For the last half an hour I had been arguing in the comment section of the topic about Luna in my favourite pony-group. My opponent was an especially stubborn fellow, who considered himself the most "true" fan of Luna, despite the fact that he had started to watch ponies, as he admitted, only from the seventh season. He also despised such additional materials as comics, for example, regarding them as "non-canon". I was going to duly explain to this scholar, using several expressions, which were popular among the people, what his opinion really meant for princess Luna and where she would advice him to stuck it into. But...
Having fixed my eyes on the phone, I was not able to react on the change in the situation. The screech of the brakes and an enormous power of the blow to the hull brought me back to reality. The last thing I saw was a heavy motorcycle, which was flying across the entire crossroad towards me, somersaulting, as if it was some toy, straight into the windshield of my father's Zhiguli the Seven, which I was driving.
***
On a fine summer day princess Luna was walking in the forest, sometimes lingering in sunlit spots among trees, the other times waltzing into cool shades. Breathing in aromas of the forest and listening to the birds talking, the alicorn was humming some tune under her breath serenely. The humongous basket beside Luna was levitated by her.
"Oh, what a lovely clearing..." - the princess admired it in a quiet voice and began to unload the basket, when suddenly she felt a particular fluctuation of the magic flow, which was attuned to her essence specifically.
"Is that another "loony"?" - Luna stopped her movement halfway musingly. And the big carpet, which was partly pulled out of the basket, returned into it.
"Very well, let Us see, who was brought to Us"
Having picked up the basket again, Luna moved her wings in front of her, as if she was drawing back the curtains with this gesture, and disappeared in the shadows.
***
I was not feeling my body, I could not move, could not even breathe. However, I was not suffocating. Perhaps, I was lying in the hospital, under anaesthetic, with my head wrapped and the artificial respiration unit working.
In front of me a soft glowing appeared, which was sparkling with blue and green tints not far away. Among those sheens I discerned features of a very familiar... horse?..
"We welcome you, Our loyal subject" - she was approaching with an enchanting smile.
I stared at her dully, being unable to look away from her bewitching green eyes and starry flows of the glimmering mane. Well, hello, narcotic hallucinations in conjunction with too much interest in brony-culture. At least it was not the Emperor of Mankind, who came to see me, so I was okay with that.
"Princess Luna?"
I tried to ask and seemed to managed that much.
"Did you recognise Us?" - she smiled - "We are pleased with your attention"
"What am I, dead?"
Luna hesitated a bit and resettled the elegant glasses, which had appeared out of nowhere, on her muzzle.
"We would have preferred to do with more delicate answers, than those ones. But since you seem to like point blank questions, We will reply directly: yes, you have died. Completely, unconditionally and irrevocably"
Fu-uck, I had not sent my reply to that dolt in comments. And now he would think that I slipped away and he was right in everything. I hate the likes of him!
Meanwhile, the horse continued:
"But We can assure you, that you got to the place, you had sincerely dreamt to get to, and you are a few steps away from a better life"
And where had I dreamt to get to exactly?..
"We only want to make sure, that you are really worthy to live in peace, that you are ready to open your heart towards it. It is not difficult. Let us look at your life"
Having touched me with her shining horn, Luna drew out of me something, that looked like a huge pile of photographs, and placed them in the space around us with a professional gesture.
"Ghm-hm-hm" - rubbing her jaw with her leg perplexedly, the mare in glasses and a white lab coat was examining the way I lived, and she did not care a bit about confidentiality of information. Although, who was I trying to cheat?..
"There is an extremely large amount of dirt in your soul. And it would not have been so bad, if that dirt had not depended on your actions"
Having wrinkled her nose with disgust, Luna gathered all images to form a large sphere and illuminated it from within with her magic. And then it became clear to me, that many of my thoughts and actions were really covered in dirt. Luna's light was not even able to break through the layers of it in some places.
"Well, it is not me, it is life" - I came up with a typical excuse, yeah. However that excuse did not work on the princess, who was gazing upon me with an unconcealed denunciation.
"Do not speak nonsense" - Luna snapped out - "Every creature almost always has a choice, where to go in their life: along the better or the worse path, towards light or towards darkness, to progress or to degradation. However..."
Without looking, she pulled one episode of my life out of the sphere and opened it wider. It was like some creepy zooming to the littlest detail, to the last sneeze. There was a quarrel with my father and the subsequent stealing of his car.
"Let Us suppose, that it is not always possible to predict and realise the consequences of one's actions, particularly when emotions are involved. But you had always chosen to step into dirt knowingly, especially when you had a chance to hurt others. Insults, humiliations, derisions, you were setting up your friends and family, people, who depended on you. You liked that"
I wanted to object, but the power of someone else's will was holding me like inside an ice block, preventing me from moving.
"It can be assumed, that you were raised that way by the social environment, in which you had been growing up. But even in that environment..." - Luna pushed the sphere with her hoof, making it rotate slowly. - "You were noticing the examples of other people's kindness. You had thousands of chances to do good deeds, to bring a little more light into other people's lives and, as the result, into your own life as well"
Having looked at the scene of stealing again, Luna crumpled it with disgust and threw it into the sphere, the surface of which was marked by circular ripples as the result of that action.
"You have not been doing anything good, considering that to be a demonstration of weakness, cowardice, spinelessness. Our verdict is that your soul is not worthy of living in Equestria"
And who is she, that cattle, to decide what I am worthy of and what I am not worthy of?! I got mad, despite being still locked up by magic.
"Oh..." - having roused herself, Luna pulled a new pack of images straight out of my head most likely, using telekinesis. She leafed through it. - "Well, it was just one rejection, and there We have, uh, an entire tome of emotions. At first you would have chained Us, then you would have beaten Our muzzle and would have torn Our wings off... the rest of action, you had come up with, We have no desire neither to watch nor to comment on. According to "this", you do not regard Us as a living and feeling creature"
Luna thrust the pack into the sphere to all the other scenes with a sad sigh.
...We-e-e-ell, my dark imagination betrayed me at the most appropriate time. Goodbye, rabbits in hats, raids, casinos, Blackjack and whores.
"How could you even dream about Equestria, living with such baggage?" - Luna squeezed the sphere of my memories into the miniature bead with a gesture of her forelegs, and we were momentarily engulfed by the darkness, in which I could only catch sight of the light, coming from the princess.
"Am I forbidden to dream?" - I smirked as I felt, that the magic, which was holding me, had weakened.
"Dreams are always based on something, even if the dreamer do not realise that. Since you were brought to Us and not to the general sorting of souls, it means that you wanted to meet Us very much. But to tell the truth, We are extremely disappointed with this meeting personally"
I was silent, dispirited. Everything turned out to be quite different from my dreams, went down the pan, to be more exact.
"Do you want to say something to Us?" - Luna asked in an official dutiful tone. I did not want to be just left here, hanging in uncertainty.
"Princess Luna, do I have a chance to make anything right?" - finally I plucked up the courage.
"As We have already noted, you cannot go back to your own world. Allowing you to enter Our world We consider an action, concerned with risk of a great danger and thus unacceptable. You know about Equestria, do you not? Where did you learn about it?"
I, fluffing and floundering around, was telling her, how I had stumbled upon some stories about "Fallout" in the Internet many years ago, and there were colourful horses in those somehow. I told her, how I had come to enjoy reading them, and had tried to watch the original cartoon, having dropped it after a few episodes, because it was too rosy, sugary and foolish for me. I told her, how I had learned about meetings of the bronies and had even attended some of them, and I blabbed out a lot of other rubbish.
While I was narrating all of that, the alicorn was sitting... or hanging... in the space in front of me, her nearly closed eyes were shining dimly and her head was resting on her half-bent leg. Well, probably, she could have simply hit my head with magic and squeeze all the information out of it. But somehow she preferred to listen, until I fell silent, having noticed, that I had started to repeat myself. Luna's deep sigh sounded like an avalanche.
"Equestria is a beautiful country. But did anyone reflect on the efforts we make to preserve the peace and welfare of our land?"
I kept quiet. I doubted, that Luna needed an answer from my good-for-nothing little soul.
"Since humans had learned about ponies, the amount of those, who aspired to get here, to us, grew considerably. But we do not let everyone in. We had established a division of "Soul Wardens". They examine everyone thoroughly"
Having conjured an enormous tome from the void, Luna leafed through it, put the bean with episodes of my life between the pages and scribed something with a pen. I caught the word, which sounded like a "butterfly", being muttered in an undertone, then the tome was closed and it disappeared.
"It happens, that we give those, who come to us, an opportunity to fully realise and fix those mistakes, which they could not or would not have the time to understand in the previous life. People in your ropey world can die suddenly. Here you are in the morning, and in the evening you are not here. Only a lot of unsaid and undone things had been left"
Her words made me sad. Meanwhile Luna created a ghostly image of a little pony.
"Diamond Tiara is one of those souls, who were reborn experimentally. Wardens allowed her to be born in Equestria as an Earth pony and watched her. Echoes of her past life as a human were apparent, and Tiara the pony had been blowing hot and cold for quite a long time. Nevertheless she managed to understand herself and chose the path, which would let her soul grow considerably afterwards"
The little pony disappeared, a white fluffy cat with a haughty expression on her muzzle appeared in her place.
"It is much easier with some people. One old woman, whose soul somehow came in Wardens' sight, loved cats. Her memory had been cleaned a little, so she would not grieve about the past life, then they turned her into a cat and gave her to Rarity. And that was all, she lives happily as a cat now"
The ghostly cat disappeared, and I felt the icy magic grasping me again from all sides. As if I was able to hurt Luna in my current condition. Although, yes, she could hardly like imaginary pictures of her wings torn off and her legs broken. Luna looked at me, through me and at something, being infinitely far away, intently.
"We cannot allow you to appear in the world of ponies "as you are". You will make horns-up of everything, and the whole world will deal with the aftermath. There is the one safe rout for you - to start living from the lowest levels. There is a strong possibility, that a long sequence of rebirthing will help to clean your soul enough for you to earn the right to be born as a pony. And you will start as a moth. Good luck, you will need it during the next five hundred lives"
Luna's insidious smile gleamed like a crescent, her horn lit up for a moment, and I was turned into a helpless, brainless, careless moth... although, I was not able to realise even that much anymore.
***
Having left the shadows, Luna sat down on the grass wearily.
"There is no limit to what people I happen to meet" - the alicorn sighed disappointedly and drove a pink butterfly, which was fluttering in front of her nose, away with a flap of her wing.
"I will need to drink "Forget-All-In" again. I had come here to fina-filly have a rest, not to get nervous. I do not want to sit in a gloomy mood, chewing grassburger to the accompaniment of thunderclaps from a dark cloud"
Having rummaged in the shadow of her basket, Luna took a simple flask out of her stash and hesitated doubtfully, while examining the content with an evident disgust. But, having grimaced, she drank it nevertheless.
"D-d-darn!" - she moaned, having hardly kept in her stomach what she had drunk, and tossed the empty phial into the shadow angrily. - "Could they not make that concoction a bit tastier?! But..." - Luna added much calmer - "I will forget about that anyway. So, where am I?"
The alicorn shook her head and looked around. And she remembered that, by the way, she came here to relax.
"Oh, what a lovely clearing..." - the princess admired it in a quiet voice and began to unload the basket.
