> Luna: Remember
(♫)
Twilight dreamed of maps and star charts. Standing next to the pillar in the center of the cave, she saw the entire inscription cleared of dust and half-superimposed over the modern, false-color maps she’d left back in the Golden Oaks. She knew that she was in fact asleep, but her situation didn’t feel dreamlike in the slightest- rather, with the stinging of her lacerated sides and the dull ache of her leg gone, she felt more alert and lucid than at any point since she’d traveled out to Fillydelphia.
She traced the symbols connecting the waystones and pillars, her pencil scribblings magnified to fantastic detail around the faded star-patterns connecting them. She added in red pen and starlight the other features of interest her search parties had found- the bodies of adventurers and Lunars alike, the patch of quickmud that had snared Parhelion, and the camp artifacts that Luna had identified. Feeling almost weightless, she leaped up to the top of the rune-pillar and surveyed the entire map at once from a single vantage point, and then she paused.
In the entire time she’d been puzzling over Luna’s ‘signs’, she’d considered each incident on its own- a single, discrete anomaly that emerged spontaneously and disappeared just as suddenly, never to be recaptured again. In that whole investigation, she hadn’t once bothered to simply graph out everything Luna had done on a single map. Now, with the sum total of it spread out in schematic form around her, she saw Luna’s predictions separated into two distinct categories. She only ever predicted the presence, absence, or nature of objects- never the actions of ponies or natural events. Sometimes, that meant elements of significant importance at the time Lunars were actively encamped in Hardfrog Valley. Those she mentally discarded, and they vanished from the map. Everything else- the quickmud, the bones, the damage to the second pillar- had developed later, during or shortly after Luna’s millennium-long exile. But, there, in each and every case, whatever she ‘foresaw’ was physically located within about ten meters of one of the pillars.
The pillars which they had only been able to discover at night.
The pillars in whose proximity Twilight had sustained an inexplicable attack from a seemingly invisible entity.
The pillars that, apparently, were heavily enchanted despite zero indication from the Lapwing’s instruments that they were in any way magical… and, in fact, seemed to possess a limited capacity to bedevil their magical communications. Just as there was zero indication on any instruments that Luna remembered any of the information about the past that she produced.
They weren’t dealing with First Century magic at all. The runes on the pillar proved that well enough. They were dealing with Nightmare Moon, of whose nature and capabilities they had extremely little knowledge. And if all bets truly were off and her instruments could not be trusted… Twilight would go with the simplest explanation available, until some sort of evidence appeared that suggested otherwise.
“Luna does remember,” the scholar said aloud, “we can’t pick it up and she isn’t aware of it, but all the information is still locked up somewhere in her head- and not just locked up, but updated by some sort of watch-spell on the pillars.” She looked around the empty dream-cavern and shook her head. “I… sort of wish I could tell her about this. And… also apologize.”
“Twilight Sparkle. Speak, and We will decide if thine words hath any merit.” said Luna’s voice behind her.
Twilight spun on her perch to find the cornflower-blue alicorn standing calmly in the mouth of the cave, nothing visible beyond save for a night sky full of stars. She stepped inside, and then faded away into the shadows that gathered around the cave walls. Suddenly finding herself fixed in place, Twilight felt the pillar sinking beneath her hooves as the starfield in the cavern entrance swelled to encompass her entire field of view.
“Thou speakest of Our memories, and Our secrets,” Luna’s voice hitched, ever so slightly, and the stars surrounding Twilight began to flock like luminescent starlings into recognizable shapes, taking on color and texture. “But what of thine own?”
The unicorn found herself, still rooted in place, looking out from what had to be Luna’s own point of view at a bat-winged pegasus in ornate armor, a steel-shod forehoof stretching out from below her vision to strike at the mare’s jaw. The perspective of the entire scene seemed horribly distorted in ways that didn’t quite make sense. Luna’s foreleg seemed a dozen meters long, but the other mare’s look of surprise and raw, animal terror was hideously magnified as the hoof drove through her armored chinguard in excruciating slow-motion. Whatever the dark background might have been was pushed out to the edges. The detail was incredible, but at the same time the entire image seemed unreal somehow, as flat and lifeless as a picture in a textbook.
“Dost… dost thou seek to blame Us for the death of brave Silver Shade, or offer thine absolution?” Luna continued, from what sounded like directly behind Twilight’s own head, “because thine accusations will not bring Us any lower than We have already fallen, and thine forgiveness hath no power to absolve.”
“I don’t plan to do either, Luna, because you didn’t kill Silver Shade. Nightmare Moon killed Silver Shade.” Her unseen body still fixed in place, Twilight settled for tracking her eyes over Luna’s memory of her own hoof, and the spiderweb of black shadow-matter that had filmed overtop. She stared intently at the reflections visible in Shade’s helmet, and managed to pick out the image of Luna’s head. The alicorn’s mouth was open, shouting or just screaming it was impossible to say, exposing bright white fangs. One eye was half-covered by a clinging membrane that gave the impression of a blue iris and slitted pupil, but clearly possessed no depth; the other rolled off to the side, wide and unfocused. “She’s the reason you can’t remember anything,” the unicorn continued, “and she’s also the reason you’ve been seeing those signs.”
There was a long pause before Luna replied. “Tell Us… verily. How dost thou know this.”
“I’m still trying to figure it out as I go along, so we’ll start with the basics,” said Twilight. Suddenly, they were both standing side-by-side in the psychomancy lab at Fillydelphia Yards, watching as a second Twilight Sparkle shouted silent questions at a second Princess Luna, while a horrified Spike and Forward March looked on. Twilight reached up to brush whatever was causing the horrible cold, sticky, itching sensation from her forehead and muzzle, found nothing there, and realized she was experiencing Luna’s own sense-memories of the instrumentation rig. She forced herself to ignore the sensation and continued.
“While the exact mental and physical processes that drive memory still aren’t well-understood, it’s generally accepted that the ability of a pony -or any other intelligent creature- to recall memories is relational. We remember things, by relating them to other things that we also remember. That’s called ‘indexing’. Since you have no recognizable memories of the time you spent as Nightmare Moon, and were unresponsive when you were first freed, I -and all of the rest of your doctors- assumed you were just unconscious, comatose, for that entire period. Meanwhile, that skin was moving your body around like a suit of armor in reverse.”
She looked around the laboratory. “But now… I think something was actually using your brain that whole time, just not you. Nightmare Moon’s memories actually exist alongside yours, but the indexing she used to organize them is so foreign that you ordinarily have no way of recalling them. What you experience as memory loss before Nightmare Moon asserted herself completely, were actually just periods when she took on partial control and pushed you out of your own head.”
The lab fell away all at once, and Twilight found herself flying alongside Princess Luna -flying, with leathery bat-like wings protruding from her sides. Below her stretched a sea of tents and cookfires, populated by little purple-armored ants, and on the hill up ahead an array of archery targets had been set up. She could hear distant laughter, and marching-songs, and smell dewy grass and roasting vegetables on the wind. Her wings seemed completely insensate and moved entirely under their own power, feeling more like a harness or saddlebags than a part of her own body. The overall sensation was a disquieting one, and she wondered if this was Luna’s revenge for the memory of the laboratory. If so, she was fairly certain she deserved it, but she continued nonetheless.
“The only way that you can access Nightmare Moon’s memories is if your brain re-indexes them more or less by accident- like if you see a clump of reeds that just so happens to look like the arrows in a target Nightmare Moon took a shot at. It isn’t hard, the equine brain is always looking for things to associate with other things, but it has to happen in just the right place at just the right time, with a memory that’s ready to be connected. Then it feels like you’re suddenly seeing context- seeing meaning- in something that, in fact, isn’t itself meaningful. It feels like a sign.”
Luna was quiet for much longer this time, long enough that Twilight worried her dream-form had somehow gotten stuck flying a remembered path with no actual intelligence remaining inside of it. But she spoke again. “Pray thee, continue.”
Twilight nodded. “Let’s use your last sign as an example.”
Suddenly they stood in broad daylight on the rocky trail above the mountain cave. Twilight’s wings were gone, now, and Luna’s were folded neatly at her sides. Twilight reckoned they were located about where Captain Marigold had been standing during the last leg of their flight from the hydra, and figured the Captain’s helmet was the one Luna had been using as a focus for the visual component of her observation spell. However, this time the clifftop was empty. Then, in a strange sort of double-vision she saw the same cliff, at the same time, bathed in gentle moonlight with a much wider path leading across the U-shaped crevice and right to the entrance of the cave.
A strange, chimeric-looking equine figure cantered up that path. It had Twilight Sparkle’s head, coloration, and cutie mark, but the broad wings, lengthy horn, and powerful frame of an alicorn. Princess Twilight Sparkle. No there’s a ridiculous thought. It moved stiffly and deliberately, like a puppet in the hooves of a novice puppeteer or a foal not far past learning how to walk, and its eyes were blue and slitted and conveyed not a trace of depth. It paused, looked across the looping path, and seemed to reconsider before taking off from the ledge with a single, inequinely-powerful leap. It passed neatly through the illusory rock face and disappeared from view.
“Is this what the sign looked like to you when it happened?” Twilight prompted.
“Aye… nay… We… I saw nothing like this then, but… it is familiar, I remember…”
“You remember Nightmare Moon walking this way, using your legs,” Twilight prompted again, as gently as she could, “you remember her making that jump and surviving it, a thousand years ago.”
Beside her, Luna’s eyes narrowed, and her ears pivoted forward. “But… what of Our other signs? Not all of them were ancient. We foresaw the damage to the pillars, and good Parhelion’s misfortune in the swamps, and thine peril before the pillar in the hills.”
In a flash, the dreamscape shifted again. Twilight watched as another Twilight Sparkle stood before the reappearing pillar at sunset, stammering without the faintest whisper of sound, blissfully unaware as a ghostly figure in Lunar armor advanced ever closer to her. She couldn’t place the position she was watching from for a moment, though, and then realized with a shock that she was in fact looking out from inside the pillar itself.
“I think the pillars are enchanted,” she explained, “Nightmare Moon set them up to hide themselves based on certain criteria, and also to report back to her through some… channel, I don’t know what kind, what was going on around them. I bet you’re still receiving all that information, but… but since it’s meant for Nightmare Moon, it just kind of… fills in the Nightmare-Moon-shaped hole in your memories instead of being anything you can understand!” Awfully scientific terminology, that…
“And… what of the spirits thou couldst not see?”
“We’re getting increasingly into speculation here, but… I think they might actually be some kind of magical construct, not ghosts at all. My shield would’ve stopped a ghost, and either everypony would’ve been able to see it or nopony would. This… this is more like a defense spell. If you do the wrong thing near a pillar, it activates and attacks. That’s what killed those adventurers- it explains why we found all of them right next to the pillars, they must’ve found the pillars themselves and the pillars decided they weren’t supposed to do that!” Twilight reached a hoof out towards the specter, “See, look, her armor is in much better condition than any real Lunar soldier’s would’ve been at this point in the War- to say nothing of the condition the other ghosts were in.”
She realized she was wandering further and further from Luna’s original question. “As for why I couldn’t see it… I remember scanning the pillar just before it started acting strange. We know these things can hide themselves from magical scanning -never mind how, but it’s possible Nightmare Moon somehow anticipated magic Equestria didn’t have in the First Century, or maybe there were analogous spells wherever she originally came from. And we also know that the pillars can hide themselves from a pony’s regular senses when they aren’t set to appear, too. I think… I think the pillar might’ve actually jammed me somehow, when it saw I was scanning it, like it thought my eyes were an instrument! I bet that if anypony around there had been wearing vision-enhancing goggles, like Rainbow’s flight goggles, they would’ve seen the same thing…” Which would be an interesting thing to test, assuming we can get the pillar to produce another sentry without endangering anypony.
“And thine dragon friend?”
The dreamscape shifted once again, placing them in one of the Royal Academy’s spacious, oak-and-red-velvet lecture halls. In the row of seats directly in front of them, a thirteen-year-old Twilight Sparkle sat alongside ponies easily half-again her age, furiously scribbling notes on the subject of draconic biology.
“Spike’s eyes work differently than a pony’s- he, like all dragons, partially sees heat instead of what we’d consider color. He can recognize most hues pretty well, but not different shades, and when he was younger he’d actually get different Academy staff with similar manestyles mixed up. Whatever criteria those pillars use to blind creatures, he might’ve fallen into it because of that. This is all… really, really speculative, of course, but… I think it’s the most logical explanation that fits all the currently existing evidence.”
“But… thou dost not know.”
Twilight shook her head.
“Then… why should We believe thee?”
(♫)
They sat across from each other on the dusty stone floor of Luna’s tower in the Castle of the Two Sisters, surrounded by the shredded remains of Nightmare Moon’s astral steel armor. Outside, there was nothing to see but stars and a brilliant, full moon.
“Luna, I… made a big mistake by doubting you. I thought that because I couldn’t explain the signs you were seeing, they… didn’t matter, or weren’t worth discussing, or couldn’t really exist. Obviously they do. But that goes both ways. Back when we were first trying to relocate your camp, you couldn’t understand how the thaumograph worked either. But that didn’t mean there was no such thing, and I don’t think we would’ve ever found the camp if we didn’t make use of it… if we didn’t know how to use it, properly, which means knowing how it works. Now, even though I’m not sure, I think I know how the signs work, too. And we do have to understand them, Luna, we can’t just take them as they come.”
The view through the tower’s great bay window became that of the crevice in the mountainside, rendered like a drawing in one of Twilight’s old introductory physics textbooks. A purple, cartoon unicorn stood on the left-side ledge and jumped off over and over again, each time describing a mathematically-precise parabolic trajectory behind her as a dotted line. Each and every time, regardless of her angle or position of takeoff, she missed the cave opening on the other side, and either crashed into the cliff face with a little cartoon ‘splat’ or disappeared into the water below. Finally the rock face itself started to move, on a flat arc that started mostly horizontally, and the vector describing the cartoon Twilight’s forward momentum nearly doubled in magnitude. Only then did her trajectory finally line up with the cave mouth. “Luna, if I’d just taken your advice without questioning it, and jumped over that gap before the cliff started to collapse… I’d almost certainly have died. Some of my friends might’ve died, too, trying to save me.”
Luna stared at the diagram for a few seconds more. Her mouth opened and she inhaled as though about to speak, but then she closed it again, swallowed hard, and nodded.
“Again, I’m… not asking you to abandon everything you believe and follow me mindlessly. I’m just telling you that I have an explanation for where your memories went, and why you’re seeing… meaning, in things that might really be meaningless. It’s up to you how much of that you want to believe, but… we need explanations and systems like this if we’re going to be working in circumstances where ponies’ lives might be at stake. We… we can’t just follow the tracks into the swamp blindly, and assume there’s no monster at the end of them.”
Now they stood in a gorgeous stone cathedral draped with purple and blue cloth, populated by bent-horned unicorns in ornate robes that Twilight recognized as Moon-Raisers. A small blue alicorn filly -as if that wasn’t a contradiction in terms- walked alongside a much older gray unicorn with a voluminous white beard and a traditional mages’ hat embroidered with dozens of small golden bells. Starswirl the Bearded, in the flesh! Or, at least, about as close as I’m ever likely to get!
The filly walked up to a dais at one end of the structure, gawking at a trio of positively ancient Raisers who sat on high platforms, twitched spasmodically, and hollered gibberish, their eyes wrapped tightly in bandages. She leaped back as if startled, and Starswirl wrapped a hoof around her shoulders and gently but quickly guided her away.
“Do thine arts tell thee… if these ‘signs’ will ever go away?” Asked the adult Luna beside her. Twilight wondered if that constituted a tacit admission that the alicorn did, in fact, believe her theories now.
“If my model is correct, eventually Nightmare Moon’s memories will either fade away completely, or your mind will reindex all of them and they’ll seem like any other information, or some will go one way and some will go the other, but… I really don’t know. Since these signs happen when you reindex Nightmare Moon’s memories, and there are only so many memories there, I think they’ll stop one way or another. I just don’t know how long that’ll take.”
“And willst thou… seek to probe Our memory again?” This time, Luna sounded genuinely fearful.
“I…” Twilight paused, swallowed, and then continued. “It’s up to you. In the short term, I know the process is painful, but in the long term it might actually turn out to be helpful in clearing up the confusion Nightmare Moon left behind her… or it might make that harder. We really, truly don’t know. I also won’t lie to you and say that it won’t ever be helpful to our work to know what Nightmare Moon was thinking when she cast a particular spell or set a certain trap. It might even keep ponies safer, knowing that kind of information. And… you’d give us a chance to push the boundaries of our understanding of how memory works. Maybe -just maybe- some insight we find here could turn into something that’s helpful for ponies who are struggling with dementia, traumatic amnesia, learning disabilities, and all sorts of other conditions. Or, we might discover it was all a huge waste of time. Ultimately, though, Luna, those memories are in your head, by right of forfeit from Nightmare Moon if nothing else, and it’s your decision what we do about them.” Twilight paused, then continued. “I do have to warn you, though, out of all of Nightmare Moon’s memories we could’ve found…”
They stood in her office in the Golden Oaks, in front of the bulletin board where she kept information relating to the last days of the Lunar Rebellions- only now it had grown to encompass the whole wall, full of tapestries and mosaics and illustrations that Twilight was positive she had never even seen before. Old and new materials alike showed details that were frankly impossible for paper to accommodate- painted blood ran wet, woven flames flickered, and Twilight fancied she could half-smell-and-half-taste burnt flesh in the back of her throat.
“… killing General Silver Shade was probably one of the mildest. If… if you’re interested, we could even… see if we can eliminate or suppress those memories entirely. That’s not without its own risks, of course, but psychomancy’s progressed a lot in the last thousand years.”
Again Luna nodded, silently.
Around them, the cave in the mountain slowly faded back into existence, this time properly populated with the sleeping forms of her friends and colleagues- and herself, Twilight realized. She looked down beneath her, and found another purple unicorn curled up on a saddlebag full of loose paper. She wondered if she could wake up simply by kicking herself. Outside, across a moonlit valley dotted with small farmsteads, a cluster of tents sat beside a bend in a fat, slow river and sparkled with the lights of dozens of campfires.
“Thou hast… given Us much to ponder, Twilight Sparkle,” Luna finally said, “And We have… choices to make and promises to keep. We shall seek thee come morning, and set right what We can. Fare thee well.”
Outside, the moon dipped below the horizon and the sun rose, then itself fell, the cycle growing faster and faster with each repetition. A great force of ponies in dark blue armor filed out from the camp on the river and left it nearly empty, and Twilight fancied that she could just about make out a larger figure with a midnight-blue coat at the very head of the column. The sun and moon bobbed and weaved madly in the sky for just a few moments, then resumed their circling. In a flash the river overran its banks and merged with an even greater deluge pouring back in from the east, instantly swallowing the camp and the farmsteads and all the rest. The cycling of day and night became a strobing, so rapid that it was painful to look at, then passed the speed equine eyes could recognize entirely and blended itself into a sort of perpetual dawn. Reeds spread like brownish flame and trees grew thick and gnarled as the water level slowly settled. The path to the cave crumbled a little at a time, one tiny rockslide flashing past after another. Cabins and small settlements popped into existence, grew, were abandoned, and crumbled back into the mud. On the horizon, ever-so-faintly, vast cities declared their presence with smoke and hazy auras of lamplight. Very quickly a railroad appeared, snaking through the mountains far away to the north, individual trains no doubt blurring past far too quickly for sight to register, and not long after that the contrails of airships began to flicker momentarily across the sky. The frantic wheeling of the sun and moon began to slow, and Twilight watched as a set of canvas tents and piles of containers appeared on the large island where the center of the Lunar camp had been. Reeds were cleared away in strips, trenches cut through the boggy soil, and little blobs of artificial construction appeared around them. Trees shifted, a vast form of orange hide and flabby flesh with too many heads chased eight ponies, a dragon, and an airship along the beach, and at last a small purple unicorn landed in the mouth of the cave after jumping away from one final rockslide.
At last, the motion of the heavens stopped completely, or at least became so slow that it was imperceptible, and Twilight Sparkle was left lying on her saddlebags with the very first rays of the rising sun shining directly in her eyes.
Attempting to move revealed two very important pieces of information. The first was that there simply wasn’t such a thing as a comfortable way to sleep the whole night on two saddlebags filled with loose paper. The second was that during the course of that same night, her pain medication had entirely worn off. Nonetheless, after much stretching and tentative stumbling, move she did, circling around the cavern to hunt for anything at all she might have missed previously. More or less on a whim, she positioned herself so that she was facing the cavern wall at the same angle as the eye symbol on the pillar, pressed herself against the seemingly solid material… and slipped right through.
The cave on the other side was pitch-dark. She muttered the incantation of her multifunction lighting spell- and as soon as the light left the tip of her horn, she developed an intense, squeezing pain just behind her eyeballs, and the glow immediately winked out.
She thought of invisible guardians and unseen traps, and remembered that Nightmare Moon was more than willing to kill ponies who made the tiniest mistakes along the path she’d set out- and bringing light into the inner sanctum of the Empress of the Night was probably not a tiny mistake.
She slipped back through the false wall and sat down near her saddlebags again. The redoubt had been there for a thousand years already. It could wait a few days longer, for Twilight Sparkle to come back with a proper work crew and proper guards and night-vision goggles- assuming those would even function properly here.
(♫)
The Guardsponies and Applejack awoke only a few minutes after that, more or less all at once. About an hour later Fluttershy followed, and then Pinkie Pie and Spike later still. They discovered they’d used up their rations the previous evening, and Twilight decided to experiment with generating edible material by accelerating the growth of several different types of moss near the entrance to the cave. The unanimous consensus was that the end result tasted terrible, and it was promptly discarded. Fluttershy had somewhat greater luck compelling the local wildlife to gather materials for them- mostly grass and acorns, but it was better than nothing.
“Can’t you make soup out of those?” Spike had asked.
“Yeah, with a skillet, stock, and a couple hours,” said Chamomile.
By Twilight’s admittedly imprecise estimates, it was around 0900 by the time the Lapwing returned, its engines whirring evenly now and its sides bristling with heavy guns. Once again communication proved impossible until the airship was practically hovering overtop of them, despite the entire clauraudient system having been replaced with a fresh one at the Station. The expected introductions were exchanged, and then the hunt began in earnest.
Twilight had worried that they would need to search most of the bog in order to find wherever the hydra had gone, which would’ve been a complicated task given the current unreliability of all of their instruments. However, all they’d needed to do was hover at low altitude over the same patch of deep water where Twilight’s party had encountered the beast originally. After only perhaps ten minutes, the reeds began to shift again, and the hydra announced itself with another ear-splitting bellow and titanic column of spray. She wondered if it still remembered the Lapwing as that one, unusually fat and aggressive bird that had managed to get away.
This time, though, they were ready for it. As soon as characteristic swell had started, Palisade had backed off and gained altitude, keeping his craft well out of the range of the beast’s stinging breath and snapping jaws. It dragged its tremendous bulk back onto the beach with surprising speed, seemingly about to make another attempt to scale the mountain or possibly searching for loose boulders to throw.
It never got the chance. The Lapwing spun around to face the hydra broadside, and all three guns opened fire at once with a noise that made the creature itself sound like a Summer Sun firecracker. Two rounds met two heads, obliterating both at once in a cloud of red fog and bone chips. Twilight didn’t initially see where the third had landed, but then the hydra made a sound like sandpaper being dragged at high speed across cobblestone, and pitched forward to reveal a bloody crater where the hump on its back was supposed to be.
It gurgled a few times, and twitched spasmodically, but that was all. Within only a few seconds, the four eyes it had left were already starting to film over.
“Hot damn! Turns out these thaumoscope doodads make for pretty neat gunsights,” Leafspring called over their helmets.
“I still don’t wanna risk getting too close to that mountain,” Palisade continued, “I think I’m gonna set down a little ways up the beach where it’s more solid. Think you can make it to us?”
“Yeah, I think we can make it. Unless there’s any more of those hydras out there,” Marigold replied.
“Don’t worry. We’ve gotcha covered,” Leafspring called back as the craft drifted east and downward, her voice already starting to hollow out and fade.
They filed out of the cave in more or less the same order as they’d come in, with Twilight bringing up the rear. She hadn’t bothered to look at the trail leading up from the entrance before, and realized it had most definitely been constructed to be navigable- if hard to spot- some time ago. Once again, she wondered exactly how Nightmare Moon had managed to assemble this entire system herself- or, perhaps, Nightmare Moon had in fact had help, and there was an entire corps of Lunar artisans somewhere who had either suffered inexplicable memory blackouts, or ended their service buried in a shallow trench. At this point, Twilight wouldn’t put anything past the entity.
“It’s a shame I never did find a good place out here to transplant those frogs,” Fluttershy was saying as she walked alongside Sergeant Chamomile, “But I think they’ll be back to normal soon. All this digging probably disturbed the hydra- they hibernate, you know, sometimes for decades at a time- and the hydra’s what’s been eating the birds that usually eat the frogs.”
“Did you know that there’s spiders that eat frogs?” Chamomile asked, more loudly, “I didn’t.” He glared at Fluttershy, “But now I do, and so now everypony else is gonna have to know that along with me.”
To Twilight’s quiet relief, the narrow path finally bottomed out and merged with the wider gravel beach. They watched the Lapwing glide past overhead, Leafspring waving at them from the open troop bay, and dip down out of sight just on the other side the half-submerged body of the hydra. It smelled even worse dead than it had alive.
“Watch yourself around the heads,” Fluttershy warned as they negotiated the narrow strip of beach left on the mountain-ward side of it, “They have enough autonomy that they might still try to bite.”
“Wait, wait, so, what, we’re just gonna leave that whole carcass here?” asked Corporal Spark.
Applejack looked over her shoulder at him, confused. “Probably, yeah. Ah mean, it’s too darn heavy to pick up and move anywhere… what else’d we be doin’ with it, anyways?”
“You’re sure you don’t wanna eat it?”
The entire party pulled up short and twisted around to look at Subtle Spark.
“Eat it?” Spike demanded. “Listen. The hydra’s a reptile. I’m a reptile. While dragons and hydras aren’t that closely related, they’re similar enough that it’d be like one of you eating a deer! I don’t even want to think about what kind of diseases it might be carrying.”
“We’re tool-using equines, Spike,” the Corporal reassured as they started moving again, “We’d cook it first!”
“Oh, and that makes it so much better.” Applejack gave the mass of scaly flesh a parting kick as she stepped out from alongside it.
“’I shall prove my dominance via ingestion’,” continued Twilight in as close as she could get to Sparky’s coltish Trotston accent, “yes, really high-functioning sapient life out here, yes sir-eee…” She was, of course, the last to round the hydra’s corpse, and on the other side the patched-up form of the Lapwing had never looked more welcome.
“No, no, seriously!” the unicorn with the crossbow continued, “When I was with the naval infantry patrolling the Griffonstone trade route, every time we took down a roc or something the sailors’d haul it down to the galley, clean it, cook it, and serve it to us with… some kinda’ booze, I don’t really remember.”
“Yeah, well, do I look like a griffon to you?” Parhelion demanded, and then paused. “Actually, on second thought… don’t answer that.”
“See, now, Sundog, the difference is, I’d bang a griffon,” Sergeant Chamomile snapped back.
“Can you all please talk about literally anything else?” Palisade demanded over their helmets as Marigold -at the head of the column- climbed into the troop bay.
“You all need to get out more!” Pinkie Pie admonished.
There was about half a meter of clearance between the ground and the Lapwing’s deck. Twilight managed to haul herself up it without assistance, but then immediately felt the strength start to trickle out of her legs. She staggered over to a crate of ammunition -properly strapped in place this time- and sat down heavily.
“You doin’ okay there, Doc?” Marigold asked.
“I’ll live.” Tartarus, I’ll do more than that. No Royal Guard’s ever called me that before, not even Shiny. The Guard call their corpsmares ‘Doc’!
“We don’t have hunting permits, and… well, to be honest,” Fluttershy stammered, “the hydra would probably have that kind of tough, chicken-like flavor other reptiles do…”
“Yeah, I think I’ll wait until we’re all out of acorns first,” Parhelion replied.
“Actually, by this time next week, the surviving buzzards will have torn open its hide; larger waterfowl will have eaten away most of its muscle mass, allowing the smaller birds to eat the remains; the fish will eat the submerged mass, and its bones will form an ideal spawning ground for generations to come.” Fluttershy looked around the compartment, blue-green eyes sparkling. “Isn't nature fascinating?”
“It’s dead,” Applejack struck her hoof emphatically on the deckplates, “’n that’s all Ah need to know.”
“Although… maybe it’s just a little more important that we’re not?” suggested Pinkie Pie.
“Good point.”
With a slight lurch, the ground began to fall away beneath them. “So, uhh, Doctor Sparkle… where do we go from here?” Palisade asked over her helmet.
“Back to Ponyville, first of all. I… think more than anything, we could all use a shower and a hot meal right about now. Real food, too, not moss and acorns.”
Everypony cheered at that, and Parhelion and Chamomile both stamped hard on the deck.
Pinkie Pie looked back to Twilight. “I’ll run a bath for you! You look like you got thrown into a muddy ditch or something!”
Spike and Twilight both stared at her in bafflement.
“It was a lot more than a ditch!” the scholar finally said, “But why would I go to Sugar Cube Corner just to bathe?”
Pinkie shrugged. “Hmm. You know, when you put it that way the whole thing really doesn’t make all that much sense.”
Acceleration pushed Twilight and her crate back against the wall of the engine compartment as they sped over the Bog. She could look out through the open side hatch and see nearly all of it at once now- tents, trees, trenches, mountains, pillars and all. For all of the insects and grime that lurked at ground level, from the air it really was quite beautiful. Twilight wondered what it would’ve taken, a thousand years ago, for that land to still be a thriving agricultural center today. Then she wondered if, with the magic and industry of later years, it might become such once again. Finally, as the reeds below her gave way to grass and a few dirt tracks, she decided she was content to leave those questions in the hooves of others. She had her own responsibilities to pursue.
“Spike? AJ? Marigold? Once everypony’s sufficiently… recovered, and we’ve cleaned up what needs to be cleaned up, do you think we can organize one more big digging crew? And… do you know if Luna’s still in town?”
(♫)
They did, indeed, assemble another digging crew. Security was a concern, since Marigold’s company didn’t have the marepower to provide what she considered sufficient protection at the cavern and also continue to guard the other locations throughout the swamp. However, the Captain found her numbers supplanted from an unexpected source- volunteers from the Lunar camp in Fillydelphia. Few if any of the transformed soldiers had much experience in the proper methods of archaeology, but they learned just as quickly and eagerly as the townsponies who worked alongside them. They were also arguably more familiar with the secretive Lunar iconography than Luna herself, at least for the time being.
Avoiding Nightmare Moon’s defensive constructs was relatively simple, as they were only active at night. However, it was also only at night that the other elements Nightmare Moon had installed in the caverns were visible. While the construct theory gained additional support from Twilight’s experiments with different vision-enhancing spells, even with Doctors Daycaller and Proper Verse assigned to basically nothing else a means of reliably detecting and analyzing the specters remained elusive. Twilight refused to let that bother her. Instead, they settled for performing most of the manual labor by day, recording their observations at dusk, and then retiring back to Ponyville to analyze what they’d found and plan their next move.
The constructs proved to be more numerous than Twilight had anticipated- they occupied an entire system of branching tunnels deep inside of what was beginning to be called Mount Hydra, standing at intersections blocked by illusory walls and offering a variety of riddles. Some- for instance ‘what must become of the Tyrant Celestia’- had clear enough answers. Others -like ‘what is the proper rank for a producer of conduits’- seemed utterly nonsensical even to the Lunars themselves. Most were historical or ideological in nature; some were magical, and a sizable subset of those referred to theorems that had been developed well after the First Century or simply had no known solutions at all. The list Twilight kept of questions and answers grew to a dozen, then two dozen, then three. Without their instruments it was impossible to truly tell, but she was convinced that at least some paths inside the maze led in circles with the same sentry asking different questions each time.
Applejack wanted to skip over the entire process and tunnel directly through the mountain to where they estimated the center of the complex lay, especially after they began encountering tunnels that were flooded or collapsed, but Twilight wouldn’t hear of it. They had come as far as they had by playing, more or less, by Nightmare Moon’s rules, and she wasn’t about to risk damaging anything just yet.
Princess Luna visited Ponyville three more times. On the first she physically bowed down before Fluttershy and begged forgiveness, which was of course granted. Her later visits were spent simply walking the site with certain members of her Night Guard, holding conversations which Twilight wasn’t privy to but doubted were much more than reminiscence of times past. She experienced only one further ‘sign’, on her third and last visit, this one leading her to a section of bog far away from her camp and in the opposite direction from Mount Hydra. Twilight and her crew excavated it in due course, and found only the skeleton of a pegasus mare, most of her skull shattered by a single powerful impact, buried in what would have at the time been a shallow and unmarked grave. Since General Silver Shade had no identifiable descendants- or, more accurately, in the intervening millennium her bloodline had thinned to the point where most ponies east of Trailhead could call themselves her descendants- she was buried alongside the other Lunar war dead at Zwhicker. Twilight didn’t think it appropriate to attend the ceremony, but she heard it was a quiet one, involving only Princess Luna and the dozen or so of Shade’s troops who had survived.
The work continued.
As always, it was the simplest approach that proved to be the best. One thing Spike had noticed early on was that the sentries did nothing to actually impede the movement of ponies through the tunnel system- they simply offered questions, revealed a path if the answer was correct, and attacked violently if it was not. So Twilight simply had the crews spill a thin layer of liquid dye, lay down a grid of notecards, collect them, and then sort through them again at a remote location far from the influence of Nightmare Moon’s lingering illusions. Any cards that didn’t get dyed had landed on something other than the floor, and anything that wasn’t recovered at all had landed somewhere unseen. It was slow, it was tedious, and it gave Private Parhelion endless opportunity to share tales of her stint as a table dealer in Las Pegasus before she’d signed on with the Guard. Thus, the troops rapidly grew to loathe it. However, it was also one hundred percent effective and very, very safe.
Little by little, night after night, over the course of a week, they made their way further into the caverns.
Finally Twilight Sparkle, Princess Luna, the Canterlot staff and the dignitaries from Ponyville all stood in front of an ornately carved, arched door- in the middle of the night, of course, because otherwise it would have appeared to be just another dead end.
The carvings were not at all dissimilar to the ones that had decorated the pillars, depicting the same historical scenery, seemingly rigged to slide over and across each other in three concentric rings. Twilight turned to her alicorn companion. “So… any ideas.”
“I fear not.” Luna then extended a hoof to the two Lunar-like figures in impossibly perfect armor standing on either side of the door. “And I suspect this riddle is not one where wrong answers will be tolerated.”
“Well,” Applejack added, “If somethin’ does go wrong… Ah’m right behind’ja.”
Twilight nodded and stepped forward. She scanned over the more familiar images- Luna’s assumption of the Moon-Raisers, the war against the Crystal Empire, the ascension of Celestia to Speakership of the Council, and all the rest. On the pillars, events had always followed a strict progression- top to bottom, then clockwise in chronological order. She grabbed the stone depicting the tidal wave summoned by Discord in her telekinetic aura, feeling it slide freely on some hidden mechanism, and placed it at the very top center of the structure. It slid into place with an audible click, and the guardians remained where they stood.
She repeated the process with each panel in turn, one after the other, and then paused. Three panels remained, which she had never seen on any of the pillars. One depicted Princess Celestia’s head severed from her prostrate body, with Princess Luna standing before her. However, this depiction of Luna had sharp canine teeth and slit-pupiled eyes; and while every single other carving had been a simple bas-relief, this figure was inlaid with another type of stone entirely- jet-black obsidian, carefully sculpted to imitate bone structure and muscle that such a dark coat would have naturally concealed.
Another panel featured transformed Lunars engaging in a variety of common tasks. Four earth ponies tilled a field, four pegasi shuttled rainclouds, and four unicorns in cooks’ aprons attended to four foals- one of each tribe and one that appeared to be a miniature alicorn. One figure from each group -including the alicorn foal- was also inlaid with obsidian. They in turn were overseen by the same dark Luna-like creature from before, under a black basalt sky filled with so many carved stars that it looked at first glance to simply be pumice or some other form of naturally porous stone.
The final panel featured a single, front-facing portrait of what could only be Luna herself, one side inlaid and the other plain. The eye on the plain side was closed, while the one surrounded by obsidian was open and featured a familiar slit pupil. The portrait’s mouth was also wide open, revealing a single sharp fang, and despite the incredible detail with which the whole panel was constructed Twilight found herself unable to decide if its expression was meant to communicate fury, terror, ecstasy, or some perverse combination of all three.
“Luna is taken over by Nightmare Moon,” Twilight said aloud as she slid the portrait symbol into the topmost position, “Nightmare Moon kills Celestia,” she slid the corresponding piece just below, “and then… what? Everypony just lives happily ever after in the lovely Lunar Republic?”
Behind her, Pinkie Pie braced herself against the side of the cavern and slowly clapped one hoof against the other. “Heh. How’s that for a prophecy?”
“’Twas no prophecy,” Luna replied, her voice ice-cold and -Twilight thought- just a little bit afraid. “’Twas… a statement. A declaration of what that creature meant to do. To pass through this doorway, our generals would need to see this… understand it… and agree. Blessed Moon, what was done to them in this place?”
“I… wouldn’t read so much into it,” Twilight murmured, “We’re looking at these images with a full -or at least more full-understanding of what Nightmare Moon was, and what your being host to her involved. Your officers didn’t have that knowledge. For all they knew, going off of only what’s here, Nightmare Moon might’ve just been a more powerful state you yourself could enter.” Then she paused, scratched her muzzle with one forehoof, and continued. “Still… this whole path that they had to travel through over and over again, night after night, in some kind of heavily altered mental state…That doesn’t sound like a test of ability to me, at least not one that would be useful on creatures more intelligent than rats and the like. It really does sound more like some kind of conditioning.”
Before she could lose her nerve, she slipped the final stone into the last remaining slot.
The sentries on either side both saluted and then flickered out of existence, and with the grinding sound of stone on stone, the entire set of concentric rings slid downwards into the floor.
The room on the other side was expansive and open to the night sky above, looking more like a crater that occupied the whole top of Mount Hydra with a chest-high stone lip around its border. Idly, Twilight wondered if they really were standing on top of the mountain now, and the rocky peak visible from outside was nothing more than an illusion; or if it was in fact the sky she was looking at now that was illusory and they were still somewhere deep underground. From what she could see from the entrance, the room was even furnished, complete with a bed, dresser, desks, and a washbasin all constructed from dark oak with accents of astral steel.
Luna made to step forward, and Twilight held up a hoof to stop her. “Princess… you should be careful. There might be more booby-traps or sentries, even in here.”
“Aye. Indeed there are.” Luna nodded, and stepped right past the incredulous Twilight. She paused in front of what proved to be a small painting of herself and Princess Celestia as fillies, perhaps eight years old, tussling over a toy wooden sword. “Here is a powerful sleep spell that works through vision.” She moved over to a map of Equestria on one of the desks, “to read the names of the divisions here will leave a stout mare paralyzed until sunrise two days hence,” her gaze moved to an innocuous-looking leather book sitting beside it, “and opening this spellbook will strike one blind. All of these things… I know of them, though I cannot remember seeing them ever before.”
“They might also be monitoring the area, like the pillars,” Twilight mused, “feeding you information meant for Nightmare Moon.”
Luna ignored her, and walked slowly across the stone floor to a particularly large desk directly across the room. “Twilight Sparkle. Thou willst wish to see this. Walk directly towards me, and look only straight ahead, and nothing shall harm thee.”
With some trepidation, Twilight did as she was told, wishing with all her heart that she had any reliable method to detect spells that may or may not have been targeted at her. Nonetheless she crossed the room without incident, at least as far as she could determine, and came to a halt beside Princess Luna. Over the stone ‘lip’ of the crater, out across the bog, she could just about make out her base camp on the old generals’ hill. A thousand years ago, she guessed the entire Lunar camp would’ve been visible from here, as well as most of the path a pony would follow from one guide-pillar to the next. There was something written on that crater lip, a faint smudge of mostly illegible Old Ponish lettering arranged in vaguely mathematical fashion. In the dust that had gathered on the floor below, equally faint, were a trail of downright reptilian-looking footprints that terminated at the edge- Was this what Luna was looking for when she found the hydra’s tracks? On the desk itself, the dust was ever-so-slightly thinner in a small square patch about the size of a book directly in the center, but other than that the surface was completely empty.
“This is where I kept my journals,” Luna said, beside her, “Including the very last. But what became of it after I left for Everfree… I truly do not know.”
(♫)
Twilight Sparkle sat at her desk in the Golden Oaks, a quill held in her telekinetic grip, a clean piece of paper and a full pot of ink set out in front of her.
Y. G. Exarch Ce- she wrote, then paused. That was far too formal. She switched out the page for a clean one and began again: Princess Cele- No. That was too impersonal. She grabbed a third page, thought for a good long while, and then began once again:
Dear Princess Celestia:
I regret, first and foremost, that my report cannot contain news of the recovery of any of Princess Luna’s writings. Indeed, I write to you posing any number of questions for which, currently, I lack any answers: What is the origin of the tracks we’ve discovered in Nightmare Moon’s redoubt? What is the significance -if any- of the writing left nearby? How does the magic that conceals it function, and what is the correct interpretation of the inscriptions on the door? In more mundane matters, what are the goals and organization of this ‘Society for Lunar-Equestrian Studies’, and how are outside elements able to so easily recover information and even photographic evidence of our operations?
I may never be able to find answers to some or all of these questions. Many of them are, quite simply, beyond my areas of expertise. However, that does not make any of them unanswerable. It may take time, and it may require substantial revisions to established magical theory, but magical theory is made to be revised. In no way does that revision invalidate the exercise. Indeed, our willingness to revise- our willingness to be wrong- is what separates us from the seers and street-mystics of your foalhood, whose signs were vague enough to account for any outcome and, thus, accounted for nothing at all. As long as the Imperial Republic is willing to fund and support my explorations, I will continue searching, whatever I may encounter.
Even if the journal is, in fact, never located, I no longer have any doubt that the attempt will amass so much other physical and historical evidence of Nightmare Moon’s existence as an independent entity as to render the rest irrelevant. The results of our memory experiments, and the inscriptions on the redoubt door, I suspect would be sufficient to convince any sane, rational pony by themselves.
Alternatively, of course, we must consider the possibility that Minister Firelight was, in fact, correct all along. While the likelihood of Luna perpetrating some deception seems to me to be incredibly slim, more improbable things have happened before and will likely continue to do so. Nonetheless, if that is indeed the case, we are still better-prepared for a betrayal from Luna now than we were before we understood so much about her. We gain nothing by denying the possibility, but we gain everything by continuing on and acquiring more information, to anticipate and prepare. Thus, I consider the roughly five hundred thousand bits expended thus far, to say nothing of the voluntary contributions of Ponyville’s citizenry and many members of the Night Guard, to be money and time well-spent.
In particular, both Forward March and myself have noticed a significant improvement in Princess Luna’s mental condition following her expeditions to Ponyville. Your sister is now interacting more frequently with modern ponies as opposed to her fellow Lunars, has displayed a greater tolerance for modern customs which she had originally found distasteful, and appears to be more alert and coherent. She is now planning trips to other historical sites throughout Equestria, accompanied by her troops. Indeed, it is my understanding that she plans to spend the next few days in Canterlot, and hopes to be there to greet you upon your return from the Parrot Isles.
She has also asked about retaining a public-relations officer to manage future interactions with the press. I would recommend assigning Kibitz or Raven to Fillydelphia for the foreseeable future as a dedicated political advisor, as a prelude to establishing the full administrative staff appropriate for a candidate to the Exarchy.
Her para-diplomatic exorcism method has proven to be between fifty percent and seventy-five percent effective against local spectral activity, although this data of course comes from a sample of ghosts that Luna knew personally as living ponies. Attempting the process on completely unrelated haunts, poltergeists, and specters would most likely fall to her skills at ghost psychiatry, in general. Nonetheless, the process is still more effective than the generally-reported success rate of a single pass with brute-force magical exorcism. Should the opportunity to test a combined approach involving both magical and psychodynamic exorcism present itself, I suspect it could approach 100% effectiveness. If so, our models of spectral memory and response behavior may also need to be revised.
In summary, the Cabinet will likely seek to interpret recent events as wasteful- the expenditure of half a million of the taxpayer’s bits on an ultimately futile program to chase mystic signs, and failure to accomplish the one thing it set out to do- recover Luna’s notes.
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
The fact that we have found things we cannot explain- that we now know what questions to ask- is a tremendous leap forward in our studies. The fact that there are so many unanswered questions further suggests to me that the gains from investigating them will be tremendous, and absolute worst thing we can do is ignore them. Whether that’s something as great and terrible as Nightmare Moon, or as simple as a mare who sees signs and omens where we just see a pile of rocks, we have met our demons head-on, pulled them out into the light, and brought them to heel.
Ponykind will never go back to living in fear.
-Your faithful student
Twilight Sparkle
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An enjoyable read. I like the moral of this story more than the moral of the original episode
Can't wait to read more. You write the fleshed out version of MLP that deserves to exist between the lines of the cartoon.
Alright! And another one published! Hope y'all enjoyed it. I had a lot of fun planning this one out, writing dialog, bouncing ideas back and forth with the Admiral- even down to whether this EC should exist at all. Anyway, stay tuned, our next EC is coming soon.
I really want to see the Lunar Tour. Not in the comedic "Luna vs. Indoor Plumbing" way, either.
And the other question this brings up, to me...Was NMM getting updates via invisible spylon while on the moon?
10880528
You'll have to form your own conjecture, but there's a clue in Friendship is Magic.
Thanks very much for getting the final chapter to this posted. I really appreciate you going to the effort. Indeed, as the previous story, based on a two-parter was a fourteen chapter deal, it makes sense that the single-episode stories would be seven chapters. But, anyway, really good job on the exchanges, characterizations and future story set-up in all the right places. Really appreciated Twilight's acknowledgements that there ARE going to be at least a few mysteries that aren't going to be solved in HER life time as well as her being respectful enough to share her findings and theories with Luna ( yes, it DOES seem the most likely that Nightmare Moon is VERY subconsciously sharing memories with Luna) and actually ask her permission before continuing her examinations in modified ways. And, yeah, the ironic foreshadowing to Twilight eventually becoming an alicorn herself is rather well done, as was the detail of Spike's vision being predominantly based on heat (which is good fore-shadowing for Ember's stuff about "most ponies looking alike to her" later on making MUCH more sense). Also appreciated the note to Celestia acknowledging that, perhaps hoping for the best but preparing for the worst IS the most logical course of action with Luna (as is continuing to work toward the best in order to make the best much more likely).
At any rate, I am very certainly going to be looking forward to the next story in this series.
Missing a letter on unreal.
10949839
Indeed it was. Welcome back, Paul.
10952882
Thanks! I'm only mildly surprised that anyone remembers STIV is a thing. It's almost as old as I am.
(We need a Starswirl emote.)
You can has review!
Outstanding stuff, and vastly improved in message and moral when compared to the source material. (Though part of me regrets the loss of a perfectly good hydra. Mostly the part that plays big green creatures with trample.) Good to see neither party completely in the right, and both of them willing to recognize that they have something to learn from the experience. Pinkie being the one to point out Twilight's folly is the icing on the cake.
I will say that I'm a bit concerned about how hard Twilight has hitting the poppy juice, but hopefully Ponyville General won't refill her prescription after this.
In any case, thank you for it. On to the next installment!
11012004
You know, you are the second person to express regret at the obliteration of the hydra. That doesn't, like offend me as an author or anything, but I am a little bit surprised. I was writing it as just a big dumb (actually kind of clever) animal, and didn't really plan to have any emotion in particular attached to it. Maybe it's because the hydra is actually the first living creature with significant screentime in Extended Cut to be unequivocally killed instead of talked down, driven off, or given severe but survivable injuries. RD disassembles some revenants in FiM EC, but those were already dead anyway, and Nightmare Moon's fate as a separate entity from Luna is -following the original episode- intentionally somewhat ambiguous.
I like being able to reliably bump off minor enemies or side characters without the limits of a TV-Y rating in these stories, but on the balance I'd say it actually causes more problems than it solves. There are so many times where a villain should just kill the mane six and be done with it, or the Mane Six should be well within their rights to do the same to a villain, but since those characters persist through all nine seasons I have to invent some reason why they are spared. Chrysalis imprisoning Twilight and Cadance instead of killing them and dumping their bodies in the Season 2 finale is going to be particularly troublesome to deal with.
11012004
That's some good XP, though. Twilight needs the levels if she's going to survive all 9 seasons, plus the comics and movie.
I enjoyed this as an extension of the first story - the worldbuilding, characters and plot flow organicially with a depth that I can really appreciate.
Definitely not getting this reference.
11033527
The reference is actually immediately afterward. In the original episode, when Twilight gets tossed in a mud puddle, she inexplicably goes all the way to Pinkie's room above Sugar Cube Corner to shower.
11317850
I guess but Luna didn't cause a question in the fundamentals of physics. She just brought the possibility seers exist back into reality. That's very diffeent.
I guess maybe seers have been so throughly debunked though that it is the same. Like if someone brought back the possiblity that sickness comes from the 4 humors. That would be very hard to swallow. From the discription seers were given in the story they didn't seem that depunked, but also Twilight was explaining it using laymens terms. So with that assumption that makes more sense now.
11344674
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Captain Kirk and company end up in the late 1980's San Fransisco:
11012277
Will it? You already brought up Chrysalis by name, a la Napoleon complex, so it sounded like you had other ideas in mind for the changelings.
11380122
We have lots of ideas in mind for the changelings. Some of which involve Canterlot Wedding. Most don't.
11515179
So, to put it simply, cattle are not intelligent, no. Neither are deer, hogs, tapirs... it's actually rather arbitrary which ungulate species are and aren't intelligent, but there *is* a unified set of characteristics for what makes an intelligent species intelligent. That'll show up in text... eventually.
And yes, this infamous movie quote replaces the sunshine dance.
This was a great story as well. I think that part of the problem between Twilight and Luna is the fact that Luna explained things from a reference point that Twilight's studies have concluded to be false. If Luna simply stated that she didn't understand how she knew things instead of using wat Twilight thinks is outdated superstition Twilight wouldn't get so defensive which would have enabled her to think things through more clearly.