Princess Celestia has a great many things she needs to remember. Most immortals do. Witness enough time and you risk becoming unmoored from it, like a word repeated until it loses all meaning. To aid her recollection, she has a sort of ritual.
Before she fully turns in, she looks over a collection of relics. Curios from noteworthy events in Equestria’s history, events that might seem minor but she can’t afford to let go. She looks over them at least once a week, usually more often. They keep her mind sharp and her wits centered.
A coin. A Griffonian coin, back from before the Idol of Boreas was lost. Gustav II had been a wily one, making simple paragraphs do elaborate dances as he twisted their meaning around. Loophole after loophole was opened and closed as Celestia hammered out a treaty with him. That one week taught her the importance of clarity far better than a century of philosophy ever could. Celestia turns it over and inspects the artistry. It’s still quite something, a griffon’s feathery fluff somehow captured in metallic miniature perfectly. No tarnishing, thankfully.
A chunk of obsidian with an edge slim enough to slip between a dragon’s scales. Can it cut through a dragon’s skin? Celestia isn’t sure, to be honest. She nearly found out, but her little speech to Dragonlord Conflagra was mostly a bluff and Conflagra didn’t give her a chance to test it. She tried diplomacy, but the only diplomacy Conflagra understood was violence, so violence was what she got.
A mug from the first time she attended Yickslurbertfest. No reason but fond memories. Truly, yaks know how to get smashed.
Finally, she turns to the most important item: a skull, shiny and polished and macabre.
It comes from what is called the War of the Weakened Sun. She was anything but.
Some smaller countries, bygone nations whose names have been lost to time, had an idea after Luna was banished. They looked on Equestria, one of its diarchs still reeling from the loss of the other, and assumed Celestia wouldn’t be in her right mind, and so Equestria would be easy pickings. She wouldn’t act rationally, couldn’t mount a defense. They entered the borderlands, pillaging and burning and worse, and swept through the country with a shocking speed before Celestia received word.
They were half right. Celestia wasn’t in her right mind. They merely made a wrong guess about how she wouldn’t act rationally. Grief and fear can make people do terrible things.
Celestia looks at the skull, turns it over. She checks the preservation spells that have kept it intact for all these centuries. They’re good. She shores them up anyway. Of everything in this room, these are the events she needs to remember the most.
It was nothing more than a convenient outlet, really. One that was potentially morally-justifiable, at that. She needed some type, any type, of catharsis. She needed something to hit. An invading horde provided a lot of somethings and someones. She wasn’t thinking as she lashed out. Then, as it provided some relief from herself, she kept doing it. Over and over and over. She cared for nothing but quenching the bloodthirst of her weapons and herself. Regardless of her mental state, that doesn’t change the facts.
Celestia had never led an army before. She still isn’t sure she did, back then; she merely descended on the battlefield and ponies flocked to her banner. She was easy to find in the throes of her magic, shining and golden and scorching and molten. She gave no orders, directed no battalions, merely threw herself into the fray with a wild abandon. How dare they think her soft? At first, her opposition had charged her, thinking that she was but one mare. Technically, she was. By the war’s end, less than two years later, simply the possibility of her showing up could make entire armies surrender. Wherever she trod, the earth turned red in her wake.
There’s some dust on the skull. She gives it a quick polish. Perfect.
She can still remember where she got this particular skull. About four moons into the war, before word of her was able to truly spread. A flight of frustration revealed some opportunistic deserters attempting to ransack a town. Her rage burned; landing with the force of a collapsing building, she stood before those violent thugs and, in a heroic act of self-control, bade them leave before they hurt her little ponies rather than torch them on the spot. One of them challenged her to a duel. Another burn; she ripped the impudent fool’s head off personally. Even now, she can very nearly hear the…
…pop. A shudder ripples through her body.
For a conflict mostly waged by a single mare, the carnage was horrific. Peace terms were long in coming simply because messengers lacked the nerve to approach her, even under a white flag. When some poor soul mustered up the courage, her inner fire roared for more fuel, but she accepted. When she cooled, she was stunned at what she was capable of. The scars on the land were plain. Foreigners flinched when hearing of Equestria. And far from singing the usual songs of noble heroism, the bards were shocked into silence at the wanton destruction she’d wrought. It took more than a century for those whispers to bleed out of the public’s mind.
Celestia looks at the skull and remembers what she did. The feeling of sunlight scorching her veins. The screams of armies being torn down. The rotten, damp warmth of blood on her skin. The scents of gore and smoke mingling together. Corpses beneath her hooves getting trampled in her stampedes. Ash and dust filling her lungs as she breathed like a bellows. The masses she left behind, bodies upon bodies upon bodies of her foes. With no one to hold her back, it was butchery whose like Equestria has never seen since.
How she misses it.
