Mediator

“I’m dying.”

The princess’ word reverberated around Twilight’s mind, now so far detached from reality. There was no room, no floor, floating in thoughts.

It can’t be right. It’s impossible.

How can... A thousand years...

The princess is an alicorn, a DEITY! How can this be possi-

“Twilight?”

The distant sound of her name shook the unicorn from her stupor. She glanced slowly up at the weakened regal figure before her. The princess would never lie. What she was seeing was real. This was real. It couldn’t be, yet it was.

“P-princess?” she stammered.

Celestia responded, “Yes, Twilight.”

It was all the confirmation the little unicorn needed. Her world collapsed. Her eyes saw images so vivid and yet so unimportant. Time seemed to stop and stretch and pass without any warning. Her body burned with a numbing cold. Sharp pain registered faintly.

And then she opened her eyes to find them drenched in tears, her whole face cold and soggy. The world looked blurred. She tried to think. She tried to walk. Walking is easy; she could remember how to do that. Who was she? Walking. It’s not working. Move legs, right? Panic. No, don’t panic. You’re just lying down, she told herself.

She gulped, and was surprised to find her breath shaky and cold. The logical part of her mind reinitialised, working out that she had been crying and hyperventilating. She felt surprisingly warm.

A large, feathered blanket. Panic?

Something gently nudged the back of her head.

Twilight’s mind awoke. Taking in details from as many senses as possible, she found herself lying curled up like a foal, her face and forelegs cold and wet from tears. She was lying on a cold stone floor. It was deathly quiet. Most shockingly, she found her princess and tutor lying beside her, wing draped over her, tenderly nuzzling her neck. She thought in a moment of post-shock delirium how much they must look like a mother mare comforting her foal.

Bleary-eyed and as embarrassed as she’d felt in her life, Twilight lifted her head, “Celestia?”

“I’m here, my dear. Take it easy.”

The cold logical part of her mind noted the irony. “Princess,” she sniffed. “Y-you’re...”

“Yes, I am. Luna and I both.”

Twilight blanched, or as much as one could with a pastel-coloured coat. She gulped and blinked hard to try to clear her eyes of tears. Luna too?

“How- how long have you known?”

She heard her tutor chuckle. “Oh, for the longest time.”

The princess looked ahead dreamily, as if collecting her thoughts. The mother deciding what bedtime story to tell her daughter.

“Twilight, what do you know about winged unicorns?”

The question caught the student off-guard. She sniffed, “Erm, w-well, winged unicorns, so-sometimes colloquially called ‘alicorns’, are ponies with tremendous magical power, and who represent the unity of the three types of pony.” Twilight looked up at her teacher. The princess seemed to smile at her pupil’s textbook recitation.

“That’s the general definition, yes,” Celestia confirmed. She smiled dreamily. “Can you remember which book that description comes from?”

Twilight frowned at the direction the conversation had taken. “I... I think it was The Origins of Equestria, by Bócere Starlight.”

Celestia chuckled heartily. “Ah, yes, that’s the one. Mr Starlight interviewed me personally on the subject of alicorns. He was such a gentlecolt.”

The princess sighed wearily, then turned to face her student. “I have lived more than one being’s fair share of lifetimes. In all my years I have only ever seen two alicorns. One of them stares out of mirrors at me,” she added smiling. “To my knowledge, my sister and I are the only winged unicorns in Equestria. I don’t know exactly if any lived before us, so any information on alicorns, whether in book or folklore, probably came from either me or Luna. The definition you gave me just now is almost word-for-word the definition I myself gave Mr Starlight.”

Twilight’s features gave away her confusion. Where was this going?

Princess Celestia closed her eyes for a moment before continuing. “Twilight, I want you to listen very carefully, this is important; winged unicorns are not born.”

Twilight blinked, “Wha-, but... huh?”

“We are not born as winged unicorns. Luna and I actually started out as nothing more than unicorns, much like yourself, actually.” Celestia’s aged eyes seemed to glaze over as she focused on the distance. “The world was very different when we were young. I don’t know if you can imagine it now, but there was no order to life. There was no day or night. The sun rested on the edge of the western horizon, and the moon hid behind the mountains in the east. The western lands were scorched by the sun’s glare. The east, as the warmth of the sun never reached it, was a frozen tundra.

“But in the middle, there existed a valley, just far enough away from the sun that light and warmth still reached it without it burning or freezing. It was in this land of perpetual twilight that life strived to endure.”

Twilight lay still, hardly daring to breath. The princess had never spoken openly about the world before her rule.

The princess paused before continuing. “My sister and I were born into a world of no order. Ponies would do anything they could to survive. You owned nothing but what you took with you. It was a world of anarchy.” Her expression hardened, “Shortly after Luna was born, our mother was... taken, from us. Our father couldn’t feed three mouths on his own, so he left the two of us.” The regal voice began to break, “We were left to fend for ourselves. I remember sitting on a hill with my sister, barely a foal, looking at that rust-orange sky with the world below tinted cobalt blue, wondering what I was supposed to do.”

Celestia took a deep, rattling breath. In the brief interlude, Twilight noticed that her throat was closing up, and that the world seemed to blur. She blinked to clear her eyes.

“I took my sister with me. I promised myself I would look after her. We went deep into the forest, away from... from everything. I raised Luna myself, I taught her everything I knew about the world. We became quite the team, I recall. We built ourselves a little den in the middle of the forest, and we began taking it in turns to sleep, so that one of us could keep an eye out for monsters...”

The princess fell silent. Unsure whether to press her for more details, Twilight held her peace, mulling over how different this world must have been.

“It was Luna’s idea, you know.”

“Huh? What was?”

Celestia gazed out of one of the throne room’s many translucent windows. “Moving the sun and the moon. I guess it was her childish imagination.” She glanced back down to her student, “You see, unicorns weren’t taught how to use their magic. Luna and I had to figure things out for ourselves. I remember I decided to humour her. I had worked out a simple levitation spell, so I tried to move the sun to amuse my sister. Naturally I failed, but Luna insisted, try again! Try again! I’d thought she was playing a game, but she was serious, she wanted the sun and the moon to move.

“So I tried. Every time I woke, I tried to move the sun, and when Luna discovered her control of magic, she began attempting to move the moon. It became our little ritual; I tried when I woke, Luna went to sleep. Luna tried when she woke, and I went to sleep. Twilight, tell me what you know about the sun.”

Twilight took a moment to realise she was being questioned. “Oh, err... It’s a distant sphere that gives off heat and light, right?”

“And can you guess what powers it?”

This wasn’t in any of her books. “... I’d say some kind of ancient magic?”

Celestia nodded curtly, then resumed gazing into the distance. “I’ll admit, even I am not entirely certain, but that is the conclusion I came to. I believe the sun is an orb of untainted magical energy, I think the enchantments were put there by whatever event created it.

“There came a time when my sister became annoyed at the moon’s refusal to move, and demanded I told her what they were made of. She stormed off into the forest when I said I couldn’t tell her.”

The princess lowered her head and closed her eyes. “It may seem like nothing important, but it struck me to my very heart when Luna ran off. We had nothing but one another, and I had never seen my sister so worked up about something.

“There was I, in the middle of a forest with Luna’s question burning through my mind; what is the sun made of? I decided to investigate. Before, I had been trying to force the sun to move by sheer magical force. However, this time, I used my magic to reach not for the whole sun, but to look inside the very being of the sun. I wanted to find out what was inside for Luna.

“I reached out and touched the sun, not with the levitation spell, not with a search spell, but with pure magical intent.” Twilight nodded in understanding. She was somewhat familiar with extending her mind with magic. “Using my magic, I extended myself up to the sun. What I found was not any kind of fathomable solid object, but a burning entity of raw magic.

“I was intrigued, so I reached deeper. I pushed my magic and my mind further and harder against the sun’s being. There, right in the core, what I... what I found was...”

Opening her eyes and slowly raising her head, the princess continued, “It was simply incomprehensible. I couldn’t see, as such, but I remember a brightness, something buckling, like a gate being weighed down by something heavy. There was a screaming, a burning, I felt like my soul was being searched and scoured. It suddenly felt like I had all the weight in the world held on my mind.

“And then it suddenly stopped. The chaos in my mind stopped, and I was left mentally crippled. I remember feeling like all my senses had been stripped away, and I was just floating in the Howling. I don’t remember what happened there, if anything, apart from a faint, cold whisper.”

Twilight cocked her head in confusion. A whisper?

“I don’t know what it said, who said it, what language was used, or even if anything was said at all. All I know is that I suddenly regained consciousness and found myself floating in the air above the forest. At first I panicked, but then I found it was actually me keeping myself aloft. In the time I had spent unconscious, I had become an alicorn.

“I felt stronger. I noticed the world had become brighter, and colours sharper and more vivid, at first I thought it was because of my transformation.” Celestia let forth a small chuckle. “Turns out I had just raised the sun for the first time.”

Silence settled over the pair. Twilight looked up at her mentor. She was smiling once more, but appeared visibly weary after the long narrative. The student lay there awhile, pondering quietly what she had just heard. Eventually her mind settled on one subject. An urgent subject. How could she have forgotten?

“Princess?” How could one handle this? “You... you said you were dying.”

Celestia merely smiled at her student. “Yes... Yes, I suppose I am.”

Long silence.

“Bu-but princess-”

“Don’t worry, my faithful student. You’ll know soon enough.”

Twilight bit her lip. She didn’t like this. The princess had just shared her life story, what more did she have to hide?

Another question came to mind.

“Princess, you said that before you and Luna, the sun and moon were still in the sky. If... if you two go...”

“Without a guide, the sun and the moon will indeed stop. Only the power of a winged unjicorn is capable of moving them.”

What!? “But you two are the only-”

“Twilight, I have a favour to ask of you,” the princess stated abruptly.

“Uh, of course! Anything!”

“No, Twilight. Don’t promise me anything until you know what it is.”

Oh?

Celestia sighed resignedly. “You know how I said alicorns were not born?”

“Yes.” Where is this going?

“Do you also recall,” the princess gazed pointedly at her student, “how I said I used to be a unicorn, so very much like yourself?”