It's (Not) the End of the World as We Know It
The moon had never looked quite the same way before. Through the naked eye, perhaps, the blood red disk may have been indistinguishable from that of past eclipses, but Twilight wasn’t looking at it with her eyes alone. She was peering at it through the long telescope she had installed in the library’s attic, slowly panning across the crimson lunar surface.
She pulled herself away from the eyepiece and looked towards the small clock on her left, sitting next to an inkwell, a trio of quills, and a piece of parchment with almost impossibly tidy cursive writing covering the top third.
“Time is 6:23 AM,” she said, a purple aura flaring around one of the quills. “No additional observations. Totality ending in one minute.” She looked through a window at the moon, hanging low over the western horizon, then towards the growing glow in the east. “Sun rising in forty-one minutes.”
She continued to watch the moon as the color slowly began to drain away, quill dutifully recording her notes as she dictated. In the last few minutes before the sun rose fully over the horizon she abandoned the telescope entirely, swiveling her head back and forth between east and west, noting how high the two celestial bodies appeared to be and how much of the smaller was still in shadow.
The screaming started just a few seconds after the sun broke the horizon, from just a couple of blocks southeast where salesponies would be setting up for the day’s market.
Images of catastrophe flashed through Twilight’s mind as she bolted for the stairs, each worse than the last. A stampede as she galloped through the door, not bothering to close (or, before that, open) it. A purple blur thought very briefly about a hydra, seen only by a pink filly awoken by the screams. And by the time she skidded to a stop in town square, she was envisaging cataclysms of such enormous scale that a civilization billions of years more advanced would have been powerless against them (and, in fact, had been powerless against, but that story is only loosely tied to this one).
What she saw was mostly confusing. There was no hungry and cranky Ursa Major; no gouge in the fabric of time and space and that one dimension nobody really liked to think about; no alien dropship disgorging troops for the conquest of Equestria.
Just a bunch of Ponyvillians in their natural state (that is to say, running around and screaming like there’s no tomorrow [which, granted, was quite often not a bad assumption to make]).
In fact, Twilight couldn’t make out even the tiniest of disasters. As far as she could tell, the only thing that was wrong was the ponies shrieking like banshees. She looked again, and then one more time to be certain, and… nope, still nothing, except another glimpse of the moon. The sight made her sigh; now there was no way she’d be getting any more observations in.
Oh, and Applejack, who was cementing herself among the minority of the merchants by hastily packing up her wares rather than running around like a chicken with its head cut off.
Her stand was, of course, on the other side of the mob, which Twilight found rather annoying as she weaved her way through the frenzy.
At least it happened early, she thought. Any later and the market would have been jammed with shoppers and vendors who showed up late.
She made it across unscathed, her accomplishment celebrated by a fanfare of distant wailing somewhere on the other side of town. Deal with it later, she thought, even as more ponies added to the din.
“Applejack!” she yelled, trying to make herself heard over the ponies behind her. “Hey! Applejack!”
The farmer jumped and turned to look back over her shoulder, then almost as quickly turned back to her cart, yanking down a bit of wood and stuffing it into some sort of drawer. She was still trying to stuff the drawer -- already practically overflowing -- by the time Twilight reached her.
“Twi, hey,” Applejack said quickly, banging on the drawer. “Look, ah’d love to chat but now ain’t a real good time-”
“Yeah, I could tell,” Twilight said. Her voice was practically dripping sarcasm, but it quickly changed to worry. “Applejack, what the hay is going on? Why’s everypony freaking out?”
“Look-- up-- that’s-- what’s-- wrong!” she said, each word punctuated by a hoof banging on the stuck drawer.
Twilight did. “But… there’s nothing wrong,” she said, confused. “It’s just the sun and the sky and the moon--”
“That!” Applejack yelled. “Sun an’ a red moon in th’ same sky!”
Applejack hit the drawer again, hard enough to make Twilight wince in sympathy for the inanimate object. Her horn flared as she took pity on the cart. The drawer closed, and when it did the rest of the cart just snapped shut.
The farmer hurried to the built-in harness and started to strap herself in, fumbling a little with the ties but managing to do a decent enough job that the cart would stay with her.
“That… that doesn’t make any sense, though,” Twilight said. “I mean, it’s just natural atmospheric lensing, not--”
“Don’t matter,” Applejack interrupted as she started to move. “It’s bad new. Just-- ah gotta go, Twi. Be careful.”
Twilight tried to say something, but by the time she’d started talking the farmpony was gone, galloping away despite the heavy cart.
The unicorn looked around. There were more ponies, now, a lot more. Although there was a lot less screaming nearby, but everypony who wasn’t banging on the door or windows of the bank or one of the stores was running like they were being chased by timberwolves, and off in the distance a wisp of dark smoke curled lazily into the sky.
Twilight sighed. It was going to be a loooong day.
She barely eyed the pony-shaped hole in the door before tiredly stepping through; it was a problem for another day. She had, quite frankly, had enough problems. She had asked a couple of relatively calm ponies what was going on after things started to calm down, and she had heard dozens of different stories about what a “shared sky” foretold. Sometimes plague, sometimes famine, other times fire, or flood, or earthquakes, all manner of nasty things. All nonsense, of course. The sun rose before the moon set all the time in Canterlot.
But… she was just too damn tired to try and figure out why there were all these superstitions.
She was, at least, aware enough to be grateful that nopony had taken advantage of the broken door and looted the library. Two or three grocery stores had been ransacked despite (or perhaps because of) the owner locking up, along with other stores of what some would call questionable utility (Twilight would not, as she later found out it would be six weeks before Quills and Sofas managed to restock their supply).
She trotted lethargically up the stairs, back to the attic where she’d been when this whole thing started. It looked much the same as it had that morning, with the exception of her notes from the night before. One of the explosions set off during the chaos (nobody was hurt, with the exception of one cow who ended up with a piece of dirt lodged in her nose) had knocked the inkwell over, spilling the liquid over the parchment and completely ruining the log of her observations.
She was too tired to bring herself to care, although when she woke up at noon the next day most of the locals would be convinced that the foretold apocalypse had come to pass.
She dropped to her haunches in front of the table and stared for a brief moment into infinity. Then she leaned forward, gaining speed until her head crashed into the desk with a dull THUMP.
“Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh,” she said in the universal language of I Have Had A Very Long Day.
“Uuuuuuuugh,” she said again for good measure.
After a few minutes with neither grunt nor motion, at the point an observer would have said she’d fallen asleep, a purple glow surrounded her horn. The inkwell turned upright, one of the quills picked itself up, and from some dark corner of the attic another piece of parchment flew to the desk. Once there they began their short dance, with just enough ink left to finish their message. Once done, they set themselves down on the table.
Then Twilight Sparkle fell asleep.
Nopony came into the attic that night, but if they did, and if they moved behind the unconscious unicorn, they may have read the letter she wrote.
In rough, blocky print it said,
“Dear Princess Celestia,
Today I learned that you really need to put basic astronomy into the public school curriculum.
Your faithful student, Twilight Sparkle.”
Author's Note
Good luck to everyone watching tonight's eclipse. If you're not planning on it, you should, especially in the eastern United States where it'll be eclipsed at dawn. It's apparently really freakin' rare to see a lunar eclipse at the same time as the sun. You might not get the chance again.
This was originally going to be longer and better, and then I sort of started running out of time. If people like it, I'll try and edit some cut stuff in.
Ciao.
