Passing the Torch

by Deparnieux

Rating: everyone
Tags: Adventure, Princess Celestia, Twilight Sparkle, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Princess Luna, Comedy
Length: 5772

Celestia teaches Twilight how to "raise" the sun.

If Twilight wants to be accepted as the rightful ruler of Equestria, she must be able to raise the sun all on her own. Thankfully, Celestia's many years managing a self-conscious student has taught her a thing or two about getting Twilight to do things.

Published 2024-10-11 21:30:00 UTC
Last updated 2024-10-11 21:30:00 UTC

Passing the Torch

“Such a wonderful gift…” Celestia chuckled and mused as she sipped appreciatively from her teacup.

Of course it was enchanted, just like every one of Twilight’s many presents to the Princesses. This one in particular was connected to a series of vats under the royal kitchen, where a small staff of Celestia’s former staff brewed her favorite teas by the gallon- it was the new Princess’s way of keeping the old guard employed and ensuring that her mentor never ran out of her unusually exotic tastes. The drinker could even choose what drink filled the cup, by clicking one of six appropriately engraved runes on the side of the cup opposite the handle.

Celestia took another draught, swirling the still-full cup around as she reflected the gorgeous starry sky that hung over Silver Shoals in the early afternoon. She had seen the stars rotated backwards multiple times over the past thousand years, but there had always been some greater reason for the sun’s absence that she had never truly appreciated the beauty of her skyward patchwork, so long ago.

Even more delightfully, the ponies around her were not taking it nearly as well. One quick glance at the resort villa behind her displayed the full extent of Equestrian panic, replete with boarded-up doors and burning houses. The normally conserved concierge and his staff huddled behind a picket of desks and chairs, wielding a hodgepodge mix of sharpened stakes, torches, and their pegasus razor-wings.

“Tis’ one thing not changed in all my years of absence,” Luna commented as she reclined beside her sister on the beach. “I find our citizens' readiness for crisis reassuring.”

“Shame on you for delighting in innocent ponies’ suffering,” Celestia smirked sidelong at her. “Perhaps we need to go back to counseling…”

“I need not my powers nor my eyes to see that stupid grin on your face, sister,” Luna yawned back. “If you will not make merrier discussion while we wait for Twilight, wipe it off and hush up.”

“Mmm.”

The two of them waited for a little while longer, cooing at passing meteors.

“Does it usually take her this long to-”

“Just give it a second…” Celestia took one last sip before dumping her teacup empty on the sand and wrapping it in a soft, impact-resistant parcel and setting it aside.

Luna opened her mouth to ask, but quickly opted for a mind-reading spell for the sake of efficiency and patience. The icy lancet of moon magic wound its way up her horn and splintered toward Celestia, only to be deflected by a transparent shield, evidently set up long in advance for precisely that purpose. Both annoyed and perturbed at her sister’s foresight, Luna tensed up in her beach chair, peering nervously around for any signs of whatever it was that Celestia so clearly saw coming.

Luna paused when she saw the lavender comet soaring across the sky, but only for a moment before writing it off. Her ears pricked up at its sonic boom as it crossed the center of the horizon, but she turned the wrong way, assuming that Celestia’s trickery was burrowing somewhere beneath her. In the meantime, the comet began to wobble, turning this way and that and up and down, as if in confusion- as if a rock from space was a thing that could be in confusion.

Suddenly, it straightened out and turned in a brisk, triumphant movement as the cosmic missile locked onto its target. Luna looked up in alarm as the grating sound of tearing air came within earshot, seeing the little purple thing bearing down on the beach at great speed.

“Holy-” she cried out, scrambling to escape her chair, but she could hardly begin both oath and movement before Twilight blasted in, throwing up a wake of water as she roared in over the shallow sea.

At the very last moment, a faint, orange wedge of solar magic materialized in front of Celestia, diverting her screaming student just ever so slightly to the right- right into Princess Luna.

“Oooh,” Celestia marveled as Twilight collided with her sister in a glorious crash, sending the two yowling alicorns spinning off along the sand and throwing up shattered pieces of Luna’s plywood chair a dozen feet in the air. The sheer vibration of the impact shuddered the nearby ground, sending Celestia’s bottomless teacup into a bounce that would have been fatal if not for its protective wrapping. “Right on time.”

“Princess Celestia!” Twilight’s head exploded out of the wreckage and she teleported over to her mentor, shaking off a shower of purple feathers as she ran. “Are you okay? Why haven’t you raised the sun yet today?”

“Twilight-” her former mentor put on her most calming smile as she sat up in her chair.

“It’s okay, I understand,” The purple alicorn rambled as she reached into her leather saddlebags, magically withdrawing a whole host of magical scrolls. “I’ve lost my powers many times- ooh, probably shouldn’t have said that… But! But that means I have here the biggest dictionary of devices capable of draining such a powerful ability and I’m sure we’ll get you back up and running in no time.”

“Twilight…” Celestia sighed as her student paced a circle around her in the sand. Resigned to her obsession, the white alicorn fluttered out of her chair and sat down in the sand, taking the opportunity to stare listlessly off into space.

“Since I managed to fly here, there can’t be any magic jammers,” Twilight mused to herself, dismissing a few dozen sheets of paper from the hurricane of scrolls surrounding her. “Tempest and Starlight both assured me that Tartarus is secure, and Fluttershy is handling Discord… Nightmare Moon maybe? Has she been here recently?”

Twilight perked up from her reading and looked around, as if expecting a polite roll call from the despotic empress of the night. However, in a convenient answer, Princess Luna chose that moment to rouse herself from unconsciousness in Twilight’s arrival crater.

“Ohhhh,” she moaned in pain, her head airy from the terrible impact. “O Sister, sister,” she faintly wheezed. “Wherefore art thou, sister?”

And then she slumped over again.

“Oookay,” Twilight dropped a few hundred pages from her whirling compendium. “Not going to ask about that. Now what could it be…”

“Could it be,” Celestia interjected helpfully. “Could it be that I just did not feel like raising the sun today?”

“Sure,” Twilight absentmindedly ruffled through the papers, not really paying attention. “I have that possibility written down right here- wait, what?!”

The much-smaller pony buzzed her wings as fast as she could and grappled Celestia’s head with her front hooves.

“What do you mean, ‘didn’t feel like raising the sun today?’” Twilight howled indignantly. Before she could quite remember who she was talking to, Twilight gave Celestia’s muzzle a vigorous shake and began to prepare the most damning consternation she could possibly muster.

Finally annoyed enough to take action, Celestia drew in a short breath and welled up a burst of solar magic. Mindful of both an ancient pledge of abstinence and the fact that she would rather not set fire to the adorable purple hummingbird currently assaulting her, her white horn only flashed for a moment before the magic splayed itself across her white coat, causing each horsehair to burn with a stinging iridescence. Orange briefly rumbled across Celestia’s majestic mane of turquoise aurora.

The defensive move was just enough power to zap Twilight, like a playful swat that brought her sitting obediently before her and reminded her of the still-very-pertinent pecking order among the cosmic gods. Not for the first time, Celestia’s resplendence completely overtook Twilight’s senses, and within moments she found herself with her wings tucked neatly to her sides, the frantic papers now lying inert on the ground.

“She’s so prettyyyy,” Luna found herself staring woozily at her glowing sister. She leaned in conspiratorially to a passing hermit crab and gossiped: “You think I have a chance with her?”

“So… why don’t you want to raise the sun?” Twilight carefully sounded the words out. Even when the statement was done, she opened her mouth a moment to recant, but upon a double-check of her words everything looked to be in order.

“My dear, faithful student,” Celestia sat down, staring fondly at her former student. Twilight had grown even in the months since they had last met, to the point where muzzle-to-muzzle, as they were, she could almost see her chin. Celestia’s kind smile only grew as Twilight realized she was sitting up too high, and she bowed her head in deference. “Oh, my. That hardly seems appropriate, don’t you think?”

“What do you mean, Princess?” Twilight glanced up at her.

“Princess?” Celestia snorted, glancing up at her noticeably crownless head. “Tell me, Twilight, what are you wearing?”

“My saddlebag?”

Celestia frowned, and with little more than an errant thought, a piercing solar blast turned the leather bag latched onto Twilight’s barrel into little more than ashes.

“Aw, that was a gift from Rarity,” she mumbled, leaning down to see if anything was salvageable. As she did so, her electrum tiara tumbled off of her head and embedded herself in the sand.

Suddenly separated from its owner, the artifact unleashed a low pulse of magic through the sand, rippling across the beach and the ocean, and echoing across a distant lighthouse. As Twilight leaned down to pick it up again, she could hear the crackling and burning of the solar energy locked inside, and when she picked it up in her mouth, the chilly exposure of the moon ruffled her feathers and made her withers tingle with its secrets.

“Oh,” she mouthed. “So, that means you want me to…”

“Yes, Twilight,” Celestia drew herself to her full height and spread her wings.

The orange light of dawn suddenly appeared on the horizon and great harnesses of fire wrapped themselves around Celestia’s great neck. With one thundering jump, she leapt into the air, dragging the sun behind her like an obscenely massive chariot, tumbling across the sky and down again, bringing back the cool night. She turned a small patch of sand into glass when she landed, her incredible powers still blazing around her legs in a shield of aurora and in scorching curls about her mane.

“Behold! As the new Princess of Equestria, it is time for you to raise our sun,” Celestia boomed.

Twilight’s whole body stiffened like a board and what felt like most of the blood in her body rushed to her head as she tried to formulate an appropriate response.

“Meep.” Twilight croaked as her wings went completely slack, her eyes glazed over and she crumpled into the sand, face down, butt up.

Celestia waited a few moments before deciding her student really was out cold, upon which realization her halo of power slowly dissipated into the air around her. On impulse, she gave Twilight’s purple flank a poke, which failed to elicit any sort of twitch or flinch whatsoever.

“I see your little ploy is going swimmingly,” A freshly-recovered Luna strolled around Celestia, smugly drawing her indigo wing over her sister’s back. “But however much I enjoy the distress of your well-endowed student, the goal was to have had her raise the sun by now.”

“Did you really just say that…?” Celestia’s shock brought a blush to her face before she managed to compose her features, which only made Luna’s smirk grow wider. As the dark blue alicorn leaned in for a closer look, Celestia’s wing gently pressed down on Twilight’s back, bringing her down to a more decent posture. Luna stuck her tongue out in defiance as her sister glowered down at her. “Luna, are you actually going to be useful or did you come here just to act like a boor?”

“I am retired, dear sister, and must no longer abide by the rules and decorum of our formerly High Office,” Luna declared with a yawn. “Nor did I ‘come here,’ for we retired in this pleasant villa together, and for that matter I am perfectly content to keep my duty of raising the Moon as thanks for the powers of Dreamwalk and the Mind-sight.”

And, so spoken, she merrily hopped off to the nearest row of thatched houses.

“Where are you going now?” Celestia groaned, a dangerously annoyed edge creeping into her voice.

“To salvage something from your botched promotion,” Luna crowed. “To fetch warm water to put dear Twilight’s hooves in.”

Twilight’s sense slowly swam back into focus some hours later, but ensconced in such a strange environment that they hardly seemed useful at all. Around her, stars swam in a such a manner that she could hear the otherworldly hum-crackle of nuclear fusion buzzing in motes around her, so close that she could feel their warmth on her muzzle.

But when she reached out to touch them, her hooves passed through empty space, their presence disappeared and it quickly became apparent that what she thought was a sandy sparkle next to her was some massive object impossibly far away.

“Uh…” She glanced over to her left to be greeted by the true splendor of her home planet. There the great space-island sat, mostly hidden by the barrier clouds that kept the world’s edge secure, but occasionally glimpses of the great blue oceans and majestic continents came through clearly enough for her to recognize the regions around Equestria. “Where am I?!”

“Oh, my dear Twilight,” Celestia chuckled from behind her. “If you can’t figure that one out, perhaps a brief stint back in magic kindergarten would do you some good…”

“We’re in space,” Twilight wheezed, her throat drying as she hyperventilated and twitched in total panic. “Why are we in space? How are we in space? What are we doing here in space?!”

“Twilight, I can’t get a word in if you keep yelling,” her mentor scolded. “And if you must keep on, at least pipe down a little. Contrary to what some may say, in space, I can certainly hear you scream.”

Eventually, Twilight regathered enough wits about her to realize that she was, at least for now, not in any immediate danger of suffocating or freezing or dying in any other way related to her being in space. When it dawned on her that a stress-induced heart attack was quickly gaining on that risk, she took a few deep breaths and allowed herself to simply float about and relax.

“So…” she tried again, without shrieking. “What are we doing in space?”

“As you know, raising the sun is an important duty for the Princess of Equestria to fulfill,” Celestia explained, stepping forward beside her student. “It must occur at precisely the same time, every day, without fail, or… Well, it’s about lunchtime and I’m sure by now downtown Canterlot is on fire.”

“But why do I have to do it?” Twilight looked up curiously at Celestia. “Aren’t you the Princess of the Sun?”

A shadow passed over Celestia’s face as the question registered with her, and silence took her for a spell.

“I am,” she said at last. “And believe me, Twilight, if that were the final word in the matter, I would raise the sun for you forever.” The shadow deepened on her face, and for a few moments Twilight could see the marks that history left on her mentor’s face. She thought she could see the outlines of both kisses and scars, made by ponies and creatures long lost to time, and as Celestia turned to face the light of Equestria, Twilight watched her rub the earthy dust of a newborn planet off her muzzle. In a voice the Sun Princess thought no one could hear, she whispered, “I want to raise the sun for you forever.”

Then she broke out of her reverie and turned back to Twilight with a kind smile.

“But alas, the role of Princess of Equestria and Princess of the Sun have been conflated for far too long,” she explained. “The expectation is that whoever sits in the Equestrian throne will protect the Equestrian people in every way, whether from monstrous threats to something as simple as a comforting dawn every single day. For you to wield anything less than that power would be… inconvenient.”

“How so?”

“Mmm, well, most ponies would find it unnerving that you still rely on me for such a large task,” Celestia reflected. “Some might even consider the transfer of power illegitimate without it. Surely you wouldn’t want that, right?”

Celestia teased her as she drifted downward, closer to the planet’s surface. As Twilight followed her, she suddenly became aware of an enormous, translucent platform underneath her. The outline was barely perceptible at first, but as the two of them descended downward, it swam more and more into focus until it solidified in her eyes as an enormous ring of glowing magic energy. Little sparkles jumped up at her feet as Twilight landed, and she marveled at its apparent ability to hold gravity and the relative softness of the material.

“It’s some of my proudest work,” Celestia couldn’t prevent herself from boasting a little. “However many thousands of years it’s been, and still as strong and stealthy as ever. This is where you’ll probably raise the sun from, so I suggest you commit the location to memory.”

“What if I can’t quite do that?” Twilight asked, trying to find some semblance of a landmark she could use to distinguish this particular point in outer space.

“Then you can use the maintenance pathway on top of Mount Everhoof,” Celestia pointed. “At the top of the mountain, gravity is weak enough that you should just be able to do a little hop and you’ll be in space.”

“A little hop?”

“My dear Twilight, I used to jump over the entire planet during the Summer Sun Celebration,” Celestia giggled as her student’s jaw slacked. “If you can’t even make it to escape velocity, I suggest you take a break from the library and hit the gym.”

With great effort, Twilight swallowed the urge to ask if Celestia and her famously large appetite was calling her fat.

“So… How exactly do you raise the sun?” She said at last.

“There are two ways,” Celestia said with a barely concealed grin. “I don’t quite think you’re ready for the fire-harnesses yet, so we’ll start off easy, you know, the everyday baby version…”

“Celestia,” Twilight growled, angry lines starting to draw over her eyes.

“Oh, very well, Miss Serious,” Celestia smiled, her fluttering wings betraying her internal laughter. “So here’s what you do…”

Celestia went over a series of spells Twilight would need to draw the sun out from underneath the planet. Surprisingly, only a few of them went anywhere beyond basic telekinesis- these being barrier spells that prevented the sun from scraping the underside of the planet as it passed under, and a few rejuvenation spells that would come in handy to remember when the Sun was “low on battery.” The telekinesis spells were nothing Twilight hadn’t been performing since magic kindergarten- at least, in theory.

Of course, hefting the Sun required a fairly different skill set than, say, fetching a sack of flour for Pinkie Pie or turning the pages of a book, and for this she was grateful for Celestia’s assistance. Working together, moving the sun into the enormous platform came quickly and more or less easily, and once it was solidly in place, ethereal clamps materialized next to the star and held it in place without any help from the two alicorns. A light blue shield automatically extruded out over the sun, protecting them from the intense heat.

“Okay, uh, now what?” Twilight asked. “How do we raise it over the planet?”

“Do you still remember how to play basketball?” Celestia squinted at something on the far side of the planet.

“Ugh, do I,” Twilight rolled her eyes as she momentarily forgot herself. “I still remember that one time Brony Jams chucked the ball at my head and the whole class laughed and wait, why are you asking me about basketball?”

She followed Celestia’s gaze across the cosmos and alighted on a small blue ring all the way on the other side of the planet- of course, due to perspective, that ring was probably comparable to the one that she stood on at that very moment and more than capable of holding the sun.

For the second time that day, all the color drained out of Twilight’s purple body and her jaw went slack. She summoned every last ounce of strength in her frame to not faint in outer space- because who knew where she might end up next- and took the deepest calming breaths of her life. Then she had to try very hard not to think about what she was or was not breathing.

“All finished?” Celestia waved her hoof in front of her face.

“I only made six hoops in eight entire years of PE!” Twilight squawked. “I can’t just go from that to shooting the actual Sun across the planet! Why- why can’t I just use my magic to pull the sun across the sky?”

“Twilight,” her teacher sighed. It wasn’t as if she didn’t understand her student’s reservations, but there was only so much incredulity Celestia could take in one day. “It took us twenty seconds of constant focus to move the sun halfway around the underside of the planet. If we used magic to move the sun across the sky, what do you think would happen?”

“Uh-”

“That’s right,” Celestia went on. “The day would either last for about forty seconds, or we would spend every last waking second of the day moving the sun carefully across the sky. It’s either that or you try to give it a toss, Twilight.”

“Um,” Twilight’s muzzle colored as she considered the enormous, fiery ball before her. “What happens if I overshoot?”

“Mmm, nothing, really. You might want to go fetch the sun in the evening so it doesn’t fly off into space, though.”

“And if I undershoot?”

Celestia chuckled heartily at that question and imagined such an aftermath. She supposed it would be rather like dropping a flaming basketball on a quaint little pottery city filled with adorable, blissfully unaware little mites. This unusually dense basketball would then melt through the floor and through the foundation of the house and then fall out across the edge of her little metaphysical experiment. And Harmony would have some very unpleasant things to say about that.

Celestia smiled and told Twilight, “Don’t undershoot.”

So said, she knelt down and touched her horn to where the sun’s equator met their magical platform and drew in a deep breath. Within moments, the star in its blue cocoon found itself enveloped in the pulsating, golden aura of Celestia’s incredible telekinesis magic, and the white alicorn gingerly lifted the Sun from its slot and laid it on her back, nestled within a much smaller, magical cone.

Suddenly unsupported by the much larger magical array, the blue shield around the sun cracked like glass around its base on Celestia’s back and fell away like eggshells from the hatching explosion.

Immediately a halo of light burst out of the sun as was allowed to bloom and flare. Unimaginable winds of searing heat followed the white-hot strands of burning gas, obscuring the vision of the two ponies and letting out a roar unlike anything Twilight had ever heard.

There was nothing to do for her but to follow her most basic instincts as the blaze rushed overhead, and Twilight immediately dove prone, huddling her head with her forelegs and trying desperately to conjure a magical shield that could stand up to the unleashed sun. So mortally terrified was Twilight that she could not even form the words to cry out for help. All she could do was scream, and the hurricane that lived in the Sun laughed at her voice and threw it far, far away.

“Twilight!” Twilight’s name exploded all around her as the winds of plasma curled and constricted through laughably gigantic vocal chords of superheated gas. “Ah, there you are…”

She felt a presence in front of her and momentarily peered upward to see Princess Celestia peering back down at her.

And she was awesome. The sun set fire to Celestia’s normally rainbow-colored aurora mane and tail, changing their colors entirely into white hot streams that tailed behind her like a comet. Her power routinely vented itself through her now-fiery breath, and when her eyes were visible from under the black smoke that majestically curled upward from every eyelash’s tip, Twilight could behold their new, strikingly orange sheen.

“Hi there,” the Sun tenderly shrieked. “You going to take it, or what?”

“I can’t!” Twilight cried out, even though she knew she was nowhere close to drowning out the sun. Tears of fear and inadequacy forming in her eyes never had the chance to run down her face before they evaporated. “I’m never going to be able to do that! How would- How could-”

“Oh, Twilight, I don’t need to hear you to know what you’re saying about yourself,” the Sun crackled and boomed. “As much of a model student you are, there are some lessons you consistently fail to learn.”

“I’m sorry,” Twilight sniffled and whispered, bowing her head as she prepared to go back to lying on the ground.

“Thankfully,” Daybreaker went on, sounding almost pleased with itself- if that is something a star can be- “Thankfully, this method of getting around that problem hasn’t failed so far. CATCH!”

The shock of the Sun being tossed on top of the cosmic platform caused the entire structure to tip like a seesaw, all the while groaning and creaking as the incredibly strong bonds of ancient alicorn magic were tested to their breaking point. Shaking off the remnants of solar energy, Celestia rushed over to the other side to help balance the weight, injecting every last ounce of magic she could muster to reinforce the struggling platform.

All in all, any normal pony would have dropped the sun. As a matter of fact, any normal pony would have been rendered three types of dead upon having the sun thrown at them, and the fact that Twilight did neither of those two things was cause for some celebration.

Unsurprisingly, the Sun knocked a week’s worth of breath out of Twilight’s lungs when it landed on her back. But before she could black out, the star’s power began to mesh with her own much in the same way it had with Celestia. Even as her mane began to adapt to its new life as living, white hot fire, that same scorching lifeblood pumped itself right back through Twilight’s lungs, refocusing her vision and priming her strength.

“YEEEOOOOOWWWWWW!” Reasonably, Twilight roared in discomfort. But this time, the Sun heard her, and amplified the sound through its terrible chords of plasma for the whole universe to hear.

Princess Celestia winced.

“So… heavy…” The Sun growled as Celestia sheepishly tapped it on the shoulder to ask if it was okay. “But… yesssssss…”

“WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!” The Sun exploded at her before Celestia could get any farther. “WHAT MADE YOU THINK THROWING THE SUN AT ME WAS OKAY?!”

“I knew you could handle it!” Celestia shouted up at it, smiling broadly as she watched her student rise underneath the enormous pressure of keeping a star balanced on her back. “And I’m so proud of you, Twilight… Now you have to throw it!”

The Sun gasped and wheezed as its new avatar slowly acclimated herself to herself. The power scorched the last bit of lavender out of Twilight’s coat, turning her wholly into a gleaming white even as her mane sparkled with an even more intense light. The purple in her eyes burned away in black puffs from her eyelashes, and revealed to Celestia the most striking pair of citrines she had ever seen- barring her own, of course.

Celestia watched patiently as the new Sun struggled through her first steps, then her next, and the next, until she managed to bring herself to a steady trot, then a canter, and then a full gallop towards the edge of the platform.

As it neared the edge, Twilight put all her weight into her front hooves and gave the mightiest buck of her life, catapulting the Sun a little ways out in front of her. Then she leapt from the platform and struck it with her forehooves, using all of her considerable powers up in an incredible magenta flash of speed and energy. Upon impact, she vented most of the solar magic that remained into her body in one last explosion to give the sun a little more momentum and to send her floating back down to the safety of the platform.

Twilight landed back on the platform looking as if she hadn’t slept in weeks and covered in singe marks. The tail end of her mane remained on fire even as it converted back into horsehair, but she hardly had the strength to stand, let alone extinguish it. No sooner had she touched down on the ethereal blue surface, Twilight’s eyes glazed over, and she would have fallen sideways and passed out if not for Celestia teleporting to her side and nestling her within the much-larger alicorn’s wings.

“Did- Did I do a good job?” Twilight whispered hazily at her.

Celestia grinned at the star now dutifully rumbling toward the planet across from them. At its current trajectory, the sun would almost certainly collide with Mount Everhoof at approximately midday and explode, but that could be fixed.

“Of course you did,” Celestia nuzzled her bedraggled student with her muzzle. “You did so well, and made me so proud… Just like I knew you would.”

“Oh!” Twilight coughed out a little cloud of soot in a spate of tired laughter. “You knew, did you?”

“Well, nopony ever knows anything,” Celestia’s eyes twinkled mischievously. “Call it an educated guess. You know quite a bit about those, don’t you?”

Twilight rolled her eyes, and belched what smoky remnants of fire magic remained in her lungs straight out into Celestia’s face, covering her mentor’s muzzle in streaks of black ash. She giggled foalishly at Celestia’s motherly smile and slumped over onto her side.

“How’s that for… an educated guess…” Twilight yawned and her wings went slack at her sides. Twilight’s breathing slowed even before her eyes closed, and she was fast asleep in Celestia’s wings before her mentor could think of a lullaby.

“Oh my,” Surrounded by the wonder of the cosmos, Celestia turned her head down and nestled it beside her student. “You’ve had quite the day, haven’t you?”

She brushed some of the larger flecks of ash away from Twilight with her hooves and gingerly groomed some of the areas around her eyes clean, all the while admiring her little purple furball.

Celestia looked around carefully for any sign that Luna- or anyone else for that matter- was watching. Once she was confident that they were alone, she leaned down and kissed Twilight on the forehead before sending her back down to Equestria in a flash of yellow teleportation magic.

“Okay, Princess,” she cracked her neck and glanced up at the sun’s slowly degrading orbit. “Let’s see if you’ve still got it.”

So said, she broke out into a brisk canter, along the far end of the ring. Within a few long strides it had become a headlong gallop, and Celestia’s acceleration only increased, her ethereal mane trailing so far behind her along the circular track that she could very nearly reach out and catch it.

When she had judged herself to be quite fast enough- just about fast enough so that seeing her far-off target was beginning to become difficult, Celestia turned and leapt toward the sun. The path of her leap carried her just to the edge of the star’s corona, where dozens of orange flares crested for her to grab onto. After catching the first of these in her teeth like a gigantic, fiery rope, Celestia’s forward momentum snagged on the Sun’s immense mass, and she began to orbit it at incredible speed. With every rotation, she would catch more and more of these plasmic threads, winding them together until she had a line to every part of the star’s surface and held it at a distance like some preposterously huge lever.

Then, all at once, Celestia unleashed a terrible blast of magic, halting her in place even as she yanked down on the solar handle in an abdominal crunch mighty enough to smash a continent into dust. She let go of the line as the Sun violently pitched upward and watched it fly a ways away on its newly corrected path, to ensure that its trajectory was just low enough that Equestria’s gravity might bring it back down in time for the evening, and of course to congratulate herself on the weight throw to end all weight throws.

“And now,” Celestia hummed to herself as the starry abyss of space began to fade as she replaced it with the comforting glow of her teleportation magic. Already, the familiar warmth of her and Luna’s quaint little retirement cottage began to splay itself out across her muzzle and she began to tap her hooves on the familiar pine floorboards. “Now, to look forward to another beautiful day, under the charge of a wise ruler, and…”

She watched in acidic resignation as Luna carried the still-snoozy Twilight from the living room by the scruff of her neck, tucking her in tenderly into Celestia’s side of the bed. Then four bowls of gently steaming water floated in from the kitchen, teetering uncertainly on makeshift magic saucers so that Luna’s naturally chilly indigo magic would not cool the liquid.

Celestia’s smile drew out into a patient grimace as Luna plopped Twilight’s hooves in the warm water, one by one. Then Luna giggled like a gremlin and skittered off into the bathroom, completely failing to spot her sister standing right behind her.

“And a sister, who I love very much,” Celestia coached herself. “Who I will not pick up and throw into the sun. Who I do not wish to harm in any way whatsoever… Physically...”

And then Celestia moved Twilight over to Luna’s side of the bed, warm water and all, and left to go fetch a spot of tea.

Author's Note

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