everything happening in Luna’s perfect night, Luna’s soul spread like a map across the heavens. A new meteor? A star changes index? Twilight was always the first to report it to the almanac. Right now she would be curled up in her bed, probably under a pile of hoofwritten notes and diagrams of the constellations.

‘We can TAKE her you foal, right now, like any shiny toy that catches our eye. Just like the dream, she will turn to you and...’

Everything seemed to stop as Luna found her attention trapped once again inside the dream. Twilight, on her silk cushion beside the obsidian throne, beribboned and shod in gold like a courtesan. Twilight would look into her eyes and say... What would she say?

“Princess, what in Equestria do you think you are doing? Are you insane? Am I some kind of pet to you?”

Luna's distress gave way to a grim smile, Nightmare had misplayed her hoof. ‘We could possess her body, but as Nightmare Moon, Twilight would hate us. Twilight is the one thing that I could have as Luna that Nightmare could not take by force.’

With a whinny of frustrated rage a white ball of light exploded outwards from Luna’s body, prone before the door. Slowly, she dragged herself to her hooves and inspected herself as best she could. Luckily, she was physically unharmed by the magical blast. The greaves and helm were nowhere to be seen and her mane had returned to normal.

‘That was .. nearly very foalish .. but the portal is open. I just hope that Celly did not feel that back in Canterlot. Nightmare should still be just a mean shadow lurking on the edge of my mind. How in Equestria did she gain so much power so quickly? This will need to be looked into, the last two times this happened Nightmare was dormant for many centuries.’

Luna had recently been introduced to a miraculous device known as a radio that pulled music out of thin air. After her first three enthusiastic days with her new toy Celly had told her, rather gravely, that radios were not designed to be operated at full volume for the total span of every day and night.

‘If I am to spend my time here working, I’ll need a radio to cheer this gloomy place up, but until then...’

Luna sang a cheerful ditty that she had learned from the miraculous device as she trotted through the portal to her personal nightmare’s old domain.

“When I was a little filly and the sun was going down...”

--c--

This was most unsatisfactory.

Dust and moisture had contrived over the years to form an unpleasant crust over most of the work spaces and floors, sometimes inches thick. Her glassware was mostly intact but was far too dirty for the subtle kind of work Luna needed to perform. Her stock of chemicals would need to be carefully inspected and tested for purity and effectiveness before she risked combining any of it with powerful magic.

‘It would take a month or two to prepare this laboratory for potion work again. Replacing some of the rarer ingredients from the less accessible parts of Equestria could take a year or more.’

Luna huffed, she would not, in any case, have even considered using something as blunt and banal as a potion on her Twilight. She needed something more ..romantic.

The storerooms were something of a disappointment also. Most of her powerful test equipment had been sent to be repurposed as weaponry as Nightmare's armies had faltered in the final weeks of the war. Room after room showed nothing but ancient depressions in the pitted floor where engines of great subtlety and cunning had once stood.

At the extreme end of the room stood a most promising round vault door bearing a huge locking wheel and combination dials. Luna suddenly felt very alone and reluctant to approach that door, her sudden apprehension did not lessen when she saw that the door was slightly ajar. There was enough room for a pony to fit through that opening.

Not wishing to take another step forward without seeing the contents of that room, Luna pulled mightily on the door with her magic, but the iron was slick with layers of warding and the hinges were frozen with a millennium's slow corrosion. The door did not so much as squeak.

Something terrible had happened here, something that she could not recall.

'Very well. If magic will not suffice, I shall have to do this the hard way with my own four hooves. What manner of beast remains in Equestria that could threaten a princess?' Squeezing her way around the heavy vault door, Luna lit her horn with a searing light and gasped in happy astonishment as she was met by a million scintillating beams and cheerful sparkles. ‘My jewels!’

Once, they had been known as the Everfree Castle’s collection and displayed for everypony to admire. Gemstones of unusual purity, properties or simply enormous mass brought from every corner of the land as gifts for the admiration of the princesses. The practice had started out innocently enough with jewels given as genuine gifts from ambassadors, a practice emulated by some principalities on special occasions. Soon, ugly rumours were spreading that special considerations were given to those that could produce the finest gifts.

The Castle had subsequently been inundated with priceless junk. Faceted and mounted in beautiful filigree, uncut and delivered by the cartload in sacks and every variation between arrived by the cartload as ponies bankrupted their kingdoms vying for royal favour. Luna’s magic had always lent itself particularly well to gemstones; having an interest in the material, she took upon herself the task of curating the collection and tried to keep the whole mess catalogued and identified.

The largest and most ostentatious ‘gift’ that they had ever received had been accompanied by an offer of marriage directed at Celestia herself. A caravan of handsome dromedaries had spent an hour unloading wicker panniers of flawless diamonds onto the court's red carpets. By the time the servants had respectfully withdrawn, the Greeting Hall had the appearance of having suffered from an icy snowstorm. The noblepony responsible had picked his way elegantly through the mass, dropped to one knee and delivered a tightly rehearsed proposal speech that had run on for at least ten minutes and had included a potted history of his families bloodline and a statement of his net worth, underwritten by no less than three respected banks.

Celestia had informed her hopeful suitor that any self-respecting stallion seeking the attention of a mare would have brought her flowers. Not rocks.

The entire incident would have been hilarious if not for the intolerably arrogant attitude of the noblepony involved. Finding himself most put out by Celestia’s rather blunt and unexpected refusal in the face of his seemingly overwhelming wealth, he had switched his crass attentions immediately to Luna at that evening's banquet. He had seemed honestly surprised when the night Princess had not leapt at the chance to be his consolation prize.

On that very night, at the closing of the festivities, and in tipsy unison, the sisters had ruled that, henceforth, they would accept for the castle no gifts more valuable or less transient than a flower.

And nopony’s hoof in marriage either.

Luna discovered that she was crying. 'Sister...'

The floor of the vault was strewn with drifts of fine moon-dust, a common physical ingredient for Nightmare's magic and for her own. Hoof prints covered the floor, too large for those of a normal pony or even a draft-pony.

Luna remembered. This is where Nightmare had run to when her armies had collapsed and Celestia's forces overran the castle's walls, the site of her last frantic attempt to craft some kind of insane super-weapon from raw gemstones and the sheer crushing power of her unbalanced will.

It had not gone well. The moon-dust was all that remained of her assistants. Scorch marks were visible across the ceiling. Desperation and hate were powerful agents, but power without control always spelt disaster. The weapon had exploded, taking much of Nightmare Moon's magic with it.

The weakened Nightmare had fled back into Luna's mind, leaving the princess suddenly alone and grievously hurt. Still wrapped in the greaves and flowing mane of Nightmare's raiment, Luna slipped through the castle, easily avoiding the soldiers, and had found Celestia waiting for her on top of the observation tower.

Nightmare's presence was gone, but Luna had her own pride. This was her castle, her home, her queendom. Those ponies who had died in Nightmare's army fighting Celestia were her ponies.

Gathering what remained of Nightmare's power, she had attacked without a word.

The Elements of Harmony should probably have simply turned her to stone, in a similar fashion to Discord, sentenced to sleep off his madness in Canterlot's genteel gardens. In her weakened state they had been more than enough to destroy her entirely.

'Celestia thought that she was fighting Nightmare Moon. What would she say, I wonder, if she knew that her little sister had tried to kill her.'

Comments

[NotATree]

good chapter!

[Anquietas]

Very interesting chapter. More please.

[Starfall]

Oh dang. That's honestly quite a shock.

[Mister Morden]

A good update!

Looking forward to more.

[Karrakaz]

While I like how the chapter is written, I feel that it doesn't belong with the current story.

It takes too much attention away from what happened in the previous chapters (especially Luna's romantic interest in Twilight)
And Luna wouldn't leave without Celestia ? They're both space dwellers and have settled down to create ponies? interesting ideas, but it does call a lot of the romance into question (or downright bewilder the readers).

[Zobeid]

Erg.... This was going pretty good until Luna started musing upon pre-history and how she and her sister are some sort of eternal alien beings who created life, created ponies, etc. The whole alicorns-as-goddesses thing always rubs me the wrong way. Why does it keep cropping up in fictions?

[janushyde]

I think it crops up because of the raw power they are implied to have coupled with how incredibly long lived they are, the added fact of rarity also helps to make the case for them being beyond mortal kin.

I rather liked the whole prehistory bit I thought it made for some good worldbuilding and even some pathos given that Luna is the one who made the ponys yet because of the need for them to be out in the light of the sun they drifted to Celestia for the most part.

Also I thought the idea of Luna having more trouble then she thought controlling the fraction of Nightmare's power she needed to tap into was very intresting and well done, even though she regretts her actions in that state of being she still faces many of the same issues that drove her to it in the first place coupled with new issue such as cultural isolation given to how she is from another time as it were.

The whole point that Luna brought up about twilight was good too. Nightmare could easily take twilight captive but bar some Discordian tactic she wouldn't be able to get her to act as she wished of her. We also see how Nightmare and luna view her the former sees her as nuaght but a posetion something desireble and novel she wishes to own. While the latter shes her as the wonderfull pony who not only truely understands Luna's work but feels a grand passion for it as well. She also sees how much intrest Twilight has in her as a pony through the letters she has "borrowed" from her sister.

Though I will admit even Luna is being somewhat short sighted here. She marks Twilight as the one thing that Luna can have that Nightmare can't take by force, the one thing she seems to want most. Yet i don't think that she is thinking long term here as Twilight is a mortal a powerfull one yes but still a mortal yet she holds the heart of an immortal being this is an issue that many Twilight Luna stories seem to gloss over though I'm sure that it will be addressed in this story at some point in time.

What I'm most looking forward to though is seeing Luna's plan not only develop but being put into action. Once she has a way to invite Twilight into her dreams how will she go about doing so as they are on diffrent sleep shceduals for the most part. After that how far can thier relationship even extrend as the issue of marridge was just addressed in this very chapter I really want to see what will happen next.

[Antor]

awesome! I think the story is at least 20% cooler after this chapter! (and it was already pretty cool in my book)

[Mossflower]

so damn awesome!
this turned into something more than JUST a twiluna romance fic, and while i do enjoy those a lot; this is SO much better!

[CoastalSarv]

I love the sense of time, the deep emotion, the personal and cosmic history described. I love how you portray the two royal sisters.

[KaiCalimatinus]

Oh wow.
M. Night Shamalamalyan would be proud.

[Archvile]

Meh... another war story -_-

333859 Indeed, it really didn't feel like the other 3 chapters at all.

334204 I'm not much of a fan of that either.

[A true pony critic]

in my opinion Luna's mind wasn't exactly stable when she shot Celestia with Nighmare's magic but hey who am I to guess and also this chapter gets an due to interesting events and long forgotten pasts

[RealityCheck]

This story is, alas, Jossed by the fact that the ponies existed BEFORE Celestia and Luna....