A white light appeared on the top of the hill, bobbing and stretching for a few moments before it settled into a narrow cone of light whose tip pointed east. It grew brighter, until a hazy golden aura reached from it off to the horizon, glowing with tiny sparkles, the kind so faint that they would disappear if you looked directly at them.
The stars winked out one by one. Then the first color returned, a deep blue filling in the blank black slate of the night. By the time birds had begun to chirp, the pre-dawn light showed the pale rosy outline of a unicorn taking shape beneath a glowing horn. Any inhabitant of Equestria would have realized it was an alicorn, and which alicorn it was, long before there was enough light to make out the wings folded along the figure’s back.
Dark horizontal stripes began to rise over the horizon in slow waves: deep purple, sea-green, amber, and finally rosewood. Then a golden spot surged out in front of them, surrounded by a red glow.
The alicorn watched that spot, but kept glancing down to a form lying on the grass near her hooves. You would have to have been standing quite close to see that it, too, was an alicorn; that its color, after accounting for the red light, was probably closer to purple than to midnight blue; and that its sides, glistening with dew, rose and fell in the slow, steady rhythm of sleep.
A connoisseur of sunrises would have said the dawn came exceedingly gentle that day. Its intensity rose more steadily than the slow crescendo of a master violinist.
Celestia smiled when she looked off towards the yellow disk, still small and dim. She smiled more when she looked down at Twilight, who was snoring lightly. Her mouth hung open, the breath rising from it turning to mist in the cold air. The red-golden light came in low and caught just the outer edge of her fur, making hairs glow like waves of sparks each time her chest rose and fell.
Celestia leaned down and stretched her neck towards Twilight, glancing back and forth between her and the horizon, and frowning critically at the hues reflected off her as if the sole purpose of the morning were to illuminate this one figure. The dew began to evaporate from Twilight’s flanks, and she twisted her neck about and grumbled in her sleep. The light crept softly over her back, trying out blue, gold, and red on her before settling on a bright lilac. She rolled onto one side, away from the light, but it was undeterred, and kept stroking her with a touch gentler than any lover, while Celestia looked on.
Twilight mumbled something and turned back towards the light. Her legs, which she’d drawn up tightly against the night, spilled back out freely again, opening her chest to the wind and light. Her eyebrows relaxed, smoothing out her eyelids. The warm rays teased a smile from her face. Finally the lids of her eyes drew slowly open, the eyes beneath still dreamy and unfocused. The Sun Princess looked into those eyes and began to sing:
Blue from the bottom of the sea of dreams,
White from the eye of the storm,
Red for the river that inside you stirs,
Gold for the bugle-blower’s horn.
The colors in the sky blazed forth one-by-one as she called their names, and in the instant that she named the last of them, the colors in her coat and the colors in the sky all hummed one rainbow chord together, and you could see that though her coat looked white on the surface, underneath it was really purple, blue, gold, and red all at the same time.
Gone are the dusty browns of past regrets,
Starlight has scoured them away.
Dreams that the stormclouds scattered yesterday
Are redrawn in the colors of the morn.
By the time she finished, Twilight was looking back at her and smiling happily. “I remember that song,” she said. “I wish you sang more often.”
“A princess may sing in public, Twilight, but a ruler, only in private. Otherwise everypony will ask her to sing in order to flatter her, and everypony will be too busy acting like they’re enjoying it to enjoy it.”
“But why did you sing it here, now?”
Celestia smirked. “To prevent you from jumping up and apologizing about sleeping through sunrise the moment you woke up.”
Twilight jumped to her hooves, stumbling twice before all the different parts of her body were awake enough to realize what she had just asked them to do. “Oh-no, oh-no, I slept through the sunrise! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll get up extra early tomorrow—”
Celestia laughed. “Twilight, there are morning ponies, and there are evening ponies, and I’ve known for a long time which kind you are. It’s in your name, for goodness sake.”
“‘Twilight’ actually refers to any daylight produced only by atmospheric scattering—”
“Yes, yes. Anyway, I wanted you to feel it, not study it.”
“Oh... Princess! You didn’t have to do that for me.”
“Well, Princess, perhaps some of the other ponies in Equestria will appreciate the day, then.”
Twilight began stammering an explanation of what, precisely, she’d meant to say, but Celestia shushed her. “Look,” she said, and indicated with her chin not any particular place or thing, but the entire meadow spread out before them.
They were standing on a small rise above a fallow field. Ahead of them, the sun was rising above a row of trees, big oaks and firs with dark shrubs clumped around them. A stream on their left ran toward it, full of run-off from Canterlot Mountain. There was nothing exotic or dramatic about the scene, which may be why Celestia, a ruler who often drove her royal chef to despair by requesting unsalted peas and raw carrots, had chosen it.
“You’re probably wondering why I asked you to spend the night out here,” Celestia said.
“I wasn’t,” Twilight said. “Now I am.”
Celestia paused to purse her lips, and tapped the grass beneath her with a forehoof. “I wanted to wake you with the sunrise.”
“You did?”
“Yes.”
Twilight frowned seriously, digesting this information. Then she brightened. “Well,” she said. “You did that!”
“More specifically,” Celestia added, “I wanted to watch you waking to the sunrise.”
“You wanted to... watch?”
“Yes. It was… very sweet.”
Twilight flicked her ears nervously and her cheeks turned from lilac to a royal purple as she waited for Celestia to say something more. Celestia just looked off towards the sun.
“Is… is that everything?” Twilight said in a hushed voice.
“No,” Celestia said, “not everything. I wanted to ask you something. Something I’ve never asked anypony before.” She still wouldn’t meet Twilight’s eyes. and her face was, incredibly, also turning slightly pink.
Twilight looked straight ahead and stood very still for several moments, like a rabbit that doesn’t know whether to freeze or bolt.
“I’m sure it’s a good question, then,” Twilight said hesitantly.
“It’s a little self-indulgent.”
Twilight bit her lip and took in a deep breath. She extended her left hoof out to the front and exhaled. Then she reached her head up towards Celestia, until the princess looked her in the eye.
“You can ask me anything,” she said with a smile.
Celestia opened her mouth to speak, then shut it and sighed. Finally, she took a breath, and turned her face to Twilight, her eyes glistening.
“What’s it like?”
Author's Note
Three questions:
Too purple?
The story uses the second-person three times. The first two are more distant: "the kind so faint that they would disappear if you looked directly at them," "You would have to have been standing quite close to the pair to see that..." But the third is straight 2nd person: "You could see that though her coat looked white on the surface..." Is that okay? Did it bother you?
How do you feel about the shift from the big section of description to the section with mostly dialogue?
A long note about writing this story, that you don't need to read:
This was supposed to be a quickie for “The Twilight Zone”. I knew exactly what was to happen, so it should have been a simple matter of writing it down. I banged out the basic story in under an hour. It was about 300 words, and completely flat. The story, after all, is basically this:
Celestia woke Twilight with the sun, then asked her what it was like.
That’s it. So why did I want to write it?
My idea was that Celestia loves her art, and loves to give ponies the experience of being woken by the dawn--especially her special student/friend/fellow princess Twilight. But watching them makes Celestia wistful, because Celestia herself can never be woken by the dawn. She wants desperately to know what it’s like, but is embarrassed to ask, because she's trained herself to be averse to self-indulgence.
Twilight, meanwhile, is confused, then thinks this awkward conversation is leading--finally?--to Twilestia. She is alarmed, considers it, decides to be open to the possibility, and waits for answer with eagerness and dread.
So much to explain! But I had a point-of-view problem: I couldn’t use Celestia’s point of view, because that would reveal what she wanted, which would ruin it not just as a no-Twilestia-for-you punchline, but also miss the subtlety of “this is something really nice which I love to do for my friends, but sometimes I wish somebody could do it for me, once”. And I couldn’t use Twilight’s point of view because she’s asleep for most of the story. I had to explain why being woken up by the sun would be interesting and pleasant, and how it’s an expression of love for Celestia, but I couldn’t tell any of it. I had to show everything.
Then I was faced with the problem of lulz. How heavy should I play the Twilestia misdirection? Crank it up hard, make Twilight eager for it, and it’s a crackfic. Ignore it, and you’d lose that humor, and the vulnerability Celestia shows by being too concerned about her question to realize how her actions come across to Twilight.
When I wrote about Twilight waking up, I thought Twilight would jump up and be embarrassed and apologetic about sleeping through the sunrise, and it would be all Lesson Zero instead of sweet and tender. So I thought maybe Celestia could prevent this by singing to her, because even Twilight can’t jump up and spaz out when the Goddess of the Sun is singing to her. But then I’d have to write a song. A sappy, not-at-all-evil song. A song that a magical unicorn princess would sing about the sunrise. The sweetness and light, it burned. I had to read a clopfic afterwards just to feel dirty again.
It stretched out to over a thousand words, and those thousand words took hours, then days, to write. Its simplicity made it harder, not easier. There was no plot or clever dialogue to fall back on. It was like building a house of cards--a push one way or the other almost anywhere could ruin it. I read about dew points and the insulating power of fur to figure out whether a horse’s hair could have dew on it. I spent an hour watching videos of sunrises, which never show what I most wanted to see, which is how the sunrise reflects off a foreground object. I puzzled over why the ordering of colors in the sky at sunrise is not the same order as the colors in a rainbow. I learned that Hollywood directors film sunsets and play them backwards as sunrises, because movie people don’t like to be on set before dawn, and you can tell when they’ve done this because the sun rises up and to the left instead of up and to the right.
I feel pretty stupid for having taken four days to write one scene. But here it is. Procrastination provided by 2048.
