"There can only be one princess in Equestria! And that princess... will be me!"
Luna's soul is screaming.
In the first few moments, it'd felt good. It'd felt so very good to lift the moon into the sky and shroud the sun. The concept of an eclipse had already existed, as previous keepers of the heavens had experimented with such things, but there'd been no living memory of them, the word having come to mean so many other things in Equestrian, with its original meaning lost.
Including what Celestia had done. She'd eclipsed Luna, leaving her younger sister wasting away in her shadow. The Avatar of the Moon had been lost in the brilliance of the Avatar of the Sun, and so it only felt fitting to blot out the sun with the moon, and reverse the dynamic, if only for a little while.
It'd only been meant for a day. Luna remembers that now. She'd only meant to keep the moon in one place for a single day's length, then lower it again to return to the proper cycle. Just long enough for everypony to see how beautiful things looked under moonlight...
Then she'd been before her sister, on the cusp of it, and the words that spilled from her lips...
She can't see Celestia anywhere. The magic surrounding her has obscured her, and more magic is cold fire rushing through her veins. Everything is stretching, twisting, contorting, and she swears that she can feel bones grinding together as parts of her reshape.
Her body is stationary as the changes take place, but Luna is still screaming. Her mouth is simply no longer her own to let the sound out.
There are faces in the whirl of shadows, and Luna doesn't know if they're real, prophetic, or hallucinations of a shattering mind. She sees her Court of Dreams, each and every nyx twisting and warping and howling in pain.
Spectacled eyes are staring at her, gaze silently asking why?
Doran
My first friend
I'm sorry
There's laughter. There's laughter and it's not hers. It's a twisted, cruel thing, a parody of true laughter and it's coming from her throat.
"Luna, I will not fight you! You must lower the moon! It is your duty!"
For years she'd steadily found her teeth more on edge every time her sister spoke, reading sarcasm and condescension into every kind word and attempt to reach out a hoof. She was convinced that Celestia pitied her at most, rolling her eyes secretly at her descent into misery.
Now all that is gone. This thing has gluttonously devoured every bit of resentment, hate, and rage, and grown strong on her despair.
I let it in
My heart let it in to feast
I failed
"Luna? I am... Nightmare Moon! I have but one royal duty now: to destroy you!"
All she has left is horror as she beats her hooves on an internal cage. She's being dragged down, the voices distorting as if she's being submerged into icy waters.
She has time for one last scream before she drowns.
The dzilla are heavy around Zecora's neck when she makes her way through the forest.
She remembers when she'd welcomed the weight with joy. She remembers family and friends dancing, and leaning up to nuzzle her new spouse, so much taller than she was. She remembers the individual weight of each ring, representing the commitment she'd made to another creature, and the promise to keep it so long as both drew breath.
She steps around the blue flowers, cautious of their mischievous magic. She'd recognized the Poison Joke a bit too late when first encountering them, and brewing the cure while her stripes rapidfire flashed in every colour of the rainbow and then some had proven a challenge. Still, it was something she'd been up to the challenge of, and she's thankful for her copy of Super Naturals in her library for its wisdom.
She'd learned to read Equestrian before learning to speak it, and she's keenly aware of the thickness of her Farasian accent. Reciting poems and singing songs had helped her learn, and even now her voice still rises and falls with the bounces of rhyme.
Her love had always enjoyed it when she sung...
She's nearing the edge of the forest, and she always hesitates at that threshold. She's still a bit skittish, each visit to town making her both long for one of the ponies to venture out and meet her, and dread it. Ponies are curious creatures, so like a zebra in some ways and yet so alien in others, and she's not sure what she would even have to talk about.
The sun on her flanks offers one potential answer, but very few have ever known what it truly means. It's rude to ask, among zebras, much like trotting up to a stranger and questioning who's recently been in their bed. Her family knows, her once-closest friends...
None of them have written her letters. It is up to her to choose when to reach out to them, with all accepting that that choice may be to never speak to them again.
Such is her right, within the tradition of the Widow's Roam. A life with plans cut short is burned to ash, and rebuilt somewhere wholly new.
But no one had expected her to choose Equestria to rebuild. Ponies are such loud, bright creatures, like foals given their weight in sugar and doused in paint, and somewhere a Creator is laughing at the fact that they'd seen fit to give a third of them wings, so they can take their antics into the sky.
As Zecora crosses over and takes the path into town, she feels she knows what will happen. After all, it's what always happens. Houses quiet, stores shut down in the middle of the day, and not a single pony in the street. Her silently calling out for guidance in the town square with digging hooves and being silently shunned.
Hope keeps her going out to them. Bitterness coats her tongue on every return to her home.
She doesn't know yet that this is the day when somepony will follow.
Sometimes even the oldest mare in the world has to be forced to swallow her pride.
Celestia drew gazes wherever she went for a walk. Also being the tallest mare in the world tended to do that, not to mentioned the golden regalia, the blindingly white pelt, the ethereal mane and tail, the presence of both horn and wings...
She's tried to discourage active reverence and worship, but so many have looked at the mare who had, for centuries, been the only alicorn in the world and saw something divine. Countless age implied wisdom verging on omniscience. The mare who knew everything, and for whom everything was going according to plan.
If only they knew.
If only they knew that the gambit with Twilight Sparkle on that Summer Sun Celebration had been an act of desperation, because she had a feeling that her apprentice had what it took to activate the elements but couldn't know for certain that she would find friends who embodied them. If only they knew that Nightmare Moon's imprisonment had been a failure, a last-ditch attempt to use the artefacts they'd once wielded together to pull her sister out of that thing when all the begging and pleading for Luna to come back had borne nothing.
Celestia does have a touch of prophecy, but she has never been able to fully distinguish what are glimpses of the future and what are just dreams. And even then, the Insight visits her so rarely, with disaster after disaster having knocked her off her hooves with its lack of warning.
Celestia is not a goddess. She's just a mare. Yet sometimes... she falls for her own hype, and then reality serves as the bucket of cold water to remind her that she doesn't know everything. Like Twilight's letter about Appleloosa.
Some of the new desert settlements had been coming up to the border of bison territory. There had been some intermingling in those border towns, a bit of immigration in both directions, even a mixed marriage or two, but the diplomatic situation between pony and bison had always been informal. Worked out between town and tribe, individual with individual.
I didn't know that the planned location for Appleloosa had crossed over into their land.
Celestia is walking, on the way to an important appointment, and the onlooking creatures see a crown-heavy head sink.
I should have known that the planned location for Appleloosa had crossed over into their land.
Not just their land, but sacred land. My ponies were planting apple trees on sacred land, right under my snout.
Unacceptable.
The diplomatic situation had been informal, and that had seemed to be the way the bison preferred it. There had been no hurry to formalize anything, because things were working as they were. It was a mistake, and it's one that Celestia knows must be corrected. One that will be corrected.
There is a bison cow waiting for her at the newly-opened embassy, with a coat the colour of clouds. Her blue eyes regard Celestia's approach with stoicism, waiting to see what the oldest mare in the world will do.
Celestia stops, and her front legs bend at the knees. Her long neck lowers, bowing until the point of her sharp horn meets the ground. Her wings splay out and dip downward, in an old pegasus form of curtsey, and the motions in her mane and tail slow, until the waves of energy are near-stationary.
"Ambassador. It is my honour to welcome you to Canterlot."
It's a reasonable question, Rainbow Dash feels, when she's been flying above and looked down to see the perpetual motion pony sitting still. In fact, even as she's swooped down and landed next to Pinkie, the only initial response to the question is a flicked ear and the bouncing curls the motion displaces. Then she leans down, takes a page of the thin book in front of her between her teeth, and carefully turns it.
"Just catching up on some reading," Pinkie says serenely, as other ponies merrily trot through the park around her, beneath the midday sun, and as Rainbow steps closer, she catches familiar splashes of colour on the page.
"Are you reading All Things With Wings?" comes the incredulous question.
"Yup."
"But that's--"
The head loaded with curls turns, and one bright blue eye looks her. Below, a simplistic drawing of a griffon, half lion and half eagle, sits there innocently, surrounded by print with large, foal-friendly letters. "It's what?"
The rest of the sentence dies in Rainbow's throat, replaced with a memory.
"Pinkie, this is my griffon friend, Gilda."
"What's a griffon?"
She walks over, and lowers herself to the grass, staring at the book from her foalhood. "You... really never saw a griffon before I introduced you to Gilda?"
"Nope."
"Or heard of one?"
"Not the slightest, slimmest, ittiest bittiest time, ever."
Like most of the things Rainbow has ever said, the words are out before thoughts can catch up. "That's so weird."
"Is it?" Pinkie leans down, turns the page again, and now several other griffons are on the pages, different kinds of birds and cats mashed together in unique combinations. "There's lots and lots of creatures in the world, and we're meeting new ones all the time. If they tried to teach us about every single one, we'd be in school forever. There's barely any pegasi where I used to live, let alone anyone else who flies. They taught me about the creatures they thought I'd meet."
Barely any pegasi. The thought is even more mind-boggling than no griffons. "Like what?"
"Cows, sheep, pigs, and goats," Pinkie counts off with taps of her hoof. "Donkeys and mules... a bit about dragons, even if it was mostly just saying that nopony knows much about them, and to run if they come for your rocks..." She smiles. "I met a diamond dog once."
Several blinks break out. "A what?"
Smiling turns to giggling. "You've never heard of diamond dogs, Dashie?"
Rainbow huffs, her chest puffing out. "You're making that up. There's no way there's dogs made of diamond and I wouldn't know."
Giggles become laughter. "Diamond dogs aren't made of diamond, silly. They just like them a lot."
Another huff. "I still think you're making it up."
"I'll show you a picture later." Another page turns, and now something new is on display, and Pinkie's eyes widen in delight upon seeing the image of a small flock of hippogriffs.
Rainbow knows the book by heart. Every foal from Cloudsdale does. She knows that the next section will be about the ornithians, then gargoyles, then rocs...
Rainbow's wing opens, and settles across Pinkie's back. If she's bothered by the foreign sensation, she doesn't show it, just looking at the colourful pictures in the book with wonder. Rainbow looks over her shoulder, and smiles too.
It isn't every day you get to watch another pony learn about the awesomeness of the skies.
