The Tower of the Fallen Star

by Raleigh

Chapter 4 - The Fallen Star

Celestia’s first instinct was to reach for her sword, but the little unicorn, ‘Luna’ she had called herself, merely stood there before her and smiled in eager anticipation of her polite greeting being reciprocated. She would not have put it past the Vizier to have used the form of an innocent foal to trick her, but, looking down into her dark eyes sparkling in the candlelight, she could not bring herself to entertain even for a second the possibility that she might strike down a filly.

“Celestia,” she said, “of Cimmareia.”

“Pleased to meet you.” Luna held out her hoof in apparent greeting, and Celestia hesitantly imitated that gesture. The smaller mare giggled, stepped closer, and tapped her polished hoof against the Cimmareian’s. “You’re supposed to bump hooves when you meet somepony new.”

“I see,” said Celestia, gingerly placing her hoof back down on the ground.

She stared around at the room, being so incongruous with the oppressive menace of the rest of the tower she had ascended. Compared with a series of chambers that seemed to have no obvious purpose other than to kill anypony foolish enough to break in, this room was very clearly a home. Everywhere she looked she saw signs of those little personal touches a pony makes when they find a place suitable to live in: the books and scrolls on the shelves, though she could not read their titles, looked as though they had been selected and arranged with care; in the corner of the room were a set of dolls that the filly had clearly outgrown but had kept for sentimental reasons; and further along the walls were decorated with hoof-drawn pictures of constellations.

“I’ve been reading books on etiquette,” said Luna. “Father says ponies aren’t allowed to see me because I’m too special, but I’m almost a grown mare now and I can’t stay here forever. Did Father send you here to see me? Please, come in!”

The words came quickly, though her refined accent never wavered. It was almost a veritable outpouring of pent-up emotion, as though the filly was trying her very best to hold back her excitement at meeting somepony new. She was as tall as an average unicorn, but her features and proportions were like that of a pony no more than fifteen, by Celestia’s guess, though her manner seemed to be that of a much younger filly. Then again, by the barbarian’s reckoning, civilised ponies who did not have to grow up with the hardship that comes with living in a cold, wet, monster-infested region like her homeland seemed immature by comparison.

This felt wrong. Not the mare, Celestia believed she was as perfectly innocent as she presented, but her mere presence in this tower and with the Vizier whose name she had heard so many ponies whisper in dread sent her primal instinct screaming. Warily, she did as she told and stepped inside the room, leaving grimy hoofprints on the rug.

“Who is your father?” asked Celestia.

“He owns this tower. Lots of ponies come and visit, but they’re not allowed to see me.” Luna shut the door behind her with a burst of magic, then turned to trot into her room and start showing off her things to her new friend, when she stopped, mouth agape in shock, when she drew up alongside the big mare.

“What is it?” said Celestia.

“You have wings.”

Celestia self-consciously fluttered her wings against her body. The filly stepped forward, reaching a hoof out to touch one, but Celestia stepped away.

“Please,” said Luna, her voice trembling. “I want to see them.”

Slowly, Celestia turned to face her, knocking over a pile of books with her rump as she did so but the filly didn’t seem to notice. She spread her wings wide; two vast, feathery white appendages on either side of her tall, domineering frame. Luna stared up in apparent awe at the sight, and, apparently having forgotten that ‘etiquette’ thing she had talked about before, reached out with her hoof and touched the thick, downy feathers.

“Father said I was the only one,” said Luna.

“What?” Celestia blurted out.

A flicker of magic from Luna’s horn unclasped her robe and it fell to her hooves in a heap. A pair of wings from the filly’s back, much like Celestia’s own, stretched wide, mirroring her own stance. “Father said I was the only one,” she repeated. “That’s why I have to hide in the tower, because I’m the only special pony with wings and a horn.”

Luna let out a sudden, shrill, foal-like squeal of delight that pierced Celestia’s ears. She pranced on the spot, her silver-shod hooves hopping on the plush rug and her wings fluttering. Her expression of utmost joy was infectious, and even Celestia found herself smiling.

“Are there more of us? Tell me everything! Is there a tribe of ponies with wings and horns out there, waiting for me? Where do they live? Are they all in the clouds like the pegasi or in big cities like the unicorns or out in the fields like the earth ponies? I’ve read all about them in my books, but I want” -Luna paused to take a breath- “I want to see them.”

Celestia waited for five seconds after the questions had stopped before speaking, just in case Luna thought of more to ask her. “I don’t know,” she said at length, and the filly’s ears drooped a little. “I thought I was the only one too. That’s why I came here, to look for your father. I thought he might be able to tell me and show me how to use magic.”

That seemed to perk the filly’s ears back up. “I can show you magic!” she said. “And we can run away together and see the world. I’m nearly an adult now, and I can make my own decisions. We’ll go and look for the ponies with wings and horns together and have adventures.”

“What about your father?” asked Celestia. Breaking and entering and potentially stealing a valuable item was one thing, potentially kidnapping a foal, or being mistaken for such, was another entirely, and one that judges were rather harsher on. Celestia rather liked her intestines inside her body.

“I said I’m nearly an adult,” snapped Luna. “And it’s not like I’m going away forever. I’ll come and visit and tell Father all about the ponies we’ve met and the places we’ve seen. And you’ll look after me like you’re my big sister.”

In the absence of the Vizier, his daughter would have to do, Celestia thought, and, in theory, she would be more valuable to him than the fallen star that she had still yet to find. Besides, as she looked down into the eager eyes of the filly, filled with so much excitement at just having met another pony like her, it would be a crime not to release her from this gilded cage and show her the world. It was a comfortable existence, but a cage is still a cage nonetheless; Luna would not have felt earth under her hooves, seen the glittering palaces and minarets of the city for herself, or known the pleasures of a stallion. The world could be harsh, as Celestia well knew, but there was joy in it, and she too felt it now that she could utter the answer to her eternal question:

I am not the only one.

The door opened.

“Father!” Luna shouted. “Look who I found! Another pony with wings and a horn!”

Standing at the door was a grey unicorn clad in hooded red robe embroidered with gold designs that resembled those letter things that Celestia had seen before, at least on a superficial level in the same way that moths and griffons both had wings. The hood was pulled low over his eyes, but a small hole had been cut for his long, thin horn. She could see a small, well-kept goatee, expertly trimmed to form a frame around his sharp chin. Though his eyes were shrouded in darkness, she could sense them staring at her, peeling away the layers of her flesh until he found her soul within.

“Look away, Luna, my dear” said the Vizier. His voice seemed to bubble up from the abyss itself.

Ears and wings drooping, she protested as only a foal could. “Please! She’s my friend.”

Celestia stepped forwards between them, saying nothing but drawing her sword with a steely rasp and resting it on her shoulder in the ready position. Her heart raced in chest, and the lingering tiredness was purged by a surge of blood. She stood there, tall, muscles tensed under her coat, staring down at the sorcerer and wondering if this little unicorn in a silly dress was truly the one the whore had said spoke with daemons and weaved doom upon his enemies. His neck would snap with a single slap from her hoof, she thought.

The Vizier smiled. “Look away.”

Luna turned her head away and clenched her eyes shut. “I’m sorry, Celestia,” she whispered.

The Vizier’s horn spluttered into a blood-red glow, like the burning heart of a ruby, or the eyes of those monsters in the garden. With a roar of defiance in the spirit of her ancestors who routed the would-be conquerors on the rain-drenched hills of their homeland, she seized the handle of her sword in her teeth and charged. They were close. Within moments the sorcerer would be reduced to a bloodied smear in the doorway, chopped in half by a brutal blade of steel and trampled by hooves that have crushed stone. Then she and Luna would both be free.

The glow intensified, suffusing the room in the hellish red glow of the pit. It throbbed like the beat of a heart, throwing everything within in sudden, stark, crimson relief before receding again. Celestia felt something in her horn, an unnamable sensation that she could not hope to describe in words, as some as of yet silent instinct within her now screamed in the mortal terror of a pony who knows they are doomed but not why. That the Vizier was casting a spell was obvious, and there was only one single hope for her -- kill him before he completes it. Closer and closer, she had but to leap forward and swing her sword and it would be done. Yet her hooves slowed, stiffened, and seemed to stick to the rug. She tripped and stumbled on, despite that cold, creeping feeling crawling up her long, muscular limbs, driven by a single-minded desire to kill the enemy, whose lips were twisted into a sadistic grin.

Her legs would no longer obey her, now stuck mid-trot. Only then, her calcifying heart straining against its fate, did she dare to look down and see stone creeping up her body. Shrieking, shouting, crying out; what muscles that were not solid rock burned with exertion to make herself move. The sword dropped from her mouth as she screamed. In the corner of the room, Luna sobbed.

The Vizier glided closer, his robe barely disturbed by the movement of his hooves. At the last moment, before the creeping petrification enveloped her face and all turned black and silent, as one final act of defiance she spat in his face.

***

Celestia awoke to a dull, droning sound. Her first sensation, before she could exert the super-equine effort required to open her heavy eyelids, was of a pounding, rhythmic pain in her head, as though Crom himself was beating an anvil inside her skull. Her mouth was dry, and there was a strange, dusty roughness when she ran her tongue along her teeth and gums. A foul smell in the air stung her nostrils -- a noxious mixture of blood and death and exotic incense that had a stultifying effect on her thoughts.

Her eyes blinked open, wiping away some sort of greasy film that seemed to have accumulated, and almost immediately she wished she hadn’t. Celestia was manacled to some sort of great stone slab, tilted back slightly, with all four of her aching limbs spread wide. The room was choked in a coagulating darkness, but before her, illuminated by the feeble light cast by a smouldering censer hanging from the ceiling, wreathed by the ghostly tendrils of smoke that clung to every surface like the early morning mists of the Cimmareian hills, was a table straining under the weight of weird eldritch devices that she could scarcely guess the purposes of. Her gaze seemed to melt off the table, incapable of appreciating the things atop it as a whole, and instead could only seem to focus on individual items: knives, daggers, saws, needles, jars of fluid in which sins against nature floated, vials, test tubes, bones, arcane sigils and Crom knew what else.

“Ah, you’re awake.” The voice seemed to materialise out of the languorous darkness, and moments later the Vizier, smirking confidently, emerged.

Celestia pulled at her restraints, but though her mighty thews strained against them, the cold metal would not yield.

“Don’t bother,” he said, circling around the table. “Those manacles are cast from metals found in a meteorite. Not even you, Cimmareian, can escape those.”

She gave one last, defiant tug with her forelegs. Celestia snarled at the Vizier, who she thought was doing well to keep his distance; any closer and she would have bitten his muzzle off.

“That’s better,” said the Vizier, returning her animal grin with a broader, self-satisfied smile of his own. “I have been looking for you, you know. Not personally, of course, but for another pony out there with wings and a horn. And after all of these years of searching, ever since little Luna fell into my lap, you just walked into my home, killed my cockatrice, and smashed my doors.”

He chuckled to himself. “That was a puzzle, by the way, the room with the bowl and the door with writing. ‘Blood and fire will open the way’, it said, but I didn’t count on my guests being illiterate.”

“Luna.” Celestia gasped, finding her voice dry and cracked. Her throat stung as she spoke. “Is she not your daughter?”

“My ‘fallen star’.” The Vizier peered over at the mess on the table, picking up instruments and examining them as he spoke. “I’m aware of that little story commoners share in their seedy alehouses. No, she is not really my daughter.”

“I thought it unlikely such a sweet filly could come from a wretch like you.”

The Vizier laughed again, and it was a mocking, hideous laugh devoid of any emotion akin to joy. “Her parents, her real parents, were minor nobles of the city, a unicorn and a pegasus, and naturally the birth of a foal with the characteristics of both caused a bit of upset, especially when the priests found earth pony blood inside her too. So they brought her to me, hoping that I could explain it. Alas, I could not. I failed. But I needed her for more research and I simply couldn’t leave her in the hooves of two ignorant ponies.”

The sickly feeling in Celestia’s stomach rose up, and the bile stung the back of her throat. She swallowed to keep it down. All around, amidst the darkness beyond the spot of meagre light cast by the censer, she imagined ghastly shapes forming, melting, and re-forming into something even more horrific.

“What happened to them?”

The Vizier sighed. “I don’t see why anypony should care,” he said. He ducked under the table and retrieved two large jars sloshing with a viscous pale-green liquid, which were placed on the table, shoving aside a pile of animal bones and a fetish taken from a Zebra shaman. Celestia leaned forwards, squinting to try and see the contents of those jars, and when she finally worked out what she was looking at, the bile returned.

In the left jar was a pair of wings, curled up to fit inside, and in the right was a unicorn’s horn complete with the small part of the brain its innards attached to.

“Bastard,” Celestia hissed.

“I wanted to know how to replicate Luna,” said the Vizier, leaving the two items on the table. “But they were desperately normal. Nothing about them even hinted at what they had unwittingly created. Luna has the potential to wield so much magical power, but she’s just a foal, still playing with dolls and dreaming of adventures. I’ve been waiting fifteen years for her to grow up, so I can unlock her true potential.”

Celestia spat dust on the floor. “For your own power.”

“All power demands sacrifice, Celestia. Preferably somepony else’s. But here you are now, a full-grown mare.” He ran his eyes hungrily over the barbarian’s strong frame, lingering between her hindlegs. “Clearly.”

The Vizier darted around the table, but remained just out of biting distance for Celestia. As he spoke, his voice grew animated; higher, more frantic, as though the words struggled to keep up with the machinations inside his diseased mind.

“Do you know how much magic is required to move the sun and moon? To give the world the gift of night and day? How many unicorns, brilliant sorcerors all, must burn themselves from the inside out and scour their bodies clean of magic every day to make it all work? You and I and one day Luna will change that when I unlock the power within you. I will sink my hooves into your flesh and drag out your magic as a surgeon tears out a foal from a dying womb. I will make more of you. I will become like you. I will ascend.”

‘Do not fear magic, but fear what a pony must sacrifice to take it.’ The words of the wise mare imparted to her before she left for the unicorn lands made little sense to her then, but now she understood them clearly.

“Release me, you coward,” Celestia snarled. “I’ll snap your horn off your head and make you eat it.”

The Vizier sighed, tutting and shaking his head in mock-disappointment. “You don’t understand,” he said. “Of course you wouldn’t. You can’t even read. But I will make you, and in time, when the pain is over, you will thank me.”

A scalpel lifted into the air from the table, encased in that dark red glow that was echoed in the horn of the Vizier. It floated closer, slowly, as if dragging out the moment of anticipation. Celestia squirmed against her restraints -- this was no fate for a warrior, no glorious death in battle, and nothing that would grant her soul a seat at Crom’s side. The sharp blade glinted brightly in the glow, and unlike the pretty dagger Redblood had wielded, this was a thin, clean, precise tool for inflicting pain, not a weapon to grant an honourable end. It rose up and up to the level of her forehead, and as it began to slice into her horn the world became nothing but white and pain.

Comments

[Bicyclette]

He chuckled to himself. “That was a puzzle, by the way, the room with the bowl and the door with writing. ‘Blood and fire will open the way’, it said, but I didn’t count on my guests being illiterate.”

haha, perfect!

i am absolutely loving this! Luna and Celestia being adopted sisters that found each other really opens up a lot more interesting story possibilities than the canonical "alicorned as foals, raised by Starswirl, rule Equestria, Luna gets jealous" arc, and the idea of artificailly creating alicorns as well as the story that the Student Six's play told having been a much darker one in reality are also concepts i am excited about, and i love how you executed them here. even though we've known him for less than a chapter, the Vizier is already such a great villain, the hero in his own story that is able to justify his own cruelty and arrogance to himself. as well as being just the opposite of everything you set up about Celestia in every way. fantastic work!