We've always loved music, in my family. The first thing I can really remember is my parents' singing, and it seems like all the world came from that. From that one moment of beauty. My world certainly did – I can't help but feel like it shaped everything that was to come. Beginnings tend to do that, I suppose. But I remember how much I loved their song.
It was quite a while later that I started singing myself. I've never been very good, at least in my own view, but I enjoyed it. That was the important thing. For years I sang with every sunrise, and the birds would sing with me. Usually something silly I'd just made up on the spot, though I had a few old favorites I'd dredge up from time to time. I sang all sorts of things, with all sorts of variations upon them. But always something happy. That much I couldn't help. I was happy, and so the songs were too.
Eventually, I came to Canterlot. Or, perhaps, the city came to me. It always feels that way in my memories, anyway, but who can trust those things? I was here, regardless, and so were talented musicians from all over. All I had to do was listen. And did I ever. I heard canons and cantatas, elegies and études. I heard doleful dirges and hopeful hymns, the richest violins and the cheapest improvisations. I heard music, and I heard it in the hearts and souls of every pony I met. There was a while, a good while, when I heard every performance in Canterlot, from symphonies to speakeasies. The city was smaller in those days, of course, but it was still quite the achievement.
I learned a lot about music, then, and it bled through to my own. I was still singing every morning, always at dawn, always something happy. I guess repetition's not all that different from practice, because I started to improve. I started receiving complements for it, too, from strangers, which was new. I'll always remember the first time it happened: a rather elderly mare sat down near me as I was starting to sing. I thought she was just resting, but when I'd finished she looked up at me and said, quietly, “More beautiful than dawn itself.” She was just trying to be nice, I know, but it meant something to me. It meant a lot.
Those may have been the best years of my life. So far, anyway, but that's still saying something. Not just because of the music I got to hear, which was spectacular, by the way, but because of family. Because I didn't go to those concerts alone. At every one, or at least every one that wasn't too early in the morning, my sister was there too.
She was really the talented one, you know. My songs were just noise compared to hers, out-of-tune ditherings beside the ballads of a master. But she'd never sing in public. She was always so shy. She listened, though, every time I sang, and she smiled. Those smiles were far more beautiful than anything I ever made.
Things got busier, later. The city grew larger and the world grew smaller, or at least closer together. It was sometime during the war with the griffons, I think, when I really started to realize that nothing lasts forever. That even this song had to end someday. The arts took a decline, and when Cloudsdale signed a non-aggression treaty and the pegasi began their exodus, I really thought we were going to lose. To tell the truth, if it weren't for the Crystal Empire's timely aid we probably would have, which made it even worse when we discovered the atrocities their king was committing. It was a trying time for everypony, and we were not excluded.
But through it all I never stopped singing, and cheerful songs at that. It was such a little thing, but that just made it all the harder to do any less. Every day a few ponies would show up, the same few, mostly, and try to smile weakly despite the hardships and the cruelties of the world. There was the chance, the slimmest chance, that I might touch another's life and make it brighter, at a time when we all so needed it, and that chance was worth far more than my mere song.
It was then that my sister and I really began to diverge. Duties called, and there just wasn't time enough to go around, not with all we had to do. So she worked all night, and I worked all day. Our schedules slowly shifted until we almost never saw each other, just the briefest of exchanges at the liminal hours. But she always listened to my cheerful little songs, the last thing she heard before she went to sleep, and she always smiled.
Of course, the Crystal Empire couldn't really save us, alone. They just let us live long enough to see something even worse. With them, the war now covered half the world, and the other half didn't want to be left out. The diamond dogs slipped past our perimeter for the first time in history and made warrens under all of Equestria. The dragons were decent enough to stay out of things, but the changelings started sneaking in during the confusion, replacing all sorts of ponies, living or dead. They didn't participate in the fighting directly, but their presence added terror and doubt to an already chaotic situation.
From the chaos woke Discord, spirit of disharmony. One day, in the midst of a particularly dreadful battle, he just appeared. By what accounts remain, his first action was to stretch and yawn, and his second was to turn each pony and griffon present into a different variety of muffin. Remarkably, Discord really brought us all closer together. The fighting stopped almost overnight, and we all collaborated to take him down. Still don't know whether that took a day or a decade, the way he messed with time, but somehow we managed to beat him. A few major natural laws were permanently rewritten, the world was literally upside down for a while, but we beat him. Everything was peaceful again. And through it all I sang.
We should have thrown a party after that, but it felt like the best celebration was a return to normality. A quiet reaffirmation that life was safe and solid and sane again, that you wouldn't wake up a different species or find literal monsters underneath your bed. We carried on, and acted our best like things were normal. Then the next problem started.
She noticed it first, but she didn't tell me until she was certain, until she had figured it all out. King Sombra wasn't aging. He'd been king almost a century, and he looked exactly the same. If she'd come to me, perhaps... or perhaps if I had gone to her, when I first saw the worry and fatigue written on her face. It wasn't enough that she knew something was wrong, she had to know exactly what. Maybe she wanted to prove herself to me, or maybe she was tired of dealing with the unknown, after all that time with Discord. I don't know. So she studied.
She still came to my songs, but she stopped smiling quite so much. There were lines under her eyes, and fatigue in them, so I thought nothing of it when her once cheerful grins became more and more obviously forced. I just gave her a hug and told her to get some sleep. I could have done so much more.
Every day she looked gloomier and grumpier than the last, and I said nothing. Eventually, of course, she figured it out. She seemed so happy as she explained to me just how Sombra had corrupted the Crystal Heart, had used its magic in reverse to drain the life force and memory of his “slaves” and burn them for fuel. She couldn't help but call it ingenious, after all the time she spent studying dark magic to work it out. And I said nothing then, either.
We wouldn't have been able to stop him, I don't think, without her efforts. She knew exactly what to do to break his enchantments, and if we hadn't he could have kept drawing more and more power from the crystal ponies. She saved all of their lives, at the very least, and even then he put up a hard fight, just with the energy he had stored. We had to banish the whole empire, but in the end we won.
The next morning I sang, and she didn't stay to listen. The next two years I sang, and she would roll her eyes and flee at the first upbeat note. I thought it was because I was a bad singer. I still wonder, sometimes.
Then she tried to blot out the sun.
She never stopped studying dark magic, apparently. Sombra's library had a great wealth of knowledge on the subject, and she surreptitiously procured it all. It corrupted her, and I was too busy being cheerful to notice.
She attacked me. I fled. But when I saw how much she was hurting the ponies I left behind, I returned. Before I banished my little sister to the moon, I asked her why. She laughed, short and bitter.
“You never did see things from my point of view.”
That was two hundred years ago, but I still can't call it winning. It was six months before I even managed to raise the sun again. When I finally did, for the first time in my life I didn't see it as the start of a new day. I saw only the end of a long and beautiful night, my sister Luna finally going to sleep.
And that is why, every morning at dawn, I sing a lullaby.
...
Any other questions? Yes, the stallion in the back, go ahead.
