Twilight of the Thunder God

CHAPTER 1. PREDICAMENTS OF A PRINCE, PROBLEMS OF A PRINCESS

Dr. Donald Blake once thought himself a normal, orphaned New Yorker of Norwegian descent; the most remarkable thing about himself being that he was a physician who ran a private practice for low-income Harlemites.

“Die, Thunderer!”

If only Jane could see him now.

Quickly, to prevent his head from parting with his godly head, he raised Mjolnir to block the incoming axe. Though its enchanted uru managed to absorb most of the impact, the resulting shockwave was still great enough to destroy the support columns of every structure within a thousand foot radius. Since one could not go that far on the encumenopolis that was the Skrull home world, aptly named Skrullos, without encountering half a dozen skyscrapers, it was that many that toppled over and away from the impact crater he laid at the bottom of.

The wielder of the axe and his present foe was not unknown to him. He had encountered the Silver Surfer (and won or fought said Sentinel of the Space-Ways to a stand still) enough to hear him talk of Galactus’s other Heralds many times. The Surfer, pacifist though he was, still could not help but speak of one Herald in particular in the most reviled of words.

Terrax.

“Impressive, Thor. Most impressive. Give thanks to whomever crafted your weapon, for there are not many things that can withstand a full-powered blow from my axe.”

“Your power… is found… wanting!” With gritted teeth, Thor kicked out with his feet, striking Terrax with enough force to catapult him into the upper atmosphere in no time at all.

He did not allow himself a moment’s respite. He had never intended for the fight to reach high-orbit over Skrullos much less its surface. Instead, as he hurled his magic mallet with all of his otherworldly might, he allowed himself a small curse at the countless lives that his mistakes in combat had inadvertently killed moments ago.

As he had expected, Terrax, no doubt by the providence of that accursed ‘Cosmic Awareness’ of his, managed to bring his axe to bare and deflect mighty Mjolnir. Throughout their battle, that ability had proven the most difficult to overcome, especially in tandem with his other ones.

“Fool! Did you honestly think that would work agai—”

Fortunately, Terrax was every bit the arrogant cur that the Surfer had described. It was almost like gazing at a mirror into Thor’s own self-absorbed past. The shear predictive power of Cosmic Awareness, curbed by Terrax’s ego, was so focused on the oncoming super-luminal hammer, that he did not notice Thor’s super-luminal fist until it was planted firmly somewhere between his lung and colon. The imparted momentum sent Terrax speeding away from Skrullos far more quickly than before, and would continue to do so for the next second or two before the pain subsided enough that he’d either decelerate or turn and use his momentum to come back.

Neither would occur. As he raced toward Terrax to press the attack, Thor could not help but smile. It was a common misconception that he required Mjolnir to fly. There was some truth to this, though only in regards to the fleet-footedness of his acceleration, which, even excluding Mjolnir, was nothing to scoff at. After the first time he had exploited Terrax’s ignorance previously during their bout, one would think he would have learned by now. Evidently, Galactus did not select him for being, as his mortal friends would say, ‘quick on the uptake.’

Once he was close enough, he fully intended to ‘bring the hammer down’ upon the stone-like exterior of Terrax’s face by throwing it, the abundance of velocity coupled with the lack of distance making it, he hoped, impossible for Terrax’s Cosmic Awareness to be of any use. However, right as Thor entered the range in which he would hurl Mjolnir, Terrax disappeared in a flash that, to the eyes of a mere mortal, would have been blinding.

“You now, it is most humorous. I’m uncertain if Irony applies to it, as I don’t think even Galactus himself grasps the concept, but it is at least that,” Terrax’s voice said, telepathically from Odin knows where.

“What is humorous, villain?”

Thor swung around just in time to block a vertical slash that would have threatened to slice him in twine, otherwise.

“That, out of all races under the stars, you choose to defend the Skrull. THE SKRULL!”

Terrax doubled his efforts to press his axe through Mjolnir, his face only centimeters away from Thor’s. “I can understand the Shi’ar or the Kree, for as arrogant as they are, they are not without their redeeming members. But the Skrull!? The Skrull use shock-collars to keep their slaves in-line and force them into spine crushing manual labor in order to mine the very minerals that comprise their shock collars, which the slaves are then forced to make on primitive assembly lines. And the Skrull do this, all the while possessing technology that renders the need for slaves obsolete. Tell me: is such a wantonly cruel, petty, and unjust race not deserving of Galactus feasting upon their home world?”

Though there was no denying that Terrax was as far from the side of The Valkyries as Loki, his words bitt into Thor’s flesh with an un-squeamish and naked truth. To be honest, it would be a fitting end for a race that thought itself high and mighty enough that they honestly believed themselves capable of conquering the realm eternal, even with Odin wide awake.

“T’would be a lie most foul if I were to say that I did not agree with you, Terrax.”

“Then why? Why do you resist me like a man who has everything to lose?”

In truth, Thor asked asked himself the same question at that moment. Indeed: why did he fight so hard for the Skrull? His resolve wavered. Then, the memories of what he had seen, the vision of what lay ahead for the mortal world he had sworn to protect, of his allies, of Jane… Well, suffice to say, until things were dealt with, and perhaps even long after, his resolve would waver no more on the matter.

A look of renewed certainty crossed his face as he said, “Because, Herald, as much as the Skrull sicken me, and as much as it sickens me more to admit… they must remain strong and united. For an evil approaches our universe. An eldritch and esoteric horror that can tear asunder the minds of beings such as us and that even my father and your master’s combined might would be loathe to halt.”

Terrax did not take kindly to him or Galactus being made out to be so inconsequential. “Blasphemy!” He teleported away through hyperspace once more and tried attacking from above.

A bolt of magic lightning greeted him in-between the eyes instead.

 “Truth.”

A hurled Mjolnir once more raced toward Terrax, but the Herald managed to conjure up a sphere of highly energized, translucent red, exotic matter around his person. Like an extremely protective cosmic plastic bubble, it absorbed the impact and protected Terrax from harm. Also like such a bubble, it went rocketing off in the opposite direction after the hammer struck with Terrax still firmly inside. A good thing, since Terrax had to expend less of his will to accelerate away. Close quarters combat had proven to be effete against his foe, but Terrax was also adept at fighting from a distance. More, he reasoned, than Thor.

Once he had gotten far enough, he pointed the end of his axe at Thor, and let rip a massive, continuous stream of red cosmic particles. Mjolnir unleashing a continuous magic lightning stream, tinged in luminous cyan, of its own. The two beams collided half way, tendrils of exotic matter lashing out randomly into the frigid abyss at the point where they met. A point which moved back and forth between the combatants, sometimes closer to one or to the other.

“You cannot best me in a contest of energy slinging, Thunderer. Yield!”

“Till the universe crumbles, I say thee: nay!”

For a minute, the combatants remained, trying to overpower their enemy’s beam with their own with ever-increasing power.

They were both unaware of dozens of drones watching their titanic clash with crystalline eyes right under their noses…

*****

Today had begun just as well as could be expected for a shrewd, politically opportunistic, mariticidal Queen like Veranke. After awakening from beneath half a dozen of her favorite alien male slaves on her bed, she had seen to it that all six were vaporized for ignoring her orders last night (as sensually delightful as their disobedience proved to be). After double-checking on her datapad to ensure that progeny from those six were impossible for her physiology to produce while munching on the veritable breakfast feast that her chambermaids had brought her, she adorned her royal regalia and exited her personal wing of the Imperial Palace. Immediately, she was swarmed by no less than a hundred of the palace guard and far more of the innumerable municipal drones that ran the day-to-day operations of the Skrull Empire. HER empire.

Being badgered by their inane questions made her tired enough to seriously consider going back to bed. She hated her empire’s brobdingnagian bureaucracy. Even after she had purged it during her most hostile of takeovers, the blasted thing still required a small planetary population to run at peak efficiency, as low as that was, and yet despite its reduced size, it STILL gobbled up resources at the same rate.

Still, she supposed that for an empire as mindbogglingly immense and powerful as hers, such an organization was necessary for her will to be carried out on even the most fringe colonies. Plus, since she had ended her people’s perpetual struggle with the Kree (more out of a desire to not aid the Shi’ar’s encroachment into Andromeda and not to hasten their decision to come for the Skrull next than out of any genuine care for the children of Hala) and every loyalist to her husband was dead, imprisoned, or galaxies away, she would need a convenient lamb to sacrifice for when the rabble began getting uppity. For though the average Skrull citizenry had more going for them than a slave, they were serfs whose situation was not that much better and, periodically, during low points in Imperial moral, would realize it and demand blood to inebriate them and make them forget their lowly lot in life once more.

As she walked toward her throne room, deciding whom among the drones pestering her would be added to her ‘list,’ her routine day proved it would be anything but.

Titannus, a brainwashed holdover from her husband’s Super-Skrull Corps that now headed her regime’s iteration of said corps, came rushing from a hallway adjacent to her and the large crowd around her. The palace guards, fearing that Titannus had regained control of his faculties and the slaughter they knew would ensue, raised their weapons and ordered him to slow his pace. When he did, they, the drones, and Veranke herself, breathed a collective sigh of relief.

However, after hearing what he had to say, Veranke wished very much that he had just regained control of his mind again and wished vengeance.

Within a minute, instead of sitting upon her plush palatial throne, she found herself seated instead upon the command throne of a small but highly advanced, highly mobile, and highly low profile starcraft in high-orbit. Her eyes scanned the holographic video-projection at the center of the vessel’s CIC and confirmed Titannus’s words for themselves.

A Herald of Galactus had indeed entered the edge of the solar system. The ships of her home world’s defense fleet stationed there were intercepting.

Despite her hardened heart, Veranke bit the bottom of her lip in anxiety. Out of all of her husband’s programs that she had cancelled or cutback, the military budget was one she had actually scaled up. Priorities one and two were counter measures against ‘World Breakers’ and making sure that Skrullos was the most hardened planet in her empire against them. And yet, despite the upgrades to the millions of listening posts, hundreds of thousands of hyperspace jammers, and the tens of thousands of light vessels currently engaging the threat… today’s intruder was not detected approaching the system until AFTER it had arrived, had arrived far too quickly, and had already destroyed half of her star ships within a light-minute radius without so much as a flesh wound apparent on its person.

The fact that the ‘World Breaker’ in question was Terrax, a servant of The World Devourer Himself that her intelligence gatherers noted always seemed to revel in the destruction of the defense forces of Skrull planets before sending out the beacon that would summon Galactus to finish them, was just the ‘shine on the star ship,’ as the old galactic adage went.

Yet, despite her doubts, she was confident. The improved defense plans were HERS after all, and even if Terrax managed to get to within a few light-minutes of Skrullos itself, her enhanced capital ships had a surprise for him.

Luckily, he would not seem to get that far, for after he had finished annihilating the interception fleet, a shimmering cyan portal opened up and deposited another World Breaker.

Normally, she would have been even more anxious (and she still intended to murder the families of whoever added the improvement to the listening posts, jammers, and interception fleet) but this World Breaker was unique in that she seriously doubted he had come to harm her empire.

Thor.

“Gods. What is it about the male ‘heroes’ of earth that makes them so… kissable,” she said to herself.

As she expected given the predictability of earth’s heroes, the big, blonde, perfect specimen of an alien male immediately attacked Terrax and a titanic battle ensued as, all the while, she did her best to undress the Thunderer with her eyes.

Since Thor had gotten the initiative and had taken Terrax completely by surprise, Veranke dared to hope that the Herald would be done away without any further losses to her side.

Unfortunately, during the conflict, Thor made a crucial mistake. So focused was he on Terrax, that he did not notice the hyperspace portal the Herald had opened up behind him with his cosmic will until he was knocked into it. What made this error so grave was that the portal deposited him within a spitting distance of Skrullos, which he was then sent hurtling towards by Terrax’s axe handle.

Had Thor crashed with the velocity the attack had given him upon Skrullos, well… let’s just say Veranke would have seriously considered staying the executioner’s hand against so many of her people for a while. Such as things were, the planetary shield that had enveloped the world the moment she had left its atmosphere reduced Thor’s velocity significantly, ensuring that he only crashed into the surface somewhere between Machs 5 and 10. She muttered out a loud, ‘Dammit,’ when she realized that Thor had crashed into the slave district that held more of her favorite alien male paramours. She said it louder when Terrax destroyed the district utterly when he attempted to crash his axe into Thor, but once they were back in space again, she let out a sigh of relief. After all, she did not look forward to looking over her shoulder after the abysmal opinion polls came her way were she to lose the home world.

As an added bonus, for the first time since their battle had begun, Thor and Terrax were standing still, caught in a life and death beam struggle.

The perfect targets for her new counter-measures.

“I’m assuming you’ve already fired one of the missiles, captain?”

“Yes, my sovereign,” the captain of her vessel said, his fist over his first heart as he turned around and bowed towards her.

“Good.” Veranke could not help but smile cruelly. “Let us see how our uninvited guests fare at the galactic core…”

*****

For the dozenth or so time, Thor and Terrax’s opposing beams were evenly spaced between them.

“I must admit, Thunderer… were Galactus to gift you as you are now with the power cosmic, no single Herald could ever hope to best you.”

“And I must admit that if you were gifted with a noble heart, you’d make a fine warrior of Asgard.”

“Believe me, Thunderer. There is nothing more noble than stepping on these locus—”

Terrax stole a glance at his left.

Thor took the chance to glance as well, finding a missile approaching them with an acceleration would make it exceed half the speed of light in a vaccuum in a second. It was as large around and as long as the mortal vehicle known as a train-car and adorned with an alien script.

“Ha! Those fools still think their pitiful armaments can harm the likes of us. You’d think after the dozenth or so capital ship of theirs I’ve destroyed with a flick of the wrist that they’d know better.”

Though Thor agreed with Terrax about the Skrull navy’s effeteness against one such as he, he felt a tad uneasy about this missile, for it read, ‘World Breaker Breaker,’ in the tongue of the Skrull. It was a most curious redundancy he had never seen written on the side of anything Skrull military related before.

He was going to turn his head back towards Terrax to suggest that they move out of whatever range the missile’s warhead had when it detonated, but found Terrax exploiting his lack of focus by pushing his beam closer towards Thor.

“Worry about the threat before you, Thunderer, and not whatever pitiful weapon the Skrull—”

Terrax never got to finish his warning, for the missile struck the two colliding beams and went off. Rather than being a massive thermonuclear or negative energy-utilizing device, however, as Thor had expected it to be, it seemed to have been a teleportation device. One whose portal expanded at light-speed within a second and that had a gravitational pull so great, that when he tried flying away from it by using his reflexes and speed in tandem, even he couldn’t help but be pulled in at the distance it had gone off at.

In the second before he blacked out, he could only hope that his sacrifice was worth it.

“Midgard… Avengers… Jane…”

*****

As the swirling, sickly green of the ‘World Breaker Breaker’ teleportation missile’s portal died down, Veranke let out a sigh of relief, yet could not help but feel a little blue. Sure, the threat to her homeworld was destroyed, her approval ratings would skyrocket at the polls because all the credit was rightfully hers and she did not abandon Skrullos in its time of crises, and she had effectively taken out ‘two kree with one laser burst,’ but she couldn’t help but feel that destroying such a hunk as Thor was a waste, the innumerable times when he had totaled Skrull interests be damned.

To top it all off, all of her favorite paramours were likely either dead or too injured to be of much use to satiate her… hungers, and make her forget Thor for a little while tonight.

Her head turned to her right, where Titannus had begun yelling out in victory, prompting the previously immensely nervous bridge crew to do the same. She took particular notice of his large, tree trunk like legs and arms, his shaggy orange-yellowish beard, and his piercing red eyes.

Sure, Titannus was one those unlucky troglodyte Skrull who could not shape-shift to save his life, which was just one of the ways in which he was inferior to that traitorous ‘Super-Skrull’ of her husband, but she had to admit: it had been far too long since she had partaken in any… domestic meat.

She licked her lips and smacked them audibly.

*****

“Luna! Luna!”

The Princess of the Night covered her ears with her bell-boot clad fore-hooves as her sister knocked with a rapid fury upon the double-doors to her room with one of her own such boots.

“Open up! Please!”

Shutting her eyes and pressing her fore-hoof boots ever harder against her ears to drown out Celestia, Luna said, “No! Away with thee!”

“Luna, please! Let me in!”

“I said go away! Can you not even fathom New Modern Equestrian!?” Luna shrieked, tears flowing down her face anew for the third time in the past minute.

“Luna, if you don’t open these doors right now, I swear upon mother and father's graves that I’ll open them myself!”

Something in Luna snapped at what Celestia had just said, and her face shifted from a contortion of pain and sorrow to one of anger enow to set the entire Equestrian countryside alight. Her horn brightly glowed with magic energy that roiled at the tip like boiling ichor in a scalding cauldron and every object with sufficient mass she could think of in her room--book cases, chairs, tables, and her bed--became enveloped in navy blue and floated five full feet off the ground. Her eyes glowing a deep azure and she pointed the tip of her horn towards the double-doors. She yelled out, “And I swear upon their graves that you’ll regret it if you do!”

Silence followed for several tense moments, and Luna doubled the amount of magic she was preparing for her horn-blast when Celestia broke said silence.

“Do… do you mean that, Luna?”

The words pierced through the anger clouding Luna’s mind like a hot, solar spear through most known materials.

Did she mean it? Was she really prepared to lash out and strike down her dearly beloved sister like she had so many centuries ago? So soon after her miraculous return to her? Over such a relatively trifling, if infuriating and disspiriting matter?

“I… I…”

Her eyes answered for her, twin rapids of tears cascading from them and down her face with renewed remorse. The energy at her horn died down to nothing and the various objects she was levitating fell back to terra firma with a loud thump.

“I’m sorry, Celestia. So, so, sorry.”

She hung her head low, her body following until she was on the ground and curled up as though she were still a fetus in her mother’s stomach though she cried like a newborn.

So caught up was Luna in what ailed her, that she didn’t notice Celestia had somehow managed to enter her room until she felt a bell-boot clad hoof that was not hers find rest on her shoulder. “Tell me, Lulu. What happened? You have my ears.”

Luna dared not open her eyes and look up at her sister. Instead, she decided to wrap both of her forelegs around the one Celestia’s hoof belonged to.

She opened her mouth and told Celestia of the events that had transpired mere minutes ago…

*****

Luna’s tenure as Princess of the Night had begun as it tended to when she had awoken that morning ago. She took a shower, put on the royal lunar regalia of the Equestrian throne, and put the secret enchantment known only to her and her sister that gave their manes that wispy, ethereal quality that had made the two of them as legendary in the popular imagination as the fact that the sun and moon were theirs to command.

Before she trotted out, six of her personal thestral (more commonly known as bat-pony) guards covering her sides and rear in a ‘U’ formation, she also made sure to pick up her copy of, “How to speak New Modern Equestrian for Derps,” in the dark blue glow of her magic. Despite her and her sister’s best efforts, in the two weeks it had been since her return, Luna was still finding all of these new nouns and adjectives and adverbs and normal verbs and pronouns and prepositions and conjunctions and interjections to be oh so exhausting, to speak nothing of the new phrases and sayings and grammatical rules she had to follow. Ha! She wished the disuse of the royal canterlot voice by higher society were the end of it! Oh, how she pined for that to be the only difference! It was almost like she had to learn a completely different language!

Memorizing all of the VERY long lineages of the Canterlot nobility had been easier!

But, it could not be helped. For better or worse, she had to gallop onwards. After all, it was she herself that had insisted on being thrust back into the life of a Princess a day after escaping her possession and imprisonment, and she couldn’t rightly perform her duties to the best of her abilities with such a monolithic language barrier standing in her way. So, as much of a pain as it was, that meant spending every second of free time adjusting to the vernacular of the day. When the court of day ruled, that meant going down to the royal archives and studying and practicing until she passed out from the mental strain.

With a sigh, she said to her guard, “Let us be off.”

She didn’t need to specify where. Her routine had been as predictable as the sunrise, her guard knowing it well by heart now.

Luna and her guard had stepped halfway to the library when they rounded a corner… and came face to face with him.

Prince Blueblood.

Luna had heard of this supposed Prince and how he was supposedly both her and Celestia’s nephew. Yet, in the many hours her eyes had spent looking up, down, and side to side over all that parchment and paper, she had never once come across any picture, photo, or even the name of this supposed Prince to any of Canterlot’s noble houses, let alone some sort of blood connection to Celestia, who Luna knew for certain had never married or even thought of a stallion in anyway that would lead to it and a baby carriage after… him. In fact, when she had brought up his name, the coldness in the furious look Celestia put on would have chilled her scorching sun to a barely sparking ember.

Whoever this Prince was, his regal title as well as his familial one of nephew wasn’t a result of any genetic link.

Still, whatever her older sister’s reasoning for making him royalty and calling him nephew, Luna had resolved to give him the benefit of the doubt upon their first encounter. For the past two weeks since she had taken up residency in the castle, she had learned from the castle staff that he was away on sabbatical and would be returning sometime today… as well as some other, less pleasant things about him. But, considering the grievous misdeeds she had committed so long ago, she was hardly one to judge him without at least a modicum of patience. This was especially true since the horrors she had heard Blueblood had committed from the maids, butlers, guards and the like were extraordinarily petty compared to her treasonous actions.

In truth, she was sort of glad to have accidentally run into him. In addition to truly gauging his temperament for herself to see the truth or lack thereof in what she had heard of him, perhaps she could get some straight answers from him about his both his titles.

She cleared her throat, with every intent to sound as cordial and polite as possible.

And then, he opened his mouth. He just had to open his big, dim-witted mouth.

"Why is the fiend that tried causing an everlasting night here? Because of her, my spa appointment in Mareitania’s most exclusive resort was late. Filth such as her should never be allowed even within sight of the Castle, let alone in it. She should have been sent right back to the moon where she belongs after all the trouble she caused."

Suffice it to say, Luna’s jaw grew slack.

“How dare you speak to the Princess of the Night in such a manner!?” one of Luna’s thestral guards, Sergeant Skotos, said furiously.

“Princess!? So THIS is Auntie’s long lost sister!? You’re telling me that hideous Nightmare Moon creature and the long lost, newly returned Princess Luna are one in the same!?” Blueblood's eyes then narrowed upon the good sergeant and he scratched at his chin contemplatively with a hoof. “Wait a moment… you’re not a pegasus! None of you guards are!”

“Truly, royal blood flows through your cerebral veins,” Sergeant Skotos replied as dry as the San Palomino desert.

“Aha! I knew it!” Blueblood said, pointing an accusing hoof at the Sergeant and then at Luna. “Nightmare Moon and her vile minions still walk the face of Equestria and have somehow cast a spell upon my Auntie convincing her that she is her dearly beloved sister! Well, I for one will not stand idly by and let such an evil, grotesque, hard-featured harpy continue to besmirch the crown so mockingly!” Blueblood stomped his hoof hard upon the ground for emphasis, looking like some brave high born stallion back from the age where the males of society’s creme de le creme were expected to have garnered at least martial competence by his age via military service.

He then promptly turned around and galloped full speed ahead with his regal tail tucked between his legs, shouting, “Guards, guards! Come quick! Nightmare Moon and her disgusting toadies have brainwashed Celestia in an attempt to seize the throne! Hurry!” before running down the hallway, turning a corner, and disappearing from sight.

Sergeant Skotos shook his head. “What a boisterous baffoon, ey, Princess?” He turned to Luna with a bemused expression, expecting her to look utterly flummoxed and maybe even more than a bit peeved.

What he did not expect, however, was for the Princess of the Night to cover her eyes with the bell-boots on her forehooves and start sniffling into them, looking so hurt… so, small.

“Uhhh… Princess Luna… are you al--”

With the suddenness of a flashbulb going off, Luna’s horn glowed with the deep azure of her magic and she teleported away from the encompassing protectiveness of her six guards. Her intent had been to teleport directly into her room, but so tumultuous was her state of mind after what had just happened, that she only managed to summon up the necessary strength of will needed to end up ten feet away from her cadre.

Another blamed failure of her life.

Hastily, she ran up to a full gallop and made her way back to her room through tear stained eyes, hyperventilating like she had just awoken from a terrible nightmare, only to realize that the reality of her life was far grimmer than even the darkest dream the recesses of her mind were capable of conjuring up.

“Princess! Where are you going!?” she vaguely heard Skotos shout behind her.

Somewhere in her mind, Luna knew that the good Sergeant deserved an answer. So soon after her purification, she didn’t have many she could call ally or even acquaintance, and the throng of thestrals that had suddenly appeared one day over the skies of Canterlot to pledge their unwavering loyalty to her and her alone like their ancestors had done so many moons ago back before she became that accursed, wicked mare of darkness were so much more than either mere allies or acquaintances. Dare she say it, she thought of them as… friends.

But, her grief had consumed her at that moment, and her primary concern as she navigated the halls of the Castle that she had taken great pains to memorize on the first day incase of emergencies, like she thought now counted as, was to hole up within the only safe confides that she new of ever since her return: the sheltering shadows of her room.

Finally, after what felt like torturous hours of feeling the eyes of the assorted castle staff upon her person as she passed by, thinking that they were drilling into the lower registers of her mind, judging her, and finding her rightfully guilty and worthy only of re-banishment for her ancient crimes, her now red eyes rested upon the embroidered double-doors to her personal quarters.

Like the throat of a thirsty mare gulping down the cool waters of an oasis that wasn’t a mere mirage, Luna’s mind was refreshed by the sight and managed to mobilize enough of her magical power to teleport her across the final fifty feet to the door before gripping the handles in her azure, telekinetic grasp and closing the doors shut behind her as she crossed through the threshold.

Now, hidden from prying eyes and all but the sharpest of ears, she dropped to the ground like a bale of hay and bawled, the tears flowing forth from her eyes and the pathetic wailing like that of when she was a foal so many moons ago. But this time, though, the shadows did offer the comfort that they had and only made her feel guiltier, making her wonder if she truly was fit to sit on her own throne rather than in prison cell buried deep in a dungeon as far away from the capital of the good ponies of this world as possible.

Perhaps on the moon.

She knew not how long she spent wallowing in her woes. She only knew that the first time she thought of anything else since letting gravity take her to the marble was when she heard her sister’s voice on the other side of the doors to the room.

“Luna! Luna!”

*****

“Shhh, shhh, shhh. Don’t cry, my sweet little Lulu. It’s alright. Night Mare Moon is gone. She’s gone, and as Faust is my witness, she is not coming back. I will not let her take you away from me again. Never again.”

Some point after finishing her retelling of recent events to Celestia, Luna had apparently begun to bawl again with a vengeance, not that she had noticed before Celestia had said as much.

She wanted to berate herself even more harshly for this oversight, but found the words of self-deprecation her mind had newly formed to hurl at her melt to nothingness like a glacier in the midday july sun by the warmth of her sister’s words and tighter embrace. Soon, so to did her tears and caterwauling disappear, Luna finding herself dry-heaving in a more inside voice instead.

“Do… do you mean that, Celestia?”

“I do. As I did the first day the good Lady brought you back to me and as I will if ever asked that question in the days ahead.”

For a brief moment, two more trails of tears broke out from Luna’s shut eyelids. But, though still tinged with sadness they were, joy was the overriding emotion that had spawned them. Luna matched the embrace her sister gave her and said, “I love you, Celly.”

“And I you, Lulu.”

A minute? An hour? A day? As when she had first given into the despair upon entering her room, Luna knew not how long she and her sister lay there, holding onto each other as though for dear life. But, she did know one thing: she was glad to be in the presence of her big sister again after so, so long.

She wished their mutual hug could have lasted forever.

But, just like her possession by that insidious entity, it was not to last on this world. She knew that.

However, as the castle shook briefly yet loudly and violently, she wished that it could have lasted just a moment longer and have ended on more peaceful pretenses...

THE END... TILL NEXT TIME!