Princess Celestia sat at the head of the dining table, spectating her subjects chatting away about the day's future endeavors. Laid out across the table were some of the finest dishes and cuisine found only in Equestria, crafted only by Canterlot's finest chefs. Herbs, vegetable omelets, and muffins alike were strewn about on only the daintiest of platters. It was just another day in Canterlot Castle, experienced within the same monotonous routine the castle's workers have grown so accustomed to.
Celestia smiled softly, relishing in the glorious image of all twenty-four residents conversing with one another. She levitated a small cup of tea to her lips and took a quiet sip. Today was the usual breakfast: Fire spore tea with a hint of ginger, buttered toast.
Beside her, a tired and mostly bare Philomena dutifully pecked at her bowl of birdseed, stationed at the bottom of her cage.
"P-Princess Celestia?" a voice shaken with anxiety piped up among the clamorous chatter.
Celestia glanced up, catching a glimpse of Scribe Rothrock trying to hide behind a pitcher of orange juice. The sun goddess chuckled softly and asked, "Yes, Scribe? What is it?" Her tone was warm, welcoming, vainly attempting to coax Rothrock out of hiding. Though unfortunately, he was always known as a nervous wreck, though Celestia refused to give up on any of her subjects.
Rothrock cleared his throat and waveringly asked, "I-I-I have taken notice in the a-absence of Princess Luna. W-Where is she?"
The sun goddess glanced to her left, at the empty seat stationed beside her. "I'm not sure," she admitted with a slight disappointment tinting her voice. "Strange, considering Luna's always the first one here for breakfast."
"Then she screams to the heavens 'We are going to bed! We thank thee, big sister!'" The few dozen ponies sitting at the long table turned to the speaker, Court Jester Surprise. She was rocking back and forth in her chair, cackling like a hyena. Her messy, blonde curls bobbed about like they were nothing but air, with the morning sunlight bouncing off her pristine white coat clad in a scarlet jester's attire.
Every scribe, paladin, and craftsman at the table stared at Surprise, slack-jawed wide-eyed. Not one pony found her sense of humor funny; just disrespectful. But Celestia, always looking out for her subjects, gave a round of forced laughter. "Yup, that's Luna all right!" The gesture was convincingly authentic.
When no one else took the hint, Celestia shot them a serious glare, signaling the group to ensue in a rather unconvincing bout of laughter.
"Oh, ha-ha. You're so funny, Surprise."
"Yeah, you really got... me?"
"Gee, Princess Celestia. You sure are good at fake laughing."
The princess chuckled, not taking the comment to heart. With the fabricated merriment bouncing off the walls of the spacious dining hall, Surprise remained utterly oblivious to the heavy sarcasm. She, instead, was just glad someone found her jokes humorous.
Right here. This is the reason why Princess Celestia loved being the ruler of Equestria. This is why she survived decades of immortality. Her subjects, every one of them, was like a family. But the ones that lived in the castle, the ones whose lives were destined to serve the Princess by past generations, they were the ones that truly gave the word 'family' it's definition.
They squabble, they work, they laugh. But at the end of the day, they were like the Princess's family. It's a tightly woven group, too. When the Princess returned after the Summer Sun Celebration, she told everypony with a heavy heart that Twilight Sparkle will not be returning. Dinner was eaten in silence that night, with everyone recollecting the memories they had with Twilight around. Others awaited the chronic crash of dinner plates, followed by a naive Twilight Sparkle shouting from the kitchen 'My bad!'
"Tia! Sister!" a familiar voice called from the end of the dining hall.
"Pfft, 'Tia,'" Adviser Burning Glory snickered.
Princess Luna soared across the dining table, trying to make up for lost time. The ponies beneath her had their stylized, heavily pampered manes ruined. Several voices grumbled, making futile attempts at fixing their own hair. Celestia's stylist, Ginger Spice, shrieked in horror as her violet beehive hairstyle went flat.
"Luna, what is it?" the Princess whispered, trying to ignore the heated stares directed at her younger sister.
"It's this," she replied with a miserable frown. A parchment, encased in a dark blue glow, levitated towards her older sister. "And... and don't read it aloud."
Thinking this would be a perfect opportunity to tease her sister, Celestia read it aloud just to spite her. The servants and bodyguards tuned in.
"Dearest Celestia and Luna-"
"No sister! Don't!" the moon goddess pleaded, hopping from one hoof to the other in urgency.
"-we've not seen you two in centuries, and have decided to come visit for a few days. We'll be there in five minutes. Lots of love, Mom and Dad." Celestia looked up from the letter, her face drawn to a blank. She continuously stared out into space, allowing the four-sentenced letter to race through her mind at least a dozen times in succession.
'Mom... and Dad!?'
Luna swallowed hard, looking back at the ponies with hungry eyes fixed on their beloved rulers. The two bodyguards stationed at the end of the hall, Shield and Sword, dropped their respective weapons and stared with the same slack-jawed look.
The only thing that broke the most awkward silence in Equestrian history was Philomena bursting into flame.
"Luna," Celestia muttered from the corner of her mouth. "How long has it been since you've received the letter?"
"Four minutes," the younger sibling replied, the normally boisterous alicorn now quieter than her sister.
Princess Celestia sucked in a drawn breath of air, recovering from this bit of shocking news. With much courtesy and two-hundred thousand years of wisdom, she stood up and yelled, "Everypony! To your stations!" She then finished in the rarely-used Canterlot voice, "NOW!"
The servants all panicked at their level-headed ruler's desultory fear and urgency. Their parents, the rulers of the galaxy itself, was coming here to Equestria! Nothing in the universe as bigger than this, so there's no time to waste! Mares and stallions of varying attire and color all mobbed out of the dining hall as one, knocking over chairs and dishes in the process.
Surprise was at the rear of the crowd, trying to push it through the narrow doorway. "Move it, jerks! I gotta get my joke book!" With great effort, she reared back and flew head on into the mass of ponies, pushing them through the exit and cracking the bordering drywall in the process.
Everpony was in such a panic that even the bodyguards that were supposed to be at Celestia's side twenty-four seven cleared out of the room.
Only the chefs and cleaners remained but for only a fraction of a second longer, taking little time in collecting the dirty dishes and fetching brooms and dustpans for the broken windows.
Only then did Celestia and Luna remain, giving the occasional eye-twitch. Philomena poked her head out of a pile of ashes and let out a harmonious caw.
Arrival of the... of the... What?
"Oh no oh no oh no! Breathe, Luna! Breathe!" the dark alicorn murmured to herself, stopping in the middle of the hall to apply a great wallop to her chest. "Breathe!" she hollered, blushing at hearing her own ridiculous commands echoing off the walls.
Luna proceeded to sprint down the long, endless hall, eventually performing a great leap and snapping open her wings, darting down the rest of the way like a bullet; her sheer speed ripped several tapestries off the walls. "Oh, how could I have been so foolish!? If I knew mother and father was visiting, I would have done this a lot sooner!"
Princess Luna's face brightened when her target finally came into view: a staircase, leading up a couple steps and then branching off to the right and another to the left; the one on the left held an image of the sun, glowing brightly like the very thing it represented, while the other was of a full moon, casting a midnight-blue afterglow that reached across the hall, splitting it into two respective colors, like day and night.
Luna made a sharp right, paying no mind to the stained glass window of herself and Celestia she just demolished, and rammed through the her bedroom door.
The Princess' normally well-composed facade came crashing down with a vengeance when she took a single gander around her shrouded bedroom. "Oh, no! Oh, no!" she groaned in despair. "I'll never clean my room in time!"
With great haste, Luna telekinetically pushed a couple dozen graphic novels from the open floor and under her massive poster bed. In return, several heavy black books were pulled out from under it urgently crammed into the shelves, paying no mind to whether or not they were arranged in chronological order. In a similar manner, Luna grabbed the navy-blue covers of her massive, round bed and tucked the edges under the mattress. As she ran her hooves across the surface, urgently trying to smooth it out, her magic worked at tying the poster bed's curtains to their respective poles.
"This place needs to look like a princess' chambers! Not a teen-filly's!" Luna hissed as she scooped up several packets of bubblegum and dumping them in a trashcan levitating beside her; replacing the packets, the Night Princess conjured some rolls of parchment, ink wells and quills out of thin air and aligned them in an orderly placement. With that out of the way, Luna shifted her wide, maddened eyes to the trashcan, and it suddenly burst into flame, illuminating the shrouded bedroom and quickly dissipating as a pile of dust and ash.
"Light! That's what I need! Light!" Luna leaped across her room, to the massive window overlooking all of Canterlot but was obscured by drawn blinds. The princess rolled them up, and nearly dropped them, along with her jaw, at the sight of the sky: it was a violent, warlike red.
"They're here!" screamed Luna. "By my mercy, they're here!"
With no time to lose, Princess Luna galloped out of her room, only stopping to flip over her "Rupony Kenshin" poster and leaving the other side facing forward: an advertisement to join the Canterlot Night Guard.
"Come, Philomena! Get up!" cried Celestia, latching her hooves around the birdcage and rattling it a bit.
In response, a drowsy Philomena, her head rejuvenated in gold and red plumage, spat a fireball in her master's face and charring it black.
"No dessert for you, young lady!" scolded Celestia, to which Philomena turned with a huff and sank back into her mound of ash. "Oh, please, Philomena! Fine, I'll let you have dessert!" No response. "I'll let you have my dessert!" The phoenix stuck her head up once more, but with an inquirous brow raised. "For the next two-hundred years!"
With a victorious caw and a flash of blinding gold, the birdcage exploded, showering the dining hall with twisted, gold metal. One piece, the base, rigid and sharpened by the blast, lodged itself into Celestia's breast. "Philomena!" scolded the princess. "Now I have to buy you another cage! I hope you're happy!" She took a napkin off the table and attempted to cleanse her white fur of blood relentlessly pouring out of her would-be fatal wound.
Philomena blushed and gracefully landed on her master's back, attempting to hide her shame behind a wing. Sheathed in an enchanting gold aura, the cage's base was pulled out of Celestia chest, half of it painted scarlet; she then cleared her throat, loud enough to regain Philomena's attention. The phoenix's eyes widened drastically as she took notice in the irate princess pointing at the gaping, fleshy wound horizontally sliced through her breast and chest plate.
"You know what you have to do," said the princess with a smirk.
Philomena hung her head low and took off, circling around Celestia and then spreading her wings to arrive at a halt. Hovering before her, Philomena craned her neck so that her head was held over the princess' jagged cut.
"Come on, Philomena. I know you can do it."
Sadly, she shook her head in response.
"Then I guess I have no choice," she said, apathetically, with a shrug.
Upon hearing those words, Philomena sporadically shook her head and, once more, held it over Celestia's wound, cringing. After many laboring moments, the phoenix managed to squeeze out a couple of tears from her glowing, yellow eyes. With a sizzling hiss, they all landed in Celestia's gory injury; the wound closed itself, mended itself, until it was nothing but a memory.
With a single, powerful beat of her wings, Philomena ascended up and away from her master and discharged a brilliant, heavenly light from her body. The intensity of the fiery rays caked the blood on Celestia chest, resulting in most of it flaking off. The princess shot her an approving smile as she circled around the room and landed on the chair closest to her. Using the tip of her wing, Philomena brushed off any lingering flakes.
"Thank you, Philomena," said the princess, exchanging a bow with her pet phoenix. "I knew I could always count on you." A caw in gratitude.
"Princess Celesita!" A worried voice rang out from across the dining hall.
"What is it, Chef Gumbo?"
The beefy lime-green earth pony nervously removed his chef's hat and said in his natural gruff voice, "Well, I'd really hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the sky, it's..." he trailed off, allowing his foreleg pointing at some obscure location outside to speak for itself.
"What? What is it?" the princess sauntered across the dining hall, gently brushing past Chef Gumbo and a tailing Clean Sweep, one of the castle's many cleaners, as they hurriedly gathered more dirty plates from the dining table.
Celestia, giving the disarrayed and filthy kitchen no attention, looked out the window and noticed its' blood-red hue. "They're here," she whispered, her blood turning to ice. "THEY'RE HERE!"
The princess' call rang throughout the castle, as did as her panicked order: "EVERYPONY TO THE COURTYARD! NOW!"
Outside: the air was still, everything was tinted a sinister red by work of the sky and every personnel working in Canterlot Castle stood in the sculpture garden, at the ready, huddled in a large group with their princesses guarding the front.
Celestia held a stern look, as did her younger sister but with a nervous glint in her turquoise eyes; Prince Blueblood had his usual smug facade, which would've placed anypony in a shocked state of mind, had it not been for the well-known fact that the spoiled prince cared for nothing but himself. Her probably didn't even know what was going on. Everypony else was just scared out of their minds, fanning themselves despite the cool sixty-degree weather or wrinkling and pulling at their respective clothing, if any was being worn.
Princess Celestia squinted, looking up at a black dot in the sky that seemed to get bigger and bigger at an alarming rate.
"What is it, my sister?" asked Luna.
"It think it's..." the Sun Princess' face hardened. "This is it, everypony. Here they come!"
"Ooh! I'm so excited!" Court Jester Surprise chimed in, hugging her joke book tightly against her chest.
When the sphere made it to the ground, it was at least half the size of a full-grown dragon. Many ponies quaking in their horseshoes took several careful steps back, huddling together even closer like a herd of sheep; Luna and Celestia held their ground, ready to face the rulers of the universe itself, and even worse, their own parents.
'This is what it must feel like whenever we visit a settlement in Equestria,' Luna thought.
Without so much as an indication or warning, the sphere dispelled in a powerful gust of black and silver wind, knocking several ponies over and uprooting some of the statue garden's surrounding foliage. By spreading their wings, the princesses succeeded in shielding most of their subjects. However, what they couldn't shield them from was the inevitable meeting of the king and queen of the known galaxy itself, standing right there, at that very moment.
King Artemis and Queen Solianna stood where the black sphere once sat, and they did not look happy. The dark, burnt sky hanging overhead made the whole situation unbearably intense.
King Artemis, Ruler of the Cosmos, Father of the Night, could best be described as his being a piece of the nighttime sky itself: his entire body was as black as a cloudless night, and as such, was dotted with dozens upon dozens of twinkling diamond-like stars that seemed a little too real. His tail, mane and wings were trapped a never-ending flow, much like his daughters'. Though, rather than waving side to side like theirs, the king's seemed to burn like an oily, liquified fire. His eyes: hard, intense, and overlain with a cold violet, as were the jewels embedded in his stainless steel crown and breastplate.
Queen Solianna, Queen of the Dawn, Mother of the Sun, looked less intimidating than her husband, but would never be mistaken for a pushover, as ensured by her fiery copper eyes, blazing like the burning sun. Her coat, a thick and creamy color, gave off the everlasting glow of morning dawn. Her mane, tail and wings were unique in both color and fluctuation: similar in coat color, traveling further down the hair turns into a burnt orange, and the ends of her mane and tail in particular turn into a whimsical nighttime blue with the stars of dusk peppered throughout. Rather than waving to and fro like a wave, Solianna's mane rolled and overlapped like mist or clouds. To say she was the embodiment of dusk and dawn would be fairly accurate.
Both alicorns were twice as tall as their daughters, dwarfing the citizens of Equestria moreso than the princesses originally did.
They were the first to bow down; so low, in fact, that their horns touched the ground. The other ponies followed suite, even Blueblood.
"Rise," uttered Artemis, his heavy, guttural voice carried out over the entire audience like a freezing wave.
Everyone, even the princesses, did so without question. Artemis and Solianna approached their daughters, leaving hoofsteps of shadow and fire in their wake. "I am not happy, girls," the king spat, never lowering his head to look down at his daughters, but did so with his overbearing gaze. "Not. One. Bit."
Luna was already shaking, but a light nudge from Celestia was enough to calm her down. "I-I-It's truly on honor to have you here, father," said the night princesses, bowing her head once more.
"'Honor,' you say?" said Artemis, the slight raise in tone was enough to push Luna into cowardice. "There is nothing 'honorable' about what I just had to endure."
"On behalf of everything that touches this sacred land," began Celestia, "we apologize for the unsatisfying welcome, fath-err, King Artemis."
Artemis looked less than pleased. "Peanuts," he muttered.
Celestia and Luna exchanged puzzled looks and returned their gazes to their parents. "What?" asked the Princess of the Sun.
"Peanuts," repeated the king. "Your mother forgot to pack me some salted peanuts for the long flight over here, and I specifically asked her to bring some before we left."
The princesses' mouths hung open, contorted into looks of utter bafflement and confusion. Glancing back at their subjects, they all shared similar looks, with some recovering from the close call of a heart attack.
"I told you, sweetie," Solianna hissed in a leveled voice, "you don't need all those peanuts for a five minute flight."
"Yes," the king retorted through gritted teeth, "I do."
Princess Celestia, still reeling in from a heart attack of her own, allowed Luna to speak, "We, uh, we have some peanuts in the Royal Pantry... i-if you want." She pointed a hoof at the back doors leading into the castle ballroom.
In just the blink of an eye, the sky was blue once more, completely voided of a doomsday glow and scarlet red; the land of Equestria was bathed in natural sunlight once more, and the whole country was most likely in a panic at what inexplicable event has just transpired.
King Artemis gave his little girls a toothy smile, as did Queen Solianna. "Well, why didn't you say so?" laughed the king, giving his daughters no time to respond as he pulled them into a big, strong hug.
"Oh, Tia and Lu-Lu," cooed Solianna, pulling Luna into a death squeeze when Artemis released her. "It's been far too long." The siblings looked across their parents' backs and exchanged puzzled glances, but eventually eased into the embrace and even returned it.
"We've missed you so much, mother and father," said Princess Celestia, tears beginning to roll down her cheeks.
