The Moon Is All Around Us
Twilight awoke with a start, eyes shooting open and lungs desperate for air. She tried to sit up, but in her blind panic she only succeeded in slipping off the stone slab she’d been resting on and landed on the cold floor with an awful echoing thud.
She scooted back against the lone table-like slab. She could see nothing and the echoes of her fall still reverberated. Her breathing was fast and hard. At first, she thought to cry out, but some nameless fear told her not to. Instead, she tried to calm herself and slow her breathing.
She couldn’t see.
She quelled another rush of panic. That didn’t mean blindness. There were magic blindfolds that she wouldn’t feel on her face. Twilight tested air for magical energies with her horn in an effort to see if she’d been blindfolded.
While there was no blindfold, there was still plenty of magic. There was enough magic in this place, wherever it was, for her to get a sense of the shape of the room. It was as if the very mortar of these walls had been mixed with some strange, unknown magic. It felt old and frail, like the more ancient parchments in the castle library. It also felt strong, but in a subdued way. No, not subdued. She almost swore now that it pulsed like a living thing and she shivered. Restrained, maybe.
The magic, whatever it might be, was unsettling. She didn’t wish to be in this room any longer.
Cautiously, she sat up and felt the ground around her with her hooves. Rock: hard and abrasive. She guessed it had been hewed with hooftools and furthermore made a tentative guess that she was in some sort of cave or building built into rock. She stood up.
It was time to say something. She had to; the silence was too overwhelming. “Is… anypony there?”
She was answered by her own voice. As the noise echoed, her imagination ran wild, and she felt as if her voice was being mocked, rather than simply echoing off the unseen walls. She shivered again, blaming it on the cold.
And it was cold. It was the kind of coldness she’d expect from Ponyville in the dead of winter, and it was summer. No, this cold was worse. It was different. Already she could feel it in her bones, feel it bypass her coat like it was nothing. This was the coldest she’d ever felt in her life.
Twilight wanted to leave wherever this place was so badly that she briefly toyed with the idea of a blind teleport jump. This place was cold and dark and wrong.
She’d convinced herself it was merely dark, and that her eyesight was fine. She knew she’d have to test it—have to illuminate her surroundings with light from her horn—but she was afraid to. As a filly, she’d feared the dark as much as any child, but her most secret fear had been blindness. Her mother had warned her, when she read late into the night, that her eyes would suffer, and she’d always worried… no books, yes, that had been part of it. But to be in the dark forever…
She closed her eyes tight and focused magic at the tip of her horn. Light flooded the room outside of her shut eyes and she felt jubilant. Not blind, not blind! She could see! She opened her eyes.
She immediately regretted that decision.
The walls were roughhewn stone, painted with old designs that were comprised mostly of nonsensical patterns and spirals. Strangely formed ponies with wide, gaping mouths that seemed to laugh, danced about these designs. The way they’d been scrawled told of a strange mind, and the whole thing was slanted downwards towards a single point. And at that point was the skeleton of some long dead pegasus, its wings separated from its body. It occurred to her that the paintings were all in a telling crimson.
Twilight almost screamed at the body, but the terrible echoes kept her silent. She looked back down to the rough ground and tried to rein in her mounting horror. She saw an opening, and a hallway beyond, and she left the terrible room behind.
The corridor was long, stretching out in the darkness too far for her small light to reveal either end. Foalish fears of the dark stirred in her—she’d never truly left them behind.
There were no candles here. She had only her magic to rely on. With trepidation, she chose a direction and walked. Each step’s report went on ahead of her, loud as the beat of a guardspony’s drum. She could almost feel the noise, like it was a mallet and her heart was the drum.
Twilight tried to remember what she’d been doing before she’d come here. If nothing else, it got her mind off of the unholy trembling of her hoofsteps along the halls.
It worried her that her memories were fragmented. She immediately suspected magic, but had nothing to test her hypothesis with. She was no expert with nueromagic, and had never enjoyed that science. What was left? She gathered scattered images like she might gather a plate that Spike had broken: Luna under the weather but trying to be polite at the dinner table, Rainbow Dash bragging about something as she lounged in the train car, Fluttershy concerned as she stood over somepony’s bed…
She knew there was a central thread that she was missing. There was one event or thing that tied all of the otherwise chaotic memories that she had, but it eluded her completely. Her mind would not help her.
So as any good researcher would do, Twilight went back to the basics. She had her magic— something she was quite glad about. While she had no idea where she was, she could guess with some degree of reasonable surety that this long tunnel was somewhere underground. While she had a few scrapes from falling off of her stone bed and was a little dirty, her body was fine. Moving on from the physical things she could tell from touch and hobbled sight, she guessed that this place was empty.
She hoped that it was empty.
Or did she? Would it be worse to have no company in this dark world away from home, or would it be worse to have company of the type such a place would surely have in residence?
Her light revealed the end of the long hall. She paused, thinking that the corners ahead looked like a good point for an ambush. She came level with the end of the tunnel and tensed, mouth open to yell…
Nothing happened. Her halting hoofstep echoed in the dark.
Somehow, this complete absence of reaction was worse. Twilight felt the need for light, wanted so very badly to see her surroundings in full. “Trick forty-one, Hanging Light,” she said softly, thinking of Spike’s proud renumerations as she grew the tiny guiding light on her horn to one much larger and then sent it upwards to hang on the ceiling above.
The room that her pale light illuminated was vast. A grand hall of strong and ancient pillars stretched out perhaps half a mile ahead of her. Tired mosaics with worn and faded colors reflected the white light off the floors. Shadowed cracks worked their way up the cyclopean and towering structures, and Twilight felt so very small.
Under normal circumstances, the unicorn would have loved to study the art and the architecture. She’d have loved to compare the hoofwork to other known ancient sources. Twilight would’ve spent hours in such a foreign and old place.
But she just wanted the sun.
Twilight continued, her face screwed up in an almost permanent grimace as each hoofstep’s sound reverberated even louder than before. Gods, but she’d forgotten how much she hated places like this in the dark. She’d loved the palace, with its magnificent library and stately halls and chambers, but she’d always feared it at night. It was almost as if someone had reached into her mind and found out all her darkest little long-forgotten fears and made a sick caricature of them.
As she walked, the light (which had never made it to the top of the chamber, but hung far above her with no anchoring surface) went on ahead. She tried to pretend that it was the sun, with its warm and happy light. She wished Celestia had lifted it up above her to provide for her. Unfortunately, the light was sickly and white and only added to her gloomy heart’s troubles. Below her hooves, damaged mosaics of monsters and strange ponies with wide white eyes stared up at her, sneering.
Her archaeological interest was beyond dead and she couldn’t care less about the hoofwork on those awful, hateful faces.
Her walk became brisker, and she turned her head side to side, looking. Her eyes wandered among the pillars, awaiting the ambush she was sure would come—that she began to hope would come. She looked for signs of life, finding none, and with each row of tall and inscrutable stone behemoths, Twilight felt smaller.
The light which floated ahead and above her eventually brought vague shadows into view, and her pulse quickened. From afar, she thought that could make out steps. Steps up to a dais, perhaps. An altar or a throne, if she was pressed to make an educated guess.
Celestia, but she hoped it wasn’t an altar. She couldn’t handle something like that in the dark.
She was very glad when it wasn’t. Her initial thought had been correct, and she came upon a raised platform ringed with stairs upon which stood a primeval couch, flanked by two stone braziers and in front of which was a strange stone egg. The chair was strange, with bizarre twists and spiralings branching out behind where once some monarch had sat. It seemed at once familiar and foreign to her sentiment, as if she’d seen it before and forgotten it.
Her curiosity came back from its frightened exile and prodded Twilight to examine this egg. For some reason, she felt like it was important.
The egg, she quickly noted with a keen scholar’s eye, had arcane markings covering it. Some of them she recognized immediately—the main thread of the magical notation meandered down the side and he traced it idly with her hoof. The language was old, a Pre-Classical dialect of Equestrian only used in magical notation and among the now defunct mages of the diocese of Lunangrad. She’d not learned it well, noting that it was so old and the magic it usually described was so outdated that the struggle to memorize it would have been pointless.
But she did remember some of it. In fact, as she translated it in her mind, she could almost feel like she knew it well. It would have bothered her how easy this was after having not seen such script in such a long time… except that the inscription was so fascinating.
A Telling Fire. She’d never actually seen one of this build herself, and knew from the diagrammed circle incantations that it was primitive. Perhaps the most primitive of this type of magic she’d ever even dreamed of… this could be itself a Pre-Classical artifact, and this whole place a long lost relic of the time before the Lunar Rebellion.
Her excited reverie was broken by a sudden humming. The arcane lines lit up with a dark blue flame, and the egg cracked along the lines. Slowly, the stone dissolved until only the bottom half was left. From this base a flame sprang.
A voice came from the flame.
“Twilight? Oh, but we are so glad that you are here! We have been so alone. Where are you?”
Luna...
The blue light flickered. Twilight was about to open her mouth, overjoyed to hear another voice besides her own, glad to know that somewhere out there in this awful world of blackness there was some other pony—
(—A memory came, quick like lightning, burning like molten iron: Celestia saying with troubled eyes, “Watch for Luna.” Recollections of her worried mentor’s eyes and how her friends had looked on in troubled ignorance of what it was she was truly doing, how she knew that they were in the dark as to her—)
She staggered, filled with sudden terror at the happiness in Luna’s voice and how it was so out of place in the gloom. Panicking, she replied, “I… I’m not sure, exactly. It’s kind of dark.” A lie, but only half of one. She could easily mention the throne. Why didn’t she? It just seemed so imperative not to tell this voice of Luna’s anything.
“Oh…” Luna sounded unsure. “I understand. Anything around you?”
This was stupid. Luna was her friend! They’d written letters and traded books. Luna had trusted her with secrets and…
She shook. Why was she so afraid? She blurted her answer out.
“Pillars. Pillars, lots of them.”
Her heart beat loud in her ear, her throat felt like she’d swallowed a rock. Where was this fear coming from? Celestia’s voice rang through her head like bright silver bells. Watch for Luna. Watch for Luna. Watch for Luna.
“Oh…” Luna recovered after a moment. “Well. There are lots of those. But there aren’t that many Telling Fires! I know this place like it was the back of my hoof… I’ll find you. You can wander around if you’d like.”
The fire died and the egg was once again whole. Twilight shook.
She stumbled off the dais, suddenly frightened of being near the egg. Something was very wrong, more wrong than it was already. Luna was her friend. Luna was a friendly voice in the darkness. Why was she so afraid? She knew that she’d forgotten… something.
Watch for Luna.
She tried to calm herself. Luna had said she could wander… so she would. “Watch for Luna” was a vague command, and it probably meant nothing more than “Keep up with Luna”. Obviously. It was the only logical conclusion for her.
So Twilight walked past the throne and in short order came across the end of the hall. A great mosaic rose ahead of her and she lowered her light. She didn’t want to see it. It would be like the ones on the floor, and she couldn’t handle that right now. Instead, she looked about for a door.
She found one. Twilight took hold of the handle with her magic and opened it.
The grating of the metallic door on its ancient hinges filled the hall with a tormenting noise. Twilight gasped as the sound assaulted her ears, but opened the door quickly and stared into the blackness beyond it.
It was an open maw. Suddenly, she thought that wandering was a terrible idea. She should just stay. Luna would come or she wouldn’t, but Twilight wouldn’t have to go down this hall… this gaping black throat.
But something told her to move. Something in her mind, way in the back, told her that this was urgent. There was no time to wait—so she didn’t. Twilight marched through the doorway and down another long hall.
This one was different than the rougher cut tunnel. This hall had well cut and placed tile, and mosaics here and there. She saw rods of silver that had perhaps once held heavy tapestries and colorful banners and was reminded once again of her days in the palace. It went on and on, branching off into little chambers and dining rooms and storage closets, and Twilight imagined a time when this cold dead place had been filled with serving ponies and snooty lords and ladies. She could almost hear them beside the loud and empty echoing of her hooves against the smooth floor.
Twilight was tired of being ignorant. She knew now that she was definitely missing some important memories. After taking stock, she could only conclude that there were two possibilities: Luna was dangerous, or Luna was in need of aid. She had only her emotional state to guide her as she tested hypotheses in the black, knowing she’d made a wrong deduction by the panic and sense of wrongness in her soul’s house.
Which told her something important: her earlier inkling had been correct. She recognized magical tampering when she saw it. This whole situation had the signs of neuromagic all over it. Not only did she have rather massive memory loss, but said memory losses seemed rather artificial. When she’d needed information about Luna, her mind had given it to her. As she assessed her own fear, her emotional state had changed and she’d felt a wordless prodding… and now, as she really began to think about it, those memories weren’t really lost. They’d been blocked from view by her conscious mind, but the unconscious and the emotional sections of her psyche still acted as if they knew. It was like University again, where this exact state had been inflicted on her as a demonstration. She’d been trained to recognize someone’s tamperings in her mind and that training came to her aid.
So who had done it?
Having had memories sealed before by an expert, she recognized shoddy work. In all honesty, she began to suspect that she recognized her own shoddy work. She’d never succeeded at mastering the art.
Her wanderings brought her to another large chamber, though this one seemed smaller. Twilight, once more, felt her own smallness. Gods, but she hated this place. Where was she? Why was she here? Why in Celestia’s name would she block her own memories?
Who had made such a place? Who had built such an awful place in the dark where there was no sun? Why?
The darkness was suffocating. She kept her breathing under control with difficulty. Twilight stood in the center of the new chamber, just trying to calm herself, breathing. Briefly, she closed her eyes.
There were hoofsteps.
She almost screamed, opening her eyes and whirling about to locate the source of the noise. “Luna?” she called out, her voice shaking. “Luna?”
There was a pause, but only a beat of silence. “Yes? We are here.”
We. Luna had stopped using plurals like that months ago; she’d finally begun to adjust to the modern vernacular. Twilight was in full panic, backing up and then freezing. She had no idea from where the sound was coming. “Luna, where are you?”
A beat of silence. The hoofsteps continued. They sounded different, metallic, as if she had her argent hoofboots on. “We are behind you.”
Twilight’s instincts screamed so loud that it was a miracle they weren’t audible. She’d broken into a cold sweat. “T-that was fast.” That voice. Oh sweet merciful Celestia, but that voice was so wrong somehow. She just couldn’t put her hoof on it. This wasn’t Luna. This couldn’t be Luna.
“We can be fast if we wish. We wished to be fast.” The hoofsteps marked out a cadence like the beating of the execution drum, and Twilight groaned in agonizing fear. Another memory—
Luna lying in her bed, curled into a ball, whimpering. Fluttershy trying to cool her down with a wet rag. Rarity with Rainbow Dash in a death grip, fearful and concerned. Rainbow trying to be comforting and completely out of her element. Applejack with her hat off and in her hoof’s hold—
The steps were so close. The echoes were as loud as the doors of Tartarus swinging shut. It was now or never—
Celestia addressing her. She won’t come out, Twilight. Are you sure you want to do this? Of course Twilight was sure. Luna was her friend. Surely it wasn’t so bad. She could be rational about these kinds of things, see through any illusions.
She bolted.
Her flight was panicked and she was on the verge of tears. Reason had fled. She only knew that, somehow, she had to get out.
The voice had lost even the semblance of normalcy. It came out, varied and in rough dissonance, as if two or three spoke at once. “Oh, Twilight, but you are so alone.”
She met the wall and found no door. “No… Celestia, no… oh gods, oh gods…” There! She found an opening and she took it, following yet another hallway. Relentlessly, the steps followed her, just far enough back to engender some wild, fey hope, but so close that her heart told her that the owner of the not-Luna’s voice would be on her at any moment.
Twilight took a turn at a crossroads. On every side, open doors passed, and in her panic and delirium she thought she saw scenes of blood and eyes. She sobbed.
“WHAT ARE YOU?”
Hoofsteps. They never picked up speed as Twilight fled with every ounce of energy she had. There was no answer but chuckling myriad, now with a dozen voices.
Another crossroads, and she took a left turn.
And was met with a wall.
“No...” she said, voice breaking. Twilight desperately rammed the wall before slumping down against the unyielding surface. “No, no, no, no,” she said in litany. Her magical light began to dim as her willpower evaporated. The hoofsteps stopped, and she turned to face what was there.
It was not Luna. This thing was a mockery of her friend. This thing which stood before her in the intersection was a mockery of life itself. Her eyes were black, inky pools with a hollow stare that froze Twilight’s blood. Cracks ran along her face and body--black cracks that leaked inky darkness downwards like blood from an open, festering wound. The blackness collected at her hooves and spread like a living thing, inky tendrils crawling along the floor. False Luna grinned and opened her mouth, revealing an even darker black—the impossibility of it clawed at Twilight’s sanity. This was wrong. It was all so very wrong. Her light was on its last legs, but still the creature was visible—darkness visible against the dark.
“But you have stopped. It is a shame. We were having fun.”
The mouth did not move, but hung open. The blackness seeped out from her, as if her sightless eyes and those gaping jaws were the beginning of some terrible darkness that dwarfedher prey’s understanding. Twilight sobbed. There were no words left, no shred of reason to shore against her fate.
Suddenly, she was falling backwards through an opening. False Luna’s laughing filled the world, and Twilight’s mind broke as she crawled without illumination through the opened escape route.
Twilight’s crawling became headlong running without regard for direction or safety. There was no planning, no thought to ignite another light. She simply ran through darkness that seemed an almost solid thing, like some sort of awful world of congealed ink. The laughing and the hoofsteps of her pursuer tore at her mind like dogs tore at meat. Without knowing how, Twilight knew that her life was ending in these halls.
She stumbled, crying. She knew she was probably bleeding, could feel the pain in her forelegs now. But she kept moving—kept running blindly—screaming and sobbing in terms. The hoofsteps were gone, the laughter died into a childish whining, then faint muttering, then nothing. She could feel something grinning at her in the dark, something not quite alive. Twilight’s thoughts were like a shattered vase.
Light.
It was soft. The silence was now replaced by screaming. “WE DEMAND YOU TO BE STILL! YOU HAVE AMUSED US, BUT YOU MUST NOW BE STILL.”
As if awaking, Twilight stopped in this new chamber. It was a kind of entrance hall, from the looks of it, just like the one in Canterlot Palace. Before her was a huge ornate door flanked by bright torches which fought back the dark. She tore at the door with her magic, opening it and going through, looking back to see her tormentor there, howling and spreading her darkness across the floor in a fit of rage. She would have Twilight, Twilight knew she would. There would be no escape.
And then she was out. The darkness stopped at the threshold and died away and the False Luna screamed in fury beyond mortal reckoning. Twilight screamed as the pressure of it burdened her mind, and the sound of the door slamming shut left her whimpering.
All around her, the lunar surface spread out almost endlessly. It was serene, and still in a different way than the labyrinthine halls had been. Here, the stillness was not death but rather contemplation. The shimmering Earth rose above her.
She lay in the dust, her breath irregular and her eyes full of tears. Slowly, Twilight’s heartbeat slowed to normal levels; the adrenaline rush left her achy but alive. She couldn’t summon the energy to even care about this bizarre new locale. She didn’t want to move ever again.
But somehow, before she drifted off into exhausted stupor, she felt the need to look up. Before her, a figure walked calmly with the full earth rising behind her, coming towards Twilight with calm progress. She felt a stab of terror at the thought of something else as horrible as the monster behind her being out here… but she was too exhausted. Let it have her. She was done.
Twilight laid her head back down in the lunar dust and closed her eyes. Her tears dried and time passed, and in the strange earthlight, she felt at peace. When her rest was interrupted, it was by Luna’s soft voice.
“Twilight? What are you doing here?”
Twilight’s eyes shot open, and she began to panic. She tried to rise on aching limbs and begin her fleeing again, but when she saw who addressed her, she paused. This was indeed Luna, but it was also not the Luna she knew. Her mane was blue as it had been in the moments after her defeat, but longer and fuller. She seemed perfectly relaxed despite her surprise. Twilight found her absolutely stunning. Beautiful beyond words. Never before had she felt the compulsion to just lay at somepony’s hooves and worship them until this moment.
“I…” She tried to describe what was behind her, but she couldn’t. Her mind was still recovering, and she sat and tried to gather her thoughts.
“You’re confused. I begin to understand, I think.” Luna sighed and sat down in front of Twilight. The Lunar Princess’ horn glowed and Twilight felt at peace, even as memories flowed and she was caught up in a river of images.
“Now, the damage is healed, I think. Tell me your story, my friend.”
Twilight spoke with wonder. “You were sick. I was visiting the Princess and the girls all came with me. You were in a bad mood: irritable, angry. We thought it was just that you felt bad, and you apologized… and then you collapsed. No one could wake you. Celestia was scared… we all were. But I… I’m foalish, Princess.” Twilight looked down at the ground. “I took too much responsibility, thought too much of myself. I can’t handle the inside of someone’s mind. I can barely know my own.”
“But you risked it because of our friendship, Twilight Sparkle. There’s no shame in that.” The alicorn’s voice was soft and like a balm. This place brought out the best in her, or at least this part of it. “Rise. Walk with me to the Palace.”
Twilight didn’t want to turn—she didn’t want to see what she’d left behind—but at Luna’s command she did.
Before her rose a terrible structure which words could only approximate. Blasphemous and torturous curves from some foreign geometry which assaulted the senses rose out of the lunar surface and cast a long and ugly shadow. The great doors that had slammed shut were as tall as a house.
“It’s… so far. I didn’t run that much.”
“It is my mind, Twilight. It is not entirely bound by physical reality. Come.” She continued to talk as Twilight followed her.
“I don’t believe you can grasp the immensity of my loneliness here. That it was the moon, I think, that saved me—I am in my element here. Without it, no trace of me would have survived to do what needed to be done. But there are… things in the Deep Chasms of the heavens, things that know neither light nor warmth and I stared into the abyss too long. It poisoned my mind, and the evil magic I had so depended on consumed me. I was not all that different from what you apparently saw. I am sorry for that, Twilight.”
“It… I came here. I signed up for this.”
“Yes, but I cry your pardon. That thing is the finality of what would have been. I retained enough of myself and my contrition to fight back. There was only one alternative: quarantine. Some mages have worked with the mind and talked about it as if they used a scalpel. I used my magic like a sledgehammer and locked away the madness you saw. But… it was so burdensome. It hurts. It is like…” She thought, and then chuckled. “I was being childish, I suspect. I was afraid of the pain of it, and I still am. It has to go. It had to go then, but I was too weak, too lost… but now I am strong. It has to end here. All this time I’ve been wandering the lunar surface, thinking of the stars and the earth above us, knowing that I’d have to come back here.”
“What will you do?”
“I think it is time to end this. Before, I simply locked it away and restarted my mind—all the contrite years of learning my lesson on the moon gone in the blink of an eye, my memories blocked. But as they came back to me after I was freed by your friendship, so did the memory of this darkness.”
They stood before the doors.
“Princess… I don’t want to go in there. I’m terrified.”
“As am I. Stand beside me, and perhaps it will go quickly.”
Twilight doubted that. Deep in her heart, she knew that it would be neither quick nor easy.
The door opened.
Twilight and Luna opened their eyes, their heads together as they lay on the latter’s bed. The ponies gathered around them gasped and began to ask them questions which neither heard. This was not a time for words. Words would not come for a long time.
Twilight wept like a foal and her startled friends could get no words out of her. The deed was done. Luna, exhausted, asked for her sister. Neither dreamer would talk about what they’d seen.
Twilight looked over at Luna with a friendly love and untold terror, and waited to see which Luna emerged. But those eyes were true. She closed her own eyes… and saw the moon which stretched out before her forever, the endless white and grey surface which was both contemplation and hell. The resting place of the exile and the harshest of mistresses. She trembled and opened her eyes.
She doubted she’d be sleeping well again for a while.
