Full beds beneath empty moons
Luna could feel it all returning, with the rising of her moon.
She was the Lady of the Night, its Princess, and with the coming of sunset on her first day as herself in… so very, very long, the influence of her old power began to tug at her mind once more. Her attachment to the moon, diminished during her imprisonment therein, began to reconnect its tenebrous threads to her, wide and full and hers again. Prison walls that had stood for a millenium finally held no sway, doors that had locked tight against Nightmare’s probing swung wide for the first time in forever, lunar power waxing to fill its destined receptacle among ponykind. Yes, she could feel it all coming back to her, the night and the dreaming realms both, her territory returned.
And oh, how it terrified her…
How gone could Nightmare Moon be, really? One day, after so many imprisoned? One day, for the rage and the jealousy and the endless, inane malice of it all to just… dissipate? Slink away like an unwelcome houseguest? No, it could not possibly be.
And no, it should not, either.
Those things had made Nightmare, and it was with those things that Luna, now free, would need to reckon with about herself. Sloughing them off so easily would be to avoid the lessons they had to teach, the knowledge that pain imparts, and that would only make it easier for them to slip back into her soul when she wasn’t paying attention. Nightmare could be recurring, Luna knew that without having to be told.
It was an idea that made even the possibility of sleep distant and challenging.
The lunatic prison that had held her for so long had been itself a constant waking dream, a realm of stasis that held her from the true dreaming world, even her own dreams. Sleep would have been an avenue of escape, and thus it had been denied her; even if Nightmare had been inclined to rest, she could not.
The only dreams available to her had been fantasies of vengeance, of the endless night to come. Once she had broken her bonds…
Faced with a real night, and nothing to do with it but sleep for the first time in a thousand years, all Luna had were those old memories to shy away from, that learned malice to studiously ignore. The things that would come to greet her when she closed her eyes did not bear thinking about.
So she hid in her bed, once everyone else had gone away and she was alone, covers drawn up to shield her from the pale moonlight slanting through the window. The old girl still sang to Luna, spoke to her in old words beyond language, older than all but ideas, promised so much of what they could do together now that she was free, Moon empty of its Mare.
How did one sleep, again?
The silence stretched out, long and occupied, the subsurface murmur of lunar imprecations practically holding Luna’s eyes open, hidden in a shell of sheets and bedding that could never be thick enough. She did not hear Celestia enter, nor cross the floor from door to bed with a clopping of hooves that was tentative but loud, her sister nervous but announcing her presence.
No, Luna did not know that she was not alone until Celestia slipped into bed beside her. She was unaware of just how long the princess had stood there, agonizing over that single, last step.
There was no doubt about who it was that had come to visit her; Luna could identify her sister anywhere. Still, she stiffened beneath the covers, heart speeding up to a brisk, nervous canter at her approach. Her mind whirled in a chaos of thoughts, panicked in its wondering of why it could be that she had come here, what reproach she could possibly express beneath these sheets.
Those emotions mounted in intensity the closer dear Celestia got, her every hoof a-tremble until, after an eternity had passed, her sister performed a gesture intimately, perfectly familiar to Luna.
That pure white snout pressed forward, nosing into the field of stars that was Luna’s mane.
‘You know what I missed most about you being away?’ There was a nervous throb in Celestia’s voice, an anxious tide of emotion that she was keeping in check only barely. ‘This. Your mane. It’s like putting my face into a cool summer night.’
Luna thought that description was apt enough; her mane was hardly made of traditional horse hair, after all. The points where it and her tail joined to her skin were… windswept, in a way that was eminently pleasant. Neither princess had ever been quite clear on exactly what star-dappled sky Luna’s mane opened onto, but the sensation of cool, gentle breezes and the silver light of distant suns was pleasant nonetheless. It had never mattered where; it was that it opened onto Luna’s sky that mattered.
‘That’s what you missed?’ Luna could not bring herself to turn over and face her sister, opting instead to stare into the blank white canvas ahead of her, the soft interior of her sheets. It seemed a safe enough direction, as she wished she could take back the biting tone in her voice, the sarcasm she had not meant to put there. Not right after Celestia had forgiven her, taken her back into the castle…
Because the truth was, she had missed it too. Perhaps only in the abstract, a subconscious longing that had not been named during her wrathful centuries as Nightmare Moon, but it had been there. Luna had missed the probing sensation of her sister’s snowy snout threading through the strands of her sky-veiled mane, and the accompanying misty warmth of Celestia’s rainbow mane drifting about her body as they moved. This close together they were doors opening onto realms the other rarely visited, Celestia’s land of sun and color, Luna’s calm and dark velvet world.
Nightmare Moon had revelled in the night. Princess Luna, on the other hand, had longed for the warm embrace of her sister’s rainbow for far, far too long.
‘One of the things,’ Celestia replied, speaking as though she had not heard the stressed sarcasm in Luna’s question. ‘The one I would keep coming back to, when I wanted you to be there and knew you weren’t. This feeling meant everything to me once, little sister.’
They were not going to fight, it seemed, and that was good. A torrent of sense memories had risen up in Luna at the touch of Celestia’s body to her own, times past that she, too, had treasured coming back in waves and softening, just fractionally, the agitation that she felt. Their days had sometimes rarely intersected, but they had made the most of the time that they did; dawns and dusks had been their moments, where one would wake the other and, for a time, simply… be.
They were a Yin and Yang, chasing one another through their own waking and dreaming moments.
‘You should be asleep,’ Luna tried her best not to press too far into her sister’s touch, the intoxicating summer heat of her mane, her presence, making it far more of an ordeal than it should have been. But this was dangerous territory, Celestia deserved better than the same old chase, particularly since she had spent a thousand years maturing and developing as a pony, while Luna had not even stagnated…
She had been broken.
‘So should you,’ Celestia whispered, the melody of her voice taking on that specific tone it did when there was more to be said. Still, it took her a while to get to it: ‘But… I don’t think you can, can you?’
‘I admit, I am finding it difficult,’ Luna sighed. ‘I do not think I’ve been in such a peaceful place for a thousand years. Anypony would find it an adjustment.’
‘That isn’t what I meant. I’m not sure that you can sleep, Luna. When I… while you were imprisoned, your connection to the dreaming realm was severed, your entire essence altered in ways I could not predict ahead of time.’ Celestia seemed to audibly reach for each word, selecting them with care and slotting them into sentences that were difficult for her to say and, accordingly, sanitized as much as the princess could muster. Every syllable had been pruned of blame or reproach… at least, for Luna.
‘I know,’ Luna replied, doing largely the same. Neither sister wished to step into the minefield that lay between them, and while that saved them from the more explosive conversations they could have, so too did it force a certain distance between them. Neither of them could say what they truly meant- that Nightmare Moon’s very presence had forced a restless wedge into their lives that it seemed beyond them to resolve.
But that did not mean that Celestia would stop trying.
‘But I think I know a way to help,’ she said, sliding forward just a little bit, enough that the tips of Luna’s wings brushed at her skin. Feeling Luna stiffen at the contact, Celestia held off going further for a moment more, perhaps fearful that her sister might bolt, the intimacy still too much. ‘It… must have been hard, being, uh, like that for so long. I can’t imagine it, but I’d like to think that we can make things better for you. Together.’
‘I haven’t slept in over three hundred thousand nights. How does one make that better in one?’
‘Well, we start…’ And here Celestia moved closer still, nudged her sister so that the midnight-clad pony rolled over, let herself sit up on all fours and look her in the eye for the first time. The daylight princess’ gaze was clear and honest in the gloom, catching the moonlight from the window and spinning it into the most sincere of promises. ‘By remembering that tonight, dear Luna, is but the first of many to come.’
There was a kiss. Luna’s first in a thousand years.
It was not their first, of course, but certainly their first since their separation. The first affection of any kind that Luna had received since emerging from her doubled prison of the cold moon and the Nightmare she had become, a shot straight to a heart too used to isolation to know what to do with it. Compulsively, she pressed into it, recalling the familiarities and cataloguing all the ways in which her sister’s taste had changed in the intervening years, as though it were possible to catch up simply through tongue against tongue.
‘I still know how to relax you, Luna,’ Celestia murmured, her mouth resting against her sister’s. ‘Which is all you really need. Nightmare was not a pony who had any calm to her, but I know that you do, and how to bring it out. It’s one of the many reasons you are not her. So: I want you to let me take care of you.’
Older sister’s magic drew the blankets higher, threw them over top of the two princesses like a bulwark against the night, blocking out the empty moon hanging above. Below the canopy there was only the soft glow of starlight and the refractive colors of Celestia’s rainbows. The mingling scents of damp night air and the sweetness of flowers in bloom. The reassurance of big sister close by, and wanting to be closer.
Luna knew how this game was played, all too well.
Into the hollow created by the curve of Celestia’s body she moved, until their flanks pressed together and the feathered tips of their wings met. The white mare’s hoof traced a languid line along the blue down of Luna’s body, reaching low toward the dark border of her cutie mark. The nerves therein sang at the touch, Luna’s heart jouncing into a nervous trot at the sheer, blase intimacy of it.
Celestia always had known where Luna wished to be touched, even when the latter would never admit it…
Her older sister’s hoof travelled through the night’s sky printed on Luna’s coat, reaching toward the pale crescent moon at its center. Shivering, Luna felt her tail rising almost by instinct, tossing itself to one side to afford the white mare greater access to her hindquarters. Her mouth opened, the breath that came out hot and intense, closer to a pant than anything else.
‘I might have thought that a thousand years would be enough to make you grow beyond me, sister,’ Luna said, her back legs extending, pushing the moon of her mark into Celestia’s gentle touch. Then, in a whisper: ‘I had feared it would…’
‘Absence makes a mare grow fonder, Luna. Be they alicorn or the simplest of ponies. There are so few of us already, and fewer still as old as we.’ Celestia was so very close now, muzzle buried in Luna’s mane, her horn tracing the most delicate of scratches along the arc of her neck. Luna had seen that horn in action so many times, knew both the brilliance and the decimation it could bring. But she knew, more keenly, the wonderful gentleness with which her big sister could wield it.
‘Even if you were not my darling kin, dearest to my heart since we were foals, that alone would be enough.’ Celestia continued, as a familiar, wanting heat began to brew in Luna’s breast, coiling tendrils up into her wings, through the distant planes present in her tail and her mane. It spread to fill her, as though she were merely a container to hold this desire, a place for this correctness, the sheer right-with-the-universe feeling of being so close to Celestia. To be paired so. To be twinned.
To be sisters once more.
This was all she could ever need, and the fact that thinking otherwise had made her a different person altogether, the very thoughts twisting Luna into Nightmare Moon, was proof enough of that. They were meant to be together, like this, in private spaces, not separated by the cruel filling of the moon. This was good.
Here, all the pretenses seemed to fall away, the cloaks they had built up through the stunned day that had followed Luna’s escape from Nightmare. Being welcomed back to Canterlot, to Equestria in general, after a thousand years of looming overhead had been a difficult thing, an unheard of thing. Nopony beside Celestia herself had living memory of a time Luna had lived there, to the palace staff she was nothing but a bogeycolt, a monster from out of fantasy. It had been… easier, to fall silent after that tearful reunion, to speak only in royal abstractions when she needed to, hiding within the expectations one had for a princess.
She had wept to see Celestia, that first time. But now that seemed so long ago, though in truth it had only been that morning. A millennium and a single day had never seemed so close to the same length, and when the time had come that they could be alone together, when Luna might have dropped those Royal Canterlot tones and spoken plainly, when the true work of reconciliation might have begun…
… She had fled. To bed, below that awful, calling moon.
And Celestia, bless her, had followed. Luna’s lovely sunlight had followed her.
She had come for her, and in coming she had reminded Luna of all the things she had once thought beyond her, believed impermanent and gone. The sister that she missed, the kingdom she had left behind, the forgiveness that she never thought could come to her… things she wanted, things that the aching parts of her that had persisted inside Nightmare Moon had wanted with a blazing passion and truly thought she would never have again, they all came flooding back.
Chief among them the warm, breezy contentment of being held by her sister.
And once upon a time, Luna had become the sort of pony who would willingly throw that away…
‘Big sister, I…’ For a moment it seemed inevitable that Luna would let it all spill out of her again, that the cleansing tide of emotion would be one of grief and remorse, not love. One look at Celestia had the younger mare pushing down the words, plugging up that part of her because that was not the thing that either of them needed right now. Nuzzling at the Princess of Night’s neck, her face, her flank, Celestia’s eyes flared with bright, arguably close to insistent, emotion.
‘Not the time for tears, dear Luna. We are princesses, we can do better than tears. We know how to take care of one another…’
Her tail, crisp and sweet as a summer breeze, flitted upward, batted between Luna’s hind legs. With it came a pulse of warm pleasure, a sensation like the wind over the stalks of the harvest, sweeping through Luna’s dark body from tail to tip. It was a viscerally satisfying feeling.
‘I-I seem to recall that this was mostly the way you took care of me,’ Luna stammered. ‘Not that I mind, of course.’
‘I remember how little you mind, dear,’ Celestia’s horn burned with magical energy, its touch now tingling and electric, raising the downy hair on Luna’s body wherever it went. The spell she cast worked between Luna’s legs, turning the flowing, sunshine hair of Celestia’s tail into something like a flail, coming down on the delicate places there with soft, batting motions. It was a complex touch, a sensation that never held the same pressure in the same place twice, was never quite shaped the same, constantly shifted so that Luna could never predict what, precisely, she would feel next. All she knew was that it left her breathless.
‘Just relax, little sister. Close your eyes and let me take care of you,’ Celestia crooned, her voice gentle and personal, but no less regal for it. ‘You are not alone, you are loved, you are wanted, and if I have my say, you shall never feel otherwise again.’
There was, at least, a rhythm to Celestia’s slapping tail, a slow and gentle beat that Luna could follow, immersing herself in the pulses of stimulation it brought. It was an easy thing to lose herself in, her eyes drifting slowly closed and, for at least a little while, the throbbing, tidal pull of the moon losing some of its distracting potency. It remained, of course- her connection to it would never be cut, only dulled- but with her sun close by and drawing its light-flecked tail across the midnight folds of her pussy, it seemed less of a curse than it had while trapped within it.
No, this had once been her blessing, and with Celestia here, with the summer mare’s saintly forgiveness and support, it could be again.
‘I am sorry that I ever had to make it your prison, sister.’ As though reading Luna’s mind, Celestia whispered precisely what she needed to hear. Muzzle to muzzle they lay, drawn together by the inexorable gravity of their kinship, horns crossing. The magic working in Celestia’s passed through, an arcane current racing through Luna to the pulsing time of the white mare’s tail. When next she spoke, it was not with her mouth.
‘It is your power, and you are trusted with it. Let it come, take it back. It, like me, is yours always.’
Luna whimpered, then, a pleasing sound that echoed, at base, with a sob. She pushed her haunches back, and Celestia obliged by coming forward, Her tail continued its teasing, rainbow work, flitting over Luna’s equine nethers again and again, seeking out the seats of her pleasure with the unerring accuracy of familiarity. Sun-kissed strands stroked across her clit, Celestia’s breath coming hot and heavy across Luna’s snout, their horns crossed like moonlight at midday. Their minds drew together, Luna’s pleasure and need shared across the circuit they had made, deepened by countless aeons spent together, the sheer weight of time making their connection near instantaneous.
Even after all these years, Luna still knew how to come to Celestia’s mind as though it were the back of her own hoof.
‘Oh, Celestia please, I need more…’ Her mental voice throbbed with need, the words racing toward her sister along conduits of pure thought. She squirmed against Celestia, knowing that short of taking charge for herself, there was nothing she could do.
And Luna did not desire that, not now. Not here…
‘I understand…’ This time Celestia did speak aloud, the telepathic version a sort of mental echo. Her tone was soothing yet powerful, a lullaby wrought by royalty, and it came with an expansion of her spellcraft to match. A force, one with the texture and wetness of a very specific, very familiar tongue, slid between Luna’s legs and, with gentle insistence, inside her. Luna took her next breath in a sharp gasp, her horn clacking against her sister’s as a shudder wracked her body.
Celestia’s magic was every bit as lovely as the mare herself.
This was the part, Luna knew, where the current of events would become undeniable very quickly, the tide something she would not be able to fight against. Prolonging the fizzing, electric sensation of Celestia’s arcane tongue spreading her hole and licking at the deepest parts of her was no longer an option for Luna, not with the understanding that her sister had of her body. She would succumb, as she had so many times in the past, when things were better and Nightmare Moon not even a name on the wind, and she would clench, and her cutie mark would burn with pleasure.
She would come, and then, like old times, she would sleep. Things could be right again.
And in the knowing that tonight would be a night of peace, spent in sweet slumber beside her sister, that in the morning she would wake beside Celestia and that even if nobody else would forgive her, her perfect sunlight already had…
Luna did not even attempt to fight it. She surrendered to it- to her- completely.
Behind it all, in the backstage of Luna’s reality, the moon fulminated in the heavens, a silver lamp atop the crown of her powers, flowing back into place after a thousand years. It came to her in waves, a building crescendo that accompanied Celestia’s tireless work, a pressure that tightened the muscles in her haunches and left the feathered tips of her wings tingling. It came with the sweet asynchrony of every equine climax, as the tendons in the legs bearing her cutie marks wound so taut it seemed they might snap, propulsive energy building and building with always the threat of the explosion on the horizon.
The moon to be found there began to glimmer with its own internal light, seeping through the holes in the bed sheets and intruding out into the real world, the world of Equestria, from the sisters’ private little bubble.
Her closed eyes did not prevent Luna from envisioning her sister with perfect clarity, the intense, lustful expression on her face deeply familiar to her. Always an overachiever, Celestia’s horn burned brighter still, the sunlight eclipsing Luna’s lunar pleasure, manifesting other tongues and probing magical forces to stroke and explore the dark pony’s body. Though verifiably Celestia, the spells could appear at impossible angles, take their time at Luna’s body, and then vanish the moment the older mare was done with them. Theirs was a distinctly spectral, playful stimulation.
One stroked the length of Luna’s belly, running from clit to chest by way of her nipples, and it coincided perfectly with a deep and lingering lick from the one between her legs, the one spelltongue that Celestia never let fade. Luna arched up from the bed, the crescent moons at her flanks flaring with truesilver light so bright it almost turned the sheets transparent for a moment, her wings spreading and pushing the canopy upward so that it became a burning white lantern, illuminated from within for that one burning moment.
But her eyes…
‘Keep them closed, sweet Luna. Let all else fade from your mind. You don’t need the rest of the world right now, just a little satisfied slumber. Relax, and let it build…’
‘I’m not sure it can build any more, big sister!’ Luna whined, her voice turning liquid and unsteady as a pair of spells tongued her cutie marks, ecstasy pounding through her like hammer blows.
‘Then let go…’ Celestia’s voice echoed through her mind, and Luna obeyed.
Something, some circuit in her mind that had not been completed before now, clicked together as the Princess of Night came. She was one half of a dyad, a moon that reflected the light of her sun, and that essential oneness never hit her harder than it did at the moment of this orgasm, her nascent powers returning full force in the presence of her shining, daylight sister.
A gray wind battened against the windows, throwing open those that had not been secured and lifting the sheets fully off of the bed. Luna lay revealed beneath the howling gust, her body dark and gleaming with sweat, the crescents on her haunches throwing starbursts of molten silver light in time with the contractions of her cunt. Her wings stretched out, wide and tall, feathers rustling in the wind of that summer night they shared.
And the moon, oh, that true moon that hung above Canterlot, presided over by its Princess for the first time in eons…
It waxed, full to bursting, as Luna came, her climax pouring out and into the night that was hers. The stars roiled and burned in her heavens, each one calling, spilling out the light infinite upon her moon, and it grew strong on that light. At the very peak, the absolute height of orgasm, the moment when pleasure turned the space behind Luna’s eyelids blank white, and all she could feel was Celestia’s stead presence, the skies above Canterlot turned the deep blue of midday, everywhere lit up as though the night had suddenly vanished.
If there was a shadow of Nightmare Moon remaining in Luna, it vanished beneath that ecstatic glare.
Celestia drew her tail around her sister as the latter came down from her high, the winds retracting to a satisfied thrum against the window panes and the light fading to a bright silver purr that draped the world in sensual grays and metal tones. Panting, Luna snuggled in close to the white mare’s flank, her moons still glowing white hot on her haunches… but growing dimmer by the moment. Her eyes had not opened, and now she lay down her head, folded her wings, her every muscle relaxing as bliss bloomed in a mind more contented than it had been all day.
Still, though, she had seen the sudden flash of daylight that had… come with her…
‘I think everypony in Equestria saw that!’ Luna whined, feeling her face heat with embarrassment. She hid lower beneath the sheets as they settled around the pair, but there was nowhere Celestia could not see her, not now.
‘And they won’t know a mite of what it portended, will they?’ Celestia laughed. ‘But that, perhaps, their prodigal princess is a little out of practice with her moon powers. I won’t tell if you won’t, little sister.’
‘... Thank you, Celestia.’
‘For keeping silent? Well, as much as I wouldn’t trade this for the world, dear, it’s hardly appropriate Canterlot dinner conversation, is it?’
‘You know that’s not what I meant, don’t be obtuse,’ Luna bumped her sister, smiling. ‘I mean, thank you. For all this. Y-you didn’t have to… After everything I did I would have understood-’
‘Do you think you can sleep now, Luna? If I stay with you?’
‘... Yes.’
‘Then let’s do that, shall we?’ Drawing one wing down over her sister, Celestia lay a kiss upon Luna’s snout, then lay her head beside her. ‘You need your rest, no more of this silliness. We have done the very definition of kissing and making up, here.’
‘I suppose you are right,’ Luna let a yawn enter her voice, though she suspected sleep would be a little time in coming yet. Still, though, nestled up beside Celestia, the moon now whispering a far friendlier song, she knew that it would. ‘Goodnight, big sis.’
Celestia’s reply was quiet, peaceful… and then there was silence. Luna listened to her elder sister’s breathing slow, then steady, as sleep took her, and waited up just a little longer before allowing it to do the same to her. This was a moment that she had waited a thousand years to have back, her own personal eclipse under Celestia’s wing…
And Luna would let it fill her before it carried her into her dreams.