With a Terrible Brightness

by Winston

Rating: teen
Tags: Tragedy, Princess Celestia, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Death, Sad, Drama
Length: 3915

The brightest days are for when we must do the most terrible things.

The time comes for all students to step out from under the shadow of their teacher and choose their own path.

On that path, knowledge is power, but if it all goes wrong... if that power is put into the wrong hooves... how far might somepony who is trying to reconcile the position of teacher with the duties of ruler be forced to go to fix these mistakes? What level of personal involvement in being responsible does she owe herself and her people?

...And how much is it going to hurt?

Gold medal winner in the The Brightest Days writeoff event. Thanks to the participants there for their feedback, as always!

Published 2023-05-12 15:10:01 UTC
Last updated 2023-05-12 15:10:01 UTC

Blinding and Illuminating

With a Terrible Brightness

“No. No clouds. That day must be full sun,” Celestia said, walking down a hallway in a quiet part of the palace. She let her head turn lazily this way and that, sweeping her pondering gaze over the various artifacts lining the walls in display cases and niches.

“That day? Isn’t that when the—”

“Yes, Raven,” Celestia said hastily, cutting off her attendant. “Yes, it is.”

The poor unicorn followed close behind the princess, trying to split herself between tasks. She was variously juggling a notepad, pen, and sheaf of papers in her magical field, paying attention to the notes she was scribbling down, and trying to keep pace at just the right distance from Celestia to hear everything the Princess was saying but also not bump into her rear whenever she paused for a moment to study a jeweled relic or piece of armor among the detritus of past ages on display.

“Sunny... day...” Raven mumbled to herself, scrawling down the note.

“Full sun,” Celestia corrected her. “Not just ‘sunny,’ full sun. Clear skies. Not a cloud.”

“Clear… sky… no clouds,” Raven corrected herself, scratching and scribbling furiously for a second or two. She lowered her pen and looked up curiously. “Umm… but why?”

Celestia just turned to glare back over her withers and gave her attendant a look.

It wasn’t an angry look—if anything, something more like tired—but nonetheless it was one that said questions about the purpose of her directions would not be indulged right now.

Not about this.

Not today.

☙ ✵ ❧

“I really did want to be friends, you know,” the powder-blue unicorn said from the other side of the heavy steel bars.

To call it a ‘dungeon’ might have been overstating things. The name stuck around mostly out of tradition. The inside of the cell was hardly designed to torture. The bed was a thick twin mattress, not a hard cold slab. The toilet was in an enclosed little alcove, not a bucket in the open, and had a curtain for at least some minor privacy. There was a cushioned chair, a dresser, and a desk for reading and writing and using as a dining table. There was even a window with a nice view, overlooking some of Canterlot’s skyline with its ornate gleaming white and gold towers and their colorful pendants waving with slow drifts in the wind.

Put down some carpet and it almost could have been a hotel room.

Still, Celestia knew that in the end, the niceties would be of little comfort and less meaning.

“You just wanted to be queen even more,” she said sadly, staring into the cell.

“Of course I did,” the mare responded in a low voice that almost sounded regretful, somewhere unreadable on the line between feigned and sincere; the voice of an aristocrat practiced at speaking with intonations that always felt reassuring and believable no matter what was being said. “But why is it so wrong to just want what everypony wants? Who doesn’t want to be queen? And who doesn’t deserve it sometimes, even?”

Celestia hated to hear it. All it did was remind her that she was well-versed in the same trick herself.

“Oh, Dawn Star. Why could you not be content?” she lamented. “You were made a Lady. You were wealthy. You were a central fixture here in Canterlot. What more could you have wanted?”

Dawn Star shrugged. “Why could Luna not be content, a thousand years ago?”

The barb in her question stung like a slap across the face. Celestia wanted to fly into a rage, to scream, to use her magic to grab the Lady Dawn Star by the throat and lift her into the air and thrash her against the bars while ordering her to never again speak of a time she hadn’t seen, a thousand years before her own, when the world was nothing like it is today.

“That was different. It wasn’t Luna that I fought and banished,” Celestia said calmly. “She was overcome with the madness of Nightmare Moon.”

“Oh. Was it the Nightmare?” Dawn asked, with the hint of a too-clever smile forming on her lips. “Well, then maybe I was also overcome with madness. You could blast me with magical rainbows or something and ‘change my ways.’ Not that I don’t appreciate the posh accommodations—” she looked around the cell “—but I have places to go and things to do, if it’s all the same, so, if that’s the dance we shall dance, then I’m not too proud to say to the crowds that I realize now I was wrong, and I’ve seen the light and found a better way, and so forth. So if we could get a move on reforming me, that would be choice.”

It was tempting.

So tempting to cave to the pretense, the painless way out.

“I wish it was that easy,” Celestia said. “I really wish I could accept that excuse.”

“Then accept it,” Dawn challenged her. “You’re the princess. What’s anypony else going to say about it? They do what you tell them to do. They think what you tell them to think. It’s so easy. Just do it.”

“And that,” Celestia said quietly, “is what you don’t understand.”

Dawn paced in her cell, her smirk fading. “Were you born into the nobility, Princess?” she asked.

Celestia stared at her, without expression. “No.”

Dawn Star stopped and stared back with a fuming intensity in her eyes. “Then maybe there’s some things you don’t understand, either.”

☙ ✵ ❧

“I’ll be honest, I had hoped you would convince me otherwise,” Celestia said, mumbling into the papers in front of her on a boardroom table.

“So did I.” A grey mare nodded from one side of the table, with a dark mane rolled up into a severe bun that had a pencil sticking out of it. “We’ve been able to find ways around this kind of thing for years. Decades. We were this close to having it pass out of living memory, even. But I don’t see what choice there is now.”

“Cut-and-dry coup attempt.” Another panel member nodded their agreement. “Made in full cognizance. I don’t see any extenuating circumstances here. She’s got no one and nothing to blame but herself, I’m afraid.”

“High treason, without mitigation,” the third panelist piped in. “And that can only mean—”

“Yes, I know,” Celestia shifted in irritation. “I know. Is this the last review, then? Nothing more to examine?”

“Not unless you can find something more,” the grey mare said. “We can’t.”

“No.” Celestia took a deep breath, and sighed. “No, inexplicably ‘finding things’ where my experts cannot isn’t my place.”

“We appreciate your trust,” the second panelist said, carefully. “And, uh, if I can say…” He cleared his throat, and looked back and forth at his compatriots. “We, uh. We trust you, too, your highness. If you know what I mean.”

“I’ll take that as merely a flattering declaration of confidence,” Celestia mumbled sourly, “and not as the offer I know it wasn’t.”

“Yes. Yes, of course that is exactly what I meant,” he said, quickly, flipping over one of the sheets of paper in front of him, brushing past like the words he’d just spoken before hadn’t existed.

Celestia thought for a moment, but found herself content to let this slide, so long as it was only a mere possibility, and one that she could afford not to look and read too deeply into. But she suspected that in the near future, panelist #2 might be called mostly to duties other than final judicial review boards for extraordinary sentences requiring royal assent.

At least for a while.

The branch superior courts—the ones outside of Canterlot, she was thinking of specifically—could always use more help with good review oversight, after all.

Still, he had done his duty with complete diligence, as far as she could tell. They all had.

And that meant there was only one thing left to do, here.

Celestia slid the special piece of parchment over to herself, the one that had sat uncomfortably unmentioned and untouched in the center of the table for this whole meeting – the one nopony seemed to want to acknowledge, as if even so much as looking at it would poison the very air in the room.

She looked around the table. There was an inkpot in front of each of the panelists for their fountain pens.

But no quill.

She wanted to facehoof. Something as basic as a quill, for crying out loud, and somehow, somepony, whose job no doubt was specifically to prepare these rooms ahead of time for meetings like this one, had forgotten. She could borrow a pen, of course, but that wouldn’t be right. Not for this.

Never for this.

She could never stoop to the vulgarity of signing this kind of assent with a pen. Pens were crude, manufactured, lifeless things. Only a quill would do.

All the same, she didn’t want to call for a clerk to bring one. She knew what it would mean, and she couldn’t bear it: sitting there in the awkward, dead space, the uncomfortable silence stretching out the time rolling by while some gofer hunted down a quill, then ran it over to the conference room, and they all just sat here in embarrassed idle discomfort, because everypony knew exactly what hideous final formality they were waiting for and nopony wanted it but nopony could dare change it.

She couldn’t face that prospect. She just couldn’t. The mere thought of it made her feel like crying, and she’d spent enough time close to the edge of that precipice lately.

So instead, she spread her right wing and leaned her head down to brush her muzzle through her brilliant white swanlike feathers as if preening. She selected the right feather by the feel on her lips; the one with just the right stiffness, not too large but not too small, not too much downy fluff near its base. Gently but firmly, she grasped the feather’s shaft in her teeth, steeled herself, and plucked it out in one swift pull.

The sting burst over her mind, bright but brief, flaring and fading until a low, dull, itching ache lingered in the empty spot where the feather had been.

Taking hold of the feather in her magical field and floating it in front of her, she saw that it still had a trace of blood on its tip. A tiny matching dot of crimson, sharp with vivid color against the white of her plumage, bloomed on her wing – just a drop, too small for anypony else to notice, hidden under the purified white of the rest of her feathers. But she saw it, and she knew it was there. And she thought it was better that way.

She slid one of the inkpots over to herself and dipped the tip of the feather into it, dabbling and rolling it slightly to pick up the thick black ink. In a smooth motion, she pulled it out, lowered it to the parchment, and scrawled her signature on the blank line at the bottom with quick, well-practiced strokes.

At the very end, with the feather’s tip running out of ink and exposing the blood that lay beneath, the final mark was tinged with red.

Better that way.

Without further remark, she laid her quill down on the dread parchment, stood up, and walked out of the conference room.

☙ ✵ ❧

“Where did I go wrong, Daisy?” Celestia asked into her teacup, staring at the dregs. It was made from bagged tea, of course. All the rage these days for its convenience, but it left no bits of leaves at the bottom for divination.

Not that reading the tea leaves ever helped, anyway. But sometimes it was nice to pretend.

“I don’t know that you did,” a white and yellow splotched mare sitting across from her at a wrought iron and glass garden table replied. “Some ponies are just like that. Terrible business, this whole Dawn Star affair. I couldn’t believe it when I heard.”

“Couldn’t you?” Celestia mumbled.

“Oh, alright.” Daisy rolled her eyes, just briefly, subtly. “I see you’re in one of your ‘let’s be honest’ moods today.”

“Yes, let’s.” Celestia nodded, setting down her teacup and trading it for a strawberry jam tart.

“Very well,” Daisy said, her voice turning a little more curt. “If you want the honest questions, my first one is, would knowing why, and then blaming the ‘why’ on yourself, really change anything? I presume you’ve already gone through the whole bureaucratic theater production and made your… your decision. So, would it have been different?”

Celestia bit into her tart and pondered this.

“No,” she finally said, after swallowing.

“Then do you really need to ask?” Daisy continued.

“One can’t help but wonder these things about a former star student,” Celestia responded.

“You were her teacher,” Daisy said, leaning forward to give Celestia a cut-the-nonsense look from across the table. “Not her mother.”

“It still hurts.”

Daisy’s face softened. She reached across the table and gently laid her hoof on Celestia’s. “I know.”

They sat in a comfortable silence for a while, just holding hooves, under an overcast sky in the little hedge-boxed rose garden.

“Pony’s going to do what a pony’s going to do,” Daisy finally said. “That’s as honest an explanation as I can give you. Matter of the heart, in the end, and nopony can lie about that. Not forever.”

“Still, it wasn’t bound to end like this.”

“No, of course not,” Daisy agreed. “We had our problems, when I was your student. I know you remember. But I never tried to literally have you stabbed in the back.”

“And why not?” Celestia asked. “What makes us friends instead of enemies?”

“I had to choose which was more valuable to me, of course. We all choose what to keep in our heart, and what to let go.” Daisy sipped her tea and set the cup down on the glass tabletop with a delicate little ceramic clink. “Sometimes, I swear, you only come here to ask me questions you already know the answers to, don’t you, Tia?”

“Oh, but you’re just so good at it, Daisy.”

They both laughed, quietly, comfortably, an easy bright beautiful sound drifting through the white and red rose blossoms atop their thorny bushes.

“But some can lie about it for a while,” Celestia said, after the last of her giggles faded. “Long enough to make their play for what they want out of the lie, anyway.”

“I suppose that’s always true,” Daisy agreed. “But… what are you getting at?”

“Nothing.” Celestia shook her head. “Nothing, other than – well, it’s a strange thing.”

“What is?”

“Envy,” Celestia answered. “I just wish I had that privilege, sometimes, is all.”

“Pish posh.” Daisy waved a hoof. “No you don’t. Duplicity is the prerogative of a Lady or a Dame. Not a Princess. Never a Princess. You don’t really want to be one of us, now, do you?”

☙ ✵ ❧

The palace doors began to open and Celestia narrowed her eyes. In the widening gap, noon daylight from the sun in the perfectly clear sky she’d ordered for this day burst in, blinding and illuminating all at once. Once her sight adjusted, she strode forward, emerging into the courtyard. A somber crowd had gathered there. Guards lined a path from the open door to the stone steps rising up to a raised amphitheater, keeping the way clear as Celestia walked.

It was the same place from which, most years, she raised the sun at dawn on the Summer Sun Celebration.

Behind her, a cluster of guards surrounded Dawn Star, powder blue coat and deep cerulean mane vivid and neon now in the full sun. They led her forward at a sedate pace following the princess.

Celestia took her time, looking from side to side at the crowd. She’d hoped it would be smaller. Some of them almost certainly hadn’t been invited, but it was generally the policy to admit whoever came to witness a public act of the Princesses. Word must have gotten around about this one. Not terribly surprising, really.

At least they were being dignifi—

And then she heard it: distantly, faintly, laughter.

Laughter.

It nearly sent her into a rage, instantly making her feel like her blood would boil. Somepony out there in the crowd was telling jokes, treating this like a social event, like some kind of amusement.

But she had a tool for dispelling them of that misconception, and she wasted no time.

“THERE WILL BE SILENCE AND RESPECT MAINTAINED AT ALL TIMES.”

The echoes of her booming declaration in the Royal Canterlot Voice died down and left a chilling stillness in their wake. The ponies of the crowd ceased any milling about or idle chatting and stood still and sober, all eyes retrained with refocused earnestness now on Celestia as she proceeded down the path, trying to hold her head high.

She reached the steps, and took them one at a time, slowly, deliberately. The stone they were made of was warm under her hooves from the unshaded noon sun blazing down, filling the whole amphitheater with the brightest light of the day.

Just as she’d ordered.

The long shadow of her horn cut the sunlight, casting a dark line on the ground before her, sliding its way up one step, then another, until she reached the top.

She waited there, in the sunshine, until the guards behind her arrived with Dawn Star. They positioned her at the center of the space, kneeling before Celestia, in shackles magically enchanted to keep her hooves bound to the stone floor.

“THE UNICORN DAWN STAR STANDS CONVICTED OF HIGH TREASON AGAINST EQUESTRIA,” Celestia declared. “THE SENTENCE OF DEATH HAS BEEN IMPOSED, AS REQUIRED BY LAW, UPHELD THROUGH APPEAL AND REVIEW, AND GRANTED ROYAL ASSENT TO BE CARRIED OUT.”

There was silence; tense, tense silence. In that moment, it seemed like nopony in the crowd even breathed.

“THEREFORE, BY MY OWN HORN YOU SHALL DIE, DAWN STAR. SO BE IT KNOWN BY ALL GATHERED HERE TO WITNESS, THAT I ALONE TAKE THIS UPON MYSELF AND NO OTHER SHALL BE HELD TO ACCOUNT.”

Celestia breathed in and out, once, slowly. “I’m sorry it’s come to this,” she said, her voice suddenly quiet. “I truly am. Forgive me for what I must do.”

“Wait! Wait! Isn’t there another way?” Dawn asked, breathing out the panicked words in a terrified, shivering voice. “Can’t it just be a show, for the crowds, and you could just… send me to Tartarus, or something? Please, there has to be—”

“No.” Celestia shook her head. “No, it’s too late. I’m sorry. It may be a show for the crowd, yes, but it’s not a comedy. It’s a tragedy.”

“Incredible. You’re actually doing it,” Dawn Star said, steeling herself up to somewhere in a blurry mid-tone between half-hearted sneering and genuine admiration. “So you do have some bloodthirst after all. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there’s more of the nobility in you than I thought. Good for you!” she laughed to herself nervously, a thin, hollow sound of desperation.

Celestia just stared at her coldly. “Do you have any last words?” she asked.

“Just a question,” Dawn said. “Why do it yourself?”

“I am not nobility,” Celestia said, “but I am royalty. That’s what you never understood.”

She took a few steps back and began focusing all her magical might into her horn. It glowed, brighter and brighter, and as its light and power waxed, the sun itself seemed to momentarily dim.

With a terrible brightness, faster and hotter than a bolt of lightning, blinding and burning, a beam of pure fire and light intense beyond imagination or comprehension burst skyward, then faded, and where Dawn Star had been, there was nothing.

☙ ✵ ❧

When Celestia retreated to her private chambers, she rid herself of attendants and ministers by saying she wanted to be alone with her thoughts for a while.

What she really meant was that she would spend the next hour or so in her darkened room, crying her eyes out.

Finally, her sobs had subsided and her bloodshot eyes were… well. Not exactly ‘under control.’ That would take a while longer. But in time she was at least collected enough to answer the persistent periodic knocking at her chamber door. Opening up, she found Raven waiting patiently outside. That was about what she expected. The silver tray she carried wasn’t very surprising, either.

“Can I come in?” Raven asked quietly.

“Come in, yes, fine,” Celestia yielded, moving out of the way to let Raven through the door.

“I, ummm, I thought this might do you some good.” Raven held aloft the tray, and pulled back the lid. “Double chocolate. Extra big slice. I told the chef it was a cake emergency. I just had a feeling.”

“Thank you, Raven,” Celestia said, not particularly feeling it but humoring her anyway.

Celestia sat at a little table in her chambers, and picked at a bite of her cake. It did make her feel a little better. A little. Sort of. Almost.

No. Not really. Not at all.

Raven pulled up a chair and sat with her, quite uninvited, which Celestia knew she knew better than to do, but also that she usually knew just when to do the things she wasn’t supposed to.

“Are you okay, Princess?” Raven asked.

“No,” Celestia said, without hesitation. “No, I am not ‘okay.’ That milestone is a while off, I think.”

“Yeaaaaah, dumb question, I guess,” Raven mumbled sheepishly. “You want me to cancel what I can for the rest of the day and shuffle off what I can’t over to Luna?”

“Would you be a dear and do that?” Celestia nodded. “I think Luna will understand.”

“Pretty sure anypony would understand,” Raven said. “You’ve had a pretty rough day, haven’t you? Maybe next time let somepony else do that… kind of… thing…”

“No,” Celestia growled. “I could never put it on somepony else.”

“Why not? Of course you c—”

“Because I have to ask myself, Raven: what kind of coward would I be if I was willing to order it, but not do it? No. No hiding. No using the dark to cover up what would be wrong if it was examined in the light. Because these things will come into the light, someday, somehow.”

Raven nodded slowly, in thought.

“If this has to be done, then I choose to do it in full sunlight, so my subjects may see and know all that I do—even the worst of what I must do,” Celestia went on. “Especially the worst. The brightest days should be when we do the most terrible things.”

She scooped up a chunk of double chocolate cake with her fork, and held it in front of her, examining it, turning it this way and that under the light of a nearby lamp.

Under enough illumination to see it—really see it—she was struck by the way it was… well, it was disgusting, actually.

Her stomach rolled as she dropped her fork and pushed the plate away. She suddenly felt like she might throw up.

Terrible, what the brightness revealed.

Just terrible.