CHAPTER 1 — THE FACELESS PRINCESS
The subdued ring of golden hooves on stone, echoing in the empty halls. The soft susurration of a mane that never stills.
The throbbing of an old wound torn open. Another betrayal. Another family broken. And the constant rubbing of the bandage against my furless flesh.
With a sigh, I take hold of the bandages in my magic and peel them away. There’s no one here to see, and the bleeding has long since stopped. I heal fast, but it seems there are some wounds even goddesses can’t recover from. This is the first time I’ve ever hit my limit.
The air is cold against the fresh-grown skin, still raw and pink. Puckered and withered. I don’t need to see myself to know exactly how I look. Magic dark enough can taint anything. Even me. And five thousand years of youth have ended in this.
There’s a mirror up ahead, covered by heavy damask, and I shy away.
But I was a vain pony when I was younger, and the palace is full of reflections. Ancient silver polished to a high sheen, huge sheets of modern glass. Even the bright panes of my stained glass windows are made to throw my own beauty back at me, pale imitations of my light and the rainbow of my mane.
All covered now, curtains and drapes and even bedding from the guest chambers, dredged up and used to smother any hint of the thing I’ve become.
The stone tunnel is dank and dark. Water drips somewhere far behind me, and the air is too humid for comfort. The only light comes from the golden glow of my horn. I stand before the brick wall, and I listen.
“Mother!” She is screaming again. She screams so often now. “Mother!”
It’s been so long since I have been anypony’s mother. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like. The joy of a foal looking up at you, their eyes bright with a new discovery. The warm weight of a trusting little soul in your arms, drifting away to sleep. The magic of seeing them blossom like a rose in spring.
“Mother!”
Now I remember the worst part of it, the only part that matters.
“Let me out!”
The loss.
My ponies are so good. So faithful. I asked for solitude and peace from myself — reflected either in the mirrors or in the horror of their expression — and they have given it to me. But now I wander alone in my echoing palace, isolated as a star in the night, as a pony alone on a barren planet, and I wonder...is this how my little sister feels?
Somewhere in the archives is my first mirror, a small disk of obsidian that we pulled from the earth in the crater that marked our descent. Luna polished it herself, long hours spent scraping it with fumbly magic, so different on this plane from the one we were used to. When she was done she turned it round to show me. Glossy and black as her night, my pale face and rounded eyes the moon within it.
The next corridor is lined with my portraits. One after another, more reflections dressed in the ever-shifting fashions of successive ages. In togas, crinolines, high lace collars. My hair piled and plaited and twisted in a hundred different ways. Only my face is unchanged. Always the same beautiful smile, secure and serene. A pillar for my ponies to look to, a beacon to light their way.
Those painted smiles make me sick. The faithfulness of the artists, the loving labour in every brushstroke — all of it now reduced to lies.
I will have to do what I did with Luna’s portraits. Nine hundred and ninety years ago, though it seems like yesterday. One by one, taken down, wrapped carefully and trapped in stasis spells so they won’t decay.
I thought it best to hide her away, while I waited. Let them forget her, one by one, as the decades passed. Why should all of us wait, after all? Why should all of us mourn, when I can bear the burden alone?
I’ll do the same with my own pictures. Close them up and lock the door. In a hundred years, my ponies will hardly remember that they ever had an unscarred princess.
When you are back, little sister, I said to her last portrait as I sealed the door on her, We’ll hang them up again.
Always when. Never if.
And until that night, I believed it. I worked for years. For centuries. Training myself to wield the elements alone, without her. I did it once. Why not a second time? Purge her as I sealed her, free her from the shadow. But the elements turned from me. I used them against her, when she was theirs and they were hers every bit as much as mine.
When I realised I was incapable I turned to my ponies. In Starswirl I thought I found my answer. But he was four hundred years too soon, and dark magic stole him away.
Now it’s stolen Sunset too.
She was noble, courageous, kind. With enough raw magic to stop a meteor in its tracks. She could have built a team, forged the harmony needed, and saved my sister. In saving Luna, she could have saved me. Instead she’s doomed us both.
They come to me when I dream. Dark faces. Voices whispering in the night. Failures and deaths and losses too numerous to count.
Luna is not here to protect me from the nightmares anymore.
“Celestia,” a faceless creature whispers. “Celestia.”
From behind a brick wall, Sunset screams for me.
The creature steps forward into the light, and I realise that it is me.
I round another corner and come face to face with a pair of dark oaken doors. As sparkling clean as everything else in my beautiful home, glossy and polished to a high sheen. And I see my ruined face staring back at me.
My left eye is amethyst-bright, shining and soulful in the pure white fur of my face. My cheekbone is high and fine. My flesh is firm and plump. I am as I have always been. Glorious. Flawless.
But then the shifting rainbow of my mane moves, and the cavity beneath leers out at me.
Blasted red flesh, scars raised and hideous. A drooping mouth, the muscles wasted and vanished in the dark flames. A mere whisper of flesh left over the skull beneath — and the gaping black maw where my left eye once was.
Like the dark mouth of a cavern, it yawns wider and wider. An endless pit, a black hole. A monster coming to swallow me up, like it took my sister and my student and a thousand others. A curse I will never be free of, no matter how long I live.
It’s more than vanity. It’s a failure, another failure in an endless list of failures. Another loss, another scar that I will bear for all eternity. Luna, Starswirl, Clover, Morningstar, Magnolia, Mistymorn, Sunset. How many more will I lose? How many more losses can I bear? I’ve seen a thousand thousand ponies born, and all of them die. Without Sunset, even Luna is lost forever. My one constant. My only hope of getting her back. Gone.
I stare at the ghoul in the doorway, and my breath is jagged as glass, catching in my throat. I am the face of a nation, and now I have no face.
CHAPTER 2 - THE GOLDEN THREAD
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.”
