Celestia’s breath sighed from her mouth in one long, mournful exhalation. The passage of the air ruffled the pale blue mane of the filly lying before her. The bed was piled high with midnight-blue cushions and silken sheets, and the little alicorn was tangled in several of them. Her limbs sprawled carelessly in the childish ease of sleep, but her expression was calm and restful.
Leaning low over her, Celestia studied the face before her as though she was seeing it for the first time. Her eyes flickered over every pore, catalogued every strand of downy-soft fur, every twitch of the eyeballs behind the thin blue lids. The two of them stayed that way for a long time, one unaware, one drinking in the sight of the other like a pony starved of companionship.
“A thousand years,” Celestia whispered, her voice as soft as a dream. “A thousand years alone. How I have missed you, Sister.”
She glanced up at the velvet curtains, hanging in rich folds down to the marble floor. It was well past the time that sunset should have been tingeing the sky red, but the full light of day still glared past the edges of the curtains.
Celestia’s nostrils flared slightly as she sighed once more, and reluctantly stood to leave. She was needed elsewhere, but her golden-shod hooves almost dragged across the floor as she left her sister’s side. The door opened silently, wreathed in the glow of her magic, and closed behind her.
The room was dark and still once more. Not a sound could be heard.
Glowing blue eyes snapped open.
Luna stretched, catlike, her limbs aching from holding the pretence of peaceful repose for so long. She stumbled to her hooves, kicking the satiny tangles of her sheets away from her. She took a few steps and turned to look over her shoulder at her room.
Centuries of loving care had been lavished upon the lunar tower. The floors were glossy black marble, the pillars obsidian, the ceilings inlaid with swirling silver designs and faithfully rendered constellations. Those of her books that had survived the destruction of the Castle of the Two Sisters had been lovingly cared for by generations of archivists, rebound time and again in deep blue covers. The bedding was all the finest Saddle Arabian silk that bits could buy, only spun last year, in the final throes of Celestia’s preparation for her return. The lunar tower had stood empty for over nine hundred years, but Celestia had cleaned it every week with her own magic.
The whole thing was a monument to how Celestia had mourned and longed for her beloved little sister. A thousand years of waiting, of hoping, of dreaming.
Luna shut her eyes and turned away. It was like a tomb. A shrine to her sister’s memories of her. She was smothered in her sister’s love, hemmed in on every side by it. Even now, it clung to her as strongly as Celestia herself did, although the white alicorn was absent.
And those times were scarce enough. In the month since Luna had…returned to herself, Celestia had left her side only for minutes at a time. Who knew how little time she had now before her sister returned once more?
Luna was…glad to be home. Of course she was. To be free of her prison, purified of those centuries of rage, of hate, decade after decade screaming her empty, futile anger into the void. To have her mind be clear at last. But to have returned into the warm, feathered embrace of her older sister, while desperately wanted at first, was fast beginning to feel almost like a different kind of prison.
Celestia hovered constantly. She was by Luna’s side as she ate and slept. She made anxious attempts at conversation and nervously showed Luna the things she had done while she waited for her. It seemed not a moment of Luna’s banishment had been spent idly. Celestia had been plotting her recovery from the very beginning. The construction of Canterlot, a new capital city for them to share. Forests planted on the mountainside with silver birch and oak, Luna’s favourite trees, to create an ancient woodland ready for her return. Experimentation with the Elements, to see if they would accept their old mistress. And after their failure, a programme of encouraged courtships, matching magically strong unicorn bloodlines together, even interspersing them with a selection of royal-born foals, spread carefully over the centuries. All to create a unicorn strong enough to have a chance at being able to wield the Element of Magic that rejected Celestia so firmly. That little project had many results, from what Luna could tell of Celestia’s slightly garbled explanation; one runaway to another dimension, a few rogue wizards, a defunct idiot of a great-great-great nephew, and a little pink unicorn talented enough to merit ascension at the tender age of fourteen, though not strong enough for Harmony’s tastes. But finally it had met its end in Twilight Sparkle and her five equally carefully curated and raised friends. Luna’s saviours, and the result of seven centuries of Celestia’s careful manipulations in the lives of her little ponies.
Luna was grateful. To the Elements, and to Twilight Sparkle, and of course to her sister. But she was also overwhelmed. She wanted to rest, to breathe. To spend an hour without Celestia’s anxious gaze, watching to see if she would corrupt herself once more. To try and remember who she was — who she had been, before the rage and the hollow space behind the stars had filled up her soul.
But Celestia’s every waking thought for a millennium had been directed to securing Luna safely back by her side. And she would not, could not relinquish her yet.
And Luna, cowed by the enormity of what her sister had done for her, could not bring herself to refuse.
She looked down at her reflection in the gleaming marble floor. In its inky depths, her deep blue coat almost looked black, and she shuddered. Only her eyes offered any reassurance; twin blue orbs with gleaming black pupils as round as the moon. No slitted pupils or vast irises. Just normal, simple pony eyes. She let out a shaky breath. She felt empty, numb. She looked into her own eyes, and tried to see into the mind behind them. Who was she? Not Nightmare Moon, no. Not any longer. But not quite yet Luna either.
Luna, Princess of the Night, had stood twice the height of a pony, her lofty horn as long as a sabre. Her mane had held the very stars themselves. Ponies had wept when they laid eyes upon her dark beauty.
The little pony that Luna beheld was barely a head taller than the very smallest of her sister’s subjects. Her mane hung limp and pale across her forehead. She looked years younger than the pink alicorn that called Celestia ‘Auntie’.
Pulling her gaze away at last from the sad little filly in the marble, Luna walked slowly across her room to the curtained window. Instinctively, her horn lit with a trembling blue glow to pull the drapes aside, but she flinched at the sight of the magic and it sputtered out. It had been too long since she used her power for anything other than to maim and kill.
She shouldered the curtains aside with her wings and padded outside.
The sky was blood red, fading to purple above the palace, and Luna let out a long exhale as she looked up at it. It had been so long since she had looked up from her beloved Equus, rather than screeching her endless fury down from the far-distant sky.
The sun slipped below the horizon, and the first star appeared. Luna’s breath caught in her throat. Little Anseres, the outermost wing feather of the Fausticorn constellation. It looked so different from down here. She remembered it as a harsh, glaring star, full of anger. But now, it was calm. Peace suffused its gentle light, and Luna’s eyes filled with tears. She remembered when she had created Anseres, when she had lit its little spark all those thousands of years ago. She remembered what it had been, before they had both changed and then changed again.
And as she remembered, Luna heard Anseres begin to sing. As the sun slid lower, other voices joined it. A tear, silver like the starlight, slid down Luna’s muzzle. Her stars were singing to her, for the first time in eons. Not the screaming war cry that had haunted her every moment as the Nightmare, but the songs as they used to sing, in the times before.
Perhaps singing was the wrong word. But nopony but Luna had ever heard those heavenly tunes, and she could think of no closer description for those soft and lilting, unearthly melodies. Tunes and harmonies she had helped to write, yet only half-remembered.
The interweaving songs synchronised and blended together, a perfect union of all Luna’s beautiful children, and she could only listen, enraptured, as they built to a wondrous crescendo. Finally there came a new voice, a stronger call, almost an echo of Luna’s own, and Luna’s mouth fell open in a gasp. Leading the chorus, her old friend, her first creation. No longer her silvery, barren prison. Restored, as she was restored, to how they had both been at the very beginning.
Luna was uncertain no longer. She knew what she must do, what she had done a hundred million times before. She lit her horn once again, and this time her magic did not falter. She reached out for oldest companion, and it reached back for her, and she wrapped it in her love and in her magic. She lifted, and it was effortless, and she felt it rise for her.
There was a brief founder, as Luna’s spell lifted her silver sphere away from another magic, a golden touch of incredible strength yet little subtlety. The moon sprang to Luna, forsaking the hated stranger at once for its true mistress, and the golden mage did not resist. Luna felt a slight tinge of happiness, of sunny golden joy, but then the fire-magic slipped away from her, and her focus snapped back to her most sacred task. Her one true calling.
She lifted the moon above the mountains, and it soared into the air like a silvery phoenix, its light brighter and richer than it had been for hundreds of thousands of nights. It bathed the land in its light, and its song swelled to fill Luna’s whole soul. The stars’ melody rose above it, a perfect soprano counterpoint, millions of voices joined as one.
Luna tipped her head back and let the moonlight wash her clean at last, let the stars sing to her of who she was, who she had been, and who she would become once more. The magic of the land came to her at last, after she had reached for it in vain for so long, and the world was bathed in the embrace of the night. Not a night dark and filled with terror, as a twisted fragment of her mind had once wanted to inflict. No, a night as Luna had created the night to be: silver and shining and wondrous, a thing of matchless beauty.
Her strength flooded back into her like a rushing tide, and Luna sang to the stars as they sang to her. The final shreds of the bad dream fled from her, and she threw her wings wide. The little form that had trapped her gave way before the surge and Luna burst back into herself. Her mane erupted from its earthly confines and streamed out behind her, a glorious flood of darkness and starlight. The crescent on her flank flared brighter even than the moon itself as Luna took to the air. The nightmare was ended. The night was restored.
Sister, do you recall the bat-ponies?
Luna watched the moon vanish below the horizon with a contented sigh. The thrill of being back on Equestria where she belonged had still not faded.
Waving aside her courtiers with a gentle shake of her head as they pressed forward, she padded silently down the shadowy corridors that Celestia had built for her centuries ago.
She felt exhausted, but when she reached her private tower, she paused and smiled quietly to herself. One of the many talents it seemed Celestia had had the time to perfect in Luna’s millennium of absence was interior decoration.
The ceiling was black marble, spangled with diamonds in the exact layout of the constellations that Luna had placed with such care eons ago. Every diamond was spelled to glow softly, and it was like looking up at the night sky itself, even during the day. The windows were made of thick, smoked glass, so that when Luna drew the purple velvet curtains to look out, the garish colours of the day would not hurt her eyes.
The bed was an enormous sunken circle, big enough for six Luna’s and strewn with soft purple and grey cushions. Everything was exactly to Luna’s tastes, or as close as Celestia could make it. She had shown the rooms to Luna very anxiously at first, explaining that she had tried very hard to make them what Luna would like, and had redone them roughly once every fifty years, as she came up with new ideas.
Luna had felt her eyes fill with tears at the thought of Celestia doing twenty different versions of the same room, and she had hugged her sister close. In a locked room off to one side of the central receiving chamber was a pair of locked doors, ornately carved with Starswirl’s cutie mark and the dark spiral of leaves and flowers that had been Clover’s cutie mark. Celestia had told her that she had placed their portraits and the possessions of theirs that Luna had kept with her in the Dark Tower in that room.
Luna had not yet found the strength to open that door.
As she stood looking at the intricate carvings in the oak, she heard hoofsteps. The stride was too long to be anyone but Celestia. Hastily, Luna shook off her melancholy thoughts and opened her door for her sister.
“Good morning, Celestia,” she said, stifling a yawn.
“Sister, do you recall the bat-ponies?”
Luna yawned again but obligingly rubbed her eyes to better focus on her sister. “I could hardly forget them.”
“I wondered if you would be willing to help me with a little…project?”
Luna, fully alert now, flashed a dark glance at the playful expression on Celestia’s face. “Nothing that will endanger the inhabitants of Shady Hollows, I trust, Sister? You know how highly I value Nightshade’s descendants.”
Celestia raised a hoof in supplication. “I know, and I would never do anything that would ever hurt any of our little ponies.” She paused. “At least, not permanently.”
Luna opened her mouth indignantly but Celestia waved her into silence before she could speak.
“Wait, wait — I’m not talking about any of the bat-ponies. You remember I told you about Twilight Sparkle and the set of ponies I put together in Ponyville?”
Luna relaxed and rolled her eyes. “Yes, Sister, you talk about your Twilight Sparkle project often and at length.”
“Oh, hush,” Celestia laughed. “I can hardly confide in my little ponies — they would think I was manipulating them, rather than guiding. I’m still growing accustomed to having you back. Its good to be able to talk about my work again.”
“I prefer to safeguard than to socially engineer,” Luna said, raising her nose a little.
“Whatever you want to call it,” Celestia waved a wing, “I have been working towards what has culminated in Twilight Sparkle for at least eight hundred and fifty years, ever since I realised that the little ponies, that we created in our image, have a limited capability to wield our magic. To wield the elements. And I wanted us to have a proper break, to spend time together, after you returned.”
Luna winced. Thinking of her hideous mistakes and endless imprisonment was something she tried very hard to avoid at present.
“I would estimate my work with Twilight Sparkle is less than a decade away from completion,” Celestia went on eagerly, evidently trying to move the conversation on. “And my work with Cadence even less than that. After they are in place, we will have at least a hundred years just to ourselves.”
Luna sighed. That did sound nice. Just time to be quiet and think together, as they had not done in so long. “And you need my assistance with something related to your little princess project?”
“Exactly!” Celestia beamed. “I just need you to cast the bat-pony spell on this little fellow!” With a little rustle, she raised her wing, letting an object she had been holding against her body fall into the golden glow of her magic. She bought the cage close to Luna’s face, revealing a fat, sleepy-looking fruit bat surrounded by a pile of dried-up apples.
Luna bristled. “Why have you caged one of my creatures?”
“For you to put the spell on him, of course, Luna! Have you not been following?”
Luna shut her eyes and heaved a sigh. She tried to inject some patience into her voice. “Celestia. Sister. I cannot make a bat-pony out of a bat. I can only make them out of ponies.”
Celestia gave a ringing laugh. “Luna, no! I want you to put the spell into him. So he can spread it.” Seeing Luna’s eyes narrow still further, she continued her explanation. “But only to one pony! And only temporarily. I am trying to teach Twilight and her friends another lesson. I have two thousand fruit bats waiting in the East Tower for you to talk to and send to Sweet Apple Acres. But I want you to put your spell into this one, so that he can infect one of the fillies. It doesn’t really matter which one, but I think—”
Luna raised a hoof to stop her sister. She sank onto her haunches and used the same forehoof to massage her temples. “Sister. I am glad to be home, but your…capability for extremely convoluted plans have hardly lessened in the time I was away. I don’t care about the details. I am sure the…whatever it is you are doing…will have the desired effect. I just want to go to bed.” She lowered her hoof and looked firmly into her sister’s eyes. “And the promise that if I do as you ask, you will not imprison any more of my night creatures in the castle. Or anywhere.”
“Of course I promise!” Celestia sing-songed, and Luna ground her teeth together a little before remembering she was supposed to be working on having more positive feelings. She thought for a moment before settling on something. No one is as…optimistic as Celestia. That is a good trait to have. And I suppose she is trying to put together a holiday for us.
“All right,” she said aloud, and paused for a moment to dredge up the details of the magic for making bat-ponies. It was more of a feeling than anything else, so far as she recalled. Wanting to give the pony in question a little more of herself than the average pony carried within them. She remembered the beam on Nightshade’s face when she had offered her the gift of the night. She had been so happy. Luna had been so happy. Nightshade had been almost like a little sister to her. Not a sister in the sense that Celestia was, of course. Not an eternal companion and partner. But a sister in the pony sense. A family member.
Luna held onto those feelings and the image of Nightshade’s plum-coloured face smiling up at her, and tried to push that essence into her horn. She added the desire for brief duration, and sent the spell forward in a little stream of blue to the bat. He burped lazily and opened his mouth for the magic, which went in. His eyes flashed the blue of Luna’s magic for a moment before they returned to normal.
“Thank you!” Celestia cried, opening her wings to hug Luna.
Luna was about to shy away, but stopped herself. No. They needed to recover their closeness. That was what had got them into this whole mess. She mustn’t push Celestia away any more.
She accepted the embrace with good grace and even leaned her head a little against Celestia’s neck, but moved away before it could continue for too long. She turned to retreat once more into her sleeping chamber, and stopped to look back over her shoulder at her sister, who was now cheerfully examining the bat in his cage.
“And release those bats in the East Tower,” Luna reminded her.
Celestia blinked and looked over at her. “Oh, dear, no, Luna — thats for you to do. The guards had enough of a job catching two thousand fruit bats for me. They can’t be expected to ship them to Ponyville too! Everyone would see them and know I was involved.”
Luna rolled her eyes and clopped her slow, tired way into her bedchamber.
“I’ll have Raven Inkwell remind you to do it at dusk!” Celestia carolled as she trotted out into the corridor, ready for another day.
Author's Note
Anyone who has read Auntie Tia's Matchmaking Service will know I love master puppeteer Celestia, benevolently pulling all the strings from the background a la Bonnie from adventure time. This is just a little more of that.
I wanted to follow up the first chapter with something that shows their relationship getting back to normal a little bit.
If you're interested in seeing more on my headcanons of Luna, Starswirl and their daughter Clover the Clever (all created before the show revealed the truth and trashed all my lovely ideas), follow the links below.
Lunaswirl goodness
