Lingering Lunacy

Chapters

I: And So We Meet Again
II: Let the Games Begin
IV: Reconaissance & Fine Acting Never Hurt Nopony
V: Backfiring All Over the Place
VI: You Dare Strike Her Down?
VII: The Greatest Weapons in the World
VIII: Your Puppet No More
III: Crystal Traps & Statue Confidants

I: And So We Meet Again

“Tolle nox et luna perfecta…”

Princess Luna stood on the indigo-tiled balcony of her wing of the castle, her horn aglow with a soft nebula of magic. There was no actual incantation required to raise the moon, but Celestia had suggested repeating the phrase like a mantra as a way of focusing Luna’s magic and strengthening it. Imprisonment for a thousand years with nothing to levitate or enchant but rocks had left the dark alicorn weakened, and for a time Celestia had to help her younger sister with the nighttime duties. As much as Luna hated to admit it—her older sister had a nasty habit of being a know-it-all at times—the phrase from a long-forgotten language worked well for her. When murmured softly, it was almost like a lullaby, except lullabies never made Luna feel sleepy in the slightest.

Satisfied, Luna drew the nebula around her horn back inside and surveyed the city of Canterlot. Mother and father ponies were shutting off the lights in their home and ushering their fillies and colts to bed, while teenagers skipped along the cobblestone gutters to whatever wild and potentially illicit adventures awaited them in the downtown districts, throwing odd shadows in the streetlamps’ path. A small yet particularly rowdy knot of Royal Guard Academy colts sneaking out from their dormitory ceased their misbehavior when they caught a glimpse of the Princess standing on her balcony. Luna couldn’t help but chuckle. She supposed that she still cut a rather fearsome figure for some of the more young and impressionable subjects of her kingdom.

Night really was the best time for deep introspection, wasn’t it? Too much had to get done during the day, and so many things cluttered the mind of the average pony. Even Luna, whose main task for daylight hours was to sleep so she could fulfill her royal work after sunset, rarely found her unconscious unfettered by lots of nonsense and outside activity. It was only after expending the excess magic that built up while she slept orchestrating the rise and fall of the night sky that the princess found her mind was clear.

There was to be a wedding. A royal wedding, at that.

No one other than Celestia, Luna, and a few of the trustworthy Royal Guard Captains knew of the upcoming nuptials. To tell the subjects of Equestria too early would mean a mad rush to Canterlot by anypony who could make their way to the region, and the logistics would be, well, a nightmare. So the princesses had quietly initiated the construction of lodgings for wedding guests not staying the castle and the hiring of new but able kitchen staff to prepare for the banquet.

The groom was Shining Armor, captain of the Royal Guard. Curiously enough, he was also the older brother of Celestia’s personal student, Twilight Sparkle. Again, given the knack Celestia seemed to have for manipulating situations around her, Luna was left to wonder if her pristine older sister was just arranging for events soon to come, building the royal family the way she saw fit.

But who was the bride?

Ah. This was what made the indigo princess hang her head in shame. Those had been her first days back from the moon, after being converted and still new to the world. She remembered that, so like an ill-tempered filly, she’d screamed and kicked and bucked, smashing priceless artifacts and seeing horror crawl over Celestia’s face, and utter confusion on the face of that other innocuous, rose-pink alicorn…

“How positively delicious.”

Luna snapped her head back up, on the alert. She hadn’t heard that voice in many months. She thought it’d been banned from her conscience forever after being blasted by the Elements of Harmony. But here it was, hissing distortedly in the corners of her mind. The princess crouched on the balcony, the cool tiles brushing her belly as she stuffed her hooves in her ears and squeezed her eyes closed, begging for the sickening laughter to stop...

“Charming. I’ve always delighted in being bowed to.”

Princess Luna opened one eye to see her mirror image standing in front of her. The only differences were that this Luna was a bit lankier, her mane and tail were not eternally flowing in a silent breeze, and she wore the most uncharacteristic self-centered smirk on her face.

“Of course, I don’t require such obedience out of my subjects, but perhaps you ponies do it diff—”

WHAM!

With brute force, Princess Luna wheeled herself around to kick at the other Luna with her hind legs.

“How DARE thou infringe upon our image!”

“My humblest apologies, dear Princess. Would you prefer I look a bit different?” In a blinding flash of green fire, the mirror Luna transformed into a dead-on imitation of Princess Celestia without her royal gold ornaments and flowing mane, though with the stupid smirk still plastered across her muzzle. Luna prepared to punt the pony a second time, but a verdant blast from the false Celestia’s horn sent her spinning on her stomach across the balcony.

“Now, now. Can’t be kicking our sister like a common mule, now can we?”

“Thou art not my sister; thou art a pestilence!”

“Oh, lose the holier-than-thou addresses. They went out of fashion centuries ago, and you aren’t endearing yourself to anyone that way.” The false Celestia rolled her eyes, which momentarily flashed from violet to green and back again. “Besides, we just as well could be sisters. After all…”

A tendril of magic shot out to grab Luna by the muzzle and drag her to her hooves.

“…I am a part of you.”

“NEVER!” Luna cried, her horn glowing with azure energy and wings flared, preparing for a magical attack. The tendril of magic that had dragged the princess to her hooves just moments ago swallowed her like a sickly green amoeba, keeping her suspended a few feet off the ground while the false Celestia looked up at her with disdain.

“Pathetic! Slow to the draw and weak to the punch. Your magic is weaker than before! If only you hadn’t exorcised me, you could be stronger.”

“That wasn’t my choice!”

“Oh?” With the apathy of one throwing off a winter coat, the visage of Celestia slid away to reveal an alicorn epitomizing decay. A lacquered shell saddled across her ash-gray back was the only feature of her still whole: her dusty blue mane and tail were reminiscent of cobwebs, and her translucent, insect-like wings were filled with gaping holes typically rendering flight impossible. Even her horn looked like the dead branch of a gnarled oak plunked on her forehead. She smiled menacingly, showing off her unnecessarily sharpened and pearly teeth. “You’re telling me I wasn’t cast away?”

Princess Luna gulped, her eyes widening. “No, that’s not what I—“

”You know we made an unstoppable team. And in your darkest hours—forgive the pun, couldn’t resist—I was the only one there to console you.”

“That’s typically what happens when one is banished to the moon for a thousand years, Chrysalis,” Luna spat with sarcasm and contempt. “One is alone.”

“I’m glad to see you’ve kept your sense of humor alive since I was so hastily torn from your conscience.”

“Why are you back?”

Chrysalis turned away for a moment, leaving Luna to hammer fruitlessly at her amoeba-like floating prison with pulses of magic. After seeming to search the night skies an eternity for Luna’s question, the insect-pony queen turned back to her captive, who immediately ceased her escape attempt.

“As you know, alicorns don’t require food from the earth like the lower classes of equines do. Magic sustains us, and because my appetite is more powerful, I sustain myself on emotions. Quite an ingenious food supply, really. I don’t ever have to worry about blights or shortages; no one can ever stop feeling.” Chrysalis licked her lips involuntarily.

“You’re just a glutton. It’s a miracle your hindquarters don’t have the same circumference as the sun by this point.”

“As always, your barbs hurt, Luna. But nonetheless I appreciate them.” There was a rather pregnant pause. “I’ve heard there was a wedding.”

“How do you—”

“It’s amazing what a Royal Guard member will tell you when they see done-up doe eyes and a lace garter.”

Luna smacked her muzzle with a hoof. “Unbelievable.”

“I completely agree. A Guard shouldn’t be so easy to beguile.”

“You still haven’t answered my question, Chrysalis.”

“Well, weddings are an absolute smorgasbord of emotions! There is tremulous excitement, and seeing how this is going to be a royal wedding, that will be multiplied tenfold. There might be some sadness lingering somewhere at the sudden life change, maybe some pangs of regret sprinkled here and there like cherries on a sundae, mmm…Oh, but the best weddings have more variety…like jealousy.”

The last word sent fear arching through every fiber of Luna’s being. Of course, Chrysalis being the unsatisfied pig yet connoisseur she was, she could probably smell emotion hanging in the air around any poor pony she happened upon. She’d hoped that the jealousy had been hidden well by her shroud of shame…

~~~

It was one of those days shortly after Luna’s return to Equestria. Princess Celestia had asked—she very well couldn’t command her own sister of equal rank—that Luna began acclimating once again to keeping night hours by sleeping during the daytime. Unable to bring herself to stay in bed, the indigo princess had taken to walking laps around the castle, hoping the exercise would wear her out enough to lull her into slumber.

Her rounds took her past the Great Receiving Chamber at the castle’s rotunda. Having not been there for a thousand years, Luna pushed the gigantic white door open, eyes wide with curiosity.

The first thing she’d noticed was Celestia’s throne, in its gilded grandeur, had been moved from the Day Courtroom to the opposite end of this chamber. Luna supposed that with her banishment, Celestia had elected to keep the large room functional—fitting, given her sister’s desire to waste as little as possible. The only sounds were the nonsensically placed waterfalls on either side of the throne tinkling as water splashed into the pools and Celestia speaking to a rose-pink unicorn standing tall in front of her.

“Wait a minute,” Luna squinted. Unless her eyes deceived her—which was very possible, given that she saw much better in the nighttime than in sunlight—there were a pair of wings folded on this unicorn’s back, the feathers tipped with purple. And another thing: this was an unusually tall unicorn, her neck and legs slender and her body curved in a way most ponies’ commonly didn’t. To be sure, her mane and tail did not flow as Celestia’s did or as Luna’s used to, but…

Luna pushed herself into the chamber, positively fuming as she stormed up the red carpet.

“Luna? I thought you were asleep!” Celestia exclaimed, looking almost embarrassed to see her sister.

“I had insomnia, so I thought I’d take a walk around the castle,” Luna replied through gritted teeth, clapping her wings firmly to her sides in agitation.

“I-I see. Luna, this is Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, otherwise known as Princess Cadence.” The rose-pink alicorn standing in front of the throne waved sheepishly, her cheeks somehow managing to blush to a darker shade of pink through her pelt. “She’s your niece.”

Princess Luna’s head was sent into a whirl. Dealing with the damage inflicted on her psyche when she was Nightmare Moon had been difficult enough to do for the past few days, and now Celestia was telling her not only was there another alicorn, but that she too was a princess, and her niece to boot? Luna felt lightheaded and ready to swoon, but she kept her hooves planted solidly on the floor, inhaling and exhaling almost imperceptibly.

“So she’s my replacement?”

Both Celestia and Princess Cadence were thunderstruck by that statement. Cadence’s violet eyes were darting around the chamber for some kind of escape, seeming to sense the impending danger.

“What in Equestria would make you say—”

“We are the only two alicorns in this world, dear sister,” Luna spat venomously. “And you expect me to stand her and believe that this,” she jabbed a dark hoof at Cadence, “is some new pony we’re to add into the royal family?”

“Luna…”

“WE are the rulers of Equestria! No one else! The two of us rule together!”

“Cadence isn’t going to—“

Jealousy seethed through Luna’s body, blocking out her sister’s words. Her eyes began to glow a blinding white as the truly powerful magic that had been pent up for over a thousand years boiled to the surface. Without so much as half a thought, her wings beat violently against the air and took her high above Celestia’s head. As the last of her normal vision slipped away to give way to raw, uncontrolled magical energy, Luna saw Princess Cadence try to bolt for the exit.

But it was too late. A scream of pure rage fueled by envy ripped out of Luna’s throat as magic blasted forth from her horn. Windows smashed, china shattered on the floor and wooden antiques splintered like cheap toothpicks. Celestia bellowed in the Royal Canterlot Voice for the guards scattered all over the castle grounds—like they’d be any kind of help whatsoever—with her eyes fixated on her younger sister suspended in midair. Her quad-colored mane rippled faster than normal, for she was anxious that Luna would at the very least destroy the Receiving Chamber and cause untold damage to the rest of the castle.

Time had seemingly ceased while Luna threw her cosmic tantrum, but her energy was expended, and she tumbled to the floor with an undignified thump. The next thing she remembered was waking up in the hospital wing of the castle, completely and utterly alone with her overwhelming sense of guilt.

~~~

“I...I…”

“You don’t need to say anything more,” Chrysalis said poisonously, letting the green orb melt away into the night air. Princess Luna fell to the tiled balcony unceremoniously, and she tossed her starry mane away from her eyes.

“Tell me what you want here, Chrysalis.”

“Well, you seemed so terribly set against a cozy reunion, so I’ll just go through with it all myself. Besides, do you really think I’d be so dim-witted as to divulge my plan to someone who won’t work with me?”

Luna was a firm believer in not saying anything if nothing nice could be said, and since every remark bubbling on her tongue at the moment was an insult, she kept her mouth shut.

“Precisely,” Chrysalis smirked, turning away from the princess and spreading her cobweb-like translucent wings. “Well I’d love to stay and chat with my former…roommate, as it were, but since I wasn’t offered to spend the night, I’ll take my leave.”

“You’re not going anywhere!” Luna cried as she jumped to her hooves, incensed.

“Oh really?”

A streamlined zap of green energy shot over Chrysalis’ shoulder from her horn, but Luna was able to deflect it with a simple shield. The zap rebounded and cleanly sliced half a foot of hair off of Chrysalis’ mane. With a mixture of disdain and wonder, the insectoid queen glanced back at Luna, who looked back with fervent defiance.

“Impressive. You’ll be an opponent worthy of fighting, but at a later time. It’ll be interesting to fight against, essentially myself.”

Chrysalis flew off into the skies over Canterlot, and Luna watched her go with the precision of a hunter sighting a pheasant. Oh, she could easily shoot her down, but that’d cause panic in the streets of Canterlot tomorrow morning to see an unfamiliar creature—an alicorn, no less—magically concussed on the cobblestones.

Luna had asked Celestia if there had been any sort of consequences when she was released from the visage of Nightmare Moon by the Elements of Harmony on that fateful night. Something that corrupting couldn’t disappear from the earth entirely; there was a cosmic balance in the universe that wouldn’t allow such a thing to happen. Unwittingly Luna had asked that question on the night of her release, still not thinking much farther ahead than the tip of her muzzle and expecting an immediate answer. Celestia had obviously been feeling the same as her little sister, and had assured, to paraphrase, that the pair of princesses would cross that bridge when they came to it, however soon in their eternal futures that might be

Now she was back. The source of her millennium of misery, the strangely resonant yet dissonant voice of her tortured psyche, the vile vicious vixen that had taken possession and made her body infamously glorious was back, and Luna had no idea what she planned to do. The wedding was in little over a week, leaving her little time to kick Chrysalis out of Canterlot before she could root herself in and wreak total emotional havoc.

It was a very good thing that, while on the moon, Luna had taught herself how to silently scream.

Author's Note

I'll keep this and all A/Ns as short as possible, because I'd rather the focus be on the story.

--The phrase Luna is muttering in the first line is in Latin, and I've honestly forgotten what it's supposed to say. It was meant to be something like "Raise the moon and the night will be complete."
--I wish I could claim this story is 100% my own, but it was inspired by bronycurious and Antony C's collaboration critique video on "A Canterlot Wedding", in which Antony C has a crazy theory on why Luna seemed to be missing from the majority of events in the two-part season finale. You can watch that video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao9teQKuEo8
--Finally, this story will be taking place during the events of "A Canterlot Wedding," but from Luna's perspective and with the obvious twist. I'm not sure if this warrants an AU tag or not, but perhaps someone more familiar with the tagging system can help me out.

See you next chapter!

II: Let the Games Begin

Tiny sunbeams filtered in through the blackout curtains of Luna’s bedchamber, and the princess stirred in her bed, drawing the blue-hued covers closer to her. Aside from the uncomfortable encounter with Chrysalis, last night had been fairly uneventful, and Luna had been able to catch a few hours’ rest more than normal. She was thankful, since now that she was growing a bit stronger each day, Celestia was expecting her to at least attend the majority of Day Court proceedings. As Chrysalis had astutely pointed out, magic sustained alicorns more than food and thus could stand in place of bed rest. But sleep was a luxury to Luna—after all, that’s what her subjects were supposed to be doing during her night—and she enjoyed getting as much as she could.

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRT! B-B-B-B-B-BRRRRRRRRRRRRT!

“AHHHHHHHH!” Luna screamed, her eyes flying open, jolted by the strident trumpet flourish. “By the verdant orchards of Appleoosa, there had better be a good reason for disturbing my slumber!”

Her eyes refocusing, she noticed a rather young earth pony messenger standing at her bedside, the very cap on his head trembling in fear.

“Forgive me, Your Highness, but I come bearing a message from…” the messenger paused, apparently lost for words. “Your Highness!”

“Yes?” Luna asked, irritated. “You’ve addressed me, what do you want?”

“No, no, you misunderstand, Your Highness. Your sister, Your Highness, wanted me to send you, Your Highness—um, wait, that’s not right—”

“My sister, Celestia, has a message for me?”

“Yes, yes!” the messenger nodded enthusiastically, and the two trumpeters who stood behind him nodded as well. “I’m so sorry, Your Majesty, Princess of the Night…”

“Would you please just tell me what she said?”

“Oh yes!” The messenger motioned to the Pegasus trumpeter, who unfurled his wing and flipped out a scroll. Barely catching it, the messenger nimbly rose to his hind hooves, unrolled the scroll and read aloud in a proclamation-like tone. “Our Royal Majesty, Princess Celestia of the Sun and Daylight, doth request an audience with Our Royal Majesty, Princess Luna of the Moon and Night, so they make partake in the morning custom of privately breaking the fast! Furthermore—”

“Wait,” Luna held up a hoof, cutting the messenger off. “She sent a messenger pony and two trumpeters to blast me out of bed this morning, all to tell me she just wants to have breakfast?”

“It seems to be that way, Your Majesty,” the Pegasus trumpeter replied, stifling a yawn with his wing.

Luna resisted the urge to clap her hoof to her forehead, instead rising out of bed and stretching her wings. “You tell my sister that if she wants me to have breakfast and interrupt the sleeping pattern that I must keep in order to run Equestria at peak efficiency, then she ought to get off her pasty-white plot and tell me so herself.”

“…ought to get off her…pasty…white…” the other trumpeter, who was a unicorn, repeated, scrawling Luna’s words on parchment.

“Don’t tell me you’re actually writing that down?” Luna said incredulously.

The unicorn trumpeter-turned-scribe looked thoroughly embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Your Majesty, I thought you were dictating—"

”Never mind that!” Luna extended her magic to snatch the parchment away and vanish it to parts unknown. “Just tell her I’ll be down in a few moments…please?” The messenger and trumpeters bowed slightly before dashing ungainly out of the room. The indigo alicorn sighed, turned away from the bedchamber doors and made her bed with magic, even though a servant would normally be in to clean the place later. She opened her closet, extracted her sparkling silver-blue shoes from the clutter, fastened the black moon necklace around her neck, and put on her tiara. After closing the door behind her, Luna jumped on the banister of the spiral staircase and rode on all fours down to the kitchens, giggling like a foal the whole time.

~~~

In a few moments’ time, Luna was sitting across the table from her sister Celestia, enjoying a simple breakfast of cooked oats and fruit imported from all parts of Equestria.

“I particularly enjoyed the welcoming party I had to wake me up this morning, dear sister,” Luna began.

Celestia just smiled and continued to stir her tea with her magic. “I didn’t think you’d wake up for silly old me. I had to get creative.”

“Sending a trio of bumbling stallions upstairs isn’t exactly creative. It just seems—”

“Like I didn’t want to get off my pasty-white plot?”

Luna’s eyes widened, and she stuffed her mouth with an apple to keep quiet.

Celestia took an irritatingly dainty sip of her tea and continued. “No need to worry, Luna, I’m not insulted. There was another reason I needed you awake this morning, though.”

“Lemmegueth,” Luna said thickly around the apple before chomping off a large portion and swishing it to her cheek to chew. “It’th the wedding?”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full. Yes, there will be some wedding planning today, but we also have ambassadors coming to speak in preparation for the Equestria Games next year.”

Luna groaned loudly and smacked her muzzle wetly into her oatmeal, frustrated. She loved watching replays of the Equestria Games she’d missed while on the moon; the spirit, the nationalism, and the pure thrill of watching ponies compete in sports was highly enjoyable for her. But the logistics of setting up such a huge event would be even more nightmarish than the royal wedding! There would be hours upon hours of pointless meetings as they decided which sports would be televised, discussed the massive security measures on transportation and crowd control, and where the Games would even take place.

“Luna, I know you’d much rather be sleeping than going to these meetings, but you and I need to present a united front as Equestria’s rulers for these ambassadors,” Celestia spoke softly, trying to hide the amused grin that grew on her muzzle from seeing her younger sister face-planted in oatmeal. “Please? For me?”

“Aw riff, fin.”

“Didn’t quite catch that.”

“All right, fine!” Luna sighed, sitting up and spewing oatmeal at Celestia, who couldn’t dodge the slew in time. She could barely suppress laughter as her older sister proceeded to daintily wipe off her face with a cloth napkin. This of course meant she barely had time to duck as a bunch of freckled bananas were lobbed across the table in her direction.

“Hey!” Luna cried, wiping the smashed, sticky globs of banana from her muzzle.

“You wanted a food fight, dear sister. Well, now you’ve got it!”

Foodstuffs of every kind went flying through the air of the dining chamber, Celestia and Luna giggling and snorting like they were fillies again the whole time. Luna half expected their mother to come charging in and demand an explanation for all the racket like the times so long ago. In those few minutes of entertaining abandon, she was almost able to forget entirely about meeting with the silly ambassadors, her encounter with Chrysalis, the royal wedding…all of it.

“Your Highnesses. Your Highnesses! YOUR HIGHNESSES!”

Luna paused mid-throw from hurtling an apple toward Celestia to look toward the voice’s source. An old unicorn who was graying at the withers stood in the kitchen door, looking thoroughly unamused by the spectacle that lay before him. Before Luna could speak, however, Celestia emerged from under the table, chunks of oatmeal sticking in her ethereal mane and somehow absent of her golden tiara.

“Stuffed Shi—I mean, Carrington! Do you have a message for us?”

“Indeed I do, Your Majesty,” the unicorn warbled while Luna ducked under the tablecloth to search for Celestia’s tiara. “The ambassadors from the Equestrian Games are at the front entrance as well as Duke Pompadourus from the Aviarian region.”

“What on earth is the Duke here for? Gryphons have been allowed to compete in the Games for years now; it’s not our fault they’ve sent so few athletes as representation.”

“I daresay, Your Majesty, that he seeks an audience in front of which he might beseech you for holding the Games in his region.”

Luna meanwhile had been searching everywhere under the table—how so much junk managed to get under there while their impromptu food fight had happened was beyond her. She pushed aside an antique soup tureen that by some miracle hadn’t been smashed—simply upturned—and found her sister’s tiara glittering faintly behind it. In her excitement and forgetting where she was, Luna snatched the tiara and smacked her head right on the underside of the table.

“OW, FOR THE LOVE OF TARTARUS!” she roared.

“Luna!” Celestia cried, taken aback by her sister’s uncouth outburst. “Go ahead, Carrington, let our guests in. Tell them we’ll join them in the Great Receiving Chamber in just a few moments.” Carrington padded away, and Celestia knelt down and lifted the tablecloth with her horn to stare at Luna, scandalized.

“Well?”

“Hehe,” Luna chuckled, smiling cheekily. “I found your tiara.”

Celestia’s eyes quickly flicked up to her forehead, evidently not noticing previously she’d been missing anything. She swiped the tiara from Luna’s outstretched hoof and gestured for her sister to crawl out from under the table.

“Old Stuffed Shirt wasn’t too pleased, huh?” asked Luna as the pair of alicorns sauntered out of the dining chamber.

“Carrington simply expects us to behave more appropriately. He holds us to a higher standard.”

“Why won’t you ever call him by his real name, dear sister?”

“He wants to be known by a more dignified name here at court.”

“But he runs a toy shop! His cutie mark is a teddy bear, for Tartarus’ sake—”

“Luna! Language!”
~~~

Oh, by her horn, Luna was bored out of her mind.

Duke Pompadourus had rudely barged in ahead of the ambassadors from the Games Committee, his feathered chest thrown out with an obviously overinflated sense of self-importance. He then began a diatribe filled with a list—he’d brought an actual list written on a scroll of parchment no less than five feet long that was clenched in his eagle’s talons—of reasons why the Aviarian region would be the perfect place to host the Equestrian Games. Celestia kept trying to interject with reasons why this wouldn’t be such a good idea, mainly that the expense of transporting all the ponies who wanted to attend the Games would be astronomical since not all were pegasi, but the Duke refused to yield.

At any rate, it’d been a good forty-five minutes into the Duke’s speech, and the most fascinating thing Luna found about him was that the feathers that ordinarily dangled over a gryphon’s face were fluffed and curled back at an impossible angle, just like his name suggested. Thankfully, she took her constant peering at him to be a sign of continued interest, so she could doodle a caricature of him without detection.

Honestly, how Celestia managed to keep a royal composure when she could clearly see the Committee ambassadors’ impatience and the Duke’s obliviousness was a miracle. Luna had broken her pose of polite disinterest—lifting her face from her hoof—to glance occasionally at her sister, and she swore she saw the pelt around Celestia’s cheeks grow infinitesimally pinker. She’d thought about trying to cut across Duke Pompadourus’ endless talking, but doing so would look somewhat rude since she clearly wasn’t paying much attention. Instead, Luna focused her attention on making the Duke’s caricature as unflattering yet true to life as possible. She was just curling his lion’s tail around to his beak to pick at one of his nostrils when Celestia finally spoke up.

“Duke Pompadourus of West Aviaria!”

By some miracle, the gryphon paused. “Yes, Your Majesty?”

“You have now unreasonably and quite rudely cut across nearly an hour’s time I was to spend meeting with the Games ambassadors, who have so patiently been waiting.”

Luna snorted derisively but quietly. She’d been watching the ambassadors in between doodling breaks, and they’d barely been patient. Two were pacing the floors, clearly trying to get the princesses’ attention, one alternated between checking various maps and her watch, and one cleared his throat so many times Luna had thought to offer him a menthol lozenge. Only one seemed okay with waiting, but that was only because she was intensely wrapped up in whatever game was on her laptop; Luna watched her punch the keys with staccato fury, whispering insults at the screen.

“Your Majesty, I was simply trying to make a case for my home region!”

“We are far from making any decisions on a host area for the Games, Duke Pompadourus, but we’ll certainly take your descriptive argument into account when that time comes,” Celestia said with a smile. The cool edge to her voice indicated that his time here was finished.

Duke Pompadourus got the message loud and clear, but nevertheless seemed hurt. “Well! I perfectly understand when I’m not welcome someplace!” He turned on his rear lion’s paws with a huff and stalked out of the chamber, his ludicrously curled and fluffed fore-feathers bobbing with each indignant step. “And don’t be surprised when I’m not in attendance at your niece’s upcoming nuptials as a result of my treatment here! Good day!”

The guards shut the chamber doors perhaps a bit harder than normal behind the gryphon; flapping noises were heard as he took off through one of the large gallery windows. Celestia stared at the doors for a long time before ushering the ambassadors in front of the two thrones where she and Luna sat.

“I deeply apologize for the delay. I wasn’t sure whether he was ever going to leave,” Celestia intoned humbly.

“It’s no trouble at all, Princess Celestia,” the head of the ambassadors, a dark brown earth pony, replied, bowing slightly and flicking his eyes over to the indigo alicorn sitting beside the white one. “Ah, and this must be your sister!”

Luna happened to look up at that moment and noticed everypony staring at her. Taking the cue, she rose from her throne to introduce herself. “I am Princess Luna of the Moon and Night, Alicorn Mare of the Darkness, co-ruler of the Diarchy of Equestria. Ordinarily I am not awake at such hours, but I wished to present a united front in the name of establishing the Equestrian Games.” Luna caught Celestia’s wink in her direction, indicating she’d done well. Mercifully, most of the proceedings were directed toward Celestia after that point, who admittedly seemed more in charge most of the time anyway. Luna added the final details to her caricature of Duke Pompadourus: turkey wings instead of a pair of majestic, well-preened eagle wings, nonsensical, unnecessary snarled teeth hanging out of his beak, and his fluffy namesake looking like it had been caught on the business end of a lightning strike. Smiling to herself, she rolled it up and set it next to the throne beside her, taking up another piece of parchment for more doodling.

Much to her surprise, words began scrawling across the page as soon as she unfurled it. They were not in her compact script, however; instead, they were in a cramped, ugly scrawl that dashed into being under an invisible quill.

Bureaucracy is the best way to start the day, isn’t it?

Luna’s eyes flickered around the chamber rapidly, wondering why one of the ambassadors would be writing on her parchment from several feet away. She glanced at the one who’d been banging away on her laptop just moments earlier, but the pegasus now raptly focused her attention on Celestia’s face, wings clasped firmly at her sides. Baffled, the princess continued to look around for anypony who could be the culprit when a flicker of green light outside the chamber caught her attention. Luna levitated her reading glasses onto the bridge of her nose under the ruse of pretending to read her “notes” when more words scratched onto the parchment.

Don’t believe that my return was for naught. I make good on my promises, Princess.

“Aunt Celestia! Aunt Luna!”

Celestia looked up from her conversation with the brown earth pony ambassador about advertising during the Games, thoroughly bewildered. “Cadence?”

The Receiving Chamber’s doors burst open and Cadence, multicolored mane askew and pink pelt disheveled, came barreling in at a most unladylike speed. She held a scrap of parchment aloft in her light blue magic, distraught. “There’s been a threat…my wedding…”

Celestia rose from her throne and the ambassadors parted the way for Cadence, who ran right up to her aunt and passed the scrap to her. The white alicorn’s violet eyes scanned over the parchment, mystified. “Luna, I can’t read this. You’re much better at archaic script than I am; can you translate for us?” She passed the scrap to Luna, who adjusted her reading glasses on her nose. This wasn’t an archaic script at all, but rather Arabic letters that were curled in upon themselves and rearranged as Luna glanced over them. Nevertheless, she had to squint to read them, being written in the same ugly scrawl on her own parchment.

“Dearest Princesses of Equestria, my subjects will soon descend upon your city of Canterlot to feed in earnest at the wedding of Princess Cadence and her fiancé. Any attempts whatsoever to repel us will be futile. You have been warned.”

Luna lowered the scrap of parchment from her line of vision to see everypony in the room paralyzed in shock. Princess Cadence was wide-eyed and cutting glances to Celestia, who for once wasn’t the embodiment of alabaster stoicism. Silence hung thick in the air until the white alicorn spoke sonorously in the Royal Canterlot Voice, causing the ambassadors to flatten to the floor in panic. Her rainbow mane snapped like a flag in a gale as she yelled.

“GUARDS! YOU ARE HEREBY SUMMONED TO THE RECEIVING CHAMBER IMMEDIATELY. ALL RANKS ARE TO REPORT, ATTENDANCE IS MANDATORY! A THREAT HAS BEEN MADE TO OUR CITY. IT’S TIME TO DEFEND WHAT IS OURS!”

“Find Shining Armor immediately, Cadence,” Celestia whispered urgently to her niece. “This threat may come to nothing, but we will require his adeptness at shield-casting nonetheless.”

“Yes, Your Majesty!” Cadence cried, hurrying out of the room. The guards flung the doors open for her, and the deafening sound of brassy horns and thundering kettle drums reached everypony’s ears as every guard from all parts of Canterlot was being summoned to the castle. Inaudibly, Celestia ushered the panic-stricken Games ambassadors from the room to someplace presumably safe. Luna, however, remained rooted to the spot in front of her throne, staring at her parchment from what seemed so long ago. Words scratched across it once more, and Luna felt her heart drop lower and lower to her stomach as each one appeared.

Let the real games begin.

Author's Note

A chapter of humorous shenanigans with castle servants ends rather dramatically with a threat to Canterlot. How exciting!
*I realized after writing this that Carrington's name and cutie mark combo ends up being a Care Bears joke--that was a total happy accident :rainbowderp: I don't know if he'll make an appearance later in the story or not; at any rate, I don't think I'll have to add an OC tag just for him.
*Luna+reading glasses=double the awesome. Seriously, someone ought to draw a picture of this if one doesn't exist already.
*Chrysalis is a sneaky wench, vandalizing court parchment from afar like that!
*If somepony would like to make cover art for this story as well as Naming Destiny, that'd be great. I'm not begging at this point, just asking :twilightsmile:

IV: Reconaissance & Fine Acting Never Hurt Nopony

Luna awoke in the solace of the statue garden shortly before dawn, gazing sleepily at the peculiar shadows the shrubbery threw in the fading moonlight. In a panic she jumped to her hooves and shook her head violently. The moon! If she didn’t lower it before Celestia woke up, there would most certainly be questions asked, not to mention a possible panic roused in the citizens of Equestria who thought Nightmare Moon had returned and was prolonging the nighttime hours.

Well technically, the cause of Nightmare Moon had returned, but nopony else knew that.

As Luna stretched out her inky blue wings and took off toward the castle, the gravity of Chrysalis’ secret presence pressed into every fiber of her being. The wedding was quickly approaching, and the Queen of Changelings was now impersonating Princess Cadence and keeping the real one sealed in the Caves. The only saving grace she had, Luna thought as she alit on her balcony and spun around to face the western skies, was Shining Armor’s shield. For the time being, Chrysalis had evidently abandoned her plan of bringing her entire army of drones in for feeding and was going to hog all the love Shining had for Cadence all for herself.

“Noctem aurora iam cedere. Sol et luna attollat requiescet.” The moon settled slowly below the expansive horizon as Luna lowered her head and murmured in the long-forgotten tongue, its pale light fading from the dewy grasses of Canterlot. She hovered a few feet off of her balcony just to be sure the moon had gone to its proper position when Celestia stepped silently outside.

“Good morning, sister. I was wondering when you’d come home.”

“You noticed I was gone?” Luna remarked, still hovering in midair.

“I always do. I always have,” replied Celestia, now standing alongside her sister. An uncomfortable and piercing silence passed between the two for what seemed like the longest of times, and Luna felt as though an icicle punctured her chest. She still had yet to fully realize just how much Celestia had done for Equestria alone for a thousand years, but what little she did know made her heart sink. She would never be able to measure up to the white alicorn beside her; even getting rid of Chrysalis by herself wouldn’t stack up to all of Celestia’s deeds.

“We…we still will be able to have the wedding, won’t we, dear sister?” Luna ventured, feeling much like a quaking little foal as she so often did these days.

“Of course we will. Cadence asked the very same question yesterday, do you not remember?”

“I do. I guess my mind was just in a different place.”

Celestia looked up at her little sister and leaned her head against Luna’s side. “I know this whole situation is troubling to you, but I assure you that Shining Armor’s shield is virtually impenetrable. There is no way any threat could make it into Canterlot unless they were already inside.” Luna felt the piercing icicle sensation again.

“Is there something I can do today? I don’t feel much like sleeping just now,” Luna asked.

“I can’t think of anything at the moment. We have no court audiences until after the wedding, and Twilight and her friends are taking care of the rest of Cadence’s plans. I’d like you to be as well-rested as possible before the big day.”

Luna took this as her cue to leave, grumbling as she padded softly back to her bedchamber. Her first order of business was to take a shower; one might think sleeping in dew-streamed grass through the whole night would get one clean, but it didn’t. The next thing to do, she thought, was to find out just how well Chrysalis was doing in her role of Cadence.

And that meant paying visits to the girls.

~~~

Her first stop was to Rarity’s room. As she flapped up the spiral staircase to the guest lodgings, Luna was turning a certain thought over and over in her mind. When Chrysalis first possessed her mind over a millennium ago, the changeling queen hadn’t been subtle. In the depths of her tortured memory, Luna could remember her anger exacerbated, lashing out fervently at Celestia and her subjects. Somehow the Night Princess found it very hard to believe Chrysalis had managed to refine her acting skills such that she could pantomime as a princess in the short year since her exorcism.

Luna came to a halt in front of a pair of oak doors on the top landing, raised a blue-shoed hoof, and solidly knocked three times.

“Come in!” a voice from within shrilled. The princess obliged, and when she nudged open one door with her foreleg, the sight within made her eyes grow as wide as saucers.

The mess was a disaster zone that Discord himself would have been immensely proud of. Cloth of every color and texture burst forth from a multitude of open trunks; others bulged ominously with what Luna figured had to be even more material. Spools of thread and ribbon lay helter-skelter on the tiled floor, some unraveled for several feet, and some impossibly knotted together. Half-dressed mannequins in all sorts of poses were placed in the remnants of a semi-circle, a couple tipped over on their sides with garments askew. And in the middle of it all stood a very bewildered and sleep-deprived Rarity, hovering over her sewing machine and working it feverishly with her magic.

“Pinkie Pie, if it’s you again, I swear I’ll—oh!” Rarity exclaimed once she glanced up from her work. “Princess Luna! I’m so sorry, I had no idea you’d be visiting! Here, let me open some curtains for you.”

“I had no idea I’d be visiting, either,” Luna mumbled as the white unicorn threw open the heavy purple panels and allowed the midmorning sun to stream into the cluttered room.

“Coffee! Can I offer you some coffee, Princess? Absolutely marvelous beverage, really, has kept me going some nights on big projects.” Before Luna could respond, Rarity had thrust a mug full of the piping hot drink toward her, and the princess could do nothing but smile and politely take a sip. What felt like pure caffeine buzzed right through to the tip of Luna’s tail, causing her to cough and her eyes to fly wide open.

“Rarity, are you sure this is just regular coffee?”

“Oh of course it is! Well I mean, it’s espresso, but really, what’s the difference?” the white unicorn shrugged, reaffixing her orange glasses on the bridge of her muzzle.

“What’s the diff--?!” Luna was about to shout, but she suppressed her indignant outburst. Now was not the time to impress upon anypony the fine knowledge she possessed as a coffee connoisseur, and particularly not in the Royal Canterlot Voice, with which she offered delivered lectures in anger. She continued to sip on the large mug of espresso, with each one sending a jolt through her entire body as soon as it hit her tongue.

At any rate, she was able to watch as Rarity returned to her sewing machine and cranked it up as high as possible. Her normally lusciously coiffed mane was kinked tightly like a beauty school perm gone horribly wrong. Luna could see that behind the neat little glasses, there were unbecoming dark shadows under the unicorn’s eyes that couldn’t possibly be mistaken for runny mascara. And her hooves weren’t quite as deft at pushing the white satin through at a steady pace past the needle as they ought to be. The princess was perfectly aware of what sleep deprivation could do to a pony—she’d walked in enough dreams of those on the verge of hallucinating—and she could see Rarity was succumbing.

“Rarity?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t you think you should maybe stop and rest for a while?”

“Stop and rest for a while!” Rarity shrieked incredulously, looking up at Luna as though she’d suggested to lop her own horn off with sharpened pinking shears. “Forgive my rudeness, Princess Luna, but you have absolutely NO idea what it’s like to make a bridal gown, and the amount of work it takes! Not to mention that I’m making the dresses for the bridesmaids as well as the dresses for myself and my friends. And they have to all be done in two days!”

“Rarity, I—”

“Do you have any idea how hard satin with an overlay of tulle is to work with? Do you?!”

“Rar—”

“DO YOU?!”

“RARITY!” Luna roared, her indigo wings flying out to the sides in agitation. “BE SILENT AND LET ME SPEAK!”
Once Rarity had snapped her mouth shut, the Night Princess trotted over to a particular mannequin that had caught her eye. Its featureless face was inclined slightly to the floor in a demure pose, and a crown of blue and pink flowers circled its head. The dress itself had a frilly light blue neckline and gathered in the center of the chest with a large oval brooch, from which two slender straps on each side ran back over the front legs. After gathering again at a waist ornamented with light curlicues, the skirt flounced over the flanks in three dramatic pearly layers fringed in gold.

“Isn’t this Cadence’s wedding dress? You’ve done a lovely job,” Luna remarked, circling the mannequin for the third time to examine it closer.

Rarity pinked slightly. “Yes, yes, it is. I’m so glad you like it, but she…requested something different.”

Luna raised her head as well as an eyebrow. “She didn’t like it?”

“She didn’t say exactly that, but she just…wanted to go in a different direction, that’s all!” the white unicorn relayed with more than a hint of false satisfaction. “And who am I to refrain from granting her every wish? This is the wedding dress for a princess, after all.”

“What did she say she wanted done differently?”

“Let’s see,” Rarity murmured, summoning a steno notebook from beside her sewing machine. “Cadence wanted more beading and a longer train on her dress, and she wanted the bridesmaids’ dresses to be a different color.” She flicked a hoof to a trio of mannequins, one of which was partially buried under a tipped-over heap of material Luna couldn’t quite identify. “She didn’t specify what color she wanted them changed to, but I’ll try my best to satisfy her.”

“And you’re all right with all of this work?”

“Oh, absolutely! Think of how much publicity this could bring me. I, Rarity of The Carousel Boutique in Ponyville, designer and tailor of the wedding gown for Princess Mi Amore Cadenza!” A heavy sigh exuded from deep within Rarity’s chest. “That is, if I can even get everything done in time. I suppose I could just doctor up my friend’s Gala dresses from last year in a pinch…”

“You’ll do no such thing.”

“Excuse me, Princess?”

“All of these things will get accomplished, but you are very much sleep-deprived, Miss Rarity. You can’t possibly expect to do your best work in such a state,” Luna said firmly.

“But I must work.”

“You must rest,” the princess implored. She brought her magic up to her horn, focused it on the massive pile of fabric and notions cluttering Rarity’s bed, tossed it off to the side, and turned down the covers. “Take it from the Night Princess, who knows a thing or two about sleep.” Luna threw in a wink for effect.

“Oh, I suppose you’re right, Princess,” Rarity yawned, slowly meandering to bed and crawling in. “B-but only a f-f-few hours’ nap, then I’ll be back to work double.”

“Of course,” Luna nodded, pacing backwards toward the door. “Nighty-night, my little pony.”

“Nighty-ni—ahhhh,” the white unicorn sighed as she nuzzled the feather-filled pillows and drifted into much-needed slumber.

~~~

The situation for the other four ponies wasn’t nearly as dire as Rarity’s, yet they all seemed to carry the same theme. Each had worked especially hard on a product to initially present to Princess Cadence. Although she hadn’t outright rejected anything, she’d behaved rather snippy and gave condescending and undercutting remarks to what the young mares had presented.

“Twi did say Princess Mi Amore Cadenza threw my hors d’oeuvres in the trash after she said she ‘love-love-loved’ them,” a flour-dusted Applejack said thoughtfully when Luna went to visit the newly-built outdoor kitchens. “Then again, they weren’t th’ best apple pastries Ah’ve ever made. If Granny Smith was here, she’d make the absolute best!”

“I see,” Luna nodded absentmindedly, observing the rest of the newly hired kitchen staff buzz about, chopping fruits and vegetables, arranging plates, mixing batter and whipping frosting.

“She was just tryin’ to spare mah feelings, Ah reckon.”

“They weren’t really that terrible, were they?”

“Well, why don’t ya try one yourself, Your Majesty?” And for the second time that day, Luna had a food product thrust at her with vigor, this time in the form of a freshly baked lattice pastry with a green apple slice perched on top. “That’s from a batch fresh outta the oven, no change to mah recipe.”

Luna brought the pastry delicately up to her mouth and took a politely small bite like her sister Celestia would have done. Her blue-green eyes flew wide open as a sumptuous blend of cinnamon, apple and vanilla danced across her tongue, and it was all she could do to not devour the rest in a hasty gulp.

“Why, these are the best I’ve ever had, even counting ones from the royal chef!”

“Aw shucks, now you’re just saying that.”

“No, I mean it,” Luna replied, her tone serious as she turned to walk out of the kitchen doors. “Continue doing what you have been, Miss Applejack. I’ll see to it that Princess,” here she had to refrain from rolling her eyes “Mi Amore Cadenza finds these suitable for her reception. And if not, then she can simply refrain from eating them.”

“Thank ya, Princess Luna!” Applejack cried, waving her toque as the indigo alicorn trotted away toward the castle.

Fluttershy had encountered Cadence’s meanness more directly. “She yelled at one of my songbirds during rehearsal yesterday,” the yellow pegasus told Luna after dismissing the majority from their wooden choir perches. “He was singing a little off-key, but she berated the poor bird for ten whole minutes.”

“No!” Luna exclaimed.

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” Fluttershy nodded. “I brought him to dinner last night to show my friends, but now he’s so humiliated he doesn’t know if he wants to sing in the ceremony at all.” She gestured furtively to a tall, dull-red bird sitting alone on a perch and turned away toward the corner. “Come on. Come meet Princess Luna!”

The bird chirped dully, staying turned away.

“Oh, don’t you see, Princess? He’s sulking!”

“That I do see,” said Luna, looking troubled and approaching the perch. “Come now, it’s all right. I won’t make you sing.” She gingerly offered a hoof up to him, and the bird eyed her suspiciously before waddling onto her hoof. “He could have a sore throat, Fluttershy.”

“Maybe…” the pegasus mused. “I have some very sweet nectar packed away that he can drink.”

“Feed him a small, warmed spoonful every two hours,” Luna stated as she smiled up at the songbird, who sat up a little taller at the prospect of nectar. “And he may be well enough to sing in the wedding.”

After leaving Fluttershy to feed her songbird, Luna visited Pinkie Pie in the large western hall where the reception would be located.

“Aren’t you so excited for the wedding Princess Luna I mean I’ve been excited before but I’ve never been to a royal wedding and that’s just super-duper-alley-ooper exciting! And Cadence came by yesterday and I showed her all the games and music and dancing and she said it would be great if we were celebrating a six-year-old colt’s birthday which is such an absolutely terrifically awesome compliment I’ve never received such a nice one all my life!”

Pinkie took a deep breath, and Luna was finally sure she was going to get a word in edgewise. Not being overly familiar with how the pink party pony spoke, however, meant Luna was completely incorrect in her assumption.

“Twilight said last night that Cadence was being a meanie-pants but I don’t think she was being a meanie-pants I mean how can you be one without wearing any pants? Anyway she said that the princess really wasn’t complimenting me and that comparing my plans for the reception to a colt’s birthday party was really an insult but I don’t think Twilight is right I mean why compare a party to another type of party if you didn’t think it was fun right? Besides if things get boring I can always bring out the party cannon ooh I know do you wanna see it?”

“Um…what?” Luna asked, shocked that Pinkie had finally seemed to bluster out of breath.

“Do you wanna see my extra-big super spectacular splenda-riffic party cannon?” Pinkie gushed.

“Um—“

"See, look!” Pinkie cried, evidently making the choice for Luna by wheeling the large blue canister out of seemingly nowhere. “If I want things to get exciting I just light the fuse back here and BOOM!” The party animal’s pink mane and tail puffed out suddenly and curled up in an ever bouncier fashion than before as she jumped into the air to illustrate the explosion. “PARTY FOR EVERYONE!”

At that point, Luna quietly excused herself and left, Pinkie’s boisterousness causing a minor headache to blossom in the princess’ temple.

Rainbow Dash was the only one who hadn’t seemed overly concerned about Cadence and what she thought. Luna found the colorful pegasus lounging around on the clouds above the Royal Guard Academy fields, and she sat on a cloud next to her.

“I haven’t really been paying a lot of attention to the princess lately,” Rainbow Dash shrugged. “I’m too busy working on getting ready to do my Sonic Rainboom.”

“Doesn’t that usually involve flying?” Luna innocently asked.

“Yeah! But today is my day off to rest my muscles. Can’t be too worn out or else I’ll just be weak. And who wants a weak Sonic Rainboom at their wedding? Oh, that’s right. Nopony!”

“So you haven’t spoken to Cadence at all?”

“Nah, she came over yesterday while I was doing wing push-ups. I showed her a few moves, some loop-de-loops, cloud-kicking, all that. Didn’t seem to care one way or the other, she just said it had better be good. And I’m going to be better than good! I’m going to be…”

Rainbow Dash leapt up and proceeded to spell out the word “AWESOME” in big puffy letters with clouds she shaped on the spur of the moment with her wings. Luna was quite impressed; the cyan pegasus really was as fast and talented as the rumors said.

“Well, I’ll leave you to your preparations,” Luna said, jumping off her cloud and spiraling down to the grassy fields below.

~~~

All of her investigating so far had told Luna not much that she hadn’t already suspected. The princess sat alone for lunch just off the castle kitchens, stirring her coffee, munching on mini daisy sandwiches and mulling over what she’d learned. The only pony she hadn’t spoken to yet was Twilight Sparkle, and Luna found it odd that she hadn’t found her wandering about the castle with a checklist and quill in hoof. After all, Celestia had told the unicorn she was in charge of making sure everything went as planned. Intrigued, Luna left the remnants of her lunch behind—swallowing the last bit of coffee, of course—and went to find Twilight. She was almost certain her sister’s charge would be nestled among the annals of the vast castle library, no doubt rereading one of the thick-bound spell-books for the umpteenth time.

“Twilight Sparkle!” the indigo alicorn called out as she soared up and down aisles and aisles of shelves in the library. “Princess Twi—oh!” She quickly clapped a hoof over her mouth and reprimanded herself. “Foolish Luna, she’s not supposed to know about that until after the wedding and Cadence is established on the throne! I’d best be more mindful…TWILIGHT SPARKLE!”

Another five minutes’ worth of sweeping high over the bookcases confirmed that indeed Twilight was not there. Luna frowned and paced out of the library, puzzling over where she could be, when she bumped head-on right into somepony.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Auntie, I didn’t mean—” Cadence gushed, then choked upon her words as she realized whom she bumped into. It only took a moment for Luna to gather her wits again before she lunged at her false niece, crossing their horns like dueling rapiers.

“YOU,” Luna hissed venomously.

“What about me?” Cadence smirked, the slightest edge of Chrysalis’ true voice slithering into her words.

“What do you plan to do? Why are you here?!”

“I would’ve thought that somepony as intelligent as you would have figured out—” Cadence cut off and jumped as a Day Guard walked past in clanking golden armor. She shot a flirtatious smile in his direction, to which he returned a confused expression to Luna, who could only shrug. Once he rounded the corner, she was back to her normal self.

“You’ve just placed yourself as the front contender for the Pony Awards’ Best Lead Mare in a Stage Production,” Luna deadpanned.

“I’d like to see you do any better.”

“I wouldn’t employ my acting skills to usurp a wedding.”

“You did it to usurp a country.”

Luna narrowed her eyes, cut by the insult but mostly annoyed.

“Well, I must be on my way. I’m going to get hitched tomorrow, and I simply must take the opportunity to have under-indulged guards ogle my engaged flank for one more day.” Cadence flipped her tail dismissively, and the low chuckle of Chrysalis rumbled through her pink throat as she sashayed after the guard. Seething with anger, Luna bit her hoof at the false princess before stalking off in the opposite direction.

Eventually she did happen upon Twilight Sparkle, who was in the last room of the suite she and her five friends had been given. When Luna pushed the oaken door open with a conspicuous squeak, the unicorn didn’t even look up from the book she was reading, her front hooves folded tightly under her chest. The way her violet eyes skimmed rapidly over the pages told Luna that Twilight really wasn’t reading to absorb, but to occupy only part of herself while the main cogs and wheels of her mind whirred in the background.

“Miss Twilight Sparkle?”

The sound of a different princess’ voice along with the unusually formal address than expected made Twilight snap her head up to attention. “Princess Luna?” She slipped a bookmark in between the pages of her tome and snapped it shut with a lavender aura of magic. “Aren’t you usually asleep right now?”

“I am, but I came to find you.” Luna edged closer to the bed. “From what I hear, you’re usually in the center of activity, organizing what everypony is doing. You organized Ponyville’s entire Winter Wrap-Up for the last two years according to my sister.”

“Yeah, well, Princess Mi Amore Cadenza seems to be managing the ENTIRE thing pretty well all by herself, if you ask me,” Twilight intoned mockingly, snorting with derision.

Now, Chrysalis, this is how you act. “Whatever do you mean?” Luna tilted her head, politely puzzled.

“She’s been a total monster! Everything my friends have done for her, she turns up her pretty little pink snout and says ‘Oh, that’s so good!’ and you know she’s being completely dishonest. ‘Oh Applejack, I just love-love-love your apple pastries!’ What does she do? Throws them right in the trash when Applejack isn’t looking!”

“No!” blurted Luna in extremely convincing shock.

“And Rarity? Cadence takes one look at the bridal gown she made and immediately starts criticizing! Rarity works hard on everything she makes, and I know for a fact that she wouldn’t let any princess walk down the aisle in a less than fantastic dress, which there already was!” Twilight was now up on all four hooves, breathing hard through her nose. “But no! None of my friends see it that way! They all think that poor Cadence is just nervous about the wedding, but they don’t even know her!”

Exhaling deeply, Twilight resumed her previous position on the bed, levitating her book to the other side of the room. Luna took that to be her cue and blinked onto the bed to kneel next to the lavender unicorn.

“It’s almost like she’s not herself,” Twilight continued. “Like she’s somepony else entirely.”

Luna turned away for a moment and swallowed hard. Oh, Twilight, if only you knew how right you really are.

“I know Cadence like the bottom of my own hoof. She was my foal-sitter, and I spent years with her while my parents were working at the castle and Shining Armor was in Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns. She’s caring and kind, and she certainly accepts the gifts and favors other ponies do for her.” Twilight heaved a huge sigh. “She would have loved Rarity’s dress; it’s just her style. Pinkie’s reception plans would be absolutely fun and memorable, and she really would ‘love-love-love’ Applejack’s pastry. Fluttershy’s birds would sing beautifully, and Rainbow Dash…well, it’s a Sonic Rainboom. Who wouldn’t love that?”

“One would certainly be the best way to end a royal wedding,” Luna nodded.

“I haven’t talked to her that much since I became Princess Celestia’s personal student, but I don’t know. A pony can’t change that much in a few years, can they?” Twilight looked up, and the profound sadness that dwelled in those violet eyes hit Luna with full force. The unicorn really did love Princess Cadence, and the dramatic changes in her personality were evidently very hurtful. A few long moments passed before the dark blue alicorn knew what to say, but when she did, she spoke confidently and with purpose.

“I believe that, first and foremost, you should talk to Cadence about how you feel. But if you find you cannot bring yourself to speak to her, then go to your brother, Shining Armor. Tell him that you believe his bride is acting unlike herself, and that you don’t want him to marry somepony who you once thought you knew but didn’t. We can’t delay this wedding any longer,” Luna held up a hoof when Twilight was about to interject, “but it does help to go into the ceremony with a fresh understanding of where everypony stands. Does that make sense?”

Twilight sighed, her ears pointed backwards. “Yes, Princess Luna.”

“Don’t allow the anger and confusion to build inside you, Twilight. Take it from somepony who knows the cost of unspoken anguish, and the consequences that follow if not done so properly.” Luna jumped lightly off the bed and headed for the door, her blue starry tail flowing behind her.

“Princess Luna?”

“Yes?”

Twilight bit the inside of her cheek. “I was going to say…never mind.”

Luna nodded and closed the door behind her, letting out the breath she’d been holding for what felt like an eternity. Oh, Twilight, I hope you follow my advice.

Author's Note

I found this chapter the most difficult to write so far, mainly because A Canterlot Wedding doesn't have a very clear timeline. Everything happens so quickly that the timing isn't well-established; thus, a lot of the days and nights run together. So in case you as the reader need a verification on when this story's events are taking place in terms of the show, we're close to the end of Part 1; specifically, this is the day after Twilight lashes out at her friends during dinner.

I think I've noticed some time discrepancies back in Chapter 2, which I'll fix so it makes more sense.

Other quick comments, since this chapter was the longest so far and I shan't plague you with a long A/N:

*Sleep-deprived/stressed Rarity was fun to write, maybe more fun than it should have been.
*Pinkie Pie...just WRITING her dialogue tires me out, she has so much energy!
*Luna/false Cadence faceoff=intense
*Poor Twilight...

As for what Twilight was going to tell Luna but refrained? You'll find out in the next chapter, but I'll leave you to make your own guesses for now.

V: Backfiring All Over the Place

Luna’s busy day didn’t end with her advisory discussion with Twilight. Although she was perfectly aware that staying up was her own choice, the princess had wanted to catch at least an hour’s worth of sleep before her night shift began. However, that wasn’t to be the case. Immediately after she’d finished her platter of stir-fried vegetables—the royal chef had been eager to try Far Eastern cuisine tonight—Celestia had asked with a simper if her little sister would be so kind as to attend to her in her bedchamber. Luna had heard snickering from the more immature wait staff behind the kitchen doors and surreptitiously sent a large stack of dirty dishes crashing off the counter, much to the rage of the easily set-off sous chef. Rumors of royal sisterly incest had always been stirred up by each successive generation, and Celestia using less than apt phrasing certainly didn’t help their cause.

“I still fail to understand why you have yet to write what you’ll say at the wedding.” Luna shook her head, keeping pace with Celestia as they cantered to her bedchamber. “And what makes you think I’ll know better what to say than you?”

“Oh, you’ve always had a better way with words than I have,” replied Celestia in a dismissive tone.

“I’m flattered,” Luna deadpanned.

Celestia said nothing, unlocking the pearly doors ornamented with gold sunbursts that led to her chambers and stepping inside.

“Answer me, sister. Are you just procrastinating?”

“No.”

“Oh, really? You have suspended both Day and Night Court until this wedding is over, so you’ve had really nothing to do to occupy your time. And don’t try to use the excuse that you have to concentrate to keep the sun in the sky lest it crash to the earth and turn Equestria to cinders like you did when we were fillies!”

“You believed it, didn’t you?” Celestia smirked.

“I—you—that’s not the point!” Luna blustered. She was thankful her coat was so dark nopony could ever see her blush. “The point is you are still lazy as ever!”

“And my point is you still aren’t writing,” the white alicorn countered, pushing a scroll of parchment, an inkpot and quill toward her sister with magic. The smile on Celestia’s face was good-natured, but Luna still glared at her and swiped the writing paraphernalia away. With a derisive snort, the dark blue alicorn settled herself down on the floor, dipped the quill in the inkpot and began to write.

A few minutes of silence passed, with Celestia stepping out onto the Solar Balcony on the premise of making sure the sun was going down smoothly. After the sun’s last feeble golden rays slipped away below the horizon and the multitude of lamps in the chamber flared to life automatically with magic, Celestia stepped back inside and closed the glass doors behind her. She peered over Luna’s shoulder.

“So…how is coming along?”

“It’s coming along fine,” Luna said tersely, continuing to dash the quill across the parchment in her spiky writing style. “I’ve almost finished the welcome speech.”

“You’re writing out my welcome speech?”

“You said you wanted me to write out what you had to say, didn’t you?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Celestia nodded. She paced across the room to her vanity, took up two hairbrushes and stroked one each through her multicolored mane and tail. The only sounds in the room were the quill scratching across the parchment and rustling as Luna used her hooves to smooth out the curling scroll.

“If you didn’t write so large, you wouldn’t have to be unfurling more parchment,” Celestia joked.

“My writing is much smaller than yours! You are the one that insists on taking up half the page with one sentence!”

“I’m teasing, Luna.”

Luna only shook her head and jabbed a period at the end of her sentence. Unfortunately, she pushed the quill a bit too hard and ended up puncturing the parchment.

“Is something bothering you?”

Oh, what an astute observation, Celestia. “It’s just…the wedding tomorrow…” Luna said idly, trying to avoid eye contact with her sister.

“Yes?”

“I…” Tread carefully now. She can’t suspect anything. Tread carefully now. “I don’t know if I should attend.”

“Whatever do you mean?” Celestia was startled, her face full of concern. “You are my sister and just as much a ruler of Equestria as I am. I know your last few ventures into the public eye have been less than successful, but that shouldn’t prevent you from trying again, and a royal wedding will be the perfect place for you to make an appearance.”

“Patronizing attempts at comforting me aside,” Luna paused from rereading the scroll long enough to roll her eyes, “that isn’t my reason for not wanting to be there.”

“Do you still feel uncomfortable around Cadence after your outburst? That was nearly a year ago, I’m sure she’s forgiven you.”

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

Oh, nothing. It’s just that there’s an evil piece of my past that’s literally been trotting around right under your nose, and I have to stop her before she does something very bad. And I don’t even know what that very bad thing could be.

Luna swallowed so hard she was sure Celestia could hear, although if she did, she gave no indication. “I would like to be well-rested so I may orchestrate a truly beautiful wedding night for Cadence and Shining Armor.” There now, that’s not a complete lie. Nopony realizes just how difficult it is to draw those constellations night after night.

There was a pregnant silence as Celestia scrutinized her younger sister from horn to hoof, during which Luna felt like she was receiving the most thorough and invasive medical examination of her life.

“Are you sure you’re not feeling ill, Luna?”

“I’m fine,” Luna said with enough conviction. She’d had enough interrogation for tonight; Celestia was making her feel like a badly behaved filly, and she wasn’t the one who’d done anything. Yet. “Here’s your script,” she continued, levitating the scroll filled with her spiky writing in front of Celestia’s face. “Feel free to make changes.” Before her older sister could respond, Luna cantered out of the chamber.

I once wielded the Element of Honesty, she thought as she made her way out to the Lunar Balcony. But I’m still one of the most convincing liars in Equestria.

~~~

Raising the moon took a considerably larger effort than normal, even accounting for Shining Armor’s magenta shield. As much as Luna had convinced herself otherwise, sleep was still crucial for her to perform her duties properly, and her daytime reconnaissance mission, though important, had drained her quite a bit. After fiddling with the star arrangement in Ursa Major for a while, she padded softly inside and turned down the dark purple covers of her bed.

“Styx,” she whispered into the room.

Almost instantly, a large dark gray unicorn materialized in a puff of magic by the balcony door. The vertical slits of his eerie golden eyes dilated as they adjusted to the darkness of the room, and his lavender armor glinted in the moonlight.

“I’m retiring early tonight. Be sure the Night Guards follow their rotations. Canterlot may be facing a threat, but that’s no reason for anypony to work any longer than they must. The wedding is tomorrow, after all.”

Styx said nothing, but bared the very tips of his fangs in a small grin.

“Oh, and do not worry if I don’t rise in time to attend the ceremony. I’ll join at my leisure.”

The unicorn Night Guard looked a little puzzled, yet he nodded in understanding.

“Anadare libero es in nomine lunae."

“In nomine lunam, decessero." Styx bowed and disappeared, leaving Luna to the very welcome embrace of slumber.

Sunrise came far too quickly for the Night Princess’ liking. Insomnia had held her in its steely grip for several hours, and the poisonous laughter of Queen Chrysalis wafted through her sleep-deprived hallucinations. Luna had been on the verge of summoning the heftiest tome from the castle library and conking herself over the head to make it all go away for a while, or a bottle of very old wine from the locked cellar below the kitchens. Of course it had been then that she finally fell asleep, snoring loudly with mouth agape.

So it was with red, puffy eyes and a sore throat that Luna crawled out of bed the morning of her niece’s wedding. She hadn’t intended to wake up looking like this, but if anypony wondered why she wasn’t attending the ceremony, she certainly looked sick, or at least very hung over. With a yawn, she shuffled over to her gigantic coffee maker, cracked open the can of freshly ground Coltombian, and began to brew the delicious morning beverage. An enormous amount of self-restraint kept Luna from seizing the entire pot off the hot plate once it was done and dumping it down her gullet to wake up; instead, she poured it neatly into a large Thermos and set off into the castle.

As she trotted briskly around the castle corridors and sipped her coffee, her mind ticked away like clockwork. Chrysalis had never been guilty of feeling anything akin to sympathy for her changeling subjects. Hay, even in the time she’d occupied Luna’s being, she’d never mentioned even having a drone army—and if there’d been something for Chrysalis to yammer on about, she’d talk about it. So why was it of utmost concern to her now that she and her changelings ate well? Furthermore, why was she willing to go through an entire wedding and pose as a princess indefinitely to do it?

Luna shook her head. Chrysalis made no sense because she didn’t have any idea what sense was. Her plan was already half-foiled by the shield surrounding Canterlot, and she’d seen Twilight Sparkle dash into the castle at an extra-late hour last night before she’d staggered to bed. If Twilight Sparkle had talked to Cadence or Shining Armor like Luna had recommended last night, the changeling queen would be ousted and the wedding would go off without a hitch—no pun intended.

“She might have even been cleared out already and I haven’t heard about it yet,” the princess mumbled to herself as she took a swig of coffee.

“Talking to yourself is the first sign of insanity, you know.”

FFFFFFFFFFFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSHHHHHHHHH! Luna spewed her coffee out in a dramatic spit-take. A coughing jag overtook her shortly after, but once she cleared her throat, her heart froze. Princess Cadence was now drenched in piping hot coffee, and she looked ready to kill.

“Did I surprise you, Auntie?” Cadence simpered after immediately composing herself, simply winking away the coffee and returning her to a pristine condition.

“I am not your aunt,” Luna spat. “What are you doing here?”

“Uh, this is the chapel?” Cadence gestured to the high sweeping doorway flanked by cherubic pegasi carved from the marble. “I’m practicing for my wedding ceremony.”

“But the ceremony is today.”

“I want this day to be perfect.” Cadence fluffed her curling mane. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to make sure I walk in just when Auntie Celestia gives me my cue.”

“I’ll give you a head start with a solid kick in the flank,” Luna muttered darkly, turning to go back the way she came. She paused when she heard Celestia’s voice ring out from behind the closed chapel doors.

“Perfect, girls. No need to rush!”

She must be watching the bridesmaids come down the aisle. And Shining Armor must be with her. I’m supposed to be resting, but Celestia won’t know where I am if I can’t be seen.

And with that, Luna cast an invisibility spell and vanished into thin air. Cadence didn’t notice her aunt’s disappearance, for she was too busy examining her reflection in a highly-polished hoof. Once Celestia gave her cue, the chapel doors were opened by unicorn guards on the other side, and Cadence sauntered in with all the nauseating sultriness she could muster. Luna slipped in right behind her and leaned against the wall a few feet away from the guard on the right. As sickening as it was watching this farce unfold before her very eyes, Luna had to admit that Chrysalis at least looked like she was having fun with it.

Celestia spoke a little longer, although Luna didn’t pay attention. In fact, she caught herself dozing off against the wall several times and shook herself awake. Suddenly, the chapel doors banged open dramatically, and Luna in her grogginess half-hoped that the real Princess Cadence had somehow managed to break out of the Caves and had come to expose Chrysalis.

“I’m here!” Twilight Sparkle cried.

Why is she announcing her presence? Somepony obviously must have asked where she was. But why is she late to the practice? What the hay is going on?

“I’m not gonna stand next to her. And neither should you!”

Oh, dung-coated pony-feathers.

“I-I’m sorry. I don’t know why she’s acting like this,” Shining Armor sheepishly told Cadence.

“Maybe we should just ignore her,” Cadence huffed, clearly annoyed by Twilight’s interruption.

“You have to listen to me!” Twilight cried, now standing midway down the aisle. Fluttershy and Applejack rushed over to her, but the unicorn ignored them and pressed on. “I’ve got something to say! She’s evil!” She pointed a lavender hoof dramatically at Princess Cadence.

Oh, for Tartarus’ sake, Twilight, this was not what you were supposed to do! NO!

Shining Armor stepped in front of his bride. Everypony in the room gasped, and the guards who were normally stoic muttered to each other. Twilight began stalking around Cadence, yelling accusations and backing her up against the chapel wall. For a moment, it looked as though Twilight had managed to corner Cadence both literally and figuratively.

And then came the alligator tears.

“Why are you doing this to me?” Cadence sobbed, rivulets of tears streaming down her pink cheeks. Twilight repeated with a defiant smirk that she thought Cadence was evil once more, and much to Luna’s surprise, Cadence galloped out of the chapel at high speed. Part of Luna wanted desperately to corner her prey for herself, but something in the back of her mind told her this wasn’t over. Or perhaps it wasn’t something in the back of her mind, but rather the look of pure outrage on Shining Armor’s face as Twilight yelled that if she didn’t stop her, Cadence would ruin her brother’s life. All of Twilight’s friends gasped again—really, they had nothing to say to this?—and the lavender unicorn looked triumphant until she turned around and clunked into her brother.

“Do you want to know why my eyes went all,” Shining Armor began, then imitated the spinning eyes Twilight had done just a minute ago. At this point, Luna tuned him out. She knew it was quite rude—he was going to be her nephew by marriage, after all—but she really didn’t find Shining Armor interesting. After all this was resolved, Luna seriously wanted to have a sit-down with Cadence and discuss her choice of husband.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and comfort my bride. And you can forget about being my best mare! In fact, if I were you, I wouldn’t even show up to the wedding at all,” Shining Armor blustered before stalking out of the chapel. Twilight was left sitting alone on her haunches in the middle of the aisle, but her humiliation wasn’t over yet.

“C’mon y’all, let’s go check on the princess,” Applejack stated firmly, and she and the other four young mares trotted past Twilight with their noses in the air, refusing to look at her. Spike followed quickly behind.

“You have a lot to think about,” Celestia hissed as she followed everypony else out of the room, looking angrier than Luna had remembered seeing her in living memory. The Day Guards at the door slammed the door behind them and followed their princess, leaving Twilight well and truly alone, tears in her eyes. Luna wanted to throw down her invisibility spell and comfort Twilight immediately; she knew the pain of abandonment Twilight was feeling right now. She too was angry that the unicorn hadn’t followed her recommendation, for it looked as though her dramatic accusation was the first time both Shining Armor and Cadence had heard any of this. But the tears in Twilight’s eyes as she crawled up the stairs to the altar and sung quietly to herself softened Luna’s heart.

All of a sudden, soft hoof-steps were heard on the altar. Luna looked up to see that Cadence—oh, who was she kidding—Chrysalis had materialized there and was stroking Twilight’s mane in a show of comfort.

“I’m sorry,” Twilight choked out through her tears.

Cadence’s eyes flashed to Chrysalis’ green, and her smile evaporated. “You will be.”

Luna stood rooted to the spot and watched in horror as sickly green flames were conjured up around a shocked Twilight. They arced and formed a dome over the unicorn’s head, and she slowly sunk into the floor as Cadence walked away with an evil smile on her muzzle.

Helpless: that was how Luna felt at the moment. She’d wasted yet another opportunity to stop Chrysalis, and now she was getting away! She’d let Twilight take the fall for something she as a responsible princess should have done herself. She should have been the one sinking into the floor with the flames, but no.

No.

Luna straightened herself up, full of resolve. She shouldn’t be acting as though the battle was over already. Why, it had merely begun! In fact, it was…

…to be continued.

Author's Note

...That last line is so bad...but I had to slip some kind of joke in to lighten the mood.

VI: You Dare Strike Her Down?

Shortly before Twilight Sparkle was melted into the floor of the chapel…

“Cady!”

Princess Cadence looked up through her tears to see Shining Armor galloping down the corridor toward her. She wiped at them with her foreleg like a filly, still sniffling.

“Sh-Shiny?” she managed to choke out through faked sobs.

“I’m so glad I found you! Listen, don’t take what Twilight,” Shining Armor snorted his little sister’s name, “said to heart. I have no idea what’s been going on with her lately.”

“It’s fine,” Cadence sniffed detachedly. From within, Queen Chrysalis could barely contain the urge to roll her eyes. By thunder, this stallion was a sniveling little colt around her, and it was only due to necessity that she allowed herself to get so close to him. His love for Cadence was more decadent than any emotion she’d tasted in a very long time, and the weaker he became, the easier task it would be for her army of changeling dolts to break the shield and feed.

“I suppose it’s my fault. I haven’t exactly kept up contact with Twilight ever since she left for Ponyville and I became Captain…”

Oh please do shut up soon, Chrysalis thought bitterly. That stupid purple unicorn you call a sister stabbed a thorn in the side of my plan, and your blathering on is devouring precious time.

“Why don’t you let me go and talk to her, Shiny?” Cadence cut across Shining Armor’s unimportant monologue.

“Oh, okay! Um, I mean, if that’s what you want to do,” the white stallion said, rubbing the back of his neck with a hoof.

“You go get ready for the real wedding.”

Shining Armor turned to walk away, and Cadence pouted. “No kiss-kiss for Cady?”

“Oh, right,” Shining Armor said sheepishly and turned back to his bride. He leaned his head in for a smooch, and Cadence did as well. At the last second however, she nuzzled him instead. A green pulse shot from her horn to his, and Shining yanked back, hoof to his forehead.

“Are you okay?” Cadence asked with false yet utterly convincing concern.

“Y-yeah, I’ll be fine. Headache again. Once we’re married and on our honeymoon, I can let the shield down and let Princess Celestia deal with guarding Canterlot.”

Shining Armor walked off down the corridor toward the main entrance of the castle. When he was just out of her line of vision, Cadence let an evil grin slip across her face and teleported back into the chapel. Time to say good night, Twilight Sparkle.

~~~

Less than half a minute passed before Luna had gathered her senses and teleported down to the Caves after Twilight and presumably Chrysalis. She miscalculated and ended up landing with rather short but sharp stalagmites poking her in the rump. Screaming in pain was not an option—she was still invisible—so Luna settled for wincing as she galloped on silent hooves through the Caves. How she knew where she was going, she didn’t know, but her hunch proved right when she saw the faint dark pink glow radiating from Twilight’s horn. The poor unicorn was wide-eyed with terror and clearly unable to see well in the dark, for she stumbled flat up against a crystalline wall.

“Hello? Is anyone there?! Where am I?” Twilight called out amidst the distant sinister laughter of Cadence.

Before Luna could yell a response, a multitude of Cadence’s eye exploded into view in the facets of the crystals. “The Caves beneath Canterlot,” she explained. “Once home to greedy unicorns who wanted to claim the gems that could be found inside.”

I came up with that load of manure, you unoriginal wench! You stole that! Luna thought. And suddenly it dawned upon her how Chrysalis knew about the Caves: this was where Luna as Nightmare Moon had fled from Celestia as she stormed around Canterlot Castle in the beginning of their epic fight. Chrysalis had asked how Luna knew of the place, and she’d made up the story of old greedy unicorns on the spot. The Night Princess had forgotten how easily she’d found it to lie back then, but that was before she realized her bond to the Element of Honesty, along with Loyalty and Magic, had been contorted beyond repair.

“Help! Help!” Twilight cried while struggling to find an exit. Luna decided to follow her voice and, without the unicorn’s knowledge, teleported so she was standing right next to her.

“It’s no use. No one can hear you, and no one will think to look for you either,” Cadence responded. “Most ponies have forgotten that these Caves even exist. Which is why they are the ideal place to keep the ones who try to interfere with my plans.”

Rage seethed through Luna, heating her blood to boiling point. If there was one thing she had hated more than anything being Nightmare Moon, it was Chrysalis’ insistence that they gloat around their victims and prisoners. If anything, Luna was more inclined to admire a villain who kept their trap shut and went on with their evildoings; Chrysalis’ problem was that she loved the sound of her own distorted voice too much. Emphasizing Luna’s point, the changeling suddenly broke out in peals of high-pitched, giddy evil laughter, and it was enough to pin Luna’s ears back to her skull.

“Plans? What plans?”

Cadence looked down at Twilight, for once showing a genuine expression on her face: confusion. “The plans I have for your brother, of course!”

“Don’t you dare do anything to my brother, you-you MONSTER!” Twilight yelled. Magic collected in high crackling concentration at the tip of her horn in pure fury.

“Only way to stop me is to catch me!” Cadence taunted. Twilight fired a shot in the princess’ direction, only for it to ricochet off of several crystals and end up nearly scorching her. Pausing only a moment, she charged up once more and fired off in rapid succession at crystals around the chamber, and it was then that Luna finally decided to take action.

Let me point you in the right direction, Twilight. Drawing up her own magic and wrapping it in an invisibility charm, she seized hold of Twilight, nudged her gently to the right of the third crystal she’d shattered, and threw in the force of her own magic with the unicorn’s. Twilight fired, and if Luna’s memory was correct…yes!

The genuine Princess Cadence, although very bedraggled and weary, sat among the shards of the crystal wall that had just been blasted away. Luna knew that Chrysalis didn’t like to stray too far from her prey, yet was always sure to have her own body in safekeeping before trying to taunt would-be heroes. Vividly, she recalled countless ponies of more than a millennium ago, hunting down Nightmare Moon and begging her to release their family and friends caught in the throes of night terrors. In return, Chrysalis would just laugh and plague those that begged with the terrors as well, while Luna sat in a far corner of her subconscious, softly crying…

No. Now was not the time for that, because Twilight had lunged forward and tackled Princess Cadence with the passion of a mad dog.

“Likely story!” Twilight was snarling. Luna quickly rushed over. The last thing she needed right now was for Twilight in her rage to accidentally kill the real Cadence and be tried in court for murder—there were far more pressing issues at hoof.

“Sunshine, sunshine, ladybugs awake—”

What the hay is she doing?

“Clap your hooves—”

“And do a little shake!” Twilight whispered in awe along with Cadence.

Really now, what in Tartarus’ name is—

Twilight leapt on Cadence and embraced her. “You remember me!”

Since when are schoolyard rhymes an acceptable form of identification to anypony?!

Chrysalis’ evil laughter rung out again, both Cadence and Twilight looked up, and they galloped off together, deeper into the Caves, toward their presumed source. Luna thought about stopping them—she knew exactly where Chrysalis was right now—but stopped herself. They need to have their own adventure, she thought, and she teleported back to the castle.

~~~

“This day is going to be perfect, the kind of day of which I’ve dreamed since I was small…”

Oh Lord no, she’s singing. Through the keyhole, Luna could see Chrysalis as Cadence dancing about the large room she’d been staying in, talking to the mannequins and admiring her hooficure. Obviously, Chrysalis was still simply riding high on elation from her plan going positively swimmingly, but was now really the time to burst out into a small-scale aria? Hubris was clearly preventing the queen from caring whether or not somepony heard.

“She well and truly is an idiot,” Luna muttered. She heard Cadence’s metallic hoofsteps—those golden shoes were really quite impractical—and she threw on the invisibility spell from before like an old cloak before the lock on the doors was tumbled open. Unfortunately, the princess didn’t move quickly enough to avoid being slammed against the wall by Cadence throwing the doors open with a flourish. Luna swore she’d never seen shooting stars travel that fast before in her life; her head felt terrible already from her lack of sleep, and this blow didn’t help at all. Once she regained the ability to at least stagger forward in somewhat of a straight line, she followed immediately after Cadence, doing her best not to trip over the very long train of her bridal gown—really, what a waste of good material for it to just trail on the ground behind somepony.

Chrysalis for all her stupidity was a master of dramatic timing, for she arrived at the chapel doors just as the first flourish of the bridal march began. Luna found herself actually thanking the changeling queen silently for demanding a longer train on her dress, since it gave Luna enough time to swoop in on silenced wings behind her and hover above the multicolored crowd for a good view. And what a crowd there was! In the front sat various representatives from the different regions outside of Equestria—Duke Pompadourus was notably absent as he’d promised. The customary Canterlot elite were there, of course, but several prominent pegasi from Cloudsdale had been able to make it, as well as some from Trottingham and beyond. Seated farther back were the middle-class ponies from the likes of Baltimare, Manehattan, and the Broncs, Ponyville and Las Pegasus who’d managed to either buy tickets or win packs at the charity auction held a month earlier. Initially the wedding was meant to be a more exclusive event, but Cadence—the real one—had insisted on the idea of tickets, saying that the average ponies of Equestria should be offered a chance to attend what would truly be a once-in-a-lifetime event too.

Princess Celestia began officiating the ceremony, and Luna noted that what her sister said was what she’d written verbatim. The indigo alicorn chuckled at that, but a knot was forming in the pit of her stomach and only tightened as the large hand on the chapel clock ticked ever closer to the twelve o’clock position. What was keeping Twilight and Cadence from getting here? To be sure, the Caves were rather tortured and twisted due to the crystals growing out at random from the walls and floor, but if a pony was careful enough and kept their focus, the Caves were fairly easy to navigate. It wasn’t as if there were broken mine cart tracks or anything to deter their way, right?

Bells tolled from the chapel roof. Celestia began speaking once more. “Princess Cadence and Shining Armor, it is my pleasure to pronounce you—”

“STOP!”

A collective gasp ran through the congregation, and they turned to see Twilight Sparkle standing alone in the doorway of the chapel, defiant anger in her eyes. Murmuring began to rumble through the room, and it was Cadence who cut across it all.

“Ugh, why does she have to be so possessive of her brother?” she asked, stomping her hoof and rolling her eyes like a bratty foal. Upon a strange look from Princess Celestia, Cadence turned on the waterworks again. “Why does she have to ruin my special day?”

“Because it’s not your special day, it’s mine!”

YES! Luna silently cheered as the real Princess Cadence leapt into the room, once again causing the crowd to gasp and murmur at this new development.

“What?! But how did you escape my bridesmaids?”

What is she talking about? I don’t remember any other bridesmaids aside from Twilight’s friends. Must have been a last-minute change on Chrysalis’ part to alienate Twilight even more.

“Ah don’t understand. How can they be two of ‘em?”

Thank you for asking the question that is undoubtedly on the mind of every pony in this room, Applejack.

“She’s a changeling! She takes the form of somepony you love and gains power by feeding off your love for them!” the real Cadence explained.

Suddenly there was a flash of green light. Luna turned her attention toward the fake Cadence only to have to squint her eyes, as the green light was next to blinding. With horror, she watched as the purple-tipped feathers blew off of spider’s-web-like wings, the pink pelt melted away to ashen gray, and the hair like a colorful sunrise faded to a monochromatic dull blue.

Chrysalis was exposing herself, and Luna couldn’t be more disgusted.

“I can’t believe she was inside of me,” the Night Princess whispered to herself, close to retching. Yes, Chrysalis had made the Nightmare Moon body quite beautiful: Luna had been taller, slimmer, blacker, and finally had the starry blue ethereal mane and tail to complement her sister Celestia. Chrysalis, however, had forced those stupid cat’s-eye pupils and the tiny fangs in to complete the ensemble, because evidently they made Nightmare Moon look more terrifying. But as much of an eye Chrysalis had for aesthetics that long ago, her true form was far from dazzling.

Her body is full of holes and gaps, and she hopes that by feeding on the emotions of other creatures, she herself will become whole. And her name is a stage of metamorphosis—evidently she believes that someday she’ll emerge as a beautiful, whole butterfly, or rather an alicorn. My stars, is she really…that easy to understand? Can her motivation really be so simple? I…almost feel sorry for her. She is not too unlike myself, wanting to change.

Luna nearly clapped her hooves due to her Eureka moment, but she paused, for Chrysalis was speaking.

“Right you are, Princess. And as Queen of the Changelings, it is up to me to find food for my subjects.”

And false, pretentious concern for her subjects immediately kicks any sympathy I had right into the gutter.

“Equestria has more love than any place I’ve ever encountered. My fellow changelings will be able to devour so much of it that we will gain more power than we have ever dreamed of!” Chrysalis gloated.

“They’ll never get the chance. Shining Armor’s protection spell will keep them from ever even reaching us!” cried Cadence, leaning right into Chrysalis’ ugly face. The queen only laughed, turning away.

“Ever since I took your place, I’ve been feeding off of Shining Armor’s love for you. Every minute he grows weaker, and so does his spell. Even now, my minions are chipping away at it.”

How the hay did she summon them?! Luna was ready to rush over to the windows to see what Chrysalis meant, but was frozen in midair by the torture of her all-too-familiar evil laughter. She pinned her ears back, hoping the sound would make the flood of bad memories stop rushing forth…ponies galloping away from her in terror…groves of trees and fields of flowers wilting from lack of sunlight…Celestia’s face full of anger and pain as she strained to pull the sun out from behind the moon’s shadow…the final blow…

“No.”

And just where have YOU been? Out for coffee?

Celestia was marching right up behind Chrysalis, fury etched across her face. “You may have made it impossible for Shining Armor to perform his spell, but now that you have so foolishly revealed your true self—”

Say it again, dear sister!

“—I can protect my subjects from you!”

Celestia launched herself into the air above the altar and sent a charged blast of golden energy from her horn toward Chrysalis, who in turn responded with a blast of green. The two streams collided in midair, and it looked as though Celestia’s was going to win. Hope blossomed in Luna’s chest, and died as soon as it’d been born.

The green swallowed the gold and blackened the tip of Celestia’s horn. The white alicorn’s eyes went wide, and then—

A gold tiara with a purple diamond-shaped gem went spiraling through the air, and clattered on the floor next to its wearer.

Celestia’s body hit the tiled floor, one wing folded in while the other splayed out like a dying swan’s. Her eyes were closed, her hooves frozen in position.

Screams rang out through the crowd, and Twilight and her friends ran to Celestia, who mumbled something Luna couldn’t hear over the cacophony. The six young mares dashed out of the chapel, along with other guests who were simply too terrified to stay any longer. Chrysalis was cackling, but the sound did not clang and pierce through Luna’s mind like it had so many times before. All she could focus on was her sister lying on the floor, looking close to lifeless. Not bothering to cloak her magic, Luna landed next to Celestia and in a flash of blue teleported both of them to the Caves. Tears clung to her eyelashes as she pored over her sister’s body. She was still breathing, but barely moving aside from that.

“Celestia, you fool. Your powers are strongest at apogee, but most difficult to control! You know that! And yet there you went, playing the hero like you always do…” Luna choked back a sob. “No. I am the fool. I should have told you I knew what was going on. I knew the whole time! But you…” She swiped at her eyes, sniffling. “Come back to me, sister, AND HELP ME FIGHT!”

Sadness laced with potent fury pulsed through the alicorn’s veins. “And you, Chrysalis. You dare imprison my niece, and that was foolhardy. But then you struck down my sister at high noon. I’ve let you ruin Equestria once with me as Nightmare Moon, but you won’t get away with this again.

“You will pay.”

Author's Note

It just occurred to me that when I named this chapter, there are a few different things it could be referring to. I'll let you chat about that in the comments.

And yes, things have indeed gotten real.

VII: The Greatest Weapons in the World

This was no longer a game.

Luna wanted to stay close to Celestia and ensure her full recovery, but she was needed elsewhere. She owed it to Celestia, Cadence, Shining Armor, and all her subjects to rid Equestria of Chrysalis’ pestilence. Deep down, she acknowledged that she too needed this victory; vanquishing Chrysalis would be the best kind of self-absolution. In time, she knew, everypony who’d known her as Nightmare Moon would have either forgiven her or passed on. But she never would be able to forgive herself, unless she succeeded today.

With fervor, she kicked off her sparkling blue slippers, wincing as they clattered noisily across the crystal cave floor. The slippers, like her crown and necklace, were part of the royal regalia, yet they also served an important purpose. Alicorns, being part earth pony along with unicorn and pegasus, had very sensitive hooves to better draw upon the earth’s magic. Slippers kept every step an alicorn took from being akin to walking on hot coals from overexposure to magic. Luna planted each hoof firmly on the floor, closed her eyes, and summoned a small amount of magic to her horn.

Show me, castle, what happens above.

In her mind’s eye, Luna saw a rendering of the castle above in a pale glowing blue. She saw the heat signatures of hundreds of ponies still fleeing from the chapel, using all possible doors and a few priceless stained glass windows to escape. Luna stomped her foot in agitation—parts of those windows had come from the Crystal Empire—but continued pushing outward. She sensed the dark blob of Chrysalis still lingering in the chapel, as well as Cadence’s unique ice-blue magical signature and Shining Armor’s magenta one.

Interesting. I’ve never seen a unicorn with such a strong magical signature before. Perhaps my sister wasn’t mistaken in naming him Captain of the Royal Guard. He certainly isn’t much of a warrior, though, is he?

Luna pushed her vision out even further to see the entirety of Canterlot, covered by the massive magenta shield courtesy of Shining Armor. But something was very, very wrong. Why did the shield appear to be concave in places? Why could she feel the thinnest of cracks webbing out from critical points in th—

Oh no

Scooping up her slippers and casting a final glance at a still-unconscious Celestia, Luna quickly teleported out of the Caves and into the first place that came to mind: the Royal Library. Just after she made it, there was a colossal boom that shook through her entire body and sent ancient tomes tumbling off the shelves. The few library attendants present screamed and ran for cover, and Luna just barely had enough strength to keep herself standing upright. Opening one eye, she gazed out the curved panoramic window to the skies above and gasped.

“The sky is falling.”

Immediately she admonished herself for saying something so foolish. The sky itself wasn’t falling, but the solid shield that had shrouded Canterlot for nearly two weeks was. Giant magenta shards of magic were plummeting to the streets below; Luna hoped the droves of citizens would be smart enough to seek shelter as quickly as possible. The air surrounding the city was suddenly filled with the nasal hum of insect wings, and the alicorn’s heart sunk to the floor.

“Changelings.”

Chrysalis hadn’t been bluffing. The chitin-coated witch was really looking to feed her subjects by any means necessary. Luna had been living in delusion this whole time, hoping Chrysalis would have abandoned any plans for large-scale invasion with a shield up around Canterlot. She’d thought better of somepony and they’d proven her wrong.

Oh my. Now I know exactly how my sister felt after my transformation…she must have felt such deep betrayal at my hooves, all because of my own jealousy. Yes, Chrysalis exacerbated my feelings, but I was still their originator. I failed to understand my subjects’ fear because I was young, and I made a terrible, terrible—

CRASH!

Luna snapped out of her reverie long enough to find a changeling had charged through the curved panoramic window, making a large hole in the glass, and was now hovering high above her. It was just smaller than the average mare, and its teal compound eyes widened upon seeing a princess standing vulnerable below. It bared its pearly fangs, hissed, and dove right toward her, torn blue wings humming furiously. Instinctively, Luna seized the first thing her magic laid upon: a rather weighty tome entitled Equestrian Magic Through the Ages: A History.

“Kyaaaaaaaaaah!” the lunar princess cried, flinging the book at the changeling.

“Peef!” The book hit the changeling square in its tiny chest and sent it careening out through the window once more. All of the glass came crashing down around Luna, who had the wherewithal to cast a quick shield for protection. She sent out a tendril of magic to retrieve the book, which floated back up to her face.

“Good thing I thought to grab this before it hit the street. It’s a first edition, after all. Twilight would have been hysterical if it went missing,” the indigo alicorn said to herself. An idea came to her just then, and her eyes widened. With giddy laughter, she pulled five shelves out of the nearest bookcase and set them on the floor beside her.

“I may not have armor or artillery, but I have even greater means at hoof. Some might say I have the greatest weapons in the world!”

A group of six changelings flew in through the broken window, only to be met by six spellbooks smashing into their heads.

“EAT KNOWLEDGE, CRETINS!”

Luna returned the books to their shelf and began firing with machine-gun speed at any changeling that came by. For the first time in many days, the princess was laughing, manic peals that ricocheted off the library walls. She had sworn earlier this wasn’t a game, yet beating changelings back with Equestrian history, magic and scientific discoveries was extremely amusing!

From her high vantage point, Luna could assess the damage being done to the inner city. Ponies who hadn’t attended the wedding were dashing about with changelings streaking after them. Terrified screams rent the air, as well as smoke from stoves left unattended by already converted ponies. Doors were yanked off hinges, windows shattered, streetlamps bent at odd angles, and trash strewn across the cobblestones. Luna had to marvel at how quickly Canterlot disintegrated, as well as how quickly elitist mares and gentle-colts could run in formal attire.

A scene at a nearby café caught Luna’s attention. She watched raptly as a dark-haired mare from the Canterlot Philharmonic Orchestra—Octavia, was it?—fought off several changelings in hoof-to-hoof combat. After about a minute of punches, well-placed kicks, and an upended café table, Octavia launched a drink cart at a particular changeling who’d been summoning its brethren with a flash of sickly green light. Luna was amazed. She really ought to give the citizens of Canterlot more credit where it was due. Not all of them were snobby and self-serving.

Pink light flashed rapidly in the corner of Luna’s eyes, and she flapped out through the library window to see what the ruckus was. Twilight Sparkle and her friends were in the thick of a changeling swarm, battling them back with rather…improvisational fighting tactics. Currently, Pinkie Pie had Twilight’s neck cradled in one hoof and was pumping the purple unicorn’s tail rapidly, blasting away any changelings with intense bursts of magic from Twilight’s horn.

“I had no idea we even worked like that…” Luna mumbled in amazement as she looked at her own starry tail. She shuddered to think what might happen if somepony ever did that to Celestia or herself. Would the sun and moon cycle through the sky like a manic cosmic carousel? What about Cadence? Could she force anypony within range to fall in love with blazing speed?

Luna’s musings were interrupted by a large outcry from within the library. She turned midair and saw that, while she wasn’t looking, hundreds of changelings had flooded in through the broken panoramic window. Several were banging headlong into the tall oaken doors, trying to access the rest of the castle. One with some level of intelligence was attempting to pick the locks with its horn, only to have it be jammed in the process. The rest had seemingly given up the hunt for food and were tipping over bookshelves, ripping out pages, squabbling over which book belonged to whom, and generally causing chaos. Had Discord been free from his statue, he would have enjoyed the sight.

Quietly, Luna landed inside and picked her way through broken glass and ripped book pages. She waited patiently to see if any of the changelings would notice her arrival. When the din persisted, she drew a bare indigo hoof to her chest, inhaled, and exhaled as she extended her leg again.

“ENOUGH!” the princess bellowed in the Royal Canterlot Voice.

Silence fell immediately. Three hundred pairs of eyes turned to Luna, terrified and curious all at once.

With their hive-mind, they dove as one to attack.

With her warrior spirit and quick thinking, Luna defended.

Thousands of books were thrown from their shelves as immense magic swelled and slammed the changelings flat against the library walls. Luna’s eyes glowed a dazzling white from within her blue domed shield, and her voice was a low, inescapable hiss that sliced through every changeling ear.

“You will leave this castle. You will attack no one, and you will seek sustenance elsewhere. Should you not leave, you will rue the very day you gazed upon me. You will keen in pain when the moonlight pierces your eyes each night. For I am Princess Luna of the Moon and Night, Alicorn Mare of the Darkness. And if need be, you shall suffer under me.”

Luna dropped the enchantment that pinned the changelings to the wall, her eyes fading to normalcy. The din that followed could only be compared to bats flooding out of their roost at twilight; every last changeling fled the library with great haste. As soon as the last one left, she dropped her blue shield as well, gathered her slippers, and trod carefully over to the oaken doors.

A whimper under one of the mountains of books and scrolls caught Luna’s attention. To her shock, a librarian withdrew themselves from under the pile, his pince-nez trembling on his snout. He said nothing to Luna, nor dared to take in the disaster around him. Instead, he stared at her with terror and tears lodged in his wide green eyes. Luna did her best to offer a calming smile, then turned and left the library.

Author's Note

This is a scene I've been waiting to write for a long time. Part of me feels like I didn't do it justice, but trust me, it was incredibly funny for me to write and imagine. This chapter is much shorter than the others because I wanted the focus to remain on Luna in the library instead of shifting as she gallops off to new places within the castle. She doesn't have much left to do as it is.

Speaking of which, I believe the next chapter shall be the last. And I promise you shan't wait another four months for the ending. What, do I look like the BBC? *deadpan humor*

P.S. The title of this chapter is a Doctor Who reference. I do hope some get it :)

VIII: Your Puppet No More

What the hay did I just do?

Admittedly, giving changelings a good literary beating was a great stress relief to the Princess of the Night. She hadn’t exercised herself magically like that in quite some time, and made a mental note to spar with some unicorn Royal Guard recruits when given the opportunity. However, the experience left Luna feeling drained—nowhere near fainting, of course, yet significantly less sure of her own hoof-steps.

She cast a quick, basic shroud of invisibility over herself as she paced away from the library. No damage had been done to this corridor; panicked ponies still had the sense not to jump from nine stories up to the Canterlot street level. Luna was loath to think of just how much it would cost to clean up the castle after this catastrophe. With magic alone, she and Celestia could fix most of it, but the Canterlot nobility would swoon in unison if they found out their beloved princesses were stuck cleaning their own castle. Doubtless one of them would try to turn this into a charity event or something ludicrous, with each noble house pledging their servants to clean for an astronomical amount of bits.

The thought left a foul taste in Luna’s mouth, and she spat with royal grace into a nearby antique vase.

That was bribery from that pompous gryphon duke, anyway. Not like I cared about that.

Oddly, Luna felt no rush to find Chrysalis, her sister, or anypony. She reveled in the eerie calm that came from walking in solitude through the eye of a storm. Outside, ravenous changelings were still ravaging Canterlot, taking ponies hostage in seedy alleyways and feeding. Celestia was surely still incapacitated down in the Caves, and with Luna notably absent, Equestria was presently without an active ruler. The real Princess Cadence and Shining Armor, though reunited, still had their wedding day ruined by a changeling invasion. Memories of a cherished day, once shattered, could never completely be recovered.

Yet none of this now seemed to matter. Apathy wasn’t the correct term for her current emotions. No, it was a sense of detachment, of feeling at once like prancing on clouds and diving into the earth’s depths. She supposed this was how an alicorn was meant to normally feel: connected to her roots of common ponies but towering above them too, a paradox of growth and stability. Some might say she felt like a goddess.

Luna rarely felt like a goddess; she had never thought herself better than anypony else. If anything, the Nightmare Moon experience had humbled her to the precipice of self-deprecation. Chrysalis’ return had sent her sailing far over that precipice, and she’d forgotten how to fly. She had failed to cleanse herself for good. The wedding hadn’t drawn the Changeling Queen back, Luna’s unstable, weakened mental state had. She was vulnerable emotional prey, exposed to her subjects’ judgment and fear—

Stop.

Luna halted at the top of the spiral staircase. She twitched an ear behind her, but nopony else had spoken. No, this voice had come from within. It wasn’t the scraping hiss of Chrysalis’ voice, but the buttery, sinisterly dulcet tones of another dark mare. The princess could hear the stars twinkle in her mane as she peered deep into her mind’s eye.

Do not be afraid. I am still with you, and will remain with you always.

“No…no, you can’t be here. I sent you away before, long ago. How?” Luna felt her knees buckle as she dropped to the floor.

When you rose the moon to cover the sun and eclipsed that fateful day, I came into your being. I joined to your mind, fettered as it was by possession, and waited for the right time to reveal myself. When you were restlessly slumbering on the moon, it was I who sung you the lullabies to ease your tortured conscience. If the one you call Chrysalis attempted to maim you further, it was I who halted her and turned her desire to change inward.

“That eclipse was the worst thing I’ve ever done.”

No. In your skewed retrospect, this may be true. But you would have not been lead on the journey you are today. You never would have known the keen of pure harmony as it sang through your body in the abandoned castle that fateful night. You never would have tasted sweet absolution.

“I’ve yet to taste it.”

Wrong again: you have tasted it. You have simply refused to acknowledge its lingering presence on your tongue.

“Many of my subjects still fear me! I hide in self-deprecation, and for what? You’re still here; I am not absolved. I am still mad!”

You are not mad. This is not lunacy that speaks to you now, but your element.

The dark blue alicorn furrowed her brow, her eyes squeezed shut. “What on earth are you talking about?”

Are you so foolish as to not recognize the Essence of the Night as it speaks to you? The very thing you have been trying to banish from your soul is your calling, your being, your destiny! You are Luna, charged with guiding the moon, stitching heroes into the inky darkness with constellations, and walking in the dreams of all. With all of your in-depth magical studies, you should be aware of the might of your destiny.

Luna chanced a peek at her flank. There, plain to see as ever, was her cutie mark: a creamy moon that glowed against a wide splotch of black.

Your return to full magical capacity has been slow, has it not? The moon has weighed heavy upon your horn, and the stars need to be pulled with more force to their positions. This is the reason: you have been restraining yourself, denying yourself, reasoning that there must be something completely wrong with who you are because of one past mistake. You have not allowed I, the Essence of the Night, to take up a full seat within you and grant you that power you have always dreamed of. Please, Luna, remember this: the world, despite outward appearances, loves genuineness. Be the Element of Honesty you once were. Embrace who you are.

Tears formed in Luna’s eyes as the Essence of the Night whispered the truth in her mind. She hadn’t been herself for so many long years. After her return, she’d only had one successful attempt at reconnecting with her subjects. Nightmare Night was now a cherished holiday across Equestria, and several cities, including Ponyville, had requested that she make a public appearance this year. Her subjects had forgiven her; she’d been too secluded to see that.

At that moment, the princess rose to her hooves. She exhaled her last breath as an insecure pony and drew in her first breath of a newly resolved, confident alicorn.

There was, however, one question jabbing Luna insistently.

“What should I do with Chrysalis? Do I just…let her go?” she asked of the Essence.

No! Damned be those who prey upon the emotionally open! See to it that she receives her deserved justice.

With new resolve, Luna marched down the spiral staircase toward the chapel. “I shall.”

~~~

“You do realize the reception’s been cancelled, don’t you?”

I have not missed your voice in the slightest, Chrysalis, Luna thought as she swooped into the chapel under a magical invisibility shroud. She’d nearly been bowled over in midair by half a dozen changelings, who’d bolted when Chrysalis gave the command to “Go! Feed!” Luckily, she hadn’t been bowled over completely, and managed to hover and take in the whole scene. Chrysalis was pacing on the altar in front of Shining Armor and Cadence, with Shining still hypnotized and Cadence’s hooves glued to the carpet with what Luna could only assume was changeling snot. Twilight and her friends had somehow been captured by the changelings they’d been fighting only a short while ago. Apparently their eternal punishment for this insolence was to listen to Chrysalis’ incessant gloating.

The last thing Luna noticed was Celestia suspended from the ceiling in a large chrysalis. Evidently Celestia had gathered enough strength to leave the Caves only to be captured herself. Luna couldn’t help but snicker at the sight. Green does become you quite well, dear sister.

“It’s funny, really. Twilight here was suspicious of my behavior all along!” Twilight slapped away the patronizing gray hoof under her chin, but Chrysalis continued. “Too bad the rest of you were too busy caught up in your wedding planning to realize those suspicions were correct!”

Applejack stepped up to Twilight’s side. “Sorry, Twi. We shoulda listened to you.”

“It’s not your fault,” Twilight consoled. “She fooled everypony!”

“Mm, I did, didn’t I?” Chrysalis smiled smugly. Luna flattened her ears as she heard some disembodied piano music crawl out from somewhere. Oh please, for the love of Celestia, do not start—

“This day has been just perfect! The kind of day of which I’ve dreamed since I was small…”

I CAN’T JUST HAVE ONE THING TODAY, CAN I?!

“Everypony I’ll soon control, every stallion mare and foal. Who says a girl can’t really have it allllllll?”

Meanwhile, Twilight belly-crawled up to the altar and zapped Cadence free from the changeling snot that held her hooves. Cadence gratefully smiled at Twilight and went over to Shining Armor, who was still hypnotized. The pink alicorn hugged her fiancé, and as she did, a multi-colored heart blossomed from her horn. Luna watched with amazement—this was Cadence’s magic of love at work, and this was the first time Luna had seen it. The heart popped on Shining Armor’s forehead, and he came to.

“Wha-where? Is the wedding over?”

Chrysalis came crashing down in front of the reunited lovers, having returned from her float-and-gloat session outside the windows. “It’s ALL over!”

Oh, shut up and grow up.

“Your spell! Perform your spell!” Twilight cried to her brother.

Chrysalis cackled, and for once, Luna didn’t flatten her ears at the sound. “What good would that do? My changelings already roam free!”

“No!” Shining Armor gasped. A faint magenta glow gathered at the tip of his horn, but it quickly faded. He strained, but nothing more came of his magic. “My power is useless now. I don’t have the strength to repel them,” he sighed.

Cadence put a hoof around her fiancé’s neck and nuzzled him. “My love will give you strength!”

Chrysalis paced over to the windows to check on her minions’ progress, cackling all the while. “What a lovely but absolutely ridiculous sentiment!”

An absolutely ridic—THAT IS IT! Luna cried internally. With scarcely a thought, starry blue magic oozed from her horn and spiraled out toward Chrysalis. The magic looped through the holes in the queen’s back hooves and became invisible sutures that held her in place by the window. Another shot of magic stitched Chrysalis’ front hooves to the windowsill.

I have had enough out of you, Chrysalis! You have played puppeteer with my subjects, my niece and my sister, and you have done so for the last time. Today you lost your greatest puppet, for I have cut the strings that bound me and let them tie you down and ground you.

A hum of other magical sources caught Luna’s attention. She turned to see Cadence and Shining Armor touching their horn tips, each with closed eyes and in a determined pose. Purple magic, a mix of Cadence’s blue and Shining’s magenta signatures, swirled around them as their connection glowed bright silver. They opened their eyes for a brief moment, unsure of what was happening, but closed them again with confidence once the magic lifted them both off the ground. Twilight and her friends gazed on in amazement. Chrysalis, with a bit of manipulation from Luna, twisted her head to look at the magical commotion; her jaw dropped.

Shining Armor and Cadence’s eyes were a brilliant white, and their bodies posed together in midair to form a heart. Magic exploded from their heart and blasted through the chapel. Chrysalis, despite her intense cries, was expelled from the castle. Her changelings also met the same fate as the magic of love radiated through Canterlot. All traces of the invasion disappeared: guard ponies glued to the streets were freed, ponies no longer cowered, and the overwhelming sense of doom that had swallowed the city for the past few hours dissipated completely.

Luna watched with satisfaction as Chrysalis spiraled off toward the Badlands in a flash of white light. But she paused: this wasn’t over. Discreetly, the princess vanished from the chapel and reappeared closer to the border of the Badlands, breaking into a full-on gallop.

She still had one last thing to do.

~~~

Chrysalis, the Queen of the Changelings, was feeling quite queasy. Although it would be extremely gross, she felt like puking, both from vertigo and utter humiliation. It took a lot of inner strength to keep her jaw clenched together and hold the vomit back. She already had to stage a big talk in front of the entire Hive to boost morale, since the invasion had been nothing less than a disorganized disaster. No doubt there would be talk of moving the Hive out of the Badlands and closer to a more accessible food source—she’d heard mumblings of Aviaria as a possibility, and that made Chrysalis retch. That puffed-up gryphon duke was utterly impossible to make deals with.

Heart-wrenching thoughts now raced through Chrysalis’ mind. What if her subjects were considering an uprising because of their starvation? It would be like the bloody Prench Revolution all over again, and she’d be thrown off the throne for sure. If it went like most other revolutions, her royal head would be mounted on a pike! Or worse: hung, drawn, quartered and served up on a platter like a great steaming—

A gossamer thread of magic suddenly wound its way around Chrysalis’ slender waist and cinched tightly, making her breath catch.

If you are the mare of Death, I am ready, Chrysalis thought as she was yanked backwards out of the sky. I welcome your shadowed embrace as you pull me through the earth to Tartarus. It would be interesting to see Cerberus again, only, you know, for eternity this ti—

“I am your puppet no more.”

Chrysalis snapped her eyes open.

No…no, this couldn’t be happening…it had to be the blood pooling in her head as she hung upside down by a magical thread, her webbed mane trailing in the sand. What she was seeing was an impossibility.

Nightmare Moon stood in front of Chrysalis in all her ebony glory, starry mane and tail afloat in the dry air of the Badlands.

Any words the changeling queen had in mind drained from her instantly. She could only gasp and sputter at what she saw. Her hooves flailed helplessly. She felt the gossamer magic thread cinch tighter and twist more air from her lungs.

Then, she witnessed the very thing that had terrified the whole of Equestria so many years ago: Nightmare Moon smiling.

This was not a warm smile. Instead, a predatory grin was etched across Nightmare Moon’s black muzzle; Chrysalis swore she saw her own reflection in the dark mare’s pearly fangs. With green eyes made round with horror, she watched as Nightmare Moon opened her mouth and drew Chrysalis closer and closer and—

A peal of sickening, sinister laughter sliced through Chrysalis’ ears as a powerful blast of magic propelled her at high speed over the Badlands and beyond.

On the ground, Nightmare Moon still cackled loudly, but her tail was evaporating as she laughed. Magic melted off of her, and she shrank and rounded out in the process. Her coat faded from ebony to indigo, her wing feathers became more rounded, and her eyes became less feline and more equine.

The only remnant of Luna’s guise was her sparkling blue helmet, which was now far too large for her head. She took it off and set it gracefully upon the ground. What should she do with the thing? Should it be kept and put on display in the room just off the Great Glass Gallery, a testament of times past and old terror? Should she leave it to be found many years later by an adventurous explorer after a few terrible sandstorms?

No. She knew what to do with it.

Rearing up on her hind legs, Luna smashed the helmet to pieces with her bare front hooves and an unbridled whinny. She immediately took flight after putting her slippers back on, leaving the blue shards glittering in the fading afternoon light.

~~~

It was a long flight back to Canterlot from the Badlands. By the time Luna caught sight of the spires projecting from the mountainside, it was already twilight. She had considered a pensive walk back to the castle, but decided against it. The Princess of the Night had pitied herself enough over the past week to last a lifetime.

Speaking of twilight, there was no doubt that Twilight had somehow organized a proper wedding for Cadence and Shining Armor in the time she’d been gone. Celestia had likely praised the purple unicorn for her actions—“persisting in the face of doubt” or some such plop. Luna wasn’t about to discredit Twilight, though; she had followed through most beautifully and even managed to fix the mess she’d made without Luna’s interference. Congratulations were certainly in order, but Celestia was the wrong pony to deliver them. Then again, she had been struck down by a starving changeling queen already…

Today had been a very crazy day, hadn’t it?

Luna’s thoughts about an express wedding were confirmed: she saw Cadence and Shining Armor enjoying their first intimate dance as a married couple, and Twilight and her friends were back in their formal dresses. The alicorn noted the size of the reception crowd was nearly twice the size of the crowd for the fake wedding. She found it odd that ponies would want to dress up and attend a royal wedding after their city had been ravaged. Then again, she really wasn’t in much of a position to judge odd behavior today.

Luna lightly touched down where Celestia and Twilight’s friends were gathered by the dance floor. And although her conscience screamed from every corner of her mind not to do so, she opened her mouth and spoke.

“Hello, everypony. Did I miss anything?”

If anypony had answered her silly question, she didn’t hear it. Pinkie Pie and her friend Vinyl Scratch started playing an irresistibly catchy dance-pop song, Twilight started to sing, and Luna just couldn’t resist anypony who laid down a solid beat.

~~~

Later that evening…

“That was quite a party, wasn’t it, sister?”

“Indeed it was,” Celestia remarked, joining Luna out on the balcony. A starry rendering of Shining Armor and Cadence surrounded by hearts now hung in the eastern skies for all of Equestria to see. Luna was a masterful artist with the stars, but she didn’t often create new constellations because of how much magical effort it took to do so. Tonight, however, she didn’t feel the slightest bit exhausted, even after all the rigorous head-banging she’d done. She certainly needed to request a copy of all of Vinyl Scratch’s albums.

“Where were they going for their honeymoon?” Luna asked.

“Neighagra Falls, I think,” Celestia replied. “A lot of newlyweds have their honeymoons there, and I believe Cadence was the one who suggested it. She doesn’t want any overly special considerations just because she’s a princess.”

“Of course. I would want the same. In fact, a nice vacation by a waterfall sounds p-p-perfectly…” Luna stuttered as she yawned, “lovely right now.”

She smacked her lips and looked out at the starry tapestry she had created for tonight. The moon hung like a giant pearl pendant, and Luna felt the Essence of the Night humming tranquilly in the back of her mind. Yes, all was well once more.

All was well…until Celestia put a hoof on Luna’s shoulder, whispered “Thank you,” and walked back inside.

“Wait, wait, wait. What do you mean by ‘thank you’?” Luna questioned, spinning around and following her sister back into her own purple bedroom.

“Can’t an older sister thank her little sister for attending a wedding reception when she slept through the ceremony?” Celestia remarked as she opened the door to leave.

“You never just say ‘thank you’! You always have some kind of hidden motive!”

Celestia just winked and walked out of the room.

Luna’s eyes grew wide as saucers, and she pressed a hoof to her mouth. Oh, Tartarus. Celestia knew.

Though it was very un-princess-like, the dark blue alicorn threw herself down on the floor and pitched a hissy fit.

Celestia always had to know everything.

The End

Author's Note

Like Celestia, I say sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, "Thank you."

III: Crystal Traps & Statue Confidants

Wedding plans were forgotten for the day. Guards ran helter-skelter through the castle, and the clopping of hooves against tiled floors was incessant for the next several hours. The Equestrian Games ambassadors had been quickly dispatched from Canterlot on the earliest express train, with reassurances from Celestia that things would be taken care of as soon as the threat was identified and expunged. Cadence had found her fiancé, Shining Armor, and she practically stayed glued to his side amidst all the swirling chaos. With guards posted on every balcony and bridge on the castle, Celestia commanded that Shining Armor cast a spell over the entire city of Canterlot; entrance would be permitted on the princesses’ approval only.

“Will we have to cancel the wedding?” Cadence asked fearfully of her aunt as Shining Armor concentrated his magenta magical force through the ceiling of the castle. Luna stood by Celestia’s side, the white alicorn’s attention focused on writing a letter with a magically levitated quill.

“I highly doubt that, Cadence,” Luna began with some hesitation. “We should have whoever made this threat against Canterlot weeded out by next Thursday.” I can only hope so, for everypony’s safety.

“I’ll bet it’s that duke from Aviaria that stormed by me so rudely,” Shining Armor interjected, his eyes staring up at the ceiling where his horn was pointed.

“That’s nonsense, Shining Armor! Equestria has had a long-standing truce with Aviaria, although admittedly not without some fraying at the edges.”

“Cadence, who gave you that letter?” Celestia asked, rolling up the parchment she’d been writing on and vanishing her quill.

“Nopony did. I found it lying on my bed after visiting the Royal Guard Academy this morning,” Cadence replied, and Luna’s throat seized up. Chrysalis meant business, and she was striking close to home with whatever her nefarious plot entailed.

“We will find the culprit soon enough, my niece. Threats are not taken lightly in Canterlot, not in this day and age. Your wedding will go on as planned.” Celestia smiled and placed a hoof consolingly on Cadence’s shoulder. “In fact, I’ve invited my most faithful student and her five friends to come and help you personally with your dress and catering details.”

“Twily—I mean—Twilight’s coming?” Shining Armor excitedly asked, his attention snapped away from reinforcing the city shield with a fifth extra layer.

“Yes, she is. I’m afraid we’ll have to break the news of the wedding to her at just the same time as everypony else due to the increased security.”

“I’m sure she’ll take it just fine. She’s pretty levelheaded,” Shining Armor shrugged, and Cadence nodded in agreement.

“It’ll certainly be nice to see her again; I haven’t seen her since she was a little unicorn filly with a blank flank!” Cadence smiled, reminiscing about her foal-sitting days when she was a young princess and new alicorn.

Luna stood by, stunned into silence by all of this and shaking her head imperceptibly. By the seven seas of Rhye, how do they all know each other? What else have I been left out on since I was up on the moon? Next I’ll hear that my sister has been carrying on some sordid love affair with that draconequus statue in the gardens!

“Luna, will you take this letter down to the postmaster for me? I still have schedules to work out for the guards’ night shifts, and I’ll need to talk to Headmaster Ironclad to see if he’ll consider letting some of the Academy upperclassmen into the ranks temporarily.” Celestia hovered the scroll in front of her absentminded sister’s muzzle, and Luna took it wordlessly, biting back the typically immature response of “why not let one of the servants deliver it.” She supposed Celestia was just trying to keep her busy in the midst of everything that was going on, and in a way she was thankful. It would have been near impossible to sleep through all the racket.

Luna padded softly down a flight of side stairs past what seemed to be a battalion of earth pony guards, their golden armor clanking as they climbed. Suddenly it occurred to her that perhaps she ought to organize her Night Guards in some sort of defense schematic around the castle for the evening hours, but they were all home with their families since it was still early afternoon. She yawned as she pushed open the sturdy oak door of the castle postmaster’s office. The elderly Pegasus who was ordinarily here running things was evidently on a late lunch break, but Luna had been in here enough times as a filly to know what to do.

The furnaces for express delivery were in a room no larger than a janitor’s closet, all crammed next to each other like metallic sparrows in a crowded birdhouse. Luna located the one marked “Ponyville” and opened the creaky grate to expose the swirling pink flames to outside air. She saw that the scroll hadn’t been sealed, and she unrolled it to read, just to sate her curiosity.

Dear Twilight,

I’m sure you are as excited as I am about the upcoming wedding in Canterlot. I will presiding over the ceremony, but would very much like you and your friends to help with the preparations for this wonderful occasion. Fluttershy, I would like you and your songbird choir to provide the music. Pinkie Pie, I can think of no one more qualified than you to host the reception. Applejack, you will be in charge of the catering for the reception. Rainbow Dash, I would very much appreciate it if you could perform a Sonic Rainboom when the bride and groom complete their “I do”s. Rarity, you will be responsible for designing the dress for the bride and her bridesmaids.

And as for you, Twilight, you will be playing the most important role of all: making sure everything goes as planned. See you all very soon!

Yours,

Princess Celestia

Luna frowned at the letter, rereading it several times to fully absorb the words. “I can’t believe it! My sister completely forgot to mention who was getting married!” She rolled her eyes and trotted out to the postmaster’s desk, pulling out parchment and dipping a ragged quill in the inkwell. It was moments like these when she was thankful she and Celestia had taken the same penmanship class as fillies; consequently, Luna could copy the same flowing, loopy cursive her sister had with ease.

Princess Celestia cordially invites you to the
Wedding
Of Princess Mi Amore Cadenza
And
Captain Shining Armor of the Royal Canterlot Guard
Friday, June 7th at twelve o’clock noon
Chapel of Canterlot Castle

She tickled her chin thoughtfully with the quill, wondering if she ought to add a note at the bottom about RSVP or the couple’s gift registries. Ultimately Luna decided against it, placing a pad of soft gold wax on the rolled-up invitation and pressing it with Celestia’s sunburst seal. In a way, she sympathized with Twilight: finding out one’s brother was getting married by invitation didn’t exactly compare to the millennium of culture shock she experienced upon her return, but the feeling was similar.

“I just hope her assistant figures out which scroll to give her first,” she sighed as she tossed both invitation and letter into the swirling pink fire for Ponyville.

~~~

As it turned out, the Ponyville Express had its name for a reason. Spike had apparently received the scrolls immediately and brought them to Twilight Sparkle, who by sheer luck had been having a picnic with all five of her friends at the time. They’d quickly packed what they needed—Rarity had evidently spent a good deal of time deciding just what materials and tools she’d need to make Cadence’s dress and had nearly packed up her entire boutique, while Pinkie Pie had insisted on bringing something she called a party cannon—and got on the next train to Canterlot. Consequently, the six young mares had made it by mid-afternoon, giving Twilight plenty of time to berate her older brother for not telling her about the wedding in person as well as time for Shining Armor to provide exposition.

Shortly before their arrival, Luna had been sitting up in one of the turrets, surveying the castle grounds and all the guards swarming like diligent ants. There was a tiny tap on the wooden door.

“Come in,” she sighed. Only Celestia knocked that quietly.

“Do you know where I might find Star Swirl’s telescope?” the white alicorn asked as she padded into the tiny circular room.

“It’s up in the Artifacts Chamber above the library,” Luna replied, quirking an eyebrow. “Why on earth do you need that?”

“Shining Armor’s shield is so thick that it’s hard to see the sky outside of it. I’ll need to know when the appropriate time will be to lower the sun.” Celestia tilted her horn at an angle toward the room’s wall, summoning the telescope to her with her golden magical aura.

“You’ve been raising and lowering the sun now for millennia, dear sister. Don’t you have the solar patterns for all the seasons practically written in your bones?”

“Yes, but it’s nice to be precise.”

Luna rolled her eyes. “You wouldn’t need a telescope to see through his shield if it wasn’t that ridiculous shade of magenta.”

“I happen to like the color, Luna,” Celestia shrugged as she inspected the scope’s lens.

“Thou wouldst,” Luna remarked with sarcasm, slipping into her old pattern of speech. She pushed aside the small throw rug that covered a round wooden trapdoor in the floor. “I’m going down to the Caves.”

“Be sure to be back upstairs for dinner. I think I’ll have Twilight and her friends join us if they so desire.”

Luna clambered down the trapdoor hole and pulled it shut with her tail, descending into darkness. The Caves were her pet project when she was a filly: whenever she and Celestia had a fight, she would go underneath the castle to its foundation and throw angry blasts of magic at the walls to blow off steam. After a few of those underground tantrums, young Luna had discovered that her magical blasts were crystalizing on the rocky walls, growing into elegant prisms of all shapes and sizes. After that discovery, Luna found herself going down there and intentionally growing crystals, creating smaller caves and partitions in the castle’s foundation. She had even once attempted to construct a smaller-scale version of the Crystal Empire she’d read about in one of the dusty history tomes, although it eventually crumbled to pieces because of the fragility of the structures she’d built.

Luna paused, a sound of heartache reaching her ears. Nopony but her and Celestia knew anything about the Caves, so who in Equestria could possibly be down here? She magically silenced her hooves and galloped toward the end of one of the larger caves, the sound growing louder and louder.

A crystalline partition separated this larger cave from a much smaller one, and Luna had to squint to make out a vague pony shape in the darkness. Ducking behind a huge purple stalagmite, she spread a faint luminous aura over her horn to see who had discovered her Caves.

What she saw almost made her jaw drop to the floor.

“Cadence?” Luna mouthed in disbelief, her blue-green eyes wide. Her purple, pink and yellow mane and tail were rumpled and ragged, and her rosy pelt was covered in dirt and scratches, but the alicorn trapped in the cave was definitely Cadence. She could hear her niece sobbing quietly, moaning in sorrow. Was Cadence having extreme pre-wedding jitters and having second thoughts about her fiancé? Was she upset by the threat made against Canterlot and having all the extra security as well as half-finished wedding plans?

And then she heard it. That sickening laughter that had plagued her psyche for what felt like eons.

“I hope you’re comfortable down here, my little princess,” the disembodied voice of Chrysalis simpered.

“Like hay I am.” Cadence glared through her tears at the chamber around her. “Where are you? Who are you and what do you want with me?!”

“You know, I’ve always wanted to be princess for a day. I’m the Queen of my subjects, but princesses just seem to have a lot more fun. Eating cakes, having tea parties, foal-sitting highly ranked ponies’ posterity. Ooh, and weddings! I’ve always wanted a wedding.”

Cadence raised an eyebrow, confusion now mixing in with the anger and hurt on her face. “If you’re a queen, don’t you have a king?”

“Oh no, my dear. I don’t have just one mate; I lay an enormous clutch of eggs and let a select few of the best males do a little…crop-dusting, as it were.”

Luna had to shove a hoof in her mouth to keep from either crying out in disgust or projectile vomiting. So Chrysalis was more insect than alicorn in her breeding habits, and she just…oh, by Tartarus, that was just gross!

“What in Equestria are you?!” Cadence cried.

“I’m Chrysalis, Queen of the Changelings, and let’s just say my subjects and I are a little hungry.” That horrible laughter rang out throughout the Caves and ceased after several long moments. Cadence sat there, looking for the source of Chrysalis’ voice, and she screamed after her.

“Get back here, you vile beast!” Cadence looked positively maniacal at this point. “Set me free NOW! Don’t you DARE lay a hoof on Shiny or I’ll…I’ll…”

She broke down in a fresh bout of tears, flopping down on the cold and unforgiving cave floor. Luna, unable to watch anymore and with a tear in her eye as well, surreptitiously teleported out of the Caves.

~~~

“I just don’t know what to do about this.”

Day had given way to night as usual, with Celestia lowering her sun from her Solar Balcony and Luna rising it from her Lunar Balcony. Dinner had gone as usual; Twilight and her friends had opted to have a private dinner from one of Canterlot’s best cafés, while Shining Armor had told them he’d eat in his captain’s quarters with Cadence. This left Celestia and Luna to have a quiet supper together of vegetable soup, with Luna not so much eating as seeing how many times she could stir a chunk of potato around her bowl until it disintegrated into the broth. When the gigantic clock on the castle struck nine, Celestia retired to her bedchamber as usual—whether her sister actually went right to sleep at such an early hour, Luna never did know.

Yes, everything went exactly as usual.

Except for, of course, that the authentic Cadence was trapped down in the Caves while Chrysalis was off doing who knows what, and that Luna was the only pony in Equestria who knew it and didn’t do a thing or raise a hoof to help her niece escape.

“Why didn’t I help her escape?”

After she paced back and forth on her sister’s balcony and peeked into the telescope to inspect the night sky outside Shining Armor’s shield, Luna had spread her wings and gently floated down to the castle gardens. These were what she’d missed most of all in her banishment to the moon. Walking through the shrubbery and labyrinths, past the cool fountains and benches, all while bathed in warm moonlight was one of Luna’s favorite activities. Her absolute favorite place to visit was the statue garden, where heroes of antiquity and artistic explorations of sculpture were immortalized in stone.

Of course, not everyone here was a hero.

Luna had chosen to speak to a very particular statue in the garden tonight, sitting in front of his towering serpentine form like a child in front of a minstrel. For all intents and purposes, he could very well have been a minstrel with all the magic tricks he could perform. But right now he was just meant to be a wall for Luna to bounce her thoughts off of.

Besides, it wasn’t as if Discord was completely deaf. Luna was absolutely confident that only his body was frozen; his mind was still whirling about, fast and chaotic as ever within the confines of his stone prison.

“I keep walking into dreams involving loads of pink cotton candy,” Luna began, her eyes tracing the strange shadow his statue threw over the neatly manicured grass. “I’m pretty confident they’re your dreams, and that cotton candy is all a representation of her, isn’t it?

“Ha! As if she’d ever love you! Celestia and Discord sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I…ha! She wouldn’t even consider marrying you, you’re evil!”

Luna’s smile of wild glee slipped off her face like soap from a clean dish.

“No. No, you’re not evil, I take that back. Not that kind of evil. Your evil is more games and chaos than hurting anypony. But right now, there’s real evil run amok in Canterlot,” she explained to the draconequus’ statue. “Am I evil for not stopping her? She imprisoned my niece and I haven’t told a soul about it—”

The indigo princess froze. Shining Armor had mentioned that he was going to his captain’s quarter to eat with Cadence. Twilight had met the mysterious mare her brother was due to marry in the flesh, and that was Cadence. No doubt the other five young mares who were Twilight’s friends had received their marching orders about catering and dressmaking and planning the reception from Cadence.

Every piece clicked into place in Luna’s mind. Chrysalis had imprisoned the real Cadence in the Caves, and she was posing as Cadence in the wedding! But why?

Alicorns don’t require food from the earth like the lower classes of equines do. Magic sustains us, and because my appetite is more powerful, I sustain myself on emotions…

Weddings are an absolute smorgasbord of emotions! There is tremulous excitement, and seeing how this is going to be a royal wedding, that will be multiplied tenfold...

But there was one thing more powerful than all the emotions Chrysalis had listed at a wedding: the love between the bride and groom. And if she knew Chrysalis—and unfortunately Luna did—she was going to go for the biggest prize to feast on, and that meant Shining Armor’s love for Cadence!

“Discord! I know what she’s doing!” Luna jumped up, her wings flaring up in excitement. “It doesn’t make sense to me yet why she wouldn’t use an alicorn whose power is generating love instead, because she’d be an endless food supply, but I know what she’s doing!”

Another thought crossed her mind and Luna sank to her knees again, folding her wings on her back.

“But I can’t do anything about it. If I up and out called her an evil villainess in front of everypony, they’d think I was crazy! They might even forbid me from coming to the ceremony!” She looked up at Discord’s stony eyes, which would normally be yellow and red were he not stuck as a statue. “What would you do?”

A gentle early summer wind tickled Luna’s ears and rustled the leaves on the shrubbery. She closed her eyes to think for a moment, then opened them halfway.

“Of course,” she whispered, craning her neck to look up at Discord. “You’d wait for just the right moment to surprise everypony. There is a method to your madness, Discord, as much as you’d like to deny logic and claim to operate solely on chaos. You’d play underhandedly, and play on ponies’ weaknesses and your strengths to defeat them. So that’s just what I will do!”

At this, Luna stood up with her chest puffed out in determination. The wind blew her mane and tail out behind her like a hero’s cape, and she smiled proudly. She could do this! She could get rid of Chrysalis all by herself, and nopony would have to be any the wiser.

But now was not the time for heroism. From the position of the moon in the inky night sky, Luna figured it was somewhere around one o’clock in the morning, and that meant it was time to return to the castle and her creature comforts.

“The castle looks a little far,” she yawned, pawing at the grass. “I suppose it could hurt to close my eyes for a little while and head back later.” Finding a good place to settle in next to Discord’s pedestal, she tucked her front hooves underneath her chest and rested her head on the ground. “You know, you really wouldn’t be so bad for my sister. After all, there is chaos in harmony.”

Chuckling at the mild double entendre, the Princess of the Night fell asleep.

Author's Note

Holy crow, lots of things happened in the chapter! As usual, I'd like to keep the A/N short, so here goes.

--I do imagine that Celestia would be so absent-minded during all the hubbub that she writes a letter to Twilight but forgets to mention who is getting married. She might be like one of those people who automatically assumes you know about everything they're talking about.
--I'm sorry if you like Shining Armor, but I feel like the only time he's worth anything is when there's exposition to be told. That and throwing his wife off a castle balcony like a javelin.
--The pink cotton candy reference should make sense to anyone who's a fan of Dislestia.

I think that'll about do it for this go-round. Please sound off in the comments section about this story; comments and favorites make Jadu a happy pony!