Chapters Most of us take stock of our possessions upon returning home from a long absence, and standing atop a small promontory overlooking the soft glow of Canterlot, Luna was no exception. While she had ample opportunity to stargaze during her exile, her thoughts had always been directed toward the world she drifted around, and her planned return. The stars had held no interest for her, only her plan to enfold her sister’s domain in eternal night.
She couldn’t help but smile as she thought of the new friends she had made in those who had finally vanquished the evil in her heart. It made this view all the more refreshing, now that she could look upon it with an untainted mind. This far above the capital, the entire sky was blanketed in starlight, and even after all this time she could still name every one of them, skipping over the unpleasant memories to those of standing on this very ledge years before the madness consumed her.
That madness, wrapped up as it was in destruction, had brought about creation. The creation of something she had been trying not to think about for over a year, and what she had finally come to this place to contemplate retrieving. Turning her gaze from the constellations near the horizon, she frowned up at the moon hovering above.
As much as her pride as Nightmare Moon had been wounded to contemplate it, she knew all too well that she was no match for her more powerful sister in a fair fight. Her banishment was evidence enough of that. One thousand years is a very long time to plot revenge, and she had done just that for nearly that entire period. Idle speculation wasn’t enough though; if she wanted to win once she found a way back home, she would need an edge over her sister, something to turn the tide in her favor.
Her darker self had devised a plan to do just that, but it would require a catalyst. Her explorations of the deepest fissures and tunnels of the rock that was her prison served to occupy most of the time she didn’t spend plotting revenge. Before one hundred years had passed, she knew nearly every inch of the moon, both inside and out. It was during one of her experiments with digging deeper into the solid core that she found what she needed.
It was a diamond. About the size of three coconuts, cloudy, lumpy, ugly, and perfect. Her heart had been racing as she extricated it from the rock around it, and brought it back to the cave near the surface that she called home.
That day, eight-hundred and seventy-three years before her return to Equestria, she had begun to channel her power into this gem. The process left her almost constantly exhausted, but she knew it would be worth the effort just to see the look on her sister’s smug face as she was brought to her knees. Every single day she performed this ritual, for hours at a time, storing a massive amount of her magic until the gem began to glow brightly blue. By the time the night of her return approached, if she had brought the diamond out to the surface, it would have been visible by telescope from the world across the void.
Of course, she had decided not to bring it back with her when she first returned, worried that her hand might be tipped too soon, and her sister prepare a means to counter her trick. That decision led to the defeat of Nightmare Moon, and the restoration of Luna, something she would be grateful for until the end of time. Opening her eyes again, her memories pushed aside momentarily, she stared up at her old prison once more.
That damnable thing was still up there, holding over eight centuries worth of hate-fueled power, and procrastinating any further wasn’t going to change that. Taking a deep, cleansing breath, she closed her eyes again, and focused on her old cave. With a brief, bright flash, she vanished from the ledge, and was once again surrounded by gray and black emptiness. As she looked around her landing point, she could see all of her hoof prints still crisscrossing the surface as far as she could see. She shook her head to dispel the lonely memories again and trudged into the small opening behind her, following the passages she had made back to where she kept what was once to be her sister’s undoing, and was now merely a problem.
It still glowed brightly, though not painfully so, and that glow swam across the walls of it’s chamber like reflections off water, belying the energy it contained. She could feel it against her horn, like some kind of magnetic force, drawing her toward it. Swallowing a feeling of trepidation, she lifted it gently from it’s resting place. Even in the moon’s lower gravity, it was far too light, as if even that small application of magic was making it exert its own power. She had to try hard not to just drop it and teleport back home, to warmth and safety.
This has to be done. There’s too much of my magic in this rock for it to be left where anything could happen to it.
Before she could try and talk herself out of it, she teleported both herself and the offending stone back onto the ledge above Canterlot, and let out the breath she had once again been holding out of subconscious habit. She set the gem on the ground in front of her, seeming to contemplate it for a moment before speaking to the presence she could feel behind her.
“I spent over eight-hundred years making this.”
The light sound of hoof prints came up beside her, the white alicorn they belonged to stopping alongside her smaller sister. Luna stole a glance over at her, and was somewhat surprised to see an expression of grudging admiration on Celestia’s face.
“…I can imagine what it was for,” was all she said in response.
“Yes. This was going to be the key to your imprisonment, my means of revenge. I had it all planned out, even down to a spell that would restrict your power to nothing but raising and lowering the sun, so I would be free from even that burden while I took control. I do not even know if it would have worked. Probably not, honestly, but it was all I could think about.”
“You weren’t yours-“
“Stop . You and I both know that is a pitiful excuse,” she replied, meeting her sister’s eyes now. “Nightmare Moon was me . Not the me that stands before you now, but she was not some other pony. I did what I did, and I made this.”
“Well, what do you plan on doing with it, then?”
At that, Luna turned her gaze back to her hooves, and then the offending diamond.
“I have not the slightest idea. That is part of why I brought it back here, because I need your help,” she responded quietly. “This thing is far too powerful to just be left where anything could happen to it. I brought it back with me because I want your help to try and find a way to destroy it.”
Celestia could see Luna’s face contort in an expression that was equal parts revulsion and anger as she looked at her work again. She looked back up to the stars, wishing though it was foolish that everything could have just returned to the way it was when her sister was given back to her. It was in the middle of remembering one particular idea of Luna’s when they were younger that a possible answer came to her.
“Luna, your wards are the only things keeping all that energy bottled up, aren’t they? I’m pretty sure there’s no way to outright destroy it without breaking the wards and releasing all of it in one pulse-“
“-which would destroy anything near it. And who knows how far that destruction would even reach?”
She sunk to her haunches with a sigh and massaged her temples, trying to think up some solution that wouldn’t involve turning the cursed thing into a magical bomb.
“Or, you could use it,” Celestia said with a hint of a smirk in her tone.
“What?” Her sister responded, looking up at her.
“Do you remember when you came to me practically jumping up and down over having devised an extreme distance teleportation spell?”
“I remember feeling silly afterward, when you pointed out that it would need more energy than that of raising the sun more than a dozen times over. I should have realized that myself.”
“So then the only way to make the spell work would be to use an external energy source-“
“-with many times that amount of power-“
“-which is of course impossible-“
“-unless one was willing to devote decades to storing one’s own energy in a suitable…”
Now they were both staring at it, but Luna wasn’t glaring anymore. Celestia couldn’t help but grin as she saw that familiar spark return to her little sister’s eyes. She leaned over close and whispered in her ear.
“Now, I’d figure that looks like enough to raise the sun over a hundred times over. And I’d bet quite a few bits that you still remember your calculations.”
“It is still just a silly idea, though. Even if I was to…visit another world, how would I choose? And who knows if my calculations were even accurate?” she responded somewhat sadly, staring at the millions of stars spread over the blackness above them.
“I think we both know a mare who would be elated at the chance to help you with this.”
At this, Luna emitted a rather un-royal snort before clamping her forehooves over her muzzle to try and stifle the giggles that were threatening to escape. After a few seconds though, she stood and adopted a more regal expression.
“We wish to make it known that we refuse all responsibility should thy pupil suffer a heart attack when we explain our intentions to her.”
“Now that’s not very nice!” her sister exclaimed, not even trying to hold back her own laughter, Luna soon following suit.
The two of them sat side by side, laughing helplessly for a few minutes before Luna hefted the now somewhat less malevolent stone in her telekinetic grasp once more. Now that the idea had been planted back in her mind, her head was in turmoil with all the old figures and estimates, the thought of making her dream a reality making her heart beat faster. She adopted a steadier stance and prepared to teleport herself back to her chambers.
“No tool is evil, Luna. You may have spent centuries crafting that stone as Nightmare Moon, planning to use it to defeat me, but that doesn’t make it any more than what it always was: a tool. It can still be used for good if you so choose. Don’t be so quick to fear your own power. Even if you doubt your own resolve, know that I don’t. The monster that consumed you is gone for good, and its time for you to believe that the same way I do.”
She walked over to her sister and crossed her neck with hers in a brief hug. As she stepped back, she saw how much more Luna looked like the old Luna, vibrant and untamed, without the slightest taint of what she would later become. She began to entertain the thought that some parts of “the old days” might just be coming back.
She stood smiling under the watchful gaze of the stars above for a minute or two after her sister departed, feeling like she wouldn’t have to worry about Luna anymore. With this kind of project to keep her sister busy, she wouldn’t mind having to take the moon off her hands every now and then if she got to see her truly happy again. Now, all that was left was to get back to her bed and catch up on all the sleep she just lost.
With the morning sun on her back, and an unconscious lavender mare blocking the doorway in front of her, Luna once again found herself on her haunches, eyes closed, massaging her temples.
“Well, at least she only fainted.”
Preliminary Experimentation
“-with that being the case, if we can precisely calculate the energy expenditure across the higher dimensions, we should be able to reach as far as, say, here, or here, while using less than a quarter of a percent of the total power we have, but that’ll also depend on the gravity of the other celestial objects within at least twenty-seven million miles and the energy necessary to match orbital velo-“
Twilight paused and flicked her ears at a strange sound to her left, turning to face the disturbance. At first her heart skipped a beat, thinking Spike was clamping his hands over his snout to keep from throwing up, until she saw how red his face was, and the tears running down his cheeks. Confused now, she followed his gaze over to Luna, and promptly turned red herself.
Luna was leaning back on her haunches, fore-hooves barely meeting the floor, staring at Twilight. She had rarely had occasion to use the word “flabbergasted” before, but the look on the Princess’s face fit it pretty well.
“…Princess?” she asked, a little hesitantly
Luna blinked a few times before responding.
“Forgive me, but…I wasn’t expecting that you would already be so familiar with the subject.”
“Well, I did a lot of ‘extra-curricular’ reading while I was in Canterlot,” she admitted, blushing. “The idea had occurred to me before, but even with all my research, I just couldn’t find a way to reduce the spell’s consumption enough to make it work.”
Luna thought about the power source currently occupying her bedroom back at the castle, decided to hold onto that information for a bit. She wanted a more realistic appraisal before she whipped out the magic ticket.
“About how much power do you think it would take?”
“Easily enough to raise the sun at least a dozen times over-what is it?”
“Nothing, please continue,” Luna replied, endeavoring to keep a straight face.
“…alright. Anyway, as I was saying, I can’t think of any way to reduce the consumption any further. I mean, teleportation spells are more strenuous to cast the further you’re trying to go, and that’s just distances of a few miles. I know you and Celestia can use some pretty powerful magic, but I gotta say this is beyond even what you two could pull off.”
“Have you tried working it all out on paper?”
“Oh! I completely forgot. Spike!”
Her number one assistant sat up from where he’d been starting to drift off from boredom.
“Huh, what?”
“Can you get that set of papers I had you file under “experimental” a few months ago?”
“Sure!”
He scampered out of the room, leaving the two mares alone. Twilight anxiously hoped her mentor’s sister would approve of her work. She hadn’t had a lot of subject matter to use as a basis, so she’d had to wing it on many of the figures, or as close to “winging it” as she ever came.
Luna was still trying hard not to smile and give away how impressed she was. Given her role as monarch and avatar of the night sky, nopony could really understand her interest in visiting her own "charges". Either that or they would simply wonder why she hadn't done so before with all of the power at her disposal. It was nice to find someone who could actually appreciate her interest, though that brought up questions she would ask at a later point. Luna started to feel like she might be able to finally pull off this crazy plan.
Spike returned with the requested papers, and Twilight laid them out on the floor between the two of them. All told, there were twelve large sheets covered in charts, graphs, and equations. Luna looked them over with a studied eye, ignoring for the moment the anxious look she could feel Twilight giving her as she ran the figures in her head, and compared them to what she had recovered of her own earlier work from where her sister had stashed it away in the royal archives. Making a mental note to thank her again for preserving those, she returned to her scrutiny.
As far as she could see, Twilight’s numbers were only missing some frame of reference points on the precise manner in which the heavenly bodies interacted with each other. What she had were book numbers, which were as accurate as book numbers could be, but they were no replacement for the visceral way in which she knew these things by heart. That could be easily remedied, however.
“Very good work, Twilight Sparkle. I can see only a few miscalculations, and those are more due to your sources. I see you marked this with a question mark, this line here?”
She began making the necessary corrections. Twilight walked around to her side to get a better look, nodding her head in silence at some of the changes, and cocking it to the side at others. When Luna lowered the quill back to the floor, she could see that all trace of trepidation had left her sister’s protégé. She was in full-on analytical mode, the Princess of the Moon sitting right next to her completely forgotten. She was only broken out of this trance by a voice below her.
“Uh, what does all this mean?” asked a clearly befuddled Spike, scratching his head.
Twilight, reflexively opened her mouth to begin another explanation, realized what she was doing, and spied the clock as she looked up.
“Oh my goodness, I lost track of time! Your bedtime was almost an hour ago!”
“Rats.”
He didn’t protest as she lifted him onto her back and carried him upstairs, though, and Luna smiled at the open doorway after they passed through it. If it weren’t for the obvious differences, you’d almost think they were siblings. She could recall fond memories of similar times she had shared with her own sister. The smile soon began to leave her face, though.
As with the phrase “no pony is an island”, so it is with memories. Hot on the heels of those happy recollections were the all-to-vivid images of the final months before her exile. Visions of bat-winged pegasi slaying their brothers in mid-air danced against the back of her eyelids as she tried to force her mind off the topic.
Her sister was always telling her to forget these memories, to remember the lessons of the past and nothing more, and never herself get tied up in the recollection. Celestia was normally a wonderful sister in all regards, and an excellent source of advice, but she had never been what Luna had, and her words – though well meaning – failed to remedy her younger sister’s affliction.
With a final wrenching effort and a firm shake of her head, she re-opened her eyes to find Twilight looking at her with concern from across the charts on the floor, mouth half open as if she had been about to announce her presence. The Night Princess took a deep breath and did her best to smile.
“I hope he didn’t give you any trouble?” she asked, hoping Twilight would pick up on her unwillingness to discuss what she had seen.
“None at all,” her host replied, looking back to the papers spread before them. “I normally never lose track of time like that, but this is…kind of exciting for me.”
“So I’ve seen.”
Twilight cleared her throat, the slight blush receding as she again immersed herself in the formulas Luna had modified. She frowned in concentration as she re-evaluated the power requirements of the tweaked spell. She eventually found herself shaking her head however, as the energy requirements were still far beyond what even the most gifted alicorn could produce at once, and there was no way to gradually execute the spell.
Upon seeing Twilight shake her head, Luna decided it was time to reveal her surprise. She stood, informed the lavender mare that she would return shortly, and then vanished in a flash. Though the librarian was confused for a few moments, that soon turned to open astonishment at the sight of what the princess returned with.
Lowering the glowing stone to the floor gently, Luna allowed a slight smile to cross her face. Her host was clearly dumbfounded, and she could clearly hear her sister’s laughter from the night before echoing in her mind as Twilight stood there with her mouth hanging open, her surroundings forgotten before this object. She slowly walked forward, stopping a foot from the motionless intruder, and reached out with her magic. She wasn’t fast enough to stop the loud gasp that left her lips as she felt only the tiniest fraction of the power coursing through the gemstone in front of her.
“Wh-ho-what is this?!”
“Think of it as a magical container. I spent over eight-hundred years storing my power in this diamond while I was on the moon.”
She mentally prepared herself for the next question, determined to give at least some kind of an answer, as she felt that her host deserved that at the very least, given the help she would be providing. She was somewhat astonished when Twilight spoke.
“It was a weapon, wasn’t it?”
“…yes, it was”
“I see…”
She didn’t back away though, Luna noticed with some admiration. The look in her eyes hardened slightly, but the analytical mind behind that gaze was still clearly in play, unperturbed by the origins of this glowing gem.
Twilight, for her part, was going over all of the calculations in her mind again, factoring in what she estimated was the total capacity of Luna’s stone. Even factoring for as much fault margin as possible, it might be possible to accomplish several trips to a sufficiently close celestial object. They would still need to find one, however, and they’d need a destination to visualize in order to make the transition.
The princess of the night was forced to duck as several heavy tomes from the shelves around them flew rapidly over her head and opened in front of the librarian, each turning to a page it would remain on for no more than a few seconds before its pages began to turn again as Twilight’s focus shifted between them. She muttered to herself, the words unintelligible to her guest, her mind operating at a breakneck pace. Finally, she closed the books and stacked them on a nearby table, turned back to Luna.
“It’ll work. You’ll only be able to manage three or four round-trips at the most, but that thing will cover the energy consumption. What we need now is to do some tests.”
She lapsed back into silence, clearly working out more figures, the frown on her face deepening with her focus. Having spoken with her sister about her protégé on numerous occasions since her return, she could see the tell-tale signs of obsession setting in. The only difference was the intensity with which this obsession was taking shape. Celestia had described most of these occurrences as somewhat manic, and that had been what she had mentally prepared herself to deal with. This was something else entirely, and she couldn’t help but think her presence in the mix was tamping down Twilight’s natural enthusiasm. Though she tried to convince herself that her concern was misplaced, she couldn’t help but feel a bit worried at the implications of that much manic energy being restrained.
“Twilight.”
Her host started at the sound of her voice.
“Y-yes?”
“How well do you know the night sky?”
“Quite well, Princess! I’ve memorized almost every star chart in the Canterlot archives. Why?”
“How about hazardous environment protection spells? Have you learned ones for exploring the ocean, ones that can hold air?”
“Uh, yes?”
“Demonstrate one for me.”
Twilight was very curious at this point, but her eagerness to demonstrate the fruits of her studies to her mentor’s sister won out. She closed her eyes, and with a brief glow from her horn, she felt the spell settle into a sphere around her. Before she could open her eyes however, there was a bright flash against her eyelids, and she felt momentarily disoriented. Opening her eyes did nothing to improve this.
There was nothing but stars. These were not stars as she had seen them before. These were bright, untwinkling and many . The entire sky above her was enshrouded with a brilliant blanket of hundreds of millions of tiny lights in the darkness, and she had to remind herself to blink. Heedless of the princess who stood next to her, watching with a bemused expression, a grin began to cross her face that would have made Pinkie envious.
Though the lack of air made it impossible to hear Twilight’s response to this new development, as she watched her clamp her fore hooves over her muzzle, Luna would have said she could feel her elation across the void between them. For the next minute, the lavender mare’s eyes roamed the heavens ceaselessly, cataloguing every star and constellation, mentally testing her knowledge. After a few breathing exercises she had memorized from a particularly useful book Celestia had recommended to her early in her studies, she finally calmed down enough to speak.
“Princess, this is amazing!”
“There’s no air here, Twilight Sparkle.”
“Oh, right,” she replied, switching to a telepathy spell with a slight blush at her mistake. “I was saying that this is amazing! The stars are so bright here, and there are so many more to see.”
She finally looked over to Luna, and saw that she wore no protective spell around herself. This confused Twilight momentarily, before she chalked it up to the Princess’s immortality, and turned her gaze back to the stars. Now that she was over the initial shock, she started looking for stars she recognized as being closer to their world from her studies. She marked two or three, and made a mental note to do some more accurate measurements once they got back to Ponyville. Speaking of which, she was probably getting close to having used most of the air in her bubble.
“We should probably head back now, Princess. I’m not sure how much air is left in this spell.”
“Alright then, I have one last thing to show you.”
With that, there was another bright flash, and Twilight re-opened her eyes to a sight that nearly made her faint again. Instead of a carpet of lights, there was a massive blue and green sphere, whisps of white drifting slowly across it’s surface. The analytical part of her mind quickly identified the continents “below” them, while the rest of her still tried to grapple with the fact that she was seeing her entire world turn majestically in front of her eyes. She stared until her vision grew blurry, blinked to clear away the tears that then drifted beside her weightlessly. It was…profound.
As they drifted, the planet making its slow revolution as it always did, Twilight could see Equestria appear over the horizon and begin to make it’s way beneath them. As it reached that point, she suddenly noticed a small group of twinkling lights sliding by, only a few miles away from a much larger grouping, and realized where those lights were coming from. If her previous tears were due to drying out her eyes by staring, she knew she couldn’t pass these new ones off as the same. That was her home, and Canterlot, where she had been born and lived most of her life. Both were just small clusters of lights on the surface of this massive sphere, and as big as her world was, it was nothing before the majesty of the starry expanse that girded it.
She looked over to Luna, floating beside her, and saw her smiling. She smiled back, sniffling a little, before wiping her tears and nodding to her. With a final bright flash, they were back in the Ponyville library, and Twilight let her spell dissipate around her. She opened her mouth to say something, closed it, tried again, and was still silent. Luna just chuckled softly and turned toward the door, feeling more in the mood for a night flight than a quick teleportation spell.
“I imagine I’ve left you with quite a bit to think about. Why don’t you sleep on it? I will return in a few days. I have some matters of state I must assist Celestia with. Goodnight, Twilight Sparkle.”
“Goodnight, Princess.”
Several hours later, still staring out her bedroom window, the lavender librarian gave up trying to calm down, and just played back the events of the day, that same childish grin returning at the thought of finally being able to fulfill the dream that both she and Luna now realized they had in common.
They were going to find new worlds among those stars, and she couldn’t wait to get started.
Princess Luna liked to think of herself as a charitable mare. Still, there are limits to everypony’s tolerance.
This was one of the first occasions since her return that she found herself indulging in some of the…darker thoughts that sometimes drifted through her mind unbidden. As wonderful as it was to watch her sister’s young niece be wed, she wasn’t sure she could be held responsible for what would befall Equestria’s “magnanimous” monarch if she had to hear one more crack about “sleeping through a hostile takeover”. As much as she loved her sister, her sense of humor was starting to wear quite thin.
She shook her head to clear her thoughts, and raised her hoof to knock on the library door. She was somewhat surprised when the door opened inches from her hoof, revealing Spike, who looked just as surprised to see the Night Princess standing there with one hoof in the air and a look of confusion on her face.
“How did you know I was standing here?”
“...I was actually headed to the market to get some coffee, ‘cause Twilight looked like she was gonna need it.”
“She is not awake?”
“Not really. She muttered something about ‘orbital mechanics’ or something when I tried to wake her up, but then she just went back to sleep.”
“I see. Perhaps I can try my hoof at waking her while you are out?” Luna suggested, trying to hold back the grin threatening to spread across her face.
Spike cocked an eyebrow, but left without further comment. As Luna closed the door behind him, she stopped fighting the grin, and trotted up the stairs as quietly as possible. Apparently their little “sojourn” had worn her new research partner out more than she had anticipated.
The market wasn’t too crowded, and Spike was able to gather both the coffee and a few other items in short order, returning to the library with a small bag of groceries. It would speak to the progression of the last two years that he was not unduly surprised when his caretaker appeared in midair and mid-scream in the library proper before said scream was silenced with a thump and a brief expression of pain.
“Morning, Twilight,” he said before walking into the kitchen to get the coffee ready.
“You could have just yelled in my ear or popped a balloon or something a little less freaky.”
“I haven’t had a chance to practice ‘fun’ since Nightmare Night, and it wasn’t that bad...”
“You try waking up to two giant glowing eyes two inches from your face.”
Luna took what most would have considered grave insolence in the face of royalty in stride and laughed uproariously. Spike could clearly be heard attempting not to snicker as he cleaned up from their light breakfast in the kitchen. Twilight had to try very hard not to roll her eyes at having one of the two immortal Diarchs of her world playing pranks on her and - oh wow, she snorts when she laughs. ..
This was too much weirdness to be dealing with less than two days after finding out that her brother was marrying her old foalsitter without her even having heard a word from him for years, followed rapidly by a massive changeling invasion, a brawl the likes of which she hoped she never had to take place in again, and having to do all the wedding preparations over again due to the first set being for the queen of said invading horde.
At least Spike makes good coffee. Sure gonna need it for today...huh, what is happening today?
“Might I ask why you dropped by today, Princess?”
“Well, we obviously couldn’t continue our little project with everything that was happening around the wedding, but I decided that two days was enough time to recover. After all, this is no minor undertaking!”
“So what’s our next step?” Twilight asked after taking another sip of her coffee, waking up far quicker now that her mind was getting back into gear on their research.
“I had thought that selecting potential targets would be the next order of business.”
“Alright. Did you bring your star charts with you, Princess, because I’m sure your’s would be more accurate-”
“Not to sound arrogant, but I have the night sky memorized Twilight Sparkle. I’m sure your own charts will be more than sufficient. Even if they were incorrect on any details, I’m sure I could help you fix them.”
“Oh, right, yeah...”
Hiding her temporary blush behind her mug, the lavender librarian’s mind was already working over what she had memorized of her star charts and trying to recall which of the nearby stars had planets that they could actually visit. She was fairly certain that even Luna couldn’t handle some of the more hostile worlds her projections indicated that some of those stars would play host to.
As soon as Twilight finished her coffee, the two adjourned upstairs to her room to further work on their calculations. It was now her bedroom floor that was covered in splayed out scrolls and massive sheets of paper covered in small drawings of solar systems. Luna was beginning to worry about how much time her host was obviously spending at her telescope when said pony spoke up again.
“Ok, I think our best bets are here, here, and here. These are all stars of around the same color as our own, so they have the best chance of having planets around them that we can actually survive visiting, and that might actually have something worth seeing on them other than rocks.”
“The second one is one I had considered myself when I first started this pursuit. I remember it having quite a few planets, but not whether they would work for us or not.”
“Well, we could solve that with a few observations, but that would have to wait until tonight, unfortunately.”
Both mares were simultaneously struck by the fact that their enthusiasm was rather abruptly left without an outlet. Until nightfall, they couldn’t do any detailed stargazing, and their calculations were already more than solid.
“Huh...well, you have any official business in Canterlot or anything?”
“No, not for today at least. My sister can handle what little there is on the agenda.”
“Well, you didn’t have much of a chance to just look around Ponyville last time you were here. Wanna get a better introduction to the town while we wait, Princess?”
“That sounds like an excellent idea, Twilight Sparkle,” Luna replied with a smile and nod.
For Luna, the walk was very relaxing, and the chance to actually take in all the sights of her new friend’s home was quite enjoyable as well. She noticed that ponies seemed to find her far less intimidating in the day, allowing her to actual meet and exchange pleasantries with quite a few of them, helping to dispel more of her less positive memories of her last Nightmare Night.
After being almost forced to break for an early lunch by an ecstatic Pinkie Pie, the two were trotting along the outskirts of Whitetail Wood, enjoying the feeling of the warm summer breeze blowing past them, the shade of the trees making their walk quite comfortable. They were halfway back to Ponyville when Twilight finally broke the silence again.
“I was meaning to ask you last time we met, but what were you shaking your head about that night? When I came back your face was scrunched up like something was hurting you.”
Luna let out a long and heartfelt sigh, berating herself for not having expected this to come up sooner or later.
“My sister doesn’t often reflect on the memories of...what happened between us one thousand years ago because she has so many memories she’s made since then. However, virtually all of mine are of dwelling on those few from that time, and my mind strays back to them sometimes.”
“You know, most ponies have a bunch of different theories on what it was like up there. Most of them assumed that you being sealed there meant that time was stopped for you for a thousand years, or something like that.”
“Its probably best that they continue to think just that. I imagine the reality that I spent that many years nursing my own hatred and plotting revenge would make it a lot harder to hold a conversation with most ponies.”
Twilight felt more of a compulsion to wince than laugh at that kind of humor, but it at least showed that Luna could see the lighter side of the subject, even if making jokes about it seemed in pretty poor taste. They walked in silence for a few more minutes before Luna abruptly stopped and looked directly at her walking partner.
“The history books may try to gloss over certain aspects of my attempted coup, but I think that you know that such situations are never as ‘neat and tidy’ as history tries to paint them to be. Not only did ponies die in those weeks, but many of them, and quite a few of those to my own horn and hooves. Celestia says I should take some solace in the fact that I didn’t kill any innocents, but what could the Royal Guard be said to be guilty of?”
She turned and looked up at the aura of the sun shining around the cloud that had drifted across it.
“Many of my Night Guard fell as well, but I barely noticed in my fervor to become the sole ruler of this world. Its still so foolish and foalish what I was trying to achieve. Endless night would have killed every one of the ponies that I was so desperate to rule, thinking that the rise and fall of both celestial bodies was some kind of tyranny.”
Twilight said nothing at this, wisely realizing that Luna wasn’t looking for any input. She merely watched as the alicorn continued to stare upward at that cloud until it finally left the sun’s face, averting her eyes from the full glare.
“Give us something back.”
Luna’s head snapped around, and her ears stood straight up as Twilight finally spoke up.
“What?”
“Your memories hurt you so much because they’re all about what you took from the ponies who looked up to you, about the ones you killed and the others you would have turned into slaves and left in eternal darkness. What you need is new memories and something that you can feel that you offered in atonement or you’re never going to get rid of those feelings. What you need to do is finish this with me; finish what you started over a millenia ago and give the world the greatest discovery it’s ever seen.
“Uhm, Princess,” she finished, blushing at the informal tone she had just used, and hoping she wasn’t about to be reprimanded.
Luna’s smile surprised her a little, but she found herself smiling in return quite easily.
“I think we can dispense with formality for the time being, Twilight. Forgive me if I tend to cling to it unduly; it may have been quite a few years, but that is still what I am most used to.”
“It doesn’t bother me, Prin-” she cleared her throat and blushed.
“It seems this is something for both of us to work on,” her alicorn research partner laughed, “Now, I recall you mentioning Ponyville Lake being a great place to swim?”
If any of their previous interactions had shocked Twilight, this one certainly took the cake. She was left standing with her mouth hanging open for what anypony would have considered a bit too long.
“C-come again?”
“Come now, it should not be that shocking that I enjoy a good swim now and then. Or did you think such things were beneath royalty?”
“I-uh-”
“Judging by your surprise, you must not be aware of how long my sister takes in the bath. Do not assume that she does not indulge simply because she is more discreet about it. Besides, all that hot water makes her horribly pruney for hours ...”
At that mental image, they both laughed, and Twilight led her back across town to the perfect place to cool off after a long summer day.
The rest of the day passed rather quickly, and Luna’s past never came up again, much to her relief. Full-black found them out on Twilight’s highest balcony with her telescope, gazing up at the sky once more. The enchanted mirrors she had finally worked the kinks out of a month ago were doing a beautiful job of clearing distortion and improving magnification, her telekinesis keeping it tracking along path's she had thoroughly memorized. Spike could be heard snoring softly in her bedroom as they kept their voices low so as not to disturb him.
“Judging by the way these other points are clustered around that star, they’re obviously it’s planets. Looks like there are...twelve of them.”
Showing impressive coordination, Twilight jotted down a rough sketch of the system while tracking her telescope with the star’s movement. Once she had that layout, she started working it into their calculations, and then cross-referencing it with the newly revised spell they had finished in their last session.
“It looks like this planet here is what we’re looking for. Fifth one out, and based on the intensity of the star it should be the closest match to our own world.”
She turned to Luna for her input, but her partner was just looking up at the sky with a blank expression on her face. One could tell by her eyes that she was deep in thought, though, and she soon smiled slightly, before her horn lit and began growing brighter, the stone back in her room growing brighter as well, causing Spike to grumble and roll over in his sleep.
Before Twilight could ask what was going on, the air in front of her began to shimmer, and suddenly she was looking at a black circle. A few more seconds of inspection showed a large number of stars visible in this circle, and she realized that Luna was channeling sufficient power from the stone to make a far-sight spell stretch that entire distance.
That would certainly explain why her face is all scrunched up like that, and the sweating .
As much as the realization that her new friend was reaching across light-years of space to make a picture in midair was rather cowing, something was wrong. It was just a black circle of space. Luna let the spell fade with the same expression of confusion, until she suddenly slapped herself in the face hard enough to leave a hoofprint.
“Argh, how could I have forgotten that?”
“Wow, that...didn’t that hurt? Wait, what did you forget?”
“The speed of light,” she responded, looking back to Twilight almost sheepishly.
It suddenly clicked in the librarian’s mind. Magic operated regardless of distance, the only notable indication of range being the energy consumption, but light was locked into a set speed just like sound, meaning that-
“-that planet isn’t there. We’re looking at where it was dozens of years ago. Yeah, that’s kind of embarrassing to forget,” she said, rubbing at the back of her neck with the realization that that should have been obvious to her as well.
“We were getting ahead of ourselves, it seems. This will require some recalculation of our spell.”
“Yeah,” Twilight replied, grinning now, “and I know just what kind of calculations we need, and exactly where to find them.”
Luna caught on, now smiling as well, and they both spoke together.
“The Canterlot Archives-” started Luna
“In the Starswirl the Bearded wing,” her partner finished.
“Ok, this might be harder than I thought.”
The books and scrolls lying around them were more than testament to that. Twilight had thought the collection seemed formidable when she was desperately searching for a way to prevent a disaster that wasn’t even going to happen, but it seemed now that having enough time to actually read through them only made the task more daunting. A few hours was starting to seem like a very generous estimate.
Unlike the last time Twilight had been here, they weren’t just tearing through shelves with near reckless abandon, but rather reading through all the materials they took from the shelves, trying to find any hints of what they were looking for. This wasn’t a problem a single simple spell could solve; they were going to need a lot of information to work with.
“I would agree that this seemed it would be a much simpler undertaking last night.”
“I know this isn’t a library, but these aren’t even alphabetized, or categorized at all!.”
Luna had to try hard not to giggle at the look of consternation on her friend’s face. If there was one thing guaranteed to offend Twilight, it was a lack of organization, and the fact that she was finding such here in Canterlot, in the building where the history of their nation was stored had her red in the face. Looking around the room again brought a more wistful expression to her face, though.
“To be honest, I am not surprised. This is somewhat characteristic of my sister...”
She let that trail off as she saw the new expression on her Twilight’s face. It was giving her the distinct feeling of tearing the walls down around the poor mare’s mind. Obviously she was far more entrenched in her beliefs of Celestia as perfection incarnate than she would like to admit. I had better qualify that before she has a stroke.
“What I meant by that is, completely apart from the number of servants we have, my sister is even more of a “mare-of-the-ponies” than she may appear at times. Working with our little ponies has always been her favorite part of our station, and she can tend to immerse herself in that to the detriment of other pursuits, such as organization.”
“So you’re saying this place has been like this all along? How the heck did you ever find anything? I mean-uhm-”
Twilight’s face was flushed again as she realized the implications of what she was saying, but the blood drained back from her face when she saw that Luna seemed not to have noticed, and was merely staring out the window.
“I am afraid the current state of disarray in this room is more recent than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“This room was rebuilt and ‘restocked’ around one thousand years ago.”
“You mean-”
“I did not come to this room specifically, but it was heavily damaged in the fighting. Were it not for the preservation spells on the contents of this room, most of these spells would have been destroyed.”
Luna began to pace the short aisle they were in an she talked, tail and ears flicking in obvious agitation.
“This building is as heavily guarded as it is because of the records of magic it contains. The magic I used to make myself a match for my sister as Nightmare Moon came in large part from this very archive. The other parts of it I cannot remember, which is for the best.”
“I’m sorry-”
“No!” she said sharply, halting her pacing and turning to Twilight. “As irritating as the frequency of such may be, my sister is right yet again. The best way to leave behind memories such as these is to keep pushing forward.
“This room is like this because Celestia has not allowed anypony inside in centuries,” she said with an explosive sigh, “not even to dust, though the preservation spells help with that. It is a testament to her absolute faith in you that she allows you unfettered access. As obvious as it is that this room is in no condition to be searched in the manner we have been pursuing, I see no need to keep up the pretense.”
With that, every scroll and book was airborne, and began circling the night princess as her eyes moved faster than Twilight thought possible. After a few seconds of cringing at watch the already disorganized material speed through Luna’s vision and land on completely random shelves, she reached out with her own magic and diverted a smaller flow through her own vision, assisting the search while vowing to one day return and install a card catalogue.
All at once the frenetic movement ceased, and several tomes fell to the floor, all the others dismissed to shelves at random. What remained were four books in front of Luna, and two more neatly stacked in front of Twilight. Without a word Luna passed one of her’s to Twilight, and they both opened all of them and started browsing. The room was silent for almost half an hour as indexes were scanned, notes were made, and page numbers were memorized or written down for future reference.
“Alright,” Twilight finally said, “I think I found part of what we’re looking for here.”
She indicated a paragraph in Explorations of Temporal Phenomena and leaned to the side so Luna could look over her shoulder. After looking it over quickly, she nodded, turned back to the center book of her own set, nodded again, and stood up.
“Yes, that equation for time factoring in teleportation spells is helpful for the scrying, but we are still missing important information to properly factor for distance of the actual teleportation.”
“This would be a lot easier if somepony had written some books on what we’re trying to do, and we didn’t have to extrapolate time spells with spells for teleportation over short distances,” the purple mare sighed.
“It is curious you should mention that. You do realize part of my surprise at your ‘monologue’ when I first came to your home was that I didn’t have to explain the full implications of this to you? And you know what I mean by that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Twilight responded after a brief pause.
“When did you learn?”
“Four years ago. She said it was alright for me to tell Spike, since he always helps me so much with my research, but she forbid me from telling anypony else-”
“That we aren’t what our little ponies think we are, yes. As my sister evidently explained to you, our titles are more symbolic than they are absolute. We do not physically control the sun and moon, and the stars are completely beyond both of us. We do however, maintain the balance of the world by keeping both bodies in check, ensuring they stay on their assigned paths and that the sun does not fluctuate harmfully. Aside from that, this world orbits the sun, and the moon orbits this world.”
“I still don’t understand, though. Why the secrecy?”
Luna stood up and began to pace once more. This time rather than agitation, she gave off an air of anticipation. Twilight was confused, but said nothing, waiting for her friend to start speaking again.
“As much as it pains my sister and I,” she finally began, “while many things have changed over the centuries, our subject’s sense of security being largely dependent on their belief in our absolute power has not. You must understand how worried we were for just that when Celestia was struck down by Chrysalis at your brother’s wedding. We were afraid that single defeat would cause widespread panic, but your brother and his fiance displaying the power of their love as they did actually helped us as much as it did everypony else, as it was seen to explain how Chrysalis could best my sister. While our links to our celestial bodies give us great power, my sister especially, we are just as prone to being taken by surprise as anypony else.
“To come out and tell the world that our powers are far more limited than they believe would do more to harm the peace we now enjoy than it would to provide enlightenment. We are confident that ponies will come who will find out the truth for themselves, and we will admit to it at that point, but we don’t wish to ‘pull the rug’ out from under all our subjects, as much as this lie grows tiresome.
“I am not content to wait, however,” she said as she halted and turned to face Twilight. “I believe that what you and I are planning to do will serve as a means to both show all the world the truth, and to show them that this truth does not bind them, but set them free. Celestia was always reluctant to agree to this, but I believe the time is right, and she now shares my opinion on this matter. This world may not be under our complete control, but what does that matter when there are millions of other worlds that can be reached, maybe even settled? Twilight, if we can do this, we will take away the safety net, and replace it with all the stars in the sky, open and inviting.”
She held out her hoof to her new friend, and held her gaze, locking eyes with her. To her happy satisfaction, the purple mare barely hesitated before putting her own hoof against Luna’s, and nodding in determination.
“I’m with you, Luna.”
“Then let us go somewhere we can better appreciate our ‘surroundings’.”
Twilight barely had time to raise an eyebrow before the now familiar feeling of being pulled along by the Princess’s teleportation suffused her, and she blinked to clear her eyes before looking around at their new location.
The room was a perfect sphere, but her brief confusion as to why they weren’t standing on the bottom was dispelled as she realized the floor beneath here was flawless glass, and it resisted any attempt to smudge it. The only light in this windowless sphere came from Luna’s horn, which illuminated her smile as Twilight finally looked to her.
“Do you like it? This is my observatory. The entire inner surface is infused with magic to support scrying spells. It allows me to do this, for instance.”
They were several hundred feet above Ponyville with no noticeable transition. As soon as her brain was done calculating the lack of wind and falling sensation, Twilight managed to get a handle on her panic and look around. She could see the bright colored dots of hundreds of ponies all moving around her hometown at once, all pursuing their daily lives without the slightest inkling that the Night Princess and their town librarian were watching them from above. Focusing her eyes carefully, she could see that this room was exactly what Luna had said - an observatory- as the image could be seen to have no real depth.
“The only disadvantage of this room is that the enhancing agent that holds the spells is lunar rock, which binds its ability to scry only to objects that can be seen from the current position of the moon. It is still morning, so the moon has not yet moved behind the planet. Now then...”
Luna’s horn glowed brighter, far more brightly than even now to maintain this spell, and the room’s magic walls were dark once more, but lit brighter than ever as her eyes began to glow brightly white along with the midnight blue aura of her horn. As Twilight watched, the walls suddenly flickered once, and then exploded with color. Every color of the rainbow and many more besides flowed around the walls in a pattern so fast and confused she was going to get a headache trying to keep up. Then as soon as it had started, the flow stopped, and the room was black once more.
This time, though, the darkness was the ground beneath them, and the stars overhead. Her eyes wide, she looked out at what she now realized was the surface of another planet. There was very little to see, but as they watched the sky behind them began to glow. The two turned to watch it rise, but it was not the soft yellow orb they were used to, and it was coming up far too quickly. A small, but painfully bright blue star slowly crossed the horizon and began to climb, still far faster than their own sun. As they looked beneath them, they saw sharp peaks of rock, dozens upon dozens of craters, and long, winding canyons. There was no corona around the sun that now sailed above them, and no haze of any kind to show an atmosphere. But the fact that this planet was so obviously devoid of life did nothing to dampen the elation of the two mares who now looked across it’s surface.
Horn still brightly lit, Luna began to shift their perspective, bringing them closer, and giving them a far better look. It was obvious to Twilight that Luna was scrying the wrong planet, whether by accident or intent, but it hardly mattered now. She was far too busy committing everything she saw to memory, desperate to archive this so she could relive it later. When she thought about the possibility of actually walking across the surface of this world or others, as close as she appeared to be now, she could barely stop herself from jumping around screaming like she did after getting her cutie mark.
After a few more minutes of tracing a narrow canyon from above, Luna’s horn dimmed, and the room was dark once more until a door slid open to their rear. The Night Princess stood and began to walk out, her head hanging a little lower an indication of how much this little excursion had taken out of her.
“You look really worn out,” Twilight observed as she got up and quickly followed her. “Weren't you channeling mana from that diamond?”
“I was, but acting as a conduit for that much power is still quite exhausting. Just because I am an alicorn does not mean I am immune to the dangers of magical ‘burnout’, and with the power I was just throttling, that can be very hard to manage.”
Her purple friend gulped at the gruesome mental images the lessons Celestia had given her about the dangers of this came back to mind. They were both silent as Luna led her through the castle, finally stopping at a set of doors she remembered were to Luna’s private chambers.
“I am sorry to have to cut another of our meetings short, but I fear I will need a few hour’s rest to recover from that spell. I will send you a letter as soon as I awake, and we can arrange our next meeting.”
“That’s fine, Luna! I’ve got some work to do back at the library in any case. I’m sure Spike will be glad to have my help.”
“I have no doubt. Until next time, Twilight.”
As the heavy doors shut behind her, Twilight paid hardly any attention to the castle, already knowing most of the corridors by heart, and having perfected the skill of deep thought while walking when she was still young.
She had known this would be a major undertaking, but being part of the revelation to the entire world that the Royal Pony Sisters weren’t the masters of heaven and earth they were thought to be? Her visions of greatness later in life had never even scratched at something this monumental. With practiced ease, she put those thoughts aside for the time being, her focus back on calculations once more, trying to work out the missing components to allow them to do what nopony had done before. The train ride back would certainly give her more than enough time.
As she sat in her seat and waited for the train to depart, she found herself smiling again. Spike’s jaw was going to be on the floor when he heard about what she’d done today.
Author's Note
Okay, I've waited long enough on this that even though every single one of my editors is offline, I went back over it myself and I'm posting it anyway. I apologize for any mistakes this may have. I also made small edits to the chapters 2 and 3 based on feedback and some adjustments to the overall storyline I'm working with. I'll probably be doing some more editing for consistency, and I'll post a blog entry when I do.
As much as planning to travel to an entirely different planet an immeasurable distance away is a somewhat heavy subject to contemplate, upon awakening to a magnificently positioned sunbeam aimed directly into her pupil, Twilight Sparkle reflected that it made little difference when it came to such mundane tasks as getting up in the morning.
As usual, Spike was still snoring blithely away, even though she had told him the night before what this day was going to involve. As helpful as he was, a morning dragon he was not. She briefly considered turning him out of his basket, but thought better of it when she considered it would only prevent her from getting some coffee in her system as quickly as possible.
Considering how early she had been up for her first Winter Wrap Up two years ago, this was abysmal. Staying up all night working on advanced mathematics in relation to space-time fluctuations really hadn’t helped, but being this far behind the curve for what was pretty much going to be the greatest achievement of her entire species was a bit beyond the pale.
She could see by the clock on the far wall of the tree that she still had an hour and some change before she needed to be ready for the chariot Luna was sending, as she had decided that making the first interstellar teleport in history merited commissioning a government chariot. Given the small size of Ponyville, and thus the quite rapid pace of gossip in said town, it was going to be hard to keep people from speculating as to why the Crown would be collecting Twilight on this particular morning. Fortunately, since this wasn’t exactly the first time the nation’s Diarchs had dropped in on Ponyville since their new librarian had arrived, the topic would hopefully be shelved before anyone got any ideas.
Twilight knew she was being paranoid to think that anyone in their right mind would guess at what she and Luna were planning to do today, but the fact that she was already so nervous that even her telekinesis was shaking was probably not helping.
The cup she had brewed at least ten minutes ago finally finished, she got up and went about gathering up what she thought she might need. Planning for something that had never been done before was somewhat of a dubious task, but Luna would probably have some suggestions of her own, and being over-prepared never hurt anyone.
When the knock came, she was ready. With a deep breath, and a quick nod of her head, she walked out her front door with what was at least a bit more confidence than what she woke up with.
Watching her tree disappear behind the chariot, Twilight Sparkle sincerely hoped she would see it again, and hoped the two pegasi pulling her through the sky couldn’t hear her hammering heart.
“You are shaking less than I was expecting.”
“I tried not shaking, but I don’t think that’s going to work,” Twilight replied somewhat tersely as she attempted to slide her saddlebags off without dropping them from her nervous shivers.
“Your anxiety is to be expected, but you can rest assured that I won’t let anything happen to you.”
Twilight turned from her bags and looked over at her research partner with an eyebrow raised.
“Well, I will do everything in my power to try and lessen the chances of anything happening to you.”
“I guess this would be one of those times where immortality comes in handy...”
“It does have benefits in terms of removing the danger from certain situations, yes.”
Bags unpacked and the contents laid out on the floor of Luna’s bedchambers, Twilight looked at what Luna had laid out herself, and was somewhat embarrassed to find her own collection to be much larger. She’d tried to keep herself to a tight weight allowance, which only required transcribing passages from a half-dozen weighty tomes onto scrolls small enough to fit in her bags. It only took an hour or two.
Luna smiled at her though, and nodded toward what she’d brought.
“You have done an admirable job of packing light, or at least as light as I would expect you to.
“I think these will actually come in handy,” she continued, unrolling a few of the scrolls to check their contents. “We may need some reference material on geology at the very least, given what we saw in my observatory.”
“I am sure you have brought only what you felt absolutely necessary. At least, I would assume so given that you can still walk while carrying it.”
Luna chuckled at the deadpan she received from her research partner before turning regarding the star charts spread around her own chambers and the numerous stacks of notes piled on top of those. While she silently seemed to take stock, Twilight looked around as well.
She had been in Princess Celestia’s bedchambers before, and while her mentor’s room always seemed perfectly well-kept, Luna’s room had the look of someone who didn’t have time for such things. The floor was mostly clear besides some sheets of notes that appeared to have fallen from their original surfaces, but there seemed no rhyme or reason to the way any of Luna’s posessions were arranged. Vases, precious stones, some items of jewelry, all sitting on whatever surface appeared to have been free at the time she received them.
On her walls, however, and continuing up across the domed ceiling, was a complete representation of the night sky. The really incredible thing was that Twilight knew from experience that these were the stars currently hidden by the bright light of the sun, and that meant that all of these surfaces were spelled to show the sky currently overhead. The moon was obviously not visible right now, but thinking about it reminded her of the other reason she had been up late the night before.
“Before we do this, I want to clarify something.”
Luna turned to face her and tilted her head to the side slightly, indicating for her partner to go ahead.
“The treaty agreed to by the three pony tribes. It didn’t occur to me until last night, and it’s part of why I didn’t sleep very well. That treaty was based on the the idea that each tribe was bringing an essential function to the table, but if the sun and moon can move on their own and are only assisted in that by ponies, that means that treaty was based on a half-truth. That’s really the reason Princess Celestia was so worried, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Luna said nothing more than that. Her gaze remained locked with Twilight’s as the final piece fit into place. It was a few seconds more until Twilight let out an awkward chuckle and rubbed the back of her neck with a hoof.
“Well...heh...no pressure, right?”
Twilight was hard pressed not to jump in shock as her partner laughed uproariously. She still needed to get used to Luna’s unpredictable responses to humor. The embarrassingly loud and raucous laughter continued for long enough to make Twilight feel awkward before she finally stopped and wiped a tear from the corner of her eye.
“Ah, what a wonderful way to dispel any lingering nerves before our trip!”
“Uh...yeah…”
“Do not fear, young Twilight! The two of us together shall show my worry-wart sister soon enough that she had nothing to worry about all this time!”
She still responds to excitement by getting louder. Noted. Twilight tried not to giggle at the princess’s enthusiasm as she slid her saddlebags back onto her back and tightened the strap. She was someone at a loss as to what to do next, but was interrupted in thinking about this as she was suddenly encased in a sphere of blue magic and held aloft.
“I realize this may not be the most dignified form of transport,” Luna said as she held the bubble of magic susptended beside her, “but it will have to do until we find another way to defend you from hostile atmospheres.”
The idea of being the first unicorn on another planet while inside of a bubble was indeed a little unappealing, but so was the idea of freezing or burning to death. Or suffocating. Or inflating like a balloon and popping like her research suggested would happen with no air around her. She quickly decided this was something she should stop thinking about.
She looked over to Luna, and saw her strapping to herself a thick belt with a lopsided metal cage on the back that was shaped to fit the brightly glowing gemstone inside it. Once she had it in place, she experimentally flapped her wings and then settled them over top of the belt, and did a few stretches to make sure it wasn’t too tight and also wouldn’t slip.
“I will have to thank the palace armourer for crafting this for me on short notice,” Luna said while giving herself a final once-over.
“Are you ready?” she asked Twilight, now looking back at her and making eye contact.
“Yes.”
Without another word, the princess levitated herself and her partner up to the center of her room, and then the glow of the diamond dimmed slightly as her horn lit brighter than Twilight had ever seen it, and her eyes opened to emit a glow to rival the sun. A sphere began to form around the both of them, bright white and crackling with lightning. Stray papers began to circle around the room as a breeze picked up from the now rapidly spinning ball of raw magical power now surrounding the two.
Twilight closed her eyes as the light became far too intense to look at, which allowed her to now pay attention to the tingling sensation that began to run up and down her body as her own magical anatomy resonated with the energy around her. The sensation in her horn reminded her of her first real use of magic back when she had resonated with the Sonic Rainboom, except this went beyond even that. At the point where it started to become uncomfortable, the odd sensations and the brightness against her eyelids disappeared. While the magical resonance was gone, the glow on her eyelids remained, but now it was of a different color. She reminded herself to continue breathing as she opened her eyes and looked up at the sky.
She thought she would see stars, and she did. However, while many of these stars were familiar, the shape of the constellations she could trace were slightly skewed from her memory, and thanks to her late night studying, she knew her memory was not flawed. And most certainly the sun that warmed her world had never been the shade of blue of the one currently rising above the horizon.
Keep breathing. Keep breathing.
Luna looked around her as Twilight examined the sky. She saw that while the atmoshpere of this world felt bitterly cold, there were what appeared to be plants around them. They were small and appeared somewhat like the cacti that could be found in the deserts of their own planet, but they were black rather than green. She turned to look at the alien sun rising over the horizon, and despite the brighter color, it looked much smaller than the one she was used to.
These plants must be this color in order to obtain enough sunlight to live even with how far from this sun this planet seems to be. This light feels far more intense at this distance than it should be, so this sun must be...more powerful somehow than Celestia’s…
While Luna was not having to remind herself to keep breathing steadily like her partner, she hadn’t felt like she felt now in nearly eleven-hundred years. She herself could now remember prancing into her sister’s room like it was yesterday, grinning like a crazy pony and almost stumbling over her words from sheer glee.
She had done it. After all this time, she was finally about to accomplish what she had longed to all those many years ago.
She lowered herself and Twilight’s sphere to the surface of this world so far from home, and the two looked at each other once again.
Twilight Sparkle, personal student of Princess Celestia, and Princess Luna, guide of the moon and shephard of dreams, had become the first two members of their species to set hoof on another planet.
Author's Note
OVER A YEAR LATER IT'S FINALLY DONE
This was actually the third prototype of this chapter. I'm honestly a bit less confident in the quality of this chapter, but I realize that the more I worry about it the more problems I'll generate just by over-analyzing.
That said, this is again being posted without a peer-edit. I apologize for any errors.
It was cold, but inside of her protective bubble Twilight couldn’t feel it. She could see that the air was thin and dry because even as cold as it was, there wasn’t any frost on the plants that were somehow able to grow in the light from the distant star. She processed this and scratched down notes while in a daze, still not fully comprehending what she was doing. She was determined to remain focused and avoid emotional reactions until their journey was complete, and she already knew that once she got home she was going to need to do quite a few of those breathing exercises her sister-in-law had taught her.
Twilight’s spell allowed her to move around on her own by walking along the underside of the protective shield like a hamster in a ball. Now that it had been cast, she could maintain it on her own easily while still taking her notes. Though she wished she could get a closer look at what she was taking notes on as Luna could, she was content with the enforced distance being the price of the protection.
It was only becoming more clear as she and Luna explored that the strange plant life they had seen when they first arrived was the most complex organism they were going to find. This cold, dark planet would support nothing greater. For Twilight, it almost seemed to instill a feeling of melancholy. There must be uncountable billions of empty worlds like this one that would never be anything more.
Even more so, it was really driving home just how rare her own world was. All those intelligent species sharing the same planet and the heavens were full of planets with no life more complex than a cactus. She had to be honest with herself that her restlessness was not entirely due to excitement. A small hint of fear hovered at the back of her mind at the very real lethal environment right outside her small magical bubble.
For Luna, the fear of the environment may not have been present, but she was no less in awe of the desolation of their surroundings. Once the two had surveyed their initial surroundings, they had started making long-range teleportations to the horizon at each new point in order to try and survey as much of the planet as possible as quickly as possible. Observing the sky for a time in each location seemed to indicate the presence of other planets around this star, and she was eager to see what they could find on those. After the fourteenth such hop with no sign of more advanced life, Twilight’s first set of notes was as complete as she could make them.
“Where are we going next? ”
“That bright point there, ” Luna responded, pointing to it with the tip of her hoof. “We will observe that world and then either look for another prospect or return home. ”
With that, Luna’s horn and eyes began to glow with the same intensity the diamond once again emitted, and with a brief sensation of falling, they were at their next destination. It was at that point, however, that Twilight noticed the familiar sensation in the pit of her stomach persisted. She was actually falling.
Any panic that might have followed was kept at bay by Luna quickly catching the orb in her magic. This allowed her to once again take a few deep breaths and look at the surface below them. The only problem was there wasn’t one.
As far as she could see in all directions was a sea of clouds, and the most odd thing about them was that they were primarily green, and she couldn’t see any break in them. The entire mass below them shifted and moved as one. She looked over to Luna for an explanation, but her partner was too excited by the observations she was making with her magic as the two floated above the seething mass below. She did however notice that Luna’s wings were open and beating, so it appeared there was some kind of atmosphere here.
“This air is not like our home world’s, ” Luna began, “I’d hardly say that it is air at all, in fact! What we can see below us is actually concentrated clouds of gas that seem to be being compressed by this planet’s much higher gravity. As far as I can tell by the spells I’m using right now, this world may be composed entirely of gasses collapsed together and held together by their own gravity! It may have no surface at all! ”
While Luna seemed as ecstatic as Twilight had been when she first told her about this plan to travel to another star, the hint of fear that she had been suppressing before was coming back far stronger now. While the Princess seemed delighted at the idea of them being suspended above a massive sea of likely poisonous gas being held down by likely crushing gravitational force, her mortal partner was starting to wish they had picked a different planet to visit.
“Luna, are any of those clouds composed of water vapor that pegasi could stand on? ”
“Not that I can see, no. At this height the air is too thin and cold, and down below the gravity compressing the gas should also be causing it to heat to extremely high temperatures. Actually, my sister and I’s observations of her sun showed that the process by which it creates the heat and light that warms our world uses gasses quite like some of what I can detect here. Theoretically, that could mean that introducing enough gas into a world like this one may cause the gas to ignite at the core and create a new star! ”
Twilight now regretted asking the question. The mental images of being instantly incinerated in an inconceivable inferno were doing nothing to help her anxiety. She had thought that after handling being in the open cold of space, she could handle something like this, but actually looking it in the face appeared to be another matter entirely.
“Princess, I’d like it if we went home now. ”
A single look at the unicorn’s wide-eyed expression and her rapid breathing removed the need to ask what was wrong. There was another bright flash, and they were somewhat safely back on the world they first arrived on. Much to her chagrin, the moment her hooves were returned to solid ground her legs failed her and she ended up on her belly inside her protective bubble.
“Are you alright, Twilight? ”
“I-I think I will be once we’re back home. I’m sorry- ”
“It’s fine. ”
The diamond once more glowed brightly with Luna’s eyes and horn, and with another blinding storm of magic, they reappeared inside of Luna’s chambers in the castle tower. As much as it embarrassed her immediately after she did it, Twilight couldn’t help but rub her cheek and forehooves into the carpet briefly just to reassure herself she was safe again.
“My apologies. I did not think about how frightening some of this might be for someone who doesn’t have my power.”
The purple unicorn regained her hooves and immediately began rummaging through her saddlebags for her notes on the desolate first planet. She had her tail turned to the Princess, but she had already seen hints of the mortified look on her partner’s face. Luna walked around in front of her and lifted her chin out of her saddlebags with a hoof so she could look her in the eyes.
“Twilight, there is no shame in fearing death. All ponies do, and it is part of what makes up our drive to live in the first place.”
“I didn’t think...I just didn’t think it would be like that. I know what we’re doing is dangerous, but thinking about falling into something that doesn’t even have a surface and will poison you, crush you into paste, and then incinerate you-”
“Twilight, you need to slow down before you hyperventilate.”
Realizing that she had started breathing rapidly as well as talking quite quickly, the unicorn took a moment to breathe deeply and try and slow her heart rate. She could still feel her cheeks burning at how foalish she must look right now.
“Again, I apologize for not considering how shocking some of this might be. You should know that I am fairly certain most other ponies would have been a sobbing mess instead of handling this like you are right now. I understand it can be embarrassing to have fear overtake you, but you were very calm despite that fear.”
“I’ll be ready next time,” Twilight responded, taking a last deep breath and feeling some of the color fade from her cheeks. “I just think I need to do some more research and probably sleep it off. I want to go over my notes first though.”
The two were soon poring over Twilight’s observations. Luna added her own points for Twilight to write in, since the unknown conditions of each planet they visited necessitated that the notes be taken inside the unicorn’s protective spell in order to avoid them bursting into flame from intense heat or crumbling in intense cold. On paper, their first explored planet was of no further value as far as exploration. However, as a first step, it had proved their spell was a success, which was a major victory for their project.
“Well, Twilight, I am afraid that I must bid you good day. My sister requested that I inform her of our trip as soon as I returned, and she will no doubt have sensed our return.”
“That’s fine. She’s probably got that look where she’s clearly desperate for details but trying not to show it.”
The two shared a short laugh and parted ways. While Luna headed toward her sister’s tower to inform her of their journey, Twilight left the castle and headed toward her parent’s house. She had thought about paying them a surprise visit while she was up in the city, and now she had a heck of a story to tell them.
Mom is not going to believe this.
Author's Note
Okay, I went to post this and the site gave me a 502 error, so this time it's not my fault it's late! This one is a little shorter than normal, but I didn't want to try and artificially extend it just to meet the previous word counts.
I apologize if you find any errors in this. If you point them out in the comments I'll address them. I've got a good idea of where I want to go next, and I think I've gotten past the introductory hurdles and can start really getting into the meat.
My job is still working me pretty hard, but my plans to move north this summer are being greatly helped by the extra hours. I just need my car to stop having problems. XD
I hope you guys enjoy, and I'm going to try and get the next one out as quickly as I can.
