The Elements were an option, yes, and one she now dearly wished she’d used. Celestia had thought of Discord at the last moment, indefinitely entombed, and thought better of wielding them against Luna. Instead, she sacrificed her regalia, magic, castle, and ponies, throwing everything against her sister. She reasoned, pleaded, threatened, begged, she threw terrible arcane magics not dredged up since the Great Draconic Succession, sent pinpoint beams of firepower to shatter shields, subtler magics meant to disable through sleep and paralysis and a thousand other means.
It dragged on, and on, shields shattering, magic clashing, the air itself breaking, along with the world around them, melted into a mess of fire, shadow, and utter, utter chaos. If she hadn’t teleported Discord to the top of the tallest mountain she could find, Celestia was certain he would’ve broken free in an instant.
The storm of clashing magic continued without end, but as it went on, Celestia found herself getting the worst of every exchange. The temperament of her magic just wasn’t suited to the subtler magics, where Luna’s very much was. Luna foiled every attempt at stealth with contemptuous ease, swatting away her invisible probes like a parent to a foal attempting to stick a hoof in the hearth.
Celestia was holding back. Luna was not, and Celestia found herself close to bodily death on several occasions before she opened her eyes, looked at the ruined wreck they’d made in reality for miles upon miles, and played to her strength.
Incredible heat, the coruscating power of the sun itself, channeled through wings, hooves, and horn, battered through every defense Luna had in front of her, disrupting the spellforms holding her dimensional shunts and spatial distortions in place, ripping through everything in a fiery wave of death.
Too late, Celestia severed the channel to the sun, the roaring radius of devastation continuing anyway, self-sustaining even without her adding fuel to the fire.
She sent out a magical pulse in all directions, blunt and all-encompassing, listening to the ping of a thousand distinct magical signatures hitting back.
Nearly all of them bore a trace of her sister.
None of them was her.
The Elements were no help. They lay dead in her magical grip, untouched in the wake of the devastation despite sitting dead in the center of it all, changed from bright gems to inert chunks of stone, untouched by the strange, disturbing, bubbling aftermath. She’d have thought them nothing more than rubble, if the presence of any sort of rubble that wasn’t trying to grow tentacles or stretched out like taffy weren’t a novelty on its own. Not even a glimmer of magic, they appeared to be nothing so much as oversized paperweights to even her deepest scans, her former connection entirely nonexistent, gone as if it never was.
By every measure, Luna was dead, along with countless ponies whose only crime happened to be proximity. Dear friends and companions, erased in moments. Firebrush would never paint again. Regal Regard had broken her concentration with that characteristically stuffy reminder of a visitor who needed her personal attention for the last time. Avid Sparkle, with her dry wit and concerningly reckless disregard for any sort of standard alchemical safety precautions—
More names, more faces, and Celestia would see none of them again.
The only potential exception, the only one, was Luna. Death of the body didn’t have to mean death of the self, not for them. Luna’s magic lingered in her moon more than her body, the same way Celestia resided in her sun. She was still there, Presence frozen in celestial orbit, yet magic needed a mind to keep it thinking, organized, consistent. In time, that imprint would grow tangled, scattered. Forever lost. A consequence of Chaos Theory, the magical constant from which Discord drew seemingly infinite power.
There were ways to restore the body of an alicorn. The Forerunners had used them extensively, tied the process to the aetherial realm in some way that used it as a memory bank, power source, and convenient method of travel all in one. They’d been trying to puzzle out that system for most of their lives since the collapse with no success.
If Celestia put all her drive, all that remained of their nation after the destruction of their seat of power, every scrap of energy, every spare resource and surviving artifact of power to the task, she estimated, at most, a seventy percent chance of figuring out a method to stabilize her sister’s Presence before it dissipated. More than that, she guesstimated a fifty percent chance she could actually maintain that for long enough to create a method that could tie it back to a semblance of a brain and body.
Doable. She’d strived against worse odds before. She didn’t doubt her capability. The only thing keeping her frozen in place, levitating herself in eerie fractured moonlight above a magically devastated field of warped spacetime, dimensionally punctured full of holes, abyssal things clawing their way into this broken facade of reality, forbidding her from acting, was the voice in her head which doubted whether she even should.
So many dead. So, so many. The area that had once been their capital was now a growing, warped, broken cancer that she’d have to dedicate her every waking moment to healing for who knew how long. She already had more than half a hunch that she’d only succeed in confining the break in reality rather than eliminating it. She flicked a scry through a minor wormhole, all the way to that distant mountain, and at a single glance spotted several fractures in what had been a flawless prison.
Discord was getting out, now. What had been a distant possibility was now an inevitability, all because of the tantrum, no matter how justified, of a single angry alicorn. The entire planet was in jeopardy on multiple fronts, so very many of her dearest friends were dead, and if she let the battleground grow out of control, disregarded entirely any reconstructive efforts, cruelly told the rest of the nation to work on bringing back the sister who had thrown away all the carefully cultivated control the two of them made sure to maintain during every moment leading up to their confrontation, she could, maybe, succeed on that one single front.
“I’m so, so sorry, sister,” she whispered to the shattered image of the moon above, reflected through several layers of jagged spacetime, what she could even make out distorted into scattered blues, reds, greens, and an unnerving portion that faded into the kind of nothingness that wasn’t black, but the nonexistent feeling of trying to see out of the back of her knee.
She beat her wings through space that dragged at her like a dragon’s grasping claws, slowed her like treacle, accelerated parts of her through time in a way that would’ve visibly aged patches of her coat, made her joints begin to creak were she not immortal.
The gathering glow of a teleport broke at the screaming hiss of an abyssal, not a sound, more a sense of sheer emotional pain which combined unpleasantly with what was already taking most of her dwindling willpower to shrug off and move through. She opened herself to her sun again, for just a moment, erasing it from existence. From that point on, she moved with more prosaic means of propulsion, beating wings and simple levitation providing constant motive force.
Celestia wasn’t she how long the journey took, bursting out of the field of death, decay, pandemonium with a gasp, her entire magical Presence relaxing in a mirror of her physical relief.
She looked to the stars, and the moon above. Willed away her hesitation, flung her Presence at Luna’s frozen, drifting imprint, and overwhelmed it with her own.
There would be no second-guessing.
She wasted several precious hours wiping away her tears. Then she began her work.
