I stood before the tall castle walls under the night sky, my armor gleaming dully in the starshine. I had been called to aid my one true Lady, but the forces that surrounded the walls were those of My Lady’s sister, and they were not likely to welcome me with joy.
I waited for the right moment in the guard’s rotations, then spread my batlike wings and flew a winding path through the magic wards, feeling my way gently until I had gained to the crenellated top. I heard a cry from the throne room, deep in the castle. I had to hurry...
“Halt there, Sir Fleetshade. No Thestrals may enter the palace at this time, at Her Highness’s orders.” Before me stood a pegasus, Captain Thrush of the Solar Guard, with two earth soldiers, fully armed and armored.
I stood firm, but let my appeal show in my eyes. “I have my duty to My Lady Moon, Captain Thrush, just as you do to your Lady Sun. I cannot stand idly by when she is in need. Do but imagine yourself in my place.”
His eyes flickered with the tiniest hint of empathy. “I have so imagined it, Sir Fleetshade, which is why I must now regretfully place you under arrest. Remain still and make no sudden moves, and cease all magic effects on your person.”
“Gladly.” I let all my spells down, which had the effect of removing the restriction on the necklace I wore below my peytral. A sphere of darkness took form, blinding my foes but leaving me my night vision. I flitted past the two earths as they dashed about, but the Captain was more canny and moved to intercept my likely path. I was forced to give him a disabling blow which I hope did not kill him outright.
I moved quickly, knowing the alert was now out and a sphere of shadow would be simple to track. Keeping to the dark corners as best I could, I made my way to a great interior window, a marvel of stained glass depicting the world at peace under the loving watch of the two sisters, and just then I heard my Lady shriek in anger. Hoofsteps were behind me as the guards followed my trail, I braced myself and leaped with all my strength.
The priceless window shattered into glittering shards as I entered the throne room. My shadow sphere was instantly overwhelmed, for I was now in the presence of the Sun personified, but all my attention was on My Lady Moon. They stood upon the dais of the Royal thrones and the air was full of the crackling hum of potent magical potential, and My Lady had been weeping, for I saw the tear trails on her cheeks. I thrust with my wings to place myself at her side, but dazzling bands of fire flew out and surrounded me.
“Halt, Thestral,” commanded the Lady Sun, “you may come no further, it is not meet for you to thus intrude upon your betters. Remand yourself at once to the guards outside this room, for none of this is a concern for one of your station.”
“Fleetshade!” cried My Lady Moon. “You can do nothing for me now, save yourself and fight for me another day!”
I hovered within the swooping bands of fire, unable to move an inch towards the intolerable heat they contained. But how my heart burned within me! I felt the core of me, my devotion and my duty, growing stronger, more solid than stone.
“Lady Sun,” I shouted, “I mean no disrespect to you, but my duty cannot be silenced. I am needed… here!”
With that, I felt something snap in the air around me, and the fiery bands flickered and broke apart, sending sparks about the room to lodge and smolder in the costly curtains and carpets. The dissolution of the spell rebounded on its caster and the Lady Sun recoiled, falling to the floor in astonishment and rage. “It is not possible!” she exclaimed. “None can sunder the Solar Bands!”
“But none have the faith of my Fleetshade!” cried My Lady Moon in triumph, as I sped to her side. She turned a grateful eye to me as I landed, and my heart swelled with my earnest loyalty as I strode forth to protect her with all my life and my strength.
In that moment, the Lady Sun strode towards us, terrible in her wrath, and she opened her mouth to speak a strident command...but instead of words, gray dust flowed out, forming a pile on the floor. She blinked in confusion, then horror, as the rest of her face fell off, and then her body, all slumping down into a lifeless pile of gray ash.
Thus also fell the the golden thrones and the castle walls, and My Lady Moon wailed in terror as she too came apart and collapsed into the dust, and I myself, stunned with horror, followed her—
The battle raged around me; my fellow Thestrals, gray and clad in their blue night armor, clashing against the golden shields of the Solar Guard. Shouts of rage, roars of triumph, the curses of the wounded and shrieks of the dying, all filled the air as I pressed on. I called out, hoarse from endless shouting, to the soldiers behind me. “Forward! We must open the gate!”
It was one of those things obvious in retrospect, but so hard to account for in the chaos of battle. The gate had not yet fallen open, hence the team sent to blow it apart had not succeeded or had been slain. Our forces were divided by the castle wall and could not rejoin; the gate had to be opened now!
My soldiers gathered behind me, bloodied and weary, as I fended off a blow from a guardspony and staved his side in with a roundhouse kick. I pointed the way and we few soldiers made our way through the howling chaos. Some of us fell, screaming and twisting in agony, a spear grazed my cheek, our hooves clanked on the armor of the slain.
We reached the cover of a buttress; we could fly now without exposure to the arrows. There were so few of us remaining, but we took to the air and headed for the window of the gatehouse. I was readying my weapon to smash the bars away when something struck me on the side.
I tumbled, got the wind under my wings again, and turned; it was Captain Thrush. My ribs ached; he had probably broken a few of them even through my armor. All the weariness of the day fell in upon me in one dire moment, and I could barely keep myself aloft.
As I struggled to face him, I felt a presence around me, over me. She was soaring through the sky, giving succor where she could, and I was reminded that she was with us all the way through. I forgot my pain and thrust out with renewed strength, and I heard a satisfying crack as something snapped in Thrush’s left wing and he fell with a cry of despair.
Our way was clear now. We took a sturdy beam from one of the battlements and passed it through the window bars, and heaved, the metal bent under our collected force, and as the bars burst from the window of the gatehouse the stone walls around us started to shed an ashen waterfall of gritty sand that fell straight to the ground, and then there was a great hissing noise as everything slumped into piles.
I cast my eyes to the sky in despair but I could not see her anymore, only the sand falling into my eyes as I came to pieces—
She was pensive, looking out the tower window, and I made a slight noise as I entered the doorway to warn her of my approach.
“Your Highness, we’ve cleared the secret passage. We’re ready to begin the next phase of the plan…”
She didn’t move. She must have heard me, but her gaze remained fixed on the bright blue sky and the green-brown fields outside and the distant castle. I saw her lift her silver-clad hoof and paw at the air several times, then she let it fall to the windowsill.
I tried again. “Your Highness? We shall need to be swift. Our forces are waiting—”
She did not move, but she spoke at last. “Fleetshade… Have we not been here before?”
I stood at attention. “I have always been here for you, My Lady. My life is sworn to your service.”
“I mean…” Again she thrust her hoof at the intrenchant air. “We have done this before; you and I. I’ve been at this window in the past, and you come to me, and we creep through the tunnel to go and rally the resistance forces, and… after that, I do not know. It does not come to anything, and I do not remember why.”
I shake my head. “My Lady, I am quite assured of our success, but only if we leave soon.”
“No,” she said, turning to me with bright turquoise eyes that froze me to the spot. “You’re just answering by rote. Please think. Do you not recall that time, when the solar bands surrounded you in the throne room and you broke free, due to your faith in me? Or when you assaulted the wheelhouse to raise the gate? You remember none of this?”
“My lady, they sound like interesting tales indeed, but…” I stop and stare into the distance, myself. “I… I do remember something. It’s familiar, like a story I read in childhood and never again since.”
“Right,” she exclaimed, her eyes flaring with hope. “These things have happened to us, but now it’s as if they never were. It’s as if we’re in a storybook with the chapters mixed, or the last pages ripped out. And if we could just stop reading the book and slam the whole thing shut in time, mayhap we could figure out what’s really going on.”
I felt as if the whole world was dropping out from under me, and even this sensation was too awfully familiar. I shuddered.
“My Lady, whatever the true case may be, I am now and always at your service, your loyal Fleetshade. What would you have me do?”
“I don’t know, at present,” she said, “But if you can hold on to what you know now, we have a chance. Something happens, and we keep forgetting. Try to hold onto some memory, so we have more time to think about it next time around. Please?” Her strong eyes shimmered, I had never before seen her showing abject fear and it almost stilled my heart. “Please try to hold on to this moment…”
A single tear rolled from her right eye, and turned to gritty sand on its way down her cheek. I saw the terror deepen in her face as it was reflected in my own, and without thought I moved forward to take hold of her, lese majeste be damned, and as I embraced her shivering and sobbing form she slumped forward into cold lifeless dust, and the walls came down around me, and the blue sky faded overhead as everything sank down and I saw a glimpse of what lay beyond, gray jagged mountains and the sky and stars overhead, the sky impossibly black and the stars impossibly bright, and the dust choked my throat as I fell as well.
If this was what lay outside the supposed book, I wanted nothing to do with it. Still, I tried to hold on to what she said, even as I became nothing, less than nothing. I knew that somewhere, sometime, we would meet again, that it all meant something more than this.
I held to my faith like a stone as I saw a red glow form over the jagged mountains—
“...and guided by etheric strings,
we take our paces, flitting things
who strut our time upon the stage,
but having turned the final page,
we very sadly have to go.
We trust you have enjoyed our show!”
With these words, the troupe of tiny pony figures, no more than a few inches high, bowed to the assembled crowd, and then they, their arms and armor, their hats and gowns, and the little castles and walls of their small stage, all shimmered and lost their varied colors, reverting to yellow sand which collapsed into piles upon the twilit beach. The crowd of watching ponies applauded and cheered at Luna, who lingered impassively for a few moments, then let a genuine smile crack her regal composure.
“Well done, my sister,” whispered Celestia, seated in the grandstand that had been constructed for the nobles at the Solstice Celebration.
As the crowd dispersed over the beach to seek other amusements, Twilight approached Luna. “What a beautiful story! Full of pageantry, romance, and a happy ending. And that’s a fascinating extension of the animus spell, Luna. I wouldn’t have thought it possible to maintain so many separate instances and keep them all moving so smoothly together.”
Luna gave a gracious nod. “Thank you, Twilight. I had many, many years to practice it.”
“You mean–?” Twilight’s eyes flicked towards the horizon, where a sliver of the unrisen Moon was visible.
“Yes. It was one of the pastimes I developed during my centuries in Abeyance. It was somewhat easier upon the Moon, for the sands there are rougher and cohere more readily.”
Twilight nodded. “Still, that’s an astonishing degree of control, beyond the limits of what I thought was possible.”
“If I did it often in one spot, it became easier there,” said Luna. “I think the thaumic fields there became imprinted with the patterns I used, and resumed them more readily. More than once I came back to the staging area to find some of the cast of puppets already assembled, as if they had made themselves ready to begin without me.” Luna gazed out over the sea shore, which was graying as the night encroached. “I used to tell myself… just silly little stories, really, about people I knew or what might have been. I would replay them over and over. It would help me to get to sleep at times.”
“That’s very interesting! And actually, it’s a little bit creepy. Do you think it’s… still going on up there?”
Luna blinked. “Without my presence, it is not at all likely that there is enough mana to cause spontaneous occurrences, don’t you think? The sand falls apart rapidly without attention.”
Twilight started to enter lecture mode. “I hope you’ll excuse me, but I’ve been doing some reading lately on animus spells. One paper found that repeated instances of the animus spell became stronger over time, often with additional and unintended side effects. They could develop imprinted, long term attributes… Luna, I am actually concerned.”
Luna fell silent as the celebrants chatted in little groups, and the gray waves continued to roll gently to the shore, spreading sand below the foam.
Twilight, who had a history of friendship problems caused by her inability to read people’s emotions, persisted. “Your spells have astonishing power,” she said, “and you have imbued these sands here with the very image of life itself. Do you not think that, over the long centuries, you may have given the sands on the Moon a touch of the spark as well, a hint of sapience, of self awareness? And with the charge of mana from the sunlight, could they be… well, thinking even now, without you there? Even as they repeat those patterns over and over, for years and years, centuries and centuries?”
Luna stayed still, staring at the waves and the little patch of lumpy sand that had been her theater. Suddenly she stood, and the wind rose around her and light flared in her eyes, and the hair of the partygoers stood on end. She reared to her hind legs and the wind blew harder, toppling drinks and shredding banners and decorations, and she growled and a bright beam of force shot from her horn to the rim of the Moon on the distant horizon. She tossed her head and the Moon rose swiftly, but covered with a horrible crimson haze. Ponies in the crowd cried out and began to back away.
Luna spread and flapped her wings, bracing with all her strength, and pulled hard. The moon rose faster and the waves rolled in harder and higher with the rising tide, surging over the spot of beach where the puppets had stood, soaking the shrieking guests and rolling up to the grandstand to splash over Twilight Sparkle and the other attendees.
“Sister! I pray thee, STOP! Command thyself!” cried Celestia in deep alarm.
But Luna had already slowed the Moon to its normal pace. The red haze started to fade from the moon. but most of the crowd had already vanished over the hills, the pretty puppet show entirely forgotten, as the waves flowed over and smoothed the sands where the little pageant had taken place.
“There,” said Luna harshly. “If there were any ‘residual and repeating patterns’ upon the lunar surface, that surge will have wiped them away.”
“Wiped them away?” said Twilight, her voice quaking. “But... No, I didn’t mean—If they were even partly sapient, that’s—”
Luna looked down at Twilight with a curious little smile that didn’t match her eyes, and Twilight’s next words froze in her throat.
“When you yourself have lived a few centuries, Twilight Sparkle, you will unfortunately end up doing many things that create unforeseen dilemmas such as this. It is usually best in the long run to put such things right immediately when they are called to your attention.
“Whatever memories may have been up there do belong there, don’t you think?
“Let us leave them to the dust.”
