The siren call of Sunset

by Hope

Royalty

"Celestia, I need to know."

Twilight looked and acted so much older and wiser. Had it only been a year?
Disgusting pretense. Damnable ego. Rip a tooth from that perfect mouth for every wretched word.

"It's difficult, Twilight," Celestia said softly, from her position laying in her bed. "I've kept the royal secrets to myself for... A very long time."

Twilight lit her antenna, bringing a warmth to Celestia's bed even though the geothermal vent below them was inert and cold.
That false care, how disgusting, how self serving. Hold our comfort hostage for our praise She doesn't know us!!! She does not know anything, child! Infant! Wretched curr! Boil her alive!

Celestia smiled gratefully and shifted to look at her more directly.

"I am not a mer-pony queen, Twilight," she said softly.

Celestia's mind ached with the enraged screams of her own Id.

"What do you mean?" Twilight asked, holding her fin.

"I was turned from an earth pony into a creature called a Titan. Infused with dark magic, the Deep One kept me as a pet, and toyed with me for decades... But I wasn't alone."

Twilight went still, confused.

"My sister, Luna, was with me," Celestia whispered in shame.

Author's Note:

Welcome back intrepid readers, welcome to the intro to a flashback exploring how exactly Celestia came to be.

Comments

[Nebbie]

11742941
I think rushing their romance is fine, it's really the conflict that felt to me overly rushed, in that Celestia is over her anger immediately and then Twilight never even gets angry at Sunset or shows she's got certain very important answers. Twilight just skips right on ahead to being super chill.
If you got lured with deception into a romance with a traitor, no matter how much they may be justified, you need to check for evidence that they have genuine intentions (how does Twilight know Sunset isn't just playing the long game against Celestia?), and it's probably a pretty good idea to at least indicate you don't like being lied to, unless you plan on being lied to a lot more in the future... Yes, Sunset's a goody-goody here, but we know that from omniscient perspective, Twilight should at least have doubts, and maybe talk to someone like Spike or Rarity for a second opinion (both of whom notably are rather absent from the later parts of the fic).
On the flipside, if you've just gotten intel verified that your mentor figure is, or at least in the past was, a secretive tyrant, it is also necessary to get some evidence that they aren't one who, if finding you doubting them as you do, would simply slice your head clean off in the middle of conversation (sure, Celestia cares about Twilight, but that may just mean she'd cry and say sorry while Twilight's head is briefly still conscious).

[Hope]

11743316
Well, you're giving me a lot of reasons to rewrite this fic hahahaha
Originally it was very rushed, very condensed for the sake of being able to enter into a contest but I'll absolutely agree that there's a lot left to explore.
Maybe I'll make a full redo like I did with Redemption in Moonlight (after some feedback, I started a new fic with the same premise but a much deeper approach, now called Primrose's Redemption) since that prevents me from just rehashing and editing existing chapters too many times.

[Nebbie]

11743815
My 2 cents on a rewrite is that a full redo would probably lose some of what made this fic really hook me and others in; while Spike and Rarity are rather transparent to me as simply tools to hook in the audience with the former saying "same relationships, different asthetic setting" and the latter dumping exposition with just enough left unanswered to make us interested, that part of the story is pretty good and it's really a shame for that part that later parts lack exploration of the two and how they relate to Twilight with things being different. As well, Twi and Sunset's first meeting is amazing and really what cements a want to see things through.
It's definitely hard to just rehash and edit chapters, but I think if you chunked things up, identifying chapters and parts of chapters to entirely redo, it wouldn't be so bad.

[Hope]

11744472
I'll admit my biggest struggle is with motivation.
I don't get very many views in comparison to authors that put out high quantities of work, so these contests give me a chance to get views and comments.
To edit an already published fic doesn't send out notifications to any of the readers, and might confuse them if a new chapter is published that doesn't line up with the version they read.
I agree though, scrapping it entirely doesn't make sense.

[Nebbie]

11745061
Yeah, it's probably best to make a new fic entry (notably also, the fic in basically its current form is what won, it'd be weird to display a fixed version and make people think it was so outstanding to begin with), and that runs into issues with Rule 7 if most chapters are wholly preserved; I think the needle could be threaded by pinning down certain ideas and bits of dialog as necessary to stay, and then rewrite around those, kind of like growing new flesh around a skeletal form.

[Hope]

11745615
I think it's doable, especially if I use those set scenes and ideas a few chapters in, rather than throwing them right at the start.