The Faceless Princess

Sunlight filters through the leaves, dim and hazy. For the first time in a long while, the palace is alive with the sound of a child’s laughter.

“Princess Celestia!” little Twilight shouts, galloping back towards me, net and jar bouncing wildly in her magic. “Your garden is amazing! I got a danaus plexippus, morpho menelaus and a tajuria cippus! Can you believe it?”

“I can’t,” I laugh, sitting up a little straighter and tilting my head — always to the right, always letting my mane flow down over the ghost of the beauty I once had. Twilight isn’t afraid of the way I look, but the habit is ingrained too deep to shake, even when it’s just the two of us. “But you need to be careful when you’re carrying them, Twilight. Butterflies are fragile.”

Instantly contrite, she adjusts the grip of her magic on the jar. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart. They’re fine, see?” I gesture to the fluttering creatures inside the jar, bright as breezies, and she smiles in relief.

I smile back with the left side of my mouth, and try not to see the face of another child superimposed over Twilight’s. She was a little smaller than Twilight at this age, a little stockier. The mane red and yellow instead of indigo, the expression more determined. But the joy of learning was the same. The eagerness to please me. The kindness in their hearts.

I blink, trying to force away the thoughts of Sunset. This is the reason Twilight is my student, not my daughter. The wounds — all of them — are still too fresh.

“I bet I’m going to finish my whole lepidopterology textbook this week,” says Twilight with immense satisfaction. “Once I’m done with the Equestrian chapter, do you think we could go to Abyssinia to look for different species?”

I chuckle. “Perhaps when you’re a little older.’

She skips away and I watch her go. My right eye is a vacant hollow in my face, but sometimes I think I see things with it. Shadows, flickering lights. A golden thread that unspools behind the little filly, tethering her to me, to the daughter that came before, the sons and nephews and granddaughters who have staked their claim in my heart over the centuries.

To the sister that all of this was for.

Many things in this world are fragile. Ephemeral as Twilight’s butterflies. The beauty I once placed so much stock in. The families I build for myself, always stolen and snatched away as time marches inexorably on.

Luna dared to love the mortals. She picked out lovers, paramours, even the occasional husband. But all I ever wanted was a family. A child, a son or a daughter, to raise and teach. Perhaps that instinct, that yearning to mother, was what set my hooves on the path that culminated in this: a golden throne and a country full of my children, none of whom will ever know me as anything other than the spectral visage in the portraits.

“Sunset, don’t.” My voice catches in my throat. Weak and broken. “Whatever it’s promised you, whatever it’s said, it’s lies.”

She looks back over her shoulder, and sneers. “It’s you who lies, Mother. And I’m done listening.”

I scream out another warning; too late, too late. And my daughter’s pretty blue eyes are flooded with black, and the darkness spirals out of her like a blight. A tendril reaches for me, burning, freezing, cutting. Blood pours down my face like tears.

A scream half-stifled in my throat, I jerk awake. I press a hoof to my heart. A nightmare. It was only a nightmare.

I remember the first time one came for me, less than a week after Luna…left. I didn’t know what it was. Nopony did. We all expected her to swoop in and save us like always, but she never came. Eventually, my little ponies forgot that she ever had. Only I remember, and every time it’s like the scar is cut afresh.

The door cracks open. A stallion’s voice. “Everything alright, Princess?”

I have to work to keep my voice even. “Yes, Alabaster. Thank you. Just a bad dream.”

He hesitates, even shuffles one more step into the room. The torchlight in the corridor beyond refracts off his golden armour. “Are…you sure, Princess? I could…I could stay, if you wanted.”

A tentative suggestion, so shyly offered that it must have taken him months to pluck up the courage. I’ve received many such over the years, and I’ve learned how to handle them gently.

“Thank you so much, Alabaster. You’re one of the kindest of my guard, and I want you to know how much I appreciate it. But truly, I’ll be alright. I just need to get a little sleep.”

He flushes, dips his head in an approximation of a bow, and retreats.

For centuries my ponies speculated about my lovers. My lack thereof. Poets and playwrights wove fanciful tales of a love lost eons ago. I smiled and kept myself aloof on that one subject, and eventually the myths took on a new shape. The virgin princess, the angel untouched. My unattainability was a part of my appeal, before the darkness took my beauty. Since then I have not cared to know how they see that aspect of me.

I suppose I should be grateful that I still elicit these attempts. That’s what Luna would say. But…but in the firelight his hair is the exact same shade of yellow, and it makes me think of darkness unspooling and a young mare’s screams distorted into a laughter not her own.

The golden thread around my heart, my head, my throat, cinches a little tighter, and though I pull a pillow over my face, sleep does not return.

My heart is pounding in my throat. Blackness hovers at the edge of my vision, despite the legion of torchbearing guards and the glowing stones at the throat of Twilight and her friends. I feel lightheaded.

Here it is. The final test of Twilight’s abilities.

My faithful student. She has done everything I’ve asked of her and more. She found the other bearers, she found the Elements themselves, and she has forged them into a workable team. They have faced windigos, ursa majors, even a petty wizard wielding an artefact that Luna crafted in her last, most unstable years.

But now everything comes down to the wire. Nine hundred and ninety-nine years of planning. The work of my life and a hundred others, including the one who waits behind the door.

One year until my sister returns.

On the threshold, looking at the mossy bricks, Twilight pauses. “Princess, who…who was she?”

I can only summon a sad smile, sagging on the right as it always does. “You’ve read the books, my faithful student. You know who she was.”

She bites her lip. “But…to you?”

A tear hovers on my lashes until I blink it away. “She was my student, like you.”

She was my daughter, like you.

A look of grim determination washes over her face and she sets her muscles. Her friends range up behind her: the farmer, the baker, the weather-pony, the seamstress and the animal whisperer. Six mares from every walk of life, and all willing to lay down their lives for their Princess, for Equestria, for Harmony. What have I done, to deserve ponies like this?

Even now, I could draw them back. I could send them home to their families and their friends. You’ve done enough, I could say. Risked enough. I could leave the wards unbroken. I could leave my daughter down here with the monster that consumed her another year, or another five hundred. She’s already gone, and to her it would make no difference.

But Luna is coming home, and this is the only chance I have. I need to know that Twilight can purge the higher magics.

And there’s a slim chance — a tiny sliver — that Sunset might survive this. She’s mortal, yes, but it’s only been ten years. Perhaps there is some part of her left untouched. Uncorrupted.

I meet Twilight’s level gaze, and I nod. “If you are ready, it’s time.”

She jerks her chin, and I light my horn to unseal the bindings. As I work Twilight gathers her newfound sisters close and they sing the song of Harmony, and the Elements burn brighter and brighter against their chests, until the soldiers have to cover their eyes.

With a burst of magic, the bricks crumble away, and Twilight lets the purifying rainbow wash into the room where Sunset starved and died and lived again. I see only the slightest movement — a skeletal figure, burnt and black, held together only by the swirling dark magic — and then the light floods over her, and carries her away. A single scream, rich and ripe with hatred, is all that remains.

When the Elements sleep again, it is very quiet. Twilight and the others drift slowly back to the floor, the extra colours vanishing from their manes, and Twilight looks up at me with tears in her eyes. “I’m so sorry, Princess. I hoped—”

I put my wing around her and hold her close against my side. She is my family now. She is all the family I have left. “—No, Twilight. You did everything you could.”

It will be different, when the moment comes. When my sister returns, my past and my present crashing together in one terrible impact.

It has to be different. It will.

“Luna,” I say, breathless with hope. Can I reach her?

And yet even now, I am afraid. Not just of the darkness that rides her, puppeteering her as it did Sunset. But with fear that she will look on me with the same expression that was so common in the early days of my maiming. Pity mingled with disgust.

When we were young we were beautiful together, and now we are both broken.

“Sister,” she snarls, head lowered as she rises from her impact crater. She is vantablack as the void and twice as terrible, and her eyes cast a sickly green glow across her cheeks.

“Luna, I am begging you to stop for a second,” I whisper. “I know it’s still you in there.”

She laughs. Bitter and manic and mad. “It hasn’t been just me in here for a very long time, sister.”

And then her eyes flash up to mine, her face a rictus grin of evil — and she falters. The Nightmare — Luna — looks into my eyes, one perfect and one a ruin, and the shock of my grisly face is enough to make my sister stumble.

And that is how I know there is something left to save.

Relief courses through me, hot as magma, and I drop my flared wings, revealing the six little ponies ranged behind me. “Twilight, now!”

“Come on, girls,” my faithful student cries, and her friends begin to glow. As one, the six of them rise into the air, and the Elements sparks to life.

“No!” snarls the Nightmare, but she is too late. My little sister is still there, deep inside her, and I know that the Elements will burn away only the evil. Luna will remain behind. The remnants of her will be reunited with the remnants of me, and we will be as one. Two shattered halves coming together again.

The rainbow flares brighter, crackling like flame, and the Nightmare is screaming, screaming. I have known the lash of magic, the way it sears through skin and bone, and I edge closer and closer to the maelstrom. The fur on my face tingles from the heat, and the rough scar tissue aches with the memory. But this is light magic. This time it will not hurt me.

And just as suddenly as it began, the aurora fades. Twilight and her friends alight upon the earth, but I am staring only at the crater.

At the filly who crumples to her knees.

I skid down the side of the crater towards her, tears prickling in my eye, falling to my knees beside her. “Luna?”

She looks up at me. Her pale blue mane swings down to cover half of her face, and for a second it is like I am looking into a mirror.

“Tia?” she says slowly, like a sleeper resurfacing from a terrible dream. “Is that you?”

“Lulu,” I choke out, and I enfold her in my wings.

“What happened…” she whispers, raising a tentative hoof, “What happened to your face?”

In the east the dawn is breaking, my horn tingling with magic and joy, and the first rays of light come creeping through the ivy that coats the old castle that was once our home.

“It doesn’t matter,” I tell her, and for the first time, the words are true. The golden thread has come full circle, and the sun can shine once more. “All that matters is you’re home.”