What is Love?

While her friends watched in awe, distracted by the magical display they had just seen, my ever faithful student Twilight Sparkle immediately began rushing to my side, concern painted on her face.

Although I had recovered the instant Shining Armor and Cadance’s spell had washed over... or rather, through me, I still lay motionless on the ground, my mind reeling.

I had failed them.

Failed my little ponies time and time again.

What kind of guardian was I? I had been forced to rely on my pupil, so young and innocent, to do what I should have.

First to restore my maddened sister to me.

My beloved sister Luna, always so emotional, so desiring of acceptance, had not received the love she so craved from our ponies, nor their scorn, but a casual apathy that over the years cut her far more deeply and more cruelly than even the most vitriolic hate would have.

She tried her best. Oh, how she tried. She began to act more like me at first, in a way. Put on an affectation of my own stoic demeanor, abandoning the shy grace and kindness that I so loved about her. She became more and more a warped reflection of myself in her endeavors to earn our subjects love and admiration, all while her sorrows and pains built up inside her and fed on themselves, growing and twisting into something more horrible than I had ever suspected in my own pathetic self-involvement.

I was too busy, you see. Too busy to give the most precious thing in my life my time, understanding, affection. With what? Absurdly petty affairs of state, utterly meaningless mere decades after their undertaking. But the pain of my ignorance will last forever.

Because while Luna had failed to gain their love, she found instead she could command their fear, and thus Nightmare Moon was birthed from the shattered remains of my dear sister’s soul.

Even while I had sole dominion of the Elements of Harmony, there was nothing I could do. The best I could manage was her banishment to the moon. Really, just putting off the problem another thousand years. The Elements stopped listening to me shortly after.

How ironic. If I thought I had been busy before, then what was I after?

I was so disgusted. So disgusted by myself, by Luna, by even our subjects. I cloistered myself away for nearly a decade, mourning. I gave them the excuse that I had to recover my powers, depleted from the struggle.

Many ponies now think of Nightmare Moon’s revolt as a civil war, a horrible fracturing of the nation of Equestria. They couldn’t be more wrong. Nopony, not even her own guard, had joined Luna in her rebellion. Not a single one. Can you imagine? Nightmare Moon had appeared alone in my throne room, to challenge her sister, and indeed, the entire nation, all by herself.

If anything, that hurts me more than if some had betrayed me to join her. I think, though we are loathe to talk about it, she knew she would not, could not win.

But desperation had consumed her.

I lay lost in my thoughts and memories of days long gone, and probably could have for a very long time, if Twilight hadn't reached me by then, crying out to me, wanting to see if I was alright.

So of course with millennia of practice, I stood up and I lied to her.

“Don’t worry about me, I’m fine. You have a real wedding to put together.”

She smiled, relieved.

I wandered off to my chambers to brood more.

Innocent, loving Twilight, who looked up to me so. She and her friends were the very embodiment of what Equestria stood for, of the primordial forces which had formed this plane. They had managed what I could not. They had cleansed the darkness from my sister’s heart, washed it away in a torrent of all those things that I was supposed to stand for to my subjects. Honesty. Kindness. Loyalty. Laughter. Generosity. Friendship.

But at the time I had no such thoughts, because I had room for nothing but relief. I was relieved. So very, very relieved. I feared Luna would be banished again, or turned to stone. Such a thing would have been disastrous, maybe as bad as Nightmare Moon plunging us into eternal darkness, for I didn’t know how much longer I could go on being Equestria’s sole monarch. The exhaustion of caring for both Sun and Moon bore down on me like a mountain on my shoulders, but more than that, I missed my sister. We were meant to rule together. Without her, I felt so alone. I don’t think you could possibly understand what it was like.

But I’m sure Luna can.

...

But enough of that. We were discussing Twilight, were we not? The filly I had inflicted Discord upon, my most ancient and dire foe.

It had taken Luna and I together to even attempt to hold the tide of chaos he brought when he first appeared. It wasn’t until we discovered the Elements of Harmony, the very essence and spirit of our plane, that we had any hope of winning the war against him -- at best, we fought delaying tactics. Before the Elements, we had only been postponing our eventual defeat as he slowly brought more and more of our land into his domain. Even with the Elements, we had only managed to seal him at great personal cost.

When he broke free of his bonds last year, he was weakened from his imprisonment, but I was weakened more. The strain of both the sun and moon was barely perceptible at first, but after a thousand years, even the lightest of weights becomes a titanic burden. Luna was nowhere near restored to her full powers yet and I knew I could not even hold him back.

So I called once again on Twilight and her friends. I had to. I hoped that they would somehow be able to seal him away again, that they would not see the extent of Discord’s insanity. For you see, good and evil mean not a thing to him. Both are merely side effects of the chaos that make up his very being. There’s nothing wrong with some of his harmless pranks or bizarre creations, but it is completely beyond his comprehension where the line between innocent fun and destroying lives lies. I don’t even know if he knows that there is such a line. Does he understand what it means to tear apart a group of friends? To make the kindest of ponies act cruelly, to take the joy of living away from the pony whose very life’s pursuit is the happiness of others? I do not know. I have tried to understand him, to reason with him, but I can not.

Thankfully, while he turned Equestria upside down, in some cases literally, far less went wrong than could have. The greatest casualties were once again Twilight and her friends. And all the while I couldn’t do anything.

And there I was only months later, after foolishly disregarding the feelings of my most loyal and faithful student, who had sacrificed so much for Equestria, and for me personally, laid low by the very danger Twilight had tried to warn me of, by such a pathetic creature as a parasite who fed on love. I should have been able to capture her easily, if not crush and grind her beneath my hooves for trying to hurt my little ponies! And I couldn’t! I was completely ineffectual. Even the vile changeling Queen, Chrysalis, was surprised to have defeated me.

And to think, the nobles still list Sol Invicta amongst my titles.

But you see, upon my defeat, I realized something. Something important.

I thought I knew about love. In a way, I do. My love for my ponies, my love for my sister, and my love for my student -- these things dominate me. I am nothing without my love for them.

But the magic that Chrysalis used against me, the same magic I felt wash through me when Cadance and Shining Armor expelled the changelings from Canterlot...

That was absolutely, and completely foreign to me.

It was at that moment, lying on the cold marble floor of my own throne room that I realized I did not know what love was.