Chap. 16 - Of Cones, Dashes and Decisions
Genealogy - (or The Mating Habits of Nocturnes Pegasi)
Of Cones, Dashes and Decisions
Being without armor gave Pumpernickel a significant speed advantage over his fellow Royal Guards, pulling out ahead of Sunny Meadows and Redoubtable by several lengths as they rounded the reservoir, and by the time they approached Sweet Apple Acres, he was just hitting his stride.
“You having fun back there, slowpokes?” He grinned as he looked back. Redoubtable had a matching grin that just filled his entire face and a thin layer of lather that had started to foam out from the leading edges of his armor and tip his snow-white feathers, while the older Nocturne guard had settled for a grim, tooth-baring snarl and large droplets of sweaty foam flying backwards from his mane and armor. An errant gust of wind caught Pumpernickel’s uniform cap and swept it off his head as he turned to look forward, and he promptly tucked his wings up to dive on the fluttering piece of cloth. The rumbling slipstream of the two other guards flowed over his head as he snapped his teeth at the falling cap. Once. Twice. The third time he caught it by the brim, and flung himself back up and into the race. Night Pegasi were not built for short range sprints with their long dragon-like wings, but Pumpernickel had been almost unbeatable in endurance flying. The only Academy Cadet able to beat him was ahead now, and he leaned into his wingstrokes with a vengeance.
“Hope you brought your money,” shouted Redoubtable as he rounded the farmer’s lightning rod and streaked back to town, passing Pumpernickel on the way by. The guard could only grin around the cap clenched firmly in his teeth as he launched into his own sharp turn, leaning into his wingstrokes and gobbling up the distance between them. Altitude was the key here, causing the first pegasus to start his descent to arrive at the destination with less angular momentum, but holding the descent until the last moment would allow the flier to keep their groundspeed higher and arrive earlier. The Royal Guard had a well-tested but highly dangerous solution to that, and all three pegasi pitched down nearly vertically with their wings tucked in as they passed almost directly above the ice cream shop.
-----
“I don’t think she’s coming back, Princess Luna.” Twilight Sparkle had been looking at the front door of the ice cream shop for over five minutes since Zecora had left their table, the librarian’s mood deteriorating almost as rapidly as the sun was approaching the horizon. A second Alfalfa Peppermint Crunch cone was hovering in front of her nose, but she only had the energy to give it the occasional lick, barely keeping ahead of thermal degradation of the frozen matrix.
“Have patience, Twilight,” said Rarity, who had splurged for a second dip of Prench Vanilla. “The two of them are most probably exchanging a romantic interlude of their own making. Just the two of them, alone, in the library.” She looked off into the distance and sighed. “No, probably not. A library is just not a place for romance(*).”
“I had hoped for their return before I was to tend to the raising of my moon,” said Princess Luna with a troubled look outside at the orange sunset. “Their time window is getting quite short.”
“I’ll get them,” offered Twilight, hopping up out of her seat and heading for the door. “I’ll be right back.”
Much of the blame for what happened next should be properly placed on the shoulders of Rainbow Dash. Experienced citizens of Ponyville had quickly learned over time to recognize the faint but distinctive sounds of a sky-blue pegasus in a high-speed descent which more often than not ended in a sudden impact. Twilight was no exception to the rule, and after the first dozen or so collisions had developed a special spell she had used frequently to good effect. Until now.
As she approached the ice cream store’s door, the abrupt scattering of ponies away from the impact zone along with a faint whistling sound from above triggered an well-practiced instinctual response in Twilight Sparkle: Her hooves planted solidly, and her horn instantly generated a powerful kinetic aura that both would hold her still in the event of collision, but also absorb most of the impact safely and spread it around the immediate vicinity.
Unfortunately the spell tended to distract her from whatever she was doing at the moment.
When the three Night Guards plummeted to a near simultaneous impact on the front steps of the ice cream shop, cushioning their impact by using their wings to generate a last-moment burst of air, that same wall of compacted air swept across her unmoving body and caught a loosely-held frozen object, propelling it across the room like a guided missile. Straight into the face of Princess Luna.
* * *
“Nice shot,” said Fate. “Right between the eyes.”
“I was aiming for the horn,” grumbled Destiny.
* * *
It probably would not have been that bad if Luna had not opened her mouth at just the wrong time. Streams of lumpy alfalfa-flavored substance flowed down multiple sides of the Princess’ face from the great lump of Alfalfa Peppermint Crunch resting on the bridge of her nose like a second horn. All throughout the ice cream shop, ponies were frozen in fear, looking at their Princess and the soon to be avenged assault upon her face. An intense kind of quiet occupied the air, the kind that normally precedes world-shattering events or executions.
Four exceptional cases of fear stood in terrified array at the front of the shop: Twilight Sparkle had a look of introspective terror, as if she were mentally looking up the current punishment for lèse majesté , Sunny Meadows had the look of sudden terrified realization that the powerful ruler that he pulled around the sky for hours at a time had just been disgraced by her own guard, Redoubtable and Pumpernickel had almost identical youthful prank-gone-wrong frightened faces. Somehow the Royal Guard’s oath had not included ‘And thou shalt not cause ice cream of disagreeable flavours to be flung into thy Princess’s face’, but they all three looked like they expected that oversight would most certainly be rectified soon. Violently.
…until Pumpernickel snorted in laughter.
It would figure the one guard who hit me in the face with a shattered door, would look at hitting me with ice cream as some sort of humorous occasion. She snorted in a matching outburst of laughter despite herself, which triggered a cascade of similar snorts, nervous laughs, and eventually the entire shop filled with the joyful noise of laughing ponies.
“My Royal Guard,” started Princess Luna firmly, her strong voice cutting through the laughter with a broad smile on her own lips. “We must commend thee for thy rapid approach to Your Princess. However, We have noticed that you do not possess the same quantity of refreshment enjoyed by the rest of Our subjects. But fear not, I believe this oversight is easily corrected with Our assistance and that of Our loyal subjects.” The lump of ice cream on the Royal Forehead separated to hover nearby, surrounded in a indigo glow as Luna’s smile became predatory.
“Ready?” All around the ice cream shop, unicorns levitated up their own leftover ice cream, pegasi and earth ponies hefted dishes and cones, and everypony reflected their Princess’s smile. The Princess had not been the only one in the shop to get an unexpected ice cream bath.
“Aim…” Twilight Sparkle backed out of the ice cream shop door, tripping over the guards while trying frantically to get some distance. In the ensuing chaos, all four of the ponies wound up fairly stationary and in a confusing unable-to-dodge pile at the bottom of the shallow steps.
“Fire!”
A wave of ice cream streaked out the store door, hitting the four ponies like a multicolored arctic avalanche, sweeping them across the street and pinning them to the far building in a frozen wave. Princess Luna strode to the ice cream shop door, and in a last insult to injury, added the greenish alfalfa-flavored blob from her own face to her Royal Guards’ arctic entombment.
She turned back to the laughing ponies inside the ice cream shop and gave a regal nod of her head. “My apologies, my loyal subjects. All shall be purchased replacement frozen concoctions twice the volume of your recent purchase at my own expense.”
Pinkie Pie gasped, clutching her guitar to her chest with a grin and breaking into a quick dramatic strum. “You don’t mean…”
“Yes!” declared the Princess of the Night. “THE ICE CREAM HAS BEEN DOUBLED!”
“Hello? Hey Lunkhead, are you in here?” The muffled echoes around the empty library drew a shiver down Laminia’s flank all the way down to her cold hooves. There was just something creepy about a room filled with books and no ponies. Some unseen force always seemed to pull at her from all directions as if the books had a need to be read, and wanted to draw her to them. It was worse with the dozen or so Books of Tradition that remained on the library main floor, each secure in their wooden chests of various sizes and design. They pulled at her will as if they wanted to suck her back inside their wooden coffin-like containers and reshape her back into a good little Nocturne mare, one who would obey and serve the family as mindlessly as the rest.
She scowled at the litter surrounding Pumpernickel’s obvious workspace, made up of dozens of copies of the same story with little colored notes peeking up through the pages. He was a Royal Guard, for Celestia’s sake, not a librarian or a researcher. The story he was researching was even that horrible mish-mash of idiocy and typos that disgraced her own family Book. Thankfully, every time she had seen it during storytime as a foal, her aunt would dismiss it with a scoff and they wound up reading ‘The Ugly Alicorn.’
A few pages of the story just happened to flip over as she passed, and she smiled when she saw the copy was lacking in the horrid typos her family copy possessed. Although it had… illustrations. Her smile vanished while she stared in secret horror at the drawings, then firmly closed the cover. Whatever budding artist had drawn an illustration of a Night Pegasus filly being consumed by flames had hopefully passed away centuries ago, because his skill and his imagination were entirely too vivid.
Pumpernickel’s family Book of Tradition sat solidly on the library floor, encased in a beautiful walnut chest that just called out for her to open. Who knew what secrets it held about the handsome stallion: the records in his family history, his deeds growing up, what honors he held at graduation from the Academy. It would be an unconscionable invasion of his privacy to look, she turned firmly from the temptation and looked at her own family chest. Well, it could not properly be called her family any more, although it still contained her own biological father. Her feelings of disgust at his window hopping behavior seemed weak, in retrospect, drawn thin by the passage of time.
She lifted the lid on the hefty Stratus family chest and looked inside, hoping to just flip through the family records and smile a bit at the recollection of father’s incandescent fury during the meetings. When the investigator’s report was read and he railed against her ‘immorality,’ how she would throw his arguments back into his own face. When letters were received from angry wives, how he would shout with reddened face, only to cringe when she suggested he go ‘deal’ with them at night while their cheating husbands were otherwise occupied. Her mind shut down and a cold lump of ice seemed to fill her belly as she stared down into the chest at the signs of her betrayal.
‘copy for Pumpernickel’
The insulting little notes were not only stuck in the storybook, but several of them poked out of various spots in the family meeting records. The lid of the chest slid through her hooves with a thump and she staggered back out into the library floor.
It was his fault she felt this way, it was him. All him. He had gotten her to open up, to feel something that had lit her up inside until she felt like she was glowing. And tomorrow he was going back to his happy family, sleep in a giant heap with the rest of his warm relatives, and laugh at the burning pain he had ignited in her heart. It was not fair! He was worse than all the other stallions, he was just as rock-headed and insensitive to the pain he caused as—
She broke off and kicked the chest that contained Pumpernickel’s family Book of Tradition. Book of Lies more like it. She kicked it again, striking her hoof right under the “Rye” carving, then threw herself against the chest, wrestling it up on one edge before flinging it upside down against the wall with a crash of abused wood.
“Stupid!” Despite her screaming tendons and an agonizing white-hot wire that seemed to be wrapped around her spine, something hurt even worse in her heart. She flung herself down over the spilled papers and began beating her head against the chest and screaming.
“Why! whump did I… whump have to fall… whump in…”
She stopped with her head pressed against the cool wood of the chest. That was it. She had given away her trust. She had promised never to do that again, and here she was. Her unseeing eyes stared at the pile of papers that had spilled out of the inverted chest. A thousand years of history, culminating in that idiot. What a waste of time and effort. She nudged the top of the pile at a well-worn book with “Rye” embroidered into the front. It had to have started there. If she could travel back in time a thousand years and pound his ancestor idiot into the dust, he would never exist. He never would have been able to break her heart. She idly flipped open the front page of the book and froze in sudden fear at what was written.
To Rye, the best little brother anypony could have.
From your big brother, Pumpernickel
Her heart seemed to stutter to a stop, and even the dust motes suspended in the evening light froze in their endless dance. She flipped over the next page, which was covered in foalish scrawls, diary entries from what she could tell. Flipping through the pages showed the erratic attention a young colt would pay to a diary, as months or even years tended to separate the scribbled entries. She paused at one dated a few months before the Creation.
Pumpenrkl and mom and dad and me wnt to the party today. Princes luna is all radient and beautifl. She sayd soon there is a big nite. Ifell sleep in party, luna say soon we sleep none it be dark all the time.
She flipped farther a little more through the diary, until the night before Luna gathered her followers and began the Exodus on the Night of Creation.
My brother says we are going with princes luna tonight. im scared but he say it going to be ok, he watch me. says there going to be big new city bilt, we all live there in the dark, play all the time. big changes to us, not sleep, just play. I think it funny i like to sleep in sunbeam but he say ok so must be.
The faint noise of a tear hitting the paper jerked Laminia back to reality. Traditionally the ancestors of the Night Pegasus families had all been spoken of as quite old. This one had been only a colt when he was transformed into their dark form on the Night of Creation, and had his Princess taken away that same night. It must have shaken his young soul to the core, and somehow affected his great-to-however-many-degrees grandson with his own case of stupidity. She flipped forward another page and was surprised by the sudden increase in legibility.
Dear big brother. I know you cannot read this, but I am going to write to you anyway. Where are you now? The princess said you died on that night, and saved our lives. In a way I lost my big brother but gained about fourty new little brothers and sisters. she says they all wold have been kill if you had not pushed ther cloud away but you died doing it and I shoud be proud. but your dead so how am I supposd to be proud. Since im oldest all the other young kids look at me like i’m some sort of leadr but i donot knwo what to do. princess put us with a bunch of other familis but i never will forget you. you best big brother. Rye.
She sniffed and twitched at a noise from outside, but after a moment she put it down as a noisy shutter somewhere in town and returned to the book.
Dear Pumpernickel, best big brother ever. Its been a few years since I’ve wrote to you. We all still are in canterlot with families, but we meet every year to talk about Luna and the long night, and about our families. They all still think of me as a leader, so I try to think to say things like you would say. I asked Princess Celestia about a bunch of stuff but she kept crying whenever I talked about Luna, so I tried to stay away from that. She made this big garden, you would really like it, she almost never crys in there. She says Luna should return someday and we should all be ready, but i don’t know. Id rather have you and mom and dad back.
Her lips thinned as she thought of the young colt, long turned to dust by time. His brotherly bond had not broken even with death. It hurt too much to read any more, she flipped farther ahead to find something that would not remind her of her own families.
Dear Pumpernickel, best big brother ever. It’s hard for me to still think of you as a big brother, because tomorrow I’m the first one of our kind to go into the Royal Guard Academy. I’m frightened, but I’ll keep on a strong face. I know if you were with me, you would say something to make me feel better. The other kids are all starting families of their own, but I keep thinking what would Luna say to her creations if we scatter all over. There has to be a way for us to stay ready when she returns.
She read through the pages as if they were memories, captured on paper for ages and only now and flowing across her mind. They were too strong to absorb in one reading. She kept having to flip farther and farther ahead in the diary to keep tears from blocking her vision. Finally she reached the last page. While the writing had gotten thin and wispy as it progressed through the last few pages of the diary, this last page was strong and thick, the mark of a younger writer.
Dear Pumpernickel, my best big brother. I have opened every reference in this diary this way, and I’m not about to change just because some snot-nosed kid is writing this down for me so write. Now! Where was I?
The doctors say I’m about done, but I wanted to make one last entry. Only have one page left anyway. I think you would be proud of us, big brother. There are over forty growing families of Nocturne in Canterlot and other towns, all awaiting the return of Luna. I fear if it takes too long, they will lose hope and just dissolve into the rest of ponydom. Some of the other families have strayed a bit, but so far the rules we have set up are keeping us together.
Princess Celestia has a spell that will turn us back into ordinary pegasi, but we turned her down flat when she asked us if we wanted it. I sincerely hope my descendants show the same courage, and do not give in to this temptation out of our loneliness. As long as we live, Princess Luna will live in our very bodies and blood.
I worry about Princess Celestia. Ever since she banished Luna to the moon, she has become so sorrowful and cold. All of the joy was taken out of her life with the loss of her sister, and now even the sight of armored Night Guard mares cause her pain. We discussed it with the Commander of the Day Guard quite a few years ago, and now only stallions guard our Princess. It seems to have helped her attitude, particularly when we started bleaching their coats to a uniform white or grey. Several of us tried bleaching too, but it was a horrible disaster. Thank the stars our coats and manes grew back.
There are still ponies who hate us for what we did on Nightmare Night, even though the Princess has been very forgiving. That outside hostility probably has held our families together more than anything I’ve done. There have been incidents, quickly hushed up, but I have been very determined to avoid any attempt at retribution on our part. Let our service to the Crown be our attempt at redemption.
We’ve been naming the foals in the memory of anypony who stayed loyal to Princess Luna during the Exodus, be they unicorn, pegasus or earth pony. There have been some of our kind born into other families, so I have made certain that they are welcomed into the families and given proper names, with certain exceptions. I thought it best if we did not name anypony after the original kids who survived to avoid confusion.
I kept them from naming anypony Pumpernickel, but I have been thinking lately. Maybe I was wrong. You were such a good brother I didn’t want any little snot-nosed brat wandering around and changing my memory of you. So here’s what I decided. After I die, the family is only going to give your name to colts we think are the most deserving. They would have to be strong, and loyal, and willing to sacrifice themselves to save others like you did for us. I’ll see you in a few days, because I’m feeling very tired. Yeah. Close it up there and put my name at the bottom. And send it to Celestia. Why? Don’t argue with me you little snit. Why’s she still writing?
Rye
(*) Twilight Sparkle’s parents would disagree, having met in the Rare Books and Manuscript section of the Canterlot Archives, become engaged in the Incunabula section, and nearly thrown out of the Archives permanently for an incident that took place eleven months before her birth.
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Warning: Chapter 16 is emotional whiplash.
The last chapter and the Epilogue have both been written, I just need to join them up.
Serious whiplash, I think. Laminia has just found out how far back Pumpernickel's bloodline goes... and just for whom he was named. I think he is a worthy successor. He has the same honour and loyalty. Okay, he's got issues but, let's face it, who in this story hasn't?
I wonder how much damage will be caused by The Great Lunar Food Fight?
That footnote explains quite a lot, actually...
Oh Twilight.
Dang, so the ancestors of every single Night Pegasi family were on that could that the original Pumpernickel pushed away? That's quite the legacy to live up to.
That footnote. You know, I'm entirely willing to believe that Twilight was conceived in a library.
Huh. Came here looking for a LunaXRarity ship.
I have to say, I am not dissapointed with what I found.
I look forwards to more.
ROFLMAO!!! Considering that they are both bibliophiles, I can easily see that.
Incidentally, I've always found libraries very erotic places. My wife could tell you more about that. I met her right outside a library.
Boy, I hope she never reads this comment.
No worries, boys. Lami is paying for everyone anyway
This explains so much about Twilight
Oh no
Ice Cream Food Fight! It's like snowball fights, only stickier!
Meanwhile, the guards all die of hypothermia, and possibly suffocation. Or is that drowning?
They were all just foals, Laminia
Oh... So that's why...
Wait, what? But... he always thought...
This was their own book... why has he never read this?
She's a terrible secretary
Remarks and corrections:
> to her Guard’s arctic entombment.
Unless this refers to them all together as "Luna's Guard", this should be [Guards'].
> had hopefully passed away years ago, his skill and his imagination were entirely too vivid.
Comma splice. Needs a semicolon.
> There have been some of our kind born into other families, I have made certain that they are welcomed into the families
Comma splice. That should be a period.
Isn't this taking pace alongside the Travelling Tutors series?
Cause in that one Twilight's parents mention that Shining Armor was 'present' at the engagment...
7202516 He was "present" in that Twilight Velvet was pregnant with him.
5925758 Fixed (and it only took me a year and a half. Quite nearly a record.)
7202516 7950579 4015037 1600308 To be specific (in my timeline, at least), Twilight Velvet and Night Light's engagement happened in the Incunabula section of the library when Shining Armor was 9 months pre partum, and the young married couple were nearly thrown out of the library when Shining Armor was somewhere between four and eight (according to calculated canon), which is just about the time when a young colt provides so much curiosity around the house that the only private place a young couple *can* be intimate is somewhere... else.
They really should have been quieter. It is a library, after all.
7950712
Ohey, just noticed... "the Night Pegasi families". Should be "the Night Pegasus families"
7951171 ....another year and a half....
Pfft. Rarity, if you don't think a library is a romantic setting, then you clearly haven't watched enough anime.