Two Pair (post-contest edit)
Author's Note
The feedback is in: a unanimous "huh?"
So, back to the drawing board. First, I went ahead and replaced the last eleven-thousand words or so with a sequence in which everypony goes out for ice cream together. This was working out pretty well until I realized that, like most mammals, horses are probably lactose intolerant as adults. Unsure of what tags I would have to add to the story to continue down that path, I scrapped that edit.
Then, I replaced every named character with Trixie, which made for a fairly compelling psychological exploration, but it was only marginally easier to follow than the original.
Finally, I settled for just adding a few paragraphs attempting to clarify the arglebarg a bit. Let me know how that goes.
Two Pair (post-contest edit)
Inside the protective magical barrier that held back the harsh northern winter, near the top of the majestic crystal palace, behind the constantly-guarded double doors of the royal bedroom, Shining Armor was snapped out of a deep sleep by his old guard instincts. The faint wafting of suddenly displaced air and the fainter-still sound of an armored hoof scraping against the smooth crystal floor left no doubt: somepony was in the room.
His eyes unable to penetrate the darkness past the foot of the bed, Shining Armor shifted his gaze to the sleeping form of his wife, who appeared undisturbed. There was nothing to indicate intrusion. The doors remained fully closed, not allowing even a sliver of light through where they met in the middle of the door frame. Likewise, the windows were all sealed as securely as they had been when he and his wife had gone to sleep.
Still, he was certain that there was an uninvited guest in the bedroom. Clearly a very capable guest, to enter so stealthily. The guards had either been silently incapacitated or bypassed completely. Shining Armor had no idea how either would be accomplished, and, feeling he did not yet have enough information to act, waited.
He did not have to wait long.
“Celestia!” A half-familiar voice called out. A hoof was kicked against the floor in frustration.
Another sudden rush of air followed.
“She is not here,” the voice announced sourly.
“Interesting.” A second voice joined the first, this one more clearly identifiable.
Princess Luna! Relieved, Shining Armor considered bringing up the lights, but his curiosity stopped him.
“Has she found a way to interfere with the trace?” Luna continued.
“It would seem so,” the first voice answered.
“Crafty as always, our sister,” Luna said ruefully. “Where are we, then?”
“You’re in our bedroom,” Shining Armor spoke up finally, as he reached out magically to turn on the lights. “And as much as I appreciate...”
He trailed off as the lights revealed two alicorns standing near the doorway. One, as expected, was Princess Luna. The other, standing slightly taller than the princess of the moon, had a lavender coat, spectral mane and tail flowing in various shades of purple, and a very familiar cutie mark.
Twilight?
Both alicorns immediately locked their gazes upon him as he sat befuddled by the scene, regarding him with blank expressions for several long moments.
“That appears to be my long-dead brother,” the Twilight-like alicorn noted, almost conversationally.
Shining Armor did not process the words or respond as his mind raced to explain what he was seeing. She certainly shared Twilight’s most distinctive features, though she looked much more like her fellow alicorns than she had the last time he’d seen her, only weeks ago. How quickly did alicorns grow, anyway? Her voice also sounded similar to Twilight’s, but it lacked the girlish quality he normally associated with his sister and was instead infused with the regal calm for which Celestia was known.
“An illusion?” Luna asked, her question mirroring the thought crossing Shining Armor’s mind at that moment.
Twilight shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
The room was suddenly bathed in moonlight as the ceiling and the tower above them disappeared. Twilight’s eyes darted between the stars as her gaze raked across the night sky.
“Approximately seven years post-return,” she reported dispassionately. “Northern regions, almost certainly the site of the Crystal Empire.”
The ceiling was, without any particular fanfare, back in place as Twilight finished speaking.
“That is no small disruption,” Luna said, sounding stunned. “She must have transposed the axes somehow.”
“Unless she came here as well and moved on before we arrived,” Twilight considered. “Either way, reckless.”
“She always has been,” Luna agreed.
Shining Armor cleared his throat, reminding the alicorns of his presence. Another long, awkward moment followed.
“Greetings, ancient brother,” Twilight said at last, her voice wooden. “It is good to see you; it’s been so long since you were not dead.”
“Hi,” Shining managed weakly.
Cadence stirred beside him. Somehow, she was still asleep, but it appeared she wouldn’t remain so for long.
“Shining,” she murmured tiredly. “Visitors… late.”
Shining was working out how to explain the situation — without understanding it himself — when Luna responded at a volume only slightly below that of her famed Royal Canterlot Voice.
“Of course, we needn’t disturb you further,” she declared. “We shall find a more suitable location to assess our predicament.”
With that, they were gone, and the lights extinguished. Cadence rolled over while mumbling something unintelligible. Shining Armor stared, unmoving, into the darkness for several hours before drifting into something resembling sleep.
Shining was almost ready to dismiss the whole scene as a bizarre dream when he and Cadence awoke in the morning. He went through his morning routine normally as he watched his wife for signs that she remembered anything odd about the previous night, but she seemed unaffected. Of course, she wouldn’t have remembered much anyway, but he took it as a positive sign.
That positivity evaporated as the couple emerged from their suite and one of the door guards stopped them.
“Your highnesses,” he said, bowing. “Your royal guests have already been seated in the dining hall.”
“Royal guests?” Cadence asked, puzzled. “Shining, do you know anything about this?”
“Sort of?” Shining replied meekly, prompting an immediate glower from the princess. It was the kind of non-answer that always raised her ire, but in this case it was the most truthful response he could give.
“Is it your sister?” She asked, before he could begin to attempt an explanation.
“Sort of.” He answered again without thinking.
“One of those days, I see,” Cadence said icily. “Very well.”
She turned her gaze forward and remained silent for the rest of the short walk to the dining hall. Shining kept to himself as well, unable to think of anything he could say to salvage the situation. Hopefully, Cadence would understand when she saw for herself.
As they turned into the dining hall, they found Luna seated alone at the far end of the absurdly long table, near its head. Cadence paused and gave Shining a sideways look.
“You could have just told me it was Luna. I don’t know why you have to be so uncooperative sometimes.”
Shining opened his mouth to speak, then closed it, again finding nothing productive to say. Cadence sighed in exasperation and started toward Luna.
“Greetings, Princess,” Luna bellowed cheerfully across the hall. “Your hospitality is greatly appreciated. We have found the accomodations quite adequate, and your staff has been helpful as well.”
“We?” Cadence inquired, sitting at her designated place at the head of the table. Shining took his seat to her left, directly across from Luna.
“Ah, yes,” Luna said, glancing briefly at the place setting immediately beside her. “My sister has stepped away for a moment. Something about assessing magical equilibrium pools at this point on the timeline. You know how she is.”
“Celestia is here?” Cadence asked, surprised. Celestia had rarely visited the Crystal Empire during Cadence’s rule, and certainly wouldn’t do so without advance notice unless there were some kind of emergency.
“No!” Luna corrected quickly, then leaned toward Cadence and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Unless… you’ve seen her?”
“I haven’t seen Celestia since the last time we all met in Canterlot,” Cadence said, confused.
“Canterlot,” Luna repeated to herself. “I suppose that fits.”
Cadence shot her husband a questioning look. He could only shrug helplessly.
Suddenly, Twilight was among them, casually taking her seat.
“I see our hosts have arrived,” she acknowledged.
Cadence jumped slightly at her appearance, recovered quickly, then frowned as she scrutinized the purple princess. Shining Armor watched his wife carefully, hoping she would be able to make sense of a situation he could not.
“Princess Cadence tells me that she last saw Celestia in the old capital,” Luna informed Twilight conversationally.
“Probably ancient Celestia,” Twilight replied. “Though we ought to investigate.”
“Twilight,” Cadence interrupted, eyes wide. “Have you been working on aging spells again?”
Twilight seemed to consider her answer carefully. “I have,” she replied at last, her tone giving the distinct impression that she was leaving quite a bit unsaid.
“Well you’re certainly making progress, but can you, um, stop? It’s making me uncomfortable.”
Twilight looked briefly to Luna, who smirked unsympathetically back at her. “I apologize, but I would rather not.”
“What, are you stuck like this or something?” Cadence asked.
“Not technically, no,” Twilight said carefully.
Luna’s smirk escalated to a series of poorly muffled giggles.
“What, then?” Cadence demanded, her patience wearing thin, as it often seemed to in the morning. She fixed Twilight with a glare that under normal circumstances would have extracted any answer from the younger princess. When Twilight simply stared back, unbothered, Cadence’s irritability was replaced by a much deeper dismay.
“She’s not our Twilight,” Shining Armor said breathlessly, as the pieces fell into place. Twilight had told him once about a particular magical experiment, a story that had seemed unbelievable at the time, even for Twilight. She’d said then that she could only perform the spell once, but neither of their guests this morning seemed the type to be bound by such a restriction. “She’s from another time.”
“I told you — under ten minutes!” Luna declared gleefully. “That’s another court session. Lose many more, and you’ll owe me a full gala.”
Cadence’s ears flattened in alarm. “That’s… not supposed to be possible.”
“Oh, it’s quite simple, really. Just another sort of teleport.” Twilight explained, as she gave Luna a sour look. “She didn’t tell you anything before I arrived, did she?”
“Take care with your accusations, sister!” Luna warned sternly.
“Sister?” Shining Armor repeated questioningly. Luna had referred to Twilight that way once already this morning, but as far as he knew, he was the only pony entitled to address her as such.
“Are you threatening the goddess of magic?” Twilight asked darkly. A spoon rose menacingly from her place setting, ensconced in her purple aura.
Cadence’s gaze shifted from Twilight to Luna. “You too?” She asked.
“Suppose that I am?” Luna challenged, oblivious to Cadence’s question. Her horn began to glow ominously.
“Many have made the same mistake.” Twilight shook her head in mock sorrow. “You would do well to learn from their fates.”
“Wait.” Cadence ordered. The pair paused, turning away from one another to look questioningly at her as her eyes darted back and forth between them. “You two?”
Shining frowned at what seemed to be a repetition of Cadence’s earlier question. His wife’s puzzled expression broke into a delirious grin as she emitted something between a sharp gasp and a giddy laugh.
“Really? I never even thought… Wow!” Cadence bubbled excitedly.
For reasons he hoped not to understand, Shining was not comforted by the sudden improvement in his wife’s mood. “So you’re not from this time,” Shining prompted, speaking over the fit of giggles erupting from Cadence.
“Phrasing becomes difficult in these situations,” Luna remarked, preempting a suddenly irritated Twilight. “Twilight would tell you that she is from this time, almost exactly. We are, after all, mere decades from the date of her birth.”
“But you would skip the pedantry and just answer the question, right?” Shining asked hopefully, drawing a scowl from Twilight.
“You haven’t asked a question,” Luna noted flatly.
Shining sighed, wondering if there was some fundamental element of alicorn nature that prevented them from providing simple answers to simple questions. Even Celestia, the most practical-minded of the four by Shining’s reckoning, had an infuriating tendency to interpret any query in the broadest possible scope. Not long into his tenure at Canterlot Palace, he had given up on asking her opinion on guard manners — questions about, for example, what uniform variation might be best for a given night’s formal dinner yielded reflections on the purpose and origins of clothing in equine society.
“We are two and a half millennia older than the iterations of ourselves with whom you are familiar,” Twilight said. “Was that what you wanted to know?”
“Wow!” Cadence exclaimed again, before Shining could respond. “That’s… You know what? This is actually a lot to take in. I’m going back to bed.”
Shining looked back to her in confusion as she stood and made for the dining hall’s exit, her gait the skipping trot of an overstimulated school-filly.
“I don’t remember her being so cheerful,” Luna said after she’d gone. “And pink. Very pink.”
“This was before her dark phase,” Twilight reminded.
Luna nodded sagely, as if this explained a great deal.
“So two thousand years,” Shining said slowly, grappling mentally with the meaning behind the words. “That’s a lot.”
“And now you wonder why we’ve come back,” Luna surmised.
Shining had actually not made it that far yet, but he nodded, eager to think about anything else.
“We didn’t intend to,” Twilight said. “We are in pursuit of Celestia, and she led us here.”
“You’re certain she’s here?” Luna interrupted.
Twilight nodded. “I am now. There are traces.”
“Chasing? Celestia?” Shining found that the new topic wasn’t any easier to process. “Why?”
“Because she must be caught!” Twilight exclaimed as she slammed a hoof emphatically on the table.
“Did she do something?” Shining asked, trying to keep panic out of his voice.
Once, he’d been responsible for maintaining a set of a contingency plans against the potential disasters deemed most likely to threaten the capital. He’d wondered at the time if the task was one Celestia had given him specifically to test his loyalty — six of the top ten doomsday scenarios centered around his sister’s well-documented mental instability. Another three extrapolated from Luna’s fairly apocalyptic track record. Shining didn’t remember off-hoof what else had made the list — probably something about dragons.
All of this came to mind because he was having great difficulty imagining that either of these alicorns was sane by any reasonable definition. Visions of the two mad goddesses chasing their former allies through time threatened his composure, but there was a perverse appeal to the idea that the culmination of an entire nation’s greatest fears had, for the moment at least, taken the form of a particularly surreal breakfast.
“He thinks us insane,” Luna said, seemingly unconcerned by the observation.
“Can you convince me otherwise?” Shining demanded.
“Doubtful,” Twilight answered flatly. “But the same could be said of Celestia. You imagine that there is some rift between us, but I meant exactly what I said: we chase her because she must be caught. The need is hers, not ours.”
Shining had no success making sense of the idea. “I don’t understand.”
“No,” Twilight agreed cheerfully. “You don’t. Shall we be going?”
“What?” Shining sputtered, alarmed by what seemed to be his sudden inclusion in Twilight’s plans.
The chime of a small bell signalled the arrival of the dining hall staff with their food carts.
“After breakfast,” Luna insisted.
“After breakfast.” Twilight confirmed.
That Twilight was essentially a goddess was an idea Shining Armor could accept on an intellectual level. He was fairly comfortable with alicorns — after all, he had married one, and reported directly to another for much of his career. When he spent time with Twilight, though, she was still just little Twily in his mind, albeit with wings and an ever-present throng of admirers seeking her attention and approval. Pondering her immortality, or the depths of her power, was not something that had practical value for him in his day-to-day life — on the few occasions when his mind started in that direction, he was left only with a vague sense of confusion. That, and some late-night resentment over the fact that he could work his way to the top of the royal guard, act as the trusted protector of the ruler of all Equestria, help to rule an entirely different nation, and still somehow be the less accomplished sibling.
Now, though, it seemed he no longer had the option of conveniently tucking away the realities of his sister’s nature in some seldom-visited corner of his mind. The Twilight across from him in the carriage was not little Twily with wings. She was ancient beyond his ability to truly conceptualize. That she even remembered him at all seemed remarkable, given that his lifetime apparently only overlapped with a miniscule portion of hers.
She had always been powerful; when she’d undergone her transformation, it was assumed that she had become even more so, which did not mean all that much to anypony outside her new peer group. Lacking any mortal pony who could serve as a point of comparison, the extent of her abilities was exactly as immeasurable as it had been previously.
If this older Twilight had grown stronger during her long life, Shining Armor would have no way of knowing. What he did know was that this version of his sister was very much at ease with her power. Since the point this morning when he had finally admitted to himself that this was Twilight, in some form, he had found himself repeatedly comparing her to Celestia.
They had the same self-assurance, and the same knowing smile that seemed impervious to the anxieties of normal ponies. She’d just found herself out of place by two millenia and seemed, at most, minorly irked by the fact. Shining knew he ought to be proud, but she was supposed to be his baby sister, and the whole thing was extremely disconcerting.
He found he was not feeling well. Perhaps it was the way his day was going, or maybe it was his occasional difficulty with aerial carriages asserting itself. Since convincing his wife to convert all of the Crystal Empire’s carriages to the closed-top variety, he’d had an easier time with them, but he still preferred to take the train. Closed-top carriages did have their disadvantages. They were considerably more cramped, which in this instance led to a third potential cause for his roiling stomach: he was not at all comfortable with the way Luna and Twilight were sharing the opposite bench.
Some contact was unavoidable in the limited space. Their current degree of familiarity, however, was wholly unnecessary in his view. Rather than the upright posture ponies normally adopted on such a seat, Luna lounged across the entire bench. Apparently unbothered by this, Twilight had wedged herself between the other mare and the seat backing, spooning around to rest her head on Luna’s neck. Their tails blended together into puddle of ethereal soup; it would have been mesmerizing, were the symbolism not so viscerally unappealing.
Shining Armor cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Why are we taking a carriage again? Both of you can fly, and teleport.”
“But you can do neither,” Luna reminded him. “And both would risk discovery by Celestia, in any case.”
“And why did you want me to come along?” He persisted. Explanation had not been forthcoming after breakfast. All too quickly, he’d found himself pressured to arrange a carriage, then ushered into it as soon as it was prepared. He was fairly certain the destination was Canterlot, but the details were hazy.
“You can move about the capital without drawing undue attention. Or, so I assume. It was Twilight who requested your presence. Perhaps she merely misses you.” Luna spoke the last sentence with an almost suspicious earnestness. To Shining, it reeked of an attempt to guilt him into accepting his role in their plans without knowing what it was. He couldn’t honestly guarantee that it wouldn’t be an effective strategy.
“Twilight?” He prodded for confirmation, but his sister was unresponsive. Her closed eyes were the centerpiece of an expression of such contentment that he almost found it heartwarming for a moment, before the queasiness returned.
“You know, there, uh, could be turbulence,” he mumbled, averting his eyes. “So you might not want to sit like that.”
Luna smiled in amusement at his concern, then her eyes narrowed as she scrutinized him more carefully. “We are making you uncomfortable.”
“I was already uncomfortable,” he deflected, embarrassed.
“Twilight.” Luna’s attempt to get Twilight’s attention was no more successful than Shining Armor’s, until she turned her head and nibbled softly on a purple ear.
“Hmm?” Twilight finally responded, one eyelid sliding up halfway.
“Your brother is disturbed by our behavior.” Luna informed her.
“He’ll live,” Twilight predicted tiredly.
“Of course,” Luna agreed. “But we had thought he would be at least somewhat prepared as of this date.”
Twilight frowned as she reluctantly allowed both of her eyes to open fully. “Shining, where do I live right now?”
Shining was slow to respond. “You, as in…”
“As in Twilight, the littlest princess, age... what, forty?” Twilight supplied impatiently.
“Twenty-six,” Shining corrected. “She lives in Ponyville.”
“I see,” Twilight murmured. “I wonder if we misunderstood Celestia’s objective in bringing us to this time.”
“Why is that?” Luna asked skeptically.
“If I still live in Ponyville, this is before the, er, awakening, and all the surrounding events. But it can’t be much earlier, based on the other milestones we’ve noted.”
“You think she wants to disrupt it?”
Twilight shook her head. “I don’t believe that’s possible. More importantly, neither does she. But I can’t imagine it was an accident, bringing us this close.”
Luna snorted dismissively. “Assuming this is more than her standard variety of undirected mischief gives her too much credit, sister. Bizarre psychological games are more your style.”
“When have I ever—”
“Stop!” Shining Armor interrupted, anguish in his voice. “Stop calling each other that. She’s my sister, not yours. And even though you aren’t actually related, acting like you are and then doing this—” Shining gestured helplessly with a hoof at the pair across from him, “is the literally the creepiest thing I have ever seen in my life.”
The alicorns stared at him in silence for a moment without any discernable shame.
“Well, you’re still young,” Luna said finally.
“Oh, be nice,” Twilight chided. “Shining, brother… What did I once call you? Some absurd acronym or abbreviation as I recall. Would that help?”
Shining set his jaw and refused to meet her gaze.
“We are alicorns. There are only a few of us, all female, and we’ve bonded over centuries of shared purpose. It is very much a sisterhood. Celestia and Luna never shared a womb in any literal sense. You must know that. They came into the world centuries apart, appearing as their domains required them. I’m as much a sister to them as they are to each other in that sense.”
“That doesn’t make it any less creepy,” Shining growled, keeping his eyes trained on the window next to him, but not really seeing anything through it.
“I can’t help you with that, I’m afraid. I’m honestly a bit surprised you find it so upsetting. You’re married yourself, to the goddess of love, as it happens. I wouldn’t expect you to be so squeamish.”
“Okay, leave aside the weird sibling thing, and forget about the fact that you’re my little sister and I’ve never seen you act affectionate with anypony prior to draping yourself all over Princess Luna here. I didn’t even know you liked mares! How much older than you is she?”
“Not even a single order of magnitude anymore,” Twilight answered with a laugh. “Though that makes me wonder: have you ever asked Cadence her age?”
“Of course!” Shining exclaimed indignantly, finally looking at his sister again.
“And?”
“Well...” Shining hesitated as he considered. He had asked, on many occasions, in fact, but now that he thought about it he’d never gotten a straight answer — she’d always found some way to redirect or interrupt him, and the fact that he hadn’t even thought it strange to this point made him wonder if there was some magical component to her ongoing evasion.
Luna’s amused smirk was banished by a sharp look from Twilight.
“You aren’t going to tell me either, are you?” Shining grumbled the question.
“Is that really something you want?” Twilight asked, voice tinged with the sort of patient wisdom that was completely infuriating coming from one’s little sister.
It wasn’t, of course, something he wanted — the problem wasn’t that he didn’t know Cadence’s age, it was that she didn’t wish to tell him. Hearing it second-hoof wouldn’t help with that. He let the conversation die as he fell into a deep introspection of the sort normally reserved for nights defined either by Ponyville cider or the spirit that was, by recent royal decree, no longer to be called ‘moonshine’. Twilight’s knowing eyes lingered on him a few minutes longer before closing again.
Twilight Sparkle could not please all of the ponies all of the time; so she repeated to herself as she strode nervously through the halls of Canterlot Palace, using her expert knowledge of the ancient structure to avoid primary corridors, crowded intersections, and most critically, guard checkpoints and patrols. This was the second time she’d opted to teleport directly from Ponyville to Canterlot for official business. The first time, she’d mentioned it in passing to Celestia, who had nodded, poured her some tea, and found her for the barest instant with one of her extraordinarily expressive, completely neutral glances.
“You’re a princess, and you can make your own decisions,” the expression had said. “I’m sure you had a good reason to deny your loyal servants the opportunity to perform the duty to which they’ve aspired since joining the service.”
Despite her attempts to avoid royal entanglements, Twilight had found herself spending ever more time in Canterlot as the years passed. An average week now included three to four visits, with the occasional overnight thrown in. There came a point when all of the ceremony surrounding The Royal Commute was more than she was prepared to endure on a daily basis.
Teleportation certainly seemed like a way to simplify things, but simplification was apparently not within the purview of a proper pony princess. The looks of resentment she’d been receiving, not just from guardsponies, but palace functionaries and even royal messengers, had only just started to fade; it seemed royal staff everywhere shared a communal pool of hurt feelings, from which all could draw equally regardless of who may have initially been slighted.
This time would be different, though. She was only needed for a brief meeting with Celestia and Luna, and it would take place in a relatively low-traffic area of the palace. She could get in and out without attracting any notice, and of course she wouldn’t mention her method of transport to either of the other princesses today. Her personal guards back in Ponyville wouldn’t even know she had left.
Though Twilight was, all things considered, a fairly level-headed pony most of the time, she had for most of her life been prone to delusions of mundanity. Chief among these was the idea that she, Twilight Sparkle, could do anything at all without attracting notice. Since the day when, as a filly, she’d set about forcibly rearranging a large part of Canterlot in reaction to hearing a very loud noise, her every move had been notable.
Even in Ponyville, where citizens were generally more polite about their constant observation of her, Twilight was, despite her inexplicable beliefs to the contrary, a spectacle everywhere she went. Today, her attempt at keeping a low profile had delayed palace-wide knowledge of her arrival by nearly a minute. Fortunately, there was another exciting arrival to distract the palace gossips.
Hoping it would aid in what she still believed to be an adequately stealthy entry, Twilight was relieved by the general aura of bustle in the palace. Her sense of purpose gave way to curiosity, however, as ponies rushed through the halls and officials entered the rare, frantic state of accelerated bureaucracy that in Twilight’s experience could only be prompted by an unannounced visit from a foreign head of state.
Against her better judgement, Twilight joined the tide of excitable ponies headed to the palace landing. They immediately made room for her, and she soon found herself standing on the landing, a crowd of chattering ponies half-surrounding her at a distance of about ten meters. The object of her attention and theirs was one of the Crystal Empire’s distinctive carriages, which had come into view at just about the time Twilight had stepped out onto the landing, and was now settling gently onto the pad designated by Canterlot’s aerial traffic directors.
A shadow and a wingbeat heralded the arrival of another pony on the landing. That this newcomer didn’t hesitate to land in the impromptu exclusion zone around Twilight suggested that she was one of three specific ponies, or, if Twilight was correct about the occupants of the carriage, one of two. Shifting her gaze, she saw a sleepy-looking Luna regarding the carriage with the same confusion Twilight felt.
“Greetings, Twilight,” Luna said upon being noticed. “I see that your own carriage is not present. Have you sent it back to your palace, to return for you later?”
Luna was still a difficult read for Twilight, especially when she was in her less expressive moods. She thought she detected a note of hope in the question, as if Luna were pleased that Twilight might be spending long enough in the capital to necessitate such an arrangement, but it could just as easily be a passive-aggressive indictment of her choice to forgo the use of the carriage entirely.
She shook her head, then attempted to change the subject. “Were you expecting Cadence today? I thought she wouldn’t be back in Canterlot for another two weeks, at least.”
“No,” Luna said, sounding preoccupied as she scrutinized the carriage carefully. As yet, no pony had emerged from it. “Tell me, Twilight, do you see or sense anything strange about this vehicle?”
Twilight looked back to the carriage, confused. “No, not really.” Luna had a habit of asking nonsensical questions just to provoke reactions, and it was sometimes difficult to say whether a given query was meant earnestly, or was one of the princess’s frequent social experiments.
“Neither do I!” Luna declared, more force behind her voice than was probably necessary.
“Okay, then,” Twilight replied awkwardly, not sure where to take the conversation from here.
“Pay me no heed,” Luna blurted in a rare lapse of her standard formality. “I am merely losing what’s left of my mind.”
She laughed with what Twilight was oddly proud to recognize as self-consciousness. The ability to correctly discern Luna’s feelings — even those she didn’t wish to hide — from moment to moment had, to date, belonged only to Princess Celestia. Twilight was making progress, though, and that excited her for reasons she didn’t completely understand.
“Oh. Well, um, please don’t do that,” Twilight said uncertainly.
Luna stared at her for a long moment with what may have been disappointment. “Very well,” she said solemnly.
Twilight wondered frantically if she had missed some cue. She searched her memory for information about social conventions involving declarations of impending insanity. Maybe she was supposed to reassure the princess? It wasn’t often that she allowed other ponies, even those closest to her, to witness such vulnerability.
“I mean, I really like it when you aren’t crazy,” Twilight added, hoping it wasn’t too late.
“Ah, the prince,” Luna said, as if Twilight had not spoken. “And it seems he is alone. I shall leave him to you. Good day.” She took to the sky before Twilight could respond, disappearing behind the palace’s central tower as she returned to her personal balcony.
Twilight was still trying to work out the implications of the interaction when Shining Armor made his way to her.
“Hey, Princess,” he greeted, the uncharacteristic use of her title and faux-cheer infusing the words drawing a suspicious look from his younger sister. “Guess Princess Luna had somewhere to be, huh? Were you two, uh... talking about anything important?”
Affecting nonchalance was actually one of Shining Armor’s more refined skills — any good captain had to be able to convince his subordinates that all was well as they faced certain doom. His failure now was more than slightly alarming.
“Are you a changeling?” Twilight asked bluntly.
“No! Well…” Shining seemed to reconsider for a moment. “No, that wouldn’t make sense. So, quick question for you, Twi: is your body just a concession to those of us constrained by physical form? Like, are you actually some kind of omnipresent essence and you manifest like this to make us more comfortable?”
“What?” Twilight sputtered, dismay over her brother’s odd behavior deepening.
Shining nodded as if he’d received a meaningful answer. “Okay. Hey, I just realized I’ve never done the Canterlot wine tour. So… Later!”
“What?” Twilight asked again.
“No, I think it’s better if you sit this one out,” Shining said in response to a question that hadn’t been asked. “Probably no-deities day or something like that. Anyway, I’m sure you have some world-defining chore or whatever to do, right? Otherwise, why would you be here?”
He trotted off toward the crowd of onlookers between himself and the palace doors, while Twilight continued to stare dumbfounded at the spot where he’d stood.
“No questions today,” he notified the crowd with the same false amiability. “Just a prince-consort here, nopony important.”
“I don’t think he’ll actually be very useful,” Luna said mildly from her perch on the cloud. She and Twilight were looking down upon the landing from far above Canterlot, keen pegasus eyes and a sound conduction spell allowing them to take in the proceedings from afar.
“Maybe not,” Twilight allowed. “He does seem a bit shaken up. There’s still time, though.”
Luna grunted her opinion of Twilight’s optimism, then moved on to a new topic. “That was painfully awkward.”
Even after so many years, Twilight struggled to keep track of Luna’s conversational shifts. “The situation with Shining?” She guessed. “It’s a lot for him to take in.”
“No, with us,” Luna corrected.
“‘Us’ as in…” Twilight prompted.
“Them. Us-them.”
“Right.” She looked at Luna, a hint of irritation in her eyes. “We always said we’d never do this enough to require new linguistic constructs.”
“Address the matter with Celestia, when we find her,” Luna advised.
“She didn’t come out to greet Shining,” Twilight said with a frown. “I had hoped she would, so we could get a look at her.”
“We may have to be more aggressive,” Luna suggested.
Twilight’s brow furrowed. “How much more aggressive?”
“The eclipse approaches,” Luna noted, knowing Twilight would not care for the idea.
Predictably, Twilight shook her head. “If you so much as touch that process, Now-Luna will know something is wrong.”
“She’ll know something is wrong, but not what,” Luna argued. “More importantly, Celestia — either or both — will feel it as well, and will have to act.”
“We aren’t here to throw Equestria into chaos,” Twilight reminded her.
They were interrupted by a spectacular explosion of streamers. A familiar annoyance stood at its center, maniacal grin adorning his face. “Did somepony say chaos?”
“Hello, Discord,” Twilight greeted sedately. Luna acknowledged the avatar of chaos with a glance, and then looked again to Canterlot below.
“Oh, it’s you two,” Discord realized with obvious distaste. His festive decorations dissolved into the air, along with his good mood. “Can I assume that you will not be staying?”
“That’s the plan, anyway,” Twilight answered, noncommittal.
“I’ll be going, then,” he said, and started to drift away on a stray breeze before a purple aura caught him and set him back on the cloud.
“Just a moment. You haven’t seen Celestia around, have you?” Twilight asked, her cordial tone contrasting with the firm grip in which she held the draconequus.
“You mean your Celestia, I presume,” Discord replied. “No, I have been fortunate enough to avoid any such unpleasantness. Will that be all?”
“Always a pleasure,” Twilight said with a smile as she released her hold. Discord grumbled incoherently to himself as he floated off.
“Is he really still sulking over the Zebrika affair?” Luna asked, as she watched him fade into the distance.
“Apparently. Doesn’t take a joke as well as one might think, does he?”
Luna snorted lightly in amusement. They lapsed into silence for some time, each looking meditatively down on the city.
“We cannot wait forever for your brother to — wait, this may be promising.”
Words could not adequately convey the excitement of Pinot Noir, guide of the Canterlot wine tour, when he’d found that Shining Armor would be attending today. To have the prince himself as a customer would elevate the tour’s already enviable profile among the capital’s elite. Perhaps he would even pose for a picture, to be used in new promotional materials. Hope turned to horror fairly quickly, however, when Pinot was forced to consider the very real possibility that his tour would, from this day forward, be associated with Shining Armor’s surrender to alcohol poisoning.
The prince was not the first to overindulge on the tour; the local nobility were known for neither fortitude nor restraint. In their case, though, solutions were near at hoof. Firstly, the various wineries of Canterlot had no compunctions about refusing to serve them once they’d become more of a disruption than their profitability justified. In contrast, Shining Armor was, due either to status or natural charisma, not having any difficulty keeping a filled glass before him at any of the establishments visited.
The second line of defense, the city guard, was typically quite efficient in keeping the streets clear of troublemakers. Unfortunately, their definition of the term could under no circumstances include this particular stallion, given his legendary history within their service. They very carefully failed to notice him as he weaved through the streets between stops, becoming increasingly loud and decreasingly coherent as the day wore on.
En route to the tour’s fourth winery, they crossed paths with Princess Luna and her standard retinue of guards and aides. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, particularly this close to a certain confectionary known to be favored by both of the royal sisters. On a normal day, Pinot Noir would direct his group’s attention to the princess, allow the out-of-towners among them to gawk in the standard fashion, and move on as soon as the traffic jam that always followed any princess in public had dispersed.
Today, though, he happened to have an unruly, drunken prince along, and he was not enthusiastic about the possibilities arising from that situation. There was a certain inevitability to the way Shining Armor broke ranks with the tour group and stumbled erratically towards the princess, as if it was destined to happen from the moment Pinot Noir first imagined the scenario. Pinot considered his options, taking a long look at the crowded intersection ahead and the inebriated stallion lurching through it, then assessing the comparatively bare side-street by which they’d arrived at this point. The tour itinerary changed with record speed.
“You!” Shining Armor bellowed, as he pushed gracelessly through the perimeter of onlookers around the princess. Luna’s guards belatedly intercepted him, faces grim as they moved to restrain a pony who was likely a personal hero to each of them.
“Prince,” Luna acknowledged formally as she signalled her guards to stand down. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Saw you with Twi ‘s’mornin’,” he slurred angrily. He pointed an accusatory hoof at her, then hastily returned it to the ground as his balance began to fail. “Y’think I donno what you were talkin’ about?”
Luna’s nose wrinkled as the alcoholic stench of Shining’s breath reached it. “Nothing of interest, I assure you,” she said carefully, marvelling at the state of the stallion before her.
“Oh, I’m innerested,” Shining insisted. “Can’t just move in on Twily like that, not without talkin’ to me about it!”
“Move in on?” Luna repeated, not familiar with the expression. “Some manner of cohabitation agreement?”
Shining blinked dully as he processed the response, then he spoke again with renewed outrage. “Tha’s just what yer after, isn’ it? Shackin’ up with my li’l sister!”
“Shining Armor,” Luna addressed him sharply, “I am not sure what—”
She was interrupted by a blinding purple flash. There was a surprised grunt from the stallion, then another flash. When her eyes cleared, Shining Armor was nowhere to be found. Luna scanned the crowd and, finding nothing, mentally shrugged to herself.
“Lilly,” she called to her aide. “Vernacular.”
Luna’s pupils shrank to pinpricks as Shining’s accusations were reluctantly explained to her.
“Now-Twilight is quite the spoilsport,” Luna complained disappointedly.
“Agreed.”
“Where do you suppose she took him?”
“Judging from the power of that teleport, all the way back to the empire.” Twilight squinted into the distance, as if she could see the spire of the Crystal Palace from where she sat.
“Well, unless you plan to fetch him, we’ll need another…” Luna trailed off, turning to look with alarm at the eastern horizon. Twilight shot her a questioning glance. “I think I may know what Celestia’s plans are,” she almost whispered.
Twilight followed her gaze. “You cannot be serious.”
The words were more plea than statement.
Behind a plastic smile that could best be described as ‘severe’, Luna was discovering novel varieties of mental and emotional turmoil. They knew. If Shining Armor knew, they all knew. She cursed the social ineptitude that inevitably followed her millennium of isolation. She’d arrogantly thought she could hide it, but she must have been broadcasting her childish infatuation to every pony that cared to see this entire time.
“Luna, did you have anything to add?” Celestia asked, looking across the table at her with a puzzled expression.
“I…” Luna’s eyes wandered to Twilight, who was still intently studying the small table around which the trio was sitting. She had refused to make eye contact for the duration of the meeting, which only reinforced Luna’s paranoia every time she dared to glance her way. “No.”
“Well, then.” Celestia paused, frowning slightly. No doubt she was considering the depths of Luna’s depravity behind that flawless mask of hers. “I suppose that’s all we need to cover today. Are you two feeling alright?”
“Just fine!” Twilight exclaimed, her voice a squeaking parody of cheer.
“My health is unsurpassed!” Luna boomed simultaneously.
Celestia sighed, giving them both a look of exasperation. “How nice for you,” she said as she stood to leave. “You know where to find me.”
Yes, Luna knew where to find her, if ever she wished to be shamed for developing feelings for her savior. It wasn’t unreasonable, Luna ranted mentally at an imaginary Celestia, to care for the pony that had freed you, first from the prison of your own madness, and later that of social isolation. It wasn’t her fault that Twilight’s coat was exactly the right shade of purple, or that the aura of unbridled magic that surrounded her was so utterly intoxicating. She couldn’t be blamed for thinking, when Twilight had transcended her mortality, that it had the feel of destiny to it. That maybe, just maybe, she had found her eternal partner.
A stifled cough at her side snapped Luna back to the moment and alerted her to the fact that she was not alone. Apparently Twilight had not followed Celestia out of the room, something she had failed to note while lost in her silent self-justification.
“Um, Luna,” Twilight started.
“No.” Luna interrupted harshly. “I do not wish to speak with you, Twilight Sparkle.”
Twilight’s ears drooped. “Oh.”
Luna nearly lost control of her stony expression as a wave of sympathy threatened to overwhelm her. It was hard to think of Twilight as being in any way vulnerable. From Luna’s perspective, at least, Twilight seemed to take everything in stride, casually accomplishing the impossible on a routine basis, never the worse for wear. As Twilight spent more time around Canterlot, though, Luna had on a few occasions witnessed true distress in the younger alicorn. It surprised her and gripped at her heart every time.
As in those previous instances, all Luna wanted to do at the moment was to encase Twilight in her wings and hold her until any trace of sorrow was erased. Such an action was neither appropriate, nor, she told herself, desired. Struggling to maintain her composure, Luna stood abruptly and stomped out of the room, teleporting to her private balcony as soon as she was a few steps down the corridor.
Twilight’s clear desire to speak to her privately, coupled with her equally-obvious apprehension at doing so, set Luna on edge. After her encounter with Shining Armor earlier in the afternoon, she saw only one probable objective: Twilight was planning to ‘let her down easy,’ as the modern parlance would have it. No doubt Twilight — and everypony else — had been hoping they could continue their act of obliviousness indefinitely. Luna rather wished they could herself, but the drunken prince had irrevocably destroyed that illusion.
She stared into the setting sun with a focus and intensity recommended against by most physicians. Particularly in their youth, the royal pony sisters had made a practice of simply avoiding those with whom their relationships had soured until such time as said ponies were no longer around to make things awkward. It wasn’t the most mature of tactics, but Celestia and Luna had not always been the most mature of ponies. She couldn’t simply wait out Twilight’s life, though; with Twilight, forever had meaning. It would have been such a happy thought, under different circumstances.
Through the open balcony door, she heard a rapping from the entryway to her chambers. It wasn’t the precisely rhythmic knocking of her personal guards, nor the patiently insistent cadence of her elder sister. Only one realistic possibility remained.
Luna allowed herself a melancholy sigh as she willed the door to open.
Twilight Sparkle’s schedule had become something of a mess. It had been bad enough when Celestia had abruptly rescheduled their meeting for the late afternoon. Earlier anxieties about upsetting her drivers, guards, and literally every other pony even peripherally associated with the royal establishment aside, the move kept her in Canterlot for several hours she’d hoped to spend catching up on matters closer to home.
Even as she spent less time in Ponyville, the town turned to her more and more frequently for resolution of local problems. She would be worried about undermining the mayor at this point, if the mayor herself were not one of her most frequent petitioners. The convenient location of her castle as compared to Canterlot, and the perception, accurate or not, of her hometown bias, made her an attractive target for all manner of requests and complaints that ponies would likely never consider taking to the other princesses.
Ponyville would have to wait, though, and so would this week’s night with the girls. It was nearly sundown, and Twilight still had two critical items on her to-do list. One, she had to talk to Luna. Two, she had to blink back over to the Crystal Empire and find out what exactly was wrong with her brother. She had no idea how long either task would take.
Luna was, as always, a puzzle. Twilight understood that the princess was upset. She’d recently been accosted in public by an angry, drunk prince — not the usual one, either. Still, it seemed unreasonable to direct that anger at Twilight. Admittedly, it would have been ideal if she’d been able to remove him from the streets just a few minutes earlier, but she had acted swiftly as soon as one of Shining’s old colleagues had alerted her to his condition. Regardless, Twilight was not responsible for her brother’s actions, much as she might be humiliated by them.
It irked her that Luna did not seem to recognize that simple fact. It always stung when she felt Luna was unhappy with her, but this was different. Deep down, Twilight believed that Luna had a sacred duty to be a pony of exactly the quality Twilight imagined her to be. Deviations from that ideal, rare though they were, constituted betrayal.
Part of her held out hope that she was misinterpreting Luna’s harsh manner. Perhaps she was troubled by something else, and was not angry with Twilight specifically. It wouldn’t exactly be good behavior, but at least it wouldn’t be terribly unjust. Every pony had bad days, after all. Or, better yet, maybe Twilight had unknowingly done something awful today and Luna’s anger was completely appropriate. She found herself excited by the very notion; Luna would still be Luna, and Twilight would just have to find a way to atone for whatever sin she’d committed.
She was standing at Luna’s door, not entirely sure whether she’d walked or teleported to arrive there. The expressions of the guards to either side of the door offered no clues in that regard. Their faces remained passive as she reached a hoof past them to knock. She was well within her rights to call on Luna, of course, so she wouldn’t expect the move to trouble them. They would likely object soon, when Twilight removed the door entirely, though. Not that there would be much they could do about it — they would alert Celestia, at least, whose reaction Twilight would be interested to see.
As she waited for a response she knew wasn’t coming, Twilight wondered whether it would be best to vaporize the door, or simply lift it from its hinges and set it aside. She believed strongly that breaking and entering was actually less invasive than teleporting inside; at least this way she acknowledged the boundaries she was violating.
Before she could further refine her renovation plans, the door fell open before her. Hiding her surprise, she nodded to the guards and stepped through, her magic closing it behind her. Through the oversized windows that composed the exterior wall, she saw Luna standing on the balcony, facing away from her. Having been admitted to the room, Twilight no longer saw any insult in teleporting within it, and she opted to join Luna with a flash of magical exertion rather than attempting to negotiate the surprisingly cluttered chamber on foot.
“Out with it,” Luna demanded sharply as Twilight appeared at her side.
“Why are you so angry with me?” Twilight asked, confusion blending with hope in her voice. All she needed was for Luna to have a reasonable justification — everything else was manageable.
“Angry?” Luna chuckled humorlessly. “I’m not angry, I’m frightened. Of you. Of what you’ve come to say.”
“What?” Twilight’s befuddlement reached dizzying new heights.
Luna finally looked at her, dispelling any doubts about her claim. Her expression was one Twilight had not seen on the princess since she’d awoken on the floor of her ruined castle, hours after the two had first met. Then, she’d faced her sister, powerless, with the expectation that she would shortly be returned to her banishment — or worse. The idea that Twilight could instill that sort of terror in Luna was more than upsetting. It was, quite simply, not acceptable.
“After your brother revealed my failure to properly conceal certain feelings, I knew you would need to make clear your lack of similar feelings. So, please, proceed.”
“What?” The single word seemed to be the extent of Twilight’s verbal capacity at the moment.
Luna growled in frustration. “I am not a child, Twilight Sparkle. Do not attempt to coddle me.”
She turned away, looking again to where the last remnants of the sun’s glow were fading on the horizon. Almost automatically, her horn lit. The inelegance of the action reflecting her emotional state, Luna wrenched her moon into the darkening sky, then frowned.
Twilight gaped silently, their conversation and the associated distress forgotten. Even though she had not found time for stargazing in a number of months she didn’t care to count, she still considered herself an astronomer; notable astral events still found a place on her mental calendar, where she could conveniently ignore them in favor of the crisis of the week. She had still very much hoped to escape her duties long enough to observe the lunar eclipse in three days’ time, though.
This would be the first since Luna’s return, and Twilight had been anticipating it for years now. Neither of the lunar eclipses Twilight had witnessed in her youth had lived up to the ancient poetry on the subject — in retrospect, it made sense that the princess of the sun would not be able to put on a particularly inspiring show, when the primary feature of said show was the sun’s absence.
Three days premature, the eclipse should have been alarming, but Twilight only managed entrancement. As had become depressingly common, her plans were once again derailed by some sort of divine meddling. She couldn’t quite summon the usual outrage tonight, though. She certainly couldn’t have planned it better. There was no place she’d rather be for this, nor any pony with whom she’d rather watch. This was everything she had imagined.
It was with great disappointment, then, that she felt a familiar pulling sensation. At least this time there was no explosion.
The elder pair arrived first, owing to their proximity to the moon as it rose.
“So, how did she manage this without alerting you?” Twilight asked, controlling her frustration as best she could. “The locals don’t seem to have sensed anything amiss either.”
“I don’t know,” Luna admitted unashamedly. “I assume she manipulated the solar side of the equation. That may explain why Now-Luna didn’t feel it, but it should have been doubly alarming to the current Celestia.”
“Well,” Twilight said, calming as she let her angst bleed away. “Nothing we can do about it now.” With her pursuers conveniently occupied here, Celestia would be free to make her next move without any worry of being tracked. She would almost certainly be gone by the time Twilight and Luna returned to Equestria.
“I always wondered why we weren’t returned here for later eclipses,” Luna mused. “I had hoped to visit again.”
Twilight had wasted quite a bit of thought on the subject herself, before swearing off the whole line of inquiry in a moderately successful attempt to preserve her sanity. This place — or, rather, this non-place — was exactly the sort of mystical nonsense for which her logical mind was utterly unequipped.
“Well, here we are,” Twilight said, only the slightest hint of exasperation still present in her voice.
The two mares spent a moment in quiet reflection, nostalgia washing over them as they remembered their previous visit over two dozen centuries ago.
“They’ll be here any moment,” Twilight said at last. “I don’t think we can hide.”
Luna surveyed their surroundings and came to the same conclusion. “Maybe if we stand very still,” she proposed.
Twilight fixed her with a look of disbelief — one that stayed frozen on her face as a sudden flash signalled the arrival their younger selves.
It would take a normal pony more than a lifetime to pore through the wealth of knowledge stored in the Royal Archives of Canterlot, the Grand Central Library of Manehattan, and the Cloudsdale historical museums. When finished, this hypothetical pony would still know surprisingly little about alicorns. Scientists throughout Equestrian history had been more than willing to document every possible detail of the sun, but had very little attention to spare for its keeper. The same could be said for other alicorns and their domains.
This neglect may have been rooted in a professional distaste for what those in scientific circles saw as the territory of mystics. That there weren’t very many alicorns to study and they tended to be rather inaccessible only compounded the issue. The only widely available information, then, came straight from the horses’ mouths.
The horses in question were not particularly knowledgeable either, however. They didn’t know what tied them to their domains, or what source, if any, granted them their power. They didn’t know what brought them into being or why. Why were there alicorns of the sun and moon, but none for oceans or forests or other forces of nature? Why had Twilight been born a mortal pony when none of the others had? Would there be more in the future? Could they die?
Celestia herself knew scarcely more than the common pony along these lines, and she’d had centuries longer than anypony else to ponder the questions. So it was that goddess of magic and the goddess of the night, while both quite competent in overseeing their domains, were completely ignorant as to the intersection of those domains.
They stood in stunned silence for a long moment after their arrival, each struggling to find words to express their confusion.
The last time Twilight had been plucked from the mortal plane, she’d found herself quite alone at her destination. That wasn’t to say the place had been empty — it was overwhelmingly full of Twilight herself, and those eternal seconds before Celestia had arrived to help her make sense of it were still difficult to think about. This time, Twilight’s was not the overwhelming presence, which made the situation almost pleasant by comparison, if no more comprehensible.
“This place is… yours?” Twilight managed finally.
Luna responded with a look of bafflement that seemed to disprove the idea.
“It feels like you,” Twilight said defensively.
“It does not,” Luna contradicted forcefully. “It is magic. It is yours. You have brought us here, somehow.”
Twilight opened her mouth to argue, then closed it as the scientist within assumed control. Research before debate, always.
The ground could not exactly be called that; it had no form, color, or texture, and was only noticeable in that neither pony appeared to be in free fall. She poked at it with a hoof, feeling as if she were carving away at the walls of reality. An amorphous something broke loose, and melted into glittering dust. This was magic, in pure form, and Twilight made it dance before her without conscious thought.
“You see?” Luna asked, as she watched the whirlwind twist and flash through patterns more complex than she could fully appreciate.
“There is magic,” Twilight admitted, frowning. “But that’s not all that’s here.”
On a whim, Twilight directed her dust upwards. Distance wasn’t a reliable concept here — meters or miles away, the stream scattered against some invisible barrier, dispersing into a breathtaking starscape. The mares stared in wonder for some time.
There was an eerie sense of realism about the place that contrasted with its dreamlike presentation. It was not Equestria in a literal sense, but it offered a view of their home that was somehow undiluted and untainted by the thousands of years of complications ponies had invented to fill it. What they saw here reflected the base truths of their world. What they did here affected the same.
“I think I see,” Luna said eventually, her voice unsteady. “Stars are magic. Little astral reservoirs. Yet another part of me that actually belongs to you.”
Twilight let the implications of the words and their tragic wistfulness settle over her in silence. Her mind wrestled with the idea that the stars themselves could be hers, even as she knew it was true. She felt them, now — every one of the thousands that twinkled above was part of her greater web, the infinitely complex flow which she had only just begun to understand.
“There’s something missing.” The words spilled out as the thought occurred to her. She looked at Luna expectantly, unbothered for once by her own lapse of self-control.
Luna met her gaze with a blank confusion that yielded almost immediately to the burning violet of Twilight’s eyes. She nodded her acknowledgement and, knowing somehow that she could, summoned her moon directly to the center of the sky. The effect was immediate; as the stars began to dance around their newly arrived anchor, an already entrancing display was multiplied to indescribable extent.
Neither could say how long they stayed that way, a part of each frolicking in the sky while they also watched, spellbound, below. When Twilight’s eyes finally strayed from their astral playground, she noticed that they were not alone.
“Oh,” she said, with a startled awkwardness that seemed utterly unfit for their surroundings. Maybe these two alicorns had been here all along. It seemed, for some reason, entirely possible that she had simply failed to notice them earlier.
Luna looked down to see what had diverted the younger alicorn’s attention. “Oh,” she repeated in a similar tone. Aside from their shimmering manes, the two figures were completely still. “Are they real?”
Twilight reached out timidly with a hoof and touched the nearest, provoking no reaction. “I don’t know,” she said. That this pony felt as she might expect a pony to feel probably didn’t mean much here. “Define ‘real’?”
Luna scowled, in no mood for spontaneous philosophical exercises. The motionless ponies before her were both familiar, each in their own way. One was Luna, a realization by which she was oddly unfazed. This did seem as likely a place as any to meet herself; with a mental shrug she moved on to the other.
The second figure made her wonder uneasily whether one or both had been pilfered from her subconscious. The guardian of dreams had dreams of her own, and in those dreams, this pony had made increasingly frequent appearances. She’d never had such a complete, unobstructed view, however. Dreams being what they were, she would see a silhouette one night, a billowing mane the next, always accompanied by vague feelings of association that never fit to words in the waking world.
Her eyes scanned the pony with a frantic fascination, desperate to absorb every detail. She wanted to invent new words, or perhaps an entire language, to describe what she saw. Eventually, though, she settled for a plain, honest statement.
“You are beautiful, Twilight Sparkle.”
“Um,” Twilight replied eloquently.
Luna looked back to her with a weak smile that carried affection alongside trepidation. “Do you not see?”
“What?”
“This is you. Your marvelous future.”
Twilight leered suspiciously at the figure, taking in its mature features, its tall, slender form, and the power that seemed to radiate from it. In all the confusion that surrounded her ascendance, one constant comfort was the mental pedestal upon which she still kept the royal sisters. The idea that she might become like them, even if only physically, was fundamentally unsettling. “No,” she denied, “I could never be that.”
Twilight shook her head, seeking but not finding clarity of mind. She turned her attention to the other statue, examining it for several seconds, her expression unreadable. “It’s perfect,” she said, more to herself than Luna, as she walked a circle around the figure.
Luna shifted uncomfortably while she pondered the ambiguity of the statement. Was Twilight merely noting the accuracy of the likeness, or saying something more meaningful about its subject? The terror she’d felt when Twilight had come to her balcony to speak with her had abated somewhat as they had shared the bliss of their night sky, but now it was back in full force. Unwilling to tolerate it any longer, she forced herself to act.
“Twilight,” she said, then nearly froze as the younger mare looked up at her. “You know how I feel,” she continued, each word an effort. “You know that I love you. I need to know…” She trailed off, her strength of will abandoning her once her meaning was clear.
Only a pony of Twilight’s particular gifts could have remained oblivious for so long. The princess of the night had not been dropping hints so much as she had been issuing bulletins. As always, everything was obvious in hindsight. Coherent thought fled her mind. What remained tumbled, unfiltered, from her mouth.
“Oh! Well, um… I mean… That’s, er…”
With each failed response, Luna’s face fell a bit further. Twilight watched in helpless despair, knowing that something was terribly wrong but too mentally disjointed to identify the problem and correct it.
“That’s not how it works,” her own voice reprimanded her, dripping with frustration. “Tell her, right now, that she’s your favorite pony in the entire world.”
“Oh.” Twilight considered the advice.
Was it true? Especially now, she couldn’t deny the connection she felt to the older princess, but the exact nature of that connection was not something she could easily describe. A bottomless rabbit hole of self-analysis awaited, but for once in her life she opted away from that path. That choice, and the ease with which she made it, told her more than any amount of soul-searching could have.
“Luna.”
Luna raised her head from where it hung despondently. The princess was fighting a losing battle against the tears that were welling in her eyes.
“You are my favorite pony in the entire world.” Twilight spoke with escalating giddiness, as she realized that it truly was that simple.
“That really shouldn’t have worked,” Twilight said, a disbelieving note in her voice. She stretched her rear legs one after another, trying in vain to relieve their stiffness. Her abilities were many and storied, but standing so completely still for such a long time was very nearly beyond her. Measuring or otherwise describing the flow of time where they’d been was a fool’s errand. In Equestria, it appeared that about five hours had passed.
Luna only snickered. Both were peering over the edge of their cloud to a balcony far below, where a different Luna and Twilight showed no signs of waking soon. The young Twilight was still small enough that Luna’s possessively outstretched wing almost completely obscured her, allowing only the tip of her muzzle and a hint of her glowing tail to be seen.
“They’re just too precious, aren’t they?”
Both alicorns jumped up in surprise, turning to face a very familiar pony. They scrutinized her in silence for a moment, then shared a meaningful glance to confirm their mutual conclusion: this wasn’t the one they were after.
Celestia laughed at their reaction in her politely mocking way. “You didn’t think she managed this without my help, did you?”
“You met her? She spoke to you?” Luna asked, aghast.
“Yes, she mentioned that you would be upset by that.” Celestia indulged in the slightest of eye-rolls, speaking volumes about her regard for that particular concern. “In all seriousness, you cannot know how gratifying it is to see you like this. Both of you.” She paused, considering. “Or, maybe you can. How am I to know what you’ve been up to all these years?”
She chuckled to herself and stepped over to the edge of the cloud. “Aside from the obvious,” she added dryly as she looked down at the younger goddesses. Her expression sobered. “It may take some time to come to terms with this.”
“You don’t seem to be having any trouble with it at the moment,” Twilight noted, turning again and joining her former mentor in gazing down upon Canterlot.
“The fact that it’s probably the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen doesn’t change the fact that little Twilight is like a daughter to me.” She sighed, and Twilight could almost see the memories of their time together flashing through the white alicorn’s mind. “It won’t exactly ease the complications of my relationship with Luna, either. Time will take care of that, I suppose. I’m told I won’t even mind serving as The Royal Third Wheel after a century or so.”
The trio stared contemplatively down on past and future for another few moments before Twilight spoke again. “You may want to move them inside. If Twilight awakens and gets the idea that she’s been seen, well… As I recall, she is prone to certain anxieties at this stage of her life.”
Celestia laughed softly. “I’m afraid there are no secrets tonight.” She looked pointedly upwards, to where stars still danced gleefully with a radiant moon.
“Oh, my,” Twilight said, face colored by a self-consciousness she hadn’t experienced in centuries. “I had no idea.” She looked to Luna, who responded with a mischievous grin. Twilight returned the smile, taking the embarrassment in stride. “I may not have been the most observant pony all of the time.”
She stepped back from the cloud’s edge. “Well,” she started, then an idea occurred to her. “Celestia — Princess. Beloved maternal stand-in. Your, um, counterpart didn’t happen to mention anything about her plans going forward — or whatever direction she might be headed — did she?”
“No.” Celestia shook her head, smiling. “All I could get from her was cryptic nonsense. A bit disorienting, being on the receiving end of that for once.”
“I’m sure,” Luna grumbled. “We had better be going, then.”
“There’s one thing I still have to do,” Twilight said solemnly. Luna gave her a questioning look. She responded with a subtle shake of her head, then disappeared.
During the day, the palace square was the social hub of the entire Crystal City. At night, it tended to be deserted, particularly this time of year. Even the city’s barrier could not hold back the northern chill completely. Shining Armor didn’t appear to mind the cold, though.
Twilight let a hoof fall noisily onto the hewn crystal surface, but the stallion’s eyes remained locked on the sky. She tried again, this time letting the hoof land on her brother’s shoulder instead.
“This is nice,” he admitted grudgingly, without lowering his gaze. “But did you really have to show the whole world?”
Twilight winced empathetically. She wasn’t sure why the meaning of the astral display was so immediately discernable to everypony, but it clearly was. “Privacy is not among the benefits of the position,” she reflected somberly. “Little Twilight doesn’t know. About this specifically, I mean.”
Shining snorted. “How long do you think that will last?”
“Millenia,” Twilight informed him matter-of-factly. “Unless my understanding of time is even less complete than I know.”
“So you’re saying I shouldn’t tell her?” Shining asked, finally lowering his head enough to make eye contact with his ancient little sister.
Twilight waved a hoof dismissively. “Do what you will. You know the risks of upsetting her, but in the broader sense neither my past nor your future is sacred. If they can be changed at all, that is.”
Shining digested the information silently for a moment. “So were you just dropping by to make sure I got my scheduled dose of late-night nihilism, or was there something else?”
“I wanted to make sure you were alright,” Twilight said earnestly, ignoring her brother’s sarcasm. "You’ve had a trying day.”
Shining chuckled at the understatement. “I’ll live — isn’t that what you said? Tomorrow will be harder. Cadence won’t much care for the tabloids out of Canterlot.”
“That isn’t what’s bothering you.”
“No,” Shining admitted. “I think I can deal with the Luna thing. It’s hard to look at this sky and stay upset, anyway — we’ll see how I feel in the morning. The part where you — where Twilight — is an eternal force of nature… that’s harder.”
“It’s hard for her too,” Twilight reminded.
“Yeah,” Shining acknowledged. “I bet you’re going to give me some sage advice about that.”
Twilight smiled guiltily. “Just as sharp as I remember.”
Shining Armor looked back to the sky, uninterested in flattery.
“Don’t worry yourself with how she’s changed; she’s doing enough of that for the both of you. Try to remember how she’s remained the same. She’s still your sister. She still needs you. She’ll miss you terribly when you’re gone.”
When Shining looked down again, he was alone.
