The sun stood proudly in the sky, watching over the land it was tasked to give its life-bringing light to. It had no consciousness to speak of, not one that could be understood with the relatively limited imaginations of its subjects. The one who controlled the sun was the one who had the real intelligence, and she used it to perform her role admirably.
It was almost time for the night to take over, though. It couldn’t be daytime forever, after all.
Slowly, the sun began its descent to the western horizon. Its heat was still billowing forth, but a cool breeze flowing amongst the trees carried the message that soon the cool night would grace the land with its presence. And in the royal castle, nestled within the boundaries of the most regal city in Equestria, a single pony stood on the balcony, looking out over the land that she and her sister had once ruled. She, the night; her, the day.
It would never be as it once was. She knew that beyond a shadow of a doubt, and it pained her immensely just to have to acknowledge that simple, yet powerful, fact.
She paced anxiously along the outer edge of the balcony, protected by a polished marble railing, lest anypony should lose their balance and plummet to the hard, unforgiving ground below them. It was only a fall of a few stories, but the designers of the castle still had not wanted to take the chance that any visitor to the royal castle be hurt during their stay in the royal halls.
Truthfully, as the princess of the night looked out, she was forced to concede that the once-bustling and vibrant castle had become a barren and desolate tomb.
Her hoof scraped the marble floor reticently, as a flood of memories came back to her, as they did every day as she performed her duties. She closed her eyes, trying to stanch the tears that she knew were coming. It never worked though, and today was no exception. She had cried so much over the preceding months that the area around her eyes was raw and pained, and the saltiness of her tears caused pin-pricks of pain in the most sensitive areas. She brushed them awkwardly away with her hoof and tried not to think about the pain. She would need all of her concentration to perform her duties.
It took all she had, most days, to control both the day and the night. As many things were, though, that she now almost counted as common facets of life, it had not always been that way. She had ruled with her sister, Celestia, for many millennia- not counting the time she had spent sealed away on the moon, of course. Her sister had reinstated her as the ruler of the night, though, upon her return to her former self after the Elements of Harmony had banished Nightmare Moon for good, and ever since then Luna had ruled alongside Celestia as equals.
At least, that is how the rest of pony society had viewed their relationship. In truth, though, Celestia had been wary of Luna since the day she had come back. Celestia had never let an inkling of that truth slip past her lips, but Luna was her sister after all. Celestia did not have to say what was on her mind, and for the most part Luna could tell what it was anyways. And besides that, Luna had not hesitated on a few occasions to use her abilities on her own sister, when she thought Celestia might have been hiding something important from her. Once, she even went into Celestia’s dreams. Only once. After that night, what she had seen made her vow to never try that again.
It was not a matter of her being ashamed at violating Celestia’s privacy, but simply what she had found out upon viewing Celestia’s dream that prompted that decision.
Luna recognized that her control over the sun was slipping, and she forced herself to put her memories and reminiscings to the back of her mind, so she could fully concentrate on the task at hand. She no longer had her sister at her side to aid her in the change between the periods of the day at large, so she had been forced to take that duty upon herself in addition to performing her regular duties. Before this, she’d had millennia to perfect her bringing the night, and she had risen admirably to the task. Now, though, the task laid upon her was much more weighty, and even the three or so months’ worth of practice had not made her any better at it. All it had done, in truth, was to make her tired and weary. She knew, though, that she couldn’t pass it off on anypony else.
The sun’s descent faltered for a moment, as Luna allowed that one simple fact to wash over her. She couldn’t ask anypony for help... because she was the only one. There was nopony else. There hadn’t been anypony else for quite a while.
Luna had to force herself out of her reverie, and in a few moments’ time, the sun began to descend once again. She sighed in relief; at least she had been able to bring herself back to reality long enough for her to continue doing her work. Moments like this used to bring her to her knees, crumbling her resolve to the point where she had to rest just to gain back enough strength to continue with her duties. Now, though, she had gained at least some modicum of mastery over her burden, and for that she was thankful.
The sun continued its path towards the horizon, and inside she wept. The breeze blew again, a bit cooler this time than the last. Still, the princess of the moon strained against the forces that were conspiring for her to fail, and sweat beaded above her eyes, making her fur shine in prismatic, almost rivulating colors. Soon, the fur on her forehead was matted down, but she dared not raise a hoof to wipe it away. The first part of her task was almost done, and she knew that once that was done, she could begin her true calling’s work, and that was going to be the easy part.
She knew that in the end, though, easy did not really mean anything. Whether it was easy or hard, she still had to do it, and she resolved that she would continue to do so, no matter what. She felt like she had no choice in the matter... the same way that she had never really had a choice in anything about her life. Her ascension to the princess-hood, the reasons why she became the ruler of the night to begin with... everything about her life, it seemed, had been pre-destined long before she had even come into existence.
In a few, long moments, the sun was completely on the other side of the horizon. Darkness washed over the land, and she stopped to take a quick breather. Her whole body ached from the tremendous effort that she had just undertaken, but she was already feeling better knowing that her sister’s duties were not being neglected in her absence. She felt like Celestia would be proud, knowing that she was being strong in her elder sister’s stead. If she could feel anything at all, wherever she was.
That was one thing that concerned Luna the most. She knew that her sister had passed on to whatever after-life there was, but even with her seeing abilities, she had not been able to get into contact with her lost sister, no matter how hard she’d tried. And she had tried, even to the point of going into an almost comatic state once. Only her remembrance of the good times she’d had with her sister and her constituents had pulled her back from the brink of oblivion. She had never tried that again.
She opened her eyes slowly. Even though she was the princess of the night, her eyes still functioned normally like other ponies’ eyes once had, and thus they had to adjust to the current absolute lack of light. In addition, she had shut her eyes so tightly that streaks of blinding, brilliant light had been playing across her eyes as she was concentrating. When she’d opened them again, she could still see shadow-play remnants of those streaks, floating in a spiderweb-like lattice in front of her. In a few minutes, her eyes had fully adjusted, and she was able to see everything around her.
There wasn’t really much to see, she admitted to herself. Her eyes roamed over what had once been a lush and thriving landscape. Now, the trees had almost completely died out, from what she could see; there were no leaves left on the branches- there hadn’t been for quite a while- and the trunks had begun to wither away, slowly making the trees seem like emaciated statues. She was almost tempted to smile when she remembered what Pinkie Pie had told her once about the trees in the Everfree Forest, and how they had looked like scary monsters before Pinkie had burst into song and driven the fear away from the other ponies.
She couldn’t bring herself to smile, though. It seemed like such a foreign concept to her. Smiling and laughter... It was almost like she couldn’t quite remember the last time she had done either of those things. The fun, it seemed, was no longer doubled.
As she concentrated on the pitch-black night sky, she could see the outlines of the moon and stars beginning to show themselves as they emerged from their nigh-invisibility. They became more and more clear, until finally their light was shining as brightly as it always had. Normally, she would have stayed there for a moment or two longer, beholding her handiwork. At the present time, though, she found nothing to be proud of. The moon was shining solely because of her; if she had not taken over her sister’s duties of bringing the day upon Equestria, she would not be able to complete her own duties. The moon and the stars only shone, after all, because the sun was also shining someplace else in the world. And in the end, she felt too selfish to truly appreciate things. So much had changed in so little time. She was not even used to the way she was feeling.
Now that she was finished with her duties in bringing forth the night, she stretched her legs, which had almost locked up on her a few times with the amount of stress her magic was putting on her body. She wondered if anypony had come to realize that fundamental truth. She remembered that for the longest time, magic was thought to be completely and totally separate from physical strength. If a pony had physical strength, that did not necessarily mean that they had strong magic potential, and vice versa. However, due to the efforts of her sister’s former student, Twilight Sparkle, it was discovered that magic and physical energy were tied together in ways that nopony had ever considered. The more magic a unicorn used, the more their physical energy was also drained. Now, it seemed like such a simple concept, and yet if Twilight had not expanded upon the little bit of research that she had discovered in Starswirl the Bearded’s archives, nopony knew how long it would have taken for it to come out.
She scanned the horizon, moving only her eyes. While she’d been performing her duties, she’d thought she’d seen some movement in one of the adjacent buildings. She’d had a pretty good view of the insides of those buildings, as most of them were so dilapidated that they’d had walls or in some cases even the roofs cave in on them, affording anypony who wanted to look a clear view of the inside of the building. If her eyes had not been deceiving her, and she actually did see movement, whatever it was that had been moving was now long gone. Luna wasn’t surprised. It had been over four months since she’d seen a single living being, pony or otherwise.
Her vision swam for a moment, and she almost collapsed onto the chipped, cracking marble that made up the floor of the balcony. In her rush to usher in the night and put the day to rest, she’d used up more magical power than she’d wanted in order to get it to maybe go by a bit quicker. This was very quickly proving to be a bit of a bad idea. She stood strong, though, fighting the urges washing over her body, and a moment or so later her vision cleared up again, and she found new strength for her legs. She sighed in relief; she would not be taken down so easily. Not when she had tasks still yet to perform.
A star winked at her from the sky, and she noticed the pulsation of the light. She wondered for a moment what it meant, and after a minute of thought it finally came to her. It was nothing that she had read in any book, nor was it any sort of lore or tradition that had been passed down from regal pony to regal pony. Rather, it was simply something that the pony called Rarity- one of Twilight Sparkle’s closest friends- had told her: whenever a star in the night sky winks at you, it is trying to tell you that you are not alone in the world, and that there is somepony out there watching over you.
The thought brought tears to Luna’s eyes, and she angrily tried to swipe them away, her mood changing in an instant. How dare the star lie to her? It was supposed to be one of her subjects. She was the princess of the night! And this star dares to tell her that she is not alone in the world, when it was more than abundantly clear to her that just the opposite was the real truth!
She felt her emotions coming back strongly, with a pure and unadulterated vengeance. She knew that she needed a change of scenery, but unable to decide what to do, she settled for simply turning dramatically and heading back into the castle, stomping her heels a bit harder than what was required for walking, as though she was putting on her own little temper tantrum. Her royal roots were still deep, though, and she fought to maintain the proper decorum even though there was nopony there to see her outburst, should it slip out.
Her steps echoed down the cold, dead halls. She knew where she was going; she’d gone there from every corner of the castle, more times than she could count. So, she could afford to become once again lost in her thoughts as she went. It seemed like she was doing that more than ever, now that she had nopony to talk to, to voice her innermost thoughts to... Nopony to try to give clarity to the muddied, befuddled introspections that made up her mind. And so, she kept to herself.
She should have been used to that, she admitted silently. Her banishment to the moon for a millennium should have prepared her for this day, albeit one that neither she nor anypony else could have foreseen coming. But this... this was different. The moon was supposed to be barren and lifeless, so she didn’t have too much of a problem with it being that way. But this... This was Equestria. This was supposed to be the greatest land in the world. Now... it was dead. And that, more than anything else, was the incongruity that she simply could not wrap her mind around.
As she thought about it more while she was making her way to her room, she realized with a slow certainty that there was not really going to be any specific way that she could ever wrap her mind around the events that had transpired. She had used up so much energy in the preceding months, trying to make it all fit into some pre-formed notion of how she thought the world should work. Now, though... her eyes were being opened, and she began to see things for how they really were.
For starters, there was no way that she could reconcile the way the world was then, with the way it was in the past. It could never go back to the way it was- at least, there was no way that she saw. Time-reversal spells were notoriously inaccurate, and besides that, time magic had never been Luna’s strong point. Sure, she’d experimented with it a few times- which unicorn filly hadn’t, really?- but a stern reprimand from Celestia, along with a lecture about the dangers of inadvertently changing facets of the past and thus altering the future as well, had cut short her ambitions of being a time-mage. And besides that, she could always just visit the past whenever she wanted to, both in her memories and by popping into somepony’s dream.
She smelled the air tentatively. She was wondering if there would be any semblance of an aroma that she used to know back then: freshly-cropped grass, the smell of a wind blowing in a rainstorm, maybe even the Cake family and Pinkie Pie bringing over some pastries for one of Celestia’s famous royal get-togethers... Luna should have known that she’d be disappointed, though, and deep down inside she did. All she could smell now was... nothing, really. The air had been devoid of odors and aromas since that day. Not even the stench of death and decay remained in the air. The wind- conjured up by the moon princess herself, of course, which was another one of her more draining activities- had blown those odors away long ago.
Even she’d for the most part stopped with the wind, though, a few months earlier when she’d realized that there was no reason to keep on doing so. There was nopony left to feel the breeze flow through their mane, nopony to look up at the trees swaying regally and to sit in calm appreciation of life’s simplest pleasures... Nopony left at all. Occasionally she would conjure up a breeze, just to remind herself that she could do so, and how alive she felt when it whisped tenderly through the strands of her mane. The sun and moon were different, though. She could deal with not having the wind blow all the time; that wasn’t her life’s work to begin with. The moon and the sun were her burden to bear, no matter what the cost.
Soon, she’d reached her room. She stared at the closed door for a moment, wondering how in Equestria it’d gotten closed. Normally, were this the time before the... accident- she knew no other way to put it- she would have been fastidious about keeping her door closed. She wanted no “common ponies” to be able to see the truly innermost workings of the palace, though she never really used that term as a derogatory statement. It was more of an acknowledgement of fact: herself and her sister were royalty, whereas her visitors were not, more times than not.
She’d always liked her privacy, Luna had. She had kept secret stashes of her most precious things, hidden away even from Celestia’s all-seeing, prying eyes. Naturally, Celestia had known about them anyways, but she’d never actually gone through them to see what was in them. In spite of her misgivings about Luna’s candidacy for princess-hood, she had not let those misgivings cloud her judgment when it came to the things that Luna valued most. Not even Celestia was that much of a tyrant.
Now that these stashes were on her mind once again, she wondered if she could even remember where they were. She’d had so many other things to think about that she had neglected her daily reminiscings, with those contents as her spiritual guide of sorts. Off the top of her head, she could remember at least one, or vaguely where it was located.
Forgetting for the moment about the mystery of the self-closing door, she pushed on it a bit harder this time with her hoof, and the door yielded itself to her mastery, opening with a loud creak. She stepped into her room, making a mental note to find some way to oil the door so she wouldn’t have to hear that confounded shriek anymore. Normally, something like that would have ranked somewhere near Priority One, at least as far as entirely short-term goals went. She had more important things to do at that moment, though.
The “royal closet,” as she had come to affectionately call it, was not really a closet. It was more along the lines of a simple in-set storage area. It was supposed to be used in order to store regal accoutrements and adornaments, and at one point it had been used for exactly that. For all intents and purposes, it still was; both Celestia and Luna’s royal effects were still in their rightful places, though they hadn’t been moved in quite some time. There was really no reason for them to leave their spots. It wasn’t like either princess any longer had use for them. Luna still kept them regularly dusted, though, more in honor of her sister’s memory than any sort of desire to ever use them again.
The bottom shelf, though, was where she now kept her collection of memories. She had the actual memories in her mind, granted, and she doubted she’d ever forget any of them. That was one of the things about being a princess that was both a gift and a curse: she could never forget anything. Not even the psychological horrors she endured during her 1,000-year exile to the moon.
Still, though... she had always enjoyed having physical mementos of those memories. Maybe it was because she wanted to truly cement them in her mind’s eye, and she felt like keeping those things was the best way to do that. Truthfully, though, she had no idea why she kept them. It just felt like the right thing to do.
Using her magic, she levitated the stack of pictures out of the shelving area; though she could have used her magic to close the door to the “closet” as well- she’d long since mastered the art of using her magic to do more than one thing at a single time- she opted to reach her hoof out and physically shut it. She felt like it was more in deference to Celestia, than anything else.
She spread the pictures out on her bed in a fan shape before hopping up onto the bed and settling herself in comfortably. Once she was settled, she began to look over the pictures that had been taken for her by her close friend, Featherweight. She had gotten to know him through her somewhat-adopted son, Pipsqueak. Of course, she had never actually gone through the process of finalizing said adoption, but she had been content to simply count the colt as her most adoring fan, after the events of Nightmare Night so many moons ago...
As she pored through the images, she could feel the weight of the night’s activities lifting off her, and her strength returning. This nightly ritual always did help her out in that way. She began to remember the events that had taken place, at which those pictures were taken. There was one of her and Celestia, standing regally alongside Twilight Sparkle at her princess coronation. Another showed her, Rainbow Dash, and Fluttershy, flying high in the sky trying to teach the filly named Scootaloo the basics of flying.
There were also some moments that had been immortalized in those pictures, that had not been as happy and joyous as the others. The death of Spike, Twilight’s “number-one assistant”, had rocked all of the Elements to the core, and as Luna glanced over a photo that had been taken at Spike’s funeral, she could still feel the waves of sadness that had been rolling off Twilight as she stood at his gravesite, unable to stanch the flow of tears that had been steadily pouring out of her as she sat through the service.
There were other moments that still resonated soundly within her conscience: Fluttershy falling ill and eventually passing on, the day that she was told by her sister that Twilight Sparkle would be her final student... The revelation that Celestia had told her about why she made that decision, and the implications that had come out of that. Luna brushed a tear away from her eye. This was one of the biggest reasons why she’d considered this gift more of a curse than anything else. The bad memories were oftentimes the ones that were on the forefront of her mind, pushing the good ones back to the edges of the shadows of her mind. And now, only one thought played through her head: the moment Celestia had told her of the disaster that was to come.
As she leaned back and rested her head on her pillow- color-coordinated, of course, with her royal colors- she thought back to that moment. Celestia had come to her, looking unusually disheveled. When Luna had asked her about what had happened, and why she looked the way she did, Celestia only had one thing to say: she had tried out a spell that Twilight had mentioned to her, one that could see the future. When she cast the spell, what it had shown her was the fall and demise of Equestria, turning the regal empire into a barren wasteland, devoid of all life.
Naturally, Luna had looked at her like she was crazy, and she voiced her concerns to her older sister. The vision hadn’t pointed out how this was to take place, she said. And besides that, she continued, what on earth could do that much devastation to the land and its denizens? When Luna had asked, just to humor her sister really, how long they had before this event was to take place, Celestia said that she didn’t know; that hadn’t been part of the vision.
It was painfully obvious that Celestia believed the omen that had been shown to her, but Luna was having a much harder time coming to grips with it. Before she could have asked her any more questions, though, Celestia had ran off, shouting something about trying to make plans for this catastrophe. Luna had not quite written it off- she was willing to at least admit that given Celestia’s track record for being quite the powerful mage, there was at least a small possibility that this spell had shown her the truth of what was actually to come- but she’d never fully embraced the idea of an apocalypse. Until it happened, that is.
It started with a whisper on the wind. There was an ominous feeling in the air, and Luna wasn’t the only one who felt it. She had been spending some rare quality time with the Elements of Harmony, and Applejack was the first to feel it. She relayed her feeling to the other members of the group, who confirmed that they all in some way had felt it as well. It had only lasted for a moment or so, and then the ominous feeling had gone away. Looking back on it, Luna realized she shouldn’t have dismissed it as easily as she had, knowing what Celestia had told her just a few days earlier.
A few minutes later, the whole world came crashing down around them. A bright light filled their vision, obscuring everything else. There were cries of pain and agony all around her, but Luna couldn’t feel anything like what they were experiencing. The only sensation she could feel was the light.
And then, something happened that still to that day, Luna could not even come close to explaining. She heard a voice, echoing through her mind. It was not a voice she had ever heard before; it had a sinister timbre that chilled her to the very core. Its message was simple: it told her that the world was now hers for the taking, and there was nothing anypony could do to stop it, because from that point on, there would be nopony left. Just as quickly as it had begun, the light faded from existence... and she was alone.
She had been in a panic for days, searching for any signs that her constituents were still around. She reached deep down into her magical reserves, sending telepathy spell after telepathy spell to those that she knew how to get into contact with. She even waited until the night had fallen, and tried to enter into somepony’s dream. Unfortunately, there had been nopony’s dreams to go into, because nopony was dreaming anymore. Wherever they were... they were not dreaming.
That is what had led her to this moment. She opened her eyes, as she had found she’d closed them during her reverie. She glanced out the double-wide window in her room, and saw the stars and moon as bright as they had always been.
She thought about what the voice had told her. Granted, it had technically not been wrong; when she had still been possessed by the spirit of Nightmare Moon, that was indeed what she had wanted: to be the sole ruler over all of Equestria. When Nightmare Moon had been exorcised from her, though, those tyrannical desires had gone with it. She no longer wanted those things that the voice had claimed was her one true desire. Truthfully, her one true desire had been to live in peace amongst the other ponies. She was tired of everypony being afraid of her. That was the old her; she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had changed... Hadn’t she?
Luna took a deep breath. She was alone now, as she had been since that day. More than anything, that meant that she didn’t have any distractions to get her off-track from what she was doing. She closed her eyes and began to probe once again for a dream, any dream. She knew what she would find, but in the end, that was all that she could do.
Maybe this time, it would be different. Maybe this time, she’d find what she’d spent so long searching for. Or maybe it would just be another fruitless effort. She had to keep going, though. Now that everypony she knew and loved was gone... keeping going was all that she had left.
