Sometimes, she liked to go for late night walks.
They didn’t happen that often. Perhaps once or twice a month, Cadance would slip from her warm marriage bed and quietly pull the doors aside and walk the long crystal corridors. Some times, she walked only for a short span of time, perhaps only five minutes or so. A turn around the perimeter and then straight back to bed. Other times, she wandered methodically until morning, turning over the whole palace in a mindless, yet methodical manner. Room by room, the blinking, slack-faced Cadance would search for nothing and find nothing.
Again, it wasn’t as if it happened all that much. It wasn’t a big deal, as she’d said many times in her life. It wasn’t like she was sleep walking! Plenty of ponies did things to let their bodies release some stress or alertness after waking, or before bed. They read or had warm milk, or whatever else they did, and her walking wasn’t so odd. She’d been doing it for, oh, years. She wasn’t sure how many years. Just years. A few years.
The guards were familiar with this routine by now. At first, they had followed her, only to be asked flatly but politely not to do so. Still, they had traded off custody after a fashion, keeping track of her via reports from one set of guards to another. They did so for their own peace of minds, and Cadance let them. If they did not interfere, if she were not aware of them, then who cared?
When she had first started living with Celestia, her walks had been more rare, and they had always been short. Their character had been different too. A younger, accented Cadance had hummed snippets of songs or said good evening to the night shift, but the Empress was silent as the spectre of death, and the similarity between her in the small hours and a ghost had not been lost on her loyal retainers.
Tonight was a wandering night.
Cadance walked down the long stairs, away from her sleeping, gently snoring husband and rocking foal’s cradle. The braziers on the walls cast enough light to see by for average ponies, but an alicorn is no average pony. Even an alicorn such as she--for there are alicorns and Alicorns--could see generally well in the dark.
She missed the flames flickering. The lights in other places, like the lights in Celestia’s palace, flickered with the dancing flame. The lights of the Crystal Palace were like everything else: enchanted crystal. Their glow was undiminished and unyielding. The light was neither warm nor organic, but rather a sickly sort of pink.
Frankly, she loathed it, but wasn’t about to say anything. The crystal ponies were sensitive to her tastes. A bit too sensitive.
She hated a lot of things about this castle.
There were two legionaries of the Custodia at the foot of the stairs. They saluted in crisp unison, like clockwork soldiers, and she hummed an affirmation. She walked on, towards the great entrance doors, but then paused and circled back to gaze at them.
They were impressive, which was really rather extraordinary considering the state of the guard. Shining had spent the first year running himself ragged reorganizing the legions completely. The Empire wasn’t conquering anypony anytime soon, and she shouldn’t be prepared to do so at the drop of a hat. The old tacticae were woefully out of date, the old armor and equipment behind the times by a thousand years, and much of the actual ponies under arms were in fact raw recruits conscripted at spearpoint into a great undifferentiated mob to tire out resistance before Sombra’s personal detachment arrived.
They were familiar. Of course they were familiar! She’d seen all of her Custodes many times. But there was just… something. Something about them.
She thought about saying something, something familiar. Greet them by name, joke about something. Wasn’t that what Celestia did? She knew every pony’s name, didn’t she?
Cadance retreated, crossing the great hall and leaving them behind.
It wasn’t mere restlessness that kept her moving. Some nights it was, but not tonight. And not recently, either.
It was the dreams that did it.
She wasn’t sure how to explain them, even to herself. It was like being another person, but only for a moment. She would wake up, confused and in a panic, not recognizing her bed or her husband, rising to stumble about her chambers until she found a mirror, looking deeply into it and falling back, dismayed. She would recognize nothing. Everything was foreign. What she saw was not herself.
The face she saw in the mirror was wrong.
She still felt that way. These legs were not hers. These steps were not her steps. These wings? Certainly not her own.
The dream, however, still felt real. It felt far more real than the tapestries she and Shining had ordered put up just last week. It was near, vivid, intense. The palace was an illusion, and a poorly crafted one at that.
Shuddering, she began her loop of the palace. Walking would bring her back. It always did.
Cadance treasured lunch with Shining Armor. Their time together, not as rulers but as spouses, was harder to come by now.
Conversation had fallen off, not in the way of those that had nothing more to say, but in the natural manner of any conversation between those who enjoyed each other’s silence. Her husband was reading reports, but she didn’t mind. To be perfectly honest, she had things of her own that needed reading on matters of state, but for some reason just looking at the pile made her feel…
Well. Not all there.
Instead, she watched the legionaries below. The palace grounds were wide and Shining Armor often had a few cohorts cycling through, using the space to hone their skills. He had explained to her with a smirk that this way he could claim that he was still working, and that even the distant presence of their commander had an effect on the rank and file. She believed him, more or less.
She glanced over at Shining for a moment. He seemed peaceful. Content, even. No shadow of dismay there. She’d wondered if he had noticed her growing sense of alarm the last few weeks. Months, really. If he had sensed anything, he was doing an admirable job of hiding it.
So she returned her eyes to the sparring below.
Cadance tsk’d. “Poor form,” she grumbled.
Shining’s pages ruffled. “Hm?”
“Come look. There, you see him? Second row, third from us. No, no he’s doing alright now, but wait a moment.” She pointed, and then quickly drew her hoof back. Wouldn’t do to be so obvious. “See him? There he goes again.”
Shining hummed again. “You’re right, actually. He’s an open book.”
“Telegraphing that lunge,” Cadance continued, frowning. “It’s like they’ve never even heard of the Gladiatoria.”
Shining didn’t say anything, so she continued. “No, see, he’s spending all of that energy moving. He has barding for a reason! He has that shield harness for a reason to, damn him.”
Shining had walked over to the balcony and only now did she notice his presence at her side. “That’s… an old Henosian manual, right? From… wow, I guess a couple of hundred years ago. I didn’t know you read that before you came to live with the Princess.”
Cadance blinked. She shook her head.
“I… I haven’t,” she said. “I’m not sure why I know that.”
“Perhaps you did, at some point. You’re right, in any case. He should be using the shield to redirect the momentum of that spear.”
Cadance bit her lip. The dreams sprang forth fresh in her mind, and she was lost for a moment, trying to seperate them from the reality in front of her. On an impulse, she reached out and touched Shining’s shoulder.
“Are you alright?” he asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
She didn’t answer.
Another restless night.
She went over the dreams in her head as she walked down the grand stair.
She was somepony else. Tall, proud, imperial. A stallion. Eyes forward and spirits high. The legions of the empire marched on the grimy barbarians of the south. She saw their banners waving in the bright sunlight, saw the blinding glare of their steel heart icons like movable altars to the Crystal Heart.
She didn’t know her name from the dream. Only the shape of her… of his body, only the weight of his step. It was different.
She had considered writing Luna about the dreams, but something stayed her hoof. Something very specific.
Something she should honestly have talked to Shining about already, but hadn’t found a time to do so.
There was something else. She’d dreamed of the Crystal Heart as well. Dreamed of it glowing, shattering. Dreamed also of herself, crushing it beneath her hooves. Dreamed of going to it and touching it with a hoof in the night time.
This night led her to the library. The dreams seemed real. What was to keep them from being real? After lunch, she had found a copy of the old Henosian manual and to her discomfort found the illustrations of armored ponies locked in combat to be one moment eerily familiar and the next utterly foreign.
Briefly, standing in the doorway to the Imperial Library with a wistful smile, she wished that she had the services of one Twilight Sparkle, Princess to All Librarians. Twilight would have found if there were some half-forgotten passage plaguing her. Twilight would probably have been able to give her a shortened version of the whole event, had she been there to ask.
It didn’t take long for her to amass a mountain range of old tomes, however. The Empress of the North quickly lost herself in the pages, feeling almost in a trance.
She remembered so much. It was overwhelming to experience, and it was almost frightening how in one moment she felt herself, Cadance, and the next she was somepony from these pages. The illustrations were all wrong. The details were too fuzzy. At times, she felt she could correct them all by heart.
The air around her whispered. She heard somepony at her left side, leaning over her shoulder as she sat in one of the library’s reading rooms. It whispered details left out of each account.
Last night’s dream was Iron Chain, Chancellor of the Empire over a thousand years before. The dreams before were others. They all began to fall into place. Each of them was real.
Somepony touched her and Cadance screamed, pulled violently from her thoughts.
But it was only Shining, who shied away in alarm. “Cadance? Hon? It’s me! It’s just me! I’m sorry I scared you.”
Cadance shuddered. Who was this stranger? No. No it was Shining. Just Shining.
“Sorry,” she said slowly, her voice sounding strange. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I noticed,” he said, moving back to her side slowly. “Cadance, are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” she said. She even managed an even tone. “Just couldn’t sleep. Thought finding some dusty old books would lull me back to bed.”
He frowned, but nodded. “That makes sense. Mind if I stay up with you? I woke up and you were gone and I probably was a little more worried than I should have been.”
She smiled and hovered one of the other chairs in the reading room to sit beside her own. Shining, smiling again as she wished he always would, sat beside her and idly she rested against him. The whispering did not start again. As she read, the pages were back to being dead records of an older time. They had nothing for her.
Cadance squirmed.
It was hard not to. The Crystal Ponies had traditions on top of traditions, and there were expectations about how their monarch should look for important functions. Every inch of her had to be perfect.
To be honest, she had always had an ambivalent relationship with the whole process. On one hand, it was fun. Certainly the final product was fun. And there was a minor excitement to the actual workings of the whole thing. But it was just so much work, so much effort. The time spent on her mane alone was exhausting.
It didn’t help that she was starting to feel herself pull away again.
Brief annoyance became anger. Could she not have a single day of just… normality? Of feeling herself, without any separation, without hearing those damn whispers?
She had no idea what it was! Or what it wanted! There was no one to confide in--how could she? How could she let it slip to anyone, even the air, that she heard things seeping out of the walls? That she kept forgetting where she was and who she was, that the world kept fading in and out for no discernible reason?
But here she was, staring into a massive mirror and thinking, again, that the face she saw reflected back was not her own.
The ignorant chattering of her maids in waiting ground on her nerves like sandpaper, and she hated feeling that way. They’d done nothing wrong. Yet every time they opened their mouths to speak or to giggle at some bit of news she had to physically restrain herself from snapping at them.
You should be somewhere else, the voices insisted over and over. You should be doing something else. You should be someone else.
And she replied--I am me, and I am no other. Leave me alone.
But they would not go.
She was going mad. The growing realization had kept her at a height of alternating panic and rage for days. Celestia had been a fine teacher of poise and decorum, but even her tutelage could not bottle up madness. Which she could no longer deny was exactly what was happening to her. She was mad. Insane. Crazy. She was losing it. She’d already lost it. The point was that if one more stars-damned hoof touched her she was going to--
Shining kissed her cheek. “Ready for tonight?”
She almost attacked him in a blind panic.
But she didn’t. Because her mind screaming at her that she didn’t know this stallion, that he was a stranger touching her, she willed herself to remain in the present, in her own self.
“Tonight? Yeah. Yes, I’m ready,” she said. She coughed, averted her eyes, tried to reconstruct a smile on a face that wouldn’t scream that she was hearing voices.
Not that she did, because again with his touch the storm settled. She didn’t have time to think about it. He was asking her something, and she feared what might happen if she paused for even a moment and he asked what was wrong.
She was done with her maids in waiting after another moment, and found herself sitting on the plush couch in her waiting room. Shining was standing in the middle of the room, not quite pacing, but obviously lost in thought.
“It’s just a party,” she said, managing to smile. “Yes, an important one in a way, with all of those dignitaries. But it is still a party.”
“True. I’m not worried about that, actually.”
“Are you worried then?” Cadance asked slowly.
“A bit. I guess if you aren’t concerned, I shouldn’t be.”
Cadance swallowed. “What? I mean, about what?”
“The Heart,” he said. “The Crystal Heart. I was wondering by the other day and it just seemed off.”
She took a deep breath. The Heart. Her dreams almost took over then. The Heart! The whispers returned just for a moment before her husband’s presence drove them away, but not before they had whispered to her that the heart of the empire was important, that it would explain everything.
“How so?”
“Darker? Like… misty inside? I’m not sure how to describe it. I’m not even sure I saw it! It just looked differently, that’s all. I’ve been meaning to ask Sunburst about it. Should I? I don’t want to worry him over nothing.”
Cadance’s mind raced. “No, I’ll talk to him about it. Actually, I’ll have a look myself first. I do have a connection of a sort to it still, you know.”
“Right.” Shining hummed, shrugged, and then smiled. “I’ll leave it to you then, hon. Now, about Lady Amethyst…”
Cadance stood before the Heart and pondered it.
The sun was long gone. She’d waited until it was dark before she came here, to the Heart, not wanting anyone to see her. Not wanting anyone to ask questions.
The last thing that she needed was questions.
The whole day had been rough. Rough was, in fact, putting it mildly. The walls whispered whenever she was more than a foot from Shining Armor. She would lose herself in the middle of conversations, forgetting who she was and where she was. It had been a miracle that she hadn’t run raving through the halls.
Something had to be done. It would start here, at the Heart. This was the first step. Next, Luna and Twilight. Not Celestia. Never Celestia. She refused to be anything other than somepony worth being proud of in front of her aunt Celestia.
She had a connection with it. Her child had a connection with it. What sort of connection? It was a fair question, and one that she wasn’t sure how to answer. The Crystal Heart was a great mystery, a living piece of history that not even the inhabitants of the Empire could really adequately explain. They knew what they needed to know--that it worked, namely, and that they owed their safety from the cold of winter to it. Otherwise, details were fuzzy. Its origins? Shrouded in legend. It’s workings were a maze of contradictory opinion and speculation.
Cadance knew only that she could feel it. Or usually she could feel it.
She didn’t now, but that wasn’t a cause for immediate alarm. Ever since Flurry, she’d felt the Heart less, and less intensely. The connection was spread out now between them.
Her ideas about what it meant to the empire were vague. It kept the winters at bay, yes. But all the references to the monarchs of the land were frustratingly unspecific.
Cautiously, she laid a hoof on the heart and closed her eyes.
It didn’t seem off. She herself seemed off, but the Heart seemed fine.
Until of course, she felt a jolt.
She left. She was separated from her body. Everything was numb. She weightless, formless, nothing but sense and a whirlwind of emotion. The heart seemed so massive in front of her, taking up all of her strange, distorted vision, blocking out everything else. She could feel herself growing drowsier as she reached out--with what body she did not know--to touch it, to be a part of it--
“Cadance?”
She was torn away and lost consciousness.
A stranger was over her when she came to on the cold floor, shaking her. “Cadance! Cadance, oh stars, you’re awake.”
She growled at him, not seeing .anyone she knew. “Blut und eisen!” she cursed, throwing him off with her magic. Whoever he was, she would destroy him for daring to touch her holy imperial person. The Emperor was sacrosanct!
The emperor, the spirit of the Empire itself, riding the souls of a thousand emperors until now, was beyond holy. The Emperor was the Empire! The spirit in the crystal heart immortal and forever, the love of the land and of its people made manifest and militant.
He was on his feet, snarling in his native tongue, summoning up a wave of fire to throw against the interloper who had regained his balance and stood there, mouth gaping in stupid awe. As he should!
“Cadance!” he shouted, and then some garbled words in his filthy barbarian tongue. He could pray to his gods if he wished, it wouldn’t spare him the Emperor’s wrath.
He threw his might, and was taken aback as his fireballs splashed harmlessly against a great arcane shield.
The interloper dropped his shielding and then yelled again before the generating a bright flash.
But the Emperor of the North was no fool. He jumped back, sight denied, expecting an attack…
Which did not come. When the light faded from his eyes the room was empty.
“Where are you?” he snarled. “Come out! Face me! I’ll burn you to ash!”
But there was no response. The furious god began to torch the room, reaching with tongues of living flame behind the pillars, scorching the crystalline walls, embracing everything but the precious crystal heart with deadly heat.
There was another flash, and before the Emperor could bat an eye, the intruder had borne him to the floor.
“Cadance! Cadance come back to me, what the hell--”
The Emperor raged and then vanished.
Cadance, soaked with sweat, coat singed, lay gasping on the floor. Shining Armor had her pinned with hooves and magic. Both of them were panting.
But she was herself again. She was Cadance, not… not whoever that was. “I’m here,” she said, voice hoarse. “I’m here! I’m me!”
Shining, chest heaving stared down at her and then fell to her side. “What… what happened?”
“I…”
She wanted to answer. She wanted to have an excuse but she had nothing. Where did she begin.
The walls began to whisper again. She could feel the weight of the heart. She could feel it pulling at some absence she only now noticed in her heart.
“We have some things to talk about,” she said, voice cracking.
Author's Note
Written for Fan of Most Everything's Contest. Sorry, FOME, I'll do somethin' better for you to make up for it.
