Of Ponies and Fate

Ehecatl watched the sunrise from the balcony of one of the palace's guest rooms. He hadn't had the chance to use it however, as Celestia and he had been up all night in deep conversation. Though she had answered many of his questions about Equestria, he felt that the questions he had answered about himself were sorely inadequate as Celestia seemed more confused as the night wore on. There was just too much to explain in so little a time.

He couldn't hope to give the full account of humanity's rise and subsequent demise at their own hands in one night. Still, it felt like his duty to at least share his experience with the young goddess of this world. She could learn something from their talks that may avert a similar fate.

As peaceful as the Equestrians seemed, he knew that if life continued to grow conflicts would ensue.

More than anything, he wanted this peaceful world to remain as it was now.

Hearing a knock, he pulled himself from the sunrise and returned to the main room of his quarters.

"I'm sorry to disturb you, but breakfast is ready," said a maid as she opened the door, making way for a cart with silver platters laden with food.

She took a sharp inhale when her eyes settled on the occupant of the room. Her eyes went wide and started to roll as she fainted.

With a thought Ehecatl caught the collapsing filly and gently levitated her to the couch across from him. He was content to let her sleep as he calmly moved to retrieve the cart.

Wheeling the cart in front of the bed, he noticed an ornate gold rimmed mirror across the room. His image played along its surface and he realized how otherworldly it appeared. Deciding a human was strange enough for this world's inhabitants, he forced his appearance to be more subdued. His robes and hair no longer flowed and his eyes no longer glowed with fey light.

He nodded his approval as he sat down to enjoy his first meal in a long while.

"Uuuggghhhh... Wh-what, where am.... What happened?" moaned the maid as she slowly recovered.

"Careful, you just had quite the experience a few minutes ago and fainted."

"Oh," She said trying to steady herself as she got off the couch, "That's not like me at all, I'm sorry to have inconvenienced you."

When the maid rounded the cart to fully apologize, she nearly fainted again at the sight of the speaker.

Reacting physically this time, Ehecatl reached out and steadied the weak kneed filly.

"I did say to be careful." he joked. A smile now playing across his face.

The strange creature's warm countenance reassured her as she gave a cautious smile in return. She was quick to recover this time and looked ashamed at her lack of professionalism.

"I'm terribly sorry sir! The Princess asked me to bring you breakfast and whatever else you may need."

"I'm fine for the moment. Breakfast was delicious by the way." He said motioning to the empty platters.

"Oh! Silly me, I'll just take those for you." said the maid as she wheeled the cart toward the door. "If you need anything else just tell the guard by the door and he'll come and fetch me."

After she closed the door quietly behind her, Ehecatl couldn't hold himself back any longer and burst into a fit of good-natured laughter.

He could imagine Celestia giving the maid instructions to mind a foreign dignitary, intentionally withholding any details, and sending the unwitting maid to fetch her guest's breakfast.

Celestia, it would seem, had an unexpected mischievous side to her.

Sergeant Silver Lance strode purposefully down the corridors of the palace toward the barracks. He was in a sour mood despite the disciplined mask of indifference that he wore while on duty.

After the Princess dismissed him from his post he had chosen to patrol the hallways for an hour before returning to wait out the rest of the night. It wasn't until he was off duty that he heard of the intruder that had confronted her in the palace gardens.

He had failed his sacred duty.

At least that's how the sergeant saw it, and nopony could convince him otherwise. It mattered little that her majesty had ordered him away. Even if his superiors wouldn't blame him, he was going to demand he be punished for dereliction of post.

          Rounding the last corner to the barracks, Silver's pace broke as he spotted a familiar face standing casually off to the side of the barracks' arches. His carefully maintained mask faltered as he shot the smartly dressed unicorn a look of disgust.

"Well, it certainly is an honor that you would grace this lowly guard with your presence councilor." Silver sniped with as much venom as he could muster.

"Oh you give me to much credit sergeant." quipped the unicorn sarcastically, "I simply came to see the face of the pony who put our Princess in so much unnecessary peril."

Iniquum Edict was both a royal adviser and an old foalhood rival of Silver Lance.

While they had never gotten along when they were young, their rivalry had grown into something closer to bitter enemies after following the paths of their chosen professions.

Iniquum saw the royal guard as a dead end career where one made little difference to the realm, and Silver saw politics as little more than a game for the power hungry to advance themselves with petty lies and half-truths.

The violet unicorn, taking advantage of the silence as the pegasus guard reigned in his anger, continued his verbal assault.

"Just imagine what would have happened if it had been a zebra agent!" He declared dramatically, pauseing to measure if his words had the desired effect.

They did.

Silver's tenuous hold on his anger slipped, locking the counselor with a glare of open hostility.

"Mock me if you must counselor, but your bigotry is an insult to what Equestria stands for!" as Silver finished, the guards that had patiently watched the exchange from their post at the barracks entrance took a few threatening paces forward, their eyes locked on Iniquum.

The counselor was no foal. If a fight broke out, the royal guard would not help him.

"My! So sensitive today. Very well, I'll leave you to your punishment then."  He quipped with a sneer as he turned to leave.

'Damn him!' Silver seethed.

That blasted sneak always brought out the worst in him. Worse still was the counselor's political stance on foreign affairs.

A growing sect of aristocrats and politicians were becoming increasingly paranoid of their neighbors at the border. They were convinced that the zebras, gryphons, and even the dragons were all somehow conspiring against Equestria. Though it helped that the main voice of opposition was the princess herself, lately it seemed that she wasn't focused on the court, like her mind was elsewhere.

Silver had never been to a session of the royal court, but it was the center of much gossip in the barracks.

"Uh, sergeant?" a voice called, snapping him out of his thoughts.

The private that spoke looked at him questioningly until Silver noticed he was still positioned with his wings extended aggressively in the direction that Iniquum had left.

He quickly righted himself and passed under the arches to the barracks without a word.

Books and tomes of various sizes floated from one end of the royal library to the next, gathering at a central point around Ehecatl, where they opened and flipped through their pages as he scanned their contents.

He had started out mundanely enough, sorting through the massive shelves without success before losing all patience. What he was looking for needed to be found before the next time he spoke to Celestia.

There was a slight snag in the form of reading, that however, was resolved by asking the librarian to sound out each character until he could connect the words to script.

The aged librarian had at first been a little shaken playing host to such a strange creature but he seemed to have a passion for teaching and soon forgot any physical differences they had.

Despite the vast amount of literature he had scanned, Ehecatl could find nothing remotely related to myths or religion. From what was he read, it could be assumed that it was generally accepted to worship Celestia as a goddess, but there was nothing on origin or creation, a constant subject of contemplation in any civilization he had ever known.

'Maybe ponies aren't as predisposed to curiosity as humans were,'  he thought, absently flipping through another tome about some fairy tale of great evil returning after a thousand years or some such nonsense.

There was only one possibility he could think of for the lack of a creation myth in a species that was ruled by a living goddess.

'She's hiding it from them.'

Ehecatl could think of at least one reason to hide such a relevant fact to history. A mix of sympathy for Celestia and sadness at the failings of his fellow gods in the creation of humanity rose above his curiosity, leaving him in no mood to continue his fruitless search.

He would just have to ask her tonight.

She had asked for his company during the raising of the moon. Seeing the loneliness lift from her delicate features into a warm smile of gratitude when he had accepted her offer only made the question he was going to ask that much more difficult.

Even that, however, was not as audacious as the favor he planned to ask her as well.

The air whirled with movement as the books levitated hastily to their original homes, clearing the room of the sea of knowledge that had crowded its halls.

As he slowly moved away from the central point of the library an aged grey tome with a gold trimmed cover caught his eye. Gently, it floated into his hands.

He worked his fingers over the embossed gold letters of the tomes title, "The Legend of Grey Mane".

It was still mid morning and he was in no hurry. With a thought he ascended lightly into the air, landing in a reclining position on the ledge of a skylight carved into the sloped ceiling.

He spent the rest of the day reading about a mythical thief named Grey Mane, whose life and adventures were said to span thousands of years. The earliest of these myths dated back some thirteen thousand years according to the author.

It was no simple work of fiction, but a collection of similar folklore shared between many cultures. Some of these tales stretched plausibility to its limits, saying that the legendary thief could steal the stars themselves.

This did little to deter him from reading farther, as he preferred such fanciful tales to the bland, predictable nature of non-fiction.

From one side of the world to the other, across seas and oceans, Grey Mane stole one marvelous item after another. From the ruins of ancient cities, from the hands of powerful rulers, from the forgotten hordes of mighty dragons, no treasure was safe from him.

So wrapped was he in the epic, he failed to note the passage of time until the sun was low enough to cast creeping shadows across the tome's pages.

Reluctantly, he dropped from his perch to the library's floor.

He alighted silently and placed the book on a nearby desk for the librarian to sort and set off to the gardens where Celestia had asked to meet him.

The halls of the palace were awash in the varying hues of amber graced by the setting sun as he made his way to the meeting spot. The guards followed him with their eyes, the air of caution thick about them as he passed.

Walking under the entrance arches he could now take in the truly inspired beauty of the palace gardens.

The lush trees and bushes, embraced in the golden colors of dusk, were cultivated in such a way as to balance the vitality of nature with the graceful, magically carved marble architecture of the palace. Situated as an over-sized balcony, the gardens ended abruptly at the lip of a sheer drop lined with marble railing, the view from which encompassed the entirety of the city below and beyond to the panoramic sight of hundreds of miles of plains, woodlands, and mountains.

The effect of such a vast oasis of greenery seemingly floating above a city built from the side of a mountain was truly breathtaking.

Standing at the railing, watching over it all, was Celestia. Her mane, full with the colors of sunrise, flowed slowly with an intangible breeze that defied the the strong winds whipping about her.

Ehecatl took his position beside her without a sound.

Giving him a quick glance she returned to the task at hand.

He watched her out of the corner of his eye as she performed a duty he was all too familiar with. More than anything, he wanted to know what she was thinking at this exact moment, but was respectful enough to not attempt gleaning her thoughts.

Instead, he waited patiently as the sun dipped below the horizon, its light lancing the sky with swaths of color in its final moments before giving way to a cooling darkness illuminated by the pale light of the moon.

"You were almost late." she muttered, breaking the silence in a mock sorrowful tone.

"Sorry." he replied, too deep in his thoughts to realize the prod for what it was.

"You're brooding too much."

"You're one to talk." he said more accusingly than he had intended to. He had meant it as a joke but his own pain had twisted it.  "Sorry."

"You've only said three things so far and two of them have been "sorry".  You're not off to a very good start." she joked with a light chuckle, attempting to lighten the mood.

"Sor-" he began before cutting of the apology with a sharp caugh.

"You're right. I came here tonight to ask you something," he put his hands on the railing, leaning out as he gazed intently to where the sun had set.

"Funny, I thought you came here tonight because I asked you to," she remarked with playful accusation.

The smile she won for her prod was short lived as he became somber again with eyes still locked on the horizon. His voice was strained when he asked.

"Who was it?" His question was only met with a confused silence before he clarified.

"The sun and moon. Did you know them?"

When he turned to face her the look on her face seemed a map of contradicting emotions. First was surprise, followed by pride, guilt, then pain and sadness, ending in loneliness.

"How do you know this?" her playful demeanor had evaporated replaced with a cold, expressionless stare.

"Then it's true..." reasoned Ehecatl, his thoughts distant.

He didn't even register the sudden change in her voice, or her question, just the confirmation of the truth.

"Did you love them?" He already knew the answer, but he needed to hear it.

Her cold stare melted with the blazing heat of anger few in existence had ever witnessed from the normally gentle goddess.

Ehecatl felt no fear.

He had faith; Faith that Celestia and he shared the same pain, the same loss, and believed she had felt the same from him.

The fires behind her eyes dimmed as she calmed herself, but did not vanish.

"I did."

"Were they close to you?" he asked when she failed to volunteer anything further.

"My mother and father they-" she paused, attempting to collect herself, "They sacrificed everything for this world, and the rest of the alicorns followed their example.  Now it's just me..."

She had kept the truth hidden from everypony for nearly a millennium but so much already lay exposed. "...and my sister."

"You have a sister? She wasn't mentioned in the archives." He reasoned that if Celestia was worshiped as a living goddess while her sister wasn't even mentioned that only left a few possibilities, none of them good.

"And for good reason, she turned on our subjects and myself in a bid to gain control of Equestria. I had no choice..." her voice caught in her throat as she gazed at the moon in a mix of guilt and longing. The equine-like pattern etched into the surface of the silver disc made the ending to her story painfully obvious, but he kept his silence, waiting for her to continue.

"After I banished her, I forbade anypony to speak of her and put the torch to all official records that same night. I wouldn't have been able to contain the information if it were not for her physical transformation. Those outside the palace that were unfortunately caught up in our battle couldn't recognize their princess. She had become a monster to be passed down as a fairy tale made to frighten young foals." once again she paused, worry lining her porcelain features.

"Now her time in banishment is almost over and without control of the one thing that can stop her I'm left with the choice of watching my world burn or fighting my sister to the death."

The despair written plainly on her face, but whether she knew it or not, her eyes were focused, not wistful or distant. There was hope there.

An unbearably long silence passed between them as Ehecatl absorbed the story. The wind of the crisp night now seemed frigid, buffeting the walls below the ledge of the garden, sending strong drafts up the walls.

It was then that the machinations of a plan started to form in his mind. It was possible to serve both their ends if it worked.

"Celestia, I have a proposition for you," he began, his words immediatly catching in his throat as he saw the fragile hope that was only a small flicker a moment ago flare into a raging inferno.

The intensity of her gaze almost forced Ehecatl to take a step back.

He held his ground.

"If I told you I had a way to insure your sister was returned to you, but it would come at a heavy price, what would you say?"

"Name it." Celestia replied without a moments hesitation.

In all his endless wanderings there was only one thing Ehecatl wanted more than anything. The one thing he could never have, since he'd failed his duty to mankind.

"It will require a large portion of your power..."

Ehecatl's face betrayed none of his mounting fear as he steeled himself to intone the final, ultamite price to be extracted.

"...And my life."