Ascendance: The Starswirl Chronicles

Grand General Luna was in the Room of War with her most trusted advisers, planning the next assault on the tribes of Pegasopolis. The rogue tribe of pegasi was proving to show stiffer resistance than she had originally credited them with, and it was now doubtful whether not Equestria's many air divisions would suffice against their lithe warriors trained to maneuver the skies from birth.

General Hot Cakes currently held the floor, his hoof moving a wooden token representing the Equestrian Air Force Fifth across a map of the theater of war. "As you can see, your Highness, if we move the 5th Division of the Air force to their sky village of Sky Haven, they'll be forced to move the majority of their troops to defend while the Airforce 7th's arcane warfare division sweeps into their capitol city and make it rain cloud-marble from the sky."

"I protest! General Hot Cakes, I'll be damned if I let my arcane warfare division go in there without any supporting troops!" Commander Wind Slice of the Airforce 7th slammed his hoof on the table, causing many a wooden token to topple over. "They'll get torn apart! I don't care how powerful they are, the rogue pegasi tribes have stronger! I've got to have my entire division if we want to have a remote chance of pulling this off."

"Stand down, Commander," said the general, scowling at the upstart for his impudence. "I must have the rest of your division for this assault; only an overwhelming force of our troops will cause those damned rogues to pool their defenses into Sky Haven. If we leave out a single division and they feel that it's a ruse, the entire operation fails!"

"The entire operation will fail if they decide that it's pointless to defend as well!" Wind Slice argued back, refusing to back down. "I will not stand by idly and watch as my men fly to their deaths!"

More voices raised around the table as each general or commander voiced their own opinions on the matter. Tension was high in the war room; Empress Corona had already expressed her displeasure to General Luna at the amount of time this campaign was taking thus far, and Luna in turn had allowed her annoyance be vented upon her generals. None of them wished to feel the wrath of either goddess they served, and so grew increasingly agitated as each day passed without a viable strategy coming forth.

Luna sighed to herself, raising a hoof to stop the argument from escalating into physical conflict. The generals instantly quieted, each pony returning to their seat and waited in fear for her rebukes. Satisifed that she had her attention, Luna turned to the unicorn on her right. "Professor Hardwing, how goes development on the cloud walking spell?" While her voice remained outwardly pleasant, Luna's voice was laced with anger at the incompetence of the research department. For years, she had been requesting the group of fools to work on a viable solution for having non-pegasi traverse the skies and they had shirked in their duties, creating a multitude of other spells they felt necessary for the welfare of the empire. Look at where that got them!

Well aware of his failures, the scholarly pony shook his head in shame. "Progess is yet to be seen, your Highness; I've had my best unicorns and pegasi working together to solve the issue for the past five months with no success. It appears impossible for earth ponies and unicorns, whose bones are solid and blood unsaturated with wind magic, to traverse the clouds. We have turned towards other alternatives, but those will not come into fruition for at least another y-"

Luna violently slapped her hoof across his face, causing the professor to fly out of his seat and hit a nearby wall with a crunch. "A year!? Professor Hardwing, are you mad? What do you propose we do during this 'year' of yours? Equestria is in the middle of a vicious sky war, and the best solutions you can come up with are a year away!?" Angrily, she advanced on the hapless researcher as he backed up even further into the wall, sweat pouring profusely down his bruising cheek.

"I-I'm sorry, your highness! I've been doing the best I can! Please, forgive me!" Whimpering, Prof. Hardwing attempted to bow in front of the angry goddess before being bodily lifted into the air by her alicorn magic.

"The time for forgiveness is over. You have failed us, Professor Hardwing," Luna said coldly, allowing her gaze to penetrate into the depths of his psyche. Applying pressure to his wings, Luna watched slowly as the fragile structures bent further and further until the wings broke with a snap, fragments of bone poking through the skin. Hardwing screamed, his vision turning red with pain while his limbs kicked out in protest.

Deadening herself to his pain, Luna continued to break the wings into smaller and smaller segments, her expression of distaste growing darker with each snap followed by an even louder scream. By the time the guards dragged away the broken, weeping professor, his wings were bent and broken in a hundred unimaginable angles and bleeding copious amounts of blood. Returning to her place at the head of the table, Luna almost retched. She hated having to resort to such tactics of torture, but her patience was being severely tested now a days, with the good will of her younger years being in short supply. Ignoring the expressions of horror and fear on the rest of her generals, Luna once again turned her attention to the current problem.

The main gist of the problem was that the rogue pegasi made up in skill what they lacked in numbers. Born in the harsh environment of the sky, they battled evenly and even above the divisions of pegasi Luna threw at them, defying her thrusts and counter-attacking in a display of complete mastery over a sense of airborn tactics that even Luna struggled with following. While she grudgingly respected the high commander behind the enemy forces, it remained a fact that this same commander was preventing her from following out her sister's will and thus caused her to grind her teeth in anger whenever reports of one failed skirmish after another slowly trickled in from the front. Her pegasi divisions were simply being outmatched man to man, and even the superiority of sheer numbers seemed to be useless in the raw might of the rogue army.

If the Airforce were to be accompanied by the Holy Equestrian Army, then the war could be over in a matter of  months. It's no secret that Equestria trained it's ground troops to be the elite of the elite, where even it's weakest soldier could take down five troops for every enemies' one. The only problem was that as all battles took place in the sky, the army would hardly serve to be more than heavily armored decoys at the mercy of a superior airforce that could safely rain death from the sky.

No, the war must be won with only her pegasi soldiers, lead by the fearless Lunar Stallions, a corp of hand-picked units by Luna herself that donned special armor made of moon-blessed steel. This armor transformed them from normal pegasi to things of legends, their wings becoming bat-like in appearance and their mouths growing fangs. It also augmented their physical and mental capabilities, making them true machines of death when unleashed on the battlefield. However, there were not enough of them to go around. She had begun this campaign with three fully armed squadrons of one hundred stallions; now, she fought with one hobbling on it's last legs. The war has been harsh to everypony, and Luna could only pray that it could end soon.

In fact, she realized, she wanted it all to end. The endless wars and bloodshed bore heavily on her soul, staining her mentality with foul impurities and guilt from the destruction she ordered her soldiers to cause. "It seems that even a goddess feels the weight of the souls she damns..."Luna whispered, a solitary tear running down her cheek before she realised that the Room of War was completely silent.

"This council is over for now - We desire a recess. We shall reconvene after lunch, or perhaps we shant. Should it be the case that we do not re-appear before you gentlemen, we trust that you are all skillful enough to plan the next offensive without us. Now, begone with you." Rising quickly from her seat, Luna stalked out of the room and sought the privacy of her chambers to vent out her vulnerability in peace.

Staggering as if in a drunken stupor, Starswirl lurched down the hall leading towards his room. His vision was starting to blur as all the exhaustion that had piled up over the past couple days crashed down upon his head, hammering away at his mind like a hammer on an anvil. Somewhere in his subconscious, a voice was telling him to get back ready for his evening classes, but an overpowering need for sleep crushed any rationality he might have possessed earlier.

Slowly yet surely, his hooves clopped one after the other down the hallway, the sound barely creating an echo as he haggardly moved towards his ultimate goal. So focused was he in his mission that he completely ignored the fact that an upset goddess was quickly making her way towards him, absorbed in her own troubling thoughts.

They would have, in fact, walked past each other without a second thought had not a cruel twist of fate suddenly twined their fates together. The first thing Luna noticed about her surroundings as something shook her from her increasingly glum mood was that an incredibly warm -scalding, in fact-  body had bumped against her before falling to the floor. The second thing was the smell of burning hairs as her coat started to singe at the edges from the intensity of the heat being generated.

"In my name, what in Equestria is going on!?" Exclaiming, she bent her head down to examine who had fallen against her. The unicorn stallion was of grey coat, medium build, and a charcoal grey mane that seemed to grow whiter by the second. A six pointed star with crossed quills was emblazoned on his flank, showing him to be an initiate of the Institute of War. He was breathing feverishly, muttering under his breath about Magus Aquus, final exams, and...mother?

Luna placed a hoof on his shoulder to rouse him before recoiling backwards, yelping in pain as her hoof burnt by his body. "Agh!" Summoning a cool glow of healing magic, she soothed the burnt hoof before gingerly planting it back on the marble tiling and staring unbelievingly at the unconscious stallion. "No mage should be able to generate this much heat and still live. This young one either possess a body of steel or..." Pausing to magically scan his body, she gasped. "Or a reservoir of solar magic." Luna's eye's widened at this discovery. In all of Equestria's recorded history, only Empress Corona (formerly Princess Celestia) could house such potent energy and live. To have a mere mortal with the same abilities could either have staggering implications for the war with Pegasopolis or spell out certain death. Carefully grabbing the still-burning mage with her lunar aura, Luna instantly teleported to her sister's chambers to discuss this new development.

It was merely ten minutes since Corona had dismissed Starswirl from her chambers before he appeared again in the grasp of her beloved sister Luna. Immediately, she stepped backward from the sheer force of the heat that now freely rolled over her and out a nearby window, nearly burning her papers on the way out.  "Sister? What is the meaning of this?"

"Look here, 'tia!" In her confusion, Luna had accidentally used Corona's old affectation before she was Empress of Equestria, but Corona ignored this minor transgression for the sake of learning what was going on. "Explain this to me now!"

Her horn lighting up with her lunar magic, Luna performed another full body scan that Corona would be able to see.

"I know not what I look at, dear sister." Corona held a blank expression of confusion. While she was indeed regent of the sun and more knowledgeable than many a pony in her kingdom, it was her sister who was patron of mathematics, medicine, and all other fields relevant to the advancement of Equestria's technology. Thus, she could not read the medical chart that was splayed out before her.

"This young one is brimming with solar magic. This is what's causing his body to overheat and the magic to spill out - although I'm guessing he could normally contain it under his own water magic. It appears that a major event of stress occurred to him which caused his mental barriers to finally break down and allow the magic to leak, although what actually caused this to occur was probably a combination of sleep exhaustion, exam stress, and the candidacy for Magus Apprentice."

"You gathered this all from a medical chart?"

"Actually, my dear sister, he was muttering about mother, the Maguus, and exams in his stupor."

"Oh," Corona said, her mouth forming a small frown of admonishment aimed towards herself. Her sister took no note of it, however, and instead decided to question her sister on the thing that was hanging over both of their heads.

"Sister, when didst you bless him with thy magic?" Luna's eyes were now stern towards her elder sister, laden with memories of an older time where blessings from the goddesses were freely given - with dire consequences for the general populace. Blessings had, in fact, been forbidden by an edict Corona herself passed in the four hundredth year of her reign, on the basis that the ponies who received them often ended up dying from magical overload.

Corona looked away, unable to continue receiving her sister's gaze. "It was when he had just been brought to me as a foal; his village was razed and the memories were scarring his well being. I cast an amnesia spell on his mind, mixed with the smallest vestiges of solar magic so that good luck would find its way easily towards him while he slowly regained his memories over the years. I did not expect the vestiges to bloom as they have." Her voice filled with remorse, Corona could only close her eyes in shame as she continued bearing the brunt of her sister's stare. Normally iron-willed and exuding an aura of fear, the Corona that stood before the regent of the Moon looked helpless and naked, fully accepting the consequences of her foolish actions.

Luna dropped her gaze, her attention returning to the stallion at her hooves. His breathing was growing slower as the magic poisoned his system, encroaching his natural resistances and seeking to destroy him from within. Sweat continued to pour down his face as the heat radiating off his prone form intensified to almost unbearable levels. "Sister, you have to remove the spell or he'll die."

"No. Should I remove it so suddenly, it will easily shatter his mind and render him unable to manipulate the arcane magics flowing within him." Corona's voice hardened into that of a dictator looking out for the interests of her empire. "Don't deny it, Luna; you've seen how much magic courses through his veins. If he suddenly learns that his parents have been dead for years, it will cause him to go mad. No," Corona said, looking towards her broken charge. "He must weather out the storm or die from it. If I can't harness his magical power for the good of Equestria, nopony can."

"You, you monster!" Luna's words jumped from her mouth before she could restrain herself. "Thou wouldst watch thy charge die before thee? We shall not allow it!"

"You shall not ALLOW it?" Corona's voice grew threateningly low, growling at the one she considered sister and slowly advancing towards her. "Remember who is an Empress and who is a mere General, Luna."

"Remember who also bears the same blood as thee, dear sister!" Luna stood defiant, puffing her chest out as if to rebuff her sister's advance.

The two stood glaring at each other, neither one standing down from the other. The minutes swam by. Drips slowly dropped from a nearby waterclock, marking five minutes till one in the afternoon. All the while, the heat in the room grew to unlivable temperatures and started to warp the stone with which it was built. Finally, Luna turned her head with a scoff. "We no longer know you, sister. If you shall not help thy charge, than he is your charge no longer. I will take him under my wing." Scooping up the now-burning mage and ignoring the smell of singed coat hairs, she magically transported herself to her own quarters

in order to be at the place where her powers were strongest before attempting to heal Starswirl.

Corona stood alone, for the first time questioning the wisdom of her decision. "Duty to Equestria, and Duty to My Little Ponies," she whispered to herself, quietly reciting the oath she had taken on her coronation day half a millennium ago.

Starswirl slowly awoke, feeling the gently sensation of weightlessness caressing his entire body. As he opened his eyes, a soft blue light filtered in from around him, causing his mind to immediately feel at ease.

"It appears that thou art fine, young one." Luna's relieved face appeared from the edge of his vision. "We hath wrought our most potent moon magics to prevent you from dying. We are glad that our efforts were not in vain."

"W-where am I?" Still drowsy, Starswirl stumbled over his words as he tried to make sense of what was going on. The last thing he remembered was being told that he was a candidate for apprenticeship to Magus Aquus and stumbling out of Empress Corona's study before everything went black.

"Rest, young one. All shall be answered in due time," Luna cooed, applying another layer of sleep magic over the tired young stallion and watching as he drifted into his subconscious once more.

The second time Starswirl awoke, it was pitch dark. He held the vague memory of seeing Princess Luna's face in another life, but could not remember where he was for the life of him. Struggling to sit up right, he lit up his horn with a small fire spell he had developed himself without ever realizing the significance of it and gazed at his surroundings.

He was in a largely circular room, the walls covered with astronomical charts and designs of inventions he had never seen before. Countless mathematical equations were scrawled across these designs, each one creating an aura of mystery and intellect for the young stallion. Looking at the decor, he realized that everything was themed after the nighttime sky - the drapes, the covers, even the carpeted flooring depicted the mark of the Moon Princess, Luna.

"Have thou slept well, young one?" Luna suddenly emerged, dressed in all the finery of her status. Starswirl gasped in surprise, the flame on his horn instantly extinguishing itself. She bore her royal chest plate, standing regally as she peered at her still disoriented subject. "We hope it has. It is our bed that thou hadst lain thy head against, you know."

Starswirl blushed deeply. While he did have many friends of the opposite sex, he had never actually been close enough to visit their rooms much less sleep on their beds. He attempted to wriggle under the covers to hide his embarrassment before realizing that it would only worsen his situation. After coming to this realization, he meekly stepped out of the bed and bowed low. "I thank you, Grand General Luna, for your kindness - I am still not surely aware of how I came to arrive under your care, but I am grateful."

"We will not require you to stand on ceremony for us - please, raise thy head and look us in the eye." Mirth bubbled underneath her voice as Starswirl slowly made eye contact with his deity. "You may call us Princess. Princess Luna."

"Yes, princess." As he finally gazed at her full beauty, Starswirl was unable to control his first impulse. "By Faust, you're beauti-" Starswirl suddenly shoved his hoof in his mouth before he could speak further. Captivated by Luna's enigmatic blue eyes and shimmering mane, his mind had made the classic Freudian slip.

"Ah, do you find us attractive?"  Luna slowly approached him, flicking her tail and giving him a sultry bat of the eye. "We do not blame thee. There are many who would have loved to have had the same sleep as you had." Lowering her tone to that of a lover, she whispered sensuously. "Would you like to bed with us?"

"Ah...erhm..." Starswirl's mind suddenly shut down, his eyes following her as she approached. A solitary bead of sweat threatened to break loose and fall across his forehead, and he slowly raised his hoof to wipe it off.

Giggling at his agitation, the goddess could no longer keep her composure. "We jest, young one! We wouldn't dare to ruin thy virginity before it was ripe for the picking!" Tears of laughter came rolling down her cheeks as she released her mirth without restraints.

Allowing himself a sigh of relief, Starswirl smiled good naturedly. "I wasn't aware that goddesses could have a sense of humor, no offense to you or your sister."

"Feh. It is our sister, Corona, who has lost her sense of humor. Leading a nation through endless wars can harden a pony's soul - even a goddess." With the last fits of laughter leaving her, Luna assumed a more somber temperament.

"But, you-"

"Just as we lead the army in its wars, we do not forget that we are also a pony. It has always been easier for us to remain in touch with ourselves, being the patron of the Night."

Starswirl nodded, slowly starting to see the differences between his two sovereigns. While Empress Corona was cold and stern most of the time and suffered extreme swings of mood, Princess Luna seemed amiable and easier to relate with. Perhaps it was because she acted more like a normal pony than the goddess she really was. In any case, Starswirl found he rather preferred this deity over the other. Suddenly, a thought came to him. "How long have I slept?"

"It is twilight's end - our sister has just nudged the Immortal Sun down over the horizon and we hath raised our Eternal Moon." Luna glanced at a nearby time-piece. "You should return to thy quarters. It is to my understanding that you must start the rites of challenge at dawn. It is best to get thy rest. Ah, before you go," Luna said, stopping Starswirl before he exited the chambers. "A blessing from me - do not worry, it will not hurt as much as the other one."

"What other on-" Starswirl gasped, the energies of the moon suddenly coming upon him. His mind felt completely reinvigorated, the exhaustion pushed away completely from his haggard frame and his energy filling up to the brim. Then the sensations came. Pure joy assaulted his very being, causing his laughter to ring forth like pealing bells. When the feelings stopped, he was filled with a sense of contentment and peace, as if all of his worries had melted away in his good feelings.

Looking up at his deity, Starswirl's eyes gleamed with thanks. "How can I repay your patronage, my Princess?"

"None is required, young one. Now, be off; I'm sure you will make an excellent Magus Aquus when you pass." Luna smiled to herself as Starswirl galloped down the hall at full speed in an effort to sleep as soon as possible. "He might be the most powerful unicorn in the castle - neigh, in all of Canterlot." Turning her face to the ever-vigilant moon, she pondered the wisdom of blessing him with her own lunar magic when Corona's sun magic still ran within him, but simple shook her head of these thoughts as she returned to her chambers. Time enough to think of the consequences later; she was curious to see what a unicorn mage of his caliber could do with the combined power of two alicorn blessings along with his already immense resevoir of magical energy.