Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria, there were two regal sisters who ruled together, and created harmony for all the land.
The eldest of the sisters was as bright and glorious as the sun in all its forms. She could be cool and invigorating like the first rays of dawn, she could be warm and mollifying as the radiant sunset, and she could be as harsh and unforgiving as the star at its zenith.
The younger sister was as dark and mysterious as the night. Her moods were as wild and mercurial as the phases of the moon, and her subjects feared her ever shifting temperament. Years passed, and they continued to take no pleasure in her quiet nights.
The moon princess fell into anger and despair, and thus was the delicate harmony that held the land together shattered. Day and Night clashed in the heavens, and the elder sister was ultimately victorious. She sealed the younger sister within her beloved moon, and there she waited for 1,000 years.
But this is not where our story begins. Our story begins ages later, after the younger sister was freed and reunited with her family. The land of Equestria knew an age of unparalleled bounty. Hope and love drifted down on cheerful northern winds and blanketed the ponies with a spirit of camaraderie and bliss. The elements of harmony came to the land and forged a balance even the regal sisters had not achieved.
In this age of prosperity, the moon princess became lonely. She felt weary and overburdened. The sun princess had daughters of her own, in spirit if anything else. The sun princess controlled only the sun, and nothing else.
But the moon princess had no one, and the younger sister was responsible for the entire night sky. The moon, and the stars that clung to it like lost children. She also manipulated the seas through her nightly influences, and this responsibility was a delicate matter that was just as important as the sky, if not more so.
Resolved to bring an end to her loneliness, and her nightly ordeals, the princess of the moon gave birth to two daughters. The eldest was wild and as capricious as the seas. Her coat was the bright cream colour of sand, her mane and tail were the blue green of the oceans. The younger was a pale white. Her mane was the faint light blue of dawn, and matched a hue in the sun princess’s mane like a reflection. Many would have figured her for the elder sister’s daughter, as the only feature she shared with the moon princess were a pair of striking turquoise eyes.
The princess of the moon loved both of her daughters very much, and they became the world to her. The daughters did not get along overmuch. The eldest was, again, unruly like the seas. She hounded her more meek and humble counterpart.
The younger was enraptured by the stars, and delighted in her mother’s stories of them. The stars, she had been told, were where the souls of all the little ponies went when they died. They were much like the sun, after a fashion. Their spirits burned against the empty night sky, and their light guided their descendents even as they sought their own path home. The sun was simply... more. It shone with enough ferocity to light everypony’s path, and it knew its course day after day.
The youngest daughter watched her mother fret over and speak to the stars of the night sky every evening, and every night after she finished her work, the daughter would rest on the balcony and sing to them. Her songs made the moon princess very happy, though she never announced her presence. The youngest daughter was shy, and couldn’t bare the attention.
Everypony was happy. The sun princess was pleased for her sister, and both could finally rest as equals. The eldest daughter grew quickly, and wandered the coastal cities. She inspired her ponies to new feats of exploration and daring. Massive bridges reached out to connect mainland and islands, ships sailed far and established new trading routes. The eldest daughter became a princess in her own right and demanded but a fraction of the splendor she brought to the world for herself.
The younger daughter remained small, though her elders did not begrudge her this, for all things grow at their own pace. She loved all the little stars and vowed that one day she would visit them, and she would make friends with each and every one of them.
But first she needed to learn and grow, and she did not feel comfortable doing so in the darkness of her mother. The moon princess had a morbid sense of humor. Yes, she was nurturing, but also brash in her own way. As time passed on, the younger daughter began to admire her aunt more and more. The wouldbe princess of the stars was understandably attracted to the biggest star of them all.
Her mother was made sad by this, her youngest’s schedule increasingly shifted away from her. The daughter spent more and more time awake during the day, and asleep at night. The moon princess did not hear her daughter sing to the stars anymore, except perhaps in her dreams, when she ventured there.
The elder daughter would still visit the palace, and sensed her mother’s displeasure, she always found ways to make her sibling suffer for it. The pranks were ceaseless, and only served to drive the youngest further into her embrace of daylight.
Eventually she stopped talking about the stars altogether, and started questing for a purpose born of daylight. The sun princess and her sister became very worried. The filly was not aging properly, and after several years her cutiemark had yet to appear. Something had to be done to set things right, though things had escalated so badly they knew not how to fix them.
The sun princess pretended to relent, and took the filly under her wing while her sister watched hopefully, and from a distance. Under her aunt’s care the filly was regaled with stories of the grandeur of night, the majesty of the stars, and was encouraged to read as much about its history as she could. She grumbled in the wake of this curriculum, it was not at all what she had expected, or wanted.
The sun princess asked what had happened to change her interests so, and her niece merely replied that the night was cold and unpleasant, and that when she sang to the stars they never responded. Her aunt wasn’t sure how to proceed, it was hard for her to argue with the filly’s blunt reasoning.
One morning, when the moon princess remained awake long enough to take tea with her sister, the daughter that had troubled them both dashed into the room with an old book in tow. She was frantic and nearly senseless with anxiety. In the dead of night, her sister had come to her and offered to read her bedtime stories.
In the story, her older sister wove a web of horror and misfortune. It talked about the things that came before harmony, back when the land was choked by fear and despair. In that time before the two regal sisters, darker and more terrifying things still ruled the night. She told her about how these things still lurk in thresholds and cracks, waiting for little fillies who deny their nature and their family. Such children were always eventually caught, and taken to a dark place where even the moon and stars did not glow.
The regal sisters stared at each other with concern, and the sun princess scooped the filly up. The moon princess watched bitterly as her elder sister nuzzled and mollified her daughter. Something she had not been able to do for many moons now. Together the sisters told her to discount the stories, they were tales to scare children, and not much else.
The moon princess was furious with her older daughter, and ordered her to leave the castle. The princess of the seas lashed out in her own way, but eventually did as she was told. Before she left, however, she paid one final visit to her sister. She told her that the creatures lurking in thresholds and cracks could come out, but only when the moon covered the sun’s face. In that darkness, the creatures scuttled forth like giant spiders and stole pray away to the cracks from whence they came.
The youngest daughter tried to be brave, but she cried herself to sleep that night, and every night after that. She renewed her efforts to acquire her cutiemark. She knew that if she could just find her talent, she’d be safe, and the spiders in the cracks would never be a threat to her ever again. She prayed for daylight and shunned the night with more fervor than ever before.
The time for the Summer Sun Festival was rapidly approaching, and every day the moon princess watched her sister struggle with her daughter. Every day she grew increasingly bitter. She began to make plans of her own. A true solar eclipse had not been seen in dozens of years, and she thought for sure that if she could prove that the night was equal in splendor to the sun, she would win her daughter back.
The day of the Summer Sun Festival finally arrived. With great effort the moon princess slept the entire night prior so as to have the strength she would need for this clever plan. The daughter was left behind in the palace where she would be safe, and the moon princess left to raise the moon, and on that day the moon and sun wrestled for as long as they had before, back when the moon princess had lost herself to despair. It was all she could do to convince her sister that the same had not happened again. She needed this, she claimed, she needed to show her daughter that the night was equal. Her elder sister had her misgivings, but she agreed.
The little filly was anything but amazed by this display, she was terrified. She was alone. She ran all over the castle in search of protection, there had to be somepony, anypony that could keep her safe. Tears streamed down her face as she came to realize a horrible truth.
The castle was empty, everypony was in Canterlot proper to watch the raising of the sun, and even more had gone when the eclipse started. Her mother was not there for her, because her mother was fighting with her sister again. She was utterly alone.
Thresholds and cracks seemed larger than she remembered, and the sight of them sent her screaming through the halls. She could hear whispers from them, dark thoughts and her own wails were repeated back to her in a droning monotone that turned her into a cowering heap. There wasn’t anywhere for her to run, she had abandoned her nature and her family, and now she had nothing.
She didn’t see them, when they took her. Her eyes were shut very tightly, because she knew that if she saw them, she might faint and never wake up again. But she did open her eyes, eventually. She opened her eyes and was surrounded by blackness, and neither the moon nor the stars illuminated her. In the distance was a small pinprick of light. Her world, her home. She raced toward it with all the strength she could muster. Her efforts did not seem to matter much, though. The harder she ran the further away it felt, and ripples and waves followed her in the dark.
Occasionally, something would lash out, and she would start to rot. A nip on her sides, and her wings began to molt away, the feathers fell off in waves until there was nothing left. Her hooves cracked and splintered until they could hardly be considered such any longer. Her fur came out in clumps, and her ears became borderline deaf nubs incapable of movement. Her mane and tail were the last to go before she curled in on herself once more and screamed with sorrow.
When the moon princess returned, content that her display had proven once and for all that her night was equal in every way to her sister’s day, she could not find her daughter anywhere. She searched personally, and ordered every guard at her disposal to follow through with searches of their own. She was nowhere, and the moon princess spent months in solitude, never quite certain why her contest with the sun had been so important.
Eventually the darkness that engulfed the daughter receded. She was blinded by light, and she screamed, though it was not because of the harsh illumination. She screamed because she was small and shriveled, she screamed for things she could no longer remember, and she screamed because deep down she knew they could always take her back.
She was a quiet child, albeit a bit disturbed. Her proud parents named her Merope, after fairy tales of their own, and they doted on her with all the love and affection they could muster.
But the love and affection they could muster wasn’t good enough. Merope had an incurable wanderlust and a pathological fear for closed spaces. Things tickled at the back of her mind, distant thoughts that begged to be remembered, but ultimately she could remember nothing. She would wander around wordlessly like a widow waiting for a husband that would never return from a war.
When she turned five there was a solar eclipse. The first solar eclipse their town had seen in many decades. The dull orange twilight ushered her out of her father’s house, and she wandered aimlessly, knocking on doors and peering through windows. No one answered her. It could have been out of fear, she might have had bad luck, or they might have all been out at the lake watching the spectacle. Merope became increasingly agitated until her fear got the better of her. She ran back to her father’s house in terror, certain that things were coming after her, and looking at her from the cracks in the sidewalk. Her father had been drinking, and when he awoke to her screaming and running back into the house, he panicked. He knew that if anything had happened to her, he'd be responsible. The amount of anger her felt at himself was easily redirected to his daughter. He beat her that night, and she did not run away again for many years.
But eventually that wanderlust did return. She would have strange dreams, dreams of running on all fours, of learning to fly, of great white wings that would shield her and embrace her, and of calling the moon mother. So every night she prayed to the moon, and ended each prayer with the name of her mother, Luna.
She ran away several times, convinced that if she picked a direction and walked in it for long enough, she’d find home. That mythical place where she would be herself again, where the regal figures from her dreams would wrap their wings around her and carry her to a castle perched precariously upon a mountain. She was regal too, she knew. Though she did not feel worthy of it.
These attempts at escape were ill-fated, and never succeeded. On one occasion a friend of hers had begged to come. His family abused him, she knew, and she couldn’t bare to leave a friend behind. As far as she was concerned, friends were the most important thing, and would be instrumental in getting her home.
When the sun started to set, her friend panicked, and begged her to take him home. So she did. Her other attempts went just as poorly, if she wasn’t running out of food within the day, she was getting dragged back to town by angry lawmen.
One day, while riding in the car with her father, she broke out into tears. She told him about her dreams, and about her confusion. She told him that she could have all the money in the world, all the toys, and all the games, and she’d still never be happy. Because she was missing something. Something was taken from her and she could never have it back.
Her father was very angry, he told her she was a disgusting greedy little girl with no compassion for others, and no understanding of what people had given her.
Her mother and father stopped living together not long after that.
She wasn’t the only one living in the house, she had brothers and sisters, and her mom was miserable trying to take care of them. She often slipped through the cracks. If she got bad grades, well, no one noticed because there was too much going on. How was she supposed to stay motivated when they weren’t even learning real magic?
As soon as Merope learned to read she lived in the library. Books held answers for everything. They told her how the big steel carriages moved on their own, and how the birds filled with people flew through the sky. This was magic, it had to be. It had to help her get home.
The more she learned, however, the more she became convinced that it wasn’t magic. Where she grew up it was always cloudy. Frequently the sun would break through and shine down in all its relatively limited glory, but at night she could go months without seeing the glow of a single star, or the moon. Eventually she just gave up. Her schooling stopped, and no one seemed to care. She spent all of her time holed up in her room sleeping, and when she couldn’t sleep anymore she would take elixirs to help her do so anyway.
She didn’t like the elixirs, they gave her terrible dreams. Dreams about thresholds and cracks, and the things that lurked in them, dreams about an angry sea that wanted to pull her away from land and leave her floundering in dark depths.
She couldn’t stay in her mother’s house forever, though. She had made some friends, and each in turn expressed their Generosity, Honesty, Laughter, Loyalty, and Kindness to her. She tried to repay their goodwill with hard work, but nothing seemed to work out. She became increasingly convinced that there was no place for her in this world. She needed to get home, wherever that was, and she believed there was one man who could help her.
On the other side of the kingdom Merope lived in was a medicine man. He wasn’t well liked by anyone really, but he claimed to talk to the dead, and darker things besides. Although people did not like him, they didn’t call him a liar either. For all of his claims there were very few who would accuse him of deception. Most people seemed to find more at fault with his brutal honesty. She had spent several years prior eagerly seeking out stories about him, and knew that if anyone had the answer it would be him. Relying completely on the help of her friends, Merope made her way to the medicine man’s hut. On foot, by carriage, any means she could manage.
When she finally arrived, her feet were bleeding and her legs were buckling. The first thing the man did was offer her his floor to sleep on, which she graciously accepted. After she got her rest and was capable of sitting, he told her the nature of her predicament.
He told her that she knew why she had come, but that he could not help her. She was not allowed to go home, she didn’t belong there anymore, and the moon was not her mother. She had things to do here, he said, and he suggested she go all the way back across the kingdom to the house of her mother until she figured out what it was.
Merope wept and pleaded. She couldn’t believe she had come all that way just to hear this counsel. She told him that if she couldn’t get home, there was nothing left for her. He wrapped his arms around her and exchanged a simple truth.
“Fairy tales rarely have happy endings.”
Merope parted with as much food as she could spare, and thanked the man for trying to help. Once more the kindness of her friends saved her, and they sent her a chariot that would take her all the way back to the house of her mother.
Her mother was less than excited to see her, but did not turn her away. The two lived alone together for many years, both exacerbating the issues of the other. As time passed, Merope became increasingly convinced that her purpose was not forthcoming, and the onset of wrinkles and age only added to that terrible knowing.
It wasn’t necessarily that getting older bothered her, it simply reminded her that every year she had lived prior to this, she would have to live again. She had only spent half of her allotted life span, and had another half to go. She didn't have her purpose, she would never have her purpose, and at the end end of everything, who's to say her bullheadedness would be rewarded with home?
She remembered the dreams from her childhood. They came so rarely now. She remembered singing to the stars as a little girl, when she did see them, but they never sang back. The burden of her confusion became increasingly difficult to bear. She used to take an elixir to help her sleep, and she knew that if it was prepared properly, she could have an elixir that would let her sleep forever. She tried to imagine a forever with warm wings, gentle eyes, and magic. It all seemed so impossible, and that fear was all it took to place her on her path.
She was afraid, holding the bottle so close to her breast, she didn’t know if the dreams were waiting for her on the other side, or if this would just lead to more pain. She remembered back when she was a little girl, when her family had gone to the cliffs surrounding the sea. Her older brothers would leap off and into the water, but no one else would. They were too afraid. She remembered how she closed her eyes, ran, and jumped off the cliff. It had terrified her at first, but once she hit the water the fear was gone. When she had climbed back up everyone had paid attention to her, everyone was proud of her. She felt like a princess.
Merope closed her eyes and drank the elixir, and in that place that it took her, she saw neither the glow of the moon, nor the stars.
