Twilight heard the hoofsteps long before she saw whom they belonged to. She easily could have glanced over her shoulder, looked through the open doorway, and seen who was walking in the hall. Instead, she looked to the side, out her bedchamber window. She saw the green of the Canterlot Castle courtyard, and past that the golden domes and white walls of Canterlot, and past that the sun falling behind faraway mountains
She only really saw the sunset.
The sun didn’t only fall. It bled. A deep red spilled onto the clouds and reflected off the snow of the mountains, dripped down valley slopes and beneath the horizon, and soaked and clotted blue skies. It was as if the sun had sensed somehow that this twilight would be the last it would ever feel of Celestia’s touch, and so suffused its mourning into the approaching night.
Come dawn, if Twilight couldn’t persuade Celestia otherwise, someone new would draw the sun up over the horizon—or else the sun would never come up at all. Someone else. Someone not-Celestia.
But that wouldn’t happen. It wouldn’t, wouldn’t happen. It was irrational. It was ridiculous. All Twilight needed to do was show Celestia that for her to forsake the sun would be like the roots forsaking the blossoms or the ocean forsaking the waves. Twilight would convince her of the absurdity and senselessness of the ceremony, and the whole ordeal would become just a bad dream, quickly forgotten by morning.
Twilight heard the hoofsteps coming closer, getting louder. They sounded rigid, soldierlike, purposeful. They clap clap clapped on the stone floor of the hall like the drumbeats of a funeral march. And they were coming for her.
Twilight sat at her desk and looked down at the tome that lay there. She opened it, then closed it again. Celestia had given it to her one year earlier. Before then, Twilight had spent a lifetime in the royal courts, as an administrator, as a diplomat, as a friend. She did everything Celestia ever asked, and then in return Celestia gave her that.
The tome was old, the words it contained were older, older than Canterlot, older than the Princesses, older than Equestria, older than history. Somepony—no, someone or something, had scratched those words into stone in an age before ponies. Bearers of the Sun had passed them down and down through time, and then they had fallen to Twilight, or into her, or at her, but without her consent.
The tome described the history and practice of the ceremony that would soon take place. The ceremony had meant many things to many peoples in many times. It had grown and changed over the ages just as the world itself had. It times long past, it had been only a rejuvenation of the magic of the earth and water and sky, and then later a bond between pony and celestial, and then later a harnessing of the sun, and then later, in the Age of Empresses, a transfer of rule and authority from matriarch to heir. And then it was nothing, forsaken by the unicorns and forgotten by the other tribes. And without the ceremony, the world eventually fell to chaos.
And then there was Celestia and Luna, and Celestia (benevolently? foolishly? tragically? selfishly?) renewed the ceremony. Celestia bound herself to the sun and Luna bound herself to the moon, and the pony tribes flourished. Since then, only one attempt had ever been made to break those bindings, and it had ended in destruction and waste and perversion.
And now there was Twilight.
The hoofsteps came closer, louder, louder. But then they slowed, became less certain. The time between each melancholy drumbeat grew longer. Twilight knew their hesitation. She felt it, too.
Twilight turned to the small mirror that sat on her desk, and tried to see a strong, experienced princess, and not a pebble in a river, a leaf in the wind, pushed about, no control over when or how, no true understanding of why or what. What more could she say to Celestia that hadn’t already been said between them? What could she say that Celestia hadn’t already considered centuries before, and then dismissed?
Twilight shook her head. She only needed to think rationally through each step. There was no such thing as a problem without a solution, and she would find that solution. She would find it. Twilight’s greatest asset had always been her intellect. It would not fail her. If only she had more time...
The hoofsteps finally came in through her doorway, and fell silent.
Twilight turned around.
Luna stood before her. She did not smile or nod or offer Twilight any friendly greeting. She regarded Twilight with impassive eyes, not angry or bitter or accusing or sad or sorry.
“The time has come,” she said.
Twilight opened her mouth to speak, but her voice faltered, and she nodded instead.
Luna said, “Are you ready?”
Twilight nodded again.
Luna said, “Then let us go.”
Twilight stayed seated at her desk.
Luna stood behind her.
Twilight gave her reflection one last desperate glance, and finally stood up.
A flash of Luna’s horn, and they were both somewhere far away.
__________________________________________________
Twilight stood before the ruined Castle of the Two Sisters, a ways away from its entrance. Luna stood beside her. The other Sister waited for them deep below the Castle.
The last ocean-spray mist of day trickled out of the sky behind the Castle’s crippled towers, and night fell over all.
The Castle of the Two Sisters was broken. As was the forest that surrounded it, and every tree in that forest, and all the animals that skulked between those trees, and even the very air those animals breathed. It was all broken deep, deep down. It was the kind of corrupted malignancy that turns a pony’s body against itself, that causes lungs to cough up blood and the stomach to turn food into vomit, for teeth to crack and fall and the mouth to turn black, for fetid red excrement to spill onto the legs from within.
All the ponies had fled that place one night long ago, fled before the corruption and the blighting of reality. The forest had been broken on that same night by one lost pony, an angry and jealous sister who had attempted to cleave the Sun Bearer’s Oath and sink the sun beneath the horizon for all time.
The malignancy the Bearer of the Moon had birthed still lived, and forever would. It manifested itself in wild winds that tore at Twilight’s eyes, in poisonous vines that strangled the Castle’s walls, in perverse, angry howls that rose up from between the trees.
Luna left Twilight’s side and started walking forward.
“Wait,” Twilight said, too quietly.
Luna kept walking. Her movements were stiff, as inflexible and uncaring as granite. “What?” she asked.
“I don’t think Celestia should do this,” Twilight said.
“The choice was already made, eons ago,” Luna said, her voice as stiff as her legs. “Thought now changes nothing. This has already been discussed, and you already agreed.”
“I’ve been… presented with new evidence,” Twilight said. “I’ve changed my mind.”
“You cannot.”
Luna never stopped walking, and Twilight had to run to catch up with her. “It doesn’t make sense!” she said, matching Luna’s pace. “That ritual is thousands of years old, maybe hundreds of thousands of years old. It’s unreasonable to hold ourselves to it any longer. We don’t need it anymore. We can find another way to restore the magic.”
Luna did not look at Twilight, only ahead, as she said, “You know why the ceremony is still necessary. Some of our body’s chains we shackle for a purpose.”
“But what about Celestia?” Twilight slowed, fell behind. “She can’t… she just can’t...”
“From the very beginning, Celestia understood where this oath would lead. She always knew this would be her fate, and it will be yours as well. Accept that now. There will be no time for it later.”
“Celestia is your sister,” Twilight told Luna’s fleeing back, because her whole world was leaking down a rusted pipe, and her closest friend was rushing towards the drain, and Luna couldn’t muster even the emotion or care necessary to offer her a sympathetic smile as they drowned together and then apart. “Don’t you care at all what she’s about to do?”
“Yes,” Luna said, and spoke the word with less feeling than with which a pegasus might speak of the condition of the kingdom’s roads.
Twilight walked faster, growled her frustration, broke into a run, and then galloped at Luna’s back, her head afire with witnessed betrayal and swiftly coming righteous judgement. “If you cared,” she spat. “If you cared you wouldn’t let her do this. Or you would you at least be the tiniest bit upset that your sister is—”
Luna whirled around to face her, her eyes wild and storm-ridden.
Twilight stumbled and stopped short just beneath Luna’s frenzied gaze.
“Twilight Sparkle!” Luna shouted with all the fury of a deity gone mad. Her mane shimmered and shone and swept the first stars from the sky, and the moon above her trembled, and she towered tall over Twilight.
“Do not,” she roared, “presume to tell me how I should feel, and do not dare instruct me on how to act. I know better than any pony alive or dead, and most certainly better than you, what my sister will do to herself tonight. She is relying on you tonight, and we have been patient and understanding with you, but if you try to forsake your word tonight, to forsake her, I swear upon my blood—”
Luna stopped abruptly, and looked down at Twilight and seemed to recognize something in her.
“I’m sorry,” Twilight said. “I didn’t mean—”
“Be quiet now,” Luna said, and all anger was gone from her voice.
Twilight waited.
Luna looked up at the rising moon.
“Twilight,” Luna finally said, still looking up into the sky. “You understand so little. And neither do I, I suppose, or any of us. But if you had any idea of what my sister’s feelings for this ceremony are, for what she will do tonight, for the part she’s played for the world, you wouldn’t do this to her. If you knew how long she has waited for this night, you would not force her to wait any longer. If you understood the affliction a life with the power she wields can become, you would not ask her to still continue on any longer.”
Twilight opened her mouth, to protest, to question, to beg, but closed it again when she found she had nothing to say, all her arguments futile. She knew, nothing she could say to Luna would matter. But Celestia...
“Celestia will die tonight,” Luna said, her voice calm, her eyes still searching overhead for something lost in the stars of her night. “The only way you can stop that is through betraying her trust in you, and I do not believe you will do that. Celestia will die tonight, but only if she has an heir. She has chosen you, and she has not chosen lightly. She chose you because you are intelligent, skeptical, talented, and capable, because you care about Equestria and you care about our little ponies, because you desire to do what is right, at all times. I am convinced, as I am sure my sister is as well, that there has never before lived a pony more suited to taking on the mantle of Bearer of the Sun. Celestia trusts you, and I trust you. Now please come.”
Luna turned and began walking towards the Castle entrance again.
Twilight could do nought but follow.
She caught up with Luna and matched her pace. Twilight looked over to see all the feeling, all the fury and pain and serenity, drain from Luna’s face just as the sun’s light had drained from the sky. And then Luna was cold and uncaring again. She was a slowly flowing river, following a course set for her in years long past, never wondering where to or why, or feeling anything for any or all she passed by.
Together, they stepped over the collapsed gate of the Castle and passed inside.
__________________________________________________
Twilight and Luna walked among the shattered, ruptured viscera of the Castle of the Two Sisters. Its rotting bowels appeared to Twilight as a testament to the supremacy of time and fate over life and will. Luna knew the way, and Twilight followed her. They did not speak to each other. Twilight heard only their hoofsteps and the slow decay of the Castle.
Twilight felt it then, the ancient magic. It was somewhere far below, faint and far away and easy to ignore. It felt her, too, from down deep underneath the Castle.
Luna led her to a stairwell that lead down below the Castle. They began their descent into darkness. The ancient magic touched Twilight again as she went from the first step to the second, only lightly, and Twilight shuddered.
Twilight and Luna walked down, and down, and down, for longer than Twilight could tell. The descent was monotonous and slow and dark. In the deep, Twilight felt the ancient magic, and it felt her, and it went from whispers to shouts, breezes to gusts. It was a cacophony of howls and drumbeats in incomprehensible rhythm that bounced and rushed off the walls of the corridor and up, up, up to Twilight and Luna, and Twilight staggered into its heady cadence. Amidst the music’s currents, she felt every Bearer who had come before as they, too, descended into the darkness, and every Bearer who would come after. She heard their steps before and beside and behind her own, breathed their breath, felt their heartbeats echo her own, their beating multiplied a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand times into the ever louder and more discordant false melody of the ancient and the eternal. She felt their fear and anxiety and acquiescence to fate as they marched down, and as they would march down, and as she marched down now, so strongly that she could no longer tell which feelings were her own, or if any of the feelings had ever been hers at all.
Twilight sank deeper beneath the Castle, and deeper into the world, and deeper into the ancient, and tried to remember her life and the joys she had felt. As she remembered her own, the other Sun Bearers remembered theirs. She saw their memories, and spoke what they had spoken, and regretted what they had not done, and missed those they had lost. She stood quietly in a wood in the rain and watched a creek swell with the anger of a storm, shaped her wonder at the beauty of life into dripping paint on a dry canvas, said goodbye for the last time to fathers and mothers without knowing it was the last time, saw her daughter, their daughter, a daughter laughing in the lightly crashing surf of a blue ocean, and softly then passionately kissed lovers, her lovers, whose lovers? under the lights of lampposts in lonely streets, and Twilight lost herself and her memories among the many crying voices and knew only the memory of the ancient, the eternal, the All.
She stumbled further down, far down below the Castle, down into the ground and below that, too, and down into the bedrock and the foundation of the earth, where the ancient magic dwelled, and she felt it and knew that it had always been and it had not changed and it would not change. It dragged her into its perpetually rising staccato, one beat, one phrase, one moment, and infinite in that moment. She felt and heard and saw the Bearers, and then past them and through them, saw all the ponies, all the dragons, all the sylphs, and all the rest of life and culture and hate, and heard them all in the ever-repeating staccato, spinning in the self-subsistent circle of the eternal. And in them she felt magic, not her magic or their magic, but magic as it really was, and it was all of them. She was inside it and it was inside her and it was inside them and it was inside, outside them both and them all, and from all of them and to all of them was the Ceremony. They were bound to it, by it, together, and it was the ancient song’s lost harmony, and they were it, and it was All.
She plummeted into the depths of the world and eternity, and there she finally beheld the slowly humming rhythm of the ground and of the water and of the air, and beyond that the easy strum of the sun and the moon, and beyond that the roaring, fiery chorus of all the stars, and beyond that the mighty crescendo of time and of fate, and they crashed against each other as one all-consuming, diverging melody.
Twilight fled before the immensity of the All, and before the immovability of the All, and before the uncaring of the All for individual life. The All bore down upon her, and all her reason and her logic were nothing and her breath came in ragged, painful gasps, her chest heaved violently, and black blood clotted her eyes.
But through the blood, Twilight saw light. She galloped towards it, past the pain and the fear, and to its warmth and safety.
She passed quickly through a threshold hewn in the deepest stone and came into the light.
Suddenly, the shouts and drumbeats of the ancient, and the rememberings of the eternal, and the tumultuous winds of the All went silent.
Twilight looked about the light and saw that she was in the Ceremony Chamber. Luna stepped in behind her. Celestia stood before them both.
__________________________________________________
The Ceremony Chamber looked just as the tome had described it. It was a dark, small, domed, circular room, the size and shape of a child’s igloo, just large enough to fit the three of them. The Ceremony Chamber had been hewn out of the bedrock in times lost and by persons unknown. Its walls were rough and uneven. Twilight suspected its appearance had not changed in millenia, possibly even since it had first been gouged out of the earth. She saw no ancient runes or ornate designs anywhere in the Chamber, no markings of any kind on the walls or ceiling. All she saw was rock, and nothing more. Twilight could only guess at how many mountains’ worth of rock and dirt hung over her head, or truly how deep they were.
Her memory of the journey down was a confused mist, and she could not remember how long it had been or anything about the tunnel. She remembered, only faintly, having screamed, but her breath was now steady and her heartbeat was calm.
The floor of the Chamber was made up of a series of shallow channels that had been cut into the stone. They ran in a series of widening concentric circles that radiated outwards from the center of the room. The final circle disappeared into the wall, after which, Twilight knew from her readings of the tome, the channels ran into the bedrock and beyond.
At the center of the concentric channels was a small, circular dais, no more than an inch higher than the rest of the floor. Beside the the dais, on either side, stood two short, stalagmite-like podiums. On one podium lay a simple stone bowl, on the other lay an equally simple stone dagger.
On the dais, stood Celestia.
Celestia’s glowing horn was the only light in the Chamber, but even in dusk, she looked regal and composed.
Luna stepped past Twilight and towards Celestia. The two sisters shared a terse embrace, and Luna held firmly onto Celestia and breathed deep. Twilight could not see their faces.
Twilight felt a great pressure bearing down on the Chamber as she watched them, more than just the pressure of the rock above them, something with more weight than all the miles of earth between her and the surface. But something else seemed to be holding it back, and the pressure hung just outside the walls of the Chamber, like the winter’s cold lurking close by a campfire and ready to rush in and consume the warmth as soon as the embers cool.
Celestia and Luna let go of each other, and Luna walked to side of the room. She stood by the wall, stiff and unmoving, and seemed to become a part of the rock of the Chamber, to meld into the shadows outside of Celestia’s light.
Celestia faced Twilight.
“Twilight,” she said. “My most faithful friend.”
And then Celestia smiled, warmly and serenely, as she always did. She smiled as if she and Twilight were doing nothing more than meeting for lunch or passing each other in the hall.
“Are you ready to begin?” she asked.
With those words, all the anxiety and fear rushed back at Twilight like a mallet come loose from a high shelf. Looking at Celestia, realizing what would come next, Twilight felt a deep, cutting pain inside her, as if a hundred trickling lesions had opened up in her stomach.
But Twilight calmed herself. She and Celestia had had disagreements before, and when Twilight had known she was right, she had always been able to convince Celestia of the correct course of action. Celestia trusted her. Celestia listened to her. Twilight only needed to show her the irrationality here, the fallacy, the senselessness.
Twilight took a step forward. “Celestia…”
“Yes?” Celestia said.
“I…” Twilight glanced at Luna, but Luna was unfeeling rock and shadow, and did not move or breathe or meet her gaze. Twilight looked at the floor instead, steadying her legs and her breath and her heartbeat. It was easier if she couldn’t see Celestia. “I don’t think you should do this.”
“Oh?” Celestia said, and, even though Twilight couldn’t see it, she knew Celestia’s smile faltered then. “May I ask why?”
“Equestria needs you,” Twilight said, and glanced at Luna again, but Luna would not react or acknowledge anything at all. Twilight looked up, past the hurt, at Celestia. “I’m…. I’m not confident Equestria will, um, survive without your influence.”
“Equestria survived for a long time before I became its Princess, and I suspect it will survive a long while yet. And Equestria has you. You are not a filly anymore, Twilight. You have accomplished much without my help or guidance. As long as you live, Equestria will never be lacking in strength or wisdom.” Celestia sighed and tried and failed to smile. “Twilight, we have discussed this. We have talked and talked and talked. You told me you understood. Why are you doing this again?”
“But you don’t have to do this,” Twilight said. “It isn’t required of you. We can choose never to do this ceremony, and nothing will happen to Equestria. You can choose not to.”
“I have chosen not to for all my life,” Celestia said. “I am ready to choose something else. I have prepared for this. For years I have waited. Equestria is ready to live without me, and so are you. I promise you, all will be well.”
“I’m…” Twilight’s voice faltered and she cleared her throat and wiped moisture from her eyes and tried to stand up straight. “I’m not certain of that. Considering that the, um, the state of the, uh, the current state is beneficial for everypony, I think it would be best for all parties if we postponed the ceremony.”
Celestia smiled in a way Twilight knew was meant to be reassuring, but only made everything worse. “I have been preparing Equestria for my absence for many centuries, and I have helped you prepare ever since you became a princess. I promise you, if I was not absolutely certain that you and Equestria were ready, I would wait. But you already know this. You already know all of this, Twilight. Please stop.”
Twilight opened her mouth and closed it and quickly opened it again, searching desperately for the right words that would get Celestia to change her mind, for the spell that would let her keep Celestia close. Her lips made the shapes of words and sounds and feelings that died in her mouth and nothing was good enough or convincing enough. There was nothing she could say that would change anything.
“Please!” she finally cried. “I need you! I need you!”
Celestia’s smile fell.
“I know, Twilight,” she said. “I know.”
Twilight waited.
“Twilight, please come here,” Celestia said quietly.
Twilight slowly, quietly crept forward and stood before Celestia.
Celestia unfolded a wing and touched Twilight’s side. She did not wrap it around Twilight’s back or hold her close. It was only a light, familiar connection. Twilight closed her eyes and pretended they were somewhere else.
“I am tired, Twilight,” Celestia said, and Twilight did not open her eyes. “I know I do not look it. I work hard to keep it hidden. I try to lose it in simple diversions, sometimes in good humor and little practical jokes, more often in the ponies around me, and in you especially. But it doesn’t work. It has never worked. I’ve tried to make you understand in so many ways, so many times. All of our talks, were they for nothing? Please listen. I know this is hard, but please try to understand. I am so very tired.”
Twilight, eyes still closed, leaned forward and rested her head on Celestia’s chest. She felt Celestia’s heartbeat through her cheek. Still beating, she reminded herself. Still beating.
“I have held this power for a long time, far longer than any other,” Celestia said. “And I am tired of it. I do not know how to explain to you the weariness of trying to do what is right. I have hurt so many, and I cannot bear the memories any longer. I am one of the few with the power to help others, and I can still do so little, so much less than I wish. I am tired of death and funerals. I am tired of suffering and illness. I am tired of broken friendships and lost love. I am tired of exploitation and submission and arrogance and deceit and defeat and surrender, and I am tired of fighting. I am so tired of fighting against the current.”
Twilight froze stiff against Celestia’s chest, and felt the heavy, downy, comforting blanket of Celestia’s wing fall onto her back.
Celestia whispered to her, “I want to rest. All I want is to rest.”
A hoof reached under Twilight’s chin and tilted her head up. Twilight opened her eyes and looked into Celestia’s face, and was astonished by what she saw there. When had Celestia become so old? Where had those lines surrounding her eyes come from? When had the skin around her mouth begun wrinkling when she talked? In all of Twilight’s memories, Celestia was healthy and happy, but the pony she looked up at now was ancient and exhausted.
“Twilight,” Celestia said, and smiled softly. “You have done so much for me already. I have asked you to do many things, more than was ever right of me or fair to you. I will understand if you refuse me now. You have earned the right to do so. Your whole life, you have supported me. You always did so loyally and generously, without ever asking anything in return. You did all that because you are a beautiful and kind pony. I have been selfish. I am sorry, and there is nothing I can ever do to be as good to you as you have been to me.” Celestia leaned down and lightly brushed Twilight’s cheek with her muzzle. “Twilight, I have one final selfish request of you. I do not ask you this as your mentor or as your Princess or your peer, or even as your friend, because no friend would ever ask another to do this. I ask you this as a tired, old mare.”
Twilight pressed her face into Celestia’s coat and felt Celestia’s feathery wing around her and listened to Celestia’s slow breath and held on to that brief, quiet moment for as long as she could, willed time to slow down or for Celestia to keep from saying those next words.
But time did not stop, and Celestia said, “Twilight, please help me rest.”
Twilight went still and cold, then held her mentor and friend tight for a long while, and then nodded.
“Thank you,” Celestia said, and kissed her forehead.
Twilight pulled herself away from Celestia and immediately felt the barren, lonely cold of the Ceremony Chamber where Celestia’s warmth had been. She did not speak. She wiped the trickling moisture from her cheek and stepped away.
Twilight walked back towards the entrance, and then stood and turned around.
She found that Celestia had already stopped being Celestia, her mentor, her friend, her family, and had become Princess Celestia, benevolent ruler of Equestria, standing tall and regal.
No, she was more than that, Twilight realized. She was Celestia, Bearer of the Sun. Hard-hearted. Judicious. Broken.
Celestia stood upon the center dais of the Ceremony Chamber, hollow channels running circles around her, and looked down upon Twilight. The full weight and magic of the sun bore down upon them both.
Celestia said, “Now, I say to you the same words the first Empress said to the second, and as you will say to your successor on the night of your abdication. You will not understand what I say, not truly, not now.”
The ritual words of the Ceremony, first inscribed by the original Empress with deep concern for the fate of those who would come after her, and then echoed across millennia in the choked air of the Ceremony Chamber by every Bearer since, now came up from Celestia’s throat and passed her lips, though they were not her own:
“The power I bestow upon you is no honor. It is no gift. It is no award or decoration of service. It is no recognition of valor or virtue or integrity. It will not cleanse you, and it will not cleanse the world. There is no love in this act, or kindness or generosity. I give you nothing of value, nothing worthy of hubris, nothing worthy of respect. I give you only chains with which you will bind yourself to the lives of this world.
“You will lose many. Some you will murder with your own hooves, and those will be the easiest. Some you will order put to death, and you may call those just or fair, but you will know how paltry the reign of justice and fairness in this world is. Some you will choose to allow to die, and you will say that you cannot help everyone. Some will die as a result of your choices, purposefully or accidentally, and you will call those unfortunate casualties. Some you will try to save, and they will die anyway. Some you will try to save, but they will fight against you, and will die, and those will be the worst of all. Most who die, you will never know their names, you will never remember them, and you will never care about them or their fates.
“With this power, you will not become any of the things you hoped to become. You will try, but you will not save yourself. You will not save your family or your friends. You will not save anyone or anything. You will not be a kind or just ruler. You will not be wise. You will not love or care for all equally. You will not serve the greater good. If you seek it, you will never find a greater good. You will not be respected by all. You will not be loved by all. You will not belong. You will not be remembered forever. You will be forgotten, and when you leave the world it will be much the same world as when you first came to it. The ones you leave behind will not have changed for better or for worse
“When you truly understand what I have said to you this night, your time to pass will have come. But now, that time is mine. I am sorry and goodbye.”
Silence fell upon Celestia as lightly as winter’s first snow upon the frail, naked trees of autumn.
Twilight sat on the cold stone floor and watched.
Celestia closed her eyes and tilted her head towards the ceiling. A light appeared on the tip of her horn. It burned feverishly, poisonously, as bright and fiery as the sun. The sick light swelled throughout the whole chamber, but Twilight did not shield her eyes.
The light quickly passed from Celestia’s horn down to her head and flooded into her eyes and strangled her neck and broke into her chest and consumed her bowels and then poured to the bottom of each of her legs, a tremor followed in the light’s wake, ripping from Celestia’s head to her tail.
All at once, the light dissipated and was gone.
Celestia fell to the floor and was still.
Twilight felt nothing. The tears that appeared on her face were bizarre and confusing. She felt as if she were somewhere else entirely. Her body still wondered, only mildly, at the body lying on the floor whose chest no longer rose or fell with breath, but she was someplace and some time else, though she did not know where. Perhaps a dream. Perhaps her mind dreamed while her body wept.
Celestia’s body rose limply off the floor and hung in the stale air, her legs dangling beneath her. Her eyes did not open and her heart did not beat.
Stepping from the shadows without becoming other than shadows, Luna approached the floating body. Twilight had forgotten she was present at all, and then remembered that Luna, the Luna she knew, wasn’t present. She was like Twilight. Dreaming. Someplace neither of them knew where, but certainly not in there in that Chamber.
The Luna that was shadows moved coldly and mechanically. She picked the stone dagger off its pedestal and held it to Celestia’s throat. She cut quickly and efficiently.
Celestia’s brilliant, immaculate white coat turned the deepest red. The red consumed her chest and then her stomach and then her legs where it fell to the floor and drip drip dripped into the stone channels and became a thick, slow rainstorm upon the floor.
Luna laid down the dagger and picked up the stone bowl. She pressed it against Celestia’s seeping chest until the bowl, too, was engrossed in red.
She turned and walked towards Twilight, stepping over the already swiftly flowing channels. The red rushed from circle to circle until the Chamber became the humid smell and clinging texture of blood.
Luna presented the bowl to Twilight, her eyes as dead and red as the stone, and said, the words far older than those inscribed by the first Empress, “Drink, and with this act confirm your oath before the magic of the earth and water and sky and stars.”
Luna gave her the bowl and walked past her and away, far and far away, from it all and from them all, and from Twilight.
Lost in dreams of herself as a small filly looking up at the tallest tower of Canterlot Castle and imagining what it might have been like to be a Princess one day, Twilight vaguely heard and saw, but did not understand, but heard her voice say the words she had read and reread in the old tome a hundred or a thousand times before.
“I will bear the sun upon my back, from this dawn to my final dusk, so that all may feel its warmth, and live.”
Twilight drank.
Milky death slipped down her throat and the sun’s light broke over the Castle of the Two Sisters far above, and the All rushed back into Twilight along her tongue, sticking to her teeth while Celestia’s blood ran in the hollows of the floor and deep into the earth, and the earth was sated.
