Consumption
The skies over Ponyville, and indeed over every bit of the vast land of Equestria, were grey and black and hung over the land like a death shroud fit for a god. For indeed, it was.
The land had dipped into deep mourning over the loss of it's primary monarch, a sudden illness that none had expected could topple the physical goddess that it did.
A nasty illness too, as the doctors had found firsthoof. Celestia had wasted and grown weak, her breathing sucking and raspy as her body rejected the air it tried to pull in. Coughs had wracked her frame, bloody phlegm flying from her tortured body. Those doctors, sworn to the health of the realm and in whose hooves the Princess' life had been placed, had not been immune to the disease. Contracting it in short order, they had died much, much faster than the goddess.
It had taken the name Consumption.
The spread had been halted only just, with heavy quarantine and burning of the bodies. The entire castle staff in one, enormous funeral pyre. The last few days of the princess had been spent in seclusion, inside the depths of a palace turned abandoned mausoleum.
Even Luna, who had cared for her ailing sister in those final days, had been forced away. To think of her country, the leadership now forced onto her, was her duty now. She could not do battle with an invisible, all powerful enemy and, with heavy heart weighing the young princess down, she had left, leaving with one last, weak smile from her adored older sister.
Under penalty of death, Canterlot had been declared a forbidden zone. In those few weeks, it had taken on more fear than the Everfree forest as a place of residing evil, a city of the dead.
To Equestria, it was The City of Red Death.
Twilight Sparkle. Librarian of Ponyville. Element of Magic. Protege to Princess Celestia.
Drunk.
To one who had never known true hardship and misery, and one known of the lives of many tortured writers, it was a natural to turn to the bottle. It did, as the books had said, rob one of the peculiar ability to remember ones own name or vast stretches of ones life but only whilst under its affects.
And for weeks now, Twilight had not been absolved of these effects.
A bottle clinked under her hoof as she walked through her library, skittering over the wooden floor and clanking against a shelf.
The simple sound of glass on wood sent a symbol crash of pain through her mind that made her teeth gnash together. The lingering hangover still played havoc with her brain.
“Damn Applejack...”
The apple farmer, dispenser of most of Ponyville's apple based liquors, had cut Twilight off. While she had thought it alright for Twilight to drown herself in apple schnaps for a few days, as many in Equestria had done when hearing the news of the Princess death, ending up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning had shown that Twilight could not be trusted with the stuff.
And so, Twilight could now remember that her teacher, her Princess...her friend...was dead.
Her moods had been uneven lately and she knew how surly and unreasonable she was being but there was naught to do about it. A close death tended to shuffle ones life.
Her caretaker, for that was what he had become during her mourning, had been sent away. She had felt that Spike, a dear friend and almost a son to her, did not need to see his 'mother' in such a state of perpetual, stewed agitation. Rarity, generous Rarity, had offered to let Spike stay with her.
He would drop in of course, to make sure she was eating, but she would never let him stay more than a few minutes. She would never let any of her friends stay more than a few minutes. There was work to be done.
Twilight, in one of her more lucid moments, had thought to write a book about the Princess. Books had been written of her, of course, but not about her. Nopony had really known her well enough to tell a story less than legend about the figure that had ruled their land for a thousand, possibly thousands, of years.
It fell to her personal student to do it.
She sat at her desk, splotches of ink here and there, dotting her carefully sorted manuscript that had just reached three-hundred and four pages.
And, while the preservation of history was important, what she wished for most of all was the remembrance of Celestia. As a scholar, Twilight was not unfamiliar with 'the look'. A casual chat with a friend, wherein she quoted an ancient philosopher or pony of history would turn awkward when somepony Twilight felt she knew intimately was met with the eternal question, “Who?”
A tap-tap-tapping on the door caused a brief glance towards the door. She saw nopony through the window and simply went back to scribbling, the quill held tight in her magical glow.
Two more pages passed until she heard the tap-tap-tapping once more.
Another annoyed glance towards the door saw the slight movement of somepony outside.
“Just a few minutes. Just a few.”
She muttered to herself as she walked over. With that weak knock, it was probably Fluttershy. Her natural cringing posture, especially present when out at night like this, would have rendered her invisible through the window. She slid the lock back and let the door swing in.
“Fluttershy, dear, I-...”
There was nopony there.
She leaned out into the dark, brooding night and saw the small lights of her neighbors. A single gust of cold, whispering wind brushed her face and for a brief terror filled instant, she thought she heard a single word on the wind.
Celestia...
As quick as thought, she slammed the door against the infernal night. Bottles and papers shuffled under her back step and a cold sweat broke over her face.
“It's okay Twilight. Just the wind. Just the wind.”
She looked over the bottles, for even a small drought to calm her nerves but they were all bone dry.
Work was the only thing left to calm her and she took her still warm seat again and lifted her quill, looking over where she had just been writing.
Her breathing calmed as more words appeared on the page. Sadly, or perhaps gladly, she was almost finished. Never would Celestia become one of those “Who?”s. Not in a thousand more years, not in two thousand.
Tap-tap-tap.
Twilight froze, looking towards the door. Sweat covered her brow again and she remained seated.
Tap-tap-tap.
Her neck fairly snapped with how fast she turned it. The sound had moved, now coming from her room.
She swallowed. Her heart pounded. She stood. Every third stair she took up to her room was met with the tap-tap-tap. Surely no branch was that on beat.
Her room was dark and a small flash of magic lit the candle on her dresser, the small flame like a tiny point in the suddenly encroaching darkness.
Tap-tap-tap.
She glanced at the window, the source of the constant, rhythmic beat. She stepped closer, the light slowly filling the space just beyond the glass. The tapping became frantic, beating furiously on the pane of glass.
She took a final step, and sighed.
Beyond was her pet, Owlowicious.
“Wha-! How and when did you get out?”
She unlatched the window, letting the bird hop in. He landed atop her back, shaking his feathers to rid them of the cold night air that had seeped into his bones.
He didn't bother to answer and merely snuggled down into his own feathers while Twilight latched the window and took them both back downstairs.
She sat back down, no longer concerned with the wheres and whats of the owls journey when she had so much to do.
An hour passed, Twilight writing furiously and forgetting the world around her as she laid the finishing touches on the long life she had...summarized.
She glared at the manuscript. A summary. To put the whole of a ponies life into three hundred pages seemed...wrong. They didn't convey knowing the real Princess. But, Twilight supposed, it was the best she could hope for.
“Isn't that right, Owlowicious?”
The bird, settled atop the large knight figure in the center of the library and uttered his only verbal stock.
“Who.”
Her heart froze at the mere utterance of the word but, once again, her rational mind reminded her of certain facts. There was little he could do to help the way he spoke and Twilight knew that she shouldn't take it personally.
She floated her manuscript up in front of her and cleared her throat.
“Listen to this. 'A Lifetime of Sun: The Life of Princess Celestia'.”
“Who?”
Twilight stopped again, glancing at her bird friend atop the bust of the royal guard. Her eye twitched slightly at the word, so aptly delivered at a moment that seemed to beg a question.
She strained a smile, her lips pulled tight over her teeth.
“Not much is known of the personal life of Princess Celestia....”
She stopped a moment, eyeing the bird. He preened his feathers, nibbling at his coat. Of course, it had been merely coincidence after all.
“...and I, Twilight Sparkle, don't pretend to know her deepest secrets. But I feel that ponies should know of her private moments, her personal life that she showed to so few. The real, kind mare that was the Princess.”
“Who?”
Twilight tossed her manuscript to the ground, rage on her face as she turned to the roosting bird surveying the library from the bust.
“STOP SAYING THAT WORD! SHUT UP!”
She picked a bottle from the debris on her floor, shooting it toward the bird with enormous force. Her aim was off, the bottle shattering on the head of the statue and sending a spray of glass shards across the room.
“Who?”
Twilight grabbed another, pitching it past the unflustered bird. The light of the candles around the room cast a hellish underglow on the small bird, growing him to monstrous proportions as his body seemed to be joined by the shadows behind him.
“Stop it! Stop it, stop it!”
Twilight walked forward, tears in her eyes, streaming down her haggard features.
Owlowicious looked down upon the young, distraught mare, his eyes black and his face as an unblinking demon's.
“The Princess doesn't deserve to be forgotten! She-she did so much! She was so loved! You can't forget her! We should never forget her or everything she did to make our lives happy!”
Her sobs stuck in her throat, her legs shaking as she collapsed into a pile of ink blotted pages and empty bottles.
“We can't f-forget...we should never f-forget...
Her bloodshot eyes turned up to the roost of the demon seeming bird. He glared down, his features sharp with the accompaniment of the single candle that lit the room. His eyes locked on hers, drawing her into the pits of Tartarus that dwelled therein. The single syllable rolled from his tongue.
“Who?”