"But… why art yon corn-goat in thine image, dear Sister?" the little abomination squeaked, looking at the Straw Celestia display that stretched the length of a neglected back corridor of Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns. Oil paintings, charcoal drawings, and newfangled photographs hung between plaquards and boards describing the tradition and its development over the years.
"That, Luna, is a long and silly story. It isn't really a corn-goat, and I swear I don't tell them anymore that there ever were such things. The practice just… reappeared one year. A clever student's prank, this class-clown who talked the rest of her class into having a bit of fun at my expense." The celestial Princess, her auroral mane waving in no breeze, smiled down at her formerly monstrous fellow-alicorn. She had been giving her sister a tour of her flagship academy, while Luna's secretary and minder Faded Palimpsest trailed behind the immortal semi-divine ponies, trying manefully to not say any of the things on his mind.
The newly returned dark princess squinted at a watercolor painting of a wicker princess rising half-built in the main courtyard of the School, unicorns swarming over the naked wood frames, assembling the wickerwork, while others weaved the eponymous straw into braids all around the construction site. Other paintings and drawings and woodcuts showed the Straw Celestias in various states of construction, destruction, and action-scenes of assault, attack, and valiant defense by the school's students.
"Thou allowed thy students to make mock of thine undyingness, in the body of a great wicker likeness of the Goat which dieth in the season, and were to rebirth in the spring a-seeding?" Faded Palimpsest and the small alicorn had barely begun their work, and Luna's grasp upon modern Ponish tenses and grammar could not even be described as ‘rudimentary'. Her speech was presently composed primarily of fragments of middle Ponish, otherwise long-forgotten by modern-day ponies, and sometimes she sounded like she'd swallowed an ancient chronicle. Her sister seemed to follow along, if nopony else did.
"It was long after all memory of the old corn-cults had faded away, Luna. They didn't truly know what they were saying with it. Fresh Spark had come across an account of the old Corn-Goat statuary tradition, and thought it would be a lark to build a giant me in stalks and straw. And it had been a very good year, the earth ponies had made such great strides that there was straw to spare." Celestia scanned the display with a pleased smirk upon her classically beautiful features, her eyes twinkling as she looked at the culminating photograph of last year's wicker princess, with its luxurious mustache and iconic monocle.
"They are burning thy semblance. Were it a rebellion against thy authority?" The innocent fragment of that great monster was looking at an older wood-cut of a burning Straw Celestia, pegasi flying overhead, and directing further lightning strikes at the already-doomed wicker princess. Luna wore a severe expression, an accidental echo of the Nightmare's militancy glittering like remembered fire in her eyes.
"Oh, no, no. You know how it is. Whenever somepony builds a big, flammable temporary effigy out of straw and wooden framework, everypony else is tempted to strike a spark and see it burn. I can't even say that it was somepony trying to revive the old cultic ritual. It just… happened. It always was going to happen." What the white princess wasn't saying, Faded was fairly certain, was that she approved of the burnings. He remembered the year that the wicker Celestia had not burned, and he'd turned from his place in the mass of the student body as they watched her magic pick up the vast construct, to look at the great goddess getting ready to put away her image into storage. She'd had a withdrawn look, as if that year's arsonists had disappointed her in some way by not burning her in effigy.
“And it isn't just about me, Luna. Look at this one. See the colors? One of the problems with my School is that it is, in the end, for gifted unicorns, and that can be divisive. The Straw Celestias offer a vent for political satire. This one was a caricature of the Lord Mayor. The wicker princesses of ‘93 and ‘74 were also political, but a lot of them were commentary on this artist or that cultural figure. There's a tendency to use the squabbles over their construction and destruction to… work out issues in a playful way, don't you see?” The look on the little alicorn's face suggested to Faded that she probably did not, or at least, didn't in the moment.
"In the end, it's a Hearthswarming tradition, Luna. My gifted unicorn students do their best to build a brilliant Straw Celestia, one that reflects that year's class's hopes, dreams, or concerns, and the students of the other schools, and the cadets of the EUP Academy do their best to destroy the PCSFGU's construct before the end of the year's Hearthswarming festivities. It's a game." A deliberately tribalist game, Faded Palimpsest thought, remembering some incidents during his own time at the princess's school, and the taunting of the pegasi and earth ponies from the tech schools and the aggressively integrated multi-tribal military academy.
"A… game. Of arson and lese majeste?"
"Yes, definitely that. It's fun for the students, and I decided that the medium and subject matter were in general, properly lowering. Every time they burn me, a little more of that look of worship goes out of a foal's eyes. Every time the Straw Celestia goes up in flames, another idol is destroyed." And the great princess loved to see idols destroyed, Faded knew that with the certainty of a passionate and well-educated student of dead cults.
"And thou sayest that thine own students militant do this destruction?"
"Oh, yes, the cadets of the Military Academy are traditionally at the forefront of the infiltration squads. Leading the ponies from the technical schools and the trade schools, of course, because it takes a mass of the multitude to distract and divert my elite students from their self-appointed tasks. And I make sure that the instructors keep them busy in the holiday season, so that the whole of their Hearthswarming isn't just running about in the courtyards and on the grounds, playing at keep-away with a three-storey-tall wicker doll.
"Mind you, nopony is ordered to do anything, and whenever the firebugs are caught, they're disciplined harshly. Arson is, after all, dangerous and illegal. Ponies have been expelled from the academy for getting caught trying to burn the Straw Celestia."
But the ones expelled are always the ones who were already unsatisfactory for other reasons, Faded thought. Getting caught with matches metaphorically in hoof was always the last straw, as it were. He suspected Princess Celestia and the chancellors of the various schools of allowing the more bigoted students to over-extend themselves in the squabbling over the Straw Celestias, so as to justify their removal prior to graduation. A sort of stress-test, as it were.
"And I'm fairly certain that all of my best officers, including almost all of the ponies who made general or captain of the guard, had their hoof in burning this year's doll or that, at some point in their careers at the academy. It shows initiative, don't you think? And the ability to show initiative without it going to your head."
"This is true, the most intrepid soldiers wert oft the ones my past self had the necessity of extracting from the tavern, sodden and bloodied from their most drunken of brawls. And the stockade wert a mighty house of instruction in the wiles of battle, if mine spotty memory fail me not." Princess Luna was… smiling. She'd clearly made some fresh connections from this conversation.
Faded Palimpsest was unsure whether to be pleased or frightened.
The tour went on, as they re-joined Celestia's instructors and deans in the outer corridors, and she continued the introduction of her retiring sister to her academic assistants. The rest of the day proved much more tedious and unenlightening to an increasingly bored Faded Palimpsest, and he chose to do his best to follow his name's prompting and disappear into the wainscotting.
Later that night, as he and his charge made their preparations for their nightly work, she returned to the subject of the Straw Celestias once more.
"Why would my sister allow her ponies to thus insult her sovereignty, her dignity?" Luna demanded of her archivist.
Faded Palimpsest was Luna's archivist because his princess - never his goddess, never to Celestia's face, a goddess - had ordered him released from his prison-cell and told Faded that she wished him to be an aide to her new-returned sister. He suspected even now that the elder princess had erroneously supposed that he was some sort of Nightmare cultist, like the younger princess's new guards.
It had been an easy mistake to make. Faded Palimpest's career in the civil service had come to an ignominious end due to his obsession with the cults of dead gods, demon-worship, and deviltry.
Oh, yes, Faded had been an archivist in the royal service before he’d been fired for his attempts to get his Unspeakable Cults manuscript published. A good one, if he said so himself. But the bureaucracy would not tolerate their employees’ attempts to circumvent the princess’s literary license office. He still had a copy of the manuscript hidden in a safe deposit box purchased under a pseudonym.
But his discharge from the princess’s service, and the dark cloud that had followed him into civilian life, had led to… well. In the days leading up to what would become the return of Nightmare Moon, the Guard had swept up unreliable ponies as a precaution. Faded Palimpsest had found himself sharing a prison block with lunatics, wicked ponies, and doomsayers, all of them at each other's throats.
He'd jumped at the chance to get away from the others.
"The Princess cannot stand to be worshipped, your highness," Faded explained for the thousandth time, as they refreshed the limiting wards and the protective circles with the aid of the princess's new guards. "But she cannot get ponies to stop throwing themselves at her hooves. The common theory at her School was that she wanted us to mock her each Hearthswarming with the Straw Celestias." As his horngrip guided the chalk along the scuffed and faded lines, Faded thought about his time at Celestia's School. He had always trod a very fine line with the effigies. He’d known with the paranoia of the hidden criminal that he played with literal fire by participating in the construction of the wicker princesses, but he had not been able to help himself. He remembered that burning, unrequited love for the towering, eternal princess, whose dark satire stood across the spell-circle from him even now, her tongue stuck out as she re-drew the runes on the smooth chamber-floor.
That year's Straw Celestia had looked so much like his mother's little princess-poppets that in his foalhood had sat on a shelf in her room whenever they didn't have guests over. When there were strangers in the house, the well-loved objects of worship had been shoved inside a drawer like the dolls they resembled, to be explained as little Flow Flash's toys if anypony rummaging about where they weren't welcome happened across them and asked. Dolls whose true nature the colt who would eventually become Faded Palimpsest was to never, ever talk about with ponies who weren't family.
Never talk about the family traditions.
And so, Faded Palimpsest had always made sure to get himself onto the Straw Celestia construction teams, had often been instrumental in erecting the wicker and wood frames, and laid his hoof to the weaving of the maize and wheat and barley straw into braided ropes to hang over the frames. But he'd only dared to join the defense squads once, in his first year at the School.
That younger Faded Palimpsest barely managed to not kill anypony fighting off the would-be arsonists. He’d discovered during that culmination of his first year at the princess's school for unicorns that he was a physical coward, and like all cowards, he could be ruthless when a pony's back was turned. A good many unsuspecting cadets went into the infirmaries that year, ambushed as they tried for the straw effigy with their matchsticks and their firespells. Faded had managed to avoid being caught out in his excessive zeal, solely through his then-discovered capacity for subterfuge, for sneaking about and for striking from behind. Faded had been so secretly, perversely proud when his team of defenders had gotten to Sixth Night and his - and their masterwork, the Straw Celestia, had stood, unburnt.
And then came that look in his goddess's eyes, that look of betrayal. Of disappointment.
"You see, Your Highness, the Princess wants the Straw Celestias burned. It's the point of the exercise. It took me a long time to realize this. I thought the game was supposed to be two-sided. I wanted it to be two-sided. But your sister didn't want one side to win. Her heart is always with the fire."
"Is this true, Master Palimpsest, or art thou projecting thyself upon a princessly screen once more?"
Faded blushed at the princess's chiding tone. She was sounding more and more like the guard-cultists' version of herself, and less like the gutted shell she'd been when he'd first been introduced to by her elder sister. He'd realized after a few hours with his assigned princess, what his role was to be. She spoke, but only when spoken to. Her replies had been vague, and occasionally non-responsive, always circular. Little Princess Luna, Regent of the Moon, Princess of the Night, spoke like a simaculra, echoing ponies' words back to them whenever she didn't understand their questions.
And she didn't understand most anything, at first.
The returned alicorn had been given into Faded Palimpsest's care broken, less a pony than a collection of parts held within a pony's skin. He had looked into the eyes of the innocent abomination that his lifelong idol had put into his care, and saw then for the first time his purpose, what he was there to do. Celestia had talked around the point, but it was only when Faded came to know his charge, that he knew his part. And so he dedicated himself to helping Luna put herself back together - to work with her to curate the best edition of herself they could discover, among the half-burned pages and scraps and fragments they could find among the archives of her life. The remnants left in the rainbow wake of the Elements of Harmony.
His part, and, it would seem, the part of her foreign guards, her former self's worshippers.
Those damnable Company ponies. Their delegation, their promised detachment of warriors had arrived, on schedule, exactly as the letter had promised. Six battle-scarred veterans with the Nightmare in their hearts. Foreign-born exiles, fanatics. Veterans at dream-magic and expert in the ways that lie beyond sleep.
Two of those creepy guards were in her chambers with her and Faded that night, waiting for the princess and her archivist to complete their preparations for the night's exercises. He would have preferred to do this alone, but they still needed the foreign cultists' expertise in this strange, alien dream-magic. Faded had no experience in it, and when the Company ponies had arrived, the little princess had been more hole than pony, and hadn't the first clue how to work the magic which was her special talent - not the fighting, not the celestial, lunar object her divine sister had delegated into her care, not the night itself. The walking of dreams. The Queen of the Night.
Luna's true purpose in life was the governance of ponies' lives beyond the veil of night, of the kingdom of dreams, of the world beyond that threshold we call sleep. And this, Faded Palimpsest couldn't give to her, couldn't return to her. Only those damnable cultists could do that. So they as they did, Faded meekly followed in their train.
The memory palace was the Luna-who-was’s inheritance to the Luna-who-is. It was as real as dreams could be, and perhaps, a bit more. The rest of the dream realm came and went like the phases of the moon. The memory palace remained, through years and decades, decades and centuries. Long after her mistress disappeared from the realm of night, the memory palace abided.
But the palace had not heard pony hooves in many an era when they first re-opened the barred gates, and advanced through the mystic dust of centuries. Those halls were strange, even to Luna’s returned guards, whose experience in dreamwalking and lucid dreaming was still, when all was said and done, carried out in the confines of their own minds’ creation, their connection with each other and with those ponies with whom they could make contact in the dreaming.
The cultist-guards knew what they were doing, that was for sure.
If only they didn't try to fill all of Princess Luna's many holes with their persistent delusions, born of years of mad demon-worship. They carried a version of the Nightmare in their hearts like a serpent, and the slithering of that serpent rasped just under the sound of their steps in the dream-world. Sometimes it walked like the armored black horror who had terrorized Equestria on the thousandth Summer Sun Celebration. And sometimes it floated like an echo of Faded’s own charge, a wispy mirror-image of the little alicorn princess, perhaps a bit taller, perhaps somewhat transparent, but never quite as real as his own Luna. Very rarely was the Nightmare a little white dragon-eyed foal, and whenever the little filly appeared, she never stayed in Faded's view, disappearing in a flash like a skittish cat afraid of strangers.
The cultists' Nightmare haunted Faded Palimpsest and Princess Luna in the dream-world like the half-forgotten ghosts that infested the memory-palace whose recovery was the royal delegation's nightly task. But where the dream-ghosts of the memory palace were parasites, interlopers and trespassers within the walls of Luna's dream-property, this three-part ghost was brought by the ponies who came to reclaim the halls of Luna's palace of dreams, and was, in a way, the gift they carried for their returned mistress.
If she ever chose to claim it.
Her elder sister, Princess Celestia, had insisted that the memories the Company cultists brought with them were not dangerous, not toxic, that they were the loving dreams of her sister's supporters' long-lost descendants, but Faded was unconvinced. He'd read their manuscripts, had seen what the leaders of the Company had dreamed for his charge. He had seen the way they looked at his little broken monster. It set every hair in his mane on edge.
But at least the cultists made strong guards in the dream-world, and guarded the backs of the lunar princess and her archivist as they made their nightly excursions within the ancient memory-palace. A palace which was the literal record and remembrance of that version of Luna which had been lost now for over a thousand years.
They stood guard as Faded Palimpsest and his little princess rummaged through the debris of centuries, searching for safe memories, clean remembrances. Faded's own talent was finding the clean texts hiding under later interpolations, later writings for which the old wisdom had been thrown away, destroyed, scraped clean of the vellum. Secrets could not hide from Faded Palimpsest, but he also had a talent for detecting the evil thoughts which lurked under the anodyne, or the re-worked, or the lying mask.
Faded had a knack for spotting corrupted memories, and did his best to keep his charge from re-absorbing old poisons, old furies and hates. This was his charge, from his white goddess, towards her little shadow, her other-self. To reassemble her sister's best self.
Every morning Faded's charge returned from their delvings in the ruin of her former self, speaking those ancient words, those long-lost echoes, her dialect reverting once again to its archaic forms. They would spend most mornings unlearning what she'd absorbed the night before, or rather, reintegrating it with the day's experience. Putting it all into place. Building today's Luna anew, every day.
This was Princess Luna's own tightrope walk, wobbling between that remembrance of the past, and an imperfect understanding the present.
"Tis very strange, this new world's Celestia. In my memories I see the Celestia that olden self saw, and despised, and raged against with all of my then-heart. She filled our summer palace with golden statuary of herself, and every return my olden self made from the outer provinces, the castles wert fuller with sister's worship, and the holy brick-a-brack of her worshipful followers."
"I have seen the same memories that you have, Your Highness. But they are memories of very, very long ago, and your former self's fall was evidently quite the event. How could the Fall of Night not change matters, or the Princess's heart? Your corrupted self was locked within the stasis of the moon; your sister was left to pick up the pieces, and keep Equestria together, safe."
"We fear we shall never see that fall, and the recovery thereof, in memories within mine former self's palace, Master Palimpsest. For that, we must look to our sister's present self, and the world she hast made in our long absence. But for tonight, we dig in mine ancient self's remembrances! Guards! To thy dream-stations!"
They found some of Luna's oldest memories of battle that night, and within them, the dreams of deadly windigoes sacking the undefended archives of the alicorn of the night. The thestral, transformed dream-selves of the Company volunteers charged headlong into the monstrous figments, and wrought bloody dream-carnage upon the interlopers. A terrified Faded Palimpsest hung back, fearful of what the monsters might do to his naked psyche.
His charge did no such thing. That night she broke through her timidity, and her caution. While he cowered, his broken princess walked through one of the Nightmare-ghosts that belonged to the cultist-guards, and that tall black horror's image disappeared as the princess's dream-self passed through the memory, drawing it into herself before Faded's terrified eyes. He saw flashes of war, of slaughter and wholesale equinicide as Luna drew the Company-dream of Nightmare into herself.
Luna shuddered, pausing in her slow advance, as her shadow grew larger, sharper, darker. Then she re-opened her eyes with a look of clarity Faded had rarely seen in his little alicorn's often-befuddled gaze. She resumed her advance upon the savage trespassers within her dream-property, to join her zealous defenders locked in combat. By the time she reached the fight, she'd manifested a black scythe, and she'd grown… larger.
And as Faded watched her violent dismantling of the windigo-ghosts, he forgot to be afraid. She moved more and more savagely, more brutally, and more gracefully, until at last she danced through the dream-gore with an ease and panache he found hard to square with the clumsy, cautious filly-princess he'd thought he'd known.
Once Luna and her thestral guards had destroyed the interloper-ghosts, she and Faded went on to explore the savage memories the windigoes had been rooting among. Those remembrances were damaged, but they were also the first memories they'd come across of Luna in battle, Luna in her panoply, in her armor and among her ponies.
In the morning, as they arose, Faded Palimpsest saw the first stars glittering in his little princess's tail. And she'd grown two inches during the night.
As they spent nights exploring Luna's memories of battle and leadership, the little princess decided that she ought to spend her days training her new, smaller body's muscles to those memories' recall. They could have used the Guard's training facilities, but for reasons that remained Luna's own, she chose to do her experimenting with her new self and her recalled memories at the Military Academy, among the new class of cadets.
She didn't enroll herself in the Academy - that would be ludicrous, and insulting to the good colts and fillies of that august institution. But Faded Palimpsest rather thought that his charge felt more at home among the young and learning while she herself was, however temporarily, small and relearning the things she once had known.
Luna might have bonded with her thestral guards, if only they hadn't worshipped her. This new princess was alike her solar sister in one regard - she was made uneasy by worship. Or perhaps, she was taking her cue from her elder sister and that sister's disdain for ponies who thought of her as a god.
And so, the filly princess ran and jumped and flew with the cadets, and beat upon the same quintains and bollards that the cadets abused. Her strength grew day after day, as night after night they dug through her memory-palace and set upon the parasites and interlopers which had colonized this corridor or that chamber, burning out the nests of bakus and hobs and hide-behinds that had made this room or that their home.
And so it was that the now-not-so-little princess came to talk with Celestia's cadets and heard their plans for infiltrating the grounds of the School for Gifted Unicorns when that year's class finished their barely-begun Straw Celestia.
"Why! It is an easy thing to destroy the creations of others, my little soldierlings! What sport is there in offense with nothing of yours to defend?" demanded Luna in that now almost-boisterous voice she'd taken to affecting after several weeks' nights spent in the remembrances of the Holsteinian Wars. "Where is your great wicker princess, your hostage to fortune?"
"But Princess Luna - it's tradition!" said a unicorn colt, his muscles rippling like a farm-pony, glistening with sweat from their interrupted spear-practice. "They build the big straw pony, we sneak about and set it on fire when they're chasing the tech-school fillies."
"Bah! Bah I tell thee! Ye both outnumber them, and many of you, out-magic them! Look at thee, my little ponies, thou art mighty! What honor is there in destroying our sister's image, without an image thyself to raise up, and defendeth her wicker honor!"
The military cadets looked around, surprised by the notion.
And, Faded Palimpsest saw, with a sinking heart, excited by the idea.
"That'd be awesome, Your Highness!" squeaked little Jib Cut, her wings spread in a display of enthusiasm. "What fun is it to go sneaking about, when you can chase ponies instead!"
"But… how would we get ponies to come and try to burn our own wicker princess?" asked Mud Wall, wiping his brow with a dirty wash-rag. He'd been holding back six unicorn cadets as they'd done their best to push him across a line in the practice-yard. "Would we put up flyers or something?"
"Simply build a straw princess bigger than the one that our sister's students are to erect in their courtyard, and vandals will beat a path to thy door!" Luna bellowed, her eyes gleaming.
"But… two Straw Celestias? Wouldn't that be like… twice the insult to the throne?" asked Glitter Bomb, her thaumic bow holding an arrow in her horn-grip. "I never understood why Princess Celestia tolerated us destroying her in effigy year after year, anyways."
"Whyfor dost it need to be a straw version of our sister? Thou hast other princesses!"
"But it feels wrong to let ponies burn poor Cadance!" objected Jib Cut. "She's just… it'd be like letting somepony kick a puppy!"
"Thou hast princesses other than our sister and our niece," Luna said with a put-upon tone of voice.
"Princess… you want us to build a wicker you?" asked Glitter Bomb, firing off her bolt and missing the target entirely. "Why would you want to be set on fire?"
"Whyever would I not?" demanded Luna. "Look at our sister! Year after year, she hath been given the catharsis of seeing her vastness burnt, destroyed, laid waste! It is, if thou thinkest about it, a marvel! A thing to be experienced, if thou wishest to ever have lived! Yes, I would see myself in straw, and wicker, and thrice my height, a challenge to every pony with a lit taper and a mind set upon demolition!"
The tumult only built from there on, and the race was on to find a place, and materials to raise their challenge to the young ponies of Canterlot.
The news of the Academy's Straw Luna under construction brought challengers, indeed, but not the ones that the returned princess had anticipated. Three other schools in the Canterlot municipality and general environs began their own wicker princesses, as well as a trade guild with a surfeit of restless journeymares and mischievous apprentices. In total, six straw princesses of various heights rose around the city in the weeks leading up to Hearthswarming, from Canterlot Public #4's ten-foot-tall ponification of Wisdom, to the Fruitier Guild's thirty-five-foot-tall Princess Cadance.
Construction hadn't begun when Princess Luna had returned from her sojourn in Ponyville for that town's famous (or infamous in Faded Palimpsest's irritated opinion) Nightmare Night festivities. His charge had ignored his disapproving refusal to join her in this visit, especially when he'd refused to explain why he didn't like that tradition.
She came back from Ponyville with a great many questions, and a decidedly complicated attitude towards her reputation in the provinces. The design of the military academy's straw princess had shifted accordingly, to something a great deal more dark and threatening. One might almost say, more militant.
And now Faded Palimpsest and his princess were on the stalk.
When the last week of the holidays arrived, Faded found himself foolishly haunting the alleys and backways like a freshmare, slinking behind Princess Luna into the dark spaces in between Canterlot's brightly lit city streets. They were both masked and dressed in dark robes, as they picked their way between trash cans and the back-way disorder that ponies hid away from their neighbors and customers. The robes did well enough to hide his identity from the baffled world, but nopony would have been fooled by the increasingly tall alicorn princess, no matter how much she swaddled herself up in black wrappings and domino cloaks. The billowing blue-white mane and tail full of stars escaped no matter what she tried to do in way of obscuring them, and gave the lie to her pretense of being just one more student on the stalk for straw-themed mayhem.
Nopony would have been fooled, that is, if anypony had been fool enough to lurk about in dark and stinking alleys during this shining, cheerful time of the season. Other than Faded and his princess.
The night before, the two of them had set fire to Morari Polytechnic's Princess Celestia, but they hadn't been able to get close to the School for Gifted Unicorns' wicker princess. But the chaos of Faded and Princess Luna's failed attempt to force their way through the spells and traps laid by Celestia's gifted students had been enough of a distraction that somepony else had gotten close enough to start a flame among the cotton-candy tresses of the PCSFGU Straw Celestia.
The diligent young unicorns had managed to put out the fire before it had consumed the whole figure, but Luna had said that it was close enough for her purposes.
Tonight, she and her taper-carrier had another target.
Nopony had gotten anywhere near her own effigy, located deep inside the wards of the EUP Academy, and guarded by a swarm of well-trained roustabouts and armed hellions. During the day, volunteer docents guarded the crowds that passed through the academy grounds to look with awe at the great black mountain of straw and wicker. The cadets kept a close watch on their visitors during open-house hours, and the traditional truce during those hours which had held for the PCSFGU Straw Celestia had been extended to all of the new wicker princesses that had sprung up overnight in school courtyards throughout the city.
But as soon as Celestia set her sun, and Luna brought on the night with her moon-rise, the grounds of the Academy became a roiling battlefield strewn with the laid-out victims of the cadets' enthusiastic defense, and PCSFGU, polytechnic, and public school students alike had been no match for the trained war-ponies. Not even the journeymares of the fruitiers or the mercers had been able to make a dent in the cadets' battle-line.
Luna hadn't been thrilled by her soldier-students' victories - rather, she'd felt it to be a challenge.
As they approached the walls of the academy, the cover of dark alleys ran out. Faded Palimpsest had a certain talent for not being seen, but he was no fighter. He hung back in the mouth of that last alleyway as his princess took to the air, and he watched her as she threw off her domino cloak, and trailed the wrappings hidden under that piece of clothing.
Shouts rose from the inner perimeter the cadets had set guard around their school, calling for the alert of the outer perimeter that Faded and Princess Luna had eluded, and the quick reaction force kept in reserve for main-force assaults upon the Straw Luna figure.
Pegasi cadets rose to Luna's bait in the air over the far wall of the Academy, and Faded could make out the distant glint as his princess manifested her battle-armor. He waited three beats of his heart, and as the unicorn-bolts began to rise to meet the princess of war in her full glory, he scurried out of his alley-mouth hiding place, in as unobtrusive a rush for the low wall of the soldiers' school as he could manage.
If it had been daylight, or if the guards had been alert and undisturbed, Faded Palimpsest would have never have gotten over the wall, let alone undetected. But the guards' attention had been arrested by the spectacle of a black-visaged dragon-eyed winged unicorn of great stature and greater power dancing the pegasus war-cotillion in the air over the Academy. She returned blast for blast with the war-unicorns gathering around her gyre on the far side of the complex, and even the earth ponies were drifting towards the fireworks.
Faded Palimpsest gave himself a little levitational boost over the wall, and scrambled down with less than impressive grace. He wasn't strong enough of a unicorn to self-levitate, but all one really needs is a starting push when you've got adrenaline and panic fueling your rush.
He felt the urge to watch his charge spend herself like a fireworks show overhead, but that wasn't why he was here. Faded kept his head down, and the taper clenched tight in his teeth.
He got right up to the wicker Luna without anypony even raising the alarm. As he lit the taper in his magic, a cadet finally, belatedly raised the alarm. The alarmed guard ran towards Faded with that earth-pony inexorability that promised broken unicorn bones when the straw-princess guard arrived.
The cadet didn't get there before Faded Palimpsest thrust his burning wick into the dry tinder of the effigy of Nightmare Moon.
Faded turned to meet the earth pony, and lowered his horn to receive the charge.
As the black wicker princess burst into shocking red-orange flames behind him, Faded Palimpsest thought to himself, this is going to hurt.
It did.
"Why did you burn your own effigy, Luna?" demanded the solar princess through the cell bars.
"Why hast thou never burned thy own effigy, Tia?" replied her little sister, looking smugly through those self-same jail-cell bars. "Well, I can not claim I laid the taper with mine own hooves. My dear sweet little pony didst that for my honor, and I bless him for it." The lunar princess stroked the mane of her battered archivist, who somehow had escaped without any broken bones.
They'd thrown Faded Palimpsest and Princess Luna into the same prison cell, and Faded had to admit, as prisons went, it was quite nice. He'd been in worse in his life.
"The lesson is never for me, Lulu. Or you. It's an exercise for the student, not the teacher!"
"Well, that is as it ought for such as you, O instructor to nations! I am, I must confess, still a student, and require lessons as much as, if not more than, your little students, Principal Celestia. I thank you for your teachings. I think I learned quite a lot this season!"
"Lulu, get out of that jail cell. They need it for the real criminals, and we have a Hearthswarming pageant to watch. They can't get started until we're both there."
"But I like it in here! It feels… homey."
"Lulu!"
"Oh, very well, Tia. But next year it is thy turn to lay waste to the wicker princesses!"
Author's Note
For those who have never heard of it, this is in some small part about the Gävle goats. Every year, one or two Swedish schools build a giant straw goat for the Christmas holidays, and every year, vandals and would-be arsonists do their level best to destroy the goats. This is a crime, and people get jailed for attacking the goats every year, but it's a sort of anarchists' tradition.
A firebug's tradition, but there it is. Some years the defenders win, and the goats stand against everything thrown at them. But most years, they burn, victim to man's perverse need to destroy the things that other people make.
Or, some would say, some folks' need to destroy the idols raised up to vanities.
Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate and the general Company.
(Incidentally, for those following along at home, this is in direct continuity with In the Company of Night and Some Other Pony's Destiny.)
