No alarm clocks are necessary in the royal chambers. I know what time it is. I always know. It is nearly sunrise, and I must perform my sacred task, the one chosen for my by Starswirl the Bearded and the Equestrian Council all these centuries past. The one for which so many of them freely gave me years of their lives Oh yes, my span of years is not my own, my magic is not my own, my life is not my own. The only thing to which I can properly lay claim is my duty, a duty which will sustain me for many millennia to come.
Why me? I know the reason you gave me, Starswirl, and I wonder if it still holds true. I, among all the candidates, was the only one who refused the offer of near immortality and absolute power. Why did you curse us so? And my poor sister, who had no say in the matter? Why did anypony need to suffer like this? For stability? For political sanity? To avoid the inevitable cycles of war?
Yes, and it worked brilliantly.
Too brilliantly, too well. The ponies started to take us for granted within the first decade, and many sought to stoke the old fires of racial hatred. Therefore, you summoned Discord from beyond the veil of worlds, an opponent against whom ponies could have common cause. But my sister and I dispatched him with too much ease, did we not?
To think, then, of how you used my own sister, how you gave that thing ingress to her mind, deliberately opening her to that possession by playing on her feelings of inferiority, natural in a younger sibling, so that I would have no choice but to bind her to the moon, for her safety, and mine, and all the world... So that the ponies could look up in the night sky and see the enemy, and not my beloved Luna. The Nightmare they feared so much that they flocked to love me for generations. The rage I still feel over that betrayal... the fire... the burning...
But it is not time yet. A few minutes more. It is still Luna's time. She does not know the truth, nor will she learn it from me. You are still her friend in her heart. I could not take that illusion from her.
I reach out, find the linkage in the magnetic fields that connect Equestria with its sun. The dawn is nearly upon us, and I have no more time for my reminiscing. I must tap into my life force. Not my life force, of course, but the lives of a hundred unicorns, pegasi, earth ponies, all surrendered in decades of age brought on in an instant and presented to me by you as a pulsing orb of energy. Accept now, or all will be wasted! They cannot have these years back! Take it or they will die young to no purpose!
How could I refuse their sacrifice? Had I but known the price I paid for those years, the relationships I would see develop, grow, ripen, rot and fall away to decay as time consumed my friends and my family, leaving me unscathed, even then I should have spurned it, but I could not have. You knew me too well, Starswirl.
So I look at my gifted years and I reach into them for my power. Here is dear Butter Scotch, the best years of his life. Here is where he should have met his wife, Sundae. There is the daughter he never had; her name should have been Caramel. And there he is as he was, an old earth pony at the age of thirty two, when he knelt before me with the rest of the Council.
I take a day of Butter Scotch's life and I convert it to magical energy. I used to try to use days that didn't really matter, boring or unpleasant days, so that I could preserve the important memories of what might have been, but over the centuries, I've come to realize that each day was important. Butter Scotch never received a patent for his crackly candy recipe from the Royal Bureau of Inventions; that was just something that would have happened. The patent vanishes in a flash of light as it is converted to power.
The time is upon us. I reach out, and my awareness extends high into the stratosphere, and I push further, up above the thunderheads, my mane and tail blazing with aurorae as I reach the ionosphere. The magnetic lines are clear up here, and my awareness takes hold of one and rides it. I pick up speed, racing to the dead thing at the bottom of the system's gravity well. Our white dwarf sun that could never sustain us, not without help.
And as my mind arrives, as always, I see you there. You, looking so sad, so alone. You look into my eyes, just for that split second that we dare, and I see all the pain, regret, arrogance and self-satisfaction that ponykind is capable of. How I remember you, my lover. Your thick brown beard tickling me awake, your grey eyes dancing as your merry jests made my days light and full of hope, until our star began to die and the blizzards came upon our world. How even all the unicorns together could only manage the briefest of sparks, and how the battles between them and the pegasi and earth ponies doomed us all.
I still remember that feeling of joy and pride when you determined that there we could save ourselves with a permanent link between the life force of all ponies and the surface of our dead star. And I will never forget the desperation, the bargaining, the denial when you said it had to be you. That you would have to go to be the receiver. And I never got to speak to you again.
I look at you now and I start to see your mouth moving, as always. Don't you dare say you are sorry for leaving me alone forever. Don't you dare! Burn, you son of a bitch!
Burn.
Author's Note
This one is experimental for me. I don't consider myself to be much of a serious writer. In fact, all I did was go to a random word generator and Sunrise popped up and I was like "oh, there's a story!" I suppose I could have made a silly one where Luna is trying to raise the sun while Celestia is on vacation but I was in a bad mood last night.
